I'm doing ok.

I just spent a little time reading from Kiki's old wordpress blog, which apparently is now deleted -- yet, I still have my own little trace of it from my subscriptions.  Funnily enough, I didn't even realize whose blog it was at first...but it quickly became evident as I continued to read.

Besides feeling a sort of forlorn sadness upon reading about her troubles and the things which plagued her (around the middle of 2012), reading through that (short-lived) blog made me realize that hearing and seeing people make promises and plans for the future has actually started to give me pangs of fear (if not disbelief, as it often has).  In much the same way that literary foreshadowing has told us time and time again that when you hear someone say "everything's going to be alright.  things will stay like this forever.", it's pretty much guaranteed that chaos will erupt in the next scene...you can always tell that a blog is ending by the infamous post that ensures you "ahh, I haven't been writing in here much, but I'm definitely going to continue!"

Why do "we" make these promises to ourselves?  Are we just that bad at planning and thinking about the future?  Are we too optimistic?  Do we not learn from our mistakes?  Given hindsight, would we still make those same plans and hopes?  Or perhaps people do it because it is not the accomplishment that is important to them, but rather the hope and intention that is meaningful?  Though I have to point out that not following through with your timelined plan isn't really going to fly when it comes to the workplace.  I say "we" in quotes here because I don't think I'm as prone to this as others are, at least that I've seen.  (Though I can't say that I'm immune to it, myself.)

It might just be a lifestyle thing.  I think that personally if I can't follow through on things that I told myself that I would do, something is wrong with my life -- either I tried to take on too much, I had bad planning, or my life just doesn't have enough free time or something.  Maybe I am just more afraid of other people of having my priorities shift midway and deciding that something isn't worth it anymore.  I don't like change and I don't like having to stop something that I committed to, so I'm always really cautious when approaching something new.  Maybe that's just a me thing -- maybe that's what makes me such a "J".



In other news, we drafted my Conspiracy 1.5 set and it went pretty well!  I already have some feedback notes that I wrote down for myself about things which I don't think are working quite right or as well as I hoped, but overall it seems that people like the set and enjoy the mechanics, which is great -- no big design failures or anything.  I ended up with this sweet UR spells-matter deck which goes through its entire deck super quickly with a bunch of cantrips and card draw, while accumulating value with spells-matter creatures.  It may not be the best but it sure is sweet!

And in other other news, I had a lot of fun drawing up this new album design for "The Best of DDRKirby(ISQ) - Volume 1":

Still have to get the CD design itself done, as well as the tray design and inside flap, but once that is all done I can get the CD finalized and then send it off to Kunaki to get it printed!  I'm pretty excited for this release, despite the fact that it doesn't have anything new in it -- it's got a ton of good stuff in it and I'm really proud of every single track that I picked out to include.