Now is as good as time as any to try and write something here, I guess.

I went to a Vienna Teng concert; it was great, as expected.  Rather than talk about any of the pieces or anything like that, I'll instead just write about how hearing this type of music -- now, at least -- directs my thoughts to various things.  Someone close to me that passed away -- almost like a child of mine.  Existential loneliness.  Loss.  I find myself thinking about The Big Stuff when I hear abstract lyrics relating to these various themes.

I've been continuing to play more Triangle Strategy, and continuing to enjoy it as well.  I'm liking almost all aspects of the game so far; besides maybe one or two slightly obtuse exploration/multiple choice sections, but those have been more of the exception to the rule, thankfully.  I've been enjoying perusing various youtube content discussing the merits of various units and their upgrades, and it's interesting to see different people have different takes on things rather than having some clear tier list that everyone agrees on.

I can feel that I'm depressed.  It's not really a surprise to me or anything, since I know there has been sadness in my life, but the realization is more of an evaluation of my mental and emotional responses than anything else.  I'm still functioning ok, and able to enjoy happy times as well.  But I can tell in my thoughts that I'm suffering from what I could only call as depression.  "Anger turned toward the self" is how I've heard it described.  I think that could be accurate.  That phrase somehow reminds me of The Beach episode (episode 45, S3E5) of Avatar: The Last Airbender.  This was an episode that I chanced upon seeing (paying half attention to it) that reminded me to check out the series.  It left a good impression on me as to what the series could maybe have to offer.  Eh, well, I'm not sure the entire series really reached these sort of heights.  But there were great parts, certainly.

Some people probably try to forget the sadness in their present lives.  I think I try not to.  Or I can't.  It's hard...unnatural?  Disingenuous, of me, to go to bed sad, and then wake up with a refreshed state of mind.  Nothing changed about my situation, why should I feel any different?  I think I detest what I can only personally see as "flighty" displays and feelings of emotion, that sort of instability and ephemerality really bothers me, so I try to stay away from it.  We should not be swayed so easily by our current circumstance, by transient situations, is what I think in my heart.  So I wake up, and I try to remember.  I remember the sadness, because that too, is a part of me that I decide to carry with me.  I try to carry as much as I can, forward with me.  It's all part of who I am.  I don't go through my day to day life like some gloomy caricature, it's nothing like that.  I just remember, and hold my emotions with me.  Emotions from the past should be important.  If they aren't, then hasn't everything has been meaningless?

Christmas came and went, and though the mailing deadline snuck (sneaked?) up on me, I managed alright with what I wanted to do, and I had a good time.  Somehow it's already the 30th; it feels like I'm not really sure what happened between Christmas and now besides that I finished another Rhythm Quest level (at least).  I guess I relaxed a bit.

I admit that the coming weeks are a bit intimidating, but as I already said above, I don't like swaying my emotional mood back and forth too far in any direction, so I'll just keep walking forward step by step for now.  I only express outward exasperation when things feel truly dire.  At all other times, it's only a steady rise and fall like the tides, I think.  No breaks, nor crises.  Everything is about the steady state.  It makes no difference how tall or short the mountain of work is, you just take a small piece of it and then put it aside.  That's all, no more, no less.

I guess maybe there is no rest for the wicked.  Or me, either.

Sometimes I'm scared to go to sleep.  But not because I'm afraid of the dark, or the dreams, or even the next day.  Of course, there are times when the late nights are filled with freedom, energy, and possibilities, and to cut it short would be a shame.  But this would be different.  I guess you could say that it is loneliness, but maybe that is not really the right word.  I think it is more like, going to sleep feels like leaving something unfinished.  That you couldn't figure out how life was supposed to be, and to end things would mean that you are powerless.  It's not true, of course.  The next day brings with it infinite possibilities, though with that it also brings fear sometimes.  But sometimes it just feels not right.

Well shucks...

I'll just write a few things, and hope to be back here sooner rather than later.

I did another ALTTPR run the other week/day and after hovering moldorm 2 on the first try and getting a 1-cycle on ganon phase 2 with master sword + somaria + cape I was feeling pretty good about myself.  Still feels nice to just play and execute well, even if not everything is perfect.

I've been delving into Triangle Strategy lately, which was gifted to me generously by a fan.  There are a few mixed reviews criticizing the lack of depth/unit customization in the tactics gameplay as well as the hefty amounts of story.  I can see where they're coming from; the experience is definitely different than both FFT and Tactics Ogre LUCT.  FFT I think is really about sculpting your units into efficient and overpowered machines, whereas Tactics Ogre I think focuses more on big armies (lots of units!), overall positioning, and sidegrades (well, for the One Vision mod, at least) in order to tweak how they perform.

Triangle Strategy contains a lot less unit customization, but it does still have an emphasis on unit positioning and usage of terrain.  It's story-heavy for sure, but I think it's actually a good balance, since the tactics gameplay itself isn't as "rewarding" as FFT where you get to grow and work with your units more substantially.  So far the story is keeping me engaged, at least, even the "exploration" sections which I can see would turn off other people.  If I were to have one gripe with it it's that some of the units seem a lot harder to use effectively than others right now, but maybe their uses are just supposed to be more niche.

Canada trip, Pump It Up, yet another goodbye

Well, where do I even begin...?

I was up in Canada for a work trip this week.  I think it went ok!

While I was there we had various teambuilding activities, including axe-throwing (!) and curling (haha).  I was terrible at the axe-throwing until the end when they showed us how to toss with one hand -- I guess that made it click for me.  Curling, on the other hand, actually came very natural to me, maybe because I've seen the correct form once or twice, maybe because I'm just used to a balanced lunging stance from martial arts.  I was genuinely impressed with how one or two of my shots were actually able to curve into the right position (with the aid of the sweeping).

I also had the opportunity to try Pump It Up for the first time, and I can say that it does not disappoint.  I've known for a while now that the PIU folks really love playing Pump, and that it's very popular in some parts...I can see why now.  Besides what I already knew (the game is in general kept a bit more "up to date" and fresh in terms of charting practices and songs), I got to experience firsthand how the panel layout lends itself to lots of fun crossover patterns.  Some friendly PIU folks were luckily around the machine and helped us with song sorting / scroll speed mods after I explained that I was a DDR player.  I started on an S6, which ended up being way too easy, and then moved up to S9/S10, capping off with an S11 that was quite fun.  The PIU player who was helping me/us out was pretty incredulous that I was playing S9/S10 on my first time and exclaimed that I must be REALLY good at DDR (I'm good, sure, but not anything special).  I think my experience with DDR doubles probably really helped here, as well as just being used to rhythm games in general and chart reading.  It was actually easier for me to get into than I thought, and I was reading crossovers pretty well, just sometimes a little too slow for my body to hit them all with precise control.

It's certainly interesting seeing the different vibe or "feel" of PIU gameplay vs DDR gameplay, I can see why PIU is known for being more about pushing you towards difficult note streams vs DDR trying to be more rhythmic and technical.  I'll have to maybe try to make it down to Round1 to try some more PIU at some point.  For now, though, probably best to get into making good use of my new LTEK metal pads...

Amidst all that, I got the news that another one of my dear friends had passed.  She was my favorite of the bunch, and I felt a pang of regret at not having visited her in the few days before leaving on my trip, as I had been thinking to.  In the end I think the decision was right at the time, so I don't blame myself...just a shame that I was not able to see her one last time.

Did you enjoy your life together, while it lasted?  Did you enjoy your time with me, while it lasted?  Was it right, that you went away?  That I could not be with you the last year of your lives?  Perhaps it was better, it was a chance for me to separate myself, so that the end would not sting so much.  But it still leaves an emptiness behind in my heart.  I don't think anyone will ever be able to replace them in my life, because they are each special.  They...were happy.  I know this, better than anyone.  I perhaps understood each of them better than anyone.  And perhaps they will live in my memory more than in anyone else's.

This week has been......interesting.  Like a vacation, but not at the same time.  I worked and put in hours for one of my jobs, but at the same time I did not achieve anything on my other jobs.  All of that is still waiting for me when I get back.  The music commissions, the Christmas letters, Rhythm Quest, vacuuming, laundry, cooking, housework, pet chores, and everything else.  I think it's easy for me to be at this work offsite and feel like the only thing to think about in the world is the stuff related to this one job.  But then I'm reminded of all of the other "jobs" that I also have a responsibility to.  At that moment, everything becomes so "small".  I'm a little afraid of everything that awaits.  I just want everything to be okay.  But it's a little bit harder to believe in that, now that another loved one is gone forever.

I've been improving, slowly, at Pop'n Music.  I've switched to playing most charts on random, which -- although more difficult -- I've really been feeling has been helping me improve, especially for chords.  It's nice feeling that I've been (hopefully) building the right playing habits for PnM, as opposed to IIDX where I definitely struggle with some bad habits from having grown up on keyboard play and not having solidified my finger placements early on.  I tend to have timing problems and mash more in IIDX as well, and definitely never played on random, so....yeah.

The one downside of playing on random is that you get really awkward note combos like 1+4 or 2+5 which you either need to hit with a really outstretched thumb, or use your wrist/forearm.  But just like the non-awkward chords (that are harder to read but easier to hit), probably better to get used to all of those at these easier levels and speeds than later.

=====

There's a lingering feeling that I have, still.

I've far away.  This time, I didn't feel that anxious, "something is wrong" feeling at being whisked away to a different land.  It was a more subdued feeling.  I guess it's only natural.  I'll never like the way it feels, to leave and go so far, so quickly.  My spirit lingers behind.

I want to let you know, that it's okay to feel sad even after you had a good day.  That it's an adaptive human behavior for negative emotions to overwhelm positive ones.

Do you think it's a necessity, that we make up for our mistakes?  Isn't an apology owed even when no wrong was intended?  How important is it that we repent for our sins?  Just how virtuous is it to feel regret?

Once upon a time, I believed that negative emotions carried no use.  That it was best to learn from our mistakes, without agonizing over them.  To do the right thing, without unnecessary anguish.  At the time, I was surrounded by what I will only describe as toxic negativity, coming from multiple fronts of my life.  It was only natural for me to learn to see negative emotions as overbearing, to establish a belief that they were hindrances, that the only way to survive was to cast them aside.

Is that really right, though?  Now that I have broken free from those dark realms, is there another way to survive?  To allow myself to feel sadness and regret, yet to believe that I need not correct my course.

I think it is difficult, too difficult, to allow oneself to feel negative emotions, without a belief that one will also be protected from them.  Whether that protection be in the form of conviction, self-compassion, experience, or the grace of others, perhaps does not matter.  Only that we have something that we can lean upon when we stumble, somewhere where we can take shelter from the inevitable storms.  That is why it shakes me so when the universe lays bare the cracks in all of my pillars.  When it becomes clear that sometimes, we have no choice but to fall to the ground.

Forever

I stare into your eyes and I

am reminded of a time I thought would last forever

even though I know you will soon be gone

 

(Originally written on November 19, 2019, almost exactly 3 years ago)

Today at dinner, I saw one of my parents using their smartphone at the table at a family gathering.  I don't think there was anything wrong about it.  But thinking back to all those times when I was remanded as a child or young adult for quietly escaping into the solace of something like a GBA game, it made me feel sad.

Sad that the will and values of people are so malleable.  That when Twitter is in its heyday people regularly complain about it, but when it's "purportedly" on its "death throes", they begin to share gratefulness and appreciation for everything they've seen on it.  I feel sad that virtues are so quick to be bent, that people are willing to hold themselves to different standards depending on the situation.  Sometimes myself, too.

But I also feel sad at the oppression that results from power dynamics.  That when you are a child you get told everything not to do, and that when you are an adult, you get told everything you have to do.  That when I was put down and walked all over by certain adults and teachers in my life there was nowhere I felt that I could turn to save for disassociation.

It reminded me that even in the times that I feel spurred to admonitions, I must remember to be gracious and humble.  To not assume a holier-than-thou attitude, to be open-minded even as I am steadfast, and to forgive even as I detest.  It is only through forgiving others that we can begin to forgive ourselves.  Only by believing that others will improve, that we can understand how to repair our broken selves.

There are good days and "ok" days.  That's only natural though, you aren't going to win everything all the time, sometimes you just take the L, you know?

My cough (which ended up being allergy-related...?) is doing much better, so good on me for getting a second opinion on that.  Unfortunately I ended up with (everyone's favorite) some insurance baggage to deal with since my insurance changed due to changing counties, which threw things off.  A headache for future me to wrestle with, to be sure, along with some other annoying finance-related management stuff that I'll have to start thinking about now that the end of the year is drawing closer.

I DJed at Friday Night Waltz and enjoyed putting my best self out there despite (due to various factors) not many people at all coming out.  Nine years ago I put on my first dance event, which also had a really small crowd of people show up...it's really interesting thinking back on how much I've gained during that span of time and how differently I run my events, in almost every single sense.  I guess the one thing that hasn't changed is my responsibility and preparation efforts.  Sure, nine years ago I didn't put great music in, and my mannerisms were probably off-putting at times, but I still did my best to make sure I had everything under my belt to the best of my then-limited capabilities.  That much hasn't changed.  I definitely could have just phoned in this FNW event, there were a LOT of things that I did not have to do but chose to do anyways.  This is not only because I hold a high standard, but because sometimes it is satisfying to do a good job even if in the end it doesn't really make a huge difference.

I cleared another Caesar 3 mission, and continue to revise and iterate on my preferred housing block(s).  I've discovered that my denser blocks need two, or even three markets to properly supply food and goods to all of the residents, so that's something I'm starting to add into the plan, along with some additional entertainment to keep sentiment up.

I finally pulled the trigger on some LTEK hard pads for DDR.  Those will take a while to arrive, but they should be really fun and shiny to play around with and spur me on to play a bunch, maybe try to just go down the setlist of DDR A or whatever.  Interestingly enough, I actually ended up buying them after first looking at Beatmania IIDX controllers (I have a stubby KOC one only).  I'm not sure that I'll end up getting one of those though...maybe if I end up downloading a more modern BMS client (mine is ages ages old) and try more charts out and feel inspired to, but else I should maybe just stick to pop'n.  Perhaps I should download a PMS client as well, or even try one of those stepmania forks?  Lots to experiment with on the rhythm game front, for sure.

Rhythm Quest continues to chug along somehow; I drew up some backdrop sets today without too much issue, so it's nice to know that I'm still able to function creatively for the project -- that's always a source of uncertainty.  But I guess that sort of creative productivity IS something that can be trained -- certainly, after many many many many iterations of One Hour Compo, I feel like being able to make a song is a given instead of a flip of a coin.  My pixel art is getting a little closer to feeling like that, perhaps.  Someday my freestyle dancing may as well.  There's levels to it, anyways.

Better write another one of these before I push it off...

Unsurprisingly, it's much more of a challenge to spend a full day on Rhythm Quest, even when in theory the day is scheduled out for it.  The tough part about it is that it's not like I didn't do good work today, just that the time was spent on other things.  What I think this means is that I'm going to have to do my best to chunk out the Rhythm Quest work into very small pieces whenever possible -- this will make it easier to squeeze in at other times -- and then do whatever I can to make sure that I am actually setting aside entire afternoons (or nights...) to work on larger tasks like trying to start on that next level.

Instead today I cooked both meals (as usual) and actually put a bunch of work into putting the second chicken coop together, which involved lugging all of the pieces up to the backyard where the other one is, and then starting to do the assembly itself.  It's about halfway done now, so I decided to call it quits so I can try to move it into place tomorrow and see if the doorways can actually connect well, then maybe I can see about assembling the rest of it, and putting down some more hardware cloth.  Chickies are doing well in the meantime, they are getting along slightly better, though there is still some bullying.  Shockingly, Black Chicky seems to have given up on brooding very quickly this time.  Maybe because of the cold...?

Speaking of the cold, it certainly has gotten a lot cooler here recently.  The new place does get quite cold (although I guess the old place was cold too), I've previously been leaving the heater vent in my room closed but maybe it's time to open it during the day at the very least (and maybe close it at night).

One Hour Compo was today -- initially I was thinking of doing some more work towards the current soundtrack commission that I've got on my plate, but the image theme came up and I thought it would be nice to do a nice downtempo chillhop track.  I ended up with this song titled "infinite night sky" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBR1VtSPY_U), which I was quite happy with.  I don't think I've got enough experience with this type of music that I can be confident to write one the entire way without stopping and fumbling on something or another (pad sounds are a tough one for this genre), but on the other hand, I feel like I've really started to find my voice in it.  That's been a pleasant surprise to discover.  I don't think I could have told you exactly what my brand of chill music would have been before, but now that I'm listening to it, it sort of makes sense.  I use similar structures from a lot of my other music -- using layers that play throughout, while switching up others.  Slowly building up to a section that speaks louder than the others, than pulling back and returning back to the beginning.  It's still my writing, just, slower and everything is more washed out by reverb and vinyl processing.

It's cool to go back to my previous work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA53w3Fonek for example) and see how far I've progressed and developed this sound.  You could say the same about my other styles too, of course, but I think this one is more apparent since it was developed in isolation, yet much more quickly since I already had such a solid foundation to build upon.

My Pokemon Unite group fizzled out and stopped playing (to nobody's surprise), so it's back to solo queuing for the most part for me.  Well, I'm no stranger to sticking to something after everybody else has left, so that's just fine.

I took a stab at the next Casear 3 mission (Carthago) and eventually admitted defeat after a somewhat-successful start.  The main problem I ran into was food distribution, which is always a finicky thing -- and tricky in this map since you have scarce farmland to work with, and have to supplement it with fishing.  I also got stomped by the military invasions later in the mission -- I'm going to have to actually import iron/weapons and train some legionnaires in order to stop them, no more just being lazy and trying to kite all day with javelin auxiliaries anymore.

I should have already known this before, but food distribution really is key to everything in laying out housing blocks.  Especially since it's very difficult for the market ladies to "do the right thing" when it comes to fetching food from granaries, I think it was a mistake how I haphazardly let some of my housing blocks be connected to the same food supplies, and wasn't strict on isolating different food types.  For my next go-around I'll need to try and avoid intermingling fruit / fish, and separate the food distribution wherever possible.  Maybe even build a grand temple to reduce food consumption.  It somehow seems to be a lot more difficult to get food to an entire housing block than I remembered before, but maybe my memory is wrong or I just need to experiment more with my market placements, or stockpile more food before starting to distribute it.

I got a chance to just vibe and dance for a bit at an event last week, that was nice!  I was pleasantly surprised by my movement not being as rusty as I expected despite not really have practiced at all in recent times.  Ah, speaking of dance stuff, it looks like I will be hopping down to DJ at Friday Night Waltz next week on the 11th.  I'll be competing with Fall Ball (I guess my fault for not penciling down the date after the initial email), so it might be a quieter night, but I'll be bringing good music as always, so come stop by if you're so inclined.

Progress on the Christmas letters continues slowly and steadily (as with most things in my life) -- 17 of those are done now, so I'd say I'm like a good half of the way there.

Somewhat surprisingly (?), my recently chronic cough (gerd related?) has gotten better this week, probably in no small part due to eating a bit lighter and more healthy.  I was (probably to the chagrin of my care team) initially supposed to have a spicy-food week, but due to various factors it seems like I've been eating relatively "nice" instead in terms of foods that might be better for acid -- porridge, some premade refridgerated pizza, brussels sprouts, seafood pasta, chicken and broccoli.  I've tried to ease back on the citrus juice a bit as well for the week, along with elevating a bit more while sleeping.  I didn't actually expect to notice a marked difference, but I have, so that's actually quite encouraging.