It's quite a weird feeling when Twitter feels more personal than Facebook?  Like, doesn't it say something about things, that the people who I ostensibly have more "real" connections with, feel way more distant?

Perhaps this just one of the reasons that I've always been a fan of connecting to someone on an artistic level.  I don't mean in terms of "hey yo I think your stuff is cool" but rather that when you share artistic views with someone, there's a semblance of being in the same boat together because you're likely to share worldviews and go through similar struggles.

One half of my mind tries to celebrate the fact that I'm done with work for the year and should sleep in and relax, whilst the other half of my mind reminds me that I still need to finish my monthly artwork before the end of December.

In other news, DDR doubles is really fun.  Some of the crosser patterns still trip me up but I don't really mind, it means there's still more to learn about reading.  It's quite a weird mind trip to try and rewire your brain that stepping on the right arrow of pad 1 is actually best done with your LEFT foot in preparation for stepping on pad 2.

Growing Up

But what if I don't want to grow up?  What if I don't feel like doing the right thing, saying what needs to be said?

How much of myself would you have me give away, for the sake of being a better person?

We have lost so much of ourselves already, in becoming adults.

How much more would you have me lose?

I wrote in my last post that this past week would be a week to "take it easy if possible", but that turned out to be not possible, as the work stuff extended until midweek and even a little beyond, having to put out fires and such.  As such the remainder of my time was mostly just focused on making sure that I was still rested and sane, but of course, part of maintaining my mental health also means trying to make forward progress on the rest of my work too.

Thankfully I seem to be in a better place as of now.  Though as you know, there are always just gonna be times when you just ain't doing so well, and that happens regardless of how well you are doing in general.

I've got one day of work left in the year -- theoretically should be pretty light and just trying to close up stuff and jot down some things for when we are back in action (?).

Even more isolated now than usual, as my quarantine pod has divided in 2 for the coming holiday season as numbers continue to rise here, blahblahblah.  I've honestly been a little too busy these past two weeks to really feel the full impact of that (whatever it may be), so we'll see how that ends up turning out over the next few days I guess.

Christmas is sneaking up quite quickly, and I'm extremely grateful to my past self right now for having taken care of all of the xmas stuff early.  I have only one or two remaining deliveries to make if any.  Hard to believe that it is already the week of already, but I guess time flies when you don't really have much time for anything, haha.

I've almost finished up the current music soundtrack commission that I've been working on, which is nice.  The latest assignment involved making 5 different versions of the same track for crossfading into each other, which was an interesting and fun exercise.

My employer offered up to two free "Kynd kits" as part of a volunteer day initiative and I ordered both a teacher appreciation kit as well as an essential worker kit.  This was...supposed to be done a few weeks ago, but at the time I was just too busy to really do anything about it.  There's not really a specific deadline or anything for it anyways, so I decided to just wait on it.  The kits themselves are an OK concept, but the contents themselves are...a little bland and drab, so I'm replacing some of the stuff in there with my own personalized materials.  I mean, it makes sense that they would provide a =plain= envelope and paper to write on, but wouldn't it be more personal to receive some messages on hand-picked stationery?

The teacher appreciation kit contained a mug that you were supposed to design using oil-based paint pens, so I spent some time brainstorming a design -- pretty happy with what I came up with!  That is definitely the most meaningful item out of all of the stuff in both kits, I feel like.  Now I'm a little curious as to what other people ended up making, if anything.

I am hoping to give that kit to one of my former teachers, but I seem to be unable to contact them at this time, so I'll have to try again next year.  Well, it's not like there's any rush or anything.  In the meantime I can try to write some notes and such for the essential worker kit and give that out to someone who works at the grocery store I go to or something.

After many days of wanting to do an ALTTPR run yet not finding the time, I finally got around to doing another one, and it sucked, lol.  Pretty much an all-dungeons-required seed, I wasn't super on point in terms of routing at certain points, and worst of all my controller started to crap out in the middle of it leading to some egregious execution errors (I opened it up later to fix it).

Been getting back into Dead Cells a bit lately, thanks to a friend picking up the game.  There have been quite a number of changes since I last played, and lots of new content as well.  I cleared 2BC and am just working on collecting more blueprints and stuff as I prepare to tackle the 3BC difficulty (newgame+++).

Have been continuing to go through with my Animorphs reread, especially during these weeks when I have been running into a little of anxiety -- reading is always a nice bedtime activity to help with those sorts of moods.  I'm now on book 27 and the past few books have been an interesting swing of ups and downs.  20-22 is the David trilogy and definitely one of the most intense parts of the entire series.  Then 23 is a very well-written Tobias book, probably also a highlight for sure.  But 24 is a weird "filler" episode with the Helmacrons, then 25 is the first book that has a ghostwriter helping, and it shows, as the quality of this book is not really quite up to snuff.  But book 26 we get back on track with a nice story about the group dealing with the Howlers/Crayak, and then book 27 is a fine Rachel book that sheds some more light into her relationship with Tobias.

Damn, what a strong relationship.  I honestly am really glad that I'm rereading these books over 10 years older, as the last time I was...in high school, I think?  Not only having perspective from having it be a second read-through, but also just having experienced relationships firsthand and having a better understanding of life and people in general, makes me appreciate some of these things a lot more.  Tobias's struggles in book 23 for example -- I don't think they really hit me with the same resonance when I was in high school, but I really appreciate the way that book is written now, there are some very powerful moments.  And yeah, Rachel/Tobias, damn.

Other things...I felt like watching something, so I decided to start going through Princess Tutu again.  It's been a while and I forgot a lot about what happened, so I don't mind watching it once more.

The new Melee documentary came out but I haven't watched it yet.  Hopefully it won't be like the first one where I only watched it like 7 years after it came out, haha, but I mean...it IS me, so who knows.

Speaking of which, I had a random itching to play the new SSX game....and when I say "new" I mean the one from 2012, lol.  It's gotten mixed reviews, so I'm a bit hesitant, but maybe if I can pick it up for cheap, it might not be bad to just try out just for fun.

Let's see...what else is there?  Cooking I guess?  We put together some nice chicken liver/gizzard hummus with pita bread, which was pretty satisfying.  I definitely have homemade ramen under my belt as a dish now, though the one ingredient that is still troublesome is the noodles.  I know sun noodle makes really good noodles and I try to just use those, but at nijiya they are usually out of just the plain noodle packs, which means they only have the ones that also include a sauce/soup base (which I don't need and just costs extra).  Maybe at some point I will need to start making my own noodles, haha.  But until then I just keep my eyes peeled for those sun noodle packs so I can buy in bulk and freeze.  Not sure if there any other good fresh ramen noodles available here?

I miss Kiki, as always.  But she does not miss me.

Weekend Recap, Vienna Teng concert, Alpha Centauri

This past week was pretty busy at work, to the point where I am being encouraged to take it easy this next week if possible, so that is going to be the plan of action.

I did not get a TON of stuff done this weekend but I did not exactly set out to do so in the first place, so that is not exactly a failure by any means.

Let's see what there is to mention...

I tuned in for Vienna Teng's concert on Saturday (yesterday).  As before, she always makes me think about how well she performs.  I thought to myself that I have never in my life performed anything with that amount of confidence.  Not among video games, tetris, speedcubing, music, marching band, social dance, glowsticking, taichi, programming, or anything else that I can think of.  That's not really out of the ordinary, I mean, most of us are not heavily involved in the performing arts, and I myself have been on record many times as preferring the practice of creation to performance, but it still really made me think about things.  Vienna has some very beautiful songs, and some that are really resonant, especially performed live, but her new work really "clicked" for me in a way that I'm not really sure any of her other works really had.

I think the closest I could compare it to is watching movies or reading stories.  There are some movies that you watch and you feel that they are very heartfelt and beautiful, but at the same time they don't really have the same impact on you because they're not really coming from the same space as you.  Like a story about parenting, for someone who doesn't ever intend on being a parent.  Or a story about the slow passage of time, for someone who has not yet escaped the fast-paced days of their youth.  Or a story about family conflict for someone who had no family at all.  That kind of thing.  I think a lot (not all?) of Vienna's other songs were and are sort of like that for me.  But this one wasn't, at that moment.  It was really good.

I accomplished....one and half things really, this weekend.  I worked on commission stuff a little bit, though I did not finish -- looks like this particular assignment is going to be one of the more slow-going ones.  Aside from that, I also drove around and did my Santa run, delivering to...7 different stops I believe, this time, waving hi from a distance while wearing mask and Santa hood.  It was kind of surreal seeing all these people exist in person, sort of a weird reminder.  In a way it was quite nice to actually interact with these people, albeit briefly, but in another way, it sort of made it feel more "real" that yeah, these are the people that I'm basically no longer seeing anymore at this time.

Well, I mean, in addition to all the other people from my past.  You know the ones.

EDIT: Gah, I forgot, I actually accomplished something else this weekend as well.  I put up the flash game archive on my website, as well as links to that on all of the affected games, so my flash games are all ready to be run past the end of 2020 (albeit locally -- sadly they will not be able to run in-browser anymore.  RIP flash).  Good to finally cross that off of my TODO list for now.  One thing at a time...

I finished a full game of Alpha Centauri.  I don't think I'll be playing another.  For those of you who don't know (and that's probably basically all of you?), Alpha Centauri is a Sid Meier game, heavily based on Civilization II, but this time set on the planet Chiron of the titular Alpha Centauri system -- in other words, using a sci-fi setting as opposed to Civ 2 which is on Earth and starts from the Ancient era.

I admittedly don't have much experience with other Civ games at all, and my main 4X game of choice is actually Master of Orion 2, so I don't have much to compare off of.  However I feel like Alpha Centauri offers some cool things....while also not really being super great as an overall experience.

I do feel like Alpha Centauri really evokes a strong sense of worldbuilding, of imagery, and of an interesting yet also bleak (?) outlook on humanity.  The planet of Chiron is infested with an alien psionic consciousness as well as "mind worms" which sprout from the xenofungus and psionically attack your troops.  The Planet itself, has a sort of "life" to it, and ends up sending more of these worm units to assault your bases in response to ecological damage such as aggressive terraforming.  The "research-based" route to victory actually has you research a way to merge human consciousness with that of the planet itself, leading to "Transcendence".  So that whole thing is pretty unique to Alpha Centauri.

The setting of having different factions split off, each with their own beliefs and strengths/weaknesses, is great too.  Of course this is standard for a civ game -- previously you'd have things like the Romans, or the Egyptians, or the Aztecs.  But this time you get factions that are based on areas of focus -- one is led by the chief science officer of the original ship, and another is led by the woman who was in charge of hydroponics.

But I think even more than that is the interesting way in which Alpha Centauri paints the technological advances and technologies/events that arise over the course of the game.  There's a video accompanying every "secret project" that you build, and not all of them are exactly happy-go-lucky celebrations.  The one for "The Self-Aware Colony" for example, repeats the words "We must dissent", with a quote, "Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind."  This is the upgrade that halves energy maintenance costs and puts an extra point of policing at every one of your bases to quell unruly citizens -- both good things -- but the video itself stands in stark contrast to this.

And many of the sci-fi advances -- nanotech, cloning vats, clinical immortality, mind control, cybernetics -- offer this same sort of duality.  They offer you exceedingly large gameplay benefits, while painting an ever-bleak picture of dystopia as being inevitable with human advancement.  The 7 factions of the original starship land on Alpha Centauri to "begin anew" after Earth was abandoned, but really they brought with them all of the baggage of mankind as a species.

There are seldom any "good guys" in Alpha Centauri and the vices of each faction are way more apparent and blatant here than in Civ, where you get something like "The Babylonians have science and religion as their strengths".  Instead in Alpha Centauri if you want to play as the economic faction, you play as "CEO Morgan" and command a corporate capitalism.  If you want to play as the industry-focused faction, that's "The Human Hive", a totalitarian faction that sees people as resources and morality as inefficiency.  If you want to play as the research-based faction, that's the one that values knowledge above ethics.  And so on and so forth.

That, along with all of the other sci-fi elements and cool technologies that you get to discover, are probably Alpha Centauri's strongest points.

The downsides....hm, where do I start.  Terraforming and using supply crawlers are two facets of the game which are vital to success yet also very complicated, with many options to choose from and no clear obvious direction about what to do.  There is an option to have your terraformers simply "auto-terraform" but I found that their choices are seldom optimal.  I think there is something to be said in understanding a complex system and trying to extract the most yield from it, but I think these two systems are just not intuitive enough and I feel like that probably alienates (pardon the pun) a lot of potential players.

Dealing with "Drones" is also one of the most annoying things in the game (more so since I was playing as University, which has more of those than normal).  Drones are Alpha Centauri's way of implementing a sort of "morale" system for bases.  If you get too many, you start to get rioting because the citizens of that base are unhappy, so you need to build recreation facilities, hospitals, etc to prevent this.  The penalty for bad morale in form of drones unfortunately is that ALL production at the base grinds to a halt, so you just wasted your turn.  As a gameplay mechanic I felt like this was just too punishing and annoying to have to deal with, I much preferred something like in MOO2 where morale confers percentage-based bonuses and/or penalties.  To make matters worse, drone problems grow worse as your empire grows larger, and not really according to an intuitive system -- sometimes you get an extra drone every 3 population, sometimes every 4 population units, and it depends on various factors such as your faction, the game difficulty, etc.

As with all 4X type games, the end-game ends up becoming pretty tedious as micromanaging a sprawling empire becomes quickly untenable.  Alpha Centauri was no different in this regard and managing the bases became pretty tiring even (especially?) after I had established clear dominance over all of the other factions and merely needed to wipe them all out by stomping across the rest of the planet.  It didn't help that half of the other factions were on a completely separate continent from me, meaning I had to build naval ships to ferry forces over there, or just wait until I had air units -- but even then, the lower-tier air units need to return to your bases for fuel.

The research "tree" (if you could even call it that) is pretty convoluted for Alpha Centauri, as it's almost random what techs become available to you at each point.

All of that to say that MOO2 is definitely going to remain my 4X game of choice.  MOO2 has cool technologies, much simpler base management, you don't have to worry about terrain or anything like that, and let's not forget the awesome ship-to-ship tactical battles which are WAY more fun than Alpha Centauri unit combat resolutions.  MOO2 still has plenty of strategy and complexity, but it takes a lot of the more painful complexity out, I feel like, in comparison.

What can I say, really?  I tire of this.  And I don't mean any thing in particular, I just mean everything.  But I guess that is how you feel when you are tired.  If enough can be enough, then I can, too.

My to-do list isn't gonna just take care of itself...but my mental health also isn't gonna just take care of itself either.  I took a day or two to just "do whatever" since I needed it.

Why is it that people assume that happiness means being joyous, being energetic, being loud?  Multiple times in my past I've been around people that I actively liked less while they were happier.

I will never be popular and never desire to be.  But if anything, I strive to be an example.  Living proof that there is another way, so many ways, to live life.  That you don't have to be outgoing in order to make friends.  That silence can be more meaningful than any words.  That your gender doesn't define who you are.  That it's normal to express sorrow.  That promises can be kept, even when they don't matter.