What happens when an insecure group of online roleplayers find themselves in a living nightmare?

…More tragic backstories, of course!

Here are some of my thoughts on the new story quest.

I loved this patch. Awesome new environment, cool new bosses, and Banyue being super cool, Sarah being Sarah. The only thing I haven’t done yet is Lucia’s Agent Story.

Spook Shack is great. As a terminally online nerd, it’s refreshing to see that kind of character played straight: just a group of friends having a good time together! I liked that about Astra Yao as well; it felt more organic for Wise and Belle to meet her in person after befriending her online as Chaotic Fried Rice.

How much are you willing to sacrifice? Everything.

What a patch. Some quick, sleep-deprived thoughts:

I never realized how much I missed Dan Heng and March until the trio reunited. I don’t have a problem with the other Amphoreus patches, but it feels refreshing to focus on the Astral Express crew after so much time with the Chrysos Heirs. They have so much more trauma to unpack now as opposed to before.

Content Warning: Starvation, trauma.

I’m not asking for pity. I’m not asking for anything. Just sharing some things that I have no one else to share with.

Surviving Each Day

In March, I tore a map of the United States of America apart with my bare hands.

It was a souvenir from 2008, a collector’s item — a sturdy slab of cardboard that showcased 50 state quarters that I had collected back then. Every slot had its proper coin, wedged permanently into place.

Nine years ago, in 2016, I volunteered with the Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit behind Archive of Our Own.

This month, I’m returning to the OTW, but in a much smaller committee this time. I’m excited to work with them and hope to bring a positive impact to the community.

(And of course, as a disclaimer, all of the views expressed on this blog are mine alone and are not intended to reflect the opinions of the OTW as a whole.)

Happy New Year! I wasn’t happy with this website’s previous layout. Today, the new layout is finally ready. I’m using the lovely Hugo theme Gokarna, which is similar to the old theme but much more streamlined for my particular use case.

I’ve removed the comment sections from the blog for now, but I might bring them back later. I’m keeping an eye on the Giscus project, just in case they add Gitlab support.

I always hoped there was some kind of front end I could edit my blog from instead of manually creating text files and then pushing them to Gitlab. Today I found out about Sveltia CMS and have integrated it into the backend of pent.blog. I’m writing this post from it right now, so hopefully it works!

So far, the UI looks pretty good. I still need to configure a bunch of things. I can’t figure out how to get cover images to work because of the way they work in Hugo, but I’ll figure it out eventually.

Life Updates

After completing a 30 day writing challenge for Final Fantasy XIV in September, I was very eager to get back to working on my Honkai: Star Rail fan fiction.

On the night of October 12, I finally finished and published chapter five of Phantom Eye Syndrome. The chapter follows Aventurine’s near death experience and ends in the same way as the canon, with him choosing to live when confronted with death.

This September, I participated in the #FFXIVwrite2024 challenge, where participants publish a Final Fantasy XIV fan fiction every single day based on a given prompt. The prompts were not set in advance, so participants truly only had 24 hours to write and publish their works.

Unfortunately, I found out about the challenge after it had already started. Still, I managed to post a fan work every day, ending the challenge with 25 works.

Welcome to the brand new pent.blog!

When I tried to install Hugo (the software powering this website) on Windows a couple of months ago, I couldn’t get it to work. On Linux? No problems. First try. It just works! ™️ Unsurprising, I know.

I created this website because I was starting to accumulate up a bunch of tiny, unused static websites that could have been merged into one. From now on, I’ll just put my public writing projects here and organize them with tags.

About Me

Hi! I’m Tango (or Pent) and I’ve been writing and longform roleplaying for about 20 years now! I like doing shortform roleplay as well, but mostly enjoy elaborate story planning and the inclusion of multiple characters.

I tend to gravitate towards dark topics, but will avoid bringing them up with no warning or consensual planning. I enjoy writing adventure and found family bonding stories too, but am open to pretty much any genre.