We didn't do half-bad this weekend, all things considered.  Yeah, we had that sleepless night.  Honestly, the first night I spent away from home I had this feeling that the whole 5-day weekend would just slip away from me and I wouldn't really get anything done.  But no, I managed to pack in an okay variety of work.  The weekend certainly didn't go as planned, in multiple ways, but at the end of it all, it's not really too bad.

Got some letter-writing done.  Not a ton; I'm going to have to see if I can pick up the pace a little bit in the coming weeks.  But some got done nonetheless.  And today I spent some nice time on Rhythm Quest.  I've been working at various performance improvements, but today I also (mostly) knocked out a bigger task, which was launching my weblate community translations site in a move to hopefully deprecate the old crowdin site.  This has been on the todo list for quite awhile, so it's good to have it finally be reaching toward completion.

Did some groceries too.  Unfortunately it seems that Nob Hill Foods is continuing to have some of my fav specialty items disappear....it's already been a while since they've carried lamb flank steak (really a shame as that's something I've not seen elsewhere either), but they seem to no longer stock duck breast either...unfortunate.  Well, I've already started shopping at Berkeley Bowl mostly anyways due to it being close to Teance, so maybe it's not a big deal.

I finally made it out to the Golfland at San Jose!  Was my first time at that course and it really wasn't half bad at all!  It's kind of hard to directly compare whether it's better or worse than the one in Sunnyvale, I mean of course they're quite similar overall, so it's just minor differences.  I think some parts are better, some parts are a little worse.  You definitely have to pay a lot of attention to the carpet surfaces, as half of them are new carpet where the ball travels much more slowly, vs the ones which haven't been replaced where you get a lot more rolling.

The Castro Valley location had a lot of challenges with uneven ground when putting and that wasn't as much of an issue here, though it still popped up minorly in a few places.  There were a couple of unique hole ideas which I appreciated as being different, though a lot of it of course was repeats.

I put up a totally acceptable performance -- 45 on the easier side and 53 on the harder one.  Par is 51 (only 17 holes per course) so overall really not a bad time at all, especially on the easy side.  Well, besides one hole on the hard side that was like, impossible for me.  It was one of the mound holes and I kept trying to see if I could use backspin on my shot to make it easier, but in the end I think I had to just play it straight.  If I'm ever out on the courses alone at night or something I'll have to play around with trying to spin the ball to see if that's actually a viable strat.

Been doing a little organizing in my room -- my drawers, specifically.  It's not super vital, I mean I hardly ever use most of the stuff in there (which maybe is a problem...), but I've been moving toward using dividers and such in an effort to give some order to all the stuff in there, as opposed to just "a pile of junk all cluttered around".  Especially for things like my extra USB cords and such, that's already helped a lot.

I stopped by the keyboard shop in San Jose!  That was a fun visit; I mean there was no reason for me to spend more money, but it was nice to see various things, and I picked up a little single-switch keychain thing.  I wasn't super interested in buying actual keyboard stuff there, but maybe if I had been there like a year or two ago I definitely would.  They had some Monokei Standard TKLs there and I definitely remember being enticed by the idea of getting a pink one of those at one point.  Interestingly enough I didn't really find it to be a great way to test switches, although you'd think it would be?  They had a tester out, but I think it's very hard to realllllyyy test switches unless you have a very controlled environment; putting them in your own board also helps a lot too.  There was one keycap set that looked and felt nice, but not really something I was considering purchasing as the color scheme was a little off and it's not like I need more keycaps anyways!

Honestly the thing that was most intriguing is that they do stabilizer tuning for like $12.  I can definitely see myself using that service.  Maybe if I have a reason to be in that area again I'll ask how they handle that.

It's voting season again so I've been spending some time going through the ballot already because I always do these sorts of things early (I look forward to them like some sort of crazy person just because it's a task I can take care of and feel good about).

I started playing through Mega Man 8, on a whim.  Really, not the best Mega Man game I could have chosen, not at all, but I honestly don't think I've played through 8 since the time we rented (?) it once upon a time.  From the "nicoevaluates" site (which appears to be down; I had to look at it via web archive), I know that MM8 really doesn't do well in the level design/overall design, and I'm already definitely starting to see that show through a lot.  There are some..."ok" gimmicks in the levels, but none of them are particularly =enjoyable=.  The enemies are pretty boring and get reused everywhere, etc. etc.  So I'm not getting my hopes too high.

Still, it does have a pretty sweet animated opening movie.  A rare instance where I think the Japanese song actually doesn't fit as well as the English one.  I don't think that's my own nostalgia talking either, I just genuinely think that the international song fits the video better and it's not particularly close.  The Japanese (vocal) song is upbeat, but feels quite misplaced, almost as if it was designed for an anime opening with very different beats and pacing.

JP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev1RsHQcrcI
NA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30VhRsLapt0

The instrumental song that we get in the NA release gets it =right=.  The filtered intro with drum loops during the slow shots of Mega Man's body parts, erupting into the main guitar chorus RIGHT when he shoots the screen and the "MEGAMAN 8" text comes up.  You can tell that the different sections of the song were written to fit the video, down to the whistle synth cue that plays right as proto man appears.  Overall the song is a little less "hype" but IMO it fits given that quite a number of shots are just pan+scan, so it's not like a full-on modern anime OP or anything.

Near the end of the video we get the main guitar chorus playing again, during the shot of Mega Man running, and it's like, YES!  The tempo is even synced to his running, and yes, yes yes.  That running animation is so quintessentially Mega Man.  He's not Mario, where you accelerate and then leap and bound.  He's not Sonic, where you zoom across the screen at high-octane speeds.  He's Mega Man, and he's got a 4-frame run cycle.  Oh yes.

If only the gameplay were actually well-designed too, haha.  Ah, well, you can't win em all.

Sleepless nights...

There is a lot of hurt, embedded in that beating heart.

I can see the memories.  I can feel the fresh scars as I run my fingers over what we thought was healed.

Mm.  Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, I guess.  Sayuri -- I mean, this Sayuri -- had scars, too.  I mean, of a different sort, but also, not really.

I want to be like her, too.  Sayuri, and Sayuri.  Ahahaha.  They really are quite alike, in some ways.  I wonder....if Sayuri, would grow up to be more like Sayuri?

Stats update (Oct 8, 2024):

Blog posts: 3,780 (Xanga archive) + 1,023 (Blogger) = 4,803 over 20.05 years (239.527 per year)
Letters written: 1,572 over 17.26 years (91.081 per year) (1 per 4.010 days)
Letters received: 571 (2.75:1 ratio)
Music: 1,096 songs released over 20.19 years (54.287 per year)
One Hour Compo: 302 top 3s out of 546 Compos entered (55.31%)
Ludum Dare (older): 14 entries, 15 medals (across all categories)
Ludum Dare (newer): 15 entries, 16 medals (across all categories)
Anime: 3,148 Episodes watched (54.41 days)

Over 1,000 songs released, woo!

Let's just quickly recap a whirlwind of stuff since it's been a while and there was a bunch to cover.

- It's been really hot as we got a sudden heat wave.  Thankfully we're basically out of it and I can finally look forward to autumn again, but it threw a number of things off balance -- not only my motivation and physical energy (and sleep...) but I had to rescue my chickens by bringing them inside from their outdoor coop, which led to a bunch of hassle.  I guess next time I know there's a heat wave coming I'll be sure to set up everything =beforehand= so I'm not shuffling around bedding and chickens in the middle of the scorching sun...

- In the midst of that my graphics card up and died and I spent like a whole day diagnosing that.  Thankfully, all systems are back up and running and I ended up with a GPU upgrade at the end of the day.  Honestly just got the cheapest one they had at Best Buy, but still way more performant than the old one I had.  Not that it'll really get put to much use at all -- playing ALTTPR isn't exactly demanding on the GPU front.  But I guess hardware video encoding will go faster probably?

Unfortunately as I was disassembling and doing a deep clean of my computer (that part felt nice), I realized that the only CPU thermal paste that I had around was.........very old.  It still works, but um...definitely not ideal, and I'd like to pull out my desktop from under my desk again one of these days and reapply.  Maybe after things cool down a bit...

- I'm back at it as far as cooking goes, and feeling my groove as I throw together meals every day.  Had one or two new recipe successes as well (braised lamb), so that's nice too.

- I launched the ALTTPR site that I mentioned in my last post, see it at https://alttpr.ddrkirby.com/ -- this took a ton of effort to make but I hope to continue adding more and more knowledge to it over time.

- I made it out to MCS again finally (after probably a year+ of  talking about it).  It was a nice time, the new venue is great as advertised and it was nice seeing some friends there.  I might try and find time to stop by again; lord knows I've been trying to find more places to find community and it sure isn't feasible for me to go dance with the Stanford kids every week or anything like that.

- This weekend was a pretty okay one.  I watched Suzume again and appreciated it; honestly probably a little more on the second watch.  I don't know, I feel like it's a little bit of a flawed movie in that the first time I watched it I was kinda puzzled at some of it, but overall there's much more good than bad and I think it does a really nice job at touching on some themes effectively in a way that resonates with me.

- After like a week of not working on Rhythm Quest I'm diving into the trenches again.  There's like a billion things to do (as always) but right now I'm trying to make a big refactor of how backdrops are rendered in the menu scene, to finally fix (hopefully once and for all?) some framerate drops, particularly when transitioning between backdrop sets.  Most of my backdrop overdraw optimizations (which I've already done) aren't actually able to happen when the backdrops are fading in and out, due to how transparency layering works, so I'm changing how it works so different backdrops sets are rendered to temporary render textures at full opacity (I needed to use pre-multiplied alpha here!) and then I have a shader that takes the two render textures and blends between those, to avoid any weird transparency blending issues.  So far it's "basically" working but I still need to iron out a bunch of the kinks.  Fortunately it actually simplifies / eliminates the need for a lot of old complicated code that tried to do god-knows-what black magic in order to get the transparency and sorting orders all working correctly, so that'll be good to say goodbye to.

Unfortunately it actually slightly decreases performance in a different way since we render everything to an intermediary texture and then render that to the screen, so it's adding an extra step to the process.  But I'm assuming that'll all be worth it.

There are other performance optimization that could be made too, but this is probably the big one that's worth it at least for now.

- I started on my xmas letters again, as it's that time of year (Inktober and all that).  I'm not holding myself to doing one a day, but I'll probably try to do it relatively regularly through the month and then see how much I have leftover.  There's a couple of bday letters to take care of during this time of year too...

- I finished my monthly pixel artwork for October -- pretty early this time, which is a nice feeling.  It's another trace (I think almost all the ones this year have been) but it turned out really well, probably better than the rest, to be honest, and I feel like I learned some things while doing it.  Honestly if I could just do a couple more in the exact same style it would probably be beneficial for me.

- There was a period of time when I really wasn't doing so well, but I seem to be recovered from that.  I'd say that I was lonely and needed like love and attention and care and all that, but honestly the best person that could truly provide all that was myself, I think I just needed to get into a place where I was able to tap into that.

- Been still really enjoying hanging out at Teance.  I know Far Leaves is having an event this Thursday as well that I'm going to try and make it out to, so I guess there is lots of tea in my near future.  Honestly feel like it might be nice to go tomorrow, too...but we'll see how I feel.

It's one of those days...

I've been doing a bunch of work here and there, just, various things.  I've been putting a LOT of effort into my upcoming ALTTPR site.  It's not quite ready to unveil just yet, but it's certainly getting close.  I recorded a ton of footage for the Armos Knights fight today.  At one point I was debating whether or not to provide all of the videos on the site as .gifs (in addition to, or perhaps instead of) as opposed to .webm videos.  I still actually output lossless gifs and keep them committed for my own safekeeping, but I encode to .webm and only serve those.  While .gifs have their advantage in some places (they autoplay in Discord, which is a little nice), webm is definitely the right choice 100%, for a couple of different reasons.  One is simply that they're way smaller and more efficient.  The second is that browsers can't actually display .gifs at 60FPS =/, it's limited to 50fps, which I didn't actually know until somewhat recently actually.  So WebM works to fix that limitation.

Of course really I should be putting all of this effort into Rhythm Quest -_-, but I'm letting myself pursue this for at least a bit.  On the Rhythm Quest front, I'm doing more stupid work that ideally game engines should just handle for you, but they don't (TM).  Unity's input system is =supposed= to just handle detecting and handling gamepad inputs for you in a generic way so that you don't have to, but unfortunately, it seems that it doesn't always work (OS/driver dependent??).  Of course, the OLD input manager works for these cases, but now you kind of have to handle control bindings yourself, sigh.  Maybe I should have just spent the $35 on a third party solution from the beginning?  Not even sure if that would have all worked out, though...

This is just another in a frighteningly-long list of "things that Unity is supposed to handle" but you end up having to write a whole bunch of logic to special case everything that it doesn't actually do properly.  Audio scheduling, input handling, UI navigation, 2D physics, 2D cameras, font rendering, ... ... ... ...this is why this game has taken 8 years to make so far...sigh.  Never using this engine again, that's for sure.

Anyways, it hasn't felt like I've made a ton of progress on various fronts lately, which I guess is both true and not true.  I got another letter done today, at least, so that's something.  Tomorrow I'll be trying to work on finishing my pixel art drawing for the month, at the very least, but maybe also some more Rhythm Quest work; I think I'll feel pretty unsatisfied if I don't get more done this weekend for RQ.

I did fire up ALTTPR and actually just play through the weekly reddit casual seed for the first time in a long while, so that was fun!

As far as cubing goes, I haven't been doing a lot of timed solves; I've been almost exclusively been focusing on trying to improve my inspection and get used to planning (or at least semi-being-aware-of) my first pair during inspection.  Currently it takes me wayyyy longer than 15 seconds to do so and half the time I either fail my cross or fail my f2l prediction, but at least it doesn't feel super impossible anymore, and that's progress that I'm happy with so far.  Just gotta keep at it, I guess.

I was pretty unhappy last week, but I did some pretty heavy processing and had a good day or two to help me through that.  The cooler weather has also been helping :)  I've been on a little break from cooking, but I feel like in another few days I'll be ready to be back at it.  I've already been watching some cooking videos and feeling inspired by one or two of them.  Sometimes these types of videos just hit right, I guess!

In totally unrelated news, I've diagnosed some weird USB disconnection issues that I've been noticing for a while (usually when cables get jostled around), which is good.  Turns out it was not one, but TWO faulty cables -- one really bad USB-C/A cable that was causing all sorts of havoc, but also the USB mini/A cable that came with my SNES controller adapter disconnects if the connector is jostled around a bunch, which doesn't happen with another short mini usb cable that I have around.  Glad I finally solved that mystery and that it's not something more gnarly like power supply issues or my motherboard acting up.  I was almost certain for a while that the culprit was my Cinnamoroll USB hub (looks cute, but I wouldn't exactly put money on it being super robust), but turns out that was just a red herring and the two cables were it, I think.

Tomorrow's the start of the weekend...let's hope that I can make a good one out of it.

Perspectives

I've mentioned this before.  Sometimes when I am a passenger in a vehicle I feel an emotional chill of sorts.  The feeling of being taken away to a different place.  It feels wrong.  But that never happens when I'm driving my own vehicle.

Change, I think, is the same way.  I feel the ground shift beneath me and my mind can't help but rage against those who would disturb what has always been there.  But in the end I am also contributing to the scars of time, all the same.  Sometimes with intent, but oftentimes it is simply a matter of existence.  We change our worlds, and each others' worlds, not because it is our purpose to change, but simply because it is a byproduct of our continued existence.

You feel that you are staying still, but at this moment you are hurtling through the fabric of space and time at a faster rate than you could even imagine.  Yet in my mind's eye I find that somehow I still cling to the idea that I am the center of the universe.

Would there not be more comfort, to be one of a sea of specks twirling about in the eddies of change?  To think that the experience of life is a shared human condition that we flow through?

Which is the feeling that keeps me here, attached to my own sensibilities?  Fear?  Pride?  Selfishness?

Were there times, when I, too, cast off into the stream of life, wholly unafraid of where I would be taken to in the next moment?

I guess there were a few.

Why do I do it?
Every time, why do I choose it?
Love made me ruthless
But every time
Why am I running back to you?
If dreaming is useless
Then why even do it?
Keep making excuses
Why am I running back to you?

Thinking about all the times that I blamed others for changing, and the times when people called me out on it.  What should they have done instead?  Should they have simply not let me into their life at all?  I'm sure some of them -- the less important ones, maybe even some of the more important ones -- certainly tried.

Maybe it's wrong of me to act like I'm all high and mighty, but certainly it couldn't be wrong for me to feel sadness.  Perhaps, it simply sometimes rubs the wrong way to act like a victim when thinking about these things.  What should they have done?

Hah, but even as I say it myself, I can feel my conviction rise up -- not only mine, but my past self's too.  No, this is not how it should be.  Everyone moves on too quickly and then complains that we are distant from each other.  There it is again, pointing the finger at everyone other than myself.

Do you not feel it?  The scars of time, the strings of the past pulling you back.  Have you already become numb to it in your endless pursuits?  The you of yesteryear is already dead, and you move forward with nary a mourning period.

 

...anyways, I'm also thinking about blame, and conflict, and these things.  About why we feel that we must change to make things better.  We learn to repress our emotions and then go to therapy so that we can rediscover them.  Who are you to decide that something is "better" than what you already knew to be true?  Perhaps your definition of "success" is too narrow if all it looks toward is growth.

 

But back to recounting the details of more mundane matters at hand.

Aside from being reminded (face it, it was bound to happen eventually...I depend on -- no, =welcome= -- being haunted by my past) of the existential problems of life, things have actually been quite alright recently.

As far as ALTTPR goes, I have to be a little bit careful that I'm not burning out, I think (maybe on more than ALTTPR, honestly), but it's been rewarding still.  I've spent time uploading some rebroadcasts of matches in the mentor tournament with my own commentary to highlight some of the stuff that the mentees have been doing.  Commentary is something that I was curious to dip my toes into, so I signed up for that role, but I found that (as usual?) I ended up just wanting to do my own thing with it instead, so I haven't been hopping on any of the official restreams.  Which is just as well...I've found a comfortable thing for myself, and it seems like it's appreciated by at least a handful of people.  Comfort...yeah, that is important to me, isn't it?

I did a bunch of programming efforts toward routing one of the ALTTPR dungeons.  Hopefully this framework will prove to be useful and extensible in figuring out how to route the other dungeons as well.  I'm happy to be able to finally have some results (though they...all just match my hypothesis to begin with...), but at the same time there is this kind of sense of dread at "okay, how in the world am I going to present this?".  I'm loathe to make a video that just says "Well I crunched all the numbers and this is the best thing" because part of the primary motivation behind my instructional ALTTPR videos was to provide video evidence backing all of my claims, but unfortunately routing Misery Mire is something that I just couldn't do simply.

Part of me wonders whether at some point I'll just take it upon myself to host my own organized wiki of sorts, with gif'ed versions of screen strats as well as documentation on strats.  It would certainly take a different sort of work than my current bite-sized rando series, and I think it would probably be less "easily digestible" (one of the other goals of the series), but there is a growing part of me that hates how ephemeral and scattered about all of the information is all over the place.  The Super Metroid folks have done a great job with this as their wiki literally has a separate page for every single screen in the game and they all connect to each other.  Great resource.

Then of course there's a part of me which hesitates to bite off way more than I can chew.  Again, solving one problem only to be confronted by larger issues, is something that can quickly lead to a feeling of burnout, I think.  So I'll be careful with this.

 

My idle speedcubing practice has continued to be a bit of a habit.  I have weird ambivalent feelings toward it, especially now that I'm of course reaching the same plateau point that I kind of was at before in terms of my knowledge and learnings.  But at the same time I got some new PBs the other day and that was actually surprising to see, like actually though, I'm quite a bit better now than I once was, which is kind of exciting.

Continuing to enjoy just hanging out and working at Teance.  Despite being someone who really prefers to work exclusively at home in my own room a good majority of the time, I can really kind of feel the appeal of working outside or at cafes now, for that sort of change of pace.  Of course, the tea itself is really a big part of it, though.  Far Leaves Tea just got a moonlight white tea in stock too, that was nice to have and just work there during that day when our power was out...

 

I'm itching to try more keyboard switches, lol.  Once this restock happens in the coming month I'm planning to just get a 10-pack of five different linears and just try them out to see.

 

Why is it that people are so quick to break the promises of their past selves?  Is it just that people's past selves are not someone who they have a close relationship with?  Do they feel like it's just a one-sided relationship?  Do people not think enough about their future selves when making commitments?

I have a relationship with the past you, too, don't you see?  And most of your relationship with me has been with the past me.  Why do so many people fail to follow through?  Why are the desires of your present self more important than what you once wanted?  Is that what it means to "live in the moment"?  To shove aside your responsibilities, break free of the "chains" of your past?

No...

Things are alright :)

I finally made it out to Teance Fine Teas and oh...it really warms my heart being here, haha.  The atmosphere and vibe is actually not quite what I expected, it was much warmer and more tranquil than I thought it would be.  Soft light filtering in through the skylights as I sit here quietly, a steady presence in the corner as a handful of people come by and leave.  Most importantly, the white teas!!!  I'm looking forward to trying them all, but already I've quite enjoyed the two that I've tried.  A familiar base and a comforting energy, but with a touch of different complexity in their flavor.  The perfect way for a creature of comfort like me to try something new...

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The ALTTPR mentor tourney has been going...quite well actually.  Somehow my mentored races have gone....8 and 1 in favor of me and my mentees.  I mean, most of the credit there is not mine, but you have to admit, an 88% win rate is certainly nothing to scoff at!!!

Partly thanks to some kind works from some of my mentees, but mostly due to practice and self-reflection, I've noticed that I'm starting to shed a little of the internal impostor syndrome that I've (either consciously or unconsciously) held around ALTTPR.  I've always felt that I'm in an interesting "involved yet not involved" spot when it comes to the rando community due to being invested and interested enough to study a lot about the game (in my own ways), yet also remaining uninterested in most community events and competitions and staying largely in the outskirts of things as an introverted loner.  (...although I'm starting to think lately that maybe I just have a false impression of how involved everyone else is)

Last year was interesting because I knew from having won the Mentor Tournament in 2022 that I was certainly skilled and knowledgeable about the game to a good extent, but at the same time felt almost underqualified to be a Mentor (not that there is any sort of objective "qualification" that demands being met besides a willingness to contribute toward the growth of others) given my lack of competitive experience (and how I stopped practicing nearly as much, thus always feeling like "eh, I'm not really in top form like I used to be").

That carried over a bit into the start of this year; when I was asked to host one of the "Boots Camp" intro sessions to kick off this year's tournament, my initial reaction was "oh...really, I'm qualified for this?"  But of course after thinking about that again I realized that was nonsense; I had already done plenty of polished instructional videos on YouTube; this would be slightly different but really not that much different at the end of the day (I ended up being quite happy with my preparation and the information that I presented).

But really I think it was over the course of my mentoring practice sessions, and even my on-the-side casual plays that I realized that I've really gotten =quite= a lot more refined in all aspects of my play (execution, knowledge, and decision-making) since two years ago despite largely having "self-studied", so to speak.

My efforts in creating all of my 30+ "Bite-Sized Rando" videos on YouTube have also felt really validated recently...not just in how I've been able to point to them when sharing knowledge with my mentees, but honestly just realizing how much I've learned myself through the process of creating them (and how useful they are to refer back to when I inevitably forget something or other, lol).  As usual, I'm appreciating my past steady and diligent efforts...

I almost hate to think it out loud, but honestly there's a part of this new confidence that has also stemmed from simply listening and watching to other mentors and realizing that there are, in fact, times (maybe more than I would have thought) when I have knowledge about the game that they actually don't.  And that volume of knowledge has been slowly accumulating as I do more and more work to unravel what "good play" should look like.

Admittedly, it is a strange feeling though; like, why is it me of all people that would be the one doing this work to time out routes and calculate EVs and produce content about it, when I've always considered myself to be a hermit on the outskirts of the community that doesn't really get involved?  Shouldn't other people have done this work already?

Well, maybe it's not super surprising if I really think about it (and let's not pretend that I'm literally THE ONLY ONE, that is certainly tooting my own horn more than would be legitimate; there are certainly others who have done a bunch of good work, though perhaps not organized in the same way).  I think I've got that interesting mix where I play the game enough to have the skill and base knowledge, but also have the technical know-how and setup to be able to record emulator inputs, play them back, and then synthesize the side-by-side timings in avisynth, plus (and let's not underestimate this) the diligence to actually want to do it and put it up in a nice format.  I guess it's really for the same/similar reasons that my social dance events have ran so successfully in the past -- I've got that sort of unique blend of being both dancer and musician, but more importantly someone who has the know-how to precisely edit music, and also know =how= the music should be edited and sequenced for people to enjoy, because I've been around enough to know...

Perhaps part of this is also simply the nature of how information sharing just tends to be more ephemeral; you just get questions and answers buried deep in the message history of one of a million different Discord channels (because of course there are dozens of decentralized ones floating around).  Even in those cases where someone puts in the effort to time something out or come up with the detailed answer, it just gets posted somewhere and then vaguely remembered as "oh yeah, according to ___ you should do this here because they timed it out and it was fastest".  And that just ends up getting mixed in with all of the off-the-cuff "well, you should do this because it's better" that people say based purely on their intuition and all of a sudden you have very legitimate facts being mixed in with the equivalent of old wives' tales.  The end result is that you can't really believe anything until you do the science to test it out yourself, or until you've seen the video evidence (which is why I started my YouTube series in the first place...).  There IS certainly a lot of room in rando for differences of opinion on how you should tackle/play various situations, but raw timing comparisons and EV calculations ought to not be an area where you have to go with subjective opinions.

AAAAnyways, all that is to say, I've been really enjoying/appreciating this opportunity, probably more so than last year, and it's been good to have that around in my life to keep me busy / interested / excited about things.

=====

Work on Rhythm Quest continues slowly, as always...I got just a little sad (as always) thinking about not only how long the project has taken but also how much income I've lost from only being part-time...but hey, you know, it's all relative -- I'm making infinitely more than I was when I had been full-time on Rhythm Quest without a primary job, haha, and having coverage for therapy sessions and dental work and all that jazz is certainly not to be taken for granted.  I've been doing my best to just get as many good little bursts of productivity in where I can, and try to make the work feel less intimidating.  When all is said and done, I'm probably doing exceedingly well given the challenge of it all...

=====

It's a good feeling, to be able to count those small blessings in life.  To have those moments where you truly feel alive.

A few things, I guess.

It's been a lot of rando stuff with the Mentor tournament.  Mostly a good thing!  Although funnily enough it's led to me being a little less active in actually just playing the weekly reddit seeds and everything.  Too busy working with mentees and coaching them through races and all.  Managed to put out a new bite-sized rando video though, which is good!

Progress on Rhythm Quest...continues slowly.  I alternatively feel like I'm spending like zero time on it and making no progress, but then I'll sit down and do stuff that I'm really happy with.  Recently I managed to basically almost finish up everything with level 6-3 (just did the backdrops and palettes today), which is a great step in the right direction as there are only 2 more levels in the main campaign to take care of!  Of course there are a billion other things to do and I'm sure a lot of the earlier levels (some of which are years old now...) can use some improvements, but it's still going to be a really big milestone for me to have all 30 main levels in some form of complete.

I've been hanging out at Far Leaves here and there (twice this past weekend actually), but will probably try to make it out to Teance next time to see what that is all about.  I didn't go do any dancing in the past week but didn't really regret it; I did end up making it out to WnY earlier this month anyways.

Last night/this morning unfortunately I suffered from some very random anxiety.  Really came as a surprise as I didn't think that I had a bunch of stuff swirling around internally but I really didn't have a good time in the middle of the night, was just super unsettled randomly, which is unfortunate.  Hopefully tonight I'll rest more peacefully.

I've been struggling to make progress on writing letters, but I honestly feel like I've been saying that for like the past year or so (maybe not super surprising).  It's still a problem.

In more pleasant news, I finally booted up and started playing Read Only Memories: Neurodiver.  Should be a fun game/story to play through from time to time, and something for myself to really look forward to, in the absence of anything else more "interesting" in my life right now in that vein.

I guess I need to work on getting a little bit closer with Sayuri?  Hard to find the right time...but yeah, I guess that is something I need to do.  Probably could stand to drink some more tea at home, too...

Sometimes I wonder if it was my destiny to be a boy, despite it all.  I mean, of course, sometimes I also wonder if in another world, it was my destiny to actually become Sayuri in the end.  Or maybe even in this world.  But then something went askew somewhere along the way.  We don't really live in that world.  Maybe it wasn't meant to be.

But like I said, I also think sometimes, about whether I was always supposed to be a boy all along.  A shallow reading of it would be something like how I'm supposed to serve as this example for others or whatever.  But I don't think that explains the destiny thing.  And I honestly don't...think I serve as an example for others.  Just the impression I get, other people don't seem to want to be like me.  Which doesn't really bother me, I mean, if I wanted to do the same thing as other people, we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are now, right?

But I think it goes deeper than that, too.  Of course, being a girl would feel like "reclaiming a part of myself", but in another way, being a girl would also feel like succumbing to pressure.  It would mean giving up something as well, and I don't just mean the obvious things.

In the same way, that I think it's important for me to "pass up on opportunities", to not speak up, to not approach people, to sit there and wait, to be quiet, I think it's always been important for me to do things my own way, to be true to myself.  It's not just that I'm trying to be contrarian, but rather, it almost feels like being a girl is, for me, the easy way out (even though it's really the harder way in most ways...).  It's a means of running away, maybe.  Or at the very least, giving up on something.  Giving up on the hope that maybe Sayuri is not the only one who could be beautiful.

Yeah, I'll never be my idol.  Maybe I'll never live with the stars.  But the life I have here in the tower isn't so bad, is it?  Just a bit lonely, waiting all of these years.  Well, I guess I'll just keep on waiting.