got_quiet

December fucked me up. In a good way, but god damn. I had like a single week home and not a single weekend free due to work travel and holiday chaos.

I had my last business trip of the year and it was a doozy. First was Hong Kong, which I was visiting for the very first time, and then I took a quick trip to Japan to do some work, but only for like 3 days.

It's been a long time since I've been somewhere completely new to me. Hong Kong gave me an opportunity to engage with a place with fresh eyes again, which is something I haven't really gotten to do in over a decade, as my work takes me to the same places over and over again, typically. A few quick observations:

Japan was a super short trip. I tried to get a day in Osaka to see a friend, but fucked up the schedule and had only less than 24 hours. I did get to see my friend but had to jump on the Shinkansen immediately after and get to work, which was exhausting after having just flown in from Hong Kong and spent half a week working. When these trips happen I lose not just a week+ of my time, but I also usually get no weekend. Sometimes I'm out two weekends. This trip I didn't really have a free day outside of work until right before Christmas, at which point I was with family, so actually last weekend was the first time since November that I wasn't traveling or working or both.

Other stuff has been going on. For example Jayvik has grabbed me by the neck and is choking me out atm, but this post is long enough so I'll post a more fannish update later.

Meanwhile, the Snowflake Challenge is starting up again. I am very much not ready. Time needs to slow the fuck down. But Challenge 2 is an old one about my fan origin story, which never really changes, so I'll just link the post I made last year about that.

I've been ill these last couple of weeks in that sort of way where I'm miserable and can't get anything done but sure all hell am not going to bother going to the doctor. There was never any follow up with that online checkup by the way. I was waiting for someone to call so I could get my flu shots, since that was part of the survey, and nope. So I gave up on them and got a vaccination elsewhere today.

A consequence of my feeling terrible was my brain short circuited and things got so silly that I ended up having to go back into the grocery store three times in a row because I couldn't remember this or that thing, including groceries that I had left at the cashier's. And then I forgot to put the lunch meat away when I got home and it didn't occur to me until the next day that this had happened, and sure enough it was sitting in a bag that morning, so I had to go buy new lunch meat because I was already feeling like crap and didn't want to risk further deterioration of my gut health. I've been feeling better now but the last few weeks have been a bit of a wild ride.

Also sort of kinda started playing this idle game on youtube of all places. Most of the playables suck, but there's this little game that's sort of similar to Neko Atsume. You can be a crazy cat dad with a husband and just fill your house with cats and do some bad interior decoration, and since you get your currency by just checking in once in a while I log in once at night, clip my cats nails, make my husband some lunch and that's it. It's called adorable home.


 

Been trying to finish up Blood of Zeus season 2, but it's so slow! And, well, it's bad. It's super bad. I can't defend it in any way. But I'm watching it in Japanese and calling it study. I tried putting on the Japanese subtitles in addition to the dub, but ... it's a completely different translation!!!! So while I could technically do both the sub and the dub I can't actually read along without effort.

I completely forgot about IF comp this year. I usually play at least 5 games so I can judge, but I've been so busy this year the whole thing completely slipped my mind. So I was reminded only a couple days ago and tried to play some games really fast (but still carefully) to get my votes in.

The first game in my personal queue was Awakened Deeply. It s a space parser game where you're going around a space ship solving puzzles. It was extremely basic. You find one thing in a room and that thing solves the puzzle in another room, rinse and repeat. There were a couple of places where some vocabulary got me stuck, and for some reason I have a terrible relationship with the "leave" verb in parser games. I always try to "leave [noun]" which almost always throws an error, and never try just "leave" until I'm at my wits end, at which point I remember to try just "leave" and finally manage to exit whatever thing I've been put in. I hate that verb. There was also one puzzle that I simply didn't understand.  That was the last puzzle of the game too, and the only one that really required more than picking up a thing that had the answer on it. So I wasn't particularly impressed with this one.

The second game was just on the edge of right up my alley but also just too esoteric for me to really be able to grab onto it. It's called Verses. I don't know what the plot was even though I played it through, but it involves "analysis" which involves interacting with Romanian poetry and getting lost in translation, but also there's mutants and dystopia and lots of viscera and shit, and someone dies. It felt interesting but just a half step away from meaning anything for me. I think the fact that you change the language by clicking on it, including translating poetry from Romanian to English, which removes the original language, which makes it feel very hard to read the original closely. I'm not grading this one until I've played my five games, because it's so hard for me to place.