Things have been going okay, I think!

World Letter Writing Day

Is coming up on Wednesday, September 1st.  Y'all know how much I'm into handwritten letters, so I encourage anyone who is interested to participate by doing some writing, either to a friend, or for an activist cause such as voter outreach.

Rhythm Quest Stuff

Progress continues on my indie rhythm game, Rhythm Quest.  As always, feel free to follow along via the devlog posts.  Here's the latest gameplay video, featuring a new level and song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up6B_Dy3_To

I'm gearing up to try and run a closed alpha test soon, just with a handful of friends and such, to get some initial feedback, and maybe identify whatever issues of the game need work -- probably stuff like "this screen is confusing" or "this level is too hard", etc.  I've done a bunch of work over the past month on stuff like the UI and tutorial flows, so I think for this next week it's time to shift over and just make a bunch of content (e.g. levels and songs), which should be very fun!  (That and debug some performance issues on Android, yipee......)

Chicky Stuff

It has been a bit of a journey getting to this point, but my two silkie chickens (xiaohei + xiaobai, or black chicky + white chicky) are all settled in together and are living a happy life in their big bin in the corner of my office.  Their living space has gone through some gradual upgrades, and it has been nice carving out a nice home for them over time.

Blackie still bullies Whitie and some days they just decide to be very noisy, but overall they have been very well behaved.  It's been nice.

Other Life Stuff

I'm taking a short trip over labor day weekend! First time traveling in years, so it should be a (hopefully safe...) nice change of pace.  Nothing too fancy or anything, and as always I'll be looking forward to home cooking abroad, lol.

Speaking of which!  I have been watching more of Ms. Yeah's "office cooking" videos, haha.  Obviously not as relevant to me as before when I was actually doing office cooking, but still funny and...actually, a little inspiring sometimes honestly haha.

Space Alert Stuff

I've been continuing to do mission runs in Space Alert, my favorite board game.  Mostly solo, but I also had a session with a friend where we managed to actually do quite nicely, even finishing a 3-mission campaign with mixed white+yellow threats and ended with a ship in perfect condition (while slightly inebriated, to boot).  I've also managed some pretty nice achievements myself, including a yellow + red threats only mission, a perfect white + yellow + red mission, and a perfect yellow threats only double actions mission.

I did have a particularly nasty failed mission the other day though, just a really unfortunate combination of yellow threats on a double actions mission.  I had been chasing the perfect double actions yellow threats achievement, and it turns out I don't really think there was a realistic way to do that mission perfectly unfortunately.

Baldur's Gate Stuff

I've been continuing through my playthrough of Baldur's Gate 1, finally reaching the actual titular city of Baldur's Gate (in chapter 5 of the story).  My party is pretty much set now, I've got:

- The player character, as a gnome multi-classed fighter/mage.  Funnily enough she ends up allocating a number of spell slots to Identify (of all things) since the other mages in the party can't scribe Divination spells.  She generally just casts a buff or two and the walks into the fray wielding a Dagger of Venom.

- Kagain, the super tanky Dwarf fighter who comes with a whopping 20 constitution.  His base Dex is only 12 but I gave him the bracers of dexterity which push that up to 18, making him hard to hit and better at hitting himself.  I fit him with the cheetah boots which increase movement speed, which ensures that he's always at the front of the group as he sprints around.

- Yeslick, the Dwarf fighter/cleric.  I was initially running a different cleric, but decided I wanted another frontline fighter and Yeslick fit the bill.  He generally just walks up and tries to whack things, but is also responsible for healing duty as well as some AoE party buffs from time to time.

- Coran, an Elf fighter/thief who is the best archer in the game with an illegal 20 dex and 3-point mastery in longbows.  He has one job (shoot things dead) and he does it extremely well.  He also happens to be providing thieving support for the team at the moment, because...

- Imoen, the player character's childhood friend, who starts as a thief, but I have (as is popular), dual-classed her to a mage.  She's currently still on downtime for her thief abilities, so she's just a mage for now until she reaches next level, at which point she'll regain access to those.  Currently she's mostly responsible for casting AoE disables like Sleep, but will also fling around some direct damage spells as well.

- Edwin, the evil mage, who happens to be the best arcane spellcaster in the game.  He's got the widest magic arsenal in the party, and uses it to good effect.  Magic often dictates most combat encounters, so it's important to have a least one person fill this role well.

Since I'm still working my way through exploring the city, it's been a lot of just gathering quests and having Coran run around stealing everything he can from innocent people's houses.  You know, typical adventuring stuff...

That's about it for now, I think...

Assigned value and attachment

I've been thinking a lot recently about the idea of what I guess I'd call "assigned value", in that meaning is self-defined as opposed to being inherent.

The situation that reminds me most easily of this is with photographs (be they digital or physical).  The idea of "capturing a moment" with a photograph is so ingrained into societal standards that it's sort of just a regular sort of ritual that accompanies so many things (birthdays, weddings, tourism, maybe even simply eating a meal).  I think the meaning of photographs has changed significantly over time, in large part due to the ease at which they can be taken, though perhaps this is also in part due to my own personal experiences having shifted.  Social media I think has also redefined the purpose of photos; oftentimes they are used more for sharing than they are for archival or remembrance.

There was definitely a time period when I had the realization that so many of the photos that I felt compelled to take did not actually hold any meaning, to myself or to anyone else.  Humans are notoriously bad (in my eyes, at least) at introspecting and being pragmatic enough about the future to admit that something is not actually needed (c.f. hoarders, "I'll definitely use this someday", "I'll get around to that later when I'm not so busy", and even "Yes, I can totally eat this amount of food").  Most of my beliefs and learnings come from empirical experience, so when I looked back and realized that I never cared to look back at many of the photos I had, it eventually trumped any sort of "fear of missing out", as they call it.

But I think this extends past the archival properties of photos and into the sharing aspect as well.  Sharing a photo has no inherent meaning in and of itself -- the meaning is derived solely from the individuals that it is shared with, and also one's self-meaning in the act of sharing.  I'm not trying to say that it's a waste of time to do things that people don't explicitly derive meaning from.  In the end our lives will come to a close; that doesn't mean all of our experiences were "useless" if they didn't hold external value.  If you feel that you gain meaning by keeping a private journal, or taking a photo of every meal you cook, or writing a review about every movie you watch, then no one can argue with that.  But I think we shouldn't lie to ourselves about what these things actually amount to in the end.

Those "precious family heirlooms" may be very symbolic in nature to you but to the next generation they may end up being nothing more than materialistic burdens.  That example in particular is something that I believe will become much more common as the disillusioned millenial population ages.  This is an age group that I feel is well familiar with climate change (my state is burning down again this year...) and has already struggled to deal with the weight of false promises of "the way to live life and be happy" from the previous generation, not to speak of weight of actual physical objects.

Anyways, these thoughts were poignantly on my mind as I gradually took down a good ~75% or so of the decorations on my office walls.  Perhaps if I was an individual more open to change over time I would have already done this a long time ago (many people perhaps stop plastering posters over all their walls after their teenage years?), but I do think having all of these things around me has brought me meaning.  Even I am not immune to the sands of time, and there are things that I move on from, too.  And I realize very well, perhaps too well, that one can only bring forward a certain number of things with them through time.  For me, that number may be higher than most, as I move more "slowly" across the years, but fundamentally it is still the same as it is for anyone.

I really noticed that initial feeling I had, that I needed to take a photographic record of all of the decorations that I had up in this place.  A sort of marking of this particular achievement or chapter of my life.  There is a voice that says "you should record this!"  But I asked myself what the meaning would be in this, and I realized that there was none.  Part of this comes from age, and the realization that many things really aren't a big deal anymore in the grand scheme of things.  Or perhaps I am just more realistic (pessimistic?) about who else would actually care about this sort of thing.  I don't mean this in a sort of "boo hoo, nobody loves me or cares about me, so why should I bother sharing my life" kind of way.  I mean this more in an existential sense -- that I am only one person, with one story, in this world.  Is it really worth my time and effort to record this thing?

I decided at that time that the answer was no.  Of course, only you can answer that question for yourself, and I'm sure the answer would be different for many people.  I think by the same token we can argue that many of our interactions are meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but clearly this is not always true as I'm still here writing and posting this blog entry.  This piece of writing which will someday fade into nonexistence.

When people think of Buddhism, do they think solely about casting aside all worldly and material possessions and trying to attain "enlightenment"?  Maybe it's hard som'etimes to find the relationship between that and to our modern lives, full of phones and computers and very strange (or at least I think so) systems of doing things.  But I think it can be very enlightening (pardon the pun) to understand how the idea of attachment functions in our lives.

There is a saying or story that I think about often about how "the cup is already broken".  There are many different versions of this parable out there, and I think people interpret it in different ways.  I particularly appreciate the version I was first told (or at least how I remember it), as I think it was especially poignant in capturing a feeling, despite perhaps being a bit off from the canonical version.

As it goes, there was a Zen student who had a fine teacup that he admired and used to drink out of every day.  Another student pointed this out to their master, that their fellow monk seemed very fond of this special cup.  The master listened to this, then walked up to the table, picked up the cup, and he lifted it high up into the air...........and then he placed it back down.  "Just remember," he said.  "The cup is already broken."

When I look for this story online, I think there are a lot of people who say it is about "being able to appreciate the things you have while they are still here".  Sort of the idea that something is precious because it will not last.  As a variant on that, I think there are people who take it to mean that we should make the most of things in the present.  That we should use that fine china set -- at the risk of breaking it -- rather than keep it locked up.  Because everything will eventually be "broken" in the end.  I think there are many who say that the point is mostly about this, about should come to terms sooner rather than later that everything will come to an end, and that we must accept this, in order to avoid future sadness.

The thing I like about this story is that the master did not tell the student what to do about the cup.  The master did not break the cup, he did not tell the student to treasure the cup while it still lasts, nor did he tell the student that he should not become attached to the cup.  He simply reminded us of the universal truth, that all things come to an end.  And I think the image of holding a fragile cup high into the air really evokes that thought in a very visceral way.  In that moment, I think you realize very clearly what you will feel when this thing is taken away from you.

As opposed to many of the other articles that are written about this story, I don't think there is a right way to confront this fact.  I think "this cup is very precious to me, so I should really value it while I still have it" is valid, but just as valid is the idea that "this cup may seem special, but in reality nothing materialistic lasts, so really it is not so special at all in the grand scheme of things".  It is up to each of us to decide for ourselves what we wish to attach ourselves to.

This is one of those posts that I'm not particularly happy with, read at your own risk, I probably said at least one or two things that are really stupid.  But whatever.

 

Sometimes a vocal corner of the internet ends up getting up in arms about some thing or another and I get wind of it.  Often I never bother actually looking at what the actual discussions are, because I already know there is not really anything to be gained from it.  This is no exception.

There are times when it pays to understand discourse and debate, so that we can better educate ourselves.  The rather short-lived (.....) BLM "uprising" was an example of something that was an issue about which many people were woefully uneducated (not surprising, when you think about the structure of our education), and could stand to learn more about abolition, the prison-industrial complex, the Tuskegee Study, etc etc.

Then there are the threads that pop up when "Media figure X purportedly did something terrible, but victim Y has a different story".  Learning about these situations has got to be about as useful as following tabloid stories in magazines about random celebrities (i.e. not very).  Yes, the truth can affect how much you respect or trust a responsible party.  That matters if, for example, you are choosing whether or not to directly support that person (purchasing their works, for example?).  Otherwise, it really can't....can it?

Ah, maybe it's because people feel that "someone is wrong on the internet".

...

Anyways, there has been some talk involving creators and gamedevs, so I thought I'd write something about that general subject (which is maybe unrelated to whatever is going on).

As a creator of various distributed content (games, music, etc...) I'm well aware that there are many struggles when it comes to releasing your works to the outside world -- and subsequently, getting "feedback" on those works.  This is something that is universally difficult for any sort of creator.  Receiving negative criticism, for example, is understandably difficult (to put it lightly) for many people.

To some extent, these are inherent problems that come as part of the deal.  Sometimes these are "skills" that can be nurtured (or neglected).  Learning to deal with your own ego, as well as having to decide on your beliefs of what an artist <-> consumer relationship should entail, I would argue are hard but important struggles for creators to go through.

...And at the same time, there are things that I really believe creators shouldn't have to go through.  Things like being denied basic levels of human respect, dealing with extreme entitlement, dealing with toxic behavior, etc.  I know this because both myself and other creators within my circles have to deal with these things constantly (to varying degrees).

When I talk about this issue with friends, it's really hard for me to know what I can say is the right way to move forward in terms of even doing anything about this problem.  Yeah, I wish I could just tell everyone "hey, be nicer to creators and respect their time", but obviously that is both ineffectual and ignores a lot of nuance.  Lately I've really just begun to think that a large root of the problem is perhaps due to a lack of empathy (and dare I say, compassion) for creators.  In other words, it's hard to know how damaging your behavior can be to a creator without having been on the other side of the interaction.  Anecdotally, a large portion (maybe all...) of transgressions that I've experienced in this way as a creator were not intended to harm.

I'd be remiss to directly parallel toxic/entitled behavior toward creators with racism, but I can't help but draw the parallel and use similar terms here.  I've been talking with a close friend a lot about marginalized groups and their (our?) struggles to be understood by those in power (white men...), even those who are "trying to understand".  And it's extremely frustrating sometimes trying to explain seemingly basic concepts to people who then double down on their stance, start gaslighting you, or mansplaining, ...  And a large part of this perhaps stems from (white) priviledge and the fact that those in power often can't really empathize with something they've never actually encountered or experienced for themselves.

We already know that creators are an extreme minority.  It may feel weird to talk about them as a marginalized group in the sense that consumers of content are the "people in power", but honestly with the power dynamics that are set up nowadays, it's perhaps not that far off from the truth.  And just as (white) privilege can make it difficult (?) for people to properly empathize with minorities, I think audiences perhaps lack a proper understanding of what their interactions look like from the other side of things.

I'd like you to look at the comments and feedback on a piece of content (a game, a video, an article, a piece of art), and ask yourself how many of these messages are written with the explicit intent of actually benefiting the creator in question in a helpful way.  Overwhelmingly, I find that most of them are not, and I think this speaks to what I see as a problem.

Let me take some sample comments from my works as case studies.  Brace yourselves....here we go:

"is there a way too full screen?? im on mac and i want full experience lol ;p" 

Well, this one's easy.  This person just plain wants me to directly offer them tech support.  Now, I'm not opposed to answering questions, but typing in incomplete sentences with poor grammar really doesn't encourage me to want to help.  This comment also incorrectly assumes that running a game in fullscreen is the "full experience".

"just lacking a windows build for people like me that dosen't like to be connected...."

This one is "just pointing out something they want", right?  Well, there's a good reason I don't provide standalone builds for all of my WebGL games -- that's 4 times the number of builds to maintain and update (webgl + windows + osx + linux).  But of course, it probably doesn't occur to this person that they're asking me to maintain 60+ builds instead of ~15, nor do they understand the time involved in this.  They're just "letting me know".  ...in other words, they're saying it would be nice if I could do all of this extra work for free.  No thanks, but I can at least give them an option:

My response: "Feel free to download the html5 version, either directly or via the itch app."
Their reply: "thanks but I don't understand how..."

.......great.

Ok, let's look at something a little better instead:

"thank you for this interactive fiction
it's a great way to deal with the theme of (lost+renewed) friendship"

Wow, this one IS actually written to benefit me -- this person actually said "thank you" for all of the hours that I sank into making this game (and telling a personal story).  That makes me feel great.

Alright, what about this one?

"STOP IVE NEVER CRIED THIS MUCH OVER A GAME WHAT"

I get a lot of comments like this where people are commenting on their reactions (hopefully positive??) to my work.  While I certainly don't mind hearing good things about my work, I would argue that a large portion of these messages are written as a form of self-expression for the commenter rather than a message that's actually for the purpose of helping the creator.  Maybe I'm just arguing semantics here, but I really feel a distinction between the previous message, which thanked me for what I did, versus these message that simply comments on what the poster's opinion was.

Here's one on a "One Hour Compo" music track that I created in one hour:

"The first 5 seconds really set the tempo for the level. Up until 1:16 I felt like I was listening to a Megaman 3 track, but the minute after before looping is odd and feels a bit out of place. It's too extended. I like the sfx and etc could be condensed to 30~ seconds max, and serve as a better bridge to loop back to the quick tempo. Started at 10/10, ends at a 7/10."

It's an honest critique and review.  That has to be helpful to the artist, right?  Sadly...no, it's really not.  This is really the kind of stuff I'm talking about.  This person honestly could have been thinking "hey, I see a way in which I think this artist could improve their craft, let me help them out by providing my feedback".  It's hard for me to "blame" this person, but I have to point out that there are many reasons why this is not helpful to me.  Here are some:

- Providing feedback on a timed musical sketch that was done in an hour is like taking an artist's one-minute figure sketch and saying "Yeah, I feel like the lines could be cleaner and you could add more detail.  Also why is it not colored?"
- Who do you think understands how to make the music that I want to make better, a random person on the internet, or myself who has been writing music and exploring my own tastes and creativity since 2004??

Something that I really want to point out about this message is the lack of qualifiers and the way that it states opinion as fact.  This person did not write, "I don't know if you feel this way too but I personally thought this section sounded odd".  They stated facts: "It's too extended".  "It's odd and feels out of place."  I used to speak like this too, until I realized that it sounds really presumptuous to state your opinions as facts (especially after you later realize you were wrong...).

But either way, what good does it serve me to hear your negative feedback on my song?  Do I really need to hear that you didn't like something I made?  No...this is not useful to me.  This may shock you to hear, but not all creators are posting their works with the express intent of gathering opinions from the general public in order to inform their process.

Something you need to understand about the dynamics of these situations is that a given creator can receive hundreds if not thousands of comments on their works.  A good rule of thumb here is to imagine that 100 different people write a similar comment to yours and imagine how you would feel?  If I get a new critique on every single one of the songs that I post that details everything I did "wrong" in it I'm going to get tired REALLLL fast.

 

Let's look at some bug reports:

I found a bug, and I'm now softlocked. I'll attach a picture, basically I collected the egg on the bottom left, then died to the knives  on the way back and respawned at the top (where I entered the room from),  but I can't move or shapeshift anymore.

Edit: I lost the screenshot and I reloaded the page to log in to itch.io, so I can't take a new one. The bug happened in the door where you get the IV shape. After getting it you go left, then down, and it's in a room where there's an egg at the bottom left part, in a narrow hallway with knives coming out of the top.

I'll be the first to admit I don't like hearing about bugs in my games, but this comment is actually very helpful.  This person is providing information that will help me improve my game (if I so choose...remember, this is a game jam game that I made for free...I'm not obligated to do anything with it...).  They've provided the exact scenario of the bug and described the conditions for reproducing it (even if their screenshot upload failed).  I was able to address this bug and fix it.  Hooray!

Contrast to the "bug reports" that simply say "Help it doesn't work", or "Game is broken".  No repro information, no browser version, no stacktrace, nothing.  You're implying that a dev should do all this work for you.  For free.

I'm not sure I remember what the point of this whole post was as it has seemingly just turned into a pointless rant about dealing with entitlement and stupidity.  I guess what I was hoping to illustrate is how feedback is not inherently helpful to a creator.  There is a time and place for well-written and constructive criticism, but I think the systems that we have in place do not facilitate this, as the pattern of interaction seems to revolve around people simply saying whatever they want to say, rather than what will actually help the creator.  It doesn't help when these feedbacks are stated as fact without taking context into account or being prompted.

If you really have some ideas that you think would help benefit a creator to do better work (unlikely, but possible), you can present them as possible ideas (with the understanding that they can and will be ignored) without criticizing the content that this person has provided (oftentimes for free...).

At some point the cons will start to far outweigh the pros of these channels of communication and when that happens I simply start disengaging (read: disable comments on everything).  The message that actually help me are the ones that people would actually mail to me personally ("thank you", "hey, I just wanted to let you know that this work really meant something to me"), and everything else seems less and less and less useful, if at all.

I don't know, maybe I "just need to have less of an ego", but honestly I feel like that rhetoric feels like gaslighting.  Maybe people just need to be less entitled and more empathetic.

But that's the problem -- how can everyone understand what it's like to receive harsh comments on their personal artistic work when so few people have actually done that?  How would you feel if you posted a video of yourself performing something and people just started commenting "Needs work, 5/10" and "lol you look dumb".  Frighteningly, that sort of thing probably happens on a daily basis...

The sad part is that I'm afraid that even when people DO have that negative experience, they just double down on it by saying "fuck these people, they're all wrong", and maybe proceed to "get their revenge" by inflicting the same harsh sentiments on others' works, putting them down to protect their own ego.

...yeah maybe I should just disengage with all feedback.

I've been trying to work on improving my dance a bit more recently, not the least bit inspired by a friend introducing me to IZ*ONE's amazing choreographies (example 1 example 2), though to be honest I had already been trying to work on this before that even happened.

I have somewhat of an interesting upbringing when it comes to dance movement, as I started with martial arts (notably, tai chi), but also taught myself freehand glowsticking through high school and beyond.  I had brief stints of pursuing liquid dancing (still an interest), gliding (never any good at this), and popping (very much still an influence), and later became acquainted with social dance.

If there's one thing that social dance did for my solo dancing, it was simply to give me an opportunity to practice moving around in general -- and become more confident with my own body movement.  That's something that really just takes time, and as dance was always (still is) a secondary pursuit of mine, I never had that sort of regular movement practice until social dance.

I give all this preface because some of it sets the context for what I'm trying to work through now, which is to actually drill down and learn my freestyle dance forms "more properly".  That's a rather nebulous term, but what I mean is that I'm trying to work on some more fundamental concepts of movement (notably, isolations.....) that I really never practiced before now with serious intent.  Which is a weird thing because I've actually been freestyle dancing on and off for so many years now, yet never actually had anything I could point to in terms of a fundamental basis for my movement.  I just sort of "figured it out" and went along with it as I just did glowsticking sessions by myself.

And to some extent, that IS a lot of how freestyle is developed, but on the other hand, I feel like not having the fundamental vocabulary in place has really limited my development (though I admit that not pursuing it as seriously didn't exactly speed things along either...).  I think if I had stuck with something like popping alone, I think I would have had a better sense of fundamental concepts to work on.  But freehand glowsticking is really nothing more than "dancing using glowsticks" which is just as wide and varied as it sounds.  There are freehanders who focus on tosses and mindgames, freehanders who focus on tutting and isolations, freehanders who focus on traces, and of course those who bring in other dance backgrounds.  This is in large part why freehand glowsticking is so interesting to look at -- because it really isn't a defined style at all.  Glowsticks are simply a prop, not a genre.

As I settle down into a more defined sensibility of movement I find myself now struggling to fuse together the freehand glowsticking movements that I've imprinted into my muscle memory together with the new (hopefully cleaner) style of body movement.  It honestly feels a bit like trying to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time.  I can focus on body isolations and clean movements, but as soon as I try to focus on integrating the sticks into it I feel like I can only focus on what my hands are doing.  And of course that makes perfect sense -- my muscle memory for all of these movement paths doesn't factor in the rest of my body at all.  And it's sort of a big ask to try and formulate full-body movement on the fly that also takes into account these props in an appealing way.

So there's work to be done.  Not to mention, both individual sides that I'm trying to fuse together aren't really super clean to begin with...but I can feel the improvement happening slowly, and that's sort of all I can ask for.

Filtering Yourself

So I spent the greater part of the week just hanging out alone by myself, essentially.  You'd think I'd blog more often when I'm just stuck with myself with nothing to do, but it seems as though I'm almost like clockwork in my posting frequency (nobody should be surprised by this). 

Initially I was going to post about a bunch of things, but I'll save the other stuff for later because I ended up having quite a bit of thoughts stemming from this one topic.

Being more careful with words

I'm fairly certain that I already mentioned before how I distinctly noticed myself using more qualifiers as I type messages and posts nowadays.  I'd like to think this is in large part due to a (hopefully) greater awareness of -- and respect for -- the fact that my opinions may not be shared nor taken as truth, and often don't deserve to be put forth so strongly as a result.  Of course, sometimes this can be dangerous in its own way; perhaps we can devalue our opinions too much as a result.  But I guess I have found (after many years) that I'd rather err on the side of humility.  Honestly, I think this is something that just needs to be learned through experience...experience both in committing the sin itself and in seeing the negative impact it can elicit when others do the same.  And hopefully when you realize that you said something that wasn't the best, you can adapt rather than simply choosing to double down...

Anyways, I just wanted to add that I now find myself more commonly editing messages immediately after the fact, when I read them over and realize that maybe the correct tone wasn't conveyed -- or perhaps the tone and meaning that I originally intended wasn't really appropriate to begin with.  Online discourse and conversation is an interesting medium in that it actually does allow for these "take-backs", these edits.  Of course, I think the fact that I sent the message without proofreading it in the first place is perhaps a sign that there is room for improvement.  But maybe that is just the next step on this journey.

Interestingly, I never really find myself rewriting my thoughts when it comes to handwritten letters.  I guess that makes a lot of sense if you think about the medium -- writing in pen is more permanent, and rewriting a sentence can look messy at best.  And of course, the very nature of the medium is conducive to mulling over your thoughts first before putting pen to paper.  This all makes sense to me.  But I bring this up because I've known friends that tell me that they've revised letters, or needed to rewrite them, or started writing but didn't send it because it wasn't happy with how it was going.  It's a different approach, I think, to letter-writing than mine.

In my more youthful years I was wholly unashamed at my own thoughts, and this is perhaps an experience shared by many.  As a result there was never really any reason for me to filter my writing -- I wanted everyone to know my all, because it was important that people accept me for who I am -- my unashamed, unfiltered self.  I later learned of course that this way of being comes with a myriad of problems, but I think it's a mistake to label this as a strictly "lesser" way of being, because there is a certain purity in being wholly yourself.  We often speak of "lost innocence", of the feeling of loss that comes from turning from a child into an adult, and I think that much of that has to do with this feeling of "being ashamed to just be yourself".

When you think about self-expression on social media, do you feel that people express a filtered version of themselves?  Or do they express their full selves unashamedly?  I think many of us would think of the former -- for me I think of smiling photos of people as they are [travelling to XYZ place, being with a friend or partner, eating some sort of yummy-looking food, etc].  I don't often see people post photos or stories of themselves when they are depressed, having a down day, sick, or crying, though of course this depends on the specific platform and community.  There are websites where I can read about inspirational stories, there are sites where I can see no end to heated arguments (and sometimes pointless debates...), and there are sites where I can admire incredible creative works, but there are few places online where I could read about how a friend feels lonely, maybe in the same way that I do sometimes.

This is something that I would argue is the difference I feel between social media today versus social media in its infancy.  In the days when I read my classmates' posts on Xanga, LiveJournal, even MySpace, I felt like I was seeing more of them than I had ever been exposed to before.  For perhaps the first time in my life (?), I understood that these were =real= people, facing struggles in their lives like I was.  I had never seen these things underneath the mask I saw everyday when we passed by each other at school and sometimes made small talk.  And so I felt as if I was not alone.

I'm not saying this was "the right way" to do social media -- like with most things, there are tradeoffs.  But even though posting angsty song lyrics, mundane complaints, and vague allusions to social drama may not have necessarily been the best forms of self-expression, reading these things was meaningful to me.  It felt as if online spaces were places where people could remove their facades, instead of crafting new ones.  This is why I've always believed in the inherent ability of technology to make us feel truly connected with others -- even though that is often no longer how it is used today.  It is this that pushes me to continue trying to share my personal thoughts with others on this blog, despite the fact that it may no longer be in vogue to do so, and perhaps carries more risks than it used to.

Rockman 7 FC

I played through Rockman 7 Famicom (Rockman 7 FC), which is an NES-styled "demake" of Mega Man 7 (originally for SNES).

It was....okay.  Now I'm going to be honest, I haven't played a classic Mega Man game in quite a while (it's also been a long time since I played through MM7 on SNES), but I found this one to be kind of disappointing, which surprised me a bit.  I honestly can't remember how much of this was just due to MM7 not being great at its base, and how much of it was the design of this remake in particular.

Obviously it's hard for me to make a concrete comparison analysis without having a proper frame of reference to point to, but I mean, there weren't really any problems as far as recreating the standard mega man physics (felt on point for the most part), and this didn't have the punishing "lose buster charge when you get hit" function or anything like that, so I can only assume that the big difference here was in level and boss design.

This is the first time I can remember going into a classic mega man game (or fangame, in the case of rokko chan / mega man unlimited) and feeling this way, so it's kind of interesting to have this realization that yes, the level design really does matter and can be screwed up in a way that makes it less satisfying.

There are of course some concrete level design examples that I can point to that were subpar.  There's a few unfair "gotcha" moments, such as a falling spikes pit that -- due to the lack of timed screen transitions -- doesn't give you enough fair time to react to the first time (at least they give you a 1-up afterwards).  Stuff like that.  But overall maybe it's just that the levels had a lot of more "boring rooms".  Things like this:

Assuming they tried to roughly follow the level design of the original Mega Man 7 game on the SNES, this is actually probably understandable.  Mega Man 7 looks like this:

Notice just how much space on the screen Mega Man's sprite takes up here.  The proportions are entirely different, so what you can fit on a screen is severely limited in comparison.  The hallway I posted in the first image probably makes a lot more sense when Mega Man is twice as big, but when he's at this smaller size it just seems kind of empty.

Here's a room from Mega Man 2, for comparison:

I'm not saying this is the sole reason for what I'm feeling, but I have a feeling it definitely contributes to it in some way.

On the plus side, the infamously-hard final wily boss felt significantly easier here, so I was thankful for that, at least, haha.  Now that I think of it, maybe a big reason for that is just because Mega Man's sprite is smaller and thus more easily able to avoid the projectiles.  Funny how changing the size of the main character can have such widespread effects...