Things are actually cruising along alright!

Dance - Somehow we had Jammix last Friday but also Bon Bon Ball on Saturday, wut?  Jammix went pretty well despite being a little bit late to it, but on the other hand, I felt a weird sort of unease while dancing.  Like I felt some sort of internal pressure to perform, a weird nervousness that I couldn't understand because, why?  Very mysterious.  Well, we'll see what happens on Saturday.

Life stuff - It's been not a bad couple of days, to be honest.  I've been doing my best to get a bunch of different things done.  I'm doing well with cooking -- mapo tofu, sichuan eggplant, hot pot, dry fried green beans, etc -- but I'm also doing good work in the "adulting" category.  Closed some accounts that I had been meaning to, and I've finished my primary election ballot ahead of schedule.  I even moved onto filling out my taxes, which somehow I feel like I have a handle on despite all the complications that I have this year (famous last words...?).  I have a new therapist too which seems to so far be working out for me.  The weather at least seems to approve, it was really beautiful outside today.  Something for myself to remember is to recall the feeling of cozy peaceful working -- in my room, with some water or tea, with nice warm lighting, bouncing between playing some games and working on rhythm quest or writing letters...honestly, I didn't do half bad with that tonight.

Letters, though, that's something I've really been neglecting.  The ghost of that activity is starting to actively haunt me; I know it's something I haven't been motivated to do very much at all.  Granted, I always take a bit of a break in January or so, but it's no good right now.  Now that I've done a good job taking care of some of this other stuff, letters is probably next on the docket.  Well, there are a few other things hanging around in that space too, but letters is the most pressing one.

Keyboard stuff - I spent some work meetings idly working on my Neo80 keyboard, which now has the PCB standoffs so I can do the o-ring mount method.  I also ended up putting all of the foams in right now, so it's the most "deep" sounding that it can be at the moment (with these switches and keycaps anyways), which has been pretty pleasing.  Of course, having the clacky sound isn't necessarily bad either.  But right now I'm liking this at the moment.  I retuned the stabilizers (getting better at balancing the wires...) but honestly the main thing to fix the ticking there was just to continue adding more and more lube haha.  Anyways, I've been really enjoying typing on this board!  I actually gave away my old one, just because I felt like I was accumulating way too many.  The other cheaper aluminum build came in (very late...) and it's not too shabby; the one thing is that the RGB isn't actually up to snuff with my old board, and there's an issue where the shine-through keycaps I got for it don't really work super-well because it has south-facing LED slots, not north-facing (oops).  No matter; I ended up putting my Cinnamoroll keycaps on there instead, which works just fine because the keyboard that those were on before has a nonfunctional key (maybe that socket is just broken, meh).

Rhythm Quest - One thing led to another and I've been spending a couple of days wrestling with every gamedev's favorite thing to do - fight game engines and plugins just to get things working.  (sigh)  So, I discovered that in later versions of Sonoma on Mac, Unity games become unresponsive to input due to some weird interaction with the way that window sizes are queried, which changed in the OS update.  There's a fix, but of course, I had to update my Unity version to fix that.  Sooo, queue a bunch of huge Unity editor downloads (don't forget the iOS/Android/WebGL build support!), plus an updated version of the Nintendo Switch SDK, etc.  Then test the project to make sure it still worked okay and it didn't introduce a million different bugs, except...what's this?  Issues with the native/managed plugins, including the one I was using for file dialogs, the steam integration, and the discord one as well...sigh.  Anyways, I'm finally at the point where I think I have at least all of the demo platforms working again (still need to test iOS + Android + Switch...).

Risk of Rain Returns - For a while I had just been getting Judgement clears with all of the different survivors.  I was stuck for quite a while on both Enforcer and Miner (both are pretty hard) but finally managed clears on those two as well.  Thinking on it more, I had completely forgotten that you can store an equipment in the main game and then use it in the Judgment trials, that would have probably helped out a bit.  Ah, no matter.  Anyways, now I'm finally back to playing the main game and unlocking random artifacts and skills, but here and there I also want to try to get more golds on the providence trials since there's an unlock for getting 15 of those I think.

Oh I guess tomorrow is Valentine's Day?  Am I supposed to write something about love or something?  I dunno.  I already talked to a bunch of people about my general feelings about that sort of stuff, maybe it's not really worth writing here.  Right now I don't really have someone to place up on a pedestal.  I mean, maybe that's sort of fine, like realistically any sort of down-to-earth two-way human connection shouldn't be founded on something like that, where one person tries to think of the other as being perfect.  But I guess, like, without anything like that in your life, what is there to illuminate your world and inspire you toward something like love?

I got a little scared when I couldn't remember the title of a piece by Leigh Alexander that really stuck with me, but I was able to dig it up without too much of a fuss.  It's called "The Future We Wanted".  Something I hope to read through again sometime in the next few days.