You wouldn't understand.  But...at this point, who would?

 

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I've been continuing to stop by and visit the Stanford kids at their Dancebreak events.  Having realized that I'm not so interested in improving my social dance anymore, has been a little freeing.  Even more than before, I feel that even when the voice in my head tells me that I should be dancing more, I can find peace despite it.  But of course, I was always that way.  Unwilling to compromise on my beliefs.

...I've discovered, though, that I've lost a bit of that.  My dancing has become cleaner, more precise, yet at the same time, more crude, more prescriptive.  My technique has improved, but at the cost of my self-expression.  As always, this is a reflection on myself as a person, too.  Just how much of myself have I lost?  And how much can I regain?  I'm not sure, but I have to try.  After all, there are plenty of good dancers out there.  My skill and experience is replaceable at best.  But the temperament that I look up to is not.

Anyways, I'll be DJing next week at Dancebreak, so do come out and stop by, if you'd like.

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I took games 1 and 2 of the finals match for my ALTTPR tournament, meaning somehow at the end of this wild ride I ended up as the champion of the entire thing.  I don't know what else to say except that I was really happy with how I played and it feels extremely validating to have my effort and practice pay off like this, even though I know that things could have very easily turned out differently.

My beliefs and practices in ALTTPR mirror some of the tenets that I hold myself to in dance, as well as simply what I believe in as a person.  It's important to me that you can succeed even as an introvert, that you don't have to "put yourself out there" if you don't want to.  That if you work hard and do the right thing, good things can still happen to you.  That the world doesn't always have to be a place where you need to fight for your next promotion.

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In the meantime, I've been setting up a new macbook, along with trying to deprecate google drive (tired of the desktop client sucking) and migrating back to pCloud.  I haven't really thrown a ton at the macbook yet (need to try getting it to run Rhythm Quest builds...) but things seem okay so far.  There's been the usual slew of customizations with regards to shortcut behavior, key layout, etc. but since this is one of the new arm64 chips, we also get to try out Parallels and run Windows 11 arm through that as opposed to doing the whole Bootcamp thing.  So far I'm pleasantly surprised with how much promise it's been showing, though it's taken a LOT of fiddling around to get everything to work correctly (so many different things trying to configure key layouts and shortcuts...).

Windows 11 itself on the other hand has been a mess to wrangle into shape -- I feel like the last time I had to work this much to get an OS to really behave well was for Windows Vista and even that wasn't really too bad...Windows 11 on the other hand continues with the push toward bunches of "bleh" settings everywhere but also discards a bunch of old useful functionality (forces the taskbar to be like OSX) along with a few puzzling and/or ugly design decisions (the new alt+tab menu is awful and really breaks screen focus).  I have the thing working a whole lot better now, but it's taken a fair amount of hacking around with different things.  Still, though, it seems quite promising.

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I've become a better person, but at what cost?