Those things that you left behind...they mean as much to you as you want them to.  It's okay to leave them behind for something better, but it's also okay to keep them close to you.  As long as you are being honest with yourself.

JaSmix Summer 2019

I'll keep fighting.  I'll keep hoping.  Because it's a fortunate thing, to even be able to hope at all.  There are some who are not so lucky.  Those who have been forced to face the reality of life.

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JaSmix Summer 2019 was this past weekend and it was a great success!  (For those not in the know, JaSmix is a community-run social dance event that I've been organizing and putting together for the past 3 years -- it's completely free and it runs for the entire day with workshops, lessons, and lots of social dancing)  Like always, it was a lot of work, but really satisfying to hear everyone's positive feedback and energy and to see everyone having a great time.  We started at 3PM this year (and ran until midnight, as usual), but we had an even more packed event this time, with events running simultaneously in both the GCC and Hacienda for most of the day -- we had 6 workshops, a group intensive, private lessons, and of course lots of dancing.

There tends to be this point sometime during a JaSmix event where I suddenly get the realization that JaSmix is basically just as long as Big Dance and arguably MORE tiring for myself since I'm literally there for 9 straight hours (more like 10 if you include setup and teardown) doing everything.  I taught my "Advanced Turning Basics" workshop, did 4 private lessons, and had a 20-minute break to eat dinner before helping out with the practica session and then DJ for the dance.  I was feeling super tired after the combo of teaching my workshop and then 4 private lessons, but was pretty alright the dance had all started and most of my job was done.  My voice was definitely pretty much shot by the end of the night though -- talking so much will do that to ya.

As I mentioned, we had things running in two different rooms this time, which meant that this was the first time where it wasn't actually possible for me to be at all of the events that happened throughout the day. (need some sort of time turner if I want to do that....) so I wasn't able to see any of the group intensive nor any of the later workshops (I was busy teaching private lessons...).  Somehow it basically all went off without a hitch though, which I'm definitely grateful for.

My lesson itself went alright I think, people seemed to enjoy it at the very least.  The private lessons have been super rewarding as I feel like I've been getting much better at actually figuring things out together with people.  And I even got a few good dances in at some point during the night, which was great.  Oh, and people really made good use of the on-screen setlist display, so that was great.

Anyhow, I'm trying to take it a bit easy now that all of that is behind me.  Here's to the next JaSmix event, hopefully in about 6 months or so!

An...."interesting" weekend.  I'm definitely ready to just be done with people and things.  I've already noted this before, but it's really funny how my immediate reaction to being stressed, tired, or even just unhappy is to turn towards trying to get things done or accomplished.  That's not necessarily a bad thing at all, I mean it sort of makes sense really -- just gotta work through it so that it'll all be over sooner.  But it is sort of funny how it's during the myemie times that I can't think about taking a break.  It's extremely rare that I'll get to the point where I really just decide that I'm out.  Of course, it does happen.  But before I get to that point, it really annoys me if I show any sort of weakness.  I'm not really sure how I got to be that way, whether it was some sort of military discipline instinct or just something I think is a generally good attitude to have regardless.  Maybe it's because seeing other people slack off when the going gets rough always really bothered me.  The whole idea of being "hardcore" back in the marching band days.  The people in the group who weren't, who really didn't care...it was always a big issue.  But that's just how it is, in life -- everyone's here for different reasons, and they all work in different ways.  Hopefully, you find yourself in situations where you can cooperate with the people around you and feel comfortable.  Every once in a while you don't, though, and I guess that sort of happened this weekend?  Sometimes it's not malicious but rather, just unfortunate.

So uh...I guess that all was a really roundabout way of saying that this weekend was kind of unfortunate.

Life has continued to be pretty good these days...

Took another crew out to the deep for Space Alert and we managed to successfully complete all of our missions, including a hilarious SNAFU where we managed to end the mission with the right side of our ship completely falling apart and two of us knocked out by a plasmatic fighter...

DJed for FNW again yesterday!  Man it is really warm these days, sometimes I forget since I'm always indoors with A/C at home now (spoiled...).  It wasn't as stressful as last time, maybe I was just nervous that day or something *shrug*.  Anyways, my next gig will be JaSmix, going to make sure to cram all of the best songs into my set for that of course!

I've started trying to work on my JaSmix workshop as well.  Thinking about teaching these things has actually definitely given me the impetus to actually improve my dancing, which was sort of a pleasant surprise.  I guess it's as good of a motivation as any to try something a bit different with my dance and really explore it so that I can talk about it effectively.  Well, hopefully anyways.  We'll see how it goes.

Was really happy with my OHC entry this past week, had a sort of System Shock 2 vibe going with some neat rhythmic filtered pads.  (Speaking of System Shock 2, been thinking about going back and finishing that Ponterbee Station playthrough...)  I've started on the next composition on my plate which is another VGM remix -- that one is coming along, but fairly slowly, which is slightly concerning, but I guess not all of these can be things that I knock out in a single hour...

Studied Puyo a bit for PPT and it's definitely been more than good enough to cover my butt when I totally screw up in Tetris and fail to do anything meaningful lol.  There's still a lot of experience that I need on both sides to really understand a lot of effective play though.  Sometimes in Tetris I still just sort of blindly downstack without really doing anything effective.

The other week I was thinking a lot about tactics games and why Tactics Ogre really impressed me, even though in some aspects it was less "cool" than FFT.  I went and looked at some FFT mods actually, seeing if there was anything that was maybe worth playing through, but in the end decided not to.  I think the thing about Tactics Ogre (or, the One Vision mod specifically), is that it really managed to bring "Tactics" to the genre, which I appreciated.  In these tactics games, both class design and equipment choices should always be about tradeoffs and specialization.  It doesn't make sense to have a unit that is a jack-of-all-trades because you can only do a single thing per turn, so specialization is the name of the game.  But there always needs to be strengths that are balanced out by weaknesses, and each unit needs to have a defined role.  There can be mages that have high magical attack, but really weak defense.  That creates the need for knights which are really good at defending squishy units -- and in Tactics Ogre they even come with movement-inhibiting abilities that prevent enemies from just waltzing right past them and attacking your squishy mages.  But then you've also got archers which can attack the mages from afar without having to deal with the knights, but only if they have good positioning.  Again, it's all about tradeoffs.  That's an area where FFT definitely falls short -- FFT is more about just making cool combos and doing the most damage with everyone.  In FFT if you deal more damage, you do more damage to EVERYTHING, and class and equip configs just become a matter of who can out-DPS everything else and have the speed to apply it.  In Tactics Ogre on the other hand, you have Ninjas that can dual-wield daggers/katanas, which are excellent against squishy targets like mages and archers.  So the ninja is this specialized assassin unit whose role is to use high mobility to take out the high priority targets, and use high evasion and one-time defensive abilities to avoid getting killed along the way.  But ninjas can't really do nearly as much damage to tanky knights, because knights have a lot of defense, and that defense gets applied to BOTH of the hits of your dual-attack.  So what do you do if you need to take out these heavy knights?  Well, you either need mages, or you need a berserker unit that can wield a massive two-handed hammer/maul to chunk through their defense.  Again, more specialization.  Even in unit formations, there are tradeoffs -- you want to have your tanky frontline units surrounding/protecting your DPS dealers in the back, and you don't want to just leave holes in your formation everywhere, but at the same time if you clump everyone up that's just asking to be hit by AoE magic spells.  Tradeoffs!  That kind of thing is just not possible in FFT since you only have 5 units or so...

I finally got a "god run" in risk of rain 2 with Rex, and unlocked the final achievement, so now I've unlocked everything in the entire game!  It started off with an early 57-leaf-clover (best item in the game) and ended up spiraling way out of control when I got another 57-leaf-clover, some other good items, a ceremonial dagger, shaped glass, etc.  The early game was a bit stressful since Rex needs very careful HP management, but once I got to a certain point the shaped glass + ceremonial dagger was just sort of decimating everything and I also found a teddy bear printer and got myself 13 teddy bears so I had a ton of evasion as well.  After a while I ended up stacking FOUR shaped glass so I was now dealing 1600% damage and things were just melting even with just my auto-attack (not even my secondary attack!).  It got to the point where the ceremonial daggers would just insta-kill everything that spawned, including the teleporter bosses, and I basically only ever had to attack at the very beginning of a level to get things started.  Pretty insane.  Even after leaving my computer running overnight (perched in a safe spot), I was still pretty much instantly killing everything.  The only thing that could possibly kill me is Happiest Mask, which is currently bugged and sometimes the ghosts actually end up attacking (and dealing damage to) you for some reason.  So after getting bored, that's how I ended up going out.  (Would have liked to go to a shrine of order at some point for the lulz, but didn't find one.)

Went to see the 3rd Hibike movie a couple weeks ago....it was good, enjoyable, but certainly not up to the level of either of the anime seasons, nor Liz and the Blue Bird.  I think there were some really interesting feelings that got evoked with how much things changed, and how inconsequential some things seemed when put into the perspective of transience (or maybe that's just how I feel about everything)...at the same time it feels like the movie was not really saying that much, and some of the themes really felt very muddled, especially when compared to some things that happened in earlier seasons that were very very very strong.  Their performance was certainly beautifully rendered, I'll give you that...

It's been half a month...sorry!

Let's see here...

My new mechanical keyboard
Is a joy to type on.  For reference, it's a Pink Filco Majestouch 2 with cherry MX 'brown' switches and it looks just beautiful.  I've really gotten used to the feeling of the keys and there's definitely this feeling of tactile satisfaction that just....still makes me just want to press on the keys randomly every once in a while.  The Razer Basilisk has been working out pretty well too -- I think the only thing I wish I could do is configure the media keys to respond or not respond to certain apps (too often it tries to control a youtube video in chrome or whatever instead of foobar running in the background) but it's not a huge deal.  Having a modifier click + mouse wheel as volume adjustment is way more useful than I would have thought -- really glad I decided to map that combo.

Dear Toki
Is the game I ended up putting out for Friendship Jam and people seem to have enjoyed it!  It's a short text-based game about writing letters to reconnect to a long-lost friend and you can play it here.

pCloud as a replacement for Dropbox
Has more or less been working OK, though I've found that the automatic syncing function feels quite a bit slower than directly working with the pCloud drive network-mapped folder.  That might warrant some changes in how I organize things and what files/folders I'm choosing to make available offline, but I'm going to have to do some experimentation to know for sure.  It could be that I always grab things from pCloud Drive (?? not sure if that will work well for mapping my desktop folder to it) but use the make available offline option...

Risk of Rain 2
Has continued to be pretty enjoyable as I just continue to do random runs on Monsoon difficulty.  I've actually just unlocked two new items -- the guilliotine and the royal capacitor, both of which are actually very very good items, so that may actually have an impact on my runs moving forward.

Puyo Puyo / Tetris
I've gotten slightly better at Puyo, but most of my random practice has actually been maintaining 4-wide combos in Tetris, which has just been...a fun little mindless thing to practice every now and then.

Dance stuff
I'll be teaching a styling workshop this Saturday (come out to the GCC and join us!) and am also continuing to put things together for JaSmix next month (woo!)

Life
Overall is continuing to go pretty well these days.  I had a lot of things that I felt like I needed to take care of these past couple of weeks, yet I also managed to take care of a lot/most of them, I feel like.  I had a couple of music commissions to work through, for example, and I knocked them out extremely quickly (being able to work fast is really a blessing).  Even taking care of a bunch of random adulting stuff like new insurance plans, replacing car air filters, blahblahblahblah.......

Cooking
I'm somewhat inspired to try shui zhu yu yet again (lol) by a recent visit to a sichuan restaurant (I want to try and do better than them), but actually my most recent cooking experiment has been sous vide BBQ pork ribs cooked for 36 hours which actually turned out pretty great!  I made them a bit on the salty side because I used a bit more dry rub than recommended in the recipe (oops) but they were very tender at 145 degrees and weren't really a ton of work either.  Definitely something I'd endeavor to try again.

Kiki
I thought about Kiki a lot last week.  I still love her deeply, that is plain as day to me.  Though it's a bit sad, I think it's also a bit of a relief.  That that aspect of me perhaps may never change.  When something was once so important to you, that you can't help but keep it close to you, even if you didn't try at all.

Space Alert
I took a new crew out to The Deep for a try at some sessions of Space Alert this past weekend, to a surprising great success!  As usual I was the acting captain on our Sitting-Duck class ship, along with our chief engineer who had flown a couple missions out to The Deep in the past; the other two were newbie cadets straight out of the academy and we had to show them the ropes and bring them up to speed...I probably ended up barking out a bunch of orders to them during our simulation missions, but they had good instincts, at least for rookies -- they communicated their actions more clearly than my previous squad had, and they even shot some extra laser charges towards the end of the mission just in case.

I woke up in the cloning vat two days after and came to the realization that our first live mission had failed.  Unsurprising, but I still grimaced when I looked at the black box recording and realized what had happened -- in the heat of the action, both of our rookies had tripped -- one was trying to get port side and slammed right into the firing console for the main laser before picking herself up and limping the rest of the way.  I reprimanded them a bit afterwards, but one of them had managed to fix a fissure on that side of the ship with the battlebots and interceptors, so I admitted I had to give them some credit.

We ended up having 3 successful missions into The Deep, one with only a single scratch on our armor by a grazing attack, no less, making it my most successful new crew yet.  We even tried our luck at one of the longer missions out by the nebula, though as quickly as we moved, it wasn't quite enough to handle the constant barrage of threats.

Still, I had to count my blessings after it was all over.  Thinking on the missions also made me question the tools I bring with me on every mission -- I've always known how to work the pulse cannon better than anyone; if you've got an extra fuse and know where to poke the console, you can overload the safety threshold on the phase capacitor and extend the range out to match that of the other laser cannons.  But lately I've been wondering if I should perhaps pack my Special Ops equipment instead, or maybe a crescent wrench that I could use to jury-rig the rocket launcher like ol Yoshiko used to.  I'll have to think on it, for sure...

A busy week...

I'm heads down in the middle of work to try and finish something for Friendship Jam, which ends on Monday!  I started off in Unity, but I'm trying to make a text-based game around letter-writing, so I tried out Twine to see if it would be a better fit.  I liked the idea of just having the game function directly in html browserland, but the Twine flow wasn't quite what I wanted, so I decided to just jank up my own Javascript/JQuery code to do it, and it's working fairly well!  I also used the tool at https://www.calligraphr.com to make a couple of handwriting fonts for the game, so my handwriting is actually in the game now as fonts, yay!  That could actually be something to apply to my blog at some point, perhaps. (?)

I've been alternatively sleeping really late and catching up as I try to work on both the writing and code for the game...Thursday night I was super dead for example so I slept for 12.5 glorious hours, which was quite refreshing.  Pretty amazing how much better I felt after that...

I was Sayuri yesterday for a brief bit!  It has been quite a long time, but I think it was nice to remember some things about it.

Other than that, actually was dealing with a number of computer-related things in the past two weeks, as I got a new work laptop (to replace the old one they gave me for my temp job).  This is probably going to be my work laptop for some time, so I wanted to take the opportunity to set up everything -- including a bootcamp partition and all.  Bootcamp assistant was pretty much flat out kaput because it didn't work correctly with the corporate software update server, so I had to manage the partitioning process myself.  I also wasn't able to setup win server on it as the installers for both WS2012 and WS2016 failed, but I WAS able to setup win10, so that's that.

I learned some other things like about how the default display setting on the new MBPs is actually a non-native resolution (!) and how gamma calibration images usually don't display properly in browsers and need to be opened in some other app (which explains a lot).  Gamma calibration seems to be getting harder and harder on the OSX platform as more and more features seem to muck around with it...this time I had to actually download a linear color profile in order to calibrate correctly.  My software gamma calibration tools of choice at the moment are QuickGamma for Win and SuperCal for OSX.

Dropbox silently instated a 3-device limit on their free service (different OSes also count as different devices) and that was no longer really going to work out super well for me, so I've made the switch over to using pCloud, which seems to be working just fine so far.

We finally secured our Aug 17th date for JaSmix!  Look forward to some announcements about that soon.

Anyhow, back to trying to write more of this story...looking forward to relaxing a bit next week.

Sometimes I feel like if I act the way I once did, then things would go back to how they used to.  It's not true, of course, but that doesn't stop me from trying anyways.

=====

Feeling a bit stressed, it seems, but I guess that makes sense given the things that I need to try and get done.  What's a little concerning is the amount of "latent" stress that seems to be bubbling around manifesting itself in nonsensical stress dreams and such.  But I'll do my best to be productive, then relax too.  It's gonna be ok I think!  Because I can get a lot done when I try.

I'll believe in "forever"

even if I know it doesn't exist

Things are going pretty ok -- I'm writing this at FNW before DJing, so I guess it'll be a bit of a scattered post, haha...it's still really warm in here =(  Thank goodness that killer heat wave died down a bit at least...

Busy weekend for me, with DJing, a friend's wedding, a birthday, etc.  Nothing super stressful, just a lot to keep track of in my mind, it feels like.
On Monday my contract gig becomes a fulltime thing, woo!  It's not a world of difference or anything, just means I know what I'll be doing past next month haha.

A bunch of things that I need to get done in the coming weeks...

- Two music commissions that I gotta finish in a month or so.
- Friendship game jam! (https://itch.io/jam/friendship-jam)  Organized by npckc, not sure if we will end up getting around to making something for it but it would be nice!  It's a super casual thing so we won't just work super hard like Ludum Dare, but it also goes until the end of the month, so we'll see if we manage something.  I've played some of npckc's works and they really made me smile, especially their more recent games...I don't know if I can really write and/or design something so wholesome but we can certainly try!  Maybe if we use our meowmie power...
- A few birthday letters to write and some other writing projects to do...
- Planning for JaSmix!  Still trying to get everything nailed down...might have to prep a workshop too!  And of course put together the setlist.
- Should probably upload All in a Day's Work 4 to NetEase...
- Have a bit of cleaning and such that I should probably do...

You know, now that I've written it out, that all doesn't actually seem like that much, especially not that much that needs to get done very soon.  So I guess it's mainly just this weekend that I need to get through, haha.

I feel...OK with my connect with the past right now.  I'm not feeling in pain with it, but not feeling super great about it either.  But I am writing to Kiki, and thought of her quite a few times this past week.  I talked with someone on Wednesday who really made me think of her a lot, actually.  Kiki seems really distant, perhaps even more distant than ever now that I don't just think of her regularly.  But I do still think of her, and that distance doesn't feel painful...

=====

DJing went well, though somehow ended up being a bit more stressful than I expected.  There are just a bunch of things to juggle between being paranoid about volume balance, announcing songs, and checking to make sure things are running on time.  I probably played more songs than anyone else has ever played at FNW -- a full 12 songs during each set -- so I knew I had to keep things moving along.  We made it in time, though!  Yet another thing that becomes possible when being vigilant about editing songs for length...

The foobar2000 live display worked just fine, though of course FNW doesn't really have a place to put it that would be super ideal, but people seemed to think it was cool and they did end up using it, so that's nice.  Really that was more of a test run though, now that I know it all works properly I can use that in case I ever get to use a projector to have it super obvious and visible to everyone.  I know there was a lot of feedback at the last JaSmix event to have setlists up and the live-updating playlist would be my solution of being able to do that yet also being able to change things up on the fly if needed.

I realized as we were going through my setlist that I could stand to pay better attention to tempos as I'm putting together the sets.  I think about tempos carefully as I'm editing individual songs but I noticed that I could have done a better job of making sure that the faster rotary waltzes were labeled as such and were in later sets.  It's something that's easy to take for granted as an experienced dancer but I think that sort of thing is still worth considering.

foobar2000, peripherals, and Goodnight Meowmie

Let's see here...the first major thing I have to write about is foobar2000!!!

I'm perhaps ages late to the party (?), but I've finally taken the plunge and switched from using iTunes to foobar2000!  This was not a decision I took lightly, but I decided to pull the trigger after working with foobar2k and considering the pros and cons, and I've been pretty satisfied so far!

Foobar2000 is a free windows-based audio player that is known for many for its customizability, advanced features, modular design, and basically being the dream of anyone who is not scared of complexity and wants to really have their music player function the way THEY want.  It's also available for OSX as of ~1.5 years ago, though I have not tested that build yet.

Perhaps more importantly, foobar2000 now (as of ~a year ago I think) has a mobile client, available for all of iOS/Android/WindowsPhone.  This is key as one of the primary things tying me to iTunes has always been the fact that my ecosystem includes a lovely iPhone SE running iOS and of course I'd really like to have my music readily available on that.

Right, so let's first talk about the things I'm losing during the move to fb2k:

First off, syncing music to iOS is a bit more involved.  Unfortunately, foobar2000 has no way of directly interfacing with the iOS media library, so instead you write music to the foobar2000 app's sandbox and only fb2k can access it.  There is no "automatic" way to do this, but fortunately the iOS fb2k app includes an FTP server that you can use to transfer files via FTP.  This is as far as I can tell the best way to transfer music to fb2k mobile as you can't access the foobar2000 app sandbox directly (without jailbreaking your phone).

Of course there's no built-in "sync management" like there is with iTunes, so instead I first use foobar_onewaysync to copy out the relevant playlists (and their associated music files) to a temporary directory, then use WinSCP to mirror that on the iPhone over FTP.  So like I said, this is "a bit more involved", but now that I have that flow set up it's as simple as running those two commands and waiting for them to complete.

Like with all things in foobar2000, I have so much more =confidence= in what is happening here with the sync.  There would be all kinds of uncommon weird annoyances back when iTunes was in the picture -- you'd find it transferring old files again and again (why?), you'd find that certain songs were missing and showed up on the device but weren't actually playable (why?), you'd find that every time you did a sync one of your playlists mysteriously duplicated itself (why?).  I think a recurring theme so far with foobar2000 is that you have to spend some effort setting up your workflow for doing certain things, but once you do, it Just Works.

The REAL main thing I'm losing during the move to fb2k is actually a significant one: it's bluetooth media browsing via the AVRCP protocol.  In other words, browsing music via my car's on-board display (or through the controls on the steering wheel).  I can still trigger playback and track skips via bluetooth, but any attempts to browse the tracks/playlists/etc from my car's bluetooth interface will result in it looking at the native iOS music library, which is now empty (as all of the music is in foobar2000).  This is actually a pretty major loss as it means that I can't really fire up a music playlist in my car unless I'm parked or stopped for a good minute, as I have to actually do that browsing on my phone itself.

As far as I can tell there's no real way around this.  foobar2000 used to have an iPod management module but that is looooooooong defunct and iOS tends to be very closed off in terms of these sorts of things anyways.  The only way I could really get this functionality back would be to bring iTunes back into the picture, and then use iOS music as my mobile app while still using foobar2000 as my desktop/laptop music player.  We'll see if it comes to that, but I don't think it will.  foobar2000 mobile is a better media player anyhow, and I don't see an efficient way to sync from foobar2000->through itunes->to the iOS device for anything more than maybe a single playlist.

That being said, what I'm =gaining= in the transition to foobar2000 feels well worth the loss so far:

- A =working= ReplayGain implementation!  I now use replaygain to play music at adjusted volumes for normalized listening.  iTunes has a proprietary "Sound Check" feature that is supposed to do this but completely fails on VBR-encoded files.  This is super useful for social dance DJing in particular as having normalized (normalized as in equal perceived loudness, not as in peaking at 0dB) volumes is pretty important.

- I've customized my UI to include a clickable waveform display that shows the current song progress and can be clicked to seek to any point in the song.  Super useful for visually seeking to a given point in the song!

- The ability to work with ID3 tags and file metadata in a very fully-featured and rich way.  Want to convert all ID3 tags to ID3v2.3?  Want to batch-append a genre or grouping tag to 500 songs?  fb2k can do it all!

- The ability to ensure that your media library's files are organized correctly and robustly.  iTunes of course attempted to do this automatically, but it wasn't customizable at all and there were a lot of times when it would come up with filenames and/or paths that seemed a little....off.  fb2k gives you the option to organize your paths however you want and will give you a preview of what files need to be moved where before actually reorganizing everything.

Anyhow, that's sort of been an ongoing pet project of mine, but I'm basically done with the switch now and have been enjoying not only the new functionality but most of all the peace of mind and robustness that fb2k offers.

=====

Alongside that big customization project, I also spent quite a while looking at mechanical keyboards and finally decided to get myself a pink Filco Majestouch 2!!!  I first started thinking about buying a new keyboard when I saw the Razer Huntsman Quartz Pink edition, but after some research I figured that I'd probably be much happier with a less "consumer-y" brand and decided on the Majestouch 2.

Just look at that beauty!  It's possible I might replace the keycap color scheme with something a little more exciting in the future, but I'm happy to just try going with the all-pink for now.  I decided on Cherry MX 'brown' switches, as I'm not a huge fan of the infamous clickety-clackity noises of the blues, and I'd still like some tactile feedback (so not going with the reds).  I also decided to go with a "TenKeyLess" size -- you'll notice that it has the arrow keys and home/end/printscreen/scrolllock/etc but no numpad.  Having full arrow keys around I think is still very useful and necessary but I think I can actually live without a numpad as there are only really a few cases where I really use it and I think the prospect of having that additional desk space freed up (and having the mouse be closer to the keys) is pretty exciting.  (if I REALLY miss the numpad I could always buy a standalone numpad, but I get the feeling I really won't miss it that much)

Anyways, that should theoretically arrive in a couple days -- super exciting!!!

I've also already gone ahead and got a Quartz Pink Razer Basilisk to go along with it:

Unfortunately for getting an aesthetically-pleasing pink mouse there are wayyy fewer options than keyboards, so it was pretty much between this and the pink Razer Lancehead (which has a symmetrical design), or perhaps a pink Zowie mouse, but that seemed to both look worse and have a worse scroll wheel/etc. (despite being lighter/etc).  Razer's Synapse software is.....a bit shady to say the least, but unfortunately that is an evil I ended up having to swallow for now.

On the plus side, the mouse itself is working great.  I was previously running a Logitech MX Revolution and this mouse feels more sensitive/smoothly responsive, and the control mapping is actually a step up as well.  There's an optional thumb trigger (they give you two different sizes!) that you can use as a modifier to give yourself a whole other set of mappings, so for example thumbswitch + mouse wheel up increases my volume, thumbswitch + mouse middle click triggers a pause/play in whatever media player is open, etc.  The media controls also work better than that of Logitech's -- no annoying onscreen display and it is also pretty intelligent about looking for media players to send the command to.  I miss having the scroll wheel free-spin function, but I'm fine living without it to be honest.

No bluetooth version so I'm back to having a cord, but I don't actually find myself minding that too much either.  Plus, it's got two multicolored lights (one in the scroll wheel and one on the logo display) and I have them set up to react to whatever audio is playing from my computer, which is pretty spiffy as well.  If I wanted I could have gotten a keyboard that also has fancy backlighting (basically the corresponding Razer model) but I really didn't consider that a priority, so just the mouse lights will have to do.

Oh, related to mice: I downloaded Smooze for OSX and am happily using it for one thing and one thing only: disabling scroll wheel acceleration!  I'm not super against scroll wheel acceleration in theory, but in practice the way OSX handles scroll wheel acceleration for mouse has just never seemed to be sensible for any mouse I've used (maybe it's different for an actual apple mouse).  Now that I've completely disabled it, I can go back to sensible scrolling, yay!!!

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In other news, our game Goodnight Meowmie has gotten quite a lot of attention since I posted it on itch.io, which is really great to see, especially because I feel like this is the most significant game I've ever worked on.  It's gotten about 2.5k views on itch since I threw it up there, which is pretty amazing.  It's also been really cool watching people's video playthroughs of it on youtube, seeing their reactions and interpretations of the game.  It really makes me feel like we did something worthwhile, that we were able to reach out to people and have them listen to our story, and perhaps take it to heart.

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In other other news, I'll be DJing at Friday Night Waltz this Friday!  Be sure to come out if you're in the area, it's gonna be great!

Life has actually been going pretty fantastically lately -- this weekend was a lot of fun, between FNW, spending time with good friends, and just being in a good place.  I feel as if I'm not losing my attachment with the past because of it either.  Things are really good right now.