Staycation

Things are good! :D

Continuing my "staycation" -- I've gotten a lot of things done and had a great time so far!

Today and yesterday I spent a lot of time in my back room putting up wall scrolls and posters.  It took a lot of planning to get everything to work out, but it was all worth it and I've got a layout that is very nice!  I'm starting to really get the hang of doing this now, I feel like, haha.  This is already the 4th time that I've done this (once in Munger, then in the Mountain View townhouse, then at The Meadows, and now at the current place).  Of course, each time I have a slightly different set of stuff (I get more things to put up over the years), but the rate at which I accumulate new decorations has virtually slowed down to a crawl now.  Part of this is an interest thing (they don't often sell wall scrolls and posters for the stuff that I'm currently into, plus I'm a little more out of touch with anime and such in general nowadays), and part of it is also just that I =know= I already have a whole crapload of stuff and don't need any more.

Anyways this time I was very systematic about it -- The key is to start off with the biggest things and then take it from there...usually I figure out the placement of all of the wall scrolls first because those are the largest and because ideally they all go on the same wall (usually taking up a majority of the wall if not the whole thing).  It definitely helps that I have photos of the previous layout at The Meadows so that I can compare -- this helps especially with the posters, to know which posters fit nicely with each other, for example.

Anyways, I've got 2 walls basically covered (minus the windows, of course, which are essentially off-limits), and I've successfully laid out all of the wall scrolls, plus all of the posters.  So I'm about halfway done...I still need to put up all of the small stuff, including pencil boards, some random art prints, stationery covers, red envelopes, etc etc etc.  I'll probably start out with the pencil boards since there are a lot of them and I'd like to put all of them together in their own dedicated space somewhere.

Last night I made it out to Mission City Swing!  I still don't think I'm going to go anymore, but I figured that I should try to go this week since I'm on vacation and because some of my friends were going to be there.  It took over an hour to get there...there was some stupid traffic along the way and I was actually worried because I was starting to zone out a bit =(  Definitely not a pleasant drive, but I managed to make it in time for the intermediate lesson, which was on musicality.  Overall it was fun to do some WCS again, and also seeing my friends, but still not really enough to justify the drive up and down -- it just sucks up way too much time out of my day that I really can't afford.  On the other hand, I certainly didn't regret going there this week, since not only did I get to dance with Marie a bunch but I also got to see Emily Cheng, who randomly had decided to stop by!  Wahh!  Hadn't seen her in ages, so that was really nice.

I put in some more work to my MtG set (the "Conspiracy 1.5" set), and I managed to fill out the entire set of commons.  I'm guessing it still needs a lot of tweaking, but that's a landmark that I'm happy to have hit.  I'm going to try designing a handful of uncommons and maybe tweak some of the numbers of the commons here and there and then hopefully do some playtesting on my own to see how everything actually ends up playing out.

Been working some on music as well -- finished some tweaks on the Super Pipe House remix (for the SMRPG OCR project), which is a great song -- all that's left now is to double-check the mixing and mastering and then that'll be done!  I also attempted to get started on making a remix for Willrock's album but it proved to be pretty difficult...I ended up with the start of a song that was....meh, ok, but I wasn't really feeling it, so I think I'll probably just scrap it and start over again with a different direction to see if it works out any better.  Wish me luck!

I played through Mysterious Space randomly last night (managed to reach a good end!), and unfortunately discovered that the in-game seamless version of the credits theme, "Journey's End", had a rendering error related to FL Studio's "Wrap" render mode combined with dBlue glitch (something I should be careful about in the future).  I hate render errors =(  Anyways, I re-rendered using Cut instead of Wrap (easiest way to fix it, unfortunately), and reuploaded it.  Not going to make an announcement about this one since it doesn't really matter as much...but yeah, sadtimes.  Ben is actually running a Kickstarter for Mysterious Space so that he can quit his day job and work on it full-time, which is kind of neat, so check that out if it sounds interesting to you.

I have another TWO albums complete and on schedule to be released, by the way! (one is just a compilation album, but the other is a brand new OST!)  Still need to put together album art for both of them -- here's hoping that I can at least get started on that this weekend.

Did some more miscellaneous cleanup around the house today too -- we re-organized the refrigerator to be much more efficient with space, which felt pretty awesome. :)

Feels nice to be settling into my new life and new place...I also stopped by Lucky's for groceries tonight, since that's now going to be the grocery store of choice because it's super close.  I'll probably still stop by Whole Foods for stuff like fish and good meat though -- it's on the way to work anyways, and you can't really beat the quality (though it is pricier).  I don't really like the way Lucky's looks, but groceries are groceries, and it's not like the quality is terrible.  Plus, it's super close!  I'll have to see how the deli counter and meat/fish counters are though -- if they suck then I'll have to just get those sorts of items from somewhere else...