Let's just quickly recap a whirlwind of stuff since it's been a while and there was a bunch to cover.

- It's been really hot as we got a sudden heat wave.  Thankfully we're basically out of it and I can finally look forward to autumn again, but it threw a number of things off balance -- not only my motivation and physical energy (and sleep...) but I had to rescue my chickens by bringing them inside from their outdoor coop, which led to a bunch of hassle.  I guess next time I know there's a heat wave coming I'll be sure to set up everything =beforehand= so I'm not shuffling around bedding and chickens in the middle of the scorching sun...

- In the midst of that my graphics card up and died and I spent like a whole day diagnosing that.  Thankfully, all systems are back up and running and I ended up with a GPU upgrade at the end of the day.  Honestly just got the cheapest one they had at Best Buy, but still way more performant than the old one I had.  Not that it'll really get put to much use at all -- playing ALTTPR isn't exactly demanding on the GPU front.  But I guess hardware video encoding will go faster probably?

Unfortunately as I was disassembling and doing a deep clean of my computer (that part felt nice), I realized that the only CPU thermal paste that I had around was.........very old.  It still works, but um...definitely not ideal, and I'd like to pull out my desktop from under my desk again one of these days and reapply.  Maybe after things cool down a bit...

- I'm back at it as far as cooking goes, and feeling my groove as I throw together meals every day.  Had one or two new recipe successes as well (braised lamb), so that's nice too.

- I launched the ALTTPR site that I mentioned in my last post, see it at https://alttpr.ddrkirby.com/ -- this took a ton of effort to make but I hope to continue adding more and more knowledge to it over time.

- I made it out to MCS again finally (after probably a year+ of  talking about it).  It was a nice time, the new venue is great as advertised and it was nice seeing some friends there.  I might try and find time to stop by again; lord knows I've been trying to find more places to find community and it sure isn't feasible for me to go dance with the Stanford kids every week or anything like that.

- This weekend was a pretty okay one.  I watched Suzume again and appreciated it; honestly probably a little more on the second watch.  I don't know, I feel like it's a little bit of a flawed movie in that the first time I watched it I was kinda puzzled at some of it, but overall there's much more good than bad and I think it does a really nice job at touching on some themes effectively in a way that resonates with me.

- After like a week of not working on Rhythm Quest I'm diving into the trenches again.  There's like a billion things to do (as always) but right now I'm trying to make a big refactor of how backdrops are rendered in the menu scene, to finally fix (hopefully once and for all?) some framerate drops, particularly when transitioning between backdrop sets.  Most of my backdrop overdraw optimizations (which I've already done) aren't actually able to happen when the backdrops are fading in and out, due to how transparency layering works, so I'm changing how it works so different backdrops sets are rendered to temporary render textures at full opacity (I needed to use pre-multiplied alpha here!) and then I have a shader that takes the two render textures and blends between those, to avoid any weird transparency blending issues.  So far it's "basically" working but I still need to iron out a bunch of the kinks.  Fortunately it actually simplifies / eliminates the need for a lot of old complicated code that tried to do god-knows-what black magic in order to get the transparency and sorting orders all working correctly, so that'll be good to say goodbye to.

Unfortunately it actually slightly decreases performance in a different way since we render everything to an intermediary texture and then render that to the screen, so it's adding an extra step to the process.  But I'm assuming that'll all be worth it.

There are other performance optimization that could be made too, but this is probably the big one that's worth it at least for now.

- I started on my xmas letters again, as it's that time of year (Inktober and all that).  I'm not holding myself to doing one a day, but I'll probably try to do it relatively regularly through the month and then see how much I have leftover.  There's a couple of bday letters to take care of during this time of year too...

- I finished my monthly pixel artwork for October -- pretty early this time, which is a nice feeling.  It's another trace (I think almost all the ones this year have been) but it turned out really well, probably better than the rest, to be honest, and I feel like I learned some things while doing it.  Honestly if I could just do a couple more in the exact same style it would probably be beneficial for me.

- There was a period of time when I really wasn't doing so well, but I seem to be recovered from that.  I'd say that I was lonely and needed like love and attention and care and all that, but honestly the best person that could truly provide all that was myself, I think I just needed to get into a place where I was able to tap into that.

- Been still really enjoying hanging out at Teance.  I know Far Leaves is having an event this Thursday as well that I'm going to try and make it out to, so I guess there is lots of tea in my near future.  Honestly feel like it might be nice to go tomorrow, too...but we'll see how I feel.