Remember those days back in Xanga-land where my old teenage self was complaining nonstop about how the world is shitty and everyone sucks and no one fucking cares and it doesn't matter, nothing fucking matters, and he was non-stop depressed and pissed off about everything?

Well guess what, he was fucking right.  Well, more like I am the worst worst worst worst worst and everything is all my fault and good god I am THE WORST fuck

Well...you win some, you lose some.....then you win some more, and lose some more...

I saved myself from a regret tonight.  But then I wasted my time away, and fell back into nailbiting too.  Ugh!  On the plus side, I rescued the night and it was not all lost; I worked on my website, getting done all of the individual game pages from Minimalist MAYHEM through Rhythm Gunner (still have to do all the earlier ones).  Unfortunately I had the first flying bug of summer show up in my room, but luckily it was not one that was too scary and it landed, letting me take care of it (phew).  Crisis averted, thankfully.  Not sure how it got in.  Also unfortunately I think I bit myself, but not too hard and not too bad.  Dunno...we'll see how tomorrow goes, I guess.

I've been listening to http://chipzel.co.uk/album/interstellaria-ost tonight.  Sadly, with the glut of amazing music that exists and that I already have, I feel like I can only justify paying a decent amount for music if I truly like it, so I'm not purchasing it, but am still streaming from Bandcamp.  It's got a really really nice style, one that I think I might even try to take some inspiration from when I'm not doing musical sketches for the visual novel project that I've been trying to contribute to.  It's got chippy elements, but is just...super super chill...it's got this downtempo chillout vibe with lots of ambience and lots of filtered synths.  I'm actually already into that from listening to this song (which I even tried to do a test deconstruction of), so it's definitely a direction that I should try to explore soon.  =Sort= of like Lifeformed, actually, but a slightly different vibe, really.  It's really nice.

The weekend is off to an okay start.  Slept quite late last night, after playing some Monaco, watching another episode of Steven Universe, and playing a little Risk of Rain (been a while!), among other things.  Got up with a lazy start to the day, but ate a sandwich and did some quality work on my website, which now has a nice thumbnail grid layout for all of my games, with some fancy animating hover text as well (yay!).  Did some work on Furball Pet today too, so that was good.  Now in the middle of writing a letter; I still need to take a bath and shave, but aside from that I don't have that much more to take care of...

"Love exists to foster people.  Even if that love doesn't bear fruit, maybe it will be nourishment for living."
--Akiko-san, Kanon (2002)

Everything's okay, probably, now that I think of it.

Been working on the website!  Content is coming along; the formatting exists but isn't super-pretty yet, will have to make some stylistic choices later.  One or two things at work have been a drag, yet thinking about it again, it's not too bad after all.  Been sleeping relatively late this week, but again not the end of the world.  We've been getting new episodes of Steven Universe, so that's great!  Managed to successfully pull myself together last night, got one or two things done and played through the Thomas Was Alone DLC, which was okay, albeit pretty unexciting.  Still have to go through the To the Moon DLC.  Still have another errand to run as well...

Worst day I've had in a while, sheesh!  what the heck?  Pffftt.

Is it annoying?  When people keep dwelling on the past too much.

I wrote in my diary today, probably the first real entry in a year or so; I never had a good routine for writing in it these days.  Part of me wishes for a more personal blog, like the older entries over at http://ddrkirbyisq.wordpress.com/, but in retrospect the main reason those are more "personal" is because I didn't care as much what people thought of me; who was going to bother to read it anyways?  I realized that even if I had a private blog, what would "private" mean?  Even if I could share it with only a few trusted people, that still wouldn't mean too much, you know?  I guess maybe life is just not as simple as it used to be.  But that's what diaries are for, after all.

House cleanup is just about done, finally.  It feels great; I like having things be in their place and I really like clean spaces that are free of clutter.  Sure, my room is still chock full of decorations, but that's an organized system...a layout, if you will.

Been trying to take care of things...doing some errands...still need to do some more.  Need to keep working on ddrkirby.com as well, etc.

Things have been pretty good lately!  Partly because of the beautiful cloudy weather making the whole world beautiful and amazing <3

Work has been going well still!  I've also been doing some long-overdue cleaning...finally got around to vacuuming the place and cleaning out the shower.  Ugh, much much overdue.  Place is starting to look much cleaner, though!  Rugs got washed too, yay.  Still have to clean the kitchen and the rest of the bathroom, but up a bunch more decorations, and dust everything, and reorganize some drawers.  I think there may be few silverfish living in some of the drawers that I hardly use unfortunately =(  Stupid silverfish!  I guess I'll just take the entire drawers outside and then shake out all the clothes and sweep it clean.  One step at a time...

I'm quite looking forward to dancing tomorrow night!  Skipped out on FNW last week, it was July 4th weekend and I wasn't sure how many people would be in anyways; had some other stuff to do, but I'll be back tomorrow for some good dancing!

Played some ITG over the weekend!  Been a while; last time I played any form of DDR was at Fanime, haha.  It was quite fun, some of the stepcharts were pretty good!  I am still too scared of the mines and hands and everything in ITG so I am still turning them off for now (rolls are fine).  7s and 8s are a good difficulty for me, I found--9s are doable but a challenge; the 7s and 8s are more relaxing and enjoyable.  I'm starting to sort of be ok at reading crossovers, but...not really that practiced on them; they definitely still trip me up sometimes.  I'm getting a little better at execution in terms of hitting the damn pads; I think if I just use my heel for everything it's a lot more accurate.  I still dunno how the good people do it with the front and back edges of their feet; I guess it's something I'd just have to learn.  Maybe it would help if I used the bar to try it?  Dunno.

Tried out Technika too, for the first time; it was quite fun!  I didn't realize it was keysounded, so that was cool.  The basic concept was super easy for me to pick up but I definitely had trouble understanding relative beat positions since there are no markers or guidelines; I guess that's just something you learn to interpret with practice, or you just learn the rhythms for each song?  Maybe people just get good at tracking the timings of notes visually as opposed to relying on rhythm sense?  I dunno, but that was for sure the most challenging part of it.  I guess in hindsight there seemed to be a consistent guideline for how far apart the notes are spaced in relation to each other, but I still wondered to myself whether it would have been nice to have some vertical lines for reference.  Well, whatever; it was fun regardless.

I've been doing design work for some card game stuff that I've been working on...one MtG set and one other project that is a completely different thing altogether, so that's been fun.  I've been figuring out a lot of stuff in the MtG set design; exploring some ideas and deciding what will probably work and not work.  It's quite cool, maybe I'll make some separate blog posts about that sometime.

It's been a while, hasn't it?

A bunch of stuff has happened, I won't bother getting to them in any specific order.

I went to San Francisco Westie Exchange (SFWX) this past weekend, which was hosted in Redwood City.  West Coast Swing!  Went to the critique session, which was helpful in identifying a few basic things that I can focus on, and then went dancing on Saturday night...I actually almost closed out the dance, stayed until 4AM when they were on their last few songs @_@.  It was really fun though, lots of good dancing and I got a lot of good practice both leading and following.  Super glad that I went, thanks to Marie for mentioning it to me!  I also met the most awesome and fun lady there and her husband, who were both excellent dancers; we had some super fantastic dances over the course of the night and I felt really happy to have met them and gotten a chance to chat with them a little bit.

My RTR cube finally got drafted at work!  It was fun; I think people liked it quite a bit.  It's never actually been drafted before (we always just used it for sealed pools) so it was a new experience.  I settled down into Orzhov pretty early on, despite passing a Deathpact Angel, and proceeded to get some deck with 11+ extort creatures (4x Kingpin's Pet lol).  It's not actually a super great deck; it's missing some strong ground defenders like basilica guards and the like.  There's some removal like an arrest and a killing glare but no Smite or anything.  It's got a palisade giant which is neat but not too many high-impact plays and it doesn't really do that well on board presence--it just extorts like crazy, which is fun.  I also have Crypt Ghast and Death to the Debtless, which is super fun ;P

Drafted DTK last week, got 2nd place losing only to the pod leader with a pretty solid/consistent RG deck.  A bit light on removal but it was good enough and ended up being a pretty easy draft to navigate.  I'm drafting MM2015 tonight so we'll see how that ends up going...only drafted it once before so I dunno if I really know what I'm doing, but it should be fun regardless.

Work has been going pretty well!  I've settled into my new team.  As an extra plus, it seems that we are auditioning some new catering companies this week, meaning good food!

Been playing The Last of Us and We Love Katamari.  The Last of Us impressed me quite a lot...the opening sequence in particular was pretty amazing IMO, and I think is an excellent example of what the medium is possible of and how it should best be utilized.

The Ecstasy of Life Album is now pretty much finished up on my end; I've sent out requests for guest remixes so I'm just waiting on those and the album artwork and then we can get it released!  I haven't actually been working on any music in a while since I skipped OHC last week, so I want to get back to trying to make something soon.  There's a project I'm supposed to be trying to do some sketches for just to see if I can come up with anything good, and then I also should be trying to do the last few songs to finish up the "DanceBit" album--which I don't think I'll call "DanceBit" in the end as I don't actually think that's a great name.  Even "ChipDance" is better I think, but maybe I'll just call it something different entirely.  Anyways, I can try to make a polka song or something.  Or if I'm lucky, a WCS song!  Because those are awesome.  Just recently found some that I've heard out on the dance floor but never knew the name of, so that's cool.

Lots of things to do...yesterday I finished up doing a bunch of cleanup on a laptop, reformatted it and installed Windows Server 2012.  It's still kind of chuggy simply because it's my super old MacBook Classic from like early 2008 or something, but now that it's been given a clean and fresh start it should be at least more usable now.

Me and some friends are thinking to start some adventures on RO again!  We're hopping onto IntenseRO, a midrate server that I once played on before back in the CS181 days (see cs181ro.blogspot.com).  I've been taking screenshots and might blog about any adventures we have, maybe here as opposed to on the ol cs181 website, heh.  Should be fun!

Lots of things to do still...need to catch up on housework too; there's a big pile of laundry to be folded and I need to clean up the bathroom and blahblahblahblah.  Some letters and such to catch up on too!  Blahhhh

Been teaching KJ to drive!  So far so good, though it was definitely stressful/scary at times O_O

What else?  Played through The Witch's House...sometime I need to set aside time to come up with a website design for ddrkirby.com as well. =X

3-day weekend this weekend though, hooray!