Busy Thanksgiving

Lots of music this past week!  I finished up a Patreon request (will be released on my next "Remixes" album), did a little update of my Brave Fencer Musashi remix, which is now OUT as part of OverClocked ReMix's Hometown Heroes album (will also be on my Remixes volume 2 album), and started up on another commission.  After this one I still have two more songs to knock out in early
December, and that's not even taking into account the fact that Ludum Dare is at the end of next week(!).  I'll be doing One Hour Compo on Thursday too...so yeah, hopefully I can set aside more time to cram out some more music soon since I have deadlines to meet.

Speaking of deadlines, xmas deadlines are quickly sneaking up on me!  I haven't done a big shopping trip, but perhaps I won't actually need to, as I'm taking a smarter approach this year and trying to do a bunch of gift shopping online instead.  Still have to make sure I'm on top of it though, since I won't have any time at all during Ludum Dare.  I have a couple of bday things to take care of too; I should at least knock out some of the handmade stuff since that will go a long way towards wrapping everything up (figuratively and literally lol).  It may seem like there is still more than a month left before xmas but I have xmas deadlines as early as two weeks into December so...

Progress on Tactics Ogre has slowed, understandably, but on the other hand I did finish up my second playthrough -- this time through the Law route, as well as getting the (bad) Lord ending.  Next up will be a go through of the Chaos route (trying to just do what is necessary) and skipping a bunch of sidequests, mostly to recruit Cressida.  I was initially thinking of having that be my last playthrough, but after reading up some more it probably makes more sense to do a 4th one on Law route to be better setup for the endgame.

Anyways, Dark Souls is on temporary hold but I've made it through Sen's Fortress!  Though I still have to actually clear out that area and find some of the stuff that I've missed, like Big hat Logan.  After that it's onto Anor Londo...

In the meantime, I finished Hollow Knight!  Definitely a huge game with a lot to explore, and pretty enjoyable at that.  As I mentioned before, each area definitely has its own unique vibe, and I was actually pretty impressed by how atmospheric some of the darker areas were, that was pretty cool.  There's still a lot more for me to do in the game, however, as I've only gotten the first (worst) ending, and still got a lot more to find and collect (as well as a bunch of better endings to get after I've found more stuff).

Yesterday was pretty productive as I managed to run some errands and do groceries as well as got my flu shot, and also cooked lunch and dinner AND managed to bake some cornbread as well (which I overcooked a bit, but was still "ok").  I hardly ever bake usually, but I'm also hoping to try pumpkin pie later this week, so hopefully that goes well.  If all goes right I'll also try making prime rib on Saturday, woo!

Last night I also "accidentally" pulled an all-nighter trying to recompile and update LoopMuse, a project that I initially made =7 years= ago in 2011.  I went into some pretty deep rabbit holes, but I'm out alive and with a pretty good understanding of what I need to do to get some of my other old projects updated as well.  I don't know if that work was honestly worth it (most would probably say not), but I feel happy that it's finally done, as that's something I was never able to get to for a long time.  I'd say that I'll try to update some other old projects as well soon, but honestly I've got so much other stuff to take care of this coming week that I probably shouldn't.  Did I mention that I also need to draw up another pixel art album cover for my Monthlies album this month, and oh, I need to do that before Ludum Dare starts...I also updated to Unity 2018 and would like to at least do some initial tests with that before LD starts so I'm not caught with my pants down for anything.

Regarding LD, we'll see what happens with it, I know trying to do something with a narrative element again would be great practice for us but it really depends on what sort of ideas we come up with.

Also, I DJed Friday Night Waltz for the first time this past week!  It was pretty successful; I'm glad people came and that they seemed to enjoy the selection of music and dancing.  As for myself, I'm getting more and more into just glowsticking...I donno, I think like when I think about social dance in theory I still am interested, but in practice I just get into the feeling of just wanting to move on my own.  There's so much more freedom of expression when it's just yourself.

So right, writing this blog post has actually made me realize that I have a ton of things to get done.  I tell people that being unemployed has allowed me to kick back and really take my time with things, but gosh I don't really know if that's true, haha.

For I am just one person, and who is one person to think that they could change the thinking of the many?  Let alone someone with as little charismatic aptitude as myself.  I am just one hard-working person with more pride than they ought to have.  And I can improve my own ability all I want, but would it even make a difference to other people?

I think that if it were not for social dance, I really wouldn't care as much about the importance of being more outgoing.  It's the only hobby I have where the community has such a direct impact on it.  And yet, for all the dedication I have to it, am I really that dedicated?  For all the times when I said people should strike up a conversation with someone they didn't know, when was the last time that I did so?  And for all the times when I encouraged people to dance the opposite role, when was the last time that I tried?

I have always believed that you don't truly have the right to wish for change unless you embody that change first.  So for now, I am just one person who will just stay in my little corner.

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Also seared duck breast

I've spent the greater portion of the past two =days= cleaning and organizing stuff.  Phew!  I don't even remember how I started down this path anymore, it was like one little thing where I was like "oh well, also trash day is coming up so I should also probably take care of this other thing that I've been meaning to and -- oh, while I'm at it, I guess I could really go through this other thing and ..." and before I knew it I was embarking on a total rehaul of boxes, drawers, and everything.

I'm very pleased at what I've been able to accomplish so far though!  I've sent a bunch of things off to recycling / landfill (related: I've also realized I'm not nearly as savvy as I should be on recycling and trash practices, so I'm starting to try to learn my way around that), marked other things for donating or giving away, moved a bunch of things around, and tried to declutter as well as reorganize so things make more sense.  No huge changes; all the furniture is still in the same place after all, but for example I had this stack of huge boxes and junk in the corner of my office before; all of that has either gotten thrown away, packed into sensible boxes in the back of my bedroom closet, or in storage in the garage where it isn't cluttering an actual room that I use.  I tackled quite a number of things including but not limited to:
- Redoing drawers in my office.  They're much better organized now.  Also my stationary and letter sets are much easier to get at without digging through piles of it).
- Shuffling some things around in my dresser drawers and rethinking how I fold some of my clothes.  When clothing and accessories are not easily accessible it becomes easy to just forget they exist and never make use of them, so I tried to push all of the "only use once in a while" winter gear and stuff way to the back, and moved all my hairties and such from my office to my bedroom dresser -- after all I should think about those as I am getting dressed along with the rest of my outfit.
- Repacked my box of boxes (not a big deal, it was already pretty ok, but still), and more importantly, completely redid the huge "bag of bags" that I use to keep all of my cute sanrio bags in (for gifting).  It's now a "box of bags", and they're roughly sorted by size so I can flip through and get a bag of the appropriate size instead of just trying to dig through a whole mess.  I also put my bubble mailers in the same box, yay!
- Coalesced some of my Magic: the Gathering stuff.  I have a ton of unopened boosters that are still nice to have, as well as a cube and a battle box, etc, but they're all sort of in one place instead of three different places, and I've thrown out a bunch of the packaging material and boxes and such that aren't really useful to me at all.
- Washed the bedsheets...dusted the floors...etc.
- Trying to air out a bunch of the scarves that unfortunately inherited the smell of a candle that they were packed together with while moving a long time ago.

In general there was a lot of switching from "big pile of things stacked on top of each other" to "horizontal stack of things so I can flip through and access any individual thing easily".

One thing I might still try is rotating the couch 90 degrees (same corner) as that might actually make the office feel a bit more opened up.  I'll have to see how it feels though.

I'm still not really done; I have a whole pile of charms and decorations that I took off of old bags (in addition to ones that I just have had the whole time) and would like to find a way to display them sensibly.  My office has a nice gridded display bookcase thing but it's sort of a big mess right now, so I will be looking to reshuffle that around and hopefully turn it back into a nice display.  I'm also entertaining the idea using some command hooks to hang charms on, but we'll see about that.

Anyways, I haven't really been accomplishing much else these past couple of days, but on the flipside I feel really productive and like I'm doing really satisfying work.  I feel great about myself for taking care of all of this stuff.  It's not just the cleaning and organization either; I'm also trying to work at better practices for other things, for example I'm trying to get the hang of using a kitchen towel while I'm working in the kitchen instead of always relying on the sink and/or paper towels.  I'm still trying to wrap my head around a workflow that works for that, but I'm sure once I figure it out (?) it will make things go a lot more smoothly.

Speaking of cooking, I tried making seared duck breast tonight!



I don't often do food blogging, but hey, why not?

Got inspired to try cooking duck breast after having it at Tanto (a tasty Japanese restaurant), and followed some of the basic directions from the Serious Eats writeup of searing duck breast.  It turned out relatively well!  This is my first time ever working with duck meat, but I think it seemed to be very forgiving in terms of timing because it has so much insulation on the skin/fat side.  You can see in the photo I managed to get a pretty nice level of doneness almost all the way throughout, which was nice (of course, also used a thermometer to help me estimate).

I didn't take a photo of it, but I knew that there would be a ton of rendered duck fat from the cooking, so planning for that I made some microwaved mashed potatoes with mushroom and just poured the duck fat all over it so it would soak into the potatoes for extra flavor.  That worked out, though I think there was even TOO much fat really for that purpose.  It also made for an extremely heavy meal, which is not necessarily a bad thing inherently, but I think I would have preferred something closer to the Tanto style where they serve it over a nice salad with thin (sweet) onion slices and daikon sprouts and other veggies.

The duck breast felt kind of like a steak; it was an interesting combination of traits between chicken and beef.  It did end up being a little chewy; I think two things I would change next time are to try to salt in advance next time (I'm assuming that duck meat, like other meats, will go through some tenderization via dry brining), as well slice much more thinly.

I think I could be a little less heavy-handed on the salt next time, it didn't seem super salty at the time but afterwards I'm feeling it a little bit.  For a long time I used fine-grained table salt out of a salt shaker but have since switched to measuring out coarse-grained salt by pinching it with my fingers, which is easier to see visually but I still need to calibrate downwards on the amount of salt that I need to use.

You can see in the photo I made a pan sauce by deglazing my stainless steel pan with a bit of sake and then adding in some mirin and soy sauce and sugar -- this seemed to be a pretty common combination of ingredients for sauce to go with duck breast when I looked up Japanese recipes (this combination is also just common in Japanese cooking in general).  It worked out alright, though I personally wasn't ecstatic about it.  I did have some wasabi in the fridge (not authentic wasabi, but the green stuff that we make do with in the states) which I remember from Tanto going super well with the dish; the same was true here.  Looking it up afterwards, these sorts of Tataki (seared meat/fish) dishes are often served with a ponzu sauce, so I'll probably try that next time.  I don't think it's worth keeping yet =another= sauce container in the fridge so I'll probably just mix my own with soy sauce and some citrus juice.

I've actually been into Japanese style salads recently, like with onion slices and daikon sprouts and such, so perhaps at some point I'll try to figure out how to put one of those together (which...honestly seems pretty simple, just figure out the dressing and then put veggies together).

Anyways, pretty good experiment, all things considered.  I ended up cooking two duck breasts (came in a pack of two) which of course is way too much to expect one human being to eat for a meal so I have another duck breast which I guess I can eat tomorrow for lunch if it's still good.  Tomorrow night I actually have a quite fancy dinner outing courtesy of my family so that should be much more exciting than this, haha.

For those of you who are still looking for more foodie stuff to entertain yourself with, I've also been going back to making this Brie and Nutella Grilled Cheese sandwich recently as I realized I haven't had nutella in a long time (and nutella is delicious).

Delta Rune Chapter 1

Took a bit, but I finished Toby Fox's new (demo?) game, chapter 1 of DELTARUNE.  I can't be bothered to write up a detailed review of it nor should I since it's so new, but some bullet points for those who are curious:
- It's definitely a spiritual successor (if not outright sequel) to UNDERTALE (there's a reason it's an anagram lol), if you liked UNDERTALE you'll feel right at home in terms of the gameplay as well as the humor and pacing.
- There are more than a few systematic differences though!  So it's got some twists on it...but you pretty much know what you're getting.
- It's not a full full-length game, no, but it's much longer than you may expect from a demo; long enough to stand on its own for an indie game, to be honest.  I did finish it in one day, but it did take two fairly hefty chunks of time.  You could probably go through it more quickly if you don't care about seeing everything.  Expect it to be significantly longer than the undertale demo.

Indie games are super inspiring haha.

Also, compo stats have been updated and are up to date now: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D104s2Z4yGqPpfNFpikc3LFB0RSxGZkZoEaKmIdV0-I/edit?usp=sharing

Happy 44th Birthday to Hello Kitty

Originally posted on Facebook:

And now that it's past midnight -- wishing a happy birthday to Hello Kitty!

I won't hesitate to say that I've become disillusioned with Kitty's US presence as Sanrio US has seemingly moved away from the ethos of "Small gift, big smile" and towards more of a pop culture/social media presence with collaborations and food trucks and pop-up cafes (see https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/retail-shifts-hello-kitty-her-friends-are-moving-real-world-n877081).  When all of our Sanrio boutiques closed down one by one everything really was downhill from there.

I get it though; many people no longer live in a world where cute pencil pouches and memo pads are even used, let alone useful, and even as a plush and symbol of cuteness/comfort, people have moved onto other sensibilities (looking at you, Pusheen), and there is not a need to create these homey Sanrio store experiences when you can just order merchandise online.

Anyways, just wanted to make a small (okay, maybe big) post celebrating the side of Hello Kitty, and really Sanrio in general, that has always appealed to me most.  This wallpaper that I'm posting here is not drawn in a traditional Sanrio style, but I think captures some of that feeling that I think represents the meaning of Sanrio for me.  I'm sure this side of Hello Kitty is still alive and well in Japan, and among the hearts of many fans.

Hello Kitty can be different things to many people and has many different sides.  For example (https://www.martinhsu.com/fullscreen-page/comp-jdieeqo3/37edc6b5-fb5d-4051-ac93-3415868b85fc/14/%3Fi%3D14%26p%3Dd4v2p%26s%3Dstyle-jdpliw7z) is a painting I saw in person in Los Angeles during Hello Kitty's 40th anniversary.  It really stood out among all of the sparkly and gaudy Lady Gaga-style exhibits as something that reflected a more peaceful feeling.

I'm also glad that this past year Sanrio Danshi aired and despite the storytelling being really generic and mediocre (as far as I have watched at least), its heart is in the right place and it does send a good message.

Anyways, here's looking back at all the good times, Kitty!

Stats as of Oct 2018

Stats are cool, aren't they?  Here's the current set of numbers:

Blog posts: 3,780 (Xanga archive) + 547 (Blogger) = 4,327 over 14.12 years (306.464 per year)
Letters written: 1,128 over 11.33 years (99.590 per year) (1 per 3.668 days)
Letters received: 323 (3.49:1 ratio)
Music: 676 songs over 14.25 years (47.446 per year)
Anime: 2,731 Episodes watched (46.68 days)
Desktop Wallpapers: 3,245

Big update, Unemployment, Tai Chi, synths, Dark Souls update, etc etc etc.

You'd think that being unemployed I'd blog more often instead of less often...but I guess it's more just that the days of me feeling like i NEED to say something about =everything= are past.  I definitely remember that stage in high school where I just found it really nice, theraputic even to just type everything out as a way of processing it and to distill any of those leftover thoughts and feelings that I had.  I'd like to (?) think that I am a little bit better at being able to acknowledge my thoughts and feelings as they happen and "let them pass", so to speak.  Kind of like meditating, you know?  Where you don't necessarily feel obligated to act upon every single thought or feeling.

Speaking of which, I think I'm really feeling a lot better so far about (not) stressing out about things in general.  Of course there is still an internal alarm bell (or whatever metaphor you want to use) that starts going off whenever I haven't gotten to one or more of my responsibilities for a long time, but I think it's been easier to not stress out about that alarm going off (and trust that I will be able to get to it).  Perhaps more importantly, it's also been easier to manage that alarm in the first place, since I really feel like I am doing a better job of keeping up with things in general now, with letters, music, etc.  Things will never be perfect and my plate will never be fully empty, but as long as I'm making forward progress I'm happy.

I did some tai chi for the first time in forever the other day!  It felt nice, just went out to the park after doing some stretching and such at home.  I'm super out of shape of course, but actually not =as bad= as I thought, so that was nice.  It didn't take a ton of time either, so hopefully that's something I can start doing randomly a bit more often.  Though it is a bit less fun doing it alone compared to when it was with others.  But it's sort of fun to be alone in its own way, too, I guess.

Worked on a bunch of music stuff today!  Got started on an interesting request to remix Gliding Dance of the Maidens, which took quite some tries to get started on, but I think I'm making headway there, yay.  Also did OHC today, in which I tried to emulate puru's progressive sounds.  I was eh...about halfway successful I think.  I managed to get pretty tight drum sequencing, which I think worked really nicely -- I'm going to have to push this "clean" style of drums more in the future.  I really stumbled on making the proper trance pluck sounds though, something which I feel like I used to be able to do but I guess I've gotten out of practice with it.  After OHC ended I spent some time experimenting with that, trying to get the hang of it not only with the classic 3xOsc synth, but also with Harmor and Sytrus.  I actually might start trying to use Sytrus a bit more often for this type of supersaw sound, as it's fairly easy to get a good unison saw sound out of sytrus and the filters actually work pretty nicely.  Harmor can do it too, of course, but...I dunno, the UI in harmor just feels more clunky and confusing, really.  Both Sytrus and Harmor are capable of doing subtractive synthesis, even though Sytrus is built for FM/ringmod and Harmor is built as an additive synth.  So maybe more Sytrus is in my future when I want to play around with synth stuff...?  Anyways, it felt good to be doing so much work on music.  It's just as well too, since I already have a commission lined up for next month too!

Xmas letters are progressing smoothly!  I've gotten 25 of them done, and also took care of some birthday letters along the way as well.  Only 6 more days left!  I still have some of the longer ones left to do though, so hopefully I can schedule them in at good times.  I still have to do my Japanese letter too, which will probably take a while, haha.  Once all the letters are done I have to make sure to not relax -- need to get all the gift shopping done early otherwise deadlines will sneak up on me before I know it...

Progressing further and further in Dark Souls, which has been keeping my interest pretty well!  I've also started listening to the Bonfireside chat podcast (that, the "Analog" melee podcast, and Limited Resources for MtG are my 3 podcasts to listen to while driving) alongside my playthrough, which...well, I wouldn't say it's the =greatest= podcast in the world, but it's enjoyable enough, for a drive.  Anyways, the main cleric character (Sayuri) has a bunch of points into Faith and uses lightning spear in addition to the Jagged Ghost Blade (currently reinforced to +4), which fortuitously dropped from one of the ghosts in new londo ruins.  It's just as well too, because we spent a LOT of time down in those ruins fighting those ghosts wayyyy before we were supposed to...we ended up clearing the ENTIRE area out and got confused because there was nowhere else to go (turns out I had just completely missed the door to the lower undead burg, argh).  Anyways, it's been serving really well, as it's got really nice base damage AND procs a nice bleed effect as well.  The only thing is that it doesn't do too well in narrower spaces or against short or flying enemies as it mainly has horizontal slash attacks, so occasionally we'll switch to the good ol mace (one of the better weapons in the game actually) and use those vertical attacks to smash things.

The jagged ghost blade doesn't have much scaling, so eventually we'll replace it with some sort of divine or just regular reinforced dex scaling weapon.  Our scimitar is currently a divine scimitar although we haven't needed it yet (once we go into the catacombs, I guess?), and we just picked up a falchion so that could be a candidate.  Some sort of katana would actually be great -- apparently there is an Iaito somewhere in blighttown that you can get to by jumping to a platform, so maybe that, if we end up going back there.  I might just do some backtracking through blighttown (ugh) anyways, as I'm sure I didn't get everything there.  I actually also should go back to the lower burg since I apparently completely missed Griggs there, lol.

Anyways, we actually made our way all the way through the depths, through blighttown, and beat quelaag, rang the second bell to presumably unlock sen's fortress (?) and are now near the ruins of chaos.  There are quite a few different directions we can explore go at this point, though I guess sen's fortress is the next real progress area (?).  There's no shortage of unexplored areas, at any rate, as there's the bridge in valley of drakes that i don't know where it goes (shortcut to somewhere?), there's the crest of artorias door which I don't know where it leads to, and a bunch of stuff in blighttown probably.  There...is certainly a lot of stuff in this game, lol.  Also, we accidentally killed the Chaos Servant guy guarding Quelaag's sister, whoops!  Didn't see the option to talk to him since I was holding my shield up.  Fortunately that doesn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, just sort of unfortunate.  Wish somebody had left a message there that indicated something about that dude though.  We also missed beating Kirk in the sewers -- didn't realize he was an NPC to be beaten.  Whatever, there's no way to expect to get everything right on the first playthrough.

My second character is a sorcery-focused int build, which is a drastically different playstyle, as she gets to really nuke things with hard-hitting magic attacks, but it requires a different set of tactics as she's sort of fragile and the magic takes time to cast, so it's tricky sometimes to find a good window of time to fire them off.  I've beaten the Gaping Dragon with that character, so next is to head down to blighttown.

Third character is sort of a lolzy one, just focusing on strength and two-handing huge weapons.  I haven't played with that one very much at all, I think I only beat the taurus demon so far.  Don't know if I'll continue, though it does seem funny to just hold really huge weapons around haha.

Cleared a Space Alert mission successfully for the first time in about 3 years, which was fun!  Really gotta keep your wits sharp to succeed in that game...it's still fun though.

I've started playing through Hollow Knight as well!  In earnest this time, as the last time I tried I didn't get very far at all.  Currently just got to the Fungal Wastes...man, a LOT of attention and detail went into the art for this game, it's pretty insane how fully-featured all of these environments are and so far the different feel of all the areas is coming across really well.  It's been fun so far.

Things that are coming up (a.k.a. things that I have to get done, lol)...besides stuff that is not really worth mentioning (getting my flu shot at some point), I actually still might want to do a short post-mortem for Bath Time, lol.  Speaking of which, there's a pretty annoying touchscreen bug, so (sigh) I probably will try to fix that up and make a new mobile build for it.  At SOME point I'll have to try to actually get back to development on Rhythm Quest, though it is certainly intimidating since there is so much that needs to be done there.  Besides all the content, I want to redo how the map screen works entirely if possible, maybe the main menu as well, but also have to make a calibration screen of some sort, etc etc etc.

For anime, Inuyasha (lol) is on hold at the moment, but I finished off Evangelion for reals (yay).  I didn't expect the ah..."change of direction" at the end of the series to be so...SUDDEN...but thinking about it, it makes sense.  For some reason I expected that to start happening earlier, but it really was compacted into the last little bit.  Anyways, now I'm making my way through the latter parts of Onii Sama e...which has had some quite nice episodes.  I don't really know what to say about it without having to explain a lot of other things about the anime, so I won't really bother, but it has been good.

Not much melee these days, but one thing that is exciting is that Rishi and KJH made it into summit!  Woot!  Should be a good lineup!  That's pretty exciting.

Also been catching up on going through random music that I've got backlogged on my drive, including Chronology (jazz rearrangement album of Chrono Trigger, it's pretty nice!), as well as Harmony of Heroes (super smash bros giant rearrangement album) and the Final Smash extension (those two didn't have that much that was to my liking, but a few things here and there were nice).  As I said, it just feels nice to be making progress on things.  I even went through all of my accumulated deviantArt notifications the other day, haha.  I'm actually trying to get back into my habit of using my little batch script to open up a bunch of websites every morning for me to check for updates!  Anyways, all of these things feel great to be going back to.  I should also be putting out my "Monthlies" release for this month relatively soon too!

Alone

Sometimes I feel truly alone in this world.  This world of mine, formed by my memories, my past, my sandcastles all forever washed away in the tides.  And that loneliness is not the feeling that no one cares, or that no one will understand, but rather that no one that matters still exists.  Because the world that I find myself in is not the one of my memory.  And it is not mine.  Yet here I am, in this unfamiliar, ever-changing reality, all by myself.  And I will never see any of those people again.  For they are not here.  Not in that form.  Not in this time.  And I will lose the people of this world once again, too, when the tide comes in and washes all those sandcastles away.  I will lose them all.  As I have lost them before.  And as I have lost even myself.

Things have been alright.  We're not quite "up to snuff" yet, but it's been an ok week, all things considered.

I finally finished off my System Shock 2 playthrough!  Having played through the entire game twice now; I think I'm safe in saying I can finally just put it to rest for all eternity now, as I really don't think there's anything more to be accomplished with it.

The GCC class went alright!  Teaching is hard, but people seemed to enjoy the class, which was great!  For the first time I was able to actually give some tips based on the things I was seeing in real-time as I was teaching, which is great as I've never been able to have the presence of mind / mental bandwidth to do that before.  As always, having multiple levels of things for people to work on seemed to work well.  I think the takeaway for me here is that one of the most helpful things you can do is run somebody else through your class and see where they mess up, because it's super likely that everybody else will have the same issues.

Somehow even without my job I am still feeling a bit stressed from all of the things I have to get done, sigh.  After thinking about it, it really just means I need to really just set aside more time by myself at home to just take care of things.  Really, I think we already knew that though.  But hopefully tomorrow will be a good start toward finding more peace with that again.

Boogie by the Bay was alright; pretty much went as expected.  Lessons were a mixed bag as always, but fun.  Actually having people that I know to hang around with and practice with made a big difference, so I'm glad that happened.  Other than that...not much to say about it, really.

Up ahead, I've gotta work on my setlist for FNW, put together a dance event, work on a bunch more letters, do some music stuff...

I wonder sometimes, how much I am "supposed" to write here, and which things I should say and not say.  There is no right answer, of course.

We're on the tail end of week 1 of unemployment now!  It's been relatively uneventful, to be honest, but not really in a bad way.  I haven't really done anything super out of the ordinary, but I think the amount of things that I've managed to accomplish and spend time on each day is really where I notice the big difference.  I'm keeping up with Inktober letters, working on music, tending to other things, etc etc.  It feels like normally I'd have to spread it out a lot more across different days, but now I'm able to start and finish a letter, but also have time for music in the same day, as well as grocery shopping, miscellaneous work, etc.  Perhaps most importantly, I just generally have so much more "me time" in general...just time spent listening to my music, at my desk, doing whatever it is that I'm up to.  I love it and I really think I have missed this a lot...it's one of the reasons college life was so great, I think.  I don't think everything is suddenly all coming up roses per se, but really it is making a big difference in the way that I can feel at peace, I think.

I spent a lot of time together with Mocha yesterday.  Gosh, was that only yesterday?  The days seem to stretch on and on now, since I'm managing so much.  Though the weeks seem just as short, heh.  Mocha really holds a special place in my heart now I think.  She is wonderful and sometimes it feels like all I want to do is just protect her and make sure that she feels loved.  Being with these meowmies is really teaching me a lot, I feel like.  The quails, too.  Watching them be culled was a really interesting emotional experience.  Not sure how to describe the feeling.  Even if I could, maybe it's not something I'd care to really write about here.  Not everything has to be said aloud.

I used to write a blog entry for every single OHC entry that I made, haha.  Don't think I'll write about every OHC here anymore, but this first one was quite fun, even though it was a relatively quiet round.  As I already knew, the OHC community isn't nearly as bustling as it used to be, so it's less exciting of an event, I guess.  But the actual act of composing really quickly hasn't changed at all, and though I am saddened that the community is less lively, it's still really fun just trying to churn out music.  It feels really satisfying, too, just getting something finished and calling it done.  I guess it's akin to quick sketching, in a way.  I haven't done any of it in such a long time.

I have to run around feeding various meowmies this weekend @_@  I will also be stopping by Boogie by the Bay, which should be pretty fun I guess.  I'm excited about going to dance WCS with other WCS dancers again, since that is always fun...and excited to hang out.  Not really as excited about actually improving in the dance; I just can't be bothered to at this point.  Besides, I have another dance scene that I feel much more of a responsibility to...

Speaking of which, I'll be teaching a class before the GCC dance on Sunday!  I'm not super stressed about it, but at the same time I haven't actually figured out my lesson plan 100%, so maybe I should be =(  Teaching is hard, ugh.

Progress in Tactics Ogre has slowed down as expected, haha, since I'm no longer playing it while walking to and from the train, and while on the train...but it's still fun to boot up every so often, like while lying in bed, or whatever.  Still going through the Law route for now (chapter 3L right now).

I do hope to get back to System Shock 2 and finally finish off that playthrough soon (ugh, it's been too long).  Once I get that done, I can turn more of a focus towards other things, perhaps...like Dark Souls!  We've been playing a bit of it and it's been quite fun!  (DS1 remastered)  It definitely has its weird quirks and difficult-to-understand bits, but the gameplay is pretty fun and deep, and ultimately feels pretty rewarding.