I think it's time for me to really sit down with an update...well, here we go.

My upcoming trip got cancelled, probably for the best for all parties involved.  Obviously I'm excited to have some more time back, and to just not be traveling, but even as far as the trip's main goals went I'm not sure how well it all would have turned out.  Anyways, that's one less thing to worry about, which is quite nice.

VBall is coming up once again, this time back at the good ol Burlingame location.  I can tell that I'm aging because some of the stuff (these waltz contests and everything) that I seemed to get really uppity about in the past just don't seem like as big of a deal anymore.  That's the natural way of how things go, right?  Of course, I bet I'll still have some element of nerves just going to the event (the curse of being high on neuroticism and a little prone to anxiety I guess), but it's just like, this thing happens every year, does anyone really care that much, blahblahblah.  Which is not to say I don't care at all, or didn't put some thought into how I want to approach things, or didn't reflect on it at all, but just, it feels like "just another thing".  Which is good, it's how most things in life ought to be.

I ended up undefeated in the glitched mentor tournament, thanks to my hard work and practice all throughout.  There's always this underpinning of "the 'better' player doesn't always get the faster time" that's present when it comes to ALTTPR and racing ALTTPR in particular, but it sometimes surprises me how much you really DO come out ahead when you have the skills to back it up.  From my early days with ALTTPR I've always assumed that seeds get really nonlinear and that you can't ever predict what's happening on the other side, but the more and more I play the more I realize that there's a large subset of stuff that both/all players end up doing in some order, and then the differences that actually lead to meaningful time differentials are actually fewer and farther between than you might thing.  I think that's of course even more true than normal when overworld glitches come into effect since to me there are less awkward situations where you're choosing between 3-4 bad choices -- there's more of an emphasis on raw efficiency over a long term, which is what I like.  It's been interesting to come back to non-glitched modes, not just because I've had to shake off some rust, but because I think I have slightly differing perspectives on some things.

Rhythm Quest work has been going pretty okay and I've been doing my best to just squeeze in work on it whenever I can.  I've got pretty okay momentum for the current big stream of work that I'm doing and I look forward to a feeling of accomplishment when I can wrap up a devlog post and share what I've been working on with all the publishing/verified artist stuff.

Besides ALTTPR, Ravenswatch has remained my default sort of "I just wanna play something I guess" game.  It's providing a good amount of challenge and interest, though some of these characters really have it rough in the early game.  I've gotten clears with 4 characters on the hardest difficulty so far, with some good luck and skill I'll manage to expand that further to more members of the cast.

Yeah, I ended up having a bit of a low point where I doubted my self-worth and all that.  I'm feeling like I've bounced back from it, fortunately.  There is this weird (maybe not so weird) sort of thing that happens (not just to teenagers) where when you come across something that seems threatening to your psyche the easiest way to deflect the damage is to just try and mentally stamp all over it.  But really those two things are not really supposed to be connected, it's a false dichotomy to tie your self worth to another person's lack thereof, or to the validity or invalidity of an idea or belief.

It is dangerous to base your sense self-worth based on external validation, BUT at the same time, there is some truth to the matter; ultimately a lot of our interactions, relations, and connections depend on our perceived worth to others.  This has always been a struggle for me to think about, because I think both of the "simple" ways of looking at it are really unsatisfying.  "Work on yourself to become someone that other people value" is not really satisfying, but neither is "Just be yourself and don't worry about what others think".  As with most simple yet hard things in life, the real path probably lies somewhere in the nebulous in-between.  Living day to day and connecting with people is probably a matter of finding the intersection of that venn diagram between what you value in yourself and what others might value in you.

I had this weird analogy that I drew the other day about seeing people as spinning gears.  And with gears, the way that they interface with each other is to fit together and then turn in tandem using their teeth (ok, it sounds weird when I write it out like that...).  Of course, maybe not all gears are compatible with each other (analogy doesn't really carry that well into the actual mechanical engineering...), maybe there is some interfacing problem, maybe the ratios are wrong or one gear needs to be seated at a certain distance away which doesn't work for the other one, right.  I feel like people have different strategies for dealing with these incompatibilities, of course you have people who just move on and find other people who they might be more compatible with, but then you have people who didn't really do that and instead they reasoned that they must be the problem, so they just started sanding off all the rough edges and then instead of a gear they end up being more of a wheel.

And of course wheels have less edges to get caught up on, they're smooth and useful, but like, you can't use a wheel as a gear anymore.  There's nothing to interface with, so yeah, there's less friction, but there's also no potential for actually achieving anything anymore.  And now you're in this really weird spot because now you realized that you still can't connect to other people, maybe you need to just "add on" teeth that you can use to interface with others, or maybe you just need to "subtract" even more by cutting out from what's left.  But both of those feel pretty bad, right?

That I think is what is tricky about being a "people pleaser" or whatever.  You can get stuck thinking, well either I keep people pleasing and then that sucks, or I just start being mean and selfish, and then that sucks.  You can replace "people pleasing" with any other manner of thing too, like for me there were often times when it was like well I can't really be a girl, so that sucks, but then if I try to just be a guy that sucks too.  But there's like this other way of interfacing with people that is neither "providing them with value" nor is it being selfish.  I guess it is a less "capitalistic" and "value-driven" way of relating to people, which paradoxically IS itself a form of value, which I think again is what is often confusing.

Anyways...