Let's see...

Life

Has been going pretty okay.  I've had some pretty nice days, as well as some "eh" lazy sort of autopilot-blah days, I guess.  I think making an attempt to get regular physical activity in at some point during the day has really been quite beneficial to my mood and happiness (which is not surprising, of course).  As well as just keeping up healthy habits in general.  Slipping up is inevitable from time to time, I think, I don't think that's something to blame oneself for.  Just take it day by day, sort of like a recovering addict/alcoholic might.

I've been taking it remarkably easy; I guess somehow the past week turned into a vacation of sorts despite not intending anything of the sort.  It's been good for me though, I feel like there were days when I remembered that life is something that is meant to be enjoyed, and that it is important to have things to look forward to when the work is all done.

Vegetarianism

I attended a virtual talk that discussed some things around sustainable eating and food security/insecurity, among other things, and while I don't think I came away with discrete actionable learnings, it was a bit inspiring in a "generic motivational speech about [topic]" way.  I think I'm already doing an okay job of having cut down on meat consumption; however this reminded me that I'd still like to get more proficient in my vegetarian cooking, so that when I cook for others I don't have to fall back on meat dishes all the time.  It'll take time, I'm sure it will happen gradually as I become more comfortable with various recipes.

 

Relationships and Gender

I guess it should have been obvious in hindsight, but when people talk about relationships there's this sort of assumed dichotomy between "friends" vs "dating"...in addition to frequent assumptions that "dating" is monogamous, heterosexual, etc., and I realized the other day that this always feels awkward in the same way that people assume a dichotomy of "male" vs "female" when talking about gender.  Setting up two societally-constrained buckets for things to neatly fall into causes "friction" (to put it gently) for those who find that their circumstances don't slot neatly into either bucket.  I've always found it difficult to articulate this succinctly but relating it to the struggles of binary gender assumptions I think makes things a lot more obvious to me.

I am astounded sometimes at how people still ask questions like "what is love?" and "how do I know whether I am in love or not?"  Maybe this is partly just me as an ISFJ-type who sees little value in arguing semantics, but I think more than that, these questions again set up a false dichotomy, where relationships are either "true love" or "not true love".  Frozen and Maleficent both (in basically the same way...) offered us the anti-trope of "true love" being represented by an actual familial bond rather than the age-old "white knight kisses (also white) princess", but really the entire idea of "true love" I think as a construct can be really damaging in more ways than I can count.  Relationships in the real world are complicated and deserve to be treated with nuance rather than sweeping generalizations.

 

Chickies

They have been amazingly peaceful for now since 小黑 (who is still brooding) has just been sitting in one spot in a tiny bin all day.  I tried breaking her out of her broodiness for a couple of days by forcing her to stand on wire / wood rather than any nesting material, but she didn't seem to want to snap out of it, so I gave up and am just letting her sit for however long she wants to, making sure she has water and food next to her since she literally just doesn't get out of the one spot for most of the day.  She's super quiet as a result and 小白 is pretty calm too since she doesn't get bullied anymore.

Ludum Dare / Far Side of the Mirror

Is this weekend!  Work on Far Side of the Mirror actually went more quickly than I anticipated; it may actually just end up being fully complete before Friday (or at least, "more or less" so).  There's only a couple of days left, so I guess this is also time for me to shift gears and dig into trying to work on some framework stuff in preparation for the weekend.  And try to continue not stressing out about Rhythm Quest and everything else that needs to get done.

Pokémon Unite

I started playing it to try it out.  It's pretty fun actually!  It's nice how streamlined everything is and I think it sets itself up to be more approachable in several ways.  There aren't a gajillion characters (yet) and that is actually a good thing when you are just starting out because if there's one common thing that is always super confusing about moba-style games it is trying to remember what the hell each of the 100+ heroes do.  At least in a fighting game like Smash Ultimate or whatever, it's 1v1, so you get a chance to just rely on fundamentals while trying to feel out what the capabilities of the other character are even if you're not familiar with that specific matchup.  In a 5v5 team game where it tends to be important to understand specific game-changing abilities -- or at the very least general roles -- that can get to be a nightmare, IMO.  Pokémon leverages existing IP that a ton of people are already familiar with, which somewhat helps, but also the fact that they're animal-like creatures instead of all being humanoid also really helps to distinguish them visually a lot more.  Even if you aren't familiar with these specific pokémon, it's extremely easy to see that Crustle is a tank -- literally just looks like a huge cube-shaped stone walking around.  I do think that the pre-match loading screen for these types of games should probably list out the role of each character (as it already does for character selection) so that you can at-a-glance understand the opposing team's composition.  Accessibility is important...

Pharaoh

I'm done with Pharaoh!  I didn't actually finish all the missions -- only up to the end of the "Ramses II" campaign.  There are 7 missions after that, but a good number of them seem to center around and/or require dealing with a bunch of combat stuff, and the combat in Pharaoh (especially the naval combat) is kind of just a pain in the butt to deal with.  So I'm calling it quits here.  Overall I stand by my previous opinion that I appreciated and enjoyed Caesar III more, but it was of course an interesting challenge designing a new style of city block with the differing constraints.  Overall the maps in Cleopatra seemed to lack a bit of diversity.  I guess a lot of this has to do with the fact that for the first half of the game (which is all I played) you're building royal tombs, all in the same bedrock mountain range.  That's sort of a nice thematic touch to see the older tombs that you've previously built, but it does make things less interesting, especially since that particular map has an annoying river passing through it with only one or two small locations on the shore to construct a dock (not ideal).  Eh, oh well.

Next will be my chance to try out Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, but probably not for some time.  I'll probably be busy playing Median XL anyways.

Things are okay, but I guess in general I always tend to write that, so maybe that's more of a formality than an actual legitimate statement.  There's been some good and a little bit of not as good, but overall most things have been good.

Day-to-day Stuff, October Prep

As is the case with many people, I spend a perhaps unreasonable amount of time day-to-day wondering whether I've done enough and what else I should be doing [insert rant about self-worth being unhealthily tied to productivity].  Every once in a while, though, there comes a time when I stop worrying about that because I've so obviously done enough for the day/week.  Of course, my goal isn't really to reach that point consistently (that would mean I'm overworking myself by far), but sometimes that's just how it goes.  Yesterday after dealing with retirement savings stuff, taking out the trash, putting together some stuff for Chickies, finishing cleaning the bathroom/toilet (probably the most annoying household chore...), and probably some other stuff too, I definitely got to that point.

At this time last week I think I was probably fairly concerned about getting enough done to be ready for October (and really, what I mean by "October" is "Ludum Dare weekend" which starts on Oct 1), but I'm pretty comfortably ahead of pace on all that.  I've already written my first 4 Christmas/Inktober letters, plus one out of the two early October bday letters, I finished my Monthlies pixel art album cover, I finished all the Rhythm Quest stuff I needed to do, mailed out my Vote Forward letters, put out another chiptune megamix, polished up a song for a music commission, updated some minor website stuff, and I'm even making decent progress towards the Far Side of the Moon revamp.

The only things that really remain are Far Side of the Moon stuff, probably one more music commission song, and then doing pre-Ludum Dare coding stuff, building more and more into my game template and framework code.

Room (?) Stuff

I have a sort of new long-term goal to look toward someday, so that's somewhat exciting.  A little birdie mentioned to me the other day how it felt a bit sad that so many things in my room were going away, and I certainly share that sentiment.  But I now have a hope in the future that both they and myself will both be pleased at what my space will look like someday.

Rhythm Quest

I sent out an closed alpha test build for my indie game, Rhythm Quest, so people have been giving me some feedback on that -- ...which I have actively proceeded to avoid reading because I now know better than to plug myself directly into these sorts of feedback channels.  It feels good to have reached this sort-of-milestone and to know that my game is at least functioning (yay) and seems to be enjoyable in some form (yay).

On the other hand I feel a pretty large dip in my motivation to work on it at the moment because "man, I already put a bunch of work into 'finishing' this part".  Well, more importantly, there's a lot of other stuff that has been more pressing, so I've just decided to shelve Rhythm Quest for now, it seems like the right thing to do.  Might as well wait until the feedback finishes coming in anyways -- and until I'm done with Ludum Dare... -- and then I can hop back onto it.  I'm a little uneasy at stepping away from the project, but I'll just have to trust in the process for now.

Chickies

Chickies are doing very well, though 小黑 is being very grumpy/broody today and yesterday.  As with everything else in my life (always...) I have been continuing to steadily improve their little corner over time -- most recently, making some additional accommodations to help make things easier in case I need to leave the house for an extended period of time.

Space Alert

I haven't been playing a ton recently but I guess my next goal is going to be trying to tackle a double-actions campaign with mixed white/yellow threats.  There's actually a bunch of different campaign achievements for me to chase after, so I'll probably be running those for a while.  I tried one the other day and got owned -- I ended the first mission with like 4 damage on both red+blue due to not planning for one point of damage on white, and then died on the second mission thanks to somehow not realizing that a malfunction had happened in red instead of white.  Eh, better luck next time.

In other related-news, I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of "Escape: The Curse of the Temple", another realtime board game that I enjoyed a lot.  This one has a bit of a different vibe than Space Alert, and I don't foresee myself going deep on it, but I'm excited to play it again as it was quite a fun time from what I remember.

ALLTPR

I feel like I've been doing fairly well, and getting pretty confident with running these open 7/7 seeds.  Check out this nifty graph I made of my times going down as I improve:

Pharaoh

Finished another mission in Pharaoh the other day, which proved to be unexpectedly difficult for whatever reason (maybe I'm just rusty?).  Somehow I was having a ton of trouble earning enough trade income to sustain my city....perhaps I was trying to export and import too many things at once?  The ships can only load a certain amount of cargo, so it's important that you don't waste those "slots" on low-profit items.  On my third playthrough of the mission I tried sticking to only one or two main exports and that seemed to work a lot better.

Median XL

I have just been =itching= to get into Median XL (the best Diablo 2 mod) again, but I know that's a pretty bad idea to do right now.  I'm telling myself I'll hold out until after Ludum Dare and then pull the trigger on that.

 

MBTI Stuff

I found another channel of funny MBTI parodies and skits (https://www.youtube.com/c/dearkristin).  I always find these pretty amusing, though they can admittedly be a bit hit-or-miss.  Every once in a while, though, one of these videos hits all the right marks and is a total hoot.  I'm a fan of how this person in particular portrays the ENFPs.  So relatable (sigh....)

Another goodbye, sort of.  It was a good weekend, and now I'm left with an interesting set of feelings as I float in the void between two sides of life.  My best friend talked about a duality before, of feeling like there were two different worlds they lived in, and often it felt as though the other one was never real to begin with.  I won't say that I share exactly the same feelings; things are much different, after all.  But I definitely feel a bit of that skepticism, that sense of "will things really be alright back on the other side?"  Even though I know that once my feet are on the ground, I will feel like I am at home again.

I'm not quite sure exactly what else I should write about here.  I could of course detail the things that I actually did this past weekend, but I feel like that is not very relevant to share here.  I guess instead I can talk about what the next chapter looks like right now.

Right now, in my near future, there's some chicky stuff to take care of, and a fair chunk of music work to do -- both for a commission of mine, and also for my own game.  Past that, I actually imagine it'll be a lot of just...preparing for next month.  October is the busy part of the year, with both the Ludum Dare game jam event as well as letter-writing, so I often need to get a head start on the work in the middle of September.  For Ludum Dare, there's no guarantee that we'll do another game in a similar style as the last two, but the most recent one showed me that there are still a lot of common functionalities that I'd like to robustly incorporate into my base starter code.  That is something that will take some time to work out.  And of course, there is finishing up the entry back from April.  And writing some ~4 or so of the 31 Christmas letters ahead of time.

There is also, however, a desire to step back from it all for a bit.  Perhaps, to process some of the feelings that I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post.  I'm not sure if this desire is transient or whether it is something that I will end up acting on concretely -- it's hard to tell until I am actually back on solid ground.  My guess is that the truth lies somewhere in between.  And of course, like all things in my life, the answer will involve a gradual incorporation of both.  An everyday balance.

It is one thing to want something for so long and then to realize that you will never reach it.  It is another thing to come to the understanding that you will still keep trying despite knowing that you will never reach it.  And it is still yet another thing to realize that what you believed in was a lie all along.

When I first learned the story of Sayaka Miki I think it was difficult for me to resonate with her struggle keenly.  I understood the tragedy of her story, but I saw her as brash, naive, and stubborn.  However, I wrote in 2013 in that I realized some things that made me feel like I started to understand her struggle a bit more.  I think I had begun to understand the idea of believing in something flawed, and had a greater appreciation of that "stubbornness".  And I also realize now the feeling of being betrayed by an ideal.  You could argue that Sayaka's naivety makes her story more "human".  That this is a flaw in her character, one that makes it resonant.  I think that's true to some extent, but humans are not the only species that are naive.  Perhaps what makes her struggle truly human is her struggle to maintain her beliefs despite being proven wrong.  In a way you could say this is an attachment to the past -- a sort of sunk-cost fallacy, if you will.  But I think it's more than that, too.  The idea of choosing to spend effort on something that is known to ultimately be futile, I think is something that feels to me to be uniquely human.  Like most good stories, Sayaka's portrayal to me doesn't have a defined single message or "moral" -- indeed, her story resolves in different ways depending on the universe.  I think this is by nature, as you can't simply "fix" this struggle by finding an answer.  It is simply something to be experienced and to learn your way through.