30th Bday, prep for Ludum Dare 44

This month is definitely a bit of a rush...after coming back from the Asia trip, I had but a short time to catch my breath and then it was onto the celebration of my 30th.  I had better write about that now I guess?

This was quite definitely the best birthday I've ever had.  Of course, it also tends to sometimes fall around the time of the spring Ludum Dare event, so sometimes the timing is weird, but even without taking that into consideration, this was by far the best it's ever been.

I wrote in 2012 that "birthdays are a reminder of how little attention people put into me and how often I can be taken for granted, as well as a reminder of the imbalances in my relationships with other people." and that sentiment was definitely an honest one at the time.  Whether these perceived imbalances were ignorantly self-inflicted or through no fault of my own is up for debate, but I definitely had not found the types of social connections that I had truly desired, and would not until the coming years (though I had at the least gotten a lot closer than before).  It was because of this (along with my own knee-jerk reactions to oppose social trends) that I originally started to deactivate my Facebook account every time my birthday rolled around -- it left me with a disgusting feeling really, that horde of people who now suddenly bothered enough to type a meaningless message to me, but only because of an automated Facebook reminder.  Realizing that that automated birthday reminder had spurred them onto more action than anything else of our relationship during the 364 other days of the year was a terrible thought.  Of course, the family celebrations didn't really help, as usually they feel like little more than rituals for their benefit and not mine (still working on that one -- but at least I have gotten them to start picking from my wishlist so I don't also leave with wholly impractical gifts).

Yet somehow after 30 years I managed to get together a great group of people whom I not only cared about but who also cared about me.  It was pretty astounding when I thought about it, I really was struck by the group that surrounded me that day and I think that day may ought to really serve as a sort of marker for myself in my life.  I planned some great activities, we had a lot of fun, and I had great help as well.  From one friend helping with tea, another helping with food preparation, another helping with miscellaneous logistics, it was truly amazing to finally have gotten together such dependable people.  Just read that post from 2012 that I linked -- what a difference!

Of course, we also totally rocked the Roosevelt Escape Room -- great success, and I felt quite proud of the team.  I think we had a great mix of both people who tried to think very quickly on their feet (me) and people who tried to be more methodic and careful (i.e. catching everyone else's mistakes).

And with that, all those people sending me short messages, somehow didn't really feel so bad anymore.

Of course, that being over, it's right into the next thing...Ludum Dare 44 is coming up this weekend!  I've been doing a bunch of prep, including updating to Unity 2019, testing some things to make sure they still work, and also setting up and testing some things for itch.io!  itch.io is sort of like the "Bandcamp of game distribution" and I've always been a fan of them and the developers that gather on their platform despite not having used them.

I do plan on trying to copy over all of our existing games over to itch, but it looks like that might (???) have to wait until after the dust from LD44 settles, as most of our recent games are actually domain-locked to avoid nasty people coming and stealing them onto their own sites.  I've added a rule to allow for itch.io hosting and tested that all to make sure it works, but I still have to go about recompiling all of the old games (probably also updating them to Unity 2019, hopefully not breaking anything in the process?), and setting up each of the project pages, etc etc etc. and that is something I just don't have the time for right now.  But I am at least set up to upload our LD44 entry onto itch.  Part of the reason I wanted to set up itch.io in the first place is because I think it does great discoverability for LD games, especially since the LD site itself has never been great at that.  (Not to mention, I might want to use itch to distribute Rhythm Quest as well!)

Anyways, Unity 2019 seems to be working well (the itch.io tests also gave me some chances to verify that older games are working fine after the upgrade, which is important since there were some bugs that I had been working around and the workaround are deprecated, so good to know that the root issues were also fixed), and I've updated my unity template project as well as forked it over and made the repo.

Other things I still need to do before LD44:
- Draw some 100x100 pixel art for this month's "Monthlies" album.  I knew this would sneak up on me even before I left for Asia...I was going to try starting this today, but then I got sidetracked by some more of the itch.io stuff and now this blog post...ugh.  Will have to try again tomorrow.  Need to get it done before LD since the end of the month is really soon after LD ends.
- Do the obligatory "I'm in" post on the LD website.
- Laundry!
- (maybe?) upload some more stuff to NetEase since I haven't for a long while
- Do a big grocery run on Friday and get lots of food and snacks :D
- If I have time, there's a boatload of letters I could probably catch up on...but not sure if that will happen =X  maybe will try to at least get to one or two...
- Keep recovering physically and don't get sick...

Things that will NOT get done before LD44:
- I have a famitracker song that I "sort of finished" on the trip to Asia but might try to flesh out (or just call it done and master it).
- Have a music commission on deck (due mid-july)
- Also a remix to do for an arrange album (due august)
- All the itch.io stuff
- Potentially hosting a GCC dance on the 18th, but leaving that up in the air based on what I feel like doing.
- There won't be another full-on JaSmix event for this quarter, but I will host the usual Summer event.  I've already done an initial reachout, now I just need to pick a good date.

Well, on the plus side, I'm somehow still cruising along and handling everything despite having a full-time job.  I do feel like I'm taking care of a lot of things...just keeping on chugging along like I do best.