No way it's May

[got_quiet]

I have not yet ripped myself away from the evil clutches of Lost Ark, but I'm working on it. Meanwhile I have a small backlog of VN reviews so got one of those finished up and posted. That's I think the first of the year, which is not good considering one of my fandom goals was to get all of the BLM bundle VNs reviewed by the end of this  year. I had no clue how it's already May. For real. As for the rest of the things I said I wanted to do this year fandom wise, none of them are even started, but I suppose I knew that was going to happen when I wrote them down.

And I have some job related deadlines that are now causing me some real stress. Yesterday I woke up and there was an email from my boss asking me about some charges from the company card. It turns out I'm a bit of an anxious soul so when I saw that my first thought was that I had some how committed fraud unconsciously and was caught and about to be fired. Once I gathered myself I calmed down and figured I had just managed to get the credit card info stolen and now we were going to have to deal with closing the card account, and once I took a step back from that I actually looked at the charges and they were all legitimate work expenses. I would say surely everyone thinks they're about to be fired any time someone coughs the wrong way but I know that's not actually true.

We are also traveling for work again. This is nice in that I have taken a work trip that brought me close enough to my family that I took a day off before hand to visit for the first time in over two years, and it was wonderful to see my grandma, who is in her mid 90s at this point. It's not so nice in that I have been relatively cautious all throughout the pandemic and now I'm working in crowds again and it fucking sucks because I have to deliberately not care about all the terrible mask behavior, because if I don't I will go insane.

I did get a chance to read Yendi on the last work trip though. I enjoyed it. Not quite as much as the prequel Jhereg, but I was still entertained, and they are easy books to just read cover to cover in a sitting or two.

I also got a little restless one night and decided I just wanted to play something new that wasn't a VN, and started Baba Is You. God damn, that game. It lures you in the first couple levels into thinking your some sort of genius, and then hits you with the real puzzles. I'm stalled out right now on a couple of them and just don't know what I'm missing, but dropping it and coming back a day or two later has gotten me through a number of blocks already. I had been streaming the game for my friends for a bit, but they spoiled a couple puzzles for me so I stopped doing that. They didn't do it intentionally. It's very hard not to offer a suggestion to a solution when you're watching someone else struggle with it lol, especially when it's one of those games where once you see the solution you feel a little silly for having spent sometimes literal hours trying to figure it out.

I also tried playing a little bit of Cloud Gardens, but it was too mindless for me. It's similar to a puzzle game I guess, in the sense that you place object on a scene and try to reach a certain number of points based on how much you can make the greenery grow, but it's more just a sort of landscape dollhouse thing. It's pretty, but I was looking for something a little more engaging.

Comments

[autumndaze]

I'm so sorry about the work stress! (Honestly I've always felt like I'm one wrong cough away from being fired, as well).

Ahh it's so cool you're reading the Vlad Taltos books!!! I'm glad you like Jhereg!!! :3 It's been so long since I've read them I had to google it to remember what happens in Yendi roflmao but oh yeah that's the Cawti book. They are pretty easy reads. What I love about them is that they're high fantasy with a lot of complex politics and world-building, but they're not doorstoppers, which you'd have to find with a lot of similar books. He's very good at writing very processable fantasy that's also funny and compelling. (Unless you read the Paarfi books then it's like... sigh).

I'm sorry those puzzles got spoiled :/ I mod for a streamer who's doing Elden Ring and I've had to yell (politely) at some folks when they kept ignoring the streamer's tags and comments for no backseating. It's so annoying.

[got_quiet]

It's such a shitty feeling, especially because I know it's just my dumb brain being stupid at me.

And yeah I'm enjoying the Vlad books! I don't know how I feel about how eager Vlad was to jump into Cawti's bed right after she tried to assassinate him but it seems the setting is into predestination and determination so I guess it's on theme.

And I'm not too disappointed about the puzzles. We hadn't made any agreement about if people could throw out suggestions so I kind of only realized I didn't want them after I had gotten them.