Xmas letters: 28 down, 3-4 to go.  Besides the fact that I'm behind on schedule, writing these has been nice this year.  I had a few in particular that I think were really nice to write.

It was an okay long Thanksgiving weekend!  Yesterday I achieved my goal of doing my monthly pixel art drawing, and today I achieved my goal of working on Rhythm Quest stuff.  I'm still overdue on a devlog post (not to mention a mailing list update...), but hopefully I'll be able to just squeeze that in soon.  I'm doing a lot of good work with custom level stuff (there is so much to do...), it's nice to have "good work" to do that isn't too entirely taxing on the creative front.

My new orb lights came in!  They're working really nicely to cozy the room up, especially at night.  Only real shame is that since they're mounted behind me they do cause a little bit of glare on the monitor, but it's really not too bad and there's not really a better placement for them.  I haven't really finalized what I'm doing with a bunch of the other stuff in my room, but progress is progress!

After somewhat of a rocky / false start, I'm actually sitting down and playing Gran Turismo 4, with the old racing wheel from my parents' place (that my brother got once upon a time).  I'm using some texture mods and shader reworks to modernize the graphics of the game a little bit (it really doesn't look as good as GT3 stock, honestly...), and am now working my way through the very early stages of the game where you have very little money and not a lot to work with.  Now that I'm actually sinking some time into driving with the wheel (and now that I actually have it working well), it's certainly been a new experience.  You can really feel the difference with the handling of the cars when you have force feedback for your wheel enabled; the fastest car that I have right now is unfortunately an MR that spins out really easily if you're not very delicate with it.

I ordered another TKL keyboard, haha, this one just because it was so dirt cheap at $59 for a gasket-mounted aluminum board, even comes with RGB.  It's not perfect, but what do you really expect for $59...?

It feels like there are a million different things to do....but I guess that's just how it is sometimes.

My main accomplishment today was doing a clean of my computer, desk, and cabling.  Well, I vacuumed the stairs and bathroom too, but that was secondary...

I gave my GPU some new thermal paste (overdue...I'm honestly not sure if I even did it the last time I opened it up) as well as got a whole bunch of dust out of it, which seems to have helped the temps on it.  I also just tidied up my desktop tower in general, but by far the biggest thing I did was to clear up my desk and try to organize all of my computer cabling.

I seem to be spending a lot of time doing online shopping (for myself...) recently, but honestly, I'm all here for it.  First it was mechanical keyboard stuff, then kitchen organization supplies, now desk products, and then...back to keyboard stuff xD.  But anyways, I bought a new monitor stand for myself, because the ergo stand that came with my LG Dualup didn't actually fit with my desk.  I had McGyver'ed an ugly workable solution, but found that I could just get a relatively inexpensive Amazon basics monitor arm and it both accomodates my desk and works just fine.  I was a little disappointed because a review mentioned being able to remove/disassemble the horizontal arm, and while I found how to do that, the bolts that I needed to remove to do so would NOT budge at all, so I gave up and just left the arm on, even though it's debatable whether I need it.  I guess it doesn't necessarily =hurt=, and if anything it makes the center of the desk feel more open to have the monitor arm off to the side instead of just being a post, so in the end I guess all's well that ends well.

The other big change I did was get all of the cables and lights off of my desk.  I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with my cotton ball and string lights yet (?), but having the cabling for all of that stuff on my desk was getting to be too much.  My big power brick (actually a power conditioner...) also used to be on top of the desk, which was sensible enough given that all the plugs are on the backside, but it was just adding to the clutter.

I was a bit conflicted on exactly where to put the power brick, but decided to just get some cable management supplies and figure it out later.  The thing is, I don't actually =need= my cables to be ultra-neat because I have desk cabinets across the entire width of my desk -- the tower itself and all of the cabling is behind all that, and inaccessible unless you move the cabinets.  Because of that I decided not to go for any sort of more expensive or heavyweight cable management solution like a power strip "bay" that you need to adhesive or drill onto the bottom of your desk.  Instead I just got a kit of cable wraps and various things to hopefully make some order out of everything.

I'm quite pleased by how it turned out!  I tried to get rid of some things that I didn't need (there was an extra SSD in my desktop that really had no business still being plugged in...plus a bunch of stuff from when I set up switching my monitor seamlessly from an OSX clamshell laptop to the windows desktop...and then never actually used that functionality), and in general just make sense of the cabling a lot more.  Again, it didn't really matter too much visibly, but it'll make my life so, so much easier whenever I need to do any work back there (plus it just makes me feel good inside).

The power brick just ended up on the floor...which is fine.  Maybe not 100% ideal since it's literally right by the heater vent, but eh; I keep that vent mostly shut and I'm sure it'll be fine....=P

Really though, I didn't have too many other great options.  I could have tried to put the power brick on top of the cabinets, tucked out of view underneath the desk, which would have really hid everything, but it would have been really awkward to cram all the cabling in that cramped space, plus if I ever needed to adjust anything or pull out one of the cabinets to get in there, it would be a huge headache.

Honestly the two biggest things that I did were just use cable ties (I used the velcro ones, but honestly you could have used zip ties in a pinch) to aggressively bundle extra cable lengths so it didn't just spaghetti everywhere, and then used big cable sleeves to group pairs or trios of cables together.  It's just nicer to have a single sleeve for bringing down the monitor power + video input together, for example, and then it can just split near the bottom wherever it makes sense to.

So that's all done for now!  There's still a lot of stuff to do in my room, though.  I have my new lights coming in soon (tomorrow?) hopefully, so I'll have to experiment with where to put those (might need to order an extension cable...), and then honestly I have to go through all of my drawers and boxes and see what makes sense to just get rid of and how I can reorganize my stuff.  There's actually still one or two cabinets in the kitchen that need organizing too, as well as a hallway cabinet, but eh.  One thing at a time.

Like I said, there's a million other things, but we can only do so much at once.  I'm quite due for another Rhythm Quest update, so I'll need to get to that, but I'm also writing my Christmas letters -- only a few more to go, thankfully.  And I've still got my monthly pixel art to take care of.

It's funny, I wrote today in one of my letters about learning a life lesson of needing to be able to sacrifice some things to make room for others.  The idea that you can't just do everything all the time.  Sometimes you need to let one thing go, even if it's just for a day, or a week.  You just do what you can, and try to pace yourself.  Sometimes you work on one thing, sometimes you work on another thing.  Today I wrote this blog post.  Tomorrow it'll be something different.  I'll try to either do Rhythm Quest or drawing tomorrow, at least one of those two things should get taken care of.  Heh, this is reminding me of how I heard from HealthyGamerGG once that there was research that was done on how successful students aren't the ones who =want= to do well on tests the most, nor the ones who most =need= to do well on the tests, but rather, it was the students who focused on scheduling how they would prepare for the tests.  Deciding in advance what they needed to do.  I guess I feel like that sometimes, too.

Things are ok!  I seem to have come down with a tiny head cold, maybe, but it's not too bad, thankfully...

Christmas letters are usually done by this time of year, but I'm about...2/3rds of the way through, only.  Well, probably less than that, since a lot of the ones I have left to write are the longer ones.  Just have to keep on chugging away at them, nothing else to do.

Rhythm Quest has been going "OK", just another case of "just sit down and do the thing".  Even if I only make a little bit of progress each time I do, that's perfectly fine.  I don't need to necessarily have another spurt where I work on it for a ton, I just have to make sure that I'm chunking away at it.

I'm enjoying my new keycaps a lot already (if only I had the actual board they will go in...), and have decided to just rotate switches once in a while; may as well, since I have all these different sets.  Currently I've been on the SP Star Magical Girl tactiles for a while; it's a refreshing change of pace to be on tactile switches again.

Super Metroid sub-50 will happen, I just have to keep on trying runs and eventually I'll nail one.  I have enough possible time save throughout that I can really make quite a few mistakes, as long as they aren't too major.  Even one kinda-bad mistake is probably okay as long as I can recover and play well otherwise, but...yeah, it's mostly just about stringing together a performance where I hit all of the big stuff and survive till the end.

Been enjoying running Risk of Rain Returns!  It's been a good long while since I played any RoR1; the release of RoR Returns actually caught me off guard.  There was an initial weird adjustment period where I was both rusty in playing the game =and= unfamiliar with the new changes, so everything felt weirdly "off", but I think I'm settling into the way that the new game handles a little more.  There are some interesting changes and tweaks to how everything works....nothing major, just little things like the ability to strafe while firing, or just the way that moving, shooting, and turning works in general.  It's neither good nor bad, just...different, I think.  Overall though I'm enjoying it; I can tell some things definitely feel better (sniper back-roll into charging a shot feels like it works much more smoothly, maybe I'm misremembering though).  There are some balance changes present for sure, but it's hard to judge exactly to what extent and how much.  But it's fun anyways!  I should fire up RoR1 once or twice to get a good comparison at some point.

I've been finding a way to enjoy myself at dance, despite it all, that's nice too.  And I guess, I am also doing my best to be beautiful.

I still play DDR here and there.  I'd love to get a clear of Start a New Day on expert double, but that is just not gonna happen for a long long time; my stamina can't even carry me through the latter part of the song at 80% speed...

What a nostalgic feeling...eating a past-midnight meal while watching some anime at my desk.  Before that I put the dishes away and reorganized just one or two things.

It's a nice feeling, knowing that I can still have these sort of times.  Part of me is tempted to see what would happen if I just went full night owl mode and flip-flopped my schedule, sleeping in the afternoons and evenings.  But no, I have too many work meetings for that to be feasible these days, not to mention being responsible for my household's meals.  Ah well.  That's probably for the best, anyways.