I usually feel like I should be blogging before bed but somehow I've not been the best at getting to it, which I guess is slightly concerning.  Can probably give another go at making a before-bed ritual and getting to bed on time (sigh) but for now I'll just sit down and type out some stuff.  As I grow older there's definitely an increasing sense of "this stuff doesn't matter".  It's different for different things of course, like I stopped taking photos as often a long time ago because I realized I didn't really care about them and there was no way I was gonna go back years and years after and look back at them, unless they were particular memories that I wanted to keep or share.  I've hardly ever felt that way about blogging as a general practice, but I've certainly lost that aspect of "I need to jot down everything that happened" in my blog.  On the one hand, I think it's healthy to not have some sort of compulsion to have to actively deal with every single thing that happens in your life, but on the other hand, I know this kind of practice can in theory (and in practice?) be helpful for mental health, so I don't think it's really a good or a bad thing.

I've had one plant that I've kept, that I received from my best friend in June of 2021 (honestly it was farther back in my memory than that) -- an African violet that I keep in a pot on my windowsill.  I always thought it was really fitting with my general approach to life that I just had one that I kept over a long time.  Like with most things in my life, I don't really use a scheduled reminder or system to water it every few days, I just kind of just do it automatically, there's this "sense" in my head of how long its been since the last time, and I end up just doing it at regular intervals.

Late last year I wrote about how it had been too-long-overdue for a repotting and had been looking in bad shape because of it; I ended up not only repotting it but removing and trimming quite a lot of it, it was really a small wimpy looking thing after that and I honestly could have done a better job (and trusted my instincts more) when formulating the new potting mix.  But it got through that phase just fine, and has grown to a full plant again, with some very healthy blooming flowers starting to emerge.

I feel like there is a parallel to what has happened with my life too -- well, maybe not as dramatic as having blooming flowers and such, but at the very least, I went through a cycle of recovery and regrowth to reach the point where I am once again.  Things are not perfect -- the early spring blooms (onset by the random weird warm days we've had) have triggered an onset of allergies, and I skipped out on MCS yesterday because I was feeling exhausted and had somehow tweaked my shoulder.  It ended up being the right choice; I was just in no shape to even make it out there, I had slept too late the previous night, for no real good reason (just idly playing some Ravenswatch), oops.

But despite those things, life is overall positive right now, with some aspirations for growth here and there, which is always nice.  To go along with the whole recover and regrowth theme, I went to the head spa the other day for the first time since Sept 2024 (don't you just love how I have all these dates on hand?).  I haven't had any sort of body work done since that time I don't think, and honestly it's been too long.  Especially in the life that I lead right now, being cared for via physical touch is something that I just don't have access to, so I think I should think about making that more of a regular part of my self-love routine somehow.  "Quality time" and "acts of service" and "gift giving" are always the easier ones to think about when thinking about self-love I think; when it comes to physical touch it's easy to just think of it in a vulgar way, but there's really more to things than that and I think it's a need that I've just been assuming is impossible to meet without looking to actually address it in ways other than having some sort of lovey-dovey relationship where I'm hugging somebody all the time.  "Words of affirmation" is an interesting one too, but lower on my priority list at the moment (though it can really be important sometimes!), so not a huge deal.

I'm trying some new actives for my skincare routine as well, so we'll see how that goes and whether my skin ends up being happy or unhappy with them.  In a move that I'm sure dermatologists and skincare gurus would approve of, I'm also starting to wear sunscreen even on my indoor-only days, since my skin will be a little more sensitive to UV.

I finally posted a Rhythm Quest devlog on all the verified artist work that I've been doing.  It's been nice to only =imagine= what people in the Rhythm Quest discord might be saying and thinking about it rather than actually be subject to an immediate feedback loop for my work.  The practice of "just being able to do my stuff" is really nice!  For the record, I still have channels for people to direct feedback to, it's just not the same as when people are just open-voicing whatever thoughts they may have.  Hopefully I can keep up the good momentum working on the project; you might think that it's going at a slow pace since it took me until March to get out a single devlog post, but I actually feel like my rate of work is going alright!

As far as Ravenswatch goes, I completed my goal of hitting a Nightmare (hardest difficulty) clear with each of the characters, so that's a nice little flagpost of an achievement.  It's an interesting game for sure, fun and with some tricky/nuanced systems in place, but very bad IMHO at its onboarding experience and doesn't do a lot of handholding, which probably turns off a lot of players, or at least I'd expect it to.  I'm used to playing a lot of old games with rather-cryptic systems in place where ostensibly a small part of the joy is discovering and solutioning exactly what is going on and in what matter you should be playing, so I don't necessarily mind a ton, but I still find myself questioning whether some of the design choices could just be more elegant and still achieve the same goals.  Fortunately, it's a bunch of stuff that's =fine= once you get used to it (not the kind of stuff that's just constantly annoying no matter how you slice it), but was it really worth designing it this specific way?  I'm not so sure.  Anyhow, I'll still probably be playing here and there; I've got some characters to rank up and all.

ALTTPR is in an interesting spot as there is an individual in the weekly races who has a suspicious habit of hitting the right route and getting not only the top time but the lowest collection rates...?  I'm all for admitting that while I am a strong and knowledgeable player I'm nothing crazy compared to some of the other folks that play (we all have our own strengths and weaknesses I'm sure), but it was difficult for me to figure out whether I should take it as a sign that there's room for me to improve or just write it off.  After some time thinking about it I'm splitting the difference and not really making it a goal to take the first place spot, but thinking of it as an experience to consider different ways that I could play if I was trying to spike a fast time (which is not my normal goal).  It'll probably be a shorter-lived experiment and not a shift in my overall playstyle, but I'm trying to take it as a learning opportunity.

Going to Teance has been great as always -- I have been recently tipping my toes into wuyi rock oolongs, so I have been starting to order their Shui Xian instead of just getting white tea like always.  We have another letter writing club meeting this weekend, which should be nice -- I definitely have a few letters that I need to catch up on.  I think I've been falling back to only writing letters during letter-writing club since it's just a dedicated time for that, but honestly it's not enough time haha.

The dating app stuff is going just fine still, I think the tricky thing about those is that like, for these other social opportunities to meet people, the best ones are the ones where if you don't really meet anybody it doesn't really feel like a waste of time.  I always think back to that one event I went to where we volunteered at the food bank and I ended up really not being into meeting and socializing with the people there, but I was just volunteering at a food bank anyways, so I felt good about the whole thing anyways.  Dating apps are really low commitment since everyone is just swiping through them while they're going potty or whatever (lol) but I think there's more of that like, "maybe this is just a waste of time" if there's nothing else nourishing or satisfying that comes out of it.

VBall went pretty alright!  But this post is quite long already, so that'll probably be a different post...