It's been about a week, huh?  I'm not sure if the fact that I've been skimping on blog posts is indicative of anything, like maybe I'm happier?  Regardless, let's get into it.

Life is in fact going a little bit better.  Things have gotten easier, though of course there are always little hiccups here and there.  On the plus side, I seem to be at a place where for once I don't actually have a ton of different things that I'm trying to work towards, which has been providing me with a rare (and I mean RARE) period of respite -- rare in large part because any other time I'm faced with something like this I immediately start worrying about what I should be doing.  Productivity is like a drug to me, really...

Ludum Dare starts in just 5 days!  I've made the initial "we're in" post at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/$184184/team-cocoa-moss-is-in-for-ld46.  I've been thinking about what kind of games might be nice for Cocoa Moss to try to build next and while thinking about it I felt that it might possibly be a good idea to play something a little different (read: not a game from the 90s), so there's a chance I might try to play through Firewatch or something this week (??).  On the other hand, I've also been thinking about visual design a bunch, and though I usually don't take on much visual design at all in our Cocoa Moss games, it's still something that appeals to and interests me.  I know Minish Cap has some lovely palettes and designs (I guess Mother 3 as well), so those are also some options for me in the future, if only as required reading.

Old games really feel like old books to me, sometimes you just get the urge to replay some games from way back when.  Speaking of which, even though I don't have my physical copies of the rest of the Animorphs series on hand, I've nabbed the PDF/e-reader versions, so I'll be able to start going through those again.

Anyways, back on the subject of old games -- keeping in line with the usual trend of me playing games from ~30 years ago, I've started a playthrough of the Quintet trilogy -- starting first with Soul Blazer, and then hopefully going through Illusion of Gaia and then the ever-lauded Terranigma.  I've seen a little bit of Soul Blazer and have played through Illusion of Gaia a couple of times, but never actually played Soul Blazer myself.  I'm pretty far through it already (just started the castle area).  It's not a game without faults I wouldn't say, but there's also a lot of charm in it, and something about the way that the level layouts are designed as well as the unique dungeon/town progression system really interests me as a designer.  Games are fascinating things, really.  Thinking about all of them really gets me excited for Ludum Dare -- and saying that I'm sure we'll probably fall flat on our faces when trying to design anything good, haha...that's just how it goes sometimes...

Made a pretty nicely successful shui zhu dish!  No fish, just lamb and pork slices, but it came out with a very pleasant fragrance and blend of spiciness and slight numbing flavor.  Definitely on the mild side, but hit all of the right notes and was pretty satisfying.  Tonight I'll be trying my hand at pork belly cooked in the mei cai kou rou style, which should be pretty exciting.

OHC600 happened, which was pretty epic.  I ended up doing a remix of a my ubiquitous Ecstasy of Life theme, which was really fun to do and turned out great.  Several other really great tunes came out of OHC600 as well, and the listening party (hosted by Starla on twitch!) was really fun to go through.  What a great event and community.  Here's to another 100 OHCs, and another 100 after that...

Went outside and did a bunch of freehand glowsticking last night, which is probably the most exercise I've gotten since quarantine started.  I've gone out and spun poi a bunch before but this is the first time in quite a while that I've done a sticking session by myself outdoors, no filming, no audience, just dancing freely and trying out new things without any restrictions.  It felt great, this is something I could definitely use more of.  There's always this weird dichotomy when it comes to dancing where on the one hand you really need time to focus on technique, form, and cleaning up all of your motions (something I'm terrible at) but on the other hand you also need time to dance freely in a way that engages your spontaneity and practices your "flow", for lack of a better term.  There's no doubt that the former is important, but I often find that, at least for my style of dancing, the latter ends up being the thing that really ends up driving improvement, interestingly enough.  But perhaps they are just two sides of a coin, really...

I reconnected with a friend after some 10 years of not really talking with them, so...yeah.  These are rare moments in life, but I know better than anyone that if you try hard enough, sometimes your efforts do bear fruit.  Sometimes it is a matter of simply trying harder, other times it is simply a matter of finding the right tree to look at.  Either way, we keep trying, and trying, and trying...