Life has continued to be pretty good these days...

Took another crew out to the deep for Space Alert and we managed to successfully complete all of our missions, including a hilarious SNAFU where we managed to end the mission with the right side of our ship completely falling apart and two of us knocked out by a plasmatic fighter...

DJed for FNW again yesterday!  Man it is really warm these days, sometimes I forget since I'm always indoors with A/C at home now (spoiled...).  It wasn't as stressful as last time, maybe I was just nervous that day or something *shrug*.  Anyways, my next gig will be JaSmix, going to make sure to cram all of the best songs into my set for that of course!

I've started trying to work on my JaSmix workshop as well.  Thinking about teaching these things has actually definitely given me the impetus to actually improve my dancing, which was sort of a pleasant surprise.  I guess it's as good of a motivation as any to try something a bit different with my dance and really explore it so that I can talk about it effectively.  Well, hopefully anyways.  We'll see how it goes.

Was really happy with my OHC entry this past week, had a sort of System Shock 2 vibe going with some neat rhythmic filtered pads.  (Speaking of System Shock 2, been thinking about going back and finishing that Ponterbee Station playthrough...)  I've started on the next composition on my plate which is another VGM remix -- that one is coming along, but fairly slowly, which is slightly concerning, but I guess not all of these can be things that I knock out in a single hour...

Studied Puyo a bit for PPT and it's definitely been more than good enough to cover my butt when I totally screw up in Tetris and fail to do anything meaningful lol.  There's still a lot of experience that I need on both sides to really understand a lot of effective play though.  Sometimes in Tetris I still just sort of blindly downstack without really doing anything effective.

The other week I was thinking a lot about tactics games and why Tactics Ogre really impressed me, even though in some aspects it was less "cool" than FFT.  I went and looked at some FFT mods actually, seeing if there was anything that was maybe worth playing through, but in the end decided not to.  I think the thing about Tactics Ogre (or, the One Vision mod specifically), is that it really managed to bring "Tactics" to the genre, which I appreciated.  In these tactics games, both class design and equipment choices should always be about tradeoffs and specialization.  It doesn't make sense to have a unit that is a jack-of-all-trades because you can only do a single thing per turn, so specialization is the name of the game.  But there always needs to be strengths that are balanced out by weaknesses, and each unit needs to have a defined role.  There can be mages that have high magical attack, but really weak defense.  That creates the need for knights which are really good at defending squishy units -- and in Tactics Ogre they even come with movement-inhibiting abilities that prevent enemies from just waltzing right past them and attacking your squishy mages.  But then you've also got archers which can attack the mages from afar without having to deal with the knights, but only if they have good positioning.  Again, it's all about tradeoffs.  That's an area where FFT definitely falls short -- FFT is more about just making cool combos and doing the most damage with everyone.  In FFT if you deal more damage, you do more damage to EVERYTHING, and class and equip configs just become a matter of who can out-DPS everything else and have the speed to apply it.  In Tactics Ogre on the other hand, you have Ninjas that can dual-wield daggers/katanas, which are excellent against squishy targets like mages and archers.  So the ninja is this specialized assassin unit whose role is to use high mobility to take out the high priority targets, and use high evasion and one-time defensive abilities to avoid getting killed along the way.  But ninjas can't really do nearly as much damage to tanky knights, because knights have a lot of defense, and that defense gets applied to BOTH of the hits of your dual-attack.  So what do you do if you need to take out these heavy knights?  Well, you either need mages, or you need a berserker unit that can wield a massive two-handed hammer/maul to chunk through their defense.  Again, more specialization.  Even in unit formations, there are tradeoffs -- you want to have your tanky frontline units surrounding/protecting your DPS dealers in the back, and you don't want to just leave holes in your formation everywhere, but at the same time if you clump everyone up that's just asking to be hit by AoE magic spells.  Tradeoffs!  That kind of thing is just not possible in FFT since you only have 5 units or so...

I finally got a "god run" in risk of rain 2 with Rex, and unlocked the final achievement, so now I've unlocked everything in the entire game!  It started off with an early 57-leaf-clover (best item in the game) and ended up spiraling way out of control when I got another 57-leaf-clover, some other good items, a ceremonial dagger, shaped glass, etc.  The early game was a bit stressful since Rex needs very careful HP management, but once I got to a certain point the shaped glass + ceremonial dagger was just sort of decimating everything and I also found a teddy bear printer and got myself 13 teddy bears so I had a ton of evasion as well.  After a while I ended up stacking FOUR shaped glass so I was now dealing 1600% damage and things were just melting even with just my auto-attack (not even my secondary attack!).  It got to the point where the ceremonial daggers would just insta-kill everything that spawned, including the teleporter bosses, and I basically only ever had to attack at the very beginning of a level to get things started.  Pretty insane.  Even after leaving my computer running overnight (perched in a safe spot), I was still pretty much instantly killing everything.  The only thing that could possibly kill me is Happiest Mask, which is currently bugged and sometimes the ghosts actually end up attacking (and dealing damage to) you for some reason.  So after getting bored, that's how I ended up going out.  (Would have liked to go to a shrine of order at some point for the lulz, but didn't find one.)

Went to see the 3rd Hibike movie a couple weeks ago....it was good, enjoyable, but certainly not up to the level of either of the anime seasons, nor Liz and the Blue Bird.  I think there were some really interesting feelings that got evoked with how much things changed, and how inconsequential some things seemed when put into the perspective of transience (or maybe that's just how I feel about everything)...at the same time it feels like the movie was not really saying that much, and some of the themes really felt very muddled, especially when compared to some things that happened in earlier seasons that were very very very strong.  Their performance was certainly beautifully rendered, I'll give you that...