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A Hiatus Update After A Million Years
I haven't felt like writing a journal update in a while. Back in September I know I was just really burnt out and depressed and it is what it is, but then I didn't feel like writing updates in October either and by then I was feeling better. I keep myself very busy so technically speaking there's always something to report about, but it's kind of... The same something, slightly repackaged, week after week and it gets boring to talk about.
If I'm bored writing it, why should anyone else want to read about it? (ah, a sentiment that applies to creative writing just as well as personal journaling!)
But now I'm taking another twitter hiatus and have more than two months of unaccounted for LIFE BULLSHIT so like, surely at this point there is something worth being excited about.
The question is just figuring out how the fuck to organize it. I did a nice subject-by-subject breakdown one of these times, so that's handy.
Conventions: I did Capclave at the end of September and Anime USA in late October and both were a good time. Capclave is my favorite lit con I actually get to go to because they always have good guests and interesting panels and I like, actually went to a few panels that discuss the technical side of writing this time and they gave me a lot of useful stuff to chew on re: the space AU fic I'd been writing for months.
Anime USA I basically spent as much time as physically possible playing jubeat, I played 53 rounds of jubeat across three days, and I also got to see Psiten and Ciry and friends a decent bit, so it was good. Sunday afternoon I semi-accidentally crashed the one-off dnd-lite tabletop game Rui was running (like literally crashed, I ended up rolling a character and hopping in midway through) which was genuinely really fun, especially since I got to hang with Mel and Rui and Laurent and friends who I hadn't gotten to see earlier during con. (I also saw Tali and Mandi and Gabbie over the weekend!)
Driving: I actually did drive with dad a not totally inconsiderable amount in September but haven't gotten to do much of anything in October. I also discovered that the driving school I paid for, which had been in business for ten years and had good reviews and was walkable from my house, went out of business. Which makes getting a license in Maryland just a liiiiiittle bit more of a huge pain in the ass, so I'm not looking forward to getting that sorted because I literally cannot take the licensing test until I do.
Theater: I've gone to a good bit of theater in the past two months! In September I saw Small Mouth Sounds with my mother and aunt at Roundhouse, which was REALLY GOOD because it was about a silent spiritual retreat and all of the body language and nonverbal communication in it was suuuuuper well done. And then just last week we saw How I Learned to Drive at Roundhouse, which was about childhood sexual abuse and incest so uh, it was exactly as heavy as that sounds. My mom hated it and thought it was too graphic; I kind of... Appreciated it, because I feel like The Point was to make you uncomfortable and make you think about how our culture views sex and assault, and it DEFINITELY DID THAT.
I also dragged Psiten to see a truly awful performance satirizing white supremacist fiction, which was lowkey traumatizing but at least I deliberately traumatized us TOGETHER. And then when I visited Yrin last we went to "Fifty Shades of Green," an informative comedy presentation about plant reproduction. It had audience participation! I volunteered to roleplay a plant for "The Pollination Game" and got to make everything I said sound as fucky as possible! Yrin informs me that the rest of the audience was very impressed by how salacious I managed to make Literally Everything sound, I'm proud.
Socializing: Besides theater and cons, I had Yrin come to visit over Labor Day weekend, which was delightful, and I visited Yrin in Boston two weeks into October, which was also very nice. I guess I also did Colossalcon East and SPX at the beginning of September?? I just didn't think about them because it already feels like it's been so long. I've basically had plans for at least PART of the weekend on every weekend for... Longer than I could really count. I don't like having totally free and unaccounted-for time, I get sad.
I visited my friends Katie and Michael for the first time since the start of the year?? Their son is getting so big now, he's two and talking more and I accidentally showed him a video of my other friend's baby daughter (I started playing it from twitter and he heard half a second of audio before yelling BABY!! and scrambling up to sit with me) and showing him a baby means I'm his new favorite person short of his parents. I also got to see June and Dani when I was in Boston. I've done pretty well getting to socialize with friends who I love! I just... still feel a little socially starved and I can't figure out quite what it is that I'm lacking.
(Like, I would very much like to see Yrin more than once a month while also being aware that even BEING ABLE to see him that often is pretty lucky, but as much as it sucks I've sort of acclimated to it sucking. It's not that. It's the rest of my social life that feels like something is missing.)
Games: I bought a switch! For a couple weeks this was really novel; I only have three games and was playing them a lot, since one is an RPG and two are rhythm games they multitask really well together. But then I kind of temporarily burnt out on the dungeon-exploring style of the RPG and now that I would maybe like to start playing again it's hard to kick my ass to pick it back up. I'd also been continuing to play The Guided Fate Paradox on the PS3 and switching gears from that to Labyrinth of Refrain was maybe a mistake because now I won't beat either game, lol.
I've been playing a ton of Jubeat. I played a lot at Colossalcon East, and made Yrin and June go with me to an arcade in Boston that has a machine, and played a HELLISH amount at AUSA. I feel really good about it! I've gotten so much better!! I really love rhythm games for the genuine skill involved in completing the task they present to you, and for how you really can measure your improvement and feel satisfied about it. AUSA finally sated the just, CRAVING I was having for this game, but I'm still excited to play a little NEXT weekend, and then a little more at Anime NYC the weekend after that.
I also quit tenirabi. I got to the point where how much it felt like a chore had well surpassed how much I was enjoying it, and so I forced myself to quit. And quitting is HARD, because even when something becomes tedious and I'm just doing it out of habit, like... It's a habit, and it needs to be broken, and it feels kind of heartbreaking to put aside all the work you've put into an account every day for months and months. I only managed to quit because I was playing Voez on the switch to get my rhythm fix, and then I downloaded Ride Zero, which is a bullet hell rhythm game with no events and which hasn't been actively updated in a year, so it's safe. Once I play through all of the game's existing content (which will admittedly take a while) there will be nothing else to do. I will have beaten it. And I will be free.
Hopefully just in time for the hypmic rhythm game to come out. God, I hope the hypmic taptap is fun.
Fandom: And that brings us to fandom! I kind of fell out of tennis! I can't say for sure whether becoming disillusioned with tenirabi led to me drifting away from tenipuri as a fandom, or whether my interest in tenipuri in a Fandom Way waning made it harder for me to love tenirabi when the game kept doing un-fun things, ultimately leading to me quitting playing tenirabi. Either way, I fucked up super bad because I fell out of tennis before finishing my big bang fic. And I don't want to force myself to write when I'm just REALLY not jiving with the characters at the moment so I'm gonna... Give myself a break for the rest of the year and see if maybe in 2019 I'll want to work on the fic again.
And also I got into hypmic. There's so much I could say about getting into hypmic but it's just been a really bizarre and different fandom experience for me. There is no canon! The only canon is the songs themselves, the drama CD tracks, various interviews, and the live shows. As a western fan with almost no language comprehension, it can only be consumed through translations! Usually I can't do audio-only fandoms (no podcast fandoms) and I don't have the patience for doing fandom with media I cannot consume directly, where it exists in XYZ format but I have to read it in script format because I need translations. And yet, somehow, I got into hypmic.
(It's because there's so LITTLE canon that even I can get through that amount of audio and translation scripts. And because the cast is just, designed to be likable.)
I'm having a nice time with hypmic because for the first time in a long time I don't dislike anything. I don't have a NOTP. The most negative feeling I have toward a ship is "this is boring" or "I only really see it happening XYZ way but I get people liking it with ABC dynamic, I can see why they got there." I love all the characters! More often than not if someone proposes a crackship and my first thought is "I can't see any way that would be interesting," five minutes later I will have figured out an angle for it and would totally read fic or look at art if it was shown to me. It's nice to just... Enjoy a thing, without feeling any need to be overly critical of what other fans are doing or thinking.
And probably that's it! I'm not giving a work update because I don't like to talk too publicly about work but the short version is "after being stressed at work for a while I'm feeling better and happier at work even if I'm busy" and there isn't anything else I can think of going on that really bears mentioning.
I could talk about writing, beyond just saying "I'm putting space AU on hiatus until 2019" but god, I don't really want to talk about writing. I want to give myself a small, manageable project to do between now and the new year but I can't settle and focus well enough to know what I want to do. Hopefully I'll figure it out.
I could also talk about RPing but I know I'm just putzing around on cherubplay again as a stand-in for writing because I can't decide what I want to write solo. I'm very capricious with RP there and my attention span is short, so I'll make plans to do XYZ plot and then three days later I'll be bored of it because ABC idea was presented to me instead. I want to RP hypmic but I can't get my shit together enough to actually sit down with one person and start something.
Ah well! Overall my feeling about life right now is pretty good. I have this vague sense that I have things I NEED TO WRAP UP and that once I finish my outstanding business everything will be REALLY good, but this is an okay place to be. I'm also aware I'm only able to feel this way because I am aggressively not thinking about current events or the upcoming election because every time I do that I am paralyzed by despair and fear and existential dread, so yeah we're gonna keep not doing that! I'm going to vote and DESPERATELY PRAY and maybe after the midterm elections the political landscape will look MARGINALLY less bleak, that would be cool!
For whoever the fuck is still out there seeing this (since I am not presently cross-posting to twitter to drag y'all in): thanks for sticking around, ILU. ♥
If I'm bored writing it, why should anyone else want to read about it? (ah, a sentiment that applies to creative writing just as well as personal journaling!)
But now I'm taking another twitter hiatus and have more than two months of unaccounted for LIFE BULLSHIT so like, surely at this point there is something worth being excited about.
The question is just figuring out how the fuck to organize it. I did a nice subject-by-subject breakdown one of these times, so that's handy.
Conventions: I did Capclave at the end of September and Anime USA in late October and both were a good time. Capclave is my favorite lit con I actually get to go to because they always have good guests and interesting panels and I like, actually went to a few panels that discuss the technical side of writing this time and they gave me a lot of useful stuff to chew on re: the space AU fic I'd been writing for months.
Anime USA I basically spent as much time as physically possible playing jubeat, I played 53 rounds of jubeat across three days, and I also got to see Psiten and Ciry and friends a decent bit, so it was good. Sunday afternoon I semi-accidentally crashed the one-off dnd-lite tabletop game Rui was running (like literally crashed, I ended up rolling a character and hopping in midway through) which was genuinely really fun, especially since I got to hang with Mel and Rui and Laurent and friends who I hadn't gotten to see earlier during con. (I also saw Tali and Mandi and Gabbie over the weekend!)
Driving: I actually did drive with dad a not totally inconsiderable amount in September but haven't gotten to do much of anything in October. I also discovered that the driving school I paid for, which had been in business for ten years and had good reviews and was walkable from my house, went out of business. Which makes getting a license in Maryland just a liiiiiittle bit more of a huge pain in the ass, so I'm not looking forward to getting that sorted because I literally cannot take the licensing test until I do.
Theater: I've gone to a good bit of theater in the past two months! In September I saw Small Mouth Sounds with my mother and aunt at Roundhouse, which was REALLY GOOD because it was about a silent spiritual retreat and all of the body language and nonverbal communication in it was suuuuuper well done. And then just last week we saw How I Learned to Drive at Roundhouse, which was about childhood sexual abuse and incest so uh, it was exactly as heavy as that sounds. My mom hated it and thought it was too graphic; I kind of... Appreciated it, because I feel like The Point was to make you uncomfortable and make you think about how our culture views sex and assault, and it DEFINITELY DID THAT.
I also dragged Psiten to see a truly awful performance satirizing white supremacist fiction, which was lowkey traumatizing but at least I deliberately traumatized us TOGETHER. And then when I visited Yrin last we went to "Fifty Shades of Green," an informative comedy presentation about plant reproduction. It had audience participation! I volunteered to roleplay a plant for "The Pollination Game" and got to make everything I said sound as fucky as possible! Yrin informs me that the rest of the audience was very impressed by how salacious I managed to make Literally Everything sound, I'm proud.
Socializing: Besides theater and cons, I had Yrin come to visit over Labor Day weekend, which was delightful, and I visited Yrin in Boston two weeks into October, which was also very nice. I guess I also did Colossalcon East and SPX at the beginning of September?? I just didn't think about them because it already feels like it's been so long. I've basically had plans for at least PART of the weekend on every weekend for... Longer than I could really count. I don't like having totally free and unaccounted-for time, I get sad.
I visited my friends Katie and Michael for the first time since the start of the year?? Their son is getting so big now, he's two and talking more and I accidentally showed him a video of my other friend's baby daughter (I started playing it from twitter and he heard half a second of audio before yelling BABY!! and scrambling up to sit with me) and showing him a baby means I'm his new favorite person short of his parents. I also got to see June and Dani when I was in Boston. I've done pretty well getting to socialize with friends who I love! I just... still feel a little socially starved and I can't figure out quite what it is that I'm lacking.
(Like, I would very much like to see Yrin more than once a month while also being aware that even BEING ABLE to see him that often is pretty lucky, but as much as it sucks I've sort of acclimated to it sucking. It's not that. It's the rest of my social life that feels like something is missing.)
Games: I bought a switch! For a couple weeks this was really novel; I only have three games and was playing them a lot, since one is an RPG and two are rhythm games they multitask really well together. But then I kind of temporarily burnt out on the dungeon-exploring style of the RPG and now that I would maybe like to start playing again it's hard to kick my ass to pick it back up. I'd also been continuing to play The Guided Fate Paradox on the PS3 and switching gears from that to Labyrinth of Refrain was maybe a mistake because now I won't beat either game, lol.
I've been playing a ton of Jubeat. I played a lot at Colossalcon East, and made Yrin and June go with me to an arcade in Boston that has a machine, and played a HELLISH amount at AUSA. I feel really good about it! I've gotten so much better!! I really love rhythm games for the genuine skill involved in completing the task they present to you, and for how you really can measure your improvement and feel satisfied about it. AUSA finally sated the just, CRAVING I was having for this game, but I'm still excited to play a little NEXT weekend, and then a little more at Anime NYC the weekend after that.
I also quit tenirabi. I got to the point where how much it felt like a chore had well surpassed how much I was enjoying it, and so I forced myself to quit. And quitting is HARD, because even when something becomes tedious and I'm just doing it out of habit, like... It's a habit, and it needs to be broken, and it feels kind of heartbreaking to put aside all the work you've put into an account every day for months and months. I only managed to quit because I was playing Voez on the switch to get my rhythm fix, and then I downloaded Ride Zero, which is a bullet hell rhythm game with no events and which hasn't been actively updated in a year, so it's safe. Once I play through all of the game's existing content (which will admittedly take a while) there will be nothing else to do. I will have beaten it. And I will be free.
Hopefully just in time for the hypmic rhythm game to come out. God, I hope the hypmic taptap is fun.
Fandom: And that brings us to fandom! I kind of fell out of tennis! I can't say for sure whether becoming disillusioned with tenirabi led to me drifting away from tenipuri as a fandom, or whether my interest in tenipuri in a Fandom Way waning made it harder for me to love tenirabi when the game kept doing un-fun things, ultimately leading to me quitting playing tenirabi. Either way, I fucked up super bad because I fell out of tennis before finishing my big bang fic. And I don't want to force myself to write when I'm just REALLY not jiving with the characters at the moment so I'm gonna... Give myself a break for the rest of the year and see if maybe in 2019 I'll want to work on the fic again.
And also I got into hypmic. There's so much I could say about getting into hypmic but it's just been a really bizarre and different fandom experience for me. There is no canon! The only canon is the songs themselves, the drama CD tracks, various interviews, and the live shows. As a western fan with almost no language comprehension, it can only be consumed through translations! Usually I can't do audio-only fandoms (no podcast fandoms) and I don't have the patience for doing fandom with media I cannot consume directly, where it exists in XYZ format but I have to read it in script format because I need translations. And yet, somehow, I got into hypmic.
(It's because there's so LITTLE canon that even I can get through that amount of audio and translation scripts. And because the cast is just, designed to be likable.)
I'm having a nice time with hypmic because for the first time in a long time I don't dislike anything. I don't have a NOTP. The most negative feeling I have toward a ship is "this is boring" or "I only really see it happening XYZ way but I get people liking it with ABC dynamic, I can see why they got there." I love all the characters! More often than not if someone proposes a crackship and my first thought is "I can't see any way that would be interesting," five minutes later I will have figured out an angle for it and would totally read fic or look at art if it was shown to me. It's nice to just... Enjoy a thing, without feeling any need to be overly critical of what other fans are doing or thinking.
And probably that's it! I'm not giving a work update because I don't like to talk too publicly about work but the short version is "after being stressed at work for a while I'm feeling better and happier at work even if I'm busy" and there isn't anything else I can think of going on that really bears mentioning.
I could talk about writing, beyond just saying "I'm putting space AU on hiatus until 2019" but god, I don't really want to talk about writing. I want to give myself a small, manageable project to do between now and the new year but I can't settle and focus well enough to know what I want to do. Hopefully I'll figure it out.
I could also talk about RPing but I know I'm just putzing around on cherubplay again as a stand-in for writing because I can't decide what I want to write solo. I'm very capricious with RP there and my attention span is short, so I'll make plans to do XYZ plot and then three days later I'll be bored of it because ABC idea was presented to me instead. I want to RP hypmic but I can't get my shit together enough to actually sit down with one person and start something.
Ah well! Overall my feeling about life right now is pretty good. I have this vague sense that I have things I NEED TO WRAP UP and that once I finish my outstanding business everything will be REALLY good, but this is an okay place to be. I'm also aware I'm only able to feel this way because I am aggressively not thinking about current events or the upcoming election because every time I do that I am paralyzed by despair and fear and existential dread, so yeah we're gonna keep not doing that! I'm going to vote and DESPERATELY PRAY and maybe after the midterm elections the political landscape will look MARGINALLY less bleak, that would be cool!
For whoever the fuck is still out there seeing this (since I am not presently cross-posting to twitter to drag y'all in): thanks for sticking around, ILU. ♥