This past week was a bit of coming back down to earth after the unexpected greatness that was the week prior.  Nevertheless, the good energy from that week rolled over and made me feel ready to at least try my best to tackle whatever life tried to throw at me...

I've mentioned in the past how I dislike the "emotional sensation" of traveling or being driven, there is a weird feeling sometimes (not always) that I get in my heart / soul where I just feel that "this is wrong" when I am moving at high speeds, or in general when I am going "away" or simply just moving fast, or even staying still at somewhere that feels "far".  (Interestingly, I didn't feel that at all when I went on my weekend trip the other week...)  Often I prefer driving to being a passenger for this reason (among others).  However, today, for the first time, I felt a twinge of emotional discomfort even though I was the one in the driver's seat (driving toward home, no less).  I can't really say why, I just know that it happened.  Today was sort of a mix, really, of things; I had a bit too much caffeine, and later at night my stomach felt a bit off, too (anxiety?).  But overall things are OK.

I managed some good quality hours of work on Rhythm Quest this past weekend, including a new devlog post, which felt nice (especially on Friday).  Hopefully I'll be able to keep that up.

I have some various medical things (both for myself and for chicky) to try and take care of this week; hopefully it can go well or at the very least without too much incident.  It's been a year since chicky's last vet appointment so it's about time; I was feeling a bit concerned about her health and feet, but in all likelihood she's probably just fine.

I am...probably also just fine, but been having some leftover knee pain here and there when I exert myself, so hopefully I can get that checked out and see if there is anything I can do to remedy that.

I've been spending -lots- of time grinding Super Metroid Any% speedrunning -- I've dropped spazer and early ice (also crab supers) from my route in an attempt to save more time.  I managed to complete a run with the new route, but unfortunately I lost a ton of time in a few places, so it wasn't a PB.  I was actually on pace for a (somewhat disappointing) PB in my most recent attempt, but got hit by Mother Brain which ended the run.  Brutal!

There are a couple of really key sections that have been thorns in my side and losing me a ton of time -- getting the initial Draygon shinespark (and just the Draygon fight in general) has been one of them; I need to go and try to pick out concrete visual cues for all of my shinespark short charges, I realize, because I think I'm running into the issue where I try to rely on my muscle / timing memory and then it gets really thrown off because of the adrenaline (or sometimes even the lag frames).

It's been really fun finding strats that work (for my level) for all of these rooms, and get gradually better and more and more refined everywhere.  I'm tempted to start a new video series detailing my "beginner-intermediate" strats just because there are some rooms where I feel like there are some nice ways to approach them that offer a good compromise (not fully optimal, but something consistent, fast, and not too hard).  But we'll see.

Had a weekend retreat, of sorts, really nice.  But I guess really I feel like my experience starts a bit earlier, on Tuesday when I had some socialization, self-care, other care, and a good night's sleep.  Wednesday I thought for sure that I was sick because I felt incredibly tired, but turns out my body was just telling me to catch up on rest, which I did.  That must have pushed a metaphorical reset button for me because I felt really refreshed afterward.  Thursday I had another outing -- which went well, and then I kicked off my weekend retreat of sorts where I took a short hop over to another city to stay with a friend.

It's been a really nice couple of days and I'm feeling happy, validated, motivated, excited, all sorts of other positive adjectives as well.  Of course, there's that bit of trepidation at the back of my mind about some of the things that I need to take care of when I am back, but it's not really too bad, especially in the face of the positive emotions that I'm feeling.

I was reminded (again) of why I care so much about making Rhythm Quest, but I was also reminded of how far I have come in my personal life as well, on a separate note.  And I know that there is hope that I'll be able to regain both my past happiness as well as my past diligence and motivation.

It's rare that I feel so good about life, especially after some of the things that I've had to go through this year.  It's always hard to take periods of time and point at them as being 5 out of 5.  But it is, now.

It's 2023.  Let me get this straight...

Flash content no longer runs in any modern browser.  There's a WIP in-browser flash emulator/player written in rust that aims to correctly and safely run flash content, but it's incomplete.

Unity has continued to bloat the engine in addition to making some..."interesting" decisions about pricing fees, contracts with defense agencies, and uh...laughable PR announcements, to say the least.

Godot Engine has recently launched a new major version, Godot 4.  Godot 4's HTML5 exports currently can't yet run on macOS and iOS due to upstream bugs with SharedArrayBuffer and WebGL 2.0.

Godot 3 builds can be exported as threaded builds to help with allowing lower audio latency (among other things), but this requires SharedArrayBuffer support, which in turn requires some COEP web headers to be served, so you need to configure your webserver to provide those (it also doesn't work on Internet Explorer, but let's be real, nobody cares).

If you're hosting on itch.io (as many do), there's now an experimental flag you can enable for your project to have those COEP headers served.  However, they determined that using the "require-corp" version of the header breaks the rest of the page, so they're opting to use "credentialless" instead.  Firefox recently launched trial support of this header, but Safari only accepts "require-corp", so your build won't work there.

...yeah, ok.

And so my week "break" ends, just as it began -- quietly, without incident.  I didn't relax a ton, didn't get a ton done, but I planned to do neither of those things, just...step through life as usual, only with a little more time on my hands.  Could I have done a little more on Rhythm Quest, for example?  Yeah, but I also could have done any number of other things, too.  It's totally fine.

Put together another keyboard build and am now auditioning different tactile switches on it to see how I feel about them.  It's a 65% keyboard, so a little more compact, and has reaffirmed my preference that TKL is my layout of choice, but eh, maybe the function-row-less (FRL TKL) layout of the board that I have coming later this year will be a nice compromise.  Anyhow, it's a fun little sidequest in my life right now.

Rhythm Quest work just continues to chug along.  I'm past that sort of initial burst of work on the level editor, but it's come a long way since then...not quite fully-featured, but it's definitely getting closer.  Looking forward to continuing to work on that some more...

In the meantime I suffered some random spurts of anxiety here and there.  It's odd because I never really figured out in particular where they came from.  Perhaps just a life thing.  To be continued, I guess.  It's something I'm going to have to sit on a bit more.  Think about how I am really feeling.  How I want to be.  Whether I'm doing the right thing.

But I'm glad that there are, at the very least, things to look forward in life, of some sort.  I installed a bunch of quality-of-life mods and am giving Baldur's Gate 3 another shot, on Tactician difficulty.  The QOL mods are helping for sure, though they can only go so far.  Going through the story a second time makes me realize how some areas were just....really confusing the first time around.  Took a second time through to kind of understand what was going on, properly.  It makes me wonder what the average experience through games like this is like.  Are other people just as confused by certain things?  Is it just bad design...?

I finished my playthrough of Link's Awakening DX.  Didn't bother getting all of the seashells (and didn't particularly care to), but finished everything else, including the "color dungeon".  Overall it was much less enjoyable of an experience than A Link to the Past, but I can sort of see why the game functions that way.  There's a lot more backtracking, it's never straightforward how to get from one screen to another since each individual screen is so small -- sort of like you're zoomed into this big maze, rather than ALTTP which is more open-feeling, both in the overworld and in the underworld (dungeons).  Surprisingly, the dungeons felt quite a lot more complex in Link's Awakening.  Especially the latter few (Eagle Tower, Turtle Rock), they really require you to backtrack a lot and keep track of overarching goals while exploring room-to-room.  Overall the dungeons were more "difficult" in that way (minus maybe Ice Palace in ALTTP?), so I understood immediately why I got stuck so easily when I played this earlier in my life.  I didn't appreciate some of the more obtuse-seeming dungeon areas -- lots of bombing walls or hookshotting in areas that might not pop out to you obviously.  I think part of the issue is that it was never obvious where I should be looking for progression in the dungeon, and it takes a long time to navigate across the various (small) rooms, so it felt like you spend a lot of time wandering around without actually making progress.  I'm sure these are all issues that are probably alleviated somewhat in the Switch remake, though (I'd imagine...).

All I can from here on out is just hope to tap into my "best self", I guess...I mean, what else is there to be doing?

I remember the days when it felt like I was actually writing interesting thoughts here, instead of just doing a mind dump.  But then, I remember doing the "daily mind dump" even before that.  Maybe these things just go in cycles.

Rhythm Quest development continues to chug along with my work on the level editor.  It's daunting because there's so much to work on, but at the same time, it's kind of a nice thing because it means you can just pick whatever you feel like working on, rather than forcing yourself to work on any particular thing.  There's no shortage of work to be done, so just do whatever you feel like.

I finished all of Baldur's Gate 3.  I can't really tell where I land on it because it's a solid mix of good and mediocre.  I think the important part is that I enjoyed it quite a bit, despite all of my criticisms.  I'm already contemplating another playthrough on the hard difficulty, but this time....equipped with some community-made mods that might hopefully help make the experience a little better in terms of quality of life improvements.  I haven't started on that, I don't know when or if I will, but I feel like the one thing that BG3 =did= help me out with was giving me something to look forward to.

I've actually been doing a good bit of gaming this week, since I gave myself the week fully off of work.  I played through Mega Man 6 on a whim -- was much easier of a game than I remembered, they are REALLY generous with the e-tanks in MM6 it seems.  But I still remember really struggling with the game when I was younger, too.  It's crazy how much one's skill can improve with these things.

I started playing through Link's Awakening DX too.  I've never played the game boy color version, admittedly, so it's slightly new in that regard, but mostly just the same ol Link's Awakening GB gameplay.  It really pales in comparison to A Link to the Past, despite being released some 7 years later.  They did a good job within the limitations of the system, but there's so much more backtracking and the world takes so much longer to navigate, so overall the pacing just feels very much slower.  I'm glad that I have the benefit of fast-forward to speed things up a little bit.  I'm also of course much better at just reasoning about puzzles, dungeon stuff, and all that, so that is helping as well.  I'm probably what, like 70% done maybe?  I already got the boomerang and am in dungeon like...6 or something?

I played through Pocky and Rocky Reshrined.  It was oddly.....not quite as fun as I expected.  It makes me wonder if the original SNES game actually had better gameplay (or maybe Pocky and Rocky 2 is even better?)  The art and music direction was good enough, just something about the gameplay wasn't really quite on the mark.  The levels either felt really chaotic or encouraged you to stop a lot, or some odd mix of both.  I can't really say for sure.  I'll have to try the original someday to give a better comparison.

I swear there's been other stuff going on besides video games, that's just the thing that readily comes to mind.  I've been continuing to enjoy white tea...really reminds me of the good that can be in life, so there's that...