In the little chunks of time I had between work, trip preparations, and rest, I started playing Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga from the Game Boy Advance collection I got with the expansion pass to my Nintendo Online account. That has long been one of my favorite Game Boy Advance titles and I was excited to play it again since my GBA hasn’t worked properly for a few years now and my DS, which I used to play GBA games with a backlight, broke a couple summers ago (and my attempts at fixing it fell by the wayside when I couldn’t find a decent 3D printable shell design to use). Having it on the Switch means it is easy to play in fits and starts, and its nature as a somewhat straight-forward RPG means I won’t have any trouble coming back to the game if I wind up not playing it for weeks or months at a time. Plus, I first played this when I was right on the cusp of reclaiming gaming for myself, without interference from my parents or brother, so there’s a decent bit of nostalgia to the game, even if I’ve played it fairly frequently over the years thanks to the slow roll-out of titles in the same general series.
Continue readingReflections on Vacation and Growth
After spending almost two weeks away from work, traveling around the US, flying to Spain, traveling around Spain (and Barcelona in particular), I finally understand why people use multiple social media accounts. Most of my pictures don’t really make sense for Facebook or Twitter, with their more connection-based platforms, so I might finally put some stuff up on the instagram account I’ve had for who knows how many years. I’ve got some nice nature and architecture pictures, along with pictures of my friends and I, so I’ll probably post those there. I’ve got enough pictures I want to post that I can probably put up a decent selection on all three of those platforms, plus Cohost (which is basically me shouting into a void still) and here, which is more of a text experience than a picture one so far as I’m concerned. I’ve still got to figure out how I want to use and balance all of these accounts, but I think I have some ideas after my friends suggested things. Who knows, though. Social media is kind of actively decaying these days, so it’s mostly just a way to share and collect the photos I took on my first cross-Atlantic international trip.
Continue readingFinding The Silver In All of Last Month’s Grey
The past few weeks have been a study in living with anxiety for me. After my coping mechanisms were overwhelmed during an incredibly stressful week, the nearness of my recent trip prevented me from taking the time I needed to recover. As I’m learning, though, it prevented me from taking the time I thought I needed to recover. This isn’t to say that I somehow did better because I was so busy, or even that I managed just fine. I think time to properly rest would have benefited me, of course, since I felt a deep, aching weariness by the time I had to drive across half the country for a flight and that drive, the flight, and settling in to my trip just added their own spins to my exhaustion. But I managed just fine and I don’t think it was even as self-destructive as I thought it might be. As it turns out, since I was so focused on doing something new and had to take care of or at least confront a bunch of personal issues I’d been putting off, I’m probably better off for being put in this position.
Continue readingFinally Following Through on my Naked and Afraid Breath of the Wild Challenge
Over the weekend, I finally started on a project that I’ve talked about doing for about five or six years now. I began a play-through of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild where I will allow myself to wear nothing but hats (aside from a few plot-centric moments that require me to wear more clothes such as entering the Gerudo city and certain quests that require me to wear specific things) and rely heavily on environmental fire as a weapon, all while playing the game on Master Mode. I’ve already finished most of the stuff on the plateau and am ready to move into the wider world. I’ve also already died half a dozen times, mostly due to my own hubris and forgetting to focus on any bokoblin with a bow since most of them will be able to instantly kill me. I’ve found myself frequently frustrated by how quickly a fight ends once I make a mistake, but that’s part of the reason I’m calling this whole personal challenge mode the “Naked and Afraid Run.” The kicker for all of this is that I’m streaming it on my relatively unused Twitch channel so that everyone can come watch/heckle me as I play. All in good fun, of course.
Continue readingPost Vacation Check-In
Well, I had a great time. There’ll be more coming about all that (especially once I’ve had time to sort through pictures and decide what is going where when it comes to social media and my blog here), but I wanted to interrupted my previously planned posting order to do a few updates about my schedule. I’ll get those out of the way quick so I can talk about something more fun/contemplative for the rest of the post.
Continue readingGetting Too Detached From The Clock
There is only one room in my home in which a clock is visible. In fact, you have to actually enter the room to see the time. You can’t see it unless you’ve gone out of your way to peer into the room or pause as you’re walking past it to look at the only clock visible from the hallway. This room is the kitchen and it has three clocks because my oven, my microwave, and my coffeemaker are all fundamentally attached to time in a way that I no longer am. It is a privilege, to be sure, to largely not need to run my life by the steady ticking of the second hand or the silent but swift change of a digital clock, and I appreciate the many factors of my life that make it possible. My largely malleable sleep schedule (I need a few days to change now, sure, but I can get used to any repeated pattern), my lack of a specific schedule at work (my boss only cares that I do my work, not when, so long as I keep it reasonable and don’t miss meetings), and a pretty accurate sense of the passage of time (I can usually tell how much time has passed within a few minutes over one or two hours and within ten to fifteen if it has been more than two hours). As a result, I’ve gone from marking the passage of my day via the steady counting of hours and instead mark it by events.
Continue readingGetting Back Into New Stuff (Book Edition)
I meant to go from Podcasts into streaming stuff, but my trip and a late-night reading incident changed my plans. As I was preparing for my trip, I wound up buying a bunch of e-books. I’d wanted to bring some stuff to read, but I absolutely did not want to bring any physical books since my bags were already jam-packed with things I couldn’t do without. I also didn’t want to re-buy any books I already own (since, like podcasts, I’ve been collecting more and more of them without actually reading anything new). My initial plan was to pick up a bunch of comics that I could read on my phone in my downtime, since it’s fairly easy to zoom in on comics when I’m using my phone and I’m already used to reading them as I scroll around a page on my phone thanks to years of reading webcomics. As I was packing, though, I remembered I have a tablet that I bought years ago as a means of having D&D Beyond at my fingertips during Dungeons and Dragons sessions and that I was bringing that anyway, for a thing I’m doing with the group. So, instead of buying a bunch of comics, I queried around for some new books to buy, bought them, and set up my tablet with an e-book app. Thanks to that, I was able to read as much as I wanted during my vacation (which turned out to be not that much since I read all the comics during the flight out/recovery time and then only had a few more occasions where I wasn’t doing something more engaging than reading).
Continue readingGoing On Vacation
Today’s post is the last one you’ll see from me until April 5th at the earliest. As this goes up, I’m currently on the road to New Jersey (and here is my routine reminder that I write and schedule these a week ahead of time), so I won’t be taking the time to write a post today. After today, I’ll either be flying to, in, or flying back from Spain. Then, on the 3rd, I’ll be driving back to good old Wisconsin from New Jersey (and attempting to do it all in one day, unlike the drive down that will be split into two days). I will probably wind up splitting that into two days of driving as well since I am enthusiastic and willing to push myself but not suicidal or foolhardy (well, I supposed that depends on which of my friends you ask, though). I’m not going to risk myself. I imagine that I’ll probably be tired and maybe still a bit jetlagged at that point, since I’m getting back to New Jersey late Sunday night and plan to leave fairly early Monday morning.
Time will tell, though, since I have the ability to take more time off if I need it and I won’t know how I’m feeling until I get there. Who knows, maybe I’ll actually feel super rested and ready for a long haul. I doubt I’ll feel anything but tired at that point, but I’m open to other possibilities. I wouldn’t mind being pleasantly surprised. I actually enjoy driving, after all, and the only reason I’d need to spread the drive out over multiple days (beyond my own potential exhaustion, of course) is if the weather turns bad. I’d done enough driving in awful weather to know that I’d be better off waiting it out than trying to drive through most of it, and late March/early April is prime “late snowstorm” weather. There’s always the chance of thunderstorms, too, so all I can do at this point is speculate.
When I’m back, I’m sure I’ll have plenty to write about and maybe even some pictures to share. Though I’ll likely only share pictures that I’d use to replace the header image on my blog. I don’t really do much with pictures here, even if I have a bunch that I’ve taken and still like years later. I just don’t really want to get into all the formatting and stuff, you know? Plus, I’m really bad about just leaving stuff on my phone for years, eventually dumping it into folders on my PC, and then ultimately forgetting it’s there until I stumble on the folder again while looking for something else (which I then immeditealy forget about as I embark on a long trip down memory lane). Many of my friends have stopped asking me to take photos of them as a result. I always offer to send them the photos they want but they decline, usually thinking they’ll pull them off Facebook eventually, but I don’t put shit on Facebook and haven’t for several years at this point.
Anyway, I don’t really have much more to say other than you will get your next post on April 5th and I’ll have plenty of stories about traveling abroad when I come back (which will only show up after a week’s delay, of course). We’ve got some cool stuff planned (not to mention I get to see a friend in person that I haven’t seen since May of 2013), so I’m hoping to have a great time and to wind up with plenty I’d like to talk about. Have a good week and a half, everyone.
You Should Check Out Friends At The Table. I Just Think They’re Neat.
I spent most of last night (technically the 13th, not the 22nd, since I write these a week ahead of time and then juggled all of this week’s posts around so I could tell everyone how much I enjoyed the Diablo IV beta) watching the Friends at the Table crew (well, most of them) play King of the Castle on Twitch. I participated a little bit, since you can sign up to become a noble in the kingdom playing out on a stream game if the streamer has it set up correctly (and I can’t think of why you wouldn’t, given the fun I had last night), and it was a very enjoyable experience. Between the amazingly accurate Gilbert Gottfried impression, one of the players using a fun voice changer for her roles, and the overall humor of the group, I recommend checking them out (this link is to the YouTube upload of their stream). It was a very fun time and while there will be some loss of fun because you can’t participate in the voting after the stream has ended, it is still a hilarious few hours of a video game that is absolutely worth your time. There’s even a wonderful, friendly troll and a campaign to legalize a plant that makes everyone feel great when they’re around it all the time.
Continue readingGetting Back Into New Stuff (Podcast Edition)
I’ve been listening to mostly the same podcasts for the past two years. To be entirely fair, there’s been a lot for me to catch up on, since I got into podcasts late in general and very late in regards to some of these longer-running podcasts, specifically. That said, I hit a point last summer where I was entirely caught up and had listened to or watched all of the Patreon bonus content I cared for, but I wound up starting a string of full-series re-listens that I’m still working through now instead of trying something new. I needed something familiar and comfortable, so I just listened to stuff all over again. Some of it was nice, since I missed things here or there the first time and a second listen-through cemented the stories and characters I loved so much more firmly in my mind. Most of it, though, was just something I enjoyed to fill the silence of my evenings, combat the tinnitus I’m developing, and drown out the constant thumping, bumping, and creaking of my upstairs neighbors. Over the past few weeks, as I’ve pushed myself to start trying new things again, I’ve finally started making progress on my “to-listen” pile.
Continue reading