After talking about it for a few years, I finally sat down with some friends to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. Given that this is one of my friends’ favorite movie, I let her pick the version we watched and so we settled in to watch a high-quality VHS rip of the original US publication of the movie. My friend cited music and some artistic choices as the reason for this selection and I, who had a vague idea of what the movie was about (burnout/depression/growing up/loss of creative spark), went along with it. I’d never seen the movie. I didn’t have an opinion. I knew that a lot of people had very specific and very strong opinions, but I didn’t really know why. After watching the movie though, I kind of get it. The specific songs chosen back in the day lend a very particular feel to the movie and, since one of them is right near the start of it, I can understand how changing the song would change the tone of the movie rather strongly. I also understand that the decision to make the cat, Jiji, speak again at the end of the movie is important to a lot of people and that it significantly changes one of the final notes of the movie, not to mention how a viewer might feel as they watch the credits roll and move on with their life. I only very recently saw the movie for the first time, so it wasn’t a very formative experience for me and while I am tempted to see how the more recent edition of the movie feels with the altered music and a story that ends more closely aligned with its Japanese source, I don’t know that I want to spend another couple hours on it (this isn’t a statement about the quality of the movie or anything, just a reflection of that fact that I don’t like to rewatch movies in quick succession). I will probably watch the movie again someday and maybe then I’ll watch the more recent version just to compare how it feels, but I really don’t expect my opinion to change that drastically since most of how I feel about it has little to do with the song selection and more to do with how burnout and creative work is depicted.
Continue readingA World Of Possibilities And Great Music In The Latest Mario Kart
After spending a bunch of time thinking about not having any ACTUAL Switch 2 games and having a weird experience trying to both play the upgraded Breath of the Wild on the Switch 2 while using my brand new 4K TV for the first time, I decided to cut to the heart of the matter and just buy Mario Kart World. For a decent part of my youth, I was a big fan of Mario Kart games. I played tons of Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Double-Dash, but I never really got into any of the games past that. I’ve played a few of them and might even own one or two more (I genuinely don’t remember), but most of the magic faded after the those two games. Once they started adding performance variability based on character mass and kart size and wheels and stuff like gliding and wall riding and all that, I just stopped feeling as invested in the game. They became just one more series of games that came out with incremental changes, slightly new features, and a whole load of new mechanics for me to learn. All of which is kind of antithetical to easy multiplayer games or party gaming, which was how I’d been playing all Mario Kart games since I started high school. They weren’t bad, ever, but they just didn’t feel like the experience I’d grown to know and love as a kid. They were closer to other racing games instead, all of them with an optimal strategy for winning based on the mechanics of the game (even if those mechanics could still be upset by the random items you’d get). The looseness and goofiness of my childhood experiences was gone, as was the days of firmly believing that green characters were faster and that yoshi had a slight advantage because of how far forward his face went.
Continue readingSlow-Cooked Considerations
After what has turned into three horrible, sweaty days, the heat wave is ending. It has not ended yet, but the wisdom of the remaining pieces of the US national weather prediction aparatus have declared that, by the time I’ve gotten my necessary groceries and made my way home, it will be over. My two sleepless, restless nights will not be joined by a third and the ruddy, glistening sheen of sweat I’ve taken to wearing in the place of my normal mistless pallor will finally take its leave. Even now, as I type this, all my weather apps and services cry out that the worst has passed. “All will be well,” they say, “With a fifty percent chance of severe thunderstorms and a constant overnight temperature not much lower than last night’s.” My office is muggy, made so by the water I’m constantly drinking to feed the stirring air that whicks all perspiration from my skin to compliment the moisture that made making its way through the heavy filters and cooling processes of the building’s HVAC system that leaves this place a dry husk devoid of comfort in the winter and my little thermometer’s delcaration that it is only seventy-six degrees in my litle rectangle does little to comfort me as a result. After all, what does the number mean to me when the only way for me to stop sweating is to sit in my chair and refrain from any kind of movement? What’s the point of knowing the temperature when even the movement of standing up to examine the digital readout is enough to pop tiny beads of just-drunk water on my forehead, upper lip, and forearms? It is hot, it cannot be denied, and I do not need a thermometer to tell me that.
Continue readingI Got Sick A Week Ago Due To Someone Else’s Failure
Well, I can now say that I have caught and survived E. Coli (and that I’m writing this the day before it goes up since I’m super behind on blog posts for what should be obvious reasons). I got extremely lucky that my entire case was incredibly “mild” and that I only missed four days of work for what amounted to bad food poisoning, so I’m saying this extremely gratefully. To my understanding, based on the results from my urgent care trip and the messages I exchanged with my practitioner afterwards, the only way I could have gotten more lucky than I was would be by not getting it in the first place. Anyway, I got to interact with the modern public health aperatus on a state and federal level, spend time digging through my trash for what I suspected was the culprit, and spend three solid days consuming a single can of soup, a handful of pretzels, and maybe a gallon of gatorade (I didn’t exactly track the specific amount I drank) on top of at least a gallon of water every day. It was quite an experience and not one I’m keen to repeat, so I’ll no longer be taking “pre-washed” vegetables at face value for the foreseeable future. As far as I can tell, I got it from some bagged salad I bought and now I’m never buying another bagged salad again (though this is the strongest suspect in my mind, it is not the only one, unfortunately). Fresh vegetables only, from now on, so I can thoroughly wash them. Which probably means I won’t be doing any more salads like that since I don’t want salad enough to make my own. It was a different question when I could buy a mix to toss with some extras thrown in, but that life is behind me now.
Continue readingCatching Up With The Demigods Of Daelen
Slowly, as I continue to recover from months of constant exhaustion, withdrawal, and pain (not necessarily in that order), I’m getting back into my various Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. This past weekend, it was time to get back into The Demigods of Daelen, my sorta-hack of Dungeons and Dragons 5e to make the numbers big and the storytelling potential just as big (don’t have to worry about the variability of a d20 as much if your bonuses to rolls are huge). Sometimes it feels more like I’ve hacked Roll20 rather than the Dungeons and Dragons system, but given that I’ve consciously and carefully taken the “bounded accuracy” core of D&D 5e and dramatically shifted it to work in a different way, I think I could probably call this a hack. One I’ll probably never write up and formalize in any way because you could probably get this effect much more easily using a different game system, but one that works for my crew of players who seem to prefer playing something that at least resembles Dungeons and Dragons over trying any new game system long enough to really get a feel for it. Anyway, this time we spent a good forty-five minutes catching up and then another forty-five minutes getting a player’s character finished. After that, we unified our players ahead of their upcoming mission, had a fun chit-chat-in-a-bar scene, and then promptly moved on to the main challenge the party will be facing for the first adventure of this campaing: a massive, orb-like mechanical contrapation that is very slowly but inexorably rolling its way towards a large-ish town that it will absolutely crush, slowly and painfully, if it is not somehow stopped. The session came to an end right as the party dealt with the first challenge pertaining to this strange almost-orb, as they were preparing to enter it, and I’m excited to see how the party deals with the challenge I’ve brewed up for them.
Continue readingNo Post Today
I’ve been sick all week and it has been a little thought-consuming in a way that makes it difficult to write about other stuff, so I haven’t had the mental space to write about anything else and the nature of my illness makes me unwilling to write about that. I’ve been losing myself in a lot of video game time, though. I’ll have plenty to write about next week when I get back into writing, assuming this illness has fully run it’s course by then.
Looking For A Silver Lining Amidst The Smoke-Filled Sky
While I’m still pretty bitter about my new work schedule and wakeup time, I’ve begun trying to find a positive spin I put on it for myself. This isn’t working super well since I know I’m lying to myself about it, but at least my attempts to find silver linings are working out a bit better. The primary silver lining I’ve found as of my second consecutive day of this crap is that I’ll now be getting off work at a time where I can more easily participate in group Final Fantasy 14 activities. This is especially relevant almost immediately because today, the day I’m writing this, marks the first instance of a weekly even I helped to schedule. Last week, on a saturday, my FC (Free Company, which is the FF14 version of player guilds) wound up getting a group together to do one of the “exploration zones” for the expansion I’d just finished. Since we planned this activity out ahead of time, I was all ready to go when the event started and had a pretty good time playing around with my friends. It was fun, even if I didn’t really know what was going on since I had to skip the cutscenes in order to not hold everything up for all the players who had already done that stuff, and we wound up getting such a large group together that someone said we should try to make it a weekly event. Since there was already a different weekly event for doing the latest “exploration zone” (which was recently released and is still very new content) and a lot of chat back and forth about when it was going to happen, I decided to just set up a poll and let everyone pick what time worked best for them. Which turned out to be Thursdays, the one day each week that I’d previously reserved as my “get to work whenever and work super late to make up for any short days” day.
Continue readingWaking Up On The Wrong Side Of Dawn
For almost… Probably two decades as of this year, actually, I’ve been getting up at six in the morning for work. Or, you know, whatever counts as work. That’s when I needed to get up in high school in order to get there on time, regardless of how I was getting there. In college, I almost always had a class at eight in the morning and, for a couple years, had an opening shift at the tech support desk in the library. Even on the days my class schedule was different, I still got up at more or less the same time unless it was specifically a day off or that was at the end of the week and didn’t have an 8am class. After I graduated, it was just easier to keep that same schedule going. I kept it going without issue until the pandemic rolled around. 2020 killed my ability to easily get up at the same time every morning and turned me from an easy early-riser who was always in bed and asleep by midnight into the current cluster-fuck of a sleep schedule I’m unfortunately maintaining to this day. For a while there in 2020 and 2021, I was waking up at whatever time every other week since I was only working every-other-week at my job and struggled to maintain a consistent time on the weeks I had work. I eventually got that under control again, around the time I started having insomnia issues and needed to structure my sleep better, and maintained that until last year. Then, last year, thanks to all the pain I was and how it ruined my ability to sleep last fall, I started letting myself sleep in a bit more so I could make sure to always get at least four hours of sleep. While I would let myself move my alarm time as much as I felt I needed, the default time that I always returned to was six. Always. Now, though, after some more developments at work along the same frustrating lines as the last ones, I’m throwing decades of history aside and setting my alarm an hour earlier. I’ve already had one miserable morning up an hour earlier as of writing this and I’ll have another five at minimum by the time you read this, so hopefully I’ll know if it’s working by then.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 36
Today sucked. It sucked for a lot of reasons. It started bad, didn’t get any better, and left me feeling like a defeated piece of shit by the time I had the free time to start writing this (aka, take breaks at work). Rather than write about that (I need time to process), I’m going to talk instead about starting to replay The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at sixty frames per second on a 4k TV. You see, I got a Switch 2 and a brand new TV, so of course the first thing I did when I got both those things set up (in a burst of nearly-manic energy on Sunday evening at 11pm) was plop in my BotW cartridge and load up the SECOND save file that the expanded Switch 2 version of the game gets you so I could start a new Master Mode playthrough. I was prepared to buy the expansions since I figured the at least 600 hours (632, precisely, according to the stats part of the new Zelda Notes acitivty in the Nintendo Online app) I have in justified spending another ten dollars, easily, but I apparently get it for free thanks to having a Nintendo Online + subscription (for those sweet, sweet N64 games, of course). I did have to wait a surprisingly long time for the game to update, but I was able to use that time to delete a number of games that were in the download queue that I had little to no intention of playing anytime soon, so it wasn’t entirely wasted time. Still, it felt weird that the download took so long (though I guess it was making some pretty major display changes) and the weirdness didn’t stop there.
Continue readingRandom Encounters Are A Double-Edged Sword In The Rotten Labyrinth
After a few weeks of delay due to my poor health, I finally ran another Dungeons and Dragons session for The Rotten Labyrinth. It was a bit shorter than usual, due to starting almost an hour and a half late, but we still got to do some stuff. There was a discussion of what to do next and how to avoid the monster that nearly took out the entire party, there was some deliberation about how to proceed with three of the more combat-inclined party members, a surprise combat encounter complete with magical compulsions, and then a bit of treasure at the end of a long passage, accessibly only via some kind of blood magic. It wasn’t the least-busy session we’ve had and the amount of ground covered does not amount to all that much, but a lot of stuff happened on the back end that was not immediately visible to my players so a decent amount of progress was made. I’ve also solidified that they’re all going to get a level-up with their next long-rest, since they’ve clearly reached the threshold for it after their last few encounters, but I find myself wondering just how long it is going to take them to explore this labyrinth or if there’s anything I could do to speed things up. As much as I enjoy having them work their way through traps and monsters and find treasure in what amounts to maybe an eighth, at most (and even that feels like a massive overestimation), of the entire first-floor of the labyrinth, I’m worried about how much actual time it is going to take to get them anywhere. Or to, you know, develop the plot. There’s really not a lot going on in this part of the labyrinth other than the introduction to the general mystery of it all and a plethora of random encounters.
Continue reading