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.