Why would you let go of what was once important to you?

Does that mean you would someday let go of me, too?

I know that I've mastered cooking a dish when I don't bother to take any photos of it because I know I'll be making it again just as well in the future.

Currently on the last military mission of Caesar 3, Lindum!  Sarmizegetusa (what a mouthful) was the misson before this and that one was definitely challenging.  Sarmizegetusa is a northern province which means wheat does not grow twice as fast as other crops -- meaning you need (roughly) twice the number of farms to feed the same number of people.  On the plus side, there are no risk of fires so no prefectures needed.

Sarmizegetusa has two major difficulties.  The first is that the farmland is really awkwardly placed -- in fact, most of it is on a narrow raised plateau that's unsuitable for any sort of larger housing areas.  There is one nice plot of farmland in the lower center area of the map, though it is close to natives which you'll need to build mission posts for.  I chose to use that area for my villa / palace housing, not sure if that was a wise or poor decision.

Anyways, this basically means you need to have a ton of farms up there on the higher ground and then a system of granaries which take the food and distribute it to the lower area where you can build your housing.  There's not a ton of open areas, and you need to fight constraints of having enough room, being not too far from the food distribution pathway, having access to water, and not being too close to the edges of the map, where the enemies spawn.

Speaking of the enemies, that's the second major difficulty here -- the Goths attack with an incredibly large force in this mission, which will overrun you quickly unless you're adequately prepared with walls, towers, and legionnaires.

Managed to get through all of it though.  Miraculously I even managed to evolve a small handful of luxury palaces (the highest possible level of housing) despite having a rather cramped space to place all of the service buildings in.

Happy MLK day.

Phew, I really needed that day off.

I've been dealing with bouts of depression here and there, as we are apt to do, but nothing extended.  There are the times when the illusions of daily life peel back and the soul-crushing loneliness of the human condition peeks out from behind, but also there are simply the times when my mind is locked in its inexorable struggle between trying to "relax" and forcing itself to continue working despite a lack of motivation.  Of course there is no "right" answer in these scenarios; often some of my most productive days have been due to this "default" inclination to simply "work a little more" before taking it easy.  But of course, there is such a thing as too much of that.  It's important also to remember our own needs.

The days when I'm feeling exhausted, sad, busy, or just plain bad are actually a little simpler to deal with.  Those feelings give me free license to focus on caring for my mental self, just as having a cold gives you all the reason you need to stay home and lie in bed most of the day.  It's the other days that are trickier, especially when the tasks to be done are intimidating.  As always, I manage to triumph, because I am both consistent, determined, and understand the strategies for breaking that intimidation down into something more manageable.  But those times when I sit down and wonder what to do with myself -- whether to throw myself into another day of productivity, or a day of hedonism, given that I don't "need" either...those days are tricky.  I am pulled in both directions, and yet not pulled at all.  An equilibrium state that makes me wonder what my end goal is.

But this is not necessarily a "problem to be solved".  When we are caught in a bad situation, sometimes you just flip your hand down and fork over the chips.  If there is one thing that the past year has done for us all it has given us the excuse of a lifetime to not feel good.  I don't think 2020 correctly deserves to be a "scapegoat" for all of the mental health problems that are attributed to it, but if there needs to be a scapegoat for it all, then I think that's fine.

Anyways, today has been better, actually quite a nice combo of things that I did with my day today.  Did an ALTTPR run, started some artwork in the morning, finished it later in the evening, made dinner for myself.  If I hadn't finished that art piece this weekend, I wonder if I would still be feeling rather stressed about "not having done enough" right now.  That, despite having accomplished other things this weekend -- made a bunch of tonkotsu broth, cooked a fair share of meals, did some knife sharpening, updated our game, and sent out two letters as well.  But who can really blame me?  The relentless drive for consistent forward motion has led me to where I am today.  Making one piece of artwork each month is only "par" for the course -- in fact, it's behind where I need to be, as it'll mean I never have artworks for any of my other non-monthly releases.

I think you can perhaps see now why work/life balance has always been an interesting issue for me.  There is no company that I can sell my soul to because I already sold my soul to my own pursuits.  A new song every week, a new art piece every month, and a new game every 6 months.  Let me remind you, that's just the baseline.

So much of the media I consume nowadays is simply borne out of a whim of following up on a memory from the past.  Remembering a feminist comic I saw once, I decided to purchase "The Mental Load" as a short read-through.  The comic in question was the "You Should've Asked" one, from a few (?) years ago.  Reading these sorts of writings just makes me reflect on how we spend our whole childhood and young adult lives essentially being lied to and have only our selves and (possibly) our social networks to figure out the real truths of being decent human beings (and the latter one is...shall we say, inconsistent, at best).

It makes me feel like I really understand people who go out of their way in an attempt to educate others.  There is a feeling of "wow, they screwed up so bad when they were trying to educate us about society." and I guess I sympathize with the gung-ho attitude of wanting to provide others that hard-earned insight.  Because who else is going to tell them, right?

Unfortunately it seems that many of these people who have their hearts in the right place also seem to be closed-minded zealots who parrot what they claim to be universal truths.  They don't seem to understand that each generation is different, that times change and we become wiser.  Which is ironic, because that is probably the very same thing they encountered while growing up in the first place.  At least, that's been my personal experience.

To give a mock example, I feel like at some point "the company" used to be your ally in the previous generations.  That's just not true anymore.  But we have all these boomer parents still telling their millenial kids that they need to prove their worth to the company so that they can get rewarded.  As someone with ties to both the video game and software dev industries, let me tell you, the only thing your "blind company loyalty" is going to buy you is a fast-track to getting exploited.  Actually, it'll lead to all of your co-workers being exploited as well.  Companies are just better at exploiting employees now, I feel like (?).  And why shouldn't they be?  Capitalism...

Luckily, the current generation(s) have access to all sorts of internet discourse, which can provide them with a wealth of varied information and opinions on all sorts of things.  Unfortunately, "a wealth of varied information and opinions on all sorts of things" can be pretty bad, too.

...anyways, enough with that.

Continuing to read through the Animorphs books (just read Visser as well as #35, I think).  I'm also following along with the "re-read critiques" from "The Library Ladies" blog, which has been neat since it provides the perspective of another (re)reader for me to compare and contrast against.  There were certain books that we really agreed on and others which we didn't quite agree on.  Reading these makes me reaffirm a bit, my desire to practice writing critiques of the media I consume.  After all, I feel like the only way to become better at art discourse is to practice doingit.

Progress on Caesar 3 continues!  I forget if I mentioned it before, but I've been playing through using the "Augustus" open-source port/mod, which optionally adds some nice gameplay features into the mix such as roadblocks, as well as some other difficulty-changing features such as enabling a global labor pool instead of forcing you to always have employment walkers encounter a house of some sort in order to have labor access.  I'm not using that particular feature as I feel like it's an interesting challenge to try and lay out your housing in a way that allows your industries to gain access to workers.  I do sometimes resort to having one or two small worker tents here and there, especially when it comes to military towers, or small islands for farming or fishing, but I try not to have too much of that going on.

I've really learned my way around planning the cities in a functional way (which is no small feat sometimes) and it felt pretty satisfying to establish an nice city and get things rolling.  I've been playing through all of the military-based missions first as I suspect that they will be easier than the peaceful missions, as their rating requirements are lower.  I'll go back and do the peaceful missions later, and then maybe move on to playing Pharaoh / Cleopatra.

Facebook - Meme images about 2020/2021 and cute animals, with a lot of ads interspersed in between.  Photos of people making food, working out, or going to places.  Occasionally someone shares an article about mental health, politics, or social activism.

Twitter (via tweetdeck) - A lot of short jokes.  A bunch of pretty good art, sometimes really amazing art.  A lot of really cool creators posting insightful comments or just cool stuff.  Every once in a while someone tries to post what they call a "hot take" which ends up spurring on nothing but predictable responses.  Anytime something bad happens, all of the aforementioned things disappear and are replaced by doom.

YouTube - Lots and lots and lots of cooking videos.  A bunch of videos of people playing games.  Every once in a while some random chillhop mix.

Let's just do it bullet-point style.

- This past week....wasn't really motivating.  It's funny how at the end of the holidays I was stressed out about having done enough work, and then once we get into the first week back to work, there was an overwhelming feeling of "....eh....".  I wish I could say that it had to do with work itself, but...it didn't.  You know.

- Caesar 3 is a harddd game.  I guess it doesn't help that I'm playing it on hard difficulty (at least I'm not playing it on very hard?), but man, this game is pretty brutal in how difficult it is to set up a functional city, and that's even WITH the improvements from the Augustus open-source port (though I'm not using some of the "easy options" like global labor pool).  But playing it has been pretty satisfying.  I certainly don't remember the game being this hard when I had played it a long time ago, but then again I probably never got very far.

- Finally pulled the trigger and signed up for prisoner correspondence project.  We'll see how that goes.

- Month(s) late, but I finished putting together my teacher appreciation kit way back from the volunteer day thing for work.  It may be late but I'm pretty confident mine has the most care that anybody put into it.  It helps that I am giving it to a former teacher of mine.

- I like meowmie.

There's other scattered thoughts and happenings, but nothing much more to write about for now.  I could write more about Caesar 3 but y'all would neither understand nor care, so I'll spare you.

Right.

I'm currently playing Caesar 3, a game released in 1998.

The last book I read was Animorphs #33, which was written in 1999.

I'm re-watching Princess Tutu, which came out in 2002.

I'm writing to a teacher from my middle school who taught me in 2003...

You can all go on ahead without me.  Not really a fan of the 2020s.

For me, "freedom of non-expression" is perhaps equally if not more important than freedom of expression.  It needs to be OK to not say things.  It needs to be OK to not do things.  You should never feel pressured to do things "because you should".  That doesn't mean you should always run away from everything and fail to face what actually needs to be confronted.  But paradoxically, it is hard for me to take an action unless I first know that not taking an action is also OK.

There is an old adage about saying something because it needs to be said, not because you need to say something.

Today I find myself trying to apply it in a different way -- do something because it needs to be done, not because I need to do something...

Games that I played in 2020

Games that I remember playing over the course of 2020, in order of release date:

• Adventures of Lolo (1989)
• Legend of the Red Dragon (1989)
• Ultimate Universe (1991)
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past [Randomizer] (1991)
• Illusion of Gaia / Illusion of time (1993)
• Super Metroid [Randomizer] (1994)
• Seiken Densetsu 3 (1995)
• Tetris Attack / Panel de Pon (1995)
• Caesar 3 (1998)
• Dance Dance Revolution [Stepmania] (1998~2008)
• Falcon's Eye (1999?)
• Alpha Centauri (1999)
• Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 (2000)
• Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001)
• Ragnarok Online (2002)
• Touhou 11: Subterranean Animism (2008)
• Dark Souls (2011)
• Mad Father (2012)
• Ib (2012)
• Analogue: A Hate Story (2012)
• Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (2012)
• Puyo Puyo Tetris (2014)
• Yomawari: Night Alone (2015)
• Stardew Valley (2016)
• Loot Rascals (2017)
• A Mortician's Tale (2017)
• Dead Cells (2018)
• Aegis Defenders (2018)
• Speed Dating for Ghosts (2018)
• Fortune-499 (2018)
• Minit (2018)
• Celeste: Farewell (2019)
• Astrologaster (2019)
• Tetris 99 (2019)
• Risk of Rain 2 (2020)
• Unreal Life (2020)
• What Comes After (2020)
• Element TD 2 (2020)
• Ikenfell (2020)
• Democratic Socialism Simulator (2020)

There's a couple of other ones, but those are the main ones I think?

Yes, I literally played games released the year that I was born until today, lol.  Some of these are second playthroughs -- Ib and Illusion of Gaia, for example.

A few brief notes:

Ultimate Universe (1991) - The most in-depth and complex game that nobody will ever play.  I sank a LOT of time into this and regret nothing.

Dance Dance Revolution [Stepmania] (1998~2008) - The perfect way to keep exercise going while staying at home.  Doubles mode (1 player using 2 pads) is wonderful.

Link to the Past / Super Metroid Randomizer - Easily the one I got the deepest into this year.  ALTTPR is wonderful and will continue to keep me entertained moving forward, and so is SMZ3.

Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001) - If you've ever wanted to start playing Melee, now is the time, as the community has made the pipedream real -- online, responsive melee play from the comfort of your home.  Melee will never die.  Hit me up if you ever want to play online.

Ib (2012) - Still holds up surprisingly well despite its age.  We replayed through it to remember what it was like since it had been a long while.

Stardew Valley (2016) - Probably the best shelter-in-place hangout game I can think of.

Fortune-499 (2018) - A hidden gem.  I really enjoyed this game, it has a little bit of everything great.  Interesting strategy, unique mechanics, good writing, etc.

Celeste: Farewell (2019) - A great way to cap off a wonderful game that everyone already knows is amazing.

Astrologaster (2019) - A surprisingly fun "wtf" comedy narrative game.

What Comes After (2020) - A highlight of the year for me.  A short "slice of life" game that is really heartwarming.  Play this if you're ever feeling down.

Ikenfell (2020) - It's been quite a long time since I could really stomach playing an RPG.  Ikenfell is a great one.

Unreal Life (2020) - Another highlight of the year for me.  I really enjoyed playing through this one.  Great aesthetics, you can tell there is a real artistic vision behind it.  Nice worldbuilding, beautiful art, and a story that strings you along.