Stagnation

[got_quiet]

This year so far has been feeling kind of like a wash. I'm not particularly happy with it. The only real positive is that I'm still semi-actively studying Japanese, but work has been burning me out a little bit, and there's some politics and friction going on that is minor but still an annoyance. The twitch in my right eye has come back. It was persistent for a few months last year but then went away cause I guess my stress levels were dropping, but now it's come back with a vengeance.

I'm pretty much on the end of my rope with Lost Ark. While theoretically you can play "at your own pace" in reality if you want to play the game with your friends you have to match the pace with your friends. If you don't you end up only getting to play content after they've solved it, and you end up dying fast to mechanics that are new to you and then waiting for them to one-shot the boss themselves because they had already spent two weeks dying over and over and learning the fight and now they can do it with their eyes closed. It fucking sucks and it's boring as hell. So my options are to double down and start playing even more to catch up, to give up playing with friends and just do the challenging content I can solo, or just fuck off and do something else. Option one is out of the question. Two is where I'm starting to lean, but if that ends up not being enjoyable I'm done. It's a shame because the content is actually interesting when it's challenging.

Overwatch League is back so that's where most of my time is going now. It's already been four weeks of games and last weekend was the stage one final. Because of COVID the league is still split into two regions which are not playing each other at all, and everyone is effectively playing on a beta patch, so there are some problems, but give those problems the games have been exciting, the teams have a lot of good storylines going that make it easy to get invested in their success, and at least some of the games have been extremely competitive.