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...