I decided to give myself a little early xmas present and buy and play through Leap Year, by managore (Daniel Linssen).  I had my eye on it for a while, it being a puzzley platformer that is small and doesn't overstay its welcome.

It didn't disappoint!  Like I was fully expecting from managore, it's well designed, hits you with "aha" moments and stumbling blocks, and I was able to finish the entire game in 1.5 hours (ymmv).  It had a nice sense of progression and there was always something to tease out but not overwhelmingly so -- there was only one point at which I felt like I was "stuck" and had to re-evaluate what I had missed / hadn't yet explored.

I don't play a ton of puzzle platformers or a ton of puzzle games in general and it always astounds me how these things can be crafted so well, but I'm assuming that like anything else it comes with experience.  Just like level design is probably a skill that needs refinement, I think puzzle design, or "level puzzle design" is most likely like this too.  I don't really have that sense, only having dabbled in this sort of level design for a few games really (Colors of Your World being the most extensive).  But making a Rhythm Quest level is probably second nature to me at this point, or just making a song in general.

I tackled another level in the Augustus campaign, this time the fourth mission.  My final city looked like this:

I did good with this one!  Didn't need to restart my entire city from scratch, though I was getting a bit worried at times.  There were some silly mistakes made along the way -- the lower-left housing block had some food distribution issues in particular, and the reservoir on the left there is super awkward and only exists to provide water to the concrete makers (which I didn't even need after I finished my monuments).  The aqueducts connecting that reservoir actually completely cut off the southern farm block, which I didn't realize until later when I facepalmed and then made sure to just add a road going through them.

Turning all of the houses into grand insulae was juuuust enough to hit the prosperity rating on this mission, and it looks like 3 "double-size" housing blocks were the right amount to get the population to exceed 5000.  I'm worried about the next mission as the terrain is really challenging (lots of rivers and rocks everywhere) and I need an extra 500 people, as well as 70 prosperity instead of 65.  I'm looking forward to the challenge, though!

It's already going to be Christmas morning...time seems to have rolled along, but relatively peaceful.  And that's a good thing, probably, I think.  Taking some time to remember that we don't have to worry about everything so much.  Life is not "supposed to" be stressful.

It's been chill, but in a good way.

I'm a little low on vegetable supplies but been making do regardless.  Used some of those dried chilis we got from China today to cook Shui Zhu Yu.  Of course, the chilis I usually use are imported from there too, so it's not too different, but it was still a lovely fragrance after giving them a brief toast in oil.  I didn't use enough doubanjiang at first (I tend to underestimate it, I think I need to remember to overindex on it next time especially because I do the nontraditional thing and strain the broth before serving it so it's easier to eat), and I think next time I could probably look to amp up the sichuan peppercorn flavor more, but I managed to rescue it with some quick thinking, stir frying some of the paste in a separate skillet before adding it in to avoid clumping.

I've been taking a bit more time than expected to do bugfixes on the Rhythm Quest patch update that I put out, so I'm looking to take a step back from that now -- maybe at the very most, just do an end-of-year mailing list post and/or brief devlog.  I took some time over the past couple of days to put in some more work on the ALTTPR site -- this next upcoming update is going to be a huge one, when I get around to finishing it, as it's going to include all of the rooms in GT basement.  I've already done the left side entirely, so now I need to start working on the rooms on the right side (which, thankfully, there are less of).

In the meantime, I've started playing Caesar 3 again!  Or, Augustus v4, to be exact.  I started eyeing it again since I called it quits on MOO2, and I've been sucked in again and am loving it.

I've thought for a while that I would just play the vanilla Caesar 3 campaign again (again), on very hard, but this time with the addition of the Augustus v4 features, like cart depots and highways and all that.  Perhaps even trying to be really disciplined with how I approached each of the missions, maybe even recording segmented video playthroughs to show how you can approach them in my style.

But!  I decided to do something differently and I noticed on rereading the Augustus manual that they've got an entirely new custom campaign designed to be played with Augustus, using all of its fancy new features and custom scenario tooling.  So I've been going along with that, and having fun so far.

It's definitely a new sort of challenge; the maps are not generous at all, and so far there are all of these irregularly-shaped outcroppings and rocks everywhere that make it impossible to really put down big ideal-shaped housing blocks.  To my initial dismay, the campaign is designed to be played using a global labor pool, which I've never really used before when playing Caesar 3, as I think having to situate housing close to industries makes for more challenging and interesting housing block considerations.

But you can clearly see that the campaign is structured in a way that expects you to be using it (although it's stated that you =can= play ithout).  I cleared the first 2 levels without, but when I saw the map for the 3rd assignment I decided that enough was enough and I turned it on, since it seemed like there would be plenty of challenge even without that restriction.

And that was definitely true!  My first attempt at the map ended up failing after quite a bit of time spent on it -- I ran into a situation where I just didn't have enough people to power all of my industries/buildings, money was tight, my population was aging (meaning less workers), etc etc.  I had to start over, this time with a better plan in mind, and using bigger housing blocks with multiple fountains.  Besides the few boo-boos I made here and there (I think I ran out of money early on because I had forgot to actually fully connect one of my key industries for trade), it worked much, much better -- I never had =any= semblance of money issues, and though I had to squeeze in one more housing block than I anticipated, everything worked pretty well and I even got some residents living in small villas at the end.

Looking forward to spending some more time enjoying the rest of that campaign, for sure.  Did I end another year essentially alone again?  Yeah, I guess so, but I've made sure to carve out peace for myself -- peace which didn't exist a month ago, sadly -- and I'm finding a way to enjoy it, as I'm apt to do.

I've got another whole week off from work, I guess?  Xmas eve should be more chilling, maybe we'll do hot pot if we're feeling it, and then Xmas day I'll drive down south.  I'll be at one of the concerts this coming weekend and then hoping to watch Liz and the Blue Bird with the rest of them, which should be good as I've actually been meaning to revisit and recall that film; it's been too long.  Reminds me that it will probably be time to watch some more Kanon soon, as well.  (right now my casual watch material has just been more Initial D...)

Hope everyone is having an okay holiday season so far.

I've always had good experiences with maintaining my machines.  I mean I won't pretend I haven't had issues with them from time to time; either hardware related (like those bad usb-c cables), or software related, but in general, they serve me well and they serve me for a looooooong time.  My laptop is from around 2012 (same as my car...) and it's still carrying on just fine.  Admittedly I don't use it on a daily basis, but it's still running peppy as it can be and I still run all of my mac/iOS Rhythm Quest builds on it.

I've wondered at times what goes into it; like why do I seem to have friends who always talk about needing to replace their laptop that's taken a turn for the worse, or all that stuff.  Not even thinking about the older folks who have a billion shortcuts on their desktop and antivirus nags and all that, I mean my peers who are (ostensibly) just doing normal things (??).  Maybe even using their phones more than their computers at this point, who knows?

I thought back on this as I read a blog post the other day about how the ceaseless need for growth and short-term capitalistic shareholder profits has led everything everywhere in software and on the internet to devolve into a shoddy mess of predatory applications and systems that are all out to garner your engagement at the cost of pretty much everything else, including functionality and user experience.

I think there's been a sneaky, easy-to-miss shift in the space where before, you could keep yourself "safe" if you just knew what to avoid.  You know, don't click suspicious links, don't open spam emails, don't go looking to download those .exe files that claim to be "free photoshop" downloaded from a sketchy domain.  If you got a ton of popups and advertisements cropping up on your screen, it's probably because you were visiting some XXX site or clicked on some fake "download" button, yeah?

At some point things evolved and the predatory agents, adware, malware, intrusiveness started leaking into other parts of the ecosystem.  When you installed genuinely useful programs, they started asking if you wanted to also install this "free offer" to add "Ask Toolbar" to your system.  When you wanted to play your favorite game you had to do it through an online "launcher" program that showed you ads while it was patching your client.

Ironically enough, antivirus software was one of the first culprits I saw starting to become more and more intrusive.  "Overdue for scan now!" I saw it prompting on someone else's system.  Along with a big docked icon that prominently displayed its name on the taskbar.  You know, kinda like a big ad banner.

We began to see advertisements in new ways.  Not just banner ads that we scrolled through on sites, but now free mobile games had clickthrough ads.  Before long enough YouTube started introducing mandatory video ads, bringing us back to what we thought we'd escaped when we migrated off of cable TV.

But the thing is, things have shifted further and further now.  The predatory agents aren't "on the outside" anymore, they're literally bundled together with your system.  "Want to install Cortana from the Windows Store?" your system would ask.  "Sign in to unlock Windows".  It's not enough that I forked over however-many-hundred-dollars for this machine, of =course= it's not.  Apple wants me to register my email with them, so I can be engaged with their services.  Because they're not done with you once you buy their product.  No no no, that's just the beginning.  Use our cloud storage, use our payment system.  Sign up for a family plan!

Do you get what I'm saying?  The advertisements aren't from spyware or malware or some nefarious fake program you downloaded from a shady corner of the internet.  They are part of your =operating system=.  They're part of the service that you're using.

It's a different ballgame now.  The scale keeps on shifting and yet we keep on walking downhill, beholden to these services and applications, because "oh, that's just the way it is".  Is it really, though?  If you asked yourself in 2000, whether it would make sense to stop your music every 15 minutes to force you to listen to an ad, what do you think they'd say?  Do you think they'd pay $12 every month to stop those ads, or would they just look at you incredulously, because we already had a culture back then where we had 500 hand-curated DRM-free MP3s at our fingertips?

Your dating apps are engineered for engagement, gating interactions behind microtransactions.  Your code editor prompts you to try installing their AI solution.  =Google search=, supposedly the pioneer of featuring a clean "no-nonsense" interface, now shows you "helpful AI query answers" along with sponsored advertisements as the first few results.

It's not stopping here, either.  Nothing in your life is immune, not if they can help it.  Your car will show you recommendations for "trending restaurants" in your area.  When your internet service goes out, you'll still get ads while you navigate through Comcast's customer self-service flow.

There is a sort of arms-race going on and a lot of the time I take it for granted what it actually takes to stay ahead of the curve.  The last time I installed Windows 10 it was the LTSC version, which is "designed for specialized devices that require stability and minimal updates, such as kiosks and medical equipment."  I block and filter more and more content that websites try to throw at me.  I have more and more open-source solutions.

Sometimes you feel a bit of a culture shock moment if you're someone who regularly uses an ad blocker and then you go to or witness a setup that doesn't have any such thing.  All of a sudden you realize that there are people who are just living in a whole different experience than you are.

"And if I haven’t made it completely clear, this means that millions of people are likely using a laptop that’s burdensomely slow, and full of targeted advertisements and content baked into the operating system in a way that’s either impossible or difficult to remove. For millions of people — and it really could be tens of millions considering the ubiquity of these laptops in eCommerce stores alone — the experience of using the computer is both actively exploitative and incredibly slow. Even loading up MSN.com — the very first page you see when you open a web browser — immediately hits you with ads for eBay, QVC and QuickBooks, with icons that sometimes simply don’t load. "

I'm struggling to put into words any sort of big takeaway from all of these feelings and such, other than to be cognizant of how the digital world is these days and how different of an experience it can or can't be based on the way you navigate it.

You know those movie scenes where it shows some super-savy independent-yet-scruffy protagonist skillfully navigating the perils of some local outdoor market as you see countless tourists and unsuspecting victims get scammed, ripped off, or even pickpocketed?  Yeah.  That's sort of the image I want you to frame your interactions with the digital world from.  There are those who are actively getting totally conned, and there are those that are kind of passively getting ripped off because they just shrug and say "this is just how it is".  But then there are those people who understand that the corporations vendors are really out there to monetize and scam you and know how to "play the game", so to speak.

The more of your life you spend online the more important I feel like this sort of thing becomes.  I had a good friend who kept on complaining that they had way too many email subscriptions and notifications coming into their email inbox every day and I asked them "Do you ever bother just unsubscribing yourself using the link at the bottom of those messages?"  And they just blinked at me because this was just a totally new concept for them and they didn't realize that it was even a common practice to include something like that with an email.  Now, I'm not saying that that's the answer to everything (you can just use a disposable email address when you can get away with it), but it just goes to show you, right?

So just remember, the next time that you tell your friend to use Spotify to find music, or that they should try using dating apps because "that's how people do it these days" -- that all of these digital spaces are out to increase the time you spend on them at all costs, including actively getting in the way of what you were actually there to accomplish.

Looking at it again, I guess maybe all I did was poorly rehash the article that I linked to.

"In other words, internet users are perpetually thrown into a tornado of different corporate incentives, and the less economically stable or technologically savvy you are, the more likely you are to be at the mercy of them. Every experience is different, wants something, wants you to do something, and the less people know about why the more likely they are to — with good intentions — follow the paths laid out in front of them with little regard for what might be happening, in the same way people happily watch the same TV shows or listen to the same radio stations. 

Even if you’re technologically savvy, you’re still dealing with these problems — fresh installs of Windows on new laptops, avoiding certain websites because you’ve learned what the dodgy ones look like, not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know what a spam bot looks like, and so on. It’s not that you’re immune. It’s that you’re instinctually ducking and weaving around an internet and digital ecosystem that continually tries to interrupt you, batting away pop-ups and silencing notifications knowing that they want something from you — and I need you to realize that most people are not like you and are actively victimized by the tech ecosystem."

I'm probably (hopefully) just being cynical here, but the whole idea of "growth and increased engagements at all costs" (including making an inferior product) really gets hammered home when I think about just how many things you can attribute to it.  Why did your favorite website get a horrible redesign that made everything unintuitive?  Because they need to do something new to bring up their metrics.  Why did DDR World ship with terrible menu navigation?  Why did Link's Awakening get remade with the worse color schemes than on the original Game Boy?  Why do we keep getting shitty remakes of old games?  Is it to foster more artificial engagement with the same thing for longer?  Why did ThatGameCompany go from creating Journey to creating Sky, a game whose fans complain about constantly being prompted by limited-time events and cosmetics to grind for currency?  Isn't it obvious?

This is why we have such a strong contingent of people who enjoy playing old games -- it's because, despite everything, they're just better a lot of the time.  Or even when they aren't, they're at least free of this sort of stuff.

Save everything you can, because it's all going to go downhill, whether you like it or not.  That version of you from 2000 didn't think that they'd be watching mandatory ads in order to watch SOMEBODY ELSE play a video game (twitch), or listening to audio ads to listen to music (spotify), or paying money in order to MAYBE chat online with someone who may or may not be human (dating apps), but here we are.

Your cloud storage will play an ad for you as it fetches your data.  Your VR games will make you watch 3D ads before you can keep playing.  Uber's new rider agreement will have a clause where you agree to listen to your driver pitch you on various products.  Your generative AI pornography will offer you microtransactions.  Your flashlight will come with a phone app asking you to register with your email in order to unlock full integration.  And perhaps all the while you'll just say "that's just how it is".

Alright, NOW I've had my fill of MOO2 for another couple years, I feel like.  Did another game, this time with the added quality of life features, and also custom modded it to have a really small map, so only like 11 star systems (for 8 players), which I think helps.  Less is more, I think, when it comes to these things.

I guess one boring thing that tends to happen when it comes to me playing against the AI is that I reason out that I get an advantage the longer I wait to come into conflict with the other races, because the further along we are in the game / tech tree, the more of a benefit I'll have accumulated with my decisions and everything.  Which isn't like necessarily true, population is really important and if you can just conquer a star system or two and take them for yourself, the extra populace and planets can really boost your empire, but especially in the early game, I'm just sitting there frantically trying to get my economy and tech going without building up any defenses until I really have to.  There is definitely a tradeoff there, I mean you DO want to just get all that stuff researched ASAP and it's a waste to start building a fleet if you don't need one, right?  And then you also run into the issue where early game beam ships are really useless compared to ships that use fighters or missiles.  Of course, a creative race gets fighters (usually non-creatives end up having to choose reinforced hull) so they've got a leg up there, but I've been trying to play non-creative recently as it's a little more interesting.

The other problem with attacking early is that colonizing new planets after wiping out the other race is slow, but conquering the other race via ground combat is also a drain on your economy as you need to produce and then upkeep the troop transport ships.

Well, at least all the building queue management was a lot easier with the key shortcuts, and for lategame battles I just fastforwarded everything.  I conquered most of the galaxy, tried to exchange tech with the Psilons for stuff I was missing, and then when I was ready and they finally got fed up with me, I went into the final war with them.  By that time I was just dilly-dallying in the end-game anyways so they already had stellar converters and all, which meant that I couldn't just trounce them like they were nothing.  But with enough ships to survive the initial turn, even their huge fleet fell.  Nice.

Anyways, that's quite enough of that.  Again, another few hours wasted, but I mean, when else but the holidays am I going to feel like that's an okay thing?  Getting in touch with good old video games isn't a bad thing during this time, right?

 

All that aside, today was an okay day.  I started it out feeling pretty ungrounded, but some white tea (and a bunch of other teas) helped with that, and then we had a nice dinner out.  I decided for Rhythm Quest to hold out and not release the song select menu yet; just going to do the difficulties update, though I did do some more work on song select anyways.  I'll try and get that released tomorrow...

I gotta stop playing Master of Orion II, haha.  Despite having ostensibly experienced pretty much most things the game has to offer (??), more than once, something keeps me coming back.  The power fantasy of just building out an empire and seeing your ships decimate the AI fleets I guess is just tantalizing, researching the cool weapons and seeing them in action.  Beam weapons of course are the "coolest" and late-game they become absolutely awesome, but in this playthrough I went with a hybrid approach of small missile-launching ships and larger fighter bay-stocked carriers in the early game.  Fighter bays really are quite, quite strong in the early game, the problem is that you give up the Reinforced Hull upgrade in order to get them.  I didn't think much of it, but later on I definitely felt the fragility of my ships...

Anyways, it gave me something to enjoy about my day, despite it taking a long-ass time and being wrought with some of the tedium inherent in a 4X-style game.  Silly me didn't think to look until =after= I finished, and I only just now found that the 1.50 fanpatch mods add a number of quality-of-life features that would have made things really a whole lot better -- build queues that you can automatically apply (even to all planets), and also, increasing the speed of all combat animations so you can just fast-forward through them.  I was gonna say, I'll probably try not to revisit MOOII for a good while again, but mayyyybeeeee with these extra features it wouldn't actually be so bad.

Still, I have to wonder whether I'd have more fun playing some more Caesar III...

Well, I got some more Rhythm Quest work done at least, and some presents wrapped as well, so it's not like I did =nothing= the entire day besides play MOOII.  Tomorrow there's an event at Teance which should be nice, and then hopefully I can continue the Rhythm Quest work.  I'm pushing to release the new all-song-select menu, but even if I decide not to (and I might), the multiple difficulties update should be ready to go without too much further work.

I'm thinking about perhaps taking a look-see at R1 today, if I can manage it after dinner (we'll see though, dance games and tonkotsu ramen maybe not the best combo).

I'm ostensibly mainly going there to hang out and meet people (hah!) but no, I mean really the pretense is going to check out Pump It Up and DDR.  I refreshed myself on the PIU interface / codes and noticed that the location seems to have "DDR World" so I looked it up and....oh god, what happened?

 

Unfortunately, we've got yet another game lost to the madness that is terrible overcomplicated UI.  Several threads have already been made on how unintuitive this is; I'm sure glad that I looked up the info/infographic on this beforehand because I'm not sure how I would ever decipher any of this on the fly in 50 seconds.  The UI literally seems as if it's designed with "traps" to foil you from getting where you want.

Select one of the "folders" of genred music?  Oops!  Now you can only play beginner or basic difficulties.  Want to see all of the music available in the game?  Well, picking the button labeled "ALL MUSIC"......doesn't show you all of the music.  Aiye..........

What was wrong with the interface that we had before.......?

Remember that the world needs people like you, too.  And though you have parts of yourself that you can't stand, you have not yet reached your final form.  You will metamorphose into an existence that only you can be.  And there are people who will not only accept your gifts but welcome them, desire them, see them as vital to their lives.  Even if you cannot see it now, you will someday.  That even your imperfect, flawed existence is something worth celebrating.  And no matter how much pain you have caused, for others and yourself, there will always be someone to forgive you, when the time comes.

Perhaps I will do a more lengthy, and less vague (for once) post, about some of the things I've been thinking about and starting to change.  Like a chemical reaction of some sort, the change has already started to take place, and though it's self-instigated, there's a part of me that worries that I will not be able to mold and form it into a proper shape.  That's not really true though; it's not like I can't course correct or anything like that.  But it is still a little disorienting, as you can imagine, to be moving toward a vague direction without settling on a constellation, a north star to sort of guide myself.

But like my experiments in voice modulation, sometimes the iterative approach involves exploring an unknown space and figuring out where to go based on the initial results.  This is the first thing that many (avid / intelligent / deranged / [insert-other-adjective]) gamers do when confronted with a new system.  Try pressing every button on the controller to see what it does.  Test the boundaries and limits.  What are the rules of the game?  Can they be bent?  Broken?  What happens if you go left instead of right?  If you jump into that pit, do you lose a life?  How many lives do you start with?  How late can you time a jump off of a platform?

I suppose there are questions analogous to these, which perhaps have yet to be answered for myself, and maybe will be answered only through trial and error.  How can I be kind =and= beautiful?  How can I be gentle yet passionate?  How can I be Timm[ie] yet also Sayuri?  How can I be strong yet vulnerable?

Even if nobody misses the old me, I will still pay it my respects, as parts of it fade away into obscurity.  Nobody else has to, that's okay.  But it's still important for me to honor my past self.  They are the only reason that I'm here today.  All of their wishes, desires, needs, dreams, promises, they all still ring true.  You could tell me that they were the most misguided person of all and it wouldn't matter, because they still deserve love.  Your past self deserves love, too.  It should go both ways, right?  My past self did so much for me.  It's only natural to want to pay it back, isn't it?  It's not that I want to love my past self above everything else.  I just think we both want the best for each other.  The hopes I have for my future self are the same feeling that my past self had about the me that is here now.

Maybe, someday...

But even though hardship can trigger new growth, it is not the hardship itself that spurs on the change, is it?  Maybe sometimes, but I want to believe in a better world, one where we can be mindful of improvement without having to also face adversity.  Like my world of ALTTPR where I simply play casual weekly async seeds and do my own research.  Like every week when I simply do a musical sketch for One Hour Compo.  Why does pain need to be a part of the process at all?

Sometimes, though, the harshness of reality must be confronted.  We come face to face with our faults, our flaws, and everything that we thought we once understood but really had no idea about.  I thought at one point that I was doing all of these pretty-haired girls a favor by offering gifts and letters.  Like No-Face, as Kiki once told me.

"I do think there are people like him everywhere, people who want to glom on to someone but have no sense of self."

Who is it that was once worthy of love, and are they still worthy in the same way?  What is it that I should reach for, and use to ground myself?  Should I still cultivate the image of the Chihayaburu, the spinning top?  Or must there be another image, as well?

Even the things that I used to take solace in, in remembering "ah yes, I am still me after all", are beginning to fade.  What if my metamorphosis results in a loss, as it must always?  Is it right to become "Timmie" from "Timm[ie]"?  What would Sayuri think, if she was here?

I guess it's no wonder that I'm so good at being alone when I've had so much practice with it.  I don't mean that in a self-deprecating way, I really mean the act of enjoying time alone by oneself.  Perhaps that is yet another reason why being alone has always been centering for me, in the same way that my confidence in writing music rarely wavers, even though I am past the point where I think that everything I do is the best thing ever.

But even in all of my uncertainty, I feel that there =is= an image that I will be happy to don.  One that embodies not just silence and grace, but perhaps gentle care as well.  It's a visage, but an important one.  I don't know if it's really something that's natural for me to do, but if I can believe in it, that's enough for me.

When neither "perfect" nor "imperfect" were good enough, what do you turn to, then?  It can be easy to feel like there is no water left in the ocean for you.  If you're lucky, maybe you'd look from where you once came from and find that the water from the babbling brook was clear enough for you to quench your thirst.  But if not?  When you feel like everyone else has left, will you, too, decide to forge ahead on your own, and if you do, will it be from bravery, or cowardice?  Will you leave everyone else in the dust, so that you can never feel that you are left behind anymore?

Could we drink from that still glass lake?  Would that be enough to sustain us?  Perhaps the oasis in the desert is necessary to keep us going, even if it's little more than a mirage.

When I look back on these times how do I want to see things?  There is something a little...disappointing, I think, even if I were to become saved from existence.  I'm not sure how to voice it or put a finger on it.  Maybe it's because it divides life into the "saved" and the "not saved".  And who is it, exactly, then, that decides our fates from up on high?  Wouldn't it feel...cheap, almost?  Being saved just because you happened to be chosen.  Like winning some existential lottery, ticketed by your own merits.

Maybe it's also because "perfect" wasn't good enough.  It makes it feel like I've already fallen from grace.  And what recourse is there, then?

Someone in the pantheon perhaps would agrue that everyone should be saved, to be chosen.  But it's not really true, is it?  Some dreams are meant never to come true, they are just dreams.  And "perfect" was never real, never in the first place, even when it still seemed magical, it never was.  But I'm always drawn to things like that, because the things that are real never last.

Where are you?  Where are you now?  And will you ever find me?  Shall I wait on the shore of that still glass lake?  Shall I wait in the tower?  Shall I wait in the sky amongst the stars?

What if you, too, won't ever turn out to be real in the first place?

Sometimes you relax and then you feel energized, other times you relax and then you feel tired.  Life's not always kind, but like...I guess I'm not, either?

But separate from all of that, there is a loss to be grieved, a loss of something that I never really had in the first place.  I don't really know how I feel about it yet.  It is simultaneously something that wasn't important at all to me that I lost, but also something that seems like my world revolves around it.  I think the things that come to my mind when I think about my loss, is "do I really want to cling to this, too?"

I know that I lost my anchor already, so I may as well continue to drift in one direction or another.

I wrote that a year ago.  What exactly was it that I was writing about?  I can guess, but perhaps not know for certain.  I don't think it was something as concrete as you might guess, but something more abstract.  Maybe a loss of a certain way that I thought I was, but perhaps never could be.

"I know that I lost my anchor already, so I may as well continue to drift".  I...wonder how I feel about that, now.  It's true, that I lost something.  That much I know for certain.  But perhaps the thing that was keeping me bound to safety was not really that thing after all.  "My anchor".  Hasn't that always been something a little different than what I was talking about?  Lately I've started to realize it.  That I'm fiercely resistant to people telling me what to do, how to live my life.  Even when I end up adopting their ways, it always has to be under my own terms, at my own pace, under my own volition.  And maybe the only true company that I =truly= keep consistently are those things that I can never reach.  The night sky, the quiet gurgling of the fountain, the steady ticking of the clock, and -- at one time -- my twin star.

There is a strength and a sadness from finding your love in yourself.  I don't think it's a bad thing, it's not like self-love is mutually exclusive with love from others.  But sometimes self-care can only be symptomatic.

I deserve a rest...

Today felt like it went by kinda quickly, but not necessarily in a bad way!

I didn't quite get great sleep last night (hopefully on track for today to be slightly better) and I got off to a late/rougher than usual start (monday...).  Worked a little later than usual as a result, but lunch was ok (pasta with mushrooms and leek), and dinner turned out well, if a little bit stuffy compared to what I've been aiming for this week (tomato soup, grilled cheese sandwiches and a little bit of spinach/arugula).

Managed to squeeze in a single Rhythm Quest re-charting today which felt nice.  Didn't manage to get any work done on my letter, so that'll be a goal for tomorrow for sure, to leave some time on Wednesday to start packing and addressing everything before going off to MCS and doing groceries and all of that stuff.

Highlight of the day was probably my ALTTPR run which went swimmingly; had a few execution mishaps for sure but also some narrowly-avoided deaths which were a relief to scrape through.  Ended up with a very low time; don't know if it'll be good for first place this week but was certainly fun regardless.

No real thoughts today, I don't think...but it's clear that the darkness has been clearing out...

Today was alright!  Not perfect, but we'll take it.  I can feel the effects of my good practices starting to kick in; today was the first day where I didn't really feel lonely and depressed, despite not having had anything like actually change in my situation or anything like that.  Which is good.  I mean, this is how it's supposed to work out!

I lost a little bit of steam toward the end of the night, but eh, it'll happen.  I managed to re-finalize/revise the heightmapping/charting for Rhythm Quest levels 1-1 through 1-3 and took care of the Easy/Hard mode charts for level 1-4.  If I can just do like another level each day that would be fantastic, but...we'll see, my work on that could end up being more bursty.

Doing good on the cooking front!  Lunch was green beans and then dinner was the leftover wood ear plus carrots, and then blackened tilapia served with a little bit of spinach and mizuna.  Tomorrow's lunch is going to be some mushroom pasta and then I'll have to figure out what I want to do for dinner; I've got a number of options.  I've actually got to go shopping closer to Wednesday or Thursday or so to restock on groceries, but there are still like 6 meals to go till then...

Also managed to get another page of writing done (less than I was hoping, but more than zero, so good enough), record my monthly Patreon videos, and take care of some more xmas shopping.  Had some quality alone time too, and played some (singles) DDR for exercise.  And another highlight of the day was just sipping on my aged white tea throughout the afternoon as I was working on Rhythm Quest stuff and such.  Helped provide some virtual company for friend, too, and watched the second episode of S3 of Hibike!.  Like I said, really not half bad at all.

My intent for the day was something to the effect of "work hard, play hard".  I think I sort of did a 4 out of 5 on that...some things came up so I couldn't fit everything in.  I think I did pretty OK on the "work" part more or less -- I mean, always more to be done, but progress is progress -- but the "play" part could have been a little better.  I keep pushing off like "quality dedicated" playtime to run rando or just do something else to that effect.  Maybe I'll just fire up a run of eletd2 lite mobile before bed, that's been a silly little timewaster of mine.

I don't really have anything substantial to report on at all, it's just a check-in more than anything else.  It's only a one-meeting day tomorrow, so hopefully a nice light way to get back into the swing of things after the Thanksgiving weekend...

Said I would check in here a little more often, so here I am!

Today was pretty "ok".  Had some more time in the car just driving along, haha, so there was that.  No big realizations or takeaways, but I definitely had some feelings come up from down under.

Did groceries today and stocked up on veggies!  Going to be trying to see if I can cook a little healthier this week to feel good, so that means veggies, leafy greens, and fish.  Did also get a few other things (just to break things up), like I'll probably be making smashburgers, some chicken, and that breakfast sausage apple dish, but I'll see if I can keep it nice and feel-good with the rest of it.

Did a really casual ALTTPR (alttpo) co-op run with a friend today, that was fun.  Sometimes I wonder whether I need a little more rando in my life to have something to feel good about and work toward, but I think my current pace of about once-a-week is pretty okay too, given the amount of other things I have kinda going on.

Letter writing is ALMOST at a close, I think.  There's actually a writing meetup going on tomorrow at cafenated but it's a bittt early for me to show up so I don't know if it's really going to be for me this time.  I know I'm supposed to be trying to get out and meet more new people but balance (and sleep) is good too, I think......  Maybe I'll make up for it by making sure I make it out to MCS this wednesday (instead of just hanging at teance haha).  Actually yeah I probably should do that especially since I will probably be missing Jammix this coming Friday.

Getting some more xmas shopping (both online and in-person) done, which feels good!  Gotta get through all of that, little bit by little bit.  Also stopped by the tiny keyboard store again in SJ, was there hanging out with a friend.  I've been taking a little break from using my Cycle7 and am back on the Evo80 instead, which is always a nice change of pace.  Typing randomly on some of the boards there in SJ made me inspired to find some time (maybe soon-ish) to finally put my HMX Gachapons into a board of some sort.  I haven't been super excited about it since I honestly feel like the WS POM+ ones in my Cycle7 feel and sound great for that board, but =maybe= the secret will be to put back in the plate foam and see how the Gachapons sound with both foams in the Cycle7.

I could also just try to use my Neo80...that has been sorely neglected for a while now, although maybe I just should hit the button on buying a new stabilizer kit for that; I think that would be the time to start driving it again.

I could still feel myself feeling sad through the day, but I'm also not feeling sucked into it.  I'm doing most of the right things...so there are things to feel good about, or hopeful toward, even in the midst of it.