There's no time like the present to make a change...

Things have been not too great recently, to be honest, though hopefully on the mend.  I'm super behind on writing letters and not really happy with the amount of time that I've had to myself lately, though maybe it's not as bad as I'm making it out to be.  I did have some quality time to myself last night, which was super helpful.  During that time I finished up a late birthday letter, wrote up an email, got youtube streaming videos rendered for my new Celestial Melody album, and also downloaded and tried out the updated tools that are available for Melee character development and modding.  They're pretty cool, and much much much easier than the raw hex editing I used to do.  You can even modify animation speeds, which was previously impossible!

Speaking of Celestial Melody, it's going to be released very soon (probably tonight or tomorrow).  I got my shipment of 15 CDs and they look pretty nice!  Though, unfortunately, I worry that some of the plastic spindles might have gotten broken during transport, as there's a bit of rattling in some of them. =(  Regardless, I took some photos of the CDs this morning, so all that's left is to upload them, double-check everything, and spread the word before hitting the button.  I'm also hoping to sell physical copies (and maybe pass out cards) this weekend at some dance events that I'm going to, which should be fun as well!  This is a jam-packed album, with over a full hour of music, and I'm really excited to be releasing it.  Next up on my music project list is probably to sit down and write some sort of awesome song that I can use as an exclusive for starting my Patreon page...

I'm into chapter 4 (the final one) in FFT, and currently going around the map completing Errands/Propositions with my team of 9 generic squad members.  The random battles have gotten to be a little bit of trouble, not because they're usually hard or anything, but because for the past two ones that I went into, one was the rare battle against dragons / hydras / tiamats which I had no way of winning (with just Agrias, Mustadio, and 3 chocobos lol), and in another one I decided to just send only Agrias and Mustadio to make things faster, but realized that it wasn't winnable because one of the enemies was a blue dragon and both Agrias and Mustadio were equipped with Ice Brands and thus had no way of actually damaging it.  Whelp.

Aside from that, my squad is doing pretty well.  I've got:

Ramza, as an Ubersquire with Dual Wield.  He's a little light on HP but is great at just walking up to things and killing them dead real fast.
Anselm is my Dragoon with Attack Up.  He's currently taking a detour and going to become a Samurai so that I can give him Doublehand (I think that increases lance damage, actually still have to check whether it works on jump)
Gerald is a Ninja with Martial Arts.  Does a ton of damage and is basically a finished build.
Dawson is a Monk with Attack Up (to poost Punch Arts).  He's pretty versatile as he can heal a ton of HP/MP with Chakra provided there is some flat ground.
Maronne is my Black Mage/Summoner who has Quick Charge.  A lot of the time she actually just casts Golem since Golem is just an awesome ability, but she's also good at just dealing magic damage with summons too.  I actually wonder if it might be worth teaching someone else Golem, someone with a little more HP to serve as a better buffer.
Lora is my Thief/stealer, who is currently a Ninja for better speed and damage.  I haven't had to use her to steal much, but there are some battles coming up where I'll have to steal some important equipment.
Margry is eventually aiming to be a Black Mage with Draw Out/Iado, and is currently learning the Draw Out/Iado abilities as a Samurai.  Her physical damage sucks right now but Iado really seems awesome.
Ladd is going to be a bard real soon but currently he's a Mediator/Orator and needs one more level before he can transition.  I never played with bards or dancers during my first play of the game so it'll be cool to try them out!  Theoretically I should be using him and Ramza to boost everyone's Brave but it's hard to find good opportunities to do that when everyone's always doing errands all the time...
Alicia is my White Mage.  I don't actually use healing that often besides Chakra, though I think she does also have Throw Item so she could theoretically use items instead of White Magic instead.  She's currently going down the Black Mage path so that she can learn Quick Charge.
Lavian is my Dancer.  Her build is basically done and she's just filling out dance skills at the moment.
Agrias is currently a Monk with Equip Swords so that she can still do good damage with her Holy Knight skills.  She's going to make a stop at Geomancer to pick up Attack Up before returning to being a Holy Knight and basically owning everything.  Might be nice to pick up Move +2 at some point but not sure if that will end up happening.
Mustadio is currently a Knight who is picking up some random Battle Skill skills before returning to an engineer who will be able to just apply disables everywhere with his gun.  I plan to have him use Equip Shield for now but it might actually make more sense to have him get Concentrate.
Rafa and Marach (and Boco) are just plain unused right now, and Luso is super high level compared to my other guys so I haven't actually been using him at all.  He'd probably be a fine character but needs a lot of JP to learn some useful skills.

I'm definitely feeling significantly better off than during my first playthrough where I basically didn't know what I was doing.  I'm sure my characters now would stomp that older set of characters.  Even in terms of equipment, I actually know what I'm doing and am gearing for the correct stats.

Having friends is so nice...it's amazing how much difference it can make in your day when you have contact with good people.  I got a new penpal too!~

I played through The Beginner's Guide recently, and thought it was pretty cool!  Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I very much enjoyed it.

Lots of dance events coming up...I'm not even going to Starlite tonight because there's too much other stuff going on.  Richard is at FNW tomorrow and I'm going to be stopping by his 8PM class, and then Brett and Daniel are hosting a dance later in the weekend.  Then next weekend is both Jammix (in Roble!?) and Boogie by the Bay.

Missed the Kaladesh prerelease because I was busy that weekend with other stuff, including going to the Google Play Indie Games Festival in SF!  There was some cool stuff being exhibited there, including Bit Bit Blocks which we really liked.  Plays really well, has some good design decisions, and is just a blast to play.

Hopefully I can start bringing life back under control this weekend.  I think I just need to remember a little more clearly the drive and willpower that I always had before, and put it to good use.

I think it's really important to compliment people, and also to thank them and show them your appreciation or admiration.  Sometimes I will randomly message people to say they are awesome for no real reason, or thank them for something that happened ages ago.  Or even apologize for something that doesn't matter because it was all in the past.

We can all be really hard on ourselves sometimes.  Sometimes it can really help to hear a friendly reminder of why your life is worthwhile, and that you are appreciated by someone else.  And it also means a lot when someone "goes out of their way" to show you that they care.  I say "go out of their way", but it really isn't -- it really only takes a couple of seconds and you'll probably end up feeling positive about it too.

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This week has been more up and down than the last...and by that I mean there were a couple of downswings.  I'm back to feeling pretty good about life, but I was feeling kind of frustrated and/or just tired of life earlier.  Sometimes it's not really anything catastrophic or systemic, but just little things that happened to stack up against you in the wrong way at the same time.  Or things that bother you more than you'd like it to.  I think everyone probably has days like that...

I've had a legitimate flurry of new album releases over the past week or two:

Watch for Falling Rocks Original Soundtrack on Sept 3
Mysterious Space Original Soundtrack - Volume 2 also on Sept 3
Take My Hand EP on Sept 7
and now Ivory on Sept 15

It feels great to get things out of the backlog!  The tracks for "Take My Hand EP" were started 5 =years= ago, and Ivory has been sitting around for a while too.

Even more exciting is the fact that I've been working on new album art for my social dance music album:

That's right!  It's finally coming around, which makes me super happy.  I'm not 100% sure this will be the actual album design, but I'm coming around on it (still need to design the rest of the physical CD case though).  You'll also notice that I'm no longer calling it "DanceBit" because I really wasn't happy with that title after thinking about it more.  "9-Bit Ballroom" was an idea I tossed around in my head, and I think that would be a good title too, but if I use this image for the album then "Celestial Melodies" definitely fits it.  I'll have to see how I feel about it after thinking it over again.

I made tomato soup for the first time this past week!  I made way too much...@_@, but it was a success!  I followed this recipe from Serious Eats, which is the lazy no-sautee version -- there is a slightly-more-effort version here.  I didn't go nuts with the blender though (it was already jam-packed to the limit so I didn't want it to explode or make a mess or anything), so I left it a little less smooth than it could have been, and had to heat it up using a pot on the stove.  Some of you may not know this but I'm actually super into cooking and try to cook my own meals pretty often.  Things that I want to try next are a cream of mushroom soup (I'm really inexperienced with soups in general, especially western soups, so I've decided to try making some), and I also wanted to have another go at this miso-glazed salmon recipe, which I've done once before.  I generally broil my salmon pretty plainly (and deliciously) but I wanted to change things up a bit for next time.  Salmon is sooooo good. >w<

I've been having a blast playing through Final Fantasy Tactics using my friend's PSP.  I'm currently knee-deep into Chapter 2 and am raising my faithful band of recruits into something fierce.  A lot of them are still just grinding JP to unlock more jobs and abilities before they actually become useful, but I've got a Monk with Attack Up that is pretty great at punching things dead AND healing a crapton of HP with Chakra.  Ramza is unfortunately currently useless as he's currently grinding JP as a Thief, which is a job class with terrible stats for dealing any sort of respectable damage.  But he's gotta get some jlvls before he can become a Ninja and get two swords.  My summoners and mages have actually been the majority of damage output in key battles.

Going to try heading to Starlite Ballroom in SJ tomorrow night with a friend.  How confusing that it's named the same as what used to be Starlite in MV (then Cheryl Burke, now who-knows-what)...regardless, I have no idea what that will be like but am looking forward to getting some dancing in and seeing my friend too!

What else has been going on?  In MtG-related news, I narrowly lost in the finals of the work sealed league that I was running, taking 2nd place as my generous consolation (to be honest I thought that I would be out much earlier than that).  I was extremely happy with how I played game 1 of the final match -- it was a rare scenario where I had all of the variables in my head, thought thoroughly through every important consideration, and was one step ahead of my opponent the whole time.  It was almost perfect ("almost" because I still may have made one or two suboptimal plays.  Magic is hard!!!).  In game 2 I kept a shaky hand with 2 mountains and white spells on the draw and needed to hit a plains in order to really play a fair game.  I bricked and despite casting a lightning axe and then a madnessed alchemist's greeting (discarding to hand size!) there was no way for me to do anything that game.  Going back to it I should have mulliganed that hand, but I think I was thrown off by the fact that I had the lightning axe to take out a threat if I missed on the land early, and if I got there the hand would have had a lot of power as having a lightning axe plus alchemist's greeting in hand is pretty good.  So I think I got trapped by seeing the lightning axe.  Game 3 he gets a faith unbroken on his selfless spirit and I didn't draw one of my 6 answers to it quite in time for it to make a difference.  I perhaps should have sided my other alchemist's greeting from the board given that I knew he had faith unbroken, but in any case, I think I'll certainly accept the loss and take 2nd.  We also did a conspiracy: take the crown draft where I drafted 10 conspiracy cards, lol.  After my first game everyone now just targets me from the onset which makes things impossible @_@.  But probably rightly so, as I have insane card advantage from Summoner's bond, which is pretty awesome.  In other news, Kaladesh spoilers have been popping out but I haven't really been following too closely.  Seems like it should be super exciting though!

So yeah, that's been life recently.  There are some good days and some not-so-good days.  It's a mix, really!

Definitely had another one of those marching band dreams last night...was some prep for a show or something and i was totally unprepared for some reason.  Omg, I just realized I also had a different dream the other night where college finals were coming up and I was actually screwed because I had basically skipped class the entire year...it never ends, lol.

In better news, Ludum Dare is over and we came out alive, with a game!  Big success!  Will be writing more about that soon. :)

It's great that my music happens to be the type that's great for getting into the zone and trying to get stuff done.  Back when I was interning at Google I was having this huuuge 8-bit chiptune kick and I was using https://electricchildren8bit.bandcamp.com/album/i-am as my work music all day (interestingly I was also using tracks by flashygoodness as "naptime music", haha)...but nowadays I'm not as into pure chiptune anymore.

Lots and lots of stuff to cover!  I feel like I've really been in need of decompressing but haven't gotten around to =(  I was going to last night but then I got distracted by watching Yo-yo videos, haha.  It actually seems pretty fun / legit, and somehow has a good mix of aesthetics that I feel like I could enjoy (but probably won't, as I've got other things that are more interesting to do).  It kind of made me want to do some glowstringing again just for the heck of it, even though I know I'm probably terrible at it now. (never was terribly good at stringing to be honest)

Ludum Dare is this weekend!!!!!  I'm excited and nervous at the same time...looking forward to what comes out of our jam, while hoping that we have a good healthy weekend of work.  Still have some setup work to do tonight, and we also have to do grocery shopping and stockpile food! :D

Went 0-3 in yesterday's draft, which felt kind of bad...but lately I've been trying to remind myself that the reason I play this game isn't just because I want to win...I mean of course I want to do the best I can and I really enjoy improving, but just playing in itself, and getting to experience the game, and talk about it, is fun!  I think MtG drafts are a little harder to truly let yourself "have fun" because well...you spent money and put time into an event, so you really want to do the best that you can.  So it's a different feeling than when I'm just sitting on the couch playing melee with my bros (awesome times, btw).  But it's important to have fun with it too, otherwise losing is just too stressful.  So yeah, I made some drafting mistakes (but no big ones), and I definitely made some play mistakes too, but to be perfectly honest it wouldn't have mattered that much in the end, I don't think -- I found the open colors and drafted accordingly but unfortunately my deck just didn't end up coming together that well.  Sometimes that just happens, I guess.  I did have a particularly awesome sequence where I beat my round 3 opponent who had 2x cryptolith fragment (!!) and a thermo alchemist on the board by casting chilling grasp on his fragments once they flipped, then casting fiery temper on his alchemist in response to his untap trigger to survive with 1 life, then attacking and scrying on my upkeep using geist of the archives in order to draw into a creature which I then needed to play in order to avoid being dead.  So that was pretty hype!  I made a bad misplay in game 3 which may have cost me the game, so that was pretty sad, but that's that...

JaSmix came and went, and was super awesome!  I'm really glad it went well, and was feeling super happy that I decided to step up and organize it this year.  Everyone was so helpful and supportive, which was wonderful to experience -- never have I ever felt the awesomeness of the community so readily, haha.  People seemed to enjoy my class too, which is good!  Big thanks to everyone else who helped make it a success!

I watched Kubo and the Two Strings...haven't been this elated with a movie since Wreck It Ralph!  I won't say that it's perfect but it made me so happy.  There were so many things that I just saw and was just like....yes!  Haha...so that was pretty amazing.  I love art!!!

Music stuff continues to roll forward...I'm going to be putting out "Take My Hand EP" soon, which is going to feature 3 old old old trance tracks that I originally made back in 2011 (!).  Then of course, I'll have another album release with whatever music I end up making this weekend for Ludum Dare.  And past that, there's still a bunch of unreleased stuff that I need to work on, of course, including that dance music album which I need to figure out album art for.  I also really want to set up Patreon soon, but I want to set aside time to make a really good song for that so that I can make it a Patreon exclusive, so that'll have to happen first.  In the meantime, though, people have been jumping on The Best of DDRKirby(ISQ) - Volume 1, which got promoted by DJ Cutman on This Week in Chiptune 158 (thanks!).  It's been performing well, especially for being a compilation album with basically no new material on it, though of course Love Everlasting still remains my best work, with The Ecstasy of Life following behind and being the #1 grossing album.  I've also got Volume 2 of the Mysterious Space OST coming out soon, so....basically, a whole bunch of stuff trickling down the pipeline eventually.

I've put some work into my personal Unity framework lately, which is coming along (just in time for Ludum Dare!).  To be perfectly honest it probably won't be too useful for this upcoming LD (unless we end up making a platformer, in which case it will be awesome), and I'll probably just be leveraging it for simple things like audio and screen transitions.  But I'm looking forward to it becoming a more developed and fleshed-out set of utility features that I can use in my games to good effect, including this particular game that I really want to make next.  Unfortunately I don't think it makes sense to work on Zenith Fighter any more at the moment, though I might want to at least put it out in =some= form or another, if anything just to have it in the archives.

Going to be watching Branching Paths tonight, hoping to get some extra inspiration and motivation for LD, so that should be fun!  Overall things are pretty OK recently...definitely have had some low points, but overall not too many of them and they haven't been too bad.  It's a really scary feeling when you can't seem to figure out what you're living for, but that hasn't really been holding me in its grip, so to speak, which is nice.  Work stuff is actually alright for now, though from time to time I get stuck on some annoying issue here and there (that's how it goes).  Also we finally got the water heater replaced so hopefully I'll be able to take showers without having to constantly fiddle with the knobs -- yay!

It's going to be really great to put everything aside and just work on something that I'm really excited about this weekend. :)

Listening back to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvs2cwrqPFE fills me with a warm sense of nostalgia and reminds me of how much hope there is in my dreams of creating more games -- games that bring joy to myself and the rest of the people who play them.

Games, too, are a part of my past and present.  Reminders of a "better" era, when we sat down in front of the TV and really enjoyed exploring these worlds.  This track in particular harkens to something like...Brave Fencer Musashi, I guess.  The pastime of really sitting down and enjoying something wholesale is something that is important, I think.  I think it's really sad when I hear that people don't play "real games" anymore because they just don't have time.  The idea that you don't have the time in your life to sit down and enjoy yourself is really sad...

Of course, I think what they really mean is just that they have more important things and other things that bring them joy, so maybe delving into these universes and gaming systems isn't something that they "need" anymore.  So that's ok.  I do miss my SNES though ^^;

I am

so sad

Today was....interesting.  Not even sure whether I'm supposed to be happy or sad right now.

Regardless, I 3-0d the draft tonight -- second time in a row!  I've actually only lost one match so far in the Eldritch Moon format (and that was during the prerelease...definitely could have played one game of that better).  The draft was very tricky to navigate...P1P1 started off with an interesting decision between Assembled Alphas and Choking Restraints.  Choking Restraints is =probably= the correct pick here, but I decided to take the Assembled Alphas to see how well it played.  It's still a very good card, but it's also a 6-drop, so I think it's reasonable to take the restraints over it.  I guess it was also worth noting that Mercurial Geists was in the pack and might wheel?  But I don't think that should really change the pick.  However I wanted to try out the rare to see how it played.  I followed it up with another odd pick -- this time I took another rare to see how it played -- Stromkirk Occultist, over the "safe" pick which would have been Ulvenwald Captive.  I ended up with an amazingly sweet deck featuring 3x Mercurial Geists (!), 4x Take Inventory (!), Docent of Perfection, Assembled Alphas, Fevered Visions, Confirm Suspicions...kind of sweet, to say the least.  It was sort of lacking solid 2 and 3-drops -- I had a sanguinary mage and a breakneck rider, and would have killed for another sanguinary mage, or an ingenious skaab.  But in practice I actually ended up OK and never got steamrolled, though to be honest I didn't play any matches against quick curve-out beatdown decks.

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Don't know what I should be praying for anymore

Caught up and checked around the internets tonight...  I discovered the devlog of this incredibly charming game in development, Leilani's Island!  I'm kind in awe at just how much good pixel art, animation, game design, AND technical programming pragmatism are brought forth in this devlog -- all by one person!  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't extremely jealous...My mind is already buzzing around with ideas, thoughts, and inspirations from reading all of it.  Indie game development is just so...exciting!!!

ABZU released today!  I haven't played it yet, but of course will do so soon.  I'll try not to compare it to Journey, because well, this game is not Journey, nor is it pretending or claiming to be Journey.  It is ABZU, and I'm sure it will be pretty awesome.  Congrats to the whole team over at giant squid for finally bringing it to light.  I can only dream of what it feels like to be a part of something like that.

Watched some GDC talks tonight as well, including one about Monument Valley, and this awesome awesome talk by Jenova Chen on Journey.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be wandering off to bed while in awe of all of these amazing things.  Amazing.

How can I hope for the future when all of my wishes are for the past?

Lots of things happened!

I got sick.  Boo.  Still recovering from the vestiges of it.

Went to Vienna Teng's concert at Stanford.  It was mind-blowing, wow.  Can't even describe.

EVO happened and Melee was pretty awesome.  Sadly no PPMD (nor Leffen), but there were a lot of really hype moments.  Scar and Toph did great with the commentary as always.  Have to give a grats to hbox for really clutching it out, though I felt bad for Armada since it was soooo close so many times, wow.  I actually feel most happy for Plup, he did amazing, though again I felt bad for his loss against HBox, he definitely cracked and HBox sort of got his number.  It was really disheartening to see in the last (?) game where HBox figured out that he could just literally stay near Plup and crouch without doing anything and Plup had no idea what to do against it because so many options lead to him getting rested (grab whiffs, dsmash gets cc'd, etc.).  I'm sure he could figure it out if he went back to it, but at the time he was just lost, which felt pretty crushing.  EVO is weird since it's only best 2 out of 3 but hey, that's what it is.

I played Inside, which was pretty good!  I personally enjoyed Limbo a bit more and felt like it was more cohesive and strong both in terms of gameplay and artistically, but Inside was still pretty enjoyable as well.  I really like how they took the concepts, cinematic design, and gameplay from Limbo and translated them into a 3D environment in a way that actually made sense.  In a lot of 3D games that have more 2D-style gameplay, the 3rd dimension almost seems like it's sort of just tacked on in an effort to make things look pretty, but for Inside it felt extremely natural, like you really were in a 3D environment that made sense despite only being able to travel to the right and left.

Practiced some calligraphy today!  It was quite fun; I finally feel as though I'm starting to get the hang of it.  It takes a lot of time, for sure, but it's really fun, and there are these rare moments when I finish a letter and feel super awesome because for once it actually turned out really well.

Working on more music stuff...I made three songs in the past few days and each one is slotting into a different album, lol.  I've got so much stuff that's pending release...it's kind of ridiculous.  They're all in various stages too -- some just need album art before they can go out, others need more songs before I can package them together into an album...

Went to the Eldritch Moon prerelease!  It was pretty fun and I was happy with my performance.  I went 2-1 with a BR madness deck featuring Triskaidekaphobia.  My match loss in round 1 was due to getting killed twice with Triskaidekaphobia...ugh.  After the event was over I thought back and I definitely punted on some plays, so not entirely happy with that, but definitely "good enough" to feel happy about it.  Unfortunately I didn't see a single emerge card get cast in any of my matches so I'm still in the dark of just exactly how good those cards are.  I have a pretty good general sense, but it's really hard to say without actually seeing it play out...

Played through Planetarian, finally!  That's been on my todo list for quite a long time now, so I finally sat down and went through it.  It was really good, probably a little better (and sadder) than I expected.  I think it just ended up resonating personally with me in a slightly unexpected way, the whole thing about a past that is no longer there for you, and how you would just keep waiting for it to return no matter what.  Yeah, that's definitely relevant to me.

*Begin LD rant*

There's some unfortunate drama going on in the Ludum Dare community regarding the upcoming August Ludum Dare.  It's kind of sad to see; yet at the same time, I can totally understand why everything is happening the way it is, sort of like it was inevitable.  Basically the issue is that PoV wants to retire the current LD website due to several issues, such as concerns about the voting system, cheaters, etc, and as such he wants to not run LD in august and come back with a new site in December.  Regardless of whether or not "new LD" in December is actually a success (that's a whole other topic), people in the community still wanted an LD in August.  The problem is that there's conflict about how the heck this community-driven LD should be run.  The plurality of votes indicated that people want to try running an LD like normal, but without the rating system.  But there's other people who want to run the LD with the old rating system one more time.  And there's also people who just want to run a separate thing altogether on itch.io.

Unfortunately it's all sort of a mess because LD is super decentralized by nature.  Without PoV defining and giving form to everything and steering the ship, there's no good way to form anything concrete.  There's tons of people who "want to help out" as well as tons of people who each have their own ideas about what should be done, but in the end that's just a recipe for disaster as you just have too many chefs in the kitchen.  A vote was made, and people wanted an LD without ratings, but now there's backlash from everyone else who didn't want that as well as people who are unhappy at PoV for not being transparent enough and basically for not seceding control to the hordes.

As someone who has placed as highly as #2 in LD before I honestly am not happy with the rating system.  When I started doing LD I really didn't care about that too much, but after getting 2nd place with Ripple Runner I realized that placing highly actually drove tons of web traffic to my game, and also drove sales of my soundtracks.  This is not only because of people discovering my game organically, but because my game would go on to get featured in articles and other posts (not to mention having a bit of a cult following in Korea).  So placing highly in LD actually has MONETARY impact as well as helping to establish my brand/presence.

Given that, it feels terrible that my game is being rated by (no offense) a bunch of random nobodys in an unstructured system.  There are a LOT of holes in the rating system:

- Friends can vote each other really highly
- If you're malicious, you can just create a bunch of accounts and upvote yourself
- You can also just downvote other people's games
- Third-party assets are often used even when they shouldn't be
- People often rate based on the post-compo versions of games instead of the 48hr/72hr versions
- People tend to rate games higher based on "cheap gimmicks"
- 5-star rating system maybe isn't good enough to differentiate between the best of the best
- No protection against updating your game silently after the deadline and claiming you "fixed some minor bugs"

I really don't know how you can fix all of this, though.  I just don't think it's possible to have structured voting without utilizing an actual panel or jury.  So I think your options are:

A) Have an actual panel or jury of people to rate games
This will never work for LD for a multitude of reasons.  There are too many games, it's against the whole "free, decentralized, do whatever" spirit of LD, people would be butthurt by the panel, etc.

B) Have subpar ratings like current LD does
The argument for this being that having ratings is better than not, which to be fair is a good argument -- how could you make LD worse by adding an additional feature?  The problem again is that as LD grows larger and becomes a Big Deal there is more and more incentive to do unscrupulous things in your own favor.  Again, placing in the top 3 of Ludum Dare would drive MONETARY benefits for me.  If I was just some nobody who places #832 out of 2,000, I would totally be on board with this option.  However, having actually been in the top 10 six times, I'm not as sure.

C) Have no ratings
The argument for this is that the current rating system is laughable and inaccurate.  I have seen several complaints about ratings for games (and have some of my own) that lead me to believe that sometimes they hurt more than they help.  This includes games being rated more times than they were downloaded (clearly fishy), someone also complained that a game that used only text received a higher graphics score than his, etc etc.  I've commonly complained that you can't get 1st place in audio unless you make a rhythm-based game, etc.

Secret option D I guess would be to have ratings, but no actual "ranking list" based on those ratings.  Which at first seems like a good idea, but it's also kind of silly -- what's to prevent someone from just crawling the entries and making the ranking list themselves?

It's worth noting that Global Game Jam, which is probably the other big game dev jam that I know of besides LD, has no compo-wide winners or ratings.  Instead, voting is done on a site-by-site basis, so you're voting for and with your peers, and it's a much smaller group of people -- everyone who is voting has had the chance to see demonstrations of ALL the games they could vote for.  Also, some sites have industry panelists on-board for judging.  So this is actually an educated vote that I would trust much more.

All in all I really don't think there is a perfect solution (and I doubt that the "new LD" site will change that).  Yes, I would rather have "better, more structured, more fair, more validated ratings" than "poorly thought-out ratings", but to be honest, whether we keep the rating system or not, I'm fine either way.  My strongest opinion is actually that people need to stop being butthurt and that we should just go ahead and do the August LD without ratings, to SEE what happens.  If LD ends up sucking as a result, so be it -- we've learned our lesson and we know never to do things that way in the future.  For christ's sake, it's just one time...

Anyways...

*End rant*

Life is pretty OK for now, if unexciting.  Just hanging in there for now...


EDIT:

Some better reading on the whole rating fiasco:

http://fireside.gamejolt.com/post/calculating-jam-voting-results-uirt8ghj

http://ludumdare.com/compo/2014/01/07/the-rating-system-is-so-flawed/

https://managore.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/game-jam-rating-systems-and-solutions/