Things have been pretty good lately!  Partly because of the beautiful cloudy weather making the whole world beautiful and amazing <3

Work has been going well still!  I've also been doing some long-overdue cleaning...finally got around to vacuuming the place and cleaning out the shower.  Ugh, much much overdue.  Place is starting to look much cleaner, though!  Rugs got washed too, yay.  Still have to clean the kitchen and the rest of the bathroom, but up a bunch more decorations, and dust everything, and reorganize some drawers.  I think there may be few silverfish living in some of the drawers that I hardly use unfortunately =(  Stupid silverfish!  I guess I'll just take the entire drawers outside and then shake out all the clothes and sweep it clean.  One step at a time...

I'm quite looking forward to dancing tomorrow night!  Skipped out on FNW last week, it was July 4th weekend and I wasn't sure how many people would be in anyways; had some other stuff to do, but I'll be back tomorrow for some good dancing!

Played some ITG over the weekend!  Been a while; last time I played any form of DDR was at Fanime, haha.  It was quite fun, some of the stepcharts were pretty good!  I am still too scared of the mines and hands and everything in ITG so I am still turning them off for now (rolls are fine).  7s and 8s are a good difficulty for me, I found--9s are doable but a challenge; the 7s and 8s are more relaxing and enjoyable.  I'm starting to sort of be ok at reading crossovers, but...not really that practiced on them; they definitely still trip me up sometimes.  I'm getting a little better at execution in terms of hitting the damn pads; I think if I just use my heel for everything it's a lot more accurate.  I still dunno how the good people do it with the front and back edges of their feet; I guess it's something I'd just have to learn.  Maybe it would help if I used the bar to try it?  Dunno.

Tried out Technika too, for the first time; it was quite fun!  I didn't realize it was keysounded, so that was cool.  The basic concept was super easy for me to pick up but I definitely had trouble understanding relative beat positions since there are no markers or guidelines; I guess that's just something you learn to interpret with practice, or you just learn the rhythms for each song?  Maybe people just get good at tracking the timings of notes visually as opposed to relying on rhythm sense?  I dunno, but that was for sure the most challenging part of it.  I guess in hindsight there seemed to be a consistent guideline for how far apart the notes are spaced in relation to each other, but I still wondered to myself whether it would have been nice to have some vertical lines for reference.  Well, whatever; it was fun regardless.

I've been doing design work for some card game stuff that I've been working on...one MtG set and one other project that is a completely different thing altogether, so that's been fun.  I've been figuring out a lot of stuff in the MtG set design; exploring some ideas and deciding what will probably work and not work.  It's quite cool, maybe I'll make some separate blog posts about that sometime.