Viennese Ball 2025

Was debating whether to try writing this one tonight or just wait until later, but I guess we're and we're doing it.  Good opportunity to let my stomach digest the rest of the sweetgreen chicken salad that I absolutely demolished after getting home...

As I've said time and time again, "Viennese Ball is, like Fanime, one of those events that happens every year, yet still manages to be a little bit different each year."  Viennese Ball, Big Dance, and Fanime I guess are kind of the trio of big "annual events" that happen for me (god willing, JaSmix will be on that list again this year...).  VBall and Fanime in particular have some odd similarities despite being such different events.

I didn't do a full writeup of VBall 2024, really, but I talked a little bit about it here and here.  Continuing the link chain for continuity, I guess.  2024 was kind of a wild ride, where all of my best laid plans got turned over completely; I ended up driving for hours since I got to the ball and then realized I forgot my skirt (of all things lol) and had to turn around and miss opening ceremony for that.  I planned to do neither of the waltz contests and then ended up doing both, lol.

I wrote some stuff that year to the extent of "why do I have to be so cynical, and feel such a big responsibility even though I know in some ways it's overblown".  I think this year I went into the ball with a healthier attitude, having learned from last year to just let whatever will be, be.  And lo and behold, life flipped some stuff over on me again!  I went from planning to be in the cross-step waltz contest, to not planning on doing it, and then to doing it again.  Unlike last year, it wasn't a "do I really want to do this" question, it was more along the lines of extenuating circumstances, ha ha.  And then the friend who I was planning to meet with and watch opening together ran late and couldn't make it...

Well, at least I came prepared, and even arrived early this time.  Changing on-site at the ball, as I have been doing, was an A+ strat as always, especially because we were in SF this time at a new location!  Looking up the reviews / online notes on parking structures was also an A+ move as I know of at least one party who parked at a place where there was no after-hours access...yeouch.

 

The Opening Committee performance this year is...hard for me to really nail down what I'd say about it in words.  Certainly the choreography was "different", I of course always appreciate pieces that try to express something or tell a story, but the first thought that comes to mind is that I was caught off-guard enough by it that I didn't really know how to feel at first.  Like I ordered a hot dog on a bun and got a big slice of pizza instead, and it's like...I'm not going to hate this pizza, if anything maybe it was better than I was expecting, but also, it takes a bit for me to recalibrate my expectations.

Perhaps it was also the words about "this dance is about exploring the meanings of leading and following" or whatever it was.  That's a pretty loaded topic for me, I guess you could say, haha, so I think that's part of what led to my feeling that I like, wasn't sure what exactly to think.  I mean they did great, I liked it and all, but it's a topic that hits close to home in a way that's pretty complicated and nuanced for me and gets into gender dynamics and all that and there's no WAY just a single choreography piece can hope to really speak to all of that stuff bubbling inside of me.

The second piece, too, about "the things we had to leave behind in order to become who we are"...I feel like that sentence brings on like 5x more baggage and complex feelings for me than even that whole shtick about leading and following.  And again, of course no way that this particular performance would speak to that.  (I mean, I've found scant few things in life that do, in general)  So like, yeah, they did great and all and I appreciated it, but I feel like the subject matter was hard for me to just take for what it was.  And that's just a me thing, totally.  Like of course their storytelling was more simplistic and fun than all of those gurgling thoughts that I have tucked away, but also, that's kinda how it should be.

I was pleasantly surprised by how well the venue accommodated for the throngs of people (of which there seem to be more and more, somehow).  It certainly ah...."felt" different?  I felt like for a good portion of the earlier parts of the ball I was wandering around the room(s) looking around to say hi to people or whatever but found it strangely difficult to run across anyone I knew.  And I was wondering whether it was just because most of the people there I didn't know, or whether something about the rooms or the layout made it harder than things were at the traditional location.  Well, I think it was probably more the former than the latter; the earlier parts of the ball are where all of the non-dancers and the first-time kids or whatever are there probably.

The ball seemed to have gone by quicker than usual this year, somehow.  I didn't even catch Swingtime's performance (wouldn't be the first time that's happened...), etc.  Maybe part of was my aimless wandering in the early part of the evening, but perhaps a big deal of it was needing to rest big-time after we did the cross-step waltz contest.  I was unfortunate enough to miss a good batch of great music to dance to during that stint, but I just had like zero energy left in the tank after performing in the contest.

 

Oh yeah, so there was that.  I've been writing lately about how I've been feeling a little... "discombobulated", as Angela Amarillas put it...about my creative flow, about how I haven't been feeling like I've been at my best.  I knew going into this whole thing that I kind of wanted to confront that and sort of figure that out for myself.  Fortunately for me life really had my back and paired me up with the easiest person for me to dance with.  Something familiar, which of course is always a welcome thing in my world.

Where do I even start?  We performed to a surprisingly-good reception, people seemed to really enjoy it, which of course is the real reason I keep bothering to do these things in the first place.  It's changed a bit, though, ever so slightly.  I think in the past there was more of a sense of burden, of obligation, almost.  I hesitate to say it, but almost fringing on martyrdom, like I'm being overdramatic, but there definitely was a little bit of sense of "I don't really wanna do this, but somebody has to".  I think I no longer feel that sense of "duty" or whatever as strongly, even though it is still a motivating factor, I guess.

For my dancing, too, it's like...I used to have very strong feelings about the way that I wanted to dance, my ideals, it was really important that I dance a certain way, and push that, almost "prove it out" in a way.  But that's lessened, too, now -- in no small part due to the fact that I simply have not "worked on" dance for....a long time.  Maybe since the covid times, probably.  So this wasn't some opportunity to "show all that I've been working on" or anything like that, quite the opposite.

Part of my dealings with creative energy and the difficulty in achieving flow state and performing my best has been about setting expectations (having some duds is part of the process, that's how it's gonna be if other times are gonna stand out), but the lion's share of it has been about getting in my own head about things.  Performing a dance is...an interesting thing, I think.  It's a different sort of energy than when you're just dancing with a partner.  When I dance just with a partner, it's usually just us, and the music, and honestly the music is really what I focus on most, in a good waltz anyways (if I have to focus on my partner, it's usually a bad sign lol!).  But when you're performing, there's this whole other aspect of the audience that enters the equation.

Honestly, a lot of the time I hated it.  I think rational thoughts and second-guessing myself and trying to "force" things absolutely sucks for my creative flow.  Which is not to say that rationality doesn't have a place in dance (or music-making, etc.)...I think I saw a video once talking about how many solo dancers will lean one way or the other...but just that it's generally a really bad thing for me.  As soon as I'm trying to pre-plan anything or force things to happen, or to try really hard to impress people, that's usually when I find myself dead in the water.  To make things worse, I think cross-step waltz is just kinda...really tough to show off/perform in?  It's a slower dance and I think there's this tendency to just want to do fast/more energetic things when you are trying to perform but when I think about a lot of the great moments I've experienced in cross-step it's really been more understated things.  I guess it just goes back to how performing for an audience really is different than just being in the dance.  In some ways thinking about this external thing really takes you out of it.

In past times I've really tried to actively push against this because I was =tired= of all the energy of "how should I impress others" or "what would be best to do".  So I really made it a point to just focus on my breathing or the music or things like that.  But this time I think it was a little different...I think I sort of had a little moment of almost like...being "zen" about it?  I definitely had the audience in mind, and I could tell that like my dancing was being affected by it, but rather than fight it I sort of just...noticed it?  I think it's said sometimes that observation is the first step toward weakening the control that something has over you...because for you to observe something happening, you need to be "on the outside" of it.

And I feel like I kinda learned, oh, maybe performing is just...a different thing, that just brings a different set of feelings.  And maybe that's ok too, like that's just how it's gonna be.  Each situation is different, like before that whole event I got to dance "Waltz of the Flowers" with a partner and that was it's own wholly different microcosm of feelings (me thinking about Princess Tutu, of course, but also of one year ago at the ball when I also danced the same song, with a different person, which of course carried its own very different feeling).  A wonderful dance actually that was, probably the one that stands out in my memory the most...

Anyone who's spoken to me knows that I have really high standards for myself for performing waltz.  I'm not exactly sure how to explain that other than I just have really high standards for myself in general haha....but I guess for waltz specifically, I DO really care about the dance as a whole, the visceral feeling of it, and the knowledge of the dance and figures and technique.  Having been going out dancing WCS every week for these months, it still just always feels like coming home when I get to go back to waltz and play at what I =know= I know best.

I've danced with WCS instructors who can instantly pinpoint your bad habits as soon as you dance with them (I mean, any pretty-competent instructor, or even just experienced dancers, will usually have that sense about them).  For me it's the same when I dance waltz with other people.  Especially over the past year I've become pretty aware of that.  That when I dance with someone, whether lead or follow, I know what's happening in the dance on not just an intuitive but also on a well-informed level.  Whether the other person is on time.  Whether =I= led a turn on the wrong beat.  How people signal (or don't signal) certain figures.  It's all kind of laid bare for me when I dance with people, or heck, even when I see them.  I don't say any of these things, of course, that's what private lessons are for, not social dances -- but the thoughts still come to me, and in those moments I think to myself, "oh, wow, I guess I actually do know quite a lot about this dance".

I guess where I was going with this is that I have my own standards for myself when I perform in these things and no amount of external validation really ends up moving the needle on that, because of course, just like everyone else is "laid bare" when I see/dance with them, that goes doubly so for myself, both in terms of technique but also in terms of "energy".  There have been times when people have had very kind words to say but I kinda knew that I fell short of what I wanted to feel, or even vice-versa.  Kinda like making all the wrong decisions in ALTTPR or a game of strategy and then getting rewarded for it just because you lucked into it.

Happily, this time I cleared my own "bar" of standards.  Honestly, though, I felt that "bar" become a little less defined for myself, which I think is a good thing.  Because yeah, there were a bunch of things I could tell weren't the best, and I was both too experimental at times but also didn't push my boundaries enough, and like of course I hadn't been working on anything new for the past umpteen months so it all would feel stale to me, but I dunno....I sorta just like, accepted that as part of the deal?  I can't say =why= I reached that conclusion, it just sort of felt that way.  I guess that perfectionism inside of me relaxed a little bit, which is probably not a bad thing.

The dance scene is an interesting thing.  Sometimes I get to thinking "well, I really haven't improved significantly in forever, so I mean...by comparison, everyone else has got to have been rising up, right".  And then I remember that so many people just cycle in and out and through this dance scene and don't really come back and somehow I'm one of the few, few people who has really stuck around.

I asked my partner afterwards, when we were dancing to some other song, whether it felt like my dancing had changed or not over the past X years.  I told this to them, but really that question was a win-win answer for me.  Like, of course, if I had improved, that's good, but for me, even just "staying the same" is something that's inherently beautiful (and, more often than not, impossible).

There were a few moments, though, when I actually =did= notice that something had changed.  Maybe that's what made Waltz of the Flowers stand out in my mind so much, because that's when I really felt it.  Certain movements that I don't think I would have felt confident about in the past.  I hadn't danced with this person for quite some time and like I said, it's not like I have been working on this sort of thing.  But movement belies who we are as people, which is why it's so significant and elucidating when I notice something like this for myself.

I can feel that I've become more confident, in some ways, for sure.  I think WCS dancing has helped with that too, as always just =any= sort of thing that instills confidence in your own body movement is so, so important.  I don't know how to translate what I felt into words, it was such a kinesthetic experience.  Confidence, yeah, but like...not in a "I've practiced this until I know it like the back of my hand" way, and also not in a "I don't know if this is going to work but I'm just going to fake it until I make it!" way either.  I think it's more the kind of confidence that comes with like...safety?  Safety and believing in yourself, I guess.  Again, really hard to put into words...

Anyways, back to bigger-picture thoughts on the whole thing.  I think the easy ending that you'd write to this whole thing is that I tried to "rekindle" my fire and like, rediscover what it was that really made me care about waltz so much.  Getting reacquainted with that visceral feeling of going across the floor and just moving through the music and spinning and all that.  And yeah, like I =did= get to experience that for the first time in a while, and it really was wonderful.  We danced to "we are the lucky ones", and though it's not my favorite song to dance to*, perhaps it was apt.  It sounds cheesy, but um...I guess, yeah, we all are lucky.

But that's the thing, this =was= the first time I really have been able to experience this more visceral "ah yes, flying across the floor and having complete trust in my partner, this is what I waltz for!" in a long time.  And it made me think about that how that's sadly just hasn't been something that's there for me to access anymore.  How I've not been pushing myself in waltz for so long.  And about how I've kinda had to find other things to sort of fill in the gaps in that absence of those motivating factors.  It's hard, but I guess I kinda have.

I see people all the time go from "wow social dance is so fun, I just want to learn ALL the dances and go to ALL the things" to a second phase where they're all "honestly it's no longer about the dancing for me I'm just here for the people", but I think the real test of whether people stick around is usually when "the people" that they refer to are no longer there.  When you can't access that anymore, do you still have reasons to stick around?  It's going to be different for every person -- some people just pick right back up and meet a new group of people, maybe other people will just focus back to the dancing, maybe some people will enjoy dance in different ways.

And like, yeah, it's =sad= that I don't get to waltz like this on a regular basis like in days of yore or whatever.  Everyone dances so differently, I think we've all been there and felt how much of a difference each partner makes.  To go back to the "sense of responsibility" thing, I think in the past I really felt like being one of the most experienced waltz dancers really meant that I should have tried to uplift the community as a whole.  JaSmix was always important to me for this reason, but I guess it's not quite as important to me anymore.  Like who am I to decide what is important for other people or to push knowledge onto them.  Sure, if I feel like it and if they feel like it, there can be something there.  But if not...?  That's okay, too.  I'm not part of this silly little epic "Last Waltz Jedi" saga or anything stupid like that, I'm just a person.

Oddly enough I think watching through Chihayafuru helped me come to peace with that a little more.  The like, top two players in that show are like super self-taught, no teacher, definitely have their own very distinct anachronisms, and go against the rest of the karuta world which is all about teams and schools and raising each other up and all.  And I was like, oh.  Yeah.  If I was good at this game I'd totally probably just be someone like Shinobu.  And like, maybe that's okay, too!

 

We go through life and we accumulate more and more experiences, and we figure out what works for us and what doesn't really work for us.  In VBall performances I've come across different ways of feeling toward that "external" energy of expectations and second-guessing that I used to see as being so disruptive.  I guess this year was yet another spin on that, another take that I hadn't seen before.  Even when I talk about Chihayafuru and not really feeling like I fit the role of uplifting a community and teaching others and whatnot, and how I usually just do everything myself, I think to the Zelda GMP mentor tournament that I've coached in for the past two summers, and how there =are= spaces where I do share knowledge and experience.

I guess overall this year's VBall gave me a new way to look at some of the same old things.  Same event, different venue.  Same partner, different dance.  Same feelings, different thoughts.  As is usually the case with me, it's not like there was anything earthshattering or mindblowing.  Just more different lenses with which to see life through.  None of them necessarily "better" than the other, just, different.  And we gain a more full and broad understanding of things as we accumulate these different views...

We're doing it!

Today was a good day, as I had hoped.  Woke up and did a bunch of cooking, starting work on dinner straight after finishing with lunch (would take a long time for the lamb shoulder to cook in the curry I was making).  Both meals turned out well!

Lunch was a cream-based shrimp spaghetti -- I used the leftover chimichurri from last night's dinner to add a hit of parsley, garlic, olive oil/etc flavor and I chopped up the leftover red onion from the salad I made a few days ago to add in as well.  I grated in some parmesan (need to get some more, actually) but honestly most of the sauce was just based on heavy cream and nowadays even when I'm going for more of a cacio e pepe or shrimp scampi deal I prefer to use some, it just makes emulsifying everything easier, takes flavor well, and pasta + heavy cream is already a good combo to begin with.

Dinner was the curry with lamb shoulder.  I haven't actually made curry in =ages=, I was wondering whether it would even come out well, but I guess this is the kind of dish that is relatively forgiving.  I did a good job of chucking in some ingredients I normally wouldn't have to clean out some produce...I didn't have any mushrooms on hand, which I normally would have tossed in, but I added some dried shiitakes for flavor, and then tossed in some celery stalks that I don't really have a plan for, plus I diced up this turnip that's just been sitting in the fridge that I didn't even pick out in the first place (from a grocery delivery where they just gave me the wrong thing I think?).  Everything came out just fine, seems that it was well-liked!  Honestly even though I started it going right after lunch the lamb could have even used a little more time (or a pressure cook, I guess...), I guess because my housemates had dinner early while I was doing OHC.  Only thing is I should have went down to stir a little more often...luckily nothing burned.

Did some more good work on Rhythm Quest -- so far this past week I worked on dynamically loading in the tilesets for each level (and being able to change them per-checkpoint), as well as the backdrops.  The main level scene wasn't engineered to switch between different backdrops, BUT the menu scene already had a totally re-engineered system to do all of that, so I basically just copied that logic over and it's all working pretty well after tweaking some scripts and shaders to do the right thing.  My current piece of work is doing the same thing but with the different particle effects in the game, unifying them so I can just load them in on-demand instead of having separate scenes per level with them already baked in.

While I was at it I decided I may as well touch up the particle implementation as a whole, and now I'm deciding to clean up the particles so that instead of just "spawning a bunch, hopefully across a big enough area to cover the entire camera view" I'm actually moving towards an approach where I only keep the particles needed to cover the screen and dynamically wrap or spawn/despawn them appropriately, reacting to screen size changes as well.  It's nice to have something concrete to work towards.  ALTTPR coding work is kind of on pause while I deal with this big Rhythm Quest rework, but that's fine as I don't want to get too distracted by the ALTTPR coding stuff (though of course I do want to figure out the Skull Woods questions...)

Speaking of ALTTPR, I've just been idly grinding z3rsim while I can, in an attempt to hopefully kick my mind into gear regarding routing decisions.  Hopefully with enough reps I can feel a little more confident about that stuff.

I did OHC today and FINALLY I did something that I was really happy with.  I've felt pretty "eh" about a lot of my recent OHC works, which again I've noted is totally expected, but it had certainly been awhile since I really felt like I was firing on all cylinders.  I've had a few songs here and there that were kinda partway there, like I sortttt of liked them, but it wasn't quite the same, until this one.  Of course it is still OHC, there's only so much I can do in an hour and corners definitely had to be cut here and there, but damn, it's good to be back again.

I closed the night out with a bunch of skin/bodycare so I can try to look beautiful tomorrow (haha), and then another Caesar 3/Augustus Reconquered mission.  This one was Sarmizegetusa (what a mouthful):

This one had an interesting setup where they encourage you to make your primary trade with the native huts as opposed to the land caravans (though of course you still want to setup normal trade operations too).  Marble was the clear obvious resource to trade with the natives, as the only land caravan route that traded marble only traded 10 of it (natives trade an unlimited amount), and it was the raw material that sold for the highest price.

Overall I managed to finish this mission with juuust enough of everything.  Obviously there's some extra space on the map still, so I could have built an extra housing block if I really needed to, and there was a boatload of extra farmland (actually ended up tearing down a bunch of farms that I didn't end up needing, especially after building the Ceres grand temple), but with the 3 big housing blocks I was juuuust at the right population count.  The palace/villa block on the far right was a bit cramped and I wasn't actually even sure whether I could evolve to 4x4 palaces with only a colloseum and no hippodrome (also only 3 types of food) but turns out you can, so I had a weird mix of 3x3s and 4x4s.  Because it was so cramped over there I actually ended up building a last-minute grand temple to Venus in the top corner to get the desirability up, though it seems like even without that I could have just barely crossed the prosperity threshold.

Didn't have to restart the mission or anything at all though!  I was a little worried when the objective to unlock fishing came up because I had not planned for a good place to put the fishing wharves at all, but luckily since there was so much farmland to grow wheat, fish was only ever needed for the palaces/villas so we didn't need a ton of it.

I think choosing to build the grand temples in the far left plateau made a lot of sense...initially I thought we could fit a small housing block there (there's water up there in case you want to), but it really wouldn't have been able to fit that many people.  If I had to do the mission again I might have honestly tried to find an alternate space for the palace/villa block, like maybe have that take the place of the upper housing block and then shift that block down to where the unoccupied (well actually there's natives there) area?  Or maybe fit a housing block instead of one of the blocks of farms, and replace that food intake with fishing?  Eh, but the problem with that is that my clay/pottery industry really took up a good portion of the fishing space too...yeah, dunno.  The housing block on the lower plateau honestly was a bit cramped too...perhaps if I moved like the weapons / oil / stone industries down there, then the space on the top-left edge would be free for more housing.  Yeah, maybe.

Anyways, I'm looking forward to the rest of the weekend.  My nose is still a bit stuffy but I'm feeling good enough to go to Vball and do my best to have fun there.  We'll see how it goes, ha ha...since we aren't in the usual location, we may not have as much space.  I was assuming we'd be in the same crowded/small location that I remember from 2023, but I checked and that year was actually in the Hilton SF Union Square, whereas we're in the Marriot Marquis this time, so I'm not sure!

Either way, there's a Teance social the day after which should be the perfect way to unwind and relax afterward.  I missed going to Teance this week since I was sick in bed, so it'll be really nice to just go there and hang out for a while, maybe get some work or writing done, too.

I dunno, I'm like feeling better physically now, but emotionally on the downturn again??  This time it's different though, not feeling lonely or anything, just kinda haven't been performing up to my own standards in a lot of different ways.  Granted, I've been sick, so maybe it's not the most fair assessment, but the ALTTPR seed really put the nail in the coffin.  Got more than a fine time, but I was kinda unhappy with how my decisionmaking was going, and last week felt kind of like that as well, like I was inexperienced and floundering about rather than keeping a cool head on and thinking ahead.

Like before, I'm still keeping it together; still cooking, still doing work here and there on Rhythm Quest, even though it doesn't =feel= like I'm doing all that much, progress is still progress.  Maybe tomorrow can be a good day, maybe I'll try to put some dedicated work in to feel good about, though I will probably also be kind of busy with cooking and OHC and all.  Who knows, maybe I'll feel good about OHC.

As always, my approach to these things is just slow and steady.  A return to white tea will probably help with my sense of self.  More letter writing or blogging always helps, too.  I'll grind some z3rsim practice for the ALTTPR stuff.  Check some boxes off for Rhythm Quest.  Try to take care of myself so I can be my beautiful self on Friday.

Things are like, somehow actually okay, surprisingly?

I rose up out of my emotional woes and instead found myself in the midst of physical ones, as I've come down with some sort of cold or other, just like everyone else these days, apparently.  Last night was god-awful as my nose was getting 100% destroyed and I had a lot of trouble sleeping through the combination of pain/discomfort and delirium.  Thankfully I seem to be past the worst of it which makes me hopeful that I'll perhaps still make it out to VBall.

I haven't been enjoying my usual White Tea, thanks to being sick, but have instead been finding some nice encouragement for living through...food!  I cooked some blackened chicken + salad with some mayo/mustard/olive oil/garlic dressing that I threw together and it really hit the spot!  Paired with some croissants that my best friend made, it was both a healthy and excellent meal and I boiled the leftover chicken bones to make some nice soup to drink afterward.

Other than that, even though I've of course not felt like doing much, I've still managed to stay functional -- I skipped a meal of cooking, but still made dinner, and have even been making small yet gradual progress on the big Rhythm Quest refactor that I've been working on (unifying all of the level generation stuff to handle all of the different tilesets/backdrops in the game).  There's a lot of work to be done on multiple fronts -- Rhythm Quest, ALTTPR analysis, ALTTPR website, work work, etc, but as long as I'm doing a bit of something each day, it's probably fine, I think?

Spent most of today just in bed sleeping, which seems to have helped things along, but also managed to get through another Augustus level -- this one is Londinium!

I restarted this one midway through and am glad that I did...was quite difficult getting everything to fit!  But I ended up with some empty space to spar in the end -- you can see that I have some empty areas where I could have added some additional industry in case I needed more pottery or bricks or furniture or whatever.

Part of my mistake this time was not really accounting for scaling up the industries.  Like yes, you can put the pottery and brick industries in the same block, and that sort of makes sense since you get to reuse clay for both, but what's going to happen when your city and exports grow and you end up needing like twice as many bricks and 4 times as much pottery as before?  Better to plan for dedicated areas for each, otherwise it becomes a little bit messier to deal with all of the logistics.

I still ended up with a supplemental pottery/furniture station toward the far left of the map; almost makes me wonder actually if I should have had pottery/furniture be made on-site for each of the housing blocks, and whether that would have made things any easier?  Having more separate, small industry blocks feeding each of the housing areas, instead of having big centralized industries that everything else pulls from.  Hmm...maybe both have their merits and it might depend on the layout of the space.  I'll have to think about that in the future.

The "grand temple mountain" in the top wasn't really part of the original plan; that area seems like it would make sense to turn into a housing block, but I had to fit the grand temples and monuments =somewhere=, and they happened to all fit up there, so it seemed as good of a place as any.

If I had to do the mission over, I would have constructed a Pantheon, for sure, to upgrade past 2x2 villas to the 3x3 ones.  I ended up with like 4 entire blocks dedicated to 2x2 villas in the end, and was honestly unsure if I could get my prosperity rating up enough with just those (you aren't allowed to build Academies in this mission).  It worked, and divvying up the food between vegetables and meat to evolve all the other housing to grand insulae helped, but I think things would have been easier if I had just went the Pantheon route.  I just checked and Large Villas are 400 prosperity rating versus Medium Villas at 180, so it's quite a big jump. 

Might have another trip to the land-of-yummy-egg-tarts coming up next month, which will probably be decent, I guess.  Yeah, things are alright.  There's things to be sad about, sure, but there's also things to be happy about too, and that makes all the difference.  Some nice company, whether it be in person or virtual, and a healthy dose of videogames to look forward to, etc etc.

Conquered the Damascus reconquered campaign mission today!

Had a few minor issues here and there with having enough money (the imports are really expensive to get going for monument construction!) and finding enough space to put everything, but I managed to work through it all, though I can't say it's a particularly "pretty" layout.  Nothing too much else to say about this one, it was fun to see the city =finally= come together near the end as I finally got the palaces up and had enough funds to import pottery and get everything all working smoothly.

Struggled to sleep last night; pretty much everything went wrong haha, I was hungry, depressed, had an early morning meeting scheduled...

I actually managed to stay awake after the morning meetings and all, surprisingly, and went to get an oil change and actually managed to do some good work at Sophie's.  I hadn't been in a long long time; it was interesting trying the "White Thunder" white tea that I remembered having good impressions of and being able to place the taste more accurately now that I've sampled more different teas.  It's definitely an aged white...closest to the Shan Lin Xi from Teance, which I also enjoy, so it's no wonder that I liked this one.  I was a bit surprised, actually, to be honest -- hadn't remembered it tasting like this, but I guess that's what I liked even back then.

Looking forward to this three-day weekend!  Let's try not to fall back to sleeping =too= late, I guess...

I've got a bunch of coding to do, both for Rhythm Quest but also for ALTTPR analysis stuff.  I finished analyzing all of the PoD stuff but I want to do some stuff for Skull Woods next as that dungeon has always really irked me how we don't really know the best way(s) to approach it.  But as I'm doing that I've been realizing that my code could use some refactors, so I'm taking care of that as well.

Sunday there's a little draw meet which should be fun; I should be able to finish my monthly pixel artwork then, as I'm already halfway through it...honestly mostly just need to tidy it up and then figure out all the colors and such.  If I have extra time maybe I should just get a head start on next month's, or maybe I should just work on other stuff...

I feel like I have a bunch to write about, but I sadly have not been doing a good job of following through on the letter-writing before bed.  Maybe tomorrow...

I finally took some time to start reconnecting with the threads of my past, today.  I had been putting it off for so long, much longer than usual.  "I'm afraid of what I might find...or not find," I told my therapist about it.

I found the usual things though.  Happiness, sadness, nostalgia, memories stirred that had been forgotten.  But perhaps most of all a familiar feeling.  In the day to day of trying to make sure that I'm doing all of the right things, I forgot that once upon a time I was all by myself, feeling either alone or anxious.  "Like something was wrong".

I made this song in 2023, "Only You", after having quite the challenge of a year to go through.  I knew the song was flawed, and "raw", for lack of a better way of putting it, but it felt authentic, too.  I knew that despite my misgivings with it that it was the way it was meant to be.  I think the me of that time understood that what I felt was "off" about that song reflected the same way that I felt toward the year.  It didn't go how I planned, it certainly didn't measure up to the original composition of the melody ("One and Only", by aivi tran).

It's rare for me to take someone else's work and ascribe new emotional meaning to it.  I mean, yes, I did a whole rearrangement album a long time ago, but even then, I don't think it was really the same.  Not the same as this song, anyways.  I've tried to write music from emotion before, but it's actually not something that comes naturally to me, not at all.  There are a few songs (my Mario theme remix, and "Let's Have an Adventure"), that came out of a feeling of uplifting cheerful exuberance, for sure, but there's very few other than that.  "Only You" is perhaps really the one example I can really point to.

I said that my arrangement doesn't "measure up" to the original composition and I think that's certainly true, but going back to it now it so clearly reminds me of a certain bundle of feelings, a certain state of mind.

I recall that song again now, having connected with these strands from my past -- a past that I can no longer go back to.  A past that I am hesitant to explore, yet relieved when I find that it carries both the same meaning, and even the same lack of meaning, as always.

There is another melody that I've written that I come back to during times like this, "Toki's Theme".  Another one of these tracks I've made once upon a time that hardly anybody remembers I'm sure, but not so for me (I use it as an alarm tone as well...).

I clasp together the healing amulet that was given to me once upon a time and as I feel lost, looking in the distance at the waves and the empty shore, I remember that even in solitude there is peace if you can search for it.  That even if your past has gone, its whispers and echoes can still lend you a gentle comfort.  At times the past can guide us, be our north star, be our reason d'etre.  But it doesn't really have to do any of those things either.  It can simply be a fixed presence in our lives.  Something that is there.  It doesn't need to catch our fall in order to be supportive.

Toki lives in her own time.  This I know, because...well, of course I know, I designed her, silly.  She is...of course, similar to me, but reading the way she writes, she feels a little bit different, too.  It's hard to describe in words.  I feel like Toki is perhaps, a more guarded version of me.  Me on my proper writing behavior, perhaps.

I guess most of all, Toki seems more...hopeful about things.  Is that...how I used to be?  Before the feelings of "Only You", before I saw the blue koi vanish before my eyes, before I said goodbye to some of my best friends?  Did I really believe that some things, will always come back to me no matter what?  Hmm...I guess, when I stop and think about it, yes.  I know distinctly that there were times in my life that made me feel that hope.  That made me think, "oh...maybe it really can be true.  Maybe there exist things in this world that will truly return to me."

Toki seems also to live life at a bit slower of a pace than mine.  I guess, in that way, she reminds me of how I was in college, at some point.  It was a peaceful yet lonely existence; it makes me wonder a bit whether those two traits of my life were intertwined.

"A world changed by time, scarred by the past of you."

Some things change, others stay the same.  I'm still listening to my own music as a blog, late at night, thinking about these things.  But something is, indeed, different this time.  A little meowmie, beckoning me to bed.  Reminding me that even in the midst of being lost, there is still something to be found.

What is the difference between admiring and desiring?

Sometimes there are things that I see and say to myself, "that's really cool and I like it, but it's not really something I want to be a part of".  And then there are the things that I'm confident are part of what I should always strive for.

But then there are those things, shining in the sky, that draw me toward them like a magnet.  They're tantalizing, yet also foreign.  Because I know they aren't really things that are natural for me, not at all.  Yet there's something about them that both captivates me but also makes me feel forlorn, that maybe, even if I try, I'll never reach them.  And that even if I =could= reach them, to do so would be to give up what I know is even more important -- the things that are a part of me already.

There have been several stars that shined bright in my life.  Three, I guess, I would say.  It's interesting...the first two, I didn't really associate them with each other that much.  They were both special, of course, but they occupied such different spaces in my life.  The first, something that shined in the distance that left and never came back.  The second, both warming me with its light but also knocking me off course, making me uncertain about my path.  The third, I always thought reminded me of that first star.  I knew that inevitably, it would leave and not come back.  I had that feeling, from the beginning.  It was the same, I guess.  That same magnetism that draws me in no matter what.  But now it reminds me of that second star, too.  The same beauty resonates across all three of them, just in slightly different ways.  But there's something so incredulous to me about that "NP" energy.

It makes me think back to the girl in the tower, and it makes me understand once again that feeling that I could never be up in the sky with those stars.  It's not my place to.

It's an interesting feeling.  I don't really feel like it's insufferable that I can never be up there.  I think I've grown to accept that a little more over the years; that I won't be together with the stars and all that.  But there's still this feeling of sadness, seeing them shine so brightly and then thinking "oh...maybe I'll never be able to do that".  I dunno, really!

The stars shine so brightly at night so that they can bring light to people like me, who are always watching them from afar.  I wrote that once.  Is that really true, though?  I'm not sure if it is or if it's not.  Maybe it's different now, that they really are so far in the distance.

Life was different, when the star was visiting the girl in the tower.  The girl was "stuck".  She =had= to leave the tower, is what we said.  I'm not sure.  Seeing the stars, thinking about the tower, thinking about the girl, I'm not really sure what my place in all of it is.  Should she stay in the tower?  Should she leave the tower?  Should she try to become a star?

Hah...just thinking about it, I think it's clear to me which one is the right choice.  She should stay in the tower.  That's always what it comes back to, isn't it?  But I think it's because there is perhaps another way out.  That the girl can change even when she is in the tower.  The star is not the only thing that can bring light to her life.  It's not worth leaving the tower to be with the stars, no matter how bright they are.  In the story, she had to leave, because it was all about the star, about the stars.  But there were other versions of the story too, right?  The version where it was so quiet, so calm.  "A collector of fulfilled wishes", she said.  That girl had a wish, too.  But she wouldn't leave the tower, didn't have to leave the tower, for her wish to come true.

I don't know if my wish will come true.  But if I think between the light of the stars, and the "place where there are no more ungranted wishes", it's clear not only where I belong, but where I would rather be.

It's still important for me to look at the stars.  To imagine what makes them shine so brightly.  To try and bring some of that light into my life, no matter how incredulous it seems.  I thought I had gotten away from that, but it seems that no matter how much I try, they keep on staying a part of my life, drawing my eyes with their magnetic light.  But that's not an unwelcome thing at all.  Maybe everything is as it should be this way.

That's another one down!  This one is Caesarea, which has the unique challenge where you can't grow or produce any food whatsoever and need to rely solely on food imports to feed your people.

I took two attempts for this one, mostly because the first time through my city was becoming a bit unwieldy in its layout and I wanted to try my hand at restructuring things a bit.  I think I managed a lot better the second time through, packing things into mostly efficient spots.  My favorite part was sticking the barracks and military academy on the verryyyy top where the crescent-shaped island is, next to the trade docks, meaning that every time a new soldier was trained they'd have to jog all the way across the entire desert to make it to their post, haha.

I'm definitely becoming a better and better player as I learn from my mistakes and the various "gotchas" that can take an otherwise booming city to a system that somehow just isn't working right.  This time I actually managed to finish the entire mission before I discovered my mistake -- I wasn't being efficient with my food imports!

I had set up the trade routes as efficiently as I could, I thought -- setting up the land traders with a nice highway to speed through the city, and building all of the appropriate monuments -- caravanserai, lighthouse, grand temple to ceres and mercury, but I still had some problems getting everyone fed toward the late part of the game, especially when I needed to divert a bunch of food supply to feed the 9 (!) luxury palaces that I made next to the hippodrome.

Turns out that my issue was not having enough warehouse storage space for the traders to dump all of their stuff off!  I've been trying to default to just having warehouses split across 4 goods, so they can only house 8 of each good.  It's more efficient in terms of warehouse usage and if you do things right you won't need to stockpile a ton of goods anyways because often you'll just always have carts from cart depots ready to unload more once those 8 are gone.  But I guess for goods where you really want the trade to be rock solid, especially for =imports=, you should probably allocate more space to them.  I also didn't think of it, but I could have just used granaries for the traders to drop off their haul, since they can do that (and granaries hold 3200 instead of 2400...maybe the cart depots even hold more?  I think from granary to granary they hold 16 units instead of 8, but I'm not sure if that applies to warehouse to granary transfers...probably not).

I had fun, though, definitely feels good to have built a great city in the end.

The next mission up has an interesting challenge where you don't have access to reservoir water (until later on, I guess?) so you have to just build using wells at first I guess?  I'm assuming you will unlock mission posts later on and then gain access to the one oasis surrounded by the native huts, so I'll have to try and plan out where my future reservoir and aqueduct lines might go after that happens...

In other news, I finally got my Pastel Dreams keycaps!  They look really cute for sure.  The DSA profile is kind of interesting, kind of a smaller key surface to find with your fingers, and definitely I feel like I prefer cherry profile since the sculpted profiles just feel nicer to navigate around finger-wise, but it's not too bad, all things considered.  I currently have them installed in my Neo80, along with the HMX Twilight switches, so more of a clacky build (although somehow the spacebar seems to be really thuddy in comparison).  I had a small issue where the backspace key wasn't returning well, maybe this particular keycap set just has the wrong tolerances for the stabilizers I'm using.  But I seem to have fenagled it around to where it works okay.  Maybe in the future I'll swap it out and the Pastel Dreams will go in the Cycle7 while the Osume Sakura goes on the Neo80?  I dunno, there's lots of possible options, I guess.

I'm supposed to try and make sure I get a little more sleep these coming weeks, so let's get to that...

As always, it's a mix, overall.  I'm at least not struggling like I was last month, so that feels nice to be able to say.  My sleep schedule is, predictably, unpredictable.  Particularly last night where I really wasn't able to sleep much at all...either owing to being too hungry or maybe having too much nighttime tea -- ended up choosing chrysanthemum tonight instead as a result...

 

I talked a bunch about linear key switches in my last post -- I ended up going with the Keygeek Tipsy Red (Blush) and the HMX Twilight switches, and nabbed myself a big batch of both.  I'm currently running with the Keygeek Tipsy Reds in my Cycle7 (added most of the foams in, as well, minus the PET sheet since that would require me to reinstall the stabs) and it's a really pleasant and tame muted sound, very refreshing!  After a while I'll take these out and switch over to the HMX Twilights and go for a more clacky build, but for now I'm enjoying these, not regretting the purchase at all.

My DSA Pastel Dreams keycaps come in soon as well, which is mega exciting.  Not 100% sure what the overall plan is going to be, maybe those will go in my Neo80 while my Osume Sakura caps stay in the Cycle7?  Or vice-versa.  Those are probably the most likely to happen; then the Cinnamoroll keycaps can go onto my small portable board probably...

 

It was a few days ago by now, but another Augustus Reconquered mission in Ceasar 3 is complete!

Felt mostly good about this one.  It was challenging for sure and there was a point in the middle where I was struggling to both feed everyone and have enough workers to accommodate everything I had going on.  I also learned that the campaign recommends turning the retirement age up from 50 to 60 (hopefully this is the last time I learn about a difficulty-related setting that I just overlooked), which certainly helps with the worker shortage issues I kept on having in previous maps.

Had one kind of major crisis where there were no incoming "invasions" so I thought it was safe to send all of my troops to dispatch to go help the distant roman city but then a barbarian attack happened shortly after and I had no army left to defend...in the end I had to end up spamming a bunch of prefectures so that the police would try to fight off the invaders and at least hold them at bay for a little bit while my towers tried to do the real damage.  Phew...

The next mission should be really interesting as there's no food production at all on the map -- you're forced to import all of your food!  Should be an interesting spin on things for sure.

 

Made la zi ji, it was a mild success!  I say mild because there's probably room for improvement -- can afford to use more xiao mi la peppers and more sichuan peppercorns to amp up both sides of the spice equation.  Shallow-frying the chicken breast/thigh worked relatively okay but I got a request to get it crispy next time, so maybe more breading / more oil is needed for that.  We'll probably ditch the breast as well, the thigh was just better as expected; using some drumstick meat might be something worth trying though.

 

I had a sort of long work week followed by a pretty long weekend (in the midst of that now).  There's this weird half-fallacy where it feels like if I just laze around and don't make full use of my weekend then it's a "waste" and I'm "behind".  I say "half-fallacy" because I think it's equal parts veritable and not at the same time.  Like, I ought not to have to feel that pressure, but at the same time, it doesn't really feel *good* to not have invigorating days.  But I guess everything in moderation is okay.  Every once in a while if you just go hedonistic degenerate mode and sleep late and play videogames all day maybe that's okay, but that really isn't sustainable at all.

Taking care of myself is important...