I felt unexpectedly supported today.  It's easy to forget, I think, about the care of the people around us and how they want us to succeed and be happy.  This is, of course, because we have a human tendency to only want to see things that reinforce our existing internal narratives.  Sometimes, there's an element of self-fulfilling prophecy that comes into it, but even without that, the data points that are highlighted in our heads are the ones that make coherent sense with our own self-narrative.

It's no different in ALTTPR, cognitive bias is of course rampant in that sort of environment.  It really sticks out when you lose because you skipped a required location and then didn't go back to it until it was your last check.  What's less obvious is all the times when you skipped the same location and gained an incremental advantage, especially those times when you still lost.  Statistical analyses and big data are some of the best tools that we have for understanding the game theory of complex systems, yet there are scant few doing that sort of thinking in that community, even on the micro-level of "how should you route X dungeon" or even "which of these two checks takes longer".  Imagine a texas hold em player who never bothers looking at the expected win percentage of their hands...

Anyways, on the ALTTPR side I'm slowly coming to a realization that I might be on the verge of making a really big shift in my routing style.  It's something that I'm not sure whether I should commit to, so more data and testing is needed on my part, but everything I've looked at so far points in favor of it...

On the life side, I...like I said, I feel supported.  Which is strange, because it was quite recently that I feel like I wasn't really in the state of mind at all to receive that sort of energy.  I had figured that I needed to take care of myself first before I could come back out of my shell, and to some extent, that work still needs to be done, but I guess sometimes people really =can= reach out and pull you in, you're not always Too Far Gone to be saved.  There is positive energy out there, "community", even, perhaps.  I've always known that solitude can be super healing for me, but company can, too, sometimes.  Both in balance, I guess.