Hi, I'm Joey.

09.30.25 — Warden Day

Happy Warden day! The oft forgotten little sibling to the larger Dragon Age Day (December 4).
I've recently started a campaign in the Dragon Age tabletop game and I've been having a blast! (Though I'm not playing a Warden.)
I'm actually running it solo. I don't know why it took me this long to think of doing that since I play Pathfinder solo sometimes. I'm thinking I should do a write up of how I set up my solo play tools, but until then check out this awesome channel: Man Alone, all about playing solo TTRPGs.

09.15.25 — SWS
It's Small Web September! I'd been so exhausted by work I failed to notice what month we are in. I need to dig out that dusty list of planned changes to the site and get to crackin'. Like the February note below mentions, I've got a lot to do. And now's the time. If you haven't worked on your website in a while or have a project you'd like some motivation to finish, join us!

02.22.25 — I Love My Website
I really love this little space, but I tend to have obsessions for different seasons and just make lists of things to work on... later. However, I actually look at my own website a lot. Just the other day I was remaking my Inquisitor in Veilguard and I needed to check his eye color — bam, the pics are there on his page. Speaking of... I need to make a page for my Rook. I also need to update Fenian's page because replaying Inquisition (in French) and despite VG not carrying over many choices I've changed much about his story. I'm going to replay Veilguard a third time before I do any write ups on it. The other games got tons and tons of replays before I wrote a word. Other than that I have plans for more blog posts, a "Craft Corner" (though I don't like taking pictures ugh, I always forget to photograph my crafts), and a space for other French language stuff. And I'm also trying to get back into the swing of fiction writing so I can finally finish the couple of fics I've been working on (one short, one long). I often feel like I don't have much to add to my website, yet I have much to add!

01.29.25 — Star Ratings
If you hover your mouse over the star ratings on Goodreads and Audible the 3-star option is "I liked it" and "Pretty good" respectively. But to me 3-stars means "It was okay" It's not a book I would particularly recommend, but also not one I'd dissuade people from reading. Herein lies a problem. If the websites are demarcating 3-stars as "good" instead of "fine" then in actuality shouldn't all my 3-star ratings be rated as 2-stars instead? "It was okay" (Goodreads) & "It's okay" (Audible). Then all my 2-stars would drop to 1-star! But 2-stars is just an abysmal rating. A 2-star book is one that I would mention how I found it lacking if someone brought it up. And I save the 1-star rating for things I actually didn't like and would want to dissuade someone from reading. I don't really use star ratings in my own reviews/logs anymore, but I do mark them on the website. So should I follow their metrics when rating books on their site??

12.11.24 — Speed of Lightning, Roar of Thunder
Added Underdog (1964) to my favorite shows. I'm obsessed. Have a listen of the ending theme: The Underdog Show - Ending. It's a freaking bop! I requested the 2007 movie from my local library system and while I do not think it is going to be good, I hope it will at least be charming.

10.24.24 — I'll Create a New World for Us
Asada Nemui is one of my favorite BL artists and though I haven't read manga in a while I was reminded of her today. She always writes unique, quirky, and refreshing stories. Absolutely killed me with Sleeping Dead. It's about a scientist who has been trying to find a way to revive the dead and he ends up creating a zombie out of a school teacher who was stabbed to death while defending a student. It's incredible the way she so easily wraps the reader up in bizarre stories. Her art is nice too and her panelling can range toward the superb. That last chapter though. Why did she have to hurt me so?

10.12.24 — We Are No Longer French
It was bothering me so I looked around for how to get the English voice in Inquisition. For some reason my download does have the English files, but they don't work I guess. Too old maybe? Thankfully this wonderful person on Nexus uploaded the needed files here: Polyglotquisition. I added them to my folders as described and voilà! I'm still gonna play in French, but now I can easily switch to English from the game menu as the Maker intended.

10.03.24 — Nous sommes tous d'Orlaïs
A few months ago I started playing Dragon Age Inquisition in French, but I ended up putting it down to do other things. I just picked it back up last night. I'm still in Haven and just got Sera and Vivienne. There was a line in a convo with Viv that I had never heard before so I wanted to hear it in English for a second, but putting the language to English borked the game. I guess when you dowload it from the EA App you only get one audio language pack. DA2 and DAO are like that too, but c'mon the DAI disk has native language features while the others don't. So I assumed a digital download would work the same. Nope! Only French for me. But that's okay. I love that Viv calls you "trésor" where in English she says "my dear". In English my brain just skips over this as kind of sarcastic, but in French I'm like "Huh? What? I'm a treasure? 🥺" even though it's still sarcastic.

09.27.24 — [Owen Wilson Voice] Wow
I don't know if it's because it's 3am, but while checking for broken links I ended up reading one of my fics and. Wow. It was pretty good. I reread them a billion times while I'm writing them, but I rarely reread them after I post them. It's certainly a pleasant surprise.

09.12.24 — Deep Work
Working on writing content for my Dragon Age Shrine and I haven't been this focused on writing anything in like a year or two. It's exciting to have written so much already (3k words) and in a single day too. When I got up to get dinner and take a break I had this wonderful realization that this is the deep work Newport wrote that book about, the one that I read and took notes on and then did nothing with. It felt wonderful. I just put on some music, closed the door, everyone left me alone, and I wrote a ton in just a few hours.

09.10.24 — Gimmick
I was looking through the pictures on my external hard drive for some more pics of my video game PCs to add to their galleries and I took a small dip into my FFXV folder. I have almost one thousand pictures in there?! And they are all so grainy and blurry, bad quality screen shots from the PS4. But holy hell, I felt emotions for those boys I haven't felt in years. Couldn't bring myself to delete them lol. I'm still adamant that whoever thought up that gimmick is a genius.