I'm trying...this'll be a short one since it's already past my bedtime.

Played a casual boots seed in ALTTPR and was pretty unhappy with my play / performance.  But there's like, not that much to do about it other than just keep at it and hope to keep learning very slowly from experience, right?

I do think that it's both that, but also a mindset thing, like I don't feel like my mental state was in the right place when I was running the seed this time, it felt like I pressured myself into making decision and that's just not how I ought to be doing things, at least not if I want to make sure I'm happy with my own play.  I guess it's similar to the stuff I wrote about performing / contests at VBall or whatever, but also a little different because it's not like I'm being evaluated by an audience (well, until I'm on restream, which actually will happen in a few months, at least for one time).

I do also feel like I've lost some of the "flowcharting" that I have tended to fall back on and rely upon in my previous rando experience; perhaps I need to make sure I'm firming up my mental framework and heuristics for approaching the game to make sure there are less big decisions that I'm sort of just winging on the fly.

I forgot to mention this last time but I played DDR the other day and I can sloooowwwwwlyy actually feel my foot speed increasing when it comes to approaching 16th strings.  It's very slight but somewhat noticeable, but that's cool, I mean I usually don't think of improvement DDR in terms of pure speed, for me it's usually mostly a stamina thing and then secondly a chart processing / technique thing, but generally I'm not used to playing charts where footspeed is really a factor (I guess that also comes from the charts that I'm used to...back in the eurobeat era when 16ths just weren't really much of a thing since the tempos were already higher).

I started to put together a setlist for my potential dance event!  Due to space reservations ending at probably like 10PM (?) it looks like I'm going to have to choose between hosting a lesson and then doing a 2-hour setlist or just deciding that I don't want to teach until JaSmix and doing just a 3-hour set by itself.  I have a lesson concept in mind but of course it takes real work to actually put something together, we'll see if that ends up materializing.  I've not really done 2-hour events so that would be an interesting little twist on making a playlist, admittedly.  It feels so short...

Things are ok!

VBall definitely threw off my sleep schedule, there were a couple days where I really struggled to get back on track and not just feel tired all afternoon or have to sleep through the first half of the day or whatever.  Given that I'm writing this at 4AM I guess I'm still not really doing great on that, but at least I haven't been feeling like I've been letting the entire day go by...

Was initially planning to go work at Teance today but it turned out to be a warm day and we were ordering so I just got my mango pomelo sago drink to enjoy at home and decided to go to Teance tomorrow instead.

I published my Rhythm Quest devlog for the month.  It always feels good to get that done, it's kind of a nice marker that makes me feel like I can take things easy.  Well, I don't actually know if that's the best though, I feel like there's this temptation to just kinda kick back and not really work on things as much after getting the devlog done.  That, despite there still being a million things for me to take care of and work on.  Sigh...

We're into March now and it feels like the weather got warm all of a sudden, making me realize that winter is almost over =(  These years I'm trying to not be AS sad about the cold weather going away, but it's still hard to come to grips with, honestly.  I miss it already.  The cool air, the rain, the clouds in the morning, candles and scarves, just...everything.  Cooking is always a big part of winter for me as well but I'm trying to not be =as= let down by the end of the cooler months and try to think about things to make in the the spring and summer seasons -- getting a crawfish boil, or doing some grilling, making poke, or things like that.

I actually did poke the other day, it wasn't bad!  This time in addition to the arctic char (which I use over salmon, no parasite risk so you don't even have to freeze it) I had some yellowfin/ahi tuna as well -- was frozen and I wasn't comfortable serving it completely raw but I felt ok having it rare/seared, so I did that.  I'm gonna have to get ahi tuna steaks more often, I find that I'm not usually a huge fan of raw tuna but having it seared is quite nice and it goes right well with some greens or sushi rice with cucumber or whatever.  Poke bowl overall could have used a hit more flavor, maybe just more soy/salt, but overall it was quite respectable, actually made quite a lot of it.  Helped that I already had the miso dressing on hand from last time, though I used all of it up...

Finally got around to making butternut squash soup, too, which turned out well.  Simple roasted butternut squash cubes (with a little bit of bacon) ended up being a big hit actually; that might be something that I do again in the future.  I usually have done butternut squash on the stovetop, searing it in browned butter and serving it with pasta, usually with some chicken and a little bit of cream, but I'm probably going to just go the oven route, it seems to be easier to get better results with.

My chickies have been doing ok...I gave white chicky a simple foot soak today, but black chicky was skittish for some reason and didn't want anything to do with me, dunno why, maybe just her being broody or whatever.  I found some of the wood floor in the nesting box peeled off, hoping that was just already there or just normal wear and tear and not chicky being a dumbass and scratching the floor up... Ugh, I feel like we went =straight= from "too cold/rainy to go out and deal with the chickens" to "too hot to deal with the chickens", what happened to the in-between weather??

Mission City Swing was really really warm this past week too...bleh.  At least it was a fun one, I feel like I brought a pretty okay energy there.  I don't mind that we have a week off from it this next week.  I've actually been kind of wanting to visit the south bay and do something there (I want Molly Tea...), we'll see if I make it out for anything in the next week or so.  Else, apparently Jammix is happening on the 14th, so I'll be down for that.

It's confirmed that this year's trip is to Portugal again so I'll be doing that same flight over there.  Not =super= looking forward to it but it should be an okay trip, I remember last time I felt that way at least.  Relaxing, not too stressful, and good food.  There's another trip happening in May too, to NY, for something else; that one still needs a bit more planning and coordination to nail down, but I'm mildly excited for that one.  I feel like I've kinda got a good handle on how I like to travel, we'll see if I can put that to good use.

This week's ALTTPR seed went just fine, I think I played well despite not getting great luck.  And that feels better than the other way around, like it had been those other weeks, so that's good.  I've been grinding a few strats and such, particularly for GT, might actually do some escape practice at some point if I get a chance.  And then of course there's the Skull Woods routing stuff and all that coding to do when I have time.  Maybe during my trip, ahahah. 

I finished the second-to-last mission of the Augustus Reconquered campaign!  This one is Lindum:

This one was quite an interesting mission, as you get a few interesting choices to make.  You can either leave the natives alone (don't build any mission posts), which locks you from building any mission posts altogether but makes the military engagements easier, or you can build mission posts and accept the harder military fights, which lets you build in the native-occupied areas.  I chose to do the former, I feel like harder military fights are not as interesting as being challenged with the city-building aspects of Caesar 3.  Like, you can always brute-force your way through military engagements with enough troops and spamming towers/walls/etc it feels like, but you can't just spam your way through economic challenges/city layouts.

Space was incredibly precious here as a result of not being able to build on the native lands, and food is also really hard to come by at first since you only have access to a little bit of farmland and the rest have wolves on them, meaning you need some amount of military to be able to unlock them safely.  Even then there isn't really a ton of farmland so you have to import food for at least some of your housing.

Later on you get a choice between building grand temple to ceres first (unlocks vine farms) or building grand temple to neptune, which unlocks fishing.  That seemed really straightforward to pick fishing -- There isn't really that much farmland on the map to begin with, and dedicating some of it to vines seemed like it would just cause food shortage issues.  Granted, there aren't that many great fishing spots either, but it certainly helped make things easier, and provided a reliable second typing of food for the housing blocks, which was very nice.  Growing vines lets you make domestic wine which can help for higher level palaces if you have that in addition to imported wine, but you can easily get around that by building a grand temple to venus which produces domestic wine anyways.

Overall near the beginning of the mission I was definitely worried whether I'd be able to fit everything in, including all the housing blocks.  I started the mission over once, not necessarily because I made big mistakes but just because I wanted to clean things up a little bit and approach the development of the city a little differently.  Besides some minor snafus it all kinda went according to plan.

There's only ONE mission left in the campaign, which should be a big one -- the map looks really big and looks to have a lot of challenge in it.  Exciting!

 

Of course there are other games to deal with too -- besides ALTTPR I'm supposed to start playing Tunic; also Leap Year got a DLC/expansion that I bought (may as well...).

 

I guess overall I'm feeling like, cautiously optimistic.  I'm feeling a bit intimidated when I think about all of the different things that are still pending action -- car stuff, I need to get my act together and plan some events, an infinite amount of Rhythm Quest work, making sure that I'm being a good pet owner, trying to sleep earlier, and all that.  Hopefully I can just jump into my tried and true approach of simply acting on things one at a time, in very small chunks...