Chai A Day

 (What, me remember to hit post after I write something? ha. Well that was a fantastic Nintendo Direct - worth the wait in my opinion, though please Nintendo don't make us wait that long again!)

Video Link

 *screams in Mario* I'm so so so excited for Mario Maker 2!! So excited I missed the bulk of the announcement and had to watch it over again because omg there's so much to be excited about here - slopes! switches! the themes! Luigi! It's coming out in June!!! I love the original Mario Maker, though I admit I didn't play all that much of it. I'm... not that good at old school Mario. I get through the games, somehow, but I'm definitely below the average skill level. Or at least I feel like that. It doesn't take away that I love the games though, and more then playing Mario Maker I love watching truly skilled players play it and the sound of it is sort of comforting? So I've fallen asleep to Mario Maker more times then I can count, and I'm looking forward to doing the same with Mario Maker 2. Fingers crossed for thwimps!

That Marvel game is mildly interesting, in that they spent so much time highlight Captain Marvel - it seems like a gesture of confidence in that movie, and that's promising. It's something similar with Joker in Smash - they aren't showing much of him, which is interesting because there's a big Persona 5 announcement planned for March. If Joker being in Smash is part of Persona 5 getting a switch release then it sort of makes sense to hold back. Yeah I'm pulling for a switch release of Persona 5, and I'm more hopeful for it after seeing the push for hardcore games. I hate that term, hardcore. The games it describes aren't necessarily harder than other games, and the easy games aren't any less core to a system's library. But what else do you call those games? Anyway, after seeing that sort of games, the Final Fantasy, the Dragon Quests, the Assassin's Creeds, the Hellblades, and even strong rumors of the Kingdom Hearts games? I feel confident in having some hope for Persona 5.

 I love that Captain Toad Treasure Tracker is getting some love, because I'd really like to see a sequel to that one - there's so much more they could do with that concept and I'd like to see it. I have that one on the Wii U, but if I had the cash to burn on buying a game I already own? I would. 

Bloodstained looks amazing. The Castlevania games are one of the gaps in my gaming experience, as I've only loved them from a distance, but I'd love to dig into Bloodstained. It looks like all the best parts of the SoTN style games, but polished and with a female protagonist.

I'm not really a fan of the series, but I've heard such good things about Dragon Quest 11 I can't help but be excited for it. I'm always down for a solid jrpg experience. Because of it's release window I imagine it's going to be my birthday game. I suppose it shows my age as a gamer that I can't quite escape the console wars mentality, and oh does it feel like a coup to have the definitive version of the game be on a Nintendo console. That's one of those good signs about the Switch and big games.

Oninaki looks beautiful. Again, I'm a sucker for pretty jrpgs. 'Deep, single player campaign' is my ultimate catnip, and I am Setsuna has been on my radar for forever. *sobs over empty wallet*

I of course downloaded and played through the Yoshi's Crafted World demo immediately. It's a delightful game, and I don't know why I'm surprised about that because of course it's a delightful game! Epic Yarn and Woolly World were delightful games so how could Crafted World be anything else? I love games that just give me a mode like Mellow Mode, so I can chill out and play a game, and it's not like it strips the challenge out of the game like some people might think. The end of March is awfully close, I need to start saving...

Fire Emblem isn't my game at all, but I have to admit on second viewing of the direct Three Houses is kind of sucking me in.

Like everyone else I downloaded Tetris 99. I'm... not great at tetris, but it's more fun to lose then I thought it would be. A nice little distraction game.

Final Fantasy VII on the switch is just.... *vibrates with excitement* FF7! Portable!! Final Fantasy IX too! I still wonder what the deal is with Final Fantasy VIII being missing in action. I'll have to look into that when I've got a spare moment.

Astral Chain is a game that at first game I wouldn't be in to - actiony, not much there to hook into. But made by Platinum Games? *hearteyes* *hearteyes* Bayonetta 3 still happily in development? *HEARTEYES INTENSIFIES* thank goodness they said something, I imagine if they didn't there'd be an uproar because of the uncertainty after Metroid Prime 4 getting restarted out of the blue. I buy the theory MP4 got handed back to Retro because Retro is finished with whatever they were working on and I'm dying to know what that was. A rerelease of the Metroid Prime Trilogy? Donkey Kong? Something new??

With a lineup like this it's hard to say they saved the best for last, but they certainly saved some strong hype for last. Link's Awakening!! I knew it was that the moment I saw the waves, just.... *screams in Zelda* That artstyle(I typo'd 'heartstyle' there, and honestly? yes!!!), that music! *buries face in hands and happy cries* Every time, it's like coming home. I don't even like that high bloom, out of focus edges graphical style, but it looks good here and I will follow Link any where.

Not part of the direct, but I the news about the Hollow Knight sequel is intriguing. Again, aren't played Hollow Knight - too poor - but the style is beautiful and I don't need to play to know the gameplay is excellent. Silksong looks like more of the same, but better and with a female protagonist. Makes me wish I'd backed the kickstarter to get in on both of these games.  

 I've been feeling pretty good since my meds got upped in the middle of January. Mom decided that today we'd go to Costco, to grab just the basics and make the most of the samples, and I didn't think anything of that. It wasn't going to be one of our all day shopping trips, or even a long trip at all. We were there maybe an hour and a half max? and I was just in so much pain when we left, sitting in the car was agonizing. I held myself together to feed the dogs and put the groceries away. I thought laying down for a bit might help, so I went upstairs to lay down and it took four hours for the pain to ebb enough that I could mildly function. An hour and a half in Costco ate five and a hour hours out of my day in total.  It's just... I thought I was doing really well the last few weeks? That whatever's up with my hip had healed more then that? But it turns out it might have been an illusion crafted by the home bound condition of it being hecking cold out. Aided by the magic of low pressure systems.

 

I did play a bit of A Hat in Time early today - made an attempt at the final boss, and actually made it through the level this time. I'd made decent progress on learning the boss's pattern when suddenly the boss just up and despawned from the arena. Just poof, gone - I don't think I'd done anywhere near enough damage for any sort of cutscene to have glitched out. I played around in the arena for a bit, just in cause something was trying to load in the background, and once it was clear nothing was going to change I quit out and I didn't have time to try again. It's a mild delight, because it's been ages since I've run into a glitch that's actually really affected my ability to play a game! As I recall... the last time was needing to wait for collision to load in FFXIII-2, and that wasn't really a hindrance just an annoyance. 

 

Well. I did it. I got all of the Steam achievements for Transistor! Steam says I've put 33 hours into this game, and I'm willing to believe it. It took a lot of practice to get the finer details of the combat mechanics into my head, and I just can't hurry through the game even on my third playthrough. The colors, the designs, the music... it's all so lush and I can't help but want to soak it, to linger long over the finer details of Transistor's world. The way the story is built up in layers, so even though it's lightly told it's got this ring of realism to it. You've got the story of Red and the Camerata and the destruction of Cloudbank, and you've also got the story of Red and The Boxer, this soft romance, and you've also got this story of Red and her emotions - her music is melancholy, her choices are desperate, and even the most strategic combat reflects anger. Like... gods, the ending of the Spine fight is just jawdroppingly visceral.

 

I just love Red - she's this brilliant artist that's had her art, her voice(her AGENCY how's THAT for a theme?), stolen from her and her partner taken for her at the same time. And the Boxer - he loves Red so damn much and only wants her to safe, and her only concern really is him. To touch on the ending - I've seen the criticism, and I think it's bunk. It's made pretty clear by the end that while Red can fix Cloudbank, she can't get her voice or the Boxer back. She could rebuild the city, people would come back but what was she supposed to do, become some sort of God of Cloudbank, presiding over an empty city? The only way she could become whole, to get her voice and her love back, is to go into the Transistor. There's this theme of self destruction/suicide in that... so Cloudbank is digital right? it's a virtual city? And the process is what shapes the city. So the city destroys itself, and in the game you have this metaphor for death with the country, but then at the end Red's choice seems less of a destruction and more of a... restoration, for lack of a better word. She goes to the country, though whether that's the country-country, the real world outside of the virtual world of Cloudbank, or another virtual world like a facsimile of the country... *SHRUG* Love is another theme - the Camerata's love of the city, wanting it to exist as it is, Sybil's obsessive love of Red, the Boxer's soft and concerned love, and Red's love carrying her through the end of all she knows.

 

I love the Boxer too - gentle, supportive, protective. I connect with his adrift nature - Cloudbank is a place where anyone can be anything, and he doesn't know what he wants to be and that makes him an outsider in that system, and right now I'm really feeling that. Life is easier if you have goals - with goals you fit into the system no matter what your goals are, but what if you just want to live? To exist? It's hard. In the game one of the locations briefly visited is the selection offices, and I doubt that's meaningless. Just like the final goal being the cradle - a journey from death to life.

 

There's all these delicious details - like the bridge with the statues of Red and the Boxer, reaching for each other and being separated and then on the return trip coming back together. That that's the only thing Red restores, the bridge she created. Red's ring, which only appears after she puts on the Boxer's jacket. The figures in the containers in the final battle, which I honestly did not notice the first time. There's also this digital ghost that shows up and it's very subtle, but it shows the which direction to go which is surprisingly helpful - it's a fairly linear game, but the locations can get visually confusing. That final song, not the credit song but the one before it, that just goes builds upward while never resolving until the credits hit. Amazing.

 

I love this game. I can't keep my head about talking about it in any serious fashion because I love it. I have Red as my computer wallpaper, and as the wallpaper and lock screen on my phone. The music is just... I find myself listening to even the instrumental tracks a lot, and I don't usually like instrumental music. It's perfect background for writing, or for walking between pools of lamppost light in the park at night. Doing that I feel like I'm in a sort of liminal space between worlds.

 

A note for accessibility - I played with a keyboard/mouse and my fingers kind of ache for that. A controller would have been better for me, but I don't have one so *shrug* The difficulty is pretty low for that first trip through the game, and only ramps up when pursuing the achievements. There are some easy builds that make the game a breeze too(Purge + Breach + Crash FTW). I put the effort in for those achievements because I love the game, it gave me something to do and it felt fair - the achievements felt achievable and not grindy. It's a game I found it worth putting that effort into.

 

I'm going to have to uninstall this game before I get sucked into yet another playthrough just to wallow in the story and the art and the music and the most shippable damn romance in gaming. I should go play Bastion now. Honestly I bounced off Bastion the first time I tried it, I didn't get sucked into the way I was with Transistor, but that was a long while ago. I have it on Steam and my 360, I wonder which would be best?

 

Anyway, some Good Videos about Transistor -

• Superbunnyhop's Video
• Games As Lit's Video
• Game Score Fanfare's Video
• 8-bit Music Theory's Video
• bonus song not on the soundtrack

So to explain my current, at this moment, state of being involves a bit of a story. More then what fits on twitter, yet I still want to say to. To complain really. 

My bedside lamp has a 'smart' lightblub in it. Which I admit is rather nice as I can control how bright it is with my voice via Alexa or an app. BUT, the 'default' mode is simply on so that if it loses power when the power comes back the light is on at full brightness. Power losses such as my dog jostling a plug loose. In the middle of the night. Several times. A 840-lumen light shining right in my eyes. And to turn it off I have to come awake enough to use the app or speak clearly. Which is how I ended up oversleeping this morning and woke up late with a headache. And because I overslept I missed breakfast, and by the time I got downstairs there wasn't any coffee left and it was late enough in the afternoon that making fresh coffee was a Bad Idea. I don't need coffee, I thought like the fool I was. Thankfully we had an engine drink tucked in the back of the fridge that was enough to vanquish the headache - I can't imagine how I went through three days of a headache like that in Florida. 

I spent my only 'spoons' for the day on washing the dishes as we were three days behind. I hate the feeling of looking at something and knowing if you do it it will be the only thing you do that day, yet also knowing that it needs to be done. Washing the dishes tore up my nails. I hope Chai doesn't repeat his stunt tonight and maybe I can deal with it tomorrow.

 In the interest of recording this nonsense, partly due to a nagging feeling that my mood cycles are shortening and if they are I really need evidence in order to track down why and deal with it(as opposed to... the regularly scheduled mental breakdowns. Listen, the bar is really low here okay? so low.)

I've been spending the last... week... two weeks? catching up on everything I missed while in Texas. Or more exactly, scrolling through blogs, skimming posts, and bookmarking the ones I want to actually read later. I've yet to find a happy place for my 'inbox' in my current social media setup. Anyway today I finally cleared step one of the backlog, and midway through I switched to laying on the loveseat downstairs and almost at once it felt like a hand was squeezing my heart, and it was a struggle to draw in breath. So i'm lying there thinking 'this is concerning. should i mention something? maybe i'm dying. if i died mom wouldn't have to pay the credit card bill. but no, this is really concerning...' then it just hit me, that yeah i've felt this before, and what it is is raging anxiety. and terribly, my first impulse(that I ignored) was to have another cup of coffee. instead i made myself take a warm shower, which only helped a bit. during my shower i played music on the ipad, and i swear my heart seized every time the volume dipped because of an incoming notification(which 90% of those are from a nearby pokemon go spawn-watching bot, SO YEAH.) to be fair, i've got a lot to be anxious about. having-to-move, no-food, surrounded-by-shitty-people levels of problems.

this of course comes on the heels of a severe depression low. i cried all the way home from st. cloud on my birthday, but it was just sort of a crummy day and i felt like shit which made the minor-crumminess so much worse. i've been more or less in that place since i got back. it's like... reality gets put on hold while traveling. ya don't have to deal with things. i wish i didn't have to deal, didn't have to live with all of the red alerts going off near constantly.

- Winter Stars

This comment is also super relevant.

8tracks playlist of the week - You intolerable lunatic

 I finally finished Yuri on Ice yesterday*. (*Thursday) Yeah I know it's taken me forever and I have no excuse except bad braining. The Bad Brain has been throwing up a lot of barriers the last few years, and focusing on... anything... is difficult. So, 12 episodes? The most I've watched of anything/finished in a long while. Well, I guess I watched Star Trek Beyond awhile back, but I couldn't focus on it and I need to see it again because what I did saw I really enjoyed.

It's a lovely, soft rainy day. I slept well enough - still having trouble accepting that I do need to go to bed at night. Having responsibilities sucks. I want to stay up all night reading and let someone else handle the mornings. Lately it's felt like all the thoughts are happening in my brain all at once and it's hard to focus on just one to get it out.

I received Down Among The Sticks And Bones on Friday, and I'm so excited. Every Heart A Doorway is... everything. DAtSaB doesn't have to be everything, it just being is enough. But I'm putting off reading it a bit, because I want to clean out my brain some. I also found my misplaced copy of Steering The Craft, which is one of those truly great books on writing. Which is... I've hit this point, where a lot of writing advice just isn't helpful. I may not have gone anywhere career-wise, but in writing theory it feels like I'm well beyond that entry level journeyman advice. So things like Steering the Craft, Get To Work Hurley, Wonderbook, and the occasional twitter thread are precious. You know now that I write that I see how it times in - how the need for more higher level craft insights has driven me to meta, lore, and analysis. The ruthless breaking down of stories, laser focused cause and effect. And let me tell you, Dark Souls and it's relatives are a GOLDMINE for that. I could speculate that it had something to do with how we have to dig for basically ALL the story in the Souls games, but nah.

So yeah, it goes like this: long form Dark Souls lore/analysis videos are great to play to fall asleep - yo Bloodborne is just as good/even better! - ongoing Themes of cosmic horror in my life(if Cthulhu himself arose out of the lake I'd be like 'sure fine it's just another Tuesday around here') - tumblr memes - oh hey this one book is really awesome(EVERYONE READ WINTER TIDE OKAY?!) - I kinda want to write in this vein - ...might as well read Lovecraft now.

I haven't actually, not in any focused way, and I've just been in that mood for awhile so why not? His stuff is fairly short and readable surprisingly. I think there might be a lesson in there, about about how his mythos as he wrote it wasn't that well suited to longer forms, as well as how to craft short stories. And I mean, he was so good at harnessing readers' imaginations that his works seem so much more then they actually are? (Hardly anyone talks about the craft aspect, which is interesting. And well, standard disclaimer here about how he was an actual trainwreck, but that's not what I'm here for today.) (I read something recently about how he encouraged others to take his mythos and run? There are conflicting reports, but I am Intrigued.)

The thing about actually reading Lovecraft's stories is while I am aware that the narrative is pushing me to be repulsed, disgusted, etc, what I actually feel for the characters is sympathy. To use The Dunwich Horror as an example, since it's the freshest in my mind - I can't find it in myself to be unsettled by a disabled woman and her eccentric farmer father? or the woman's heavily autistic-coded son? Ultimately the 'spooky/scary other' falls completely flat for me, doing so so much as to upset the entire tea cart of the story. It's a bit of a quirk of the writing style, that the bigotry can be attributed wholly to the narrator(something that is not helped, confusingly enough, by the Wilbur being a self insert. wtf lovecraft.) 

The result of ignoring the narrator's opinions is it then reads as a tragedy of the complications of raising half-human children, and of not fitting the social mold. Our only solid source of for the Whateleys' motivations is the questionable translations of a child's diary. Looking at it that way makes monsters of the stuffy old white men of academia that we're being fed as the heroes. It's kind of amazing that it can so easily be read that way, and explains some of the longevity of Lovecraft's mythos. It's an interesting exercise in itself to view the story through both the lens of the author, and on its own. Death of the author and all that. 

I'm not sure if I got out all my thoughts about this. It's taken a long time to write this entry, due to my brain just being a bad brain in general. I feel like my knowledge and understanding of this whole subject is much less sophisticated then it could be. Here is a link to The Dunwich Horror, in case one might want to read it for themselves.

Addendum: thoughts on the Call of Cthulhu. My audiobook tells me that I've been pronouncing R'lyeh wrong this entire time(audio, btw, is an excellent format for these stories.) My original above thoughts stand, about perspective and how Lovecraft's stories are like prisms, and you can get something totally different with how you turn it. It was a bit amusing that it seemed like he was deliberately padding for wordcount by repeating plot points over and over again, and I got the impression that he didn't really know meanings of all of the big words he used - I wonder how many readers do? "an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse." is still objectively hilarious.

Sort of confluence of all this is a story idea, something I'm pondering for an attempt at July's Camp Nano. It's definitely more of a gothic story, the cosmic horror stuff got mushed in there because *gestures upwards* I don't brain good in the summer though, and camp nanos have never gone well for me, on top of potential business, so we'll see if it happens.

8tracks playlist of the week - sounds nice in stormy weather and "It was so dark that it was even hard to hear"

It's hot - 85 inside, gods knows what outside and I'm not even going to look humidity. All I know is I'm miserable inside, it's worse outside, and we can't afford to turn on the AC. There's no breeze either. At least it's too hot for bonfires... for now.

I made iced coffee this morning. First attempt - too much cream. Attempts will continue.

I almost forgot E3 was this weekend. I find it comforting to sink into the hype for a bit, to wrap up in the slick press conferences and streamed discussions. Makes it easy to forget for a moment that I won't ever play the vast majority of the games. In another life I actually became a gaming journalist.

So this week I had a... revelation. Walking two senior dogs three+ times a day, you end up with a fair amount of time to think while you wait for them to remember to tend to their business, and the thought that came to me was this - I wonder if growing up with an extended family for whom nothing was good enough has ANYTHING to do with why I have so much trouble interacting with online communities. Ya suppose? It's one of those things, being able to look back and say 'that was a really unfair way to treat a child'. Nothing like being held to a high standard by narcissists. I mean that's not the sole reason I treat social interaction of all kinds like hot iron, but it's probably one of the building blocks.

I try not to think about how posting this is technically interacting on a social network. If I did I'd basically have to never touch the internet ever. (Oh hey, a reason I occasionally disappear!)

8tracks playlist of the week : Take my soul

we found out this morning that my mom's close friend Deb, Chai and Rita's human grandma, passed away last night. It was... sudden and utterly unexpected. It still hasn't completely sunk in - feels like any moment they'll call and say there's been some sort of mix up, because how could Deb possibly be gone? She and mom were in the middle of a project, mom had plans to stay with her for several months this year, there was talk of her coming to visit... and suddenly none of that is happening? Who are we supposed to talk to about this? There was none better a friend then Deb.

Her dog is in good hands. Elle continues to be probably the best cared for acd in the country.

Just... dear friends, take care of yourselves. Don't put things off, especially your health.