I'm staying afloat and surprisingly on top of a lot of stuff in my life, but productivity-wise, I'm still at all-times low. My motivation to do things is just not high, so I'm surviving without thriving.

Good: passed lifeguard, and applied to BE a lifeguard at the Y! Managing life okay, albeit not perfectly.
Bad: I'm still very obviously depressed, oof.

Progress: I am more comfortable driving, and managed to schedule a pickup of my lifeguard gear, which I actually got today which will help for tomorrow and Saturday. In terms of daily things, I am mostly staying on top of them. I'm falling a bit behind on oral hygiene, and vitamins, and showering at my training isn't quite good enough, but overall doing decently well to stay ahead. Plus, I've done work on projects!

Regress: not committing to any project, continuing to waste time on games, falling behind on oral hygiene and vitamins, and so on and so forth.

​Adulting is hard.

...But I've been rather busy. The lifeguard training is rather exhausting as it eats up a whole day (and this week will eat up a full two). Making up on missed time takes a lot of recovery. I've been perpetually behind, catching up on eeeeeverything.

So suffice to say, I've been swamped.

However, I have found time to begin dabble in projects, and...there is one which I am rather extensively considering going through on--for once not a superhero or supervillain story!

I've been productive and as of today I am mostly caught up on life.

So things are good, it's just taxing.

My bad.

Today's not gonna be much better as I'm rushing to bed to get sleep for big day round two.

It is an absence that is, mostly, not my fault.
I could've made a blog entry yesterday night--that's my fault; I forgot. So no blog Monday, totally my fault.

No blog on Sunday, Saturday, or Friday?

Not so much.

There was a three-day period without internet. Three solid days.

​Still recovering today.

I did have a new story idea come to me. Basically a shonen manga. The protagonist is a pre-transition in the closet transwoman who dies--as she is, very clearly, unhappy with this and dissatisfied, feeling unfulfilled in her life with a bunch of unfinished business due to not having gotten to live her life as her, she ends up in a lesser circle of Hell.

Hell, in this setting, is basically made up of a combination of those who did great atrocities causing endless suffering and are unrepentant about it, and those who cannot find happiness in death even if they have the ability to move on.

If they cannot be at peace with their demise, especially if they have negative feelings, Hell it is for them. If they ever get to be at peace, they can move on, but for as long as they cannot accept their death, for as long as they cannot resolve their issues, they are stuck in Hell.

In this sense, Hell is a little like a jail in that theoretically, anyone within can move on. If someone who has caused great harm genuinely sees the error of their ways, recognizes the pain they inflicted, is remorseful of it, then they have the chance to move on (tho they may be stuck in Hell if they're unable to find a way to get redemption).

If someone who hasn't caused great harm, but hasn't accepted their death, finds a way to accept it, they can move on.

Hell is overseen by the ultimate exemplifiers of both of these traits: demons, who're technically fallen angels; they were never human, but they did great atrocities (it's how they became fallen after all) and cannot be at peace with their situation. There's multiple types of demons, all of them immensely powerful in Hell.

Theoretically, tho, even a low-rank angel can not only go toe-to-toe with the strongest of demons (demons retain a lot of angelic power, but lost a lot of it in their fall), and yes, outrank them. Angels mostly stay out of Hell to not interfere with the process of Hell to reform individuals, but can intervene if they feel their presence is necessary for a soul that's close to moving on.

Hell, in this setting, works a lot like Earth. (Even with Earth technology!) You can't truly die, but all pain you experience is amplified. If you don't eat, you become really hungry and will eventually collapse from fatigue, and even pass out (which is not pleasant, see below). If you don't drink, you become parched with thirst and will eventually collapse from dehydration, and even pass out (which is not pleasant, see below).

If you don't sleep (you need to sleep), you become fatigued, experiencing incredibly amplified duress during this time, and eventually, your efforts to avoid sleep will fail, and you'll collapse, passing out, from exhaustion eventually.

And sleep? During the time you sleep, you don't dream. You relive aspects of your life, including seeing the feelings and thoughts of others, up to and including personally feeling your death, amplified, many times over, repeated multiple times. "Life flashing before your eyes", only much much worse.

Fatigued-induced sleep makes it much much worse. You relive it not only with even more sensations, but for a much much much longer period of time.

If you suffer a would-be fatal injury, you not only experience the full pain of your original death but of the new death, and stay that way until your wound heals.

While the unrepentant monsters are mostly kept in a different, deeper, section of Hell, by and large, the entirety of Hell is left to run amok as people see fit. Meaning that you've got to fend for yourself. You can form bonds with others, friendships, even create societies, but you can constantly be attacked by people who're warlords commanding literal armies of the Damned.

In that world where you're up against literally billions (not quite trillions; not everyone goes to Hell and quite a lot who did move on) of humans, and even against quite-often-malicious demons, you're basically subject to their whims. You follow their rules or suffer for your disobedience.

Hell does have things like landmarks, a map, and such, but due to being infinite and, largely, the same weather (there's frozen areas for frozen hells and water areas for damp hells but it's mostly fire and brimstone of various kinds), it's a pretty bleak place occupied by pretty bleak individuals that're largely hard to befriend owing to them all having various issues of their own.

And the protagonist finds herself in Hell, struggling.

But it's discovered that she has a fairly rare power for a human; the power to manifest her soul's will, and the willpower to control it. (Both are, individually, rare, but having both is even rarer.) On the one hand, this gives her magical powers that you'd expect in any shonen series, making her able to fend for herself, be able to stand up against anyone except others with this power and Demons who have a similar, but inherently innately stronger, version of the power. Meaning she, unlike most denizens of Hell, won't be repressed by the rules of those around her.

On the other hand: the power to manifest her soul's will with the willpower to control it makes her an actual threat: if she can escape to the real world, she has the strength to partially manifest on Earth. She can't come back from the dead, but she could disrupt the world as what amounts to a ghost akin to a poltergeist, a fairly big threat.

After gaining control over this power and learning of what it can give her, she becomes what's known as a "Third-Generation Succubus". First-generation Succubii are a specific type of Demon. Second-generation Succubii are descendants of those Demons (Demons' ability to procreate is limited, but not nonexistent altogether, and children of Demons are fully fertile with absolutely no restrictions), and have the same traits, just with less bounding to Hell.

Third-Generation Succubii are purely just humans. Humans, nothing demonic/angelic about them, that just so happen to have a specific type of powersets that represent nearly-identical powers to their demonic namesakes. (Inherently weaker than their Second/First-Generation counterparts tho.)

Those powers include shapeshifting, accelerated healing that lacks pain (getting hurt still hurts, but healing is done with less pain), enhanced charm (manifests as a passive influence on the emotions of others but also increases self-confidence and allows for easier smooth-talking, essentially granting the user a silver tongue), enhanced strength/speed/endurance/stamina, increased empathy (manifests as pseudo-telepathy, in being able to sense the feelings of others nearby and increased analytical abilities to guess at what this means), and pure energy manifestations of handheld objects:

Swords, bows, guns, shields, knives, etc.

Oh, and also: they have incredible lust and instantly heal from having consensual sex, and are vastly powered up from having had it, and the more often they have consensual sex, the stronger they become.

And thus her journey as a protagonist begins, where she fights and makes friends.

It's just the first day of the training, but it's still anxiety-inducing: aside from trips to the dentist, this will be the first time I'll have been out in public since quarantine began, in spring of 2020. I am all kinds of panicked:
Will I actually be bringing everything I need?
​Did I actually do all of the pre-course work I was supposed to?
Will I show up at the right place?
What do I say?
Will I actually be able to drive safely?
Will I actually be able to pass?
Will I get enough sleep tonight?
Will I wake up early enough tomorrow?
Will I be physically well tomorrow?

Suffice to say: it's a big deal and I'm so worried I'm going to screw up big time, somehow.

...But today I had a rather memorable one.
It can be found here.
It's so memorable that...hmm, lessee if this works:

...I wanted to put it on today's blog.

Basically, what happened was that I knew the script said that it was 'know'. I was so confident that I hit 'record'...and then after the recording started, just as I opened my mouth, I went, "...wait...", mentally second-guessed myself, had to suppress saying a wrong word, considered ending the recording to start over, checked my notes which is where I got the initial confidence from and realized that's not the place to check, checked my tiktok to get the actual confirmation, confirmed it was the word to say, said it, and then did a post-word "everything is normal" reaction.

It is both my finest work of all time and my worst work of all time and it WILL entertain you.

On the one hand: I have been staying on top of most if not all of my daily tasks for almost a week straight now.

On the other hand: the deadline for my pre-course homework is in less than two days, I still have yet to start one and one is not yet finished albeit close to and I haven't confirmed the time/location and printed out directions and gotten an address for the GPS and so on and so forth.

Exemplified by the fact that to drive safely, I'll need to get a good night's sleep on Thursday, which means I effectively have 1.5 days left to do all of that, double-check that I'm bringing everything that I need, and such.

So while there is a lot of good going on in my life, I am exhausted and yet running out of time.
The choice to get sleep instead of finish work is not working out; I'm still sleep-deprived right now. So I made the wrong call and progress is slow-going because in my exhausted state, it's hard to do the work I need to.

Oops.

This is genuinely a case of hindsight tho. I knew procrastinating would be an issue; I swore that I'd start at the beginning of February, but ended up starting only about a week into February, and not doing enough quickly enough at that. Instead of almost two weeks, I've had less than one, and every time I chose sleep over work, in spite of it seeming like the right choice at the time, it's more and more proving to have not been.

​Crunch time, I guess.

And I do mean just about everything.
All daily tasks aside from brushing teeth (which I'm gonna do post-blog), done.
I did a little bit on my pre-class work (tho I need to hurry up on that, I'm running out of time to do it--I technically have a choice of doing more tonight or heading to bed early but I wanna be healthy and go to bed early).
I even got all games played today: League, Minecraft, and Epic Battle Fantasy 5.

I did everything I should do in a day and it feels good.

​Still gotta pick up the pace tho.