Well, okay, I guess we can catch up on actual happenings too.  It's hard to know what to write though, for a multitude of reasons.  But I know I have had thoughts, so we'll just start with whatever I end up remembering.



She is gone.  The "Kagome" person, she is gone.  Of course, I always knew she would be, she was destined to leave my life, as another had once before.  I told her as much, too.  I knew.  And it seems now that that time has clearly passed.  Thinking about that person's name, I'm not 100% sure how to feel.  Being with this person reminded me so strongly, of the one that I've never forgotten.  I guess I miss them both.  But it is hard to imagine that I would ever choose to hold onto this thread tightly.  For not only did I know from the beginning that things would end, but I knew also, that she was only a reminder of whom I really wanted to see.  That person, whose absence seems...unfair, even.
And yet it always astonishes me, how "the girl of the four winds" is still in my life, even when those two are not.  And yet, even if I stop reaching backwards, I must never stop remembering.



itch.io has a massive charity bundle on sale now and even if you care nothing about supporting the NAACP and community bail funds, you should still get it because the amount of value there is insane, like....insane, like, what???

I've been making my way through some of the games this weekend, since....well, playing games is apparently what I needed to do.  I played through all of Fortune-499, an interesting little card-based game which I enjoyed.  While I think there were aspects that felt slightly (and I mean slightly) not as "elegant" as I would have liked, that's really a minor complaint, and overall I found that it managed to simply.....stay interesting.  I think it was a great mix of game mechanics and narrative and each chapter tries to throw something new at you.  I feel like the pacing of the game (if that's the right term) felt really nice because of that.  The aesthetic is well-done too, these little details like the transition that happens every day really help put a nice bow on the whole package.  Very nice.

I played through the hilarious Astrologaster as well, a narrative-based comedy choose-your-own-adventure game that involves you playing as a "doctor" who reads the stars (read: "bullshits everything") to diagnose his patients.  I'd recommend really sitting down and playing through this in one sitting if you're going to, simply because I feel like it would be really awkward to come back to it after getting halfway through and having forgotten all of the context that informs your decisions through the game.  I found it difficult to keep everything straight in my head towards the later part of the game, but somehow managed to squeak by with a license at the end -- huzzah!  It did a really good job of giving you some interesting challenges in terms of trying to figure out what choices would lead to a "good" outcome, often having you balance honesty with people-pleasing as well as external concerns and future consequences.

I tried out Interstellaria briefly, but it seems a bit more intimidating (and unfortunately not as user-friendly) than I had hoped.  I'm willing to try giving it another chance (the soundtrack!), but I'm tempering my expectations for that one, as I know it's supposed to not be the most polished game in existence.



In the meantime, I've finished Illusion of Gaia!  Crazily, I also managed to find this really long critical analysis/writeup of Illusion of Gaia, which was certainly interesting even if not super groundbreaking.  IoG (or "Illusion of Time" as it is also known) is an interesting game, as I've said before.  I think it does a few things right, and some other things fairly mediocre.  But as with Secret of Mana (perhaps the prime example), sometimes bundling together some mediocrity with vibrant visuals, GREAT music, and a world that "looks and feels great" is really enough to get a game through all of its flaws.  I never knew this before, but it turns out that you can fight every single boss as Will (not freedan or shadow), though doing this for some of the later bosses is just plain tedious (pharaoh queen would just take forever....), and doing it for the hardest boss in the game (the vampires) is a very legitimate challenge, perhaps even harder than beating the "secret boss" Solid Arm.  I'd have to say Illusion of Gaia starts to kind of fall flat near all of the final sections of the game.  For most of the game, once you finish a dungeon, you simply move onto the next area, but for some reason once you get to Ankor Wat and the Mountain Temple, you have to backtrack through the whole dungeon in order to exit.....couple that with the sequence in Rivermia where you need to wait for the lily pad, plus the Pyramid which has you switching forms over and over again...not to mention waiting in like in Euro, as well as fetching the girl 3 apples.....there's suddenly a LOT of tedium that gets introduced and none of it is particularly good.  At least combat is more interesting, as you know have some additional abilities to play around with (read: "mess around with and take more damage than if you had just done the simple thing").  The boss rush at the end isn't super engaging either, as all of the bosses are easier this time around (due to being Shadow), though the vampires are still challenging as ever.  The final boss is more or less a pushover, so yeah.  What really drags IoG down at the end, though is the slllllooooooowwwwww dialogue throughout all of the ending sequences.  Thank goodness I had a fast-forward function available to me there.

Anyways, this now clears me to try Terranigma again, if I so choose...I have heard good things about this game, and apparently it has a bittersweet ending of some sort, but I'll try not to get my hopes TOO high.

Oh, I should also mention that I finished the entire alternate puzzle mode of Panel de Pon, yay!

Also randomly started playing through Full Throttle.......but I mean, I guess this ought to not be a surprise to anybody anymore, that yet again I've taken a game from....*checks*....1995, and randomly decided to go and play through it.



I've been continuing to read through Animorphs here and there (got through book 6...ok, I'm not very far yet, I admit)...also came across a random thread on twitter praising KA Applegate for being super supportive of the BLM movement, as well as...you know, writing a so-called children's book series that talks about slavery, war, xenophobia, child soldiers, morality, humanity, ... I haven't gotten to all of the more heavy stuff (that all comes later on in the war...) but we're getting there.  Yeah...just thinking about it, I still recall reading book 48.  It was late at night and I was using the desk lamp in my bedroom at my parents' place, listening to Sixpence None the Richer.  Hearing the song "Tonight", at the ending of that book, when Rachel is supposed to figure out what to do, and she just...doesn't know.  It's left unsaid what happens, and I think that's actually really good writing.  Because the impact of that moment would be gone, if Rachel just decides what to do.  You'd have the answer.  But you don't.  You don't know what happens.  You don't know what Rachel should do, or should have done.  Just like her.  And all the while, Leigh Nash was singing, "Tonight it's time....choose a direction...if you fail...you can make a correction...."



I love meowmie.



Randomly watching some more of HealthyGamerGG, and such, actually feels.....great.  There's this element of human contact and conversation that I think I couldn't really identify as a missing block in isolated life, and I think hearing supportive voices and seeing people help each other, even if not directed at myself, is invigorating.  And I think =past= even that, I think just hearing someone break down problems and emotions in such a rational and relatable way is quite useful.  I think it's like.....I don't know if this happens to other people, but when you hear or watch or even read someone's speaking or writing a lot, I think sometimes you begin to formulate an internal monologue or rationalization in their words, in their style of thinking.  And I think that's actually really helpful, in a lot of different situations.



Speaking of people helping each other out...last but certainly not least (the opposite, really), I've been trying to embark on this journey that several others have been.  There are some things to do, many things to do, really.  But for now, the first thing to do is simply....to do my homework.  Abstract plans are hard to act on, but if there is anything I am good at, it is taking what seems like a giant boulder and chunking it up into bite-sized pieces such that I can make progress, and then make progress, and then make progress again.  And I hope that someday, =we= will make progress....make progress....and continue to walk forward.  What is overwhelming, hopeless, and impossible all at once becomes something easier to digest when it becomes a tangible thing.  HealthyGamerGG talked about that too, actually, as a form of Operational Procrastination.

So yes.  We will try, and try, and keep trying.  And we each have our own small part to play in this thing.  I already know what I hope mine to be.  For now, I'm just making my way there.



I donno, I mean....I guess I could write these blog posts with a bit more context and explanation.  But sometimes blogs are ok too, without explanation.  When you don't really know exactly what I'm talking about, but you can read that there's a sentiment behind it.  Does every art piece need its "point" to be explained in order to be appreciated?