On the one hand.
I've done a lot of good.
On the other hand.

I feel like I'm failing. A fraud. Just.

So much wasted potential.

I'm wasting my life.

​And I hate it.

I've actually been having a lot of dreams worthy of recording as stories recently, and last night had at least two that were incredibly coherent, filled (they were mostly with a start middle and ending where I could manually fill in the gaps), basically worthy of being a Phyrra and Cyrus tier of story that came from a dream that I could flesh out into a real world.

Unfortunately.

I've been unable to motivate myself to actually.

Be new.

Be creative to something new.

All I want.

All I want to do.

Is revisit the old.

Old, and old, over and over again.

And I bet my depression certainly doesn't help.

That said.

I AM trying my best to do my best.

I'm doing not enough and feel like doing ten things. League, tft ranked, tft hyper-roll, chrono trigger, stardew valley, minecraft. I don't have the time to do them all in a day, best I can do is like 2-4 out of the six.

And the more I am to the higher end, the more likely it is that it came at the cost of daily stuff I should be doing daily. Like emails, mafia stuff, staying on top of webcomics, even rl health stuff.

​I'm also finding myself going to bed earlier and waking up at the same time or later. Like, I'm dead tired now at 4:20 am. That's an hour or two earlier than the time I normally would be dead tired, and yes, I am writing this just before I am going to go to bed.

I am still going to sleep until like 2, or 3, or even 4 pm. In spite of going to bed 1-2 hours early, I will wake up at the same time or later.

Sleeping literally 12 hours is something which has been happening to me as of late.

It's possible my body is short on vitamins or something, but if I had to wager a guess, most of this tiredness and long sleep is due to depression.

That said.

I am doing what I can.

While I'm largely dead inside for most things, some things in my more manic moments have actually been inspired--for instance, I actually think that I might have it in me to draw Elemental Ruby.

Elemental Ruby.

I'm pretty sure I've blogged about her before.

But it was a long long time ago because I don't really talk much about Red Hood Rider in spite of having not lost my desire to make it. (My desire to make it has only grown, rather than shrunk.)

So to refresh your memory.

Elemental Ruby is Ruby Scarlett Ventrella, canonically after the end of her titular series, Red Hood Rider. She first gains access to the form ~10 years after the ending of the story, and by the time she passes the mantle of Elemental Rider of Light on to the next generation (small spoiler there, but one which canonically makes an appearance before the end of the series anyway so it's not much of a spoiler that it happens as I am not revealing the how), her vampiric powers have grown to the extent where she keeps the form permanently, albeit losing the actual light-aspects of it, with her simply mimicking the appearance of the light powers while using pure darkness ones.

Elemental Ruby is Ruby's final, and ultimate, super form, combining aspects of her previous super forms. She has footwear of the arbalest armor super mode, with her boots literally made of the crossbow (also allowing her to jump on air and accelerating her jumps). On her thighs as thigh bands she has blades that are her darkness staff's bladed section, acting as both arrows and knives/shortswords.

Her skirt is a strapless, shoulderness, backless dress which prominently shows off her stomach. (Dresses in real life might be able to do 2/4, potentially 3/4, but all four would probably be beyond the realm of possible. Fortunately for Ruby, she has magic.) It also has slits at the thighs to allow for greater range of movement.

Ruby's right arm is covered in tendrils of darkness, with a red gem sticking out of the 'glove' on the back side of the hand. Her left arm is covered in threads of light, with a gem that I believe is colored white, and these threads also form a hard-light construct of a bow.

Erupting from near the shoulderblades, she has two wings/capes that combine the properties of feathered wings and malleable, pliable, fabric-like capes in that they provide flight but are flexible, can cover her back, fold in, are fully controlled by her, and take from her Archangel form. The right wing is white, the left wing is black, and they can shoot feathers like arrows/knives, and are very very long. (I think like 20 feet long?)

Her hair is alternating strands of black and golden hair, and is ankle-length, going all the way down. Her mask when she chooses to wear it...well, that I don't remember off the top of my head because I didn't want to draw the masked version of her, I wanted to draw the unmasked version of her.

Basically, it's an incredibly detailed, nuanced, elegant, gorgeous, animated form--one I previously said that I could draw maybe one piece of it at a time but that was it. That I'd never be able to draw the whole thing at once.

Well, sans the mask (which I don't perfectly remember and don't actually have the inspiration/vision to draw as it was specifically her unmasked self I thought about), I actually think that I could draw her that way now.

Yes, really.

I think I could pull it off.

I'd just need to actually start drawing.

Something I've not done recently because there's so much to do in a day.

So much to do, so little time, and I waste most of it on games.

I am very very badly depressed right now.
It shows.
Badly.
In me.
With everything.

But while I'm slipping on several things I should be doing, SOMEHOW, I actually managed to do other things. I managed to stream as my answer to depression and I managed to brush my teeth tonight among other accomplishments.

I've not read emails and done lots of daily stuff.

But I'm not a complete failure.

​Just mostly one.

One day I have an excuse for; I streamed.
The other days...not so much.

Unfortunately, I'm very very tired tonight so I'm not going to be able to make a proper blog.
​Hopefully tomorrow.

It was actually something rather significant.

Unfortunately.

While I can remember that it was a significant blog.

I can't remember what it was going to be.

I legit can't think of it.

Was it related to my mental health? Physical health? To twitter? To projects? To games? To streaming?

Closest I can think of is maybe my thoughts on playing Chrono Trigger.

Basically, the thought I wanted to explain there is.
Well.
Do you know how in most games when you're grinding, it feels like a grind?
Well in Chrono Trigger, I've been doing some grinding, but instead of it being a grind, it is legit just something I am doing casually and am doing for fun. Grinding casually while multitasking is fun for me. I am genuinely having fun doing a repetitive thing. A thing that is normally done because of a specific need to get to a certain stronger point, I am doing just for kicks. Not because I need to (while I have one area I technically have a desire to have more, there's plenty of time to get there; otherwise I actually have technical incentive minmax wise to not do so!), but because I sincerely genuinely want to.

That might've been the blog, actually.

I probably was going to write a blog-lengthed entry on it tho rather than literally just one paragraph on the subject. It was something I was rather passionate about discovering, but not something I felt I could share in another media like discord or even on twitter.

Tho speaking of twitter.

I did make this today, posting it there because I didn't have anywhere better to put it.

It was inspired by memes from the main streaming community I am a part of. A frequent meme in the community is a meme of "the two genders: X and Y" where the X and Y are never male/female and always something else, e.g. "the two genders: math and boobs" (actual example of one instance of the meme).

Usually, the two genders in question are not directly related to each other (tho they can be, e.g. hot dog vs taco; stegosaurus vs tyrannosaurus), and usually the two genders in question are not directly tied to something from features of males/females, tho these are just loose guidelines, obviously.

I couldn't limit my meme to just two genders, tho, because there were three key roles that I wanted to cover. (I technically could go up to five: ghosts weren't included, and accusers weren't included.) The process of being killed, the process in discovering a kill, and the process of being voted out for a kill, summed up by phrases I usually hear from players in Among Us lobbies. (I actually made this meme while watching secondhand Among Us! By which I mean, I was watching a hosted stream of someone playing it.)

Screams of "AHHHHHHH!!!" are common when being killed, especially with the proximity mod on and especially in generally-more-wholesome lobbies especially with casual players rather than more longterm players. (My separation between the two: casual players play Among Us only when invited to play in a group. Longterm players play Among Us frequently, are inviting others to play or are always getting invited to play, average playing it at least once a week and might even play it more, and even seek out similar games to it and seek out mods to it.)

"Oh nooooooo!!!"s when sincere are common in more wholesome/casual lobbies, and when sarcastic are more common in more close/longterm lobbies. (Basically, sincere is when there's a level of innocence. Sarcastic is when they're good enough friends to make small jabs at each other.)

And "It wasn't meeeeeeeeeeeee!!!" is screamed in many a game regardless of lobby type from every type of player.

I made it out of Among Us material, but I also made it to be applicable outside of Among Us.

In any friend group, you can find instances of these especially when playing games, but it need not be Among Us specifically. It need not be a game specifically and it need not even be multiplayer specifically, altho it's obviously most frequent when there's the overlap of it being multiplayer and a game. (By which I mean you have friends actively there and it is something you're playing.)

I suppose that's it for now.

...I had planned to go to bed, but for whatever reason (I had one, a reasonably good one, I just don't actually remember it), I decided to play TFT Hyper-roll with the goal of quickly finishing the Leona+Diana quest for the LGQTBA+ flairs (which I wanted to immediately equip, obviously).

I knew I'd be fairly good at it, because running comps that have strong earlygame power but don't reliably scale is something of a specialty of mine, but what I didn't realize is that TFT Hyper-roll isn't "fast Normal tft", it's more "fast Ranked tft", in that playing it innately inherently carries with it a ranking system.

It's also much much more fun than I thought, and suited to my style. I thought it was just "fast tft, meant to be done quicker", but it's actually notably different in a way that makes it feel fun, the mechanics are neat and make me want to play more.

If for no other reason than to climb in it, too. I've reached Plat (albeit bare minimum) in tft, so reaching the high ranks in Hyper-roll might actually be doable, while getting me tons of quest progress.

Soyeah, that's a thing I'll be doing more of.

I suppose in a sense (I didn't mean for the title to be a pun but in hindsight...), I mean that in more ways than one as I did take a shower today, to try and help out my ears.

Basically. I am wearing old, gunk-ridden headphones that're literally falling apart, and they don't do my ears any favor especially because I wear them for 16 hours a day mostly out of necessity and literally have to HUG them to my ears, CLENCHING them to drown out the noises of my family eating, also not doing my ears any favor, and sometimes when I sleep I also do that with a pillow.

My hair is not very healthy, and this compounds with the headphones to add to the gunk. That, aside from my bad rubbing/scratching habits, which probably also don't do my ears any favor.

Net result: I actually got a bulge which formed in my left ear, similar to the bulges that occasionally pop up on my face when I've gone too long without showering. The sort of thing that is easily fixed with good skincare and which I imagine is common among people who have bad skincare like me.

Soyeah, I decided to try and mitigate that with a basic rinse--no shampoo/conditioner, but if I still take my shower on Wednesday like I am planning to, that's when I will do that.

That did mean I got a late start into the day though, and with that late start...I did basically nothing.

Ah well.

I don't have an exact log of the exact nature of the slip-ups, but I believe it's three days missed? I think?
One slipup was me pulling a pseudo-all-nighter combining tft with watching MSI live--I hadn't finished my League Client's quest, so I figured that while I was trying to make back some losses, might as well knock that quest out at the same time, watching live rather than a twitch vod at 1.5x speed.

After MSI finished, I did get close to a full night's sleep, mind you! I couldn't get to a full six, because I couldn't stay asleep in spite of my plan being to sleep that long. (That, or my sister began to eat popcorn which thanks to my misophonia will instantly wake me up, I forget which.)

The next night the lapse was I believe just a crash? Like, due to having not actually gotten a full night's sleep, just desperately needing it and my mind shutting off to the extent that I forgot to do things that I should do. I don't actually remember why I missed, so this is my best guess, of sheer exhaustion meaning that night was lost.

Last night however was a deliberate choice to invest my time elsewhere. Not on tft, mind you!

For the second time ever, I did a solo stream.

My first stream was done in a random spur of the moment whim when I was in a very bad headspace and needed something to chill out to.

While this one was also slightly spur of the moment, I actually planned it out. As in, I planned it out but actually executed it in a spur of the moment choice rather than electing to not do so.

There are very specific conditions for me to get a stream off and that night had the perfect combination of them all:
-It must be late enough that everyone in my house is asleep.
-It must be during a time that my father is not sleeping on the couch in the living room, which for some random-ass reason he's doing almost every night now these days.
-It must either be a short stream to accommodate for my mom getting up, or be during a night where my mom will not get up.
-I must not have a stream that I really want to be watching (since I can't stream while also watching a stream, meaning for me to stream there can't be a stream I want to watch).
-I must have a game that I want to stream.

In this case, I managed to meet all of the criteria at once, because I had the idea of streaming Chrono Trigger. I've been floating around the idea of streaming that childhood game of mine. (I played on an emulator, mind you, as the SNES was before my time, but it was still one of the largest game influences on me. It, along with SaGa III/Final Fantasy Legends III was what got me writing my very first story and was up there with Final Fantasy VII for leaving a lasting impact on me.)

I wanted to stream for multiple reasons.
I wanted to practice speaking again. With my voice. That's not something that I get to do very often. Even if nobody showed up (nobody did) and even if nobody watches the vod, streaming to help practice my speaking was worth it.
I wanted to play the game but to do it in a way where I felt like I was sharing it with others.
I wanted to dip my toes into the realm of streaming as something that could potentially connect me to others.
I wanted the experience, just of the experience.
It seemed like it'd both be fun, and be constructive.
It was tremendously successful on both accounts, because even though I am very lousy at streaming, I got the learning experience of having done it the way I did.

So I wanted to maximize the stream time, which came at the cost of blogging and tiktok that night.

Since my mom is presumably getting up today, didn't stream tonight, thus, blog + tiktok today, butyeah, will be doing more of this in the future I hope.

All in all, pretty successful, that night.

As for more recent things.

I did, indeed, prove to myself that I am, in fact, competent enough in tft to not be hardstuck gold. I actually got the promotion to Platinum!

...Admittedly. Plat IV with 3 LP. I am guaranteed to derank the next time I play tft. (I need to get into the mindset that it'll be okay to derank before I play again because no way do I keep that rank when playing.)

I had a lot of League games today, albeit most going rather poorly for a variety of different reasons. Autofilled to top where in spite of crushing the early game a gank+rift herald completely eradicated and reversed my lead because I couldn't prevent the tower from falling with all five plates taken in less than 20 seconds and the chain-cc wasn't counterplayable in a 1v2.

Autofilled to jungle and in spite of me emphasizing how bad I am at the role, nobody dodging or offering to swap with me.

A game with an enemy Veigar Support.

I believe there was also a game where my toplaner DC'd separate from these (tho that might've been the same game as the above, not sure).

Eventually, I did get a win tho, and it was actually a game where I got to actually test out my new build to its fullest, getting to full items on it! I was a bit hard-carried, admittedly, but my lack of agency that game wasn't my fault as a fed AD-Shaco is designed to one-tap an adc even when the adc has a Frozen Heart (I think that's the highest armor item in the game?) and more health than a normal adc would have, so obviously thanks to his invisibility and oneshot potential I died a lot to him but was when Shaco was absent mostly fine.

The new build I am testing, by the way, is basically a hybrid build. It's not the best in any field except for waveclear, but it's reasonably balanced. The build is my Grasp build (altho I am testing running Demolish on it rather than Font of Life), but instead of BoRK+Stridebreaker, it's Ravenous Hydra into Stridebreaker.

No health shred, no attack speed (until later), no stealing movespeed, but higher attack damage, better lifesteal thanks to the omnivamp, and much better waveclear.

I then built Essence Reaver third, for the mana to sustain. (Again, normally, this would work, but against a fed Shaco who oneshots you, can't sustain back up. It worked against 3-4 of the other enemy champions tho!) Which with a sheen proc also helps to boost waveclear a bit.

And then Runaan's Hurricane fourth.

I finished it with Phantom Dancer fifth, for the as+ad, but it could've been anything.

I took Beserker's Greaves, altho I did sell them for the sixth item Frozen Heart.

The build is designed to maximize my economy: as I suck at last hitting, the idea is to make it much easier to get the minion kills, with insane waveclear, and also if I get the opportunity to safely do so, take tower plates. And to have good mobility and incredible sustain, so that I will, if not oneshot (again, to reiterate, AD Shaco wrecked this aspect of the build as wherever Shaco was, if I was near I was dead), stay up high in both health and mana, with the ability to take objectives fast, push waves fast, waveclear on the defensive to an obnoxious degree, good attack damage, a little attack speed, basically give me everything I personally need.

I don't think it's a good build in general--but I think it's a good build for me given my playstyle and my weaknesses. A build that has good poke but good dps as well. I can't run it every game, obviously, but this was a great test run of what the build can in theory offer so I hope to continue to use it in the future.

With that, I'm going to go get some sleep.

There's probably more that I am forgetting--both to blog about and to do.

​But it'll have to wait until tomorrow.

I was incredibly active on twitter today including making what would normally be a blog post in a twitter thread. That did kinda drain the energy from blogging about the things within, but it was still something that felt good to type out in full. It was just me putting a lot of myself out there for the world to see.

I also continued to do a lot of stuff. I'm not doing everything every day, there's some things I missed today that I did yesterday, but I was still doing a lot of good overall.

And, hey, I'm within striking distance of promoting out of Gold and into Platinum in tft! That's quite good! (Now admittedly, it only takes one 8th place loss to demolish my LP since losses overall are greater than wins in terms of LP butstill, if I didn't get 6th or below I'd be in pretty darn good shape.)

​Probably going to go to bed now as I don't really have the energy to stay up, but it's going pretty decently all things considered.

I actually managed to climb to Gold I (albeit at literally 1 LP so next time I play I almost assuredly will derank down again) in tft, I was mostly on top of rl stuff, I even brushed my teeth! (Altho I did mess up by putting my toothbrush back in its holder before doing the second toothpaste brush.)

So while not the most productive, it felt like a productive day.

Which is extra impressive, given how tired I've been. This tiredness I'm not sure if it's because of being badly depressed, a side-effect of the vaccine, or both, but I did need to nap for a long time today and am in spite of that tired a good 2-3 hours before I'd normally go to bed.

I might not have done everything I should but I'm doing enough at the least.

​With tomorrow being scheduled to be a shower day, with luck, this continues into tomorrow.