Happy times, yet stressful times.

I have certain been stressed over the past few days...no denying it, really.  The plus side is that even though there is stress, there is light in my life as well.

Our Decadance finale show is coming up in less than a week!  (tickets still available at https://decadance.yapsody.com/)  At this point I'm pretty grateful to past me that I only signed up for a small handful of pieces; it's a good amount for me to be performing.  Some of the rehearsals have been quite hectic so I am glad that I didn't bite off more than I can chew!  Apparently I am still stressed out about it though, because I definitely dreamed about being in the show / dress rehearsal last night with all sorts of things going wrong, agh.  I guess it didn't help that I was thinking about it a bit before bed, haha. *sweat*

JaSmix logistics are all done with, finally, so I can kick back and just look forward to enjoying the event!  ...and by that I mean stress out about the workshops I'm helping to teach.  It will be OK!...but it's hard to not fret about it until I am confident about exactly how I am going to cover everything.  It is going to be super fun though, especially the glowsticking one...actually all of our workshops this year should be really fun -- please come out and stop by! :D

I still have a little more tweaking to do for the setlist for that night -- mostly finding room to fit all the good stuff, lol.  But not so worried about that part, really.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together!!!  I have started playing it in earnest, playing it on PSP.  Important note is that I am actually not playing the vanilla version of the game -- instead I'm playing it with the "One Vision" mod, which basically rebalances the entire game and comes pretty highly recommended from fans of the game.  For all zero of you who can actually understand it, a consolidated changelist can be found in the post at the top of this thread.  Note that I have never played Tactics Ogre before, so reading through the changelist meant pretty much nothing to me at the time, but it seemed to be a good idea and nobody really recommended NOT playing with the mod, so it was a no-brainer.  From what I can tell, it basically rebalances the classes in a major way -- archers used to be really overpowered in the original game, apparently, and some other classes like terror knights were close to useless.  There are a lot of skills and such that have been switched around, which is a bit confusing when trying to read up on strategy because many of the tips that apply to the original game may no longer apply.  But it's all new to me anyways, so it's pretty fun discovering what all the different classes are about and all.

Tactics Ogre: LUCT is...really complicated, lol.  I'm not sure how much more complicated it is because I'm playing with this new mod, but compared to FFT it has been a lot harder to wrap my head around just what I should be doing and how damage and stats and status effects work and all.  On the plus side, it has been really fun slowly learning about all of the workings of the game and getting my footing around everything.  The battles and unit management definitely have significantly different feel from FFT, and that was definitely disorienting at first.  Battles are much more large-scale and terrain and unit formation really matters quite a bit more -- which is pretty cool actually.  The battles do drag on for a bit longer in general but you do get the sense of a war of attrition which is kind of cool.  And yeah, building units is really quite different.  There's less of the whole FFT aspect of "build your own combos" which I think is a net loss, but it's still pretty interesting anyways and I'm sure I'm doing a ton of things wrong already haha.

Overall though I am really happy I started playing it; it seems like it will keep me engaged for quite a while since there is just so much stuff to explore.  Not only in terms of the mechanics, classes, equipment decisions (which are very nontrivial!), but also there are branching story paths which you can replay in a sort of newgame+ style sense, etc etc.  So, look forward to more updates as I learn my way around the game a bit more.

I'm finally starting to get the hang of Peach in Melee!  I'm still sloppy as all heck, but I can at least play neutral of some sort and I have been understanding some more key interactions and such.  She's really quite fun!  One thing that I realize I need to focus on is threatening more tricky grabs as different characters, so I think that should be my focus at the moment.  That includes just running up and raw dashgrabbing them as Peach, but also shinegrabs as spacies, and empty hop grabs as well as wavelanding onto platforms and grabbing.

This week will be perhaps a hectic week for me with all the stuff coming up.  But I am thankful for the light in my life.  Whether it is friends, or meowmies, or just some simple moments spent alone by myself.  These things will carry me through, I know.