Things have been alright recently...really well, actually!

I've been busy...mostly with work, but everything else too--lots of things were going on this week.  I took care of a good number of them though, so hooray.

I'm moving!  After about a year and a half at my current place, it's time to pack up and move to somewhere new, later this month--really soon, actually!  I'm pretty excited--I'll be moving into my own place, hoping, hoping to replicate the same "atmosphere" that I had back when I was in Munger during my 5th year at Stanford.  My room at that time was my "sanctuary", and really accounted for much of my happiness throughout that period of my life.  I'm not exactly sure just how my new place will feel, but it will certain be nice, that's for sure (and expensive...T_T).  I'm really looking forward to having my own space, to just come back home after work and just relax and be myself, with the whole place to myself, instead of one bedroom out of the entire big house.  It'll be nice to have the fridge and kitchen all to myself again too!  Ahh, just thinking about it really brings back great memories from the times at Munger...

I haven't yet decided what to do about all of my decorations; I really haven't.  That will definitely take some thinking.  It's not so simple anymore, you see...it's not like before, when it was simply a matter of "where should I put everything?"  Because you see, I'm not sure that I want to put everything up anymore.  I'm really not sure.

I think that on one hand, it is really cool how my room has always been--how the walls have always been covered in decorations, how it's all packed into grid-like patterns so that the entire wall space is full of Sanrio characters and anime characters.  But on the other hand, some of the stuff that I have isn't really that important--the things that I got back when it was just "anything is okay to have on the walls because I want more wall decorations, more!"  The random Naruto posters, the Sanrio phone charm backings--things like that.  And the posters that got laminated (unfortunately) are really heavy and a bit warped, so they aren't great at staying up.

I guess part of me is afraid of change; afraid of giving up what I used to have.  That resistance to change will always be a part of me, and I never wish it to go away.  I think that's part of it.  But I guess another part of it is just that I don't really know how else I =would= be.  What =would= I do if I didn't try to just put everything up?  Would I have bare walls?  Would I have mostly bare walls except for a few things?  Would I keep the living room clean but have the bedroom be full of stuff?  What about all of my shelf decorations?  I'm not really sure.

Work has been a mixed bag--I have a lot of work to do, and am fearing that I'll get behind/am getting behind, but at the same time the quality of what I'm doing together with my coworker is really excellent and I'm super proud of it.  It feels good to be a chief engineer on the project and making really thoughtful design decisions in order to make everything clean and sensible.  I'm really grateful for having such a good coworker to handle things with.  It's also great that I'm still able to chat with my former manager about things since she's really helpful with the kinds of support that I always find myself needing.

If you haven't heard, Match Girl got 2nd place overall and 2nd place for audio in Ludum Dare, which is awesome!  Read the postmortem here for more about that.  The soundtrack has been getting LOADS of buzz because of it, which is quite awesome--over 300 downloads already since Ludum Dare voting ended and I got a huge traffic influx.  People really seem to like it, which is great!  I even had to give people an alternate download link so that I wouldn't run out of Bandcamp free download credits so quickly.

I've been importing all of my old Xanga content into a wordpress site at http://ddrkirbyisq.wordpress.com/, which is taking quite a while (thanks to it being split into many XML files with 100 posts each that have to be uploaded one by one)--I'll make an announcement when that's all done, though I doubt that it will actually mean much to any of you.  It's probably not going to affect me much either, to be honest, because unfortunately all of the permalinks that I have that link to the "quality" posts that I had are all still invalid since everything has new URLs now.  But it'll be nice to know that it's still up there on the web -somewhere-, at the very least.  Maybe once it's all done I can also use the search feature to look for specific posts that I remember?  Maybe...

Deca rehearsal started up again after our lengthy holiday break!  The first rehearsal was exhausting, but so fun too!  I'm so glad I get to be a part of the group, really.  There was this one point when we were waist-deep into learning our new choreo and I was really tired but trying to push hard anyways and suddenly I just realized how awesome everything was.  Maybe it was just me realizing that this is exactly what made Marching Band and Winter Percussion so great as well--just drilling the same things over and over again until you're really tired...sure, it drains you, but it's also so rewarding...

I'm mostly through watching Higurashi (1st season) for the second time...it's really odd watching it again.  I didn't really think that much of it the first time, but it's just...so different now.  Partly because of all of the things that my idol talked to me about it, and partly just because I have so many more experiences that I can relate it too.  I guess personal experiences just make everything more vivid in that way because it evokes more feelings in you.  It's the same thing with, I dunno, seeing hugs and tight embraces in movies--things like that, you feel it much more after you actually understand what that kind of thing feels like, emotionally.  And same thing with Wreck-It Ralph and the sense of nostalgia too.  The climax of Frozen actually hit me really hard because it evoked some memories of Journey in my mind, and Journey was a super-emotional experience.  Which reminds me, I still really haven't gotten a chance to get in deep with that game and interact with the "community", but I really hope to.  Soon, soon.  I feel a little more confident that I actually will carry through with that now that I've actually seen FEZ and Mega Man 10 to completion.  Good times...

I spent/wasted a bunch of time this week browsing through videos of this year's Awesome Games Done Quick, which features speedrunners going through games as fast as they can, and getting donations for charity.  I think the way they have the event set up is super super awesome, and can't believe that I haven't heard of this before.  Some of my favorite speedrun games are on there too--Super Metroid and Metroid Zero Mission, for example, but they also did GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, mega man games, and a whole bunch of other things that are just great for speedruns.  They even played through IWBTG and IWBTGG!

It's been a while since I've made a blog post of any substantial length...actually, I kind of sucked at this one because I didn't even finish it in one go, which is really weird--I actually saved it and then picked up later.  Weird...