I initially said that we were going to try and do Ludum Dare, but we decided to back out -- just as well since I was feeling a little stressed about getting everything ready in time along with doing all the other things I needed to take care of.

Even better, it let me stop by to dance with the Stanford kids at Jammix where I actually had one of the most pleasant nights out dancing in recent (or even non-recent) memory.  My life has/had been going really well lately so I think bringing that positive energy really helped me to open up and feel comfortable.  I've always tried to consciously push aside and quiet down the anxious voice inside of me that wanted me to push past my comfort zone and try to be more outgoing, instead reminding myself that when I felt truly comfortable, I would naturally lean into it (as I have in the past), and it was a nice feeling to see that blossom into fruition so clearly.  Almost sad, in a way, thinking back to all the times when I went to dance and just wasn't in a great place.  But there was meaning, and learning, in all of those times, too.  I don't regret it; all of it was part of the journey to where I am now, and beyond.

Anyhow, combined with my long weekend, those few days were unmistakably another one of those rare "5 out of 5" periods in my life.  I came down a little bit off of that high -- actually in no small part due to spending a lot of time debugging complicated infrastructure stuff while working on a Rhythm Quest side project.  It really feels like no matter what you dig into -- self-hosting web services, gamedev, healthcare, even taxes, ...there are just infinity gotchas along the way and nothing is ever intuitive.

That, is actually one of the strengths of a lot of good video game design -- that it is clear, readable, intuitive, and yet still interesting.  These games engage us in the same way that the best parts of our jobs engage us -- when we are engaging with a problem that we're interested in, with nothing else to get in the way.  It's unfortunate that sometimes (many times?) somewhere along the way the people who work on videogames forget about the merits of this readability, not just in terms of visuals (though quite often so), but in terms of everything else, too.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for enjoying games that reward you for knowing arcane intricacies, but it troubles me when games make things more complicated just for the same of being more complicated.  Don't we already have enough of that in real life?

Fortunately, I was able to dig myself out of the rabbit holes I got myself into to and put down my work to take a break today and play some DDR and rando to chill a bit before I'm on the job again tomorrow.

Speaking of rando, I'm trying to make a slightly more concerted effort to wrap my head around keysanity now, but I still feel as though I suck a lot at it.  I played another seed today and things started well but I felt like I really didn't make the right decisions after that at all.  I guess it'll just take more reps and thinking about it, I guess.

Similarly, for cubing I think I'm doing...okay.  It's about time for me to relearn all of the OLLs, but at the same time, .....goddamn, I really suck at my cross, lol.

Keyboard-wise, I'm back on my Neo80 with some new switches, and a syringe to more easily tune up the stabilizers, but I'm becoming more and more interested in giving the Cycle7 another whirl, or even a few -- I can try out a few different configurations, maybe.  I ended up switching to the wireless mouse for now.  Took me a few days to get used to it, but I'm doing alright.  I miss the button layout and the overall feel a bit, for sure, but the first time I took it out of my backpack and flipped a switch and had it instantly working again sure felt niiiice.

My sleep got thrown out a bit by the latest long sessions of debugging, so I'm trying to wind down and see how I can do tonight, haha.  But yeah, overall things are really going quite alright.

Feels like I worked on quite a variety of things today, unfortunately a lot of them are still in flight and still need additional work.  I have a letter that I wanted to try and work on this weekend, for example, but I haven't gotten around to it =(  At least I got some other stuff done, like laundry, vacuuming, even set up some smart bulbs in my ceiling light so that I can control the color temp and brightness better...

Ludum Dare
LD55 is coming up this weekend (already!) and today I started the process of trying to make sure that I'm actually prepared for it.  This is finally the time that I switch over to using Godot 4.x (upgrading from Godot 3.x).  Godot 4 still doesn't support single-threaded web exports (coming in 4.3, available via dev snapshot) but rather, itch.io's SharedArrayBuffer header support is now good enough for me to just switch over to using only threaded builds.  Safari, in particular, didn't play nice with the itch.io headers, but a workaround has been added where on Safari the game will just break out and open in a new window.  So finally we can get OK audio latency, use a threaded build, use all the new GD4 features, and have OK support for most browsers.

Of course, I had to spend some time figuring out how to make sure that the viewport gets sized correctly in the popout new window.  By default everyone just assumes that you should be able to resize your games at will and just fullscreen them to play and...arghhhh.

There's still a bunch of work to be done in terms of cleaning that up, but also I'm just going through and migrating all of my starter/common GDScript code to GD4, also making it idiomatic (changing my naming conventions) along the way.  I also fixed up some dev environment issues -- turned out I had faulty/conflicting python installs leading to some strange behavior for some of the VSCode extensions I was trying to use...

Keyboards
This'll have to change back before the weekend hits, but I've switched over my KTT Strawberry switches and my Osume Sakura keycaps -- taken them out of my Neo80 and put them on my Cycle7 so that I can use that for a while!  Despite the Neo80 having the superior featureset for me (magnetic connector/no ribbon cables, wireless since I didn't order a wireless Cycle7, and of course, a function row...), I'm quite enjoying the typing experience of the Cycle7!  The sound profile is actually a little better; I'll have to see if I can tweak the Neo80 to be just a little bit more to my liking.

I also opened up my cheap smaller board, the GMK67, because the left bracket key wasn't working.  I dunno what exactly I did to it, but everything's AOK with it now, and I was using it this past weekend since I was out and about.  That's all for the best too, that board isn't super duper nice but it's actually perfect for portability.

It's been a while since I spent any money on this hobby (lol....) so I ordered some new switches, HAHA xD.  I also put a mouse on my wishlist, it might be time for me to finally finally jump ship from my current one and get a wireless mouse -- just continuing along the trend of decreasing the number of things on my desk!

Tetris
I didn't manage an M rank for this year's "Carnival of DEATH", unfortunately, but it was a good experience playing for a week.  I could certainly feel myself improving a lot over the course of those days of play, just couldn't manage to put together a good run, especially in the 400-500 section.  I managed to get to 500 in 3:27:xx twice, just two seconds away from an M rank, so I certainly got close.  Oh well!

Cubing
I've been continuing to fiddle around with speedcubing, actually managing a sub-20 average of 12 at one point (woo!).  I haven't started to bother learning 1-look OLL yet, probably later at some point, but right now I'm focusing on learning more efficient F2L solutions.  I have my old "standard, tried and true" single solutions for every single case that I used way back when, but some of them involve like double cube rotations from certain angles, etc etc, and I'm trying to implement some other solutions, like especially ones that use sledgehammers to set up nice cases, or even some that use wide turns.  There's a few really unintuitive solutions as well that =would= be nice to learn, but those are going to be harder for me to remember I feel like.  We'll see.

FL Studio
This probably won't happen in time for Ludum Dare, but at some point I might consider a cleanup of my FL Studio setup.  My samples and plugins themselves are doing OK, but ever since I got my new monitor I've been dealing with this annoying issue where some plugins do totally OK with scaling up to the higher resolution / handling DPI scaling, but other ones don't and as a result are really tiny.  Since I was looking up hidpi support stuff because of Godot, I took another look at it today.  Previously my attempt at fixing the issue was to enable "bridged" mode for those small plugins, which allows them to scale up.  Unfortunately, that requires those plugin windows to pop out separately from FL, which overall I just found to be too clunky.  So I pedaled back on that and have just been living with small tiny plugins.  But I think I might actually just go and run FL in "scaled" mode, so basically FL uses a smaller viewport and then the OS just scales everything up (?).  The end result is that I no longer have tiny plugins...unfortunately all the text and everything is a little more blurry, but honestly, that might be fine as a tradeoff for me.  I'll have to fiddle around with it later, once I'm all done with LD.

Minigolf
I was over in the South Bay this past weekend and on a whim I went out to Golfland at night and just did some solo practice on the good ol classic course.  There've been some changes here and there since the last time I went!  One hole in particular has a nasty surprise where part of the turf is this super new and soft/cushiony section, which eats up your ball's speed a lot more than you might expect.  Hole 18 on the "King's Quest" side (the one with the dragons) is the big square pyramid (probably hardest hole among both courses?) but they re-did it...it's now a bit less tall and instead of being a square pyramid, they shaved off the corners and made it slightly more octagonal, so you don't get super screwed over when you end up in a diagonal slot.  The circular mound (hole 7 or something?  i forget which side) is also different, they added a short backplate at the back on the top, so in theory if you hit straight you can just bounce off of it which should make it a lot easier as long as your aim isn't too far off.

Being out there on the course alone was kinda cool!  It was more brightly lit at night than I had remembered and it was nice being able to just go at my own pace and practice hitting the holes multiple times if I wanted to.  I'm going to have to perhaps work on my technique though, I want to really get more consistency with both my aim and control.  Also, the holes where you have to shoot up the ramps and land in the bullseye are basically impossible...I don't know how I was ever doing those before.  It's really hard to get the ball to roll true / have enough topspin to just roll flat and still have enough power to get up the ramp with enough speed, so it's sort of RNG in terms of what angle the ball ends up hitting the ramp at I felt like.  Maybe there's some secret to hitting the ball that will make it stick to the ground a little more?? (maybe that's the kind of thing you'd need a real golf putter for...)

I thought I came out with a pretty good score on the king's quest side (I got wrecked on the other side) but I looked at my old scorecards and I think I did even better before.  Also apparently I got a 42 on the Safari side at one point, what the hell??  That's 12 under par for an 18 hole course...I don't understand how I was able to string together so many birdies...sheesh.

Anyways I was looking into whether there are any other courses here and there and there's actually a golfland in San Jose area that I'll have to hit up (along with the Milpitas one).  Of course, all of them share the same basic ideas and decor, so I probably won't go anytime super soon, but it'd be fun.  There's also one or two different courses around SF / Berkeley / Walnut Creek area, maybe someday I'll hit those up.  Honestly going to that random indoor minigolf place (pales in comparison to golfland) during my overseas trip kinda made me remember how fun it is.

ALTTPR
Been still playing pretty consistently!  Recently got piloted in a pilot spoiler seed, which was fun to just run a seed in 56 minutes -- did pretty well besides a death to chain chomps and then failing torch glitch on Ganon.  I've been trying to wrap my head more around keysanity routing, we'll see if I can get more into that mode like I've always been saying that I will.  I've been neglecting the Super Metroid side of things for a while though, so maybe it's time to switch gears to that at some point too.  And then I want to do some timings for Misery Mire...

Haircut
I finally got a long-overdue hair trim, maybe getting a bit more trimmed off than I should have.  It's not THAT short (feels that way in comparison...) but I probably could have left on a few more inches...oh well.  On the plus side, my hair is super healthier now, though on the other hand, I'm going to have to wait a while before a re-bleach/recolor otherwise it's just not going to be worth it.

Rhythm Quest
Is going OK!  I'm waist deep into a pretty big refactor to enable recoloring of the in-game beat markers and obstacles based on beat (basically beat skins).  There's a lot of work involved there but not too much creativity so it's just a matter of getting through it with time.  If I can manage it, I'll be able to make some sort of devlog on all the recent work I've done before LD hits and destroys all my productivity for like a half week plus.

Life
Overall is doing pretty okay, all things considered.  My weekly copay for my eco sessions was a little higher than it should have been which I took up with them, so it feels good to be getting a (quite) low rate for that.  Like I said there's still some more things that I'm hoping to get done this week, hopefully that all manages to work out well.  I seem to have falled back into my old sleeping habits, especially over this past weekend (oops), so maybe I can push that forward a little bit.