I am utter trash.

Absolute garbage.

My one, one redeeming characteristic; there are a few people who I am good to who I have made their lives genuinely better by being a part of them.

A few.

Not nearly enough to justify just being an overall trash human, waste of resources, who can't make anything of herself.

The little good I've done isn't good enough to make up for how much I've just wasted my life.
And worsening it is, in spite of noting the above, I won't go out of my way to be better.
I'm not going to make an effort to do more good than I already do.
I'm not going to make an effort to better myself.

I'll continue to do what I am doing now, making an effort to just maintain what I've done now.
It's not enough.

It's really not good enough.

I don't like quantifying it as "it'll have to do", though I honestly have no choice.
It'll have to do for me to continue doing the little good that I am.
It's not doing what I want to do.
But it's something which will have to continue at this level at least.
I can't let the little good things I do fade into being no good things at all.
So I'll keep on holding on and trying to continue to do good.
​Even if it's not nearly enough.

Which moves it back to October 27th, 2022. And counting.

I mean, as far as games go, today was great! I channeled what amounts to Ultimate Luck student levels of luck in League. Getting into a game that I'd love to have played as a support...and then someone dodged. Hoping not to get jungle...and getting jungle. Having a team that I was terrified would flame me...and ended up being one of the nicest teams I've ever been on. Thought I would suck, but ended up doing fairly well. (I still died seven times, like three times due to not having ult, twice due to not pressing it in time, then a couple more due to pressing it too soon, or thereabouts, but I was stacking up, dealing tons of damage, legit playing the game.) Was still not performing well...but the enemy team had a dc so the game was a 5v4 in our favor.

Played TFT aiming to run an Urgot comp for the challenge, since I figured Urgot would be a champion for 8k in one round with four casts of his ult. Never got him do do that, but I lucked out--as it so happens, his ult dealt the necessary damage to the rift herald, and that counted for the quest. As you can tell by me surviving to rift herald, that was also a remarkably good match!

Did some work on the minecraft server.

And more or less explored the village in epic battle fantasy 5. I now need to accumulate 800k for buying crafting material and also stocking up on coffee, and I need to farm it out. Because I need gold plates, going to be doing my normal loop through the fortress, but when I math out exactly what items I have and need, then I might alter my route for farm to a more recent area. (Need to look stuff up and such.)

All in all, good day for gaming.

​Lousy day for doing anything that is anything.

I believe that's the date to move back to.

I am just terrible, godawful.

On the one hand. I am surviving. Doing things. For the first time in a very long time, I did some writing! I wrote a bit of a story. Mind you, it wasn't particularly well-written, I felt like I was stealing some material from a prior story of mine, and due to the medium I wrote it in (on a minecraft server), I can't show it off, butstill. It was writing! Serious writing! Not the best, but passable as being. Well. Writing by me.

Speaking of the minecraft server, I've been thriving on it, more or less.

I've also been vastly furthering my grinding/farming (equal parts both, for items, experience, AP, and gold) in Epic Battle Fantasy 5, and beaten all of the monsters in the challenge area for the 10-40 medals (I'm one medal short of 49), and I've caught almost all of the monsters too, so I'm ready to move on to a new area next time I start to play.

I've been playing TFT a lot since the new release, too. I'm quite the fan of Zed as a carry unit. (Ideally, lifesteal in the form of a bloodthirster, attack speed in the form of a rageblade or rfc, and then a third utility item, either giant's slayer or sword breaker to make Zed CC targets.) He works well in a ton of comps. Rebels, obviously, but also Infiltrators, but also: did you know Chrono 4 Celestial 4 Zed is a monster? Even with zero items? Because Chrono 4 gives him the attack speed and Celestial 4 gives him the healing.

That said, I don't force him every game.

I also love the star guardian comps, but in spite of the ease in forcing them, I've only been playing them when the comp has naturally come to me.

Similarly, I've been running a fair amount of blaster/brawler 4 due to their synergies. (Two blaster/brawlers share synergies for a free Chrono 2 and Battlewhateverthatsynergyis 2.) In theory, there's 2/3rds of a third synergy (Lucian/Vi), but going cybernetic is often not necessary especially since both of the units can be replaced. (Vi + Gnar is better than T2 Malphite, but if I get a T3 Malphite especially with a Warmogs--one of the only units the reworked Warmogs is good on due to his passive--then you replace Vi with Gnar. Lucian + Jinx is better than T2 Graves, but if I get a T3 Graves then you replace Lucian with Jinx.)

I've also played a little bit of Cybernetic, but it's a mixed bag of success.

There was a time where I'd have said tanks were dead, due to how much CC, how much raw damage, how many anti-tank abilities (not to mention the item) there are, but I've run a fair amount of Vanguard 6 which convinced me that, in spite of the nerf to warmogs, in spite of the max health, stealing ad, stealing mr/armor, units, that they can work...but they're an even GREATER mixed bag in terms of success.

Especially since there's no clear comp for me to always build into.
Usually it seems ideal to build a sniper. Teemo, if you go Astro 3 via Nautilus, Vayne otherwise for Cybernetic 3. Maybe both. But it's a comp that I can only get to work like...20% of the time. (I'd love to go Vanguard 6 Mystic 4 but that requires level 9 plus a spatula.)

When it works, it works amazingly well! So well that I was instantly convinced to take back my sentiment of "tanks are completely and utterly dead".

But it only works 20% of the time which gives the comp an 80% failure rate so I'm not that fond of it anymore.

Hmm, are there other comps?

I don't really know how to run an ideal Astro comp, I've run some but I want to theorycraft some more optimal ones.
I really really REALLY want to run a Sniper 4 comp, but I've yet to figure out how. I've seen a Sniper 4 comp, and it even won, but I didn't see how it was built start to finish to pull it off.

I've also run a bit of Dark Star as a comp, and it can work reasonably well. It pairs really well with Zed, rather notably. (Shaco, for the obvious, but also Karma, and more.)

In League news...I ran a game of tank Ashe and did remarkably well on it! Really really remarkably well on it. I only died twice--once to a very early gank level 2 before I had any capability to survive a gank and with no way of anticipating a gank, and a second time when the entire enemy team dogpiled me and slowed and CC'd me for ages upon ages and in spite of it taking a full minute for them to kill me I almost lived anyway.

It took me a long time to get that unkillable, and was touch-and-go the entire time. But I cs'd at a record rate (over 5/minute!), and managed to just...perform well. I did run out of mana quite often, annoyingly enough, which is why in my opinion Ashe needs a buff. (And, frankly, I feel justified for this. If you look at professional play in 2020 across all regions, Ashe has a near-zero pick rate and for damn good reason because her winrate is dismal, standing in the 33-40% range. She's never picked unless people banned other adcs limiting the adc pool and performs rather suboptimally the entire time. PROFESSIONAL PLAYERS can't win on Ashe. That says everything about the state she's in; she NEEDS a buff. Granted, I'm of the opinion those professional players are using the wrong build, going lethal tempo attack speed BoRK->Runaan's, butstill.)

But I digress. I continue to mostly play her in bot as both an adc and support.

I also had recently what was probably the best Vladimir game of my life, where I was doing massively to help my team and was actually being an actual carry.

Granted, my winrate is still in the realm of like 40-60%, for good reason; for every game I am performing incredibly well in, there's a counterpart game where I am playing incredibly poorly. There's four types of games, in exactly equal distribution, 25% of each, regardless of role or champion. Games I am legit carrying in and we win; games I am a star player on but we still lose; games I am being carried which result in a win; games where we don't have any winning lane and just...lose. Exactly dead even on all.

The real news: I've started setting myself to auto-fill in queues, which means...jungle games! Now, I can't play Ashe in the jungle. Well, I could try, but we'd definitely lose and my teammates would flame me for the loss. So I decided to try and pick up playing one of the only two marksmen junglers I know about: Kindred. The mechanics of Kindred are fairly easy for me to get, actually.

The problem is I have no real clue how to jungle optimally. (How the heck do I manage to kill camps like Wolves at level 2 with just one buff? I don't know how to pull it off.) My first Kindred game was a game where fortunately, the loss wasn't my fault. Top lane lost; bot lane lost; mid lane was the closest I came to contributing to a loss because it was a lane that was going even and I ganked under the impression we were in an easy 2v1 where we could kill the enemy laner, but both times I tried, both times, it was actually at least a 2v2 if not a 2v3 with the enemy midlaner having their jungler and maybe more there to turn things around.

Needless to say, that game was a stomp, but my teammates didn't flame me for it, didn't blame me, so that was nice.

My second Kindred game...I actually won! And I felt like I was more or less in the right place at the right time, giving my team the help they needed to live, to get kills, etc. I think I got like five marks before the enemy team surrendered, in a game that was like 15 minutes long. This, in a game I was convinced my support was intent on inting (and sure enough, botlane was the lane that I feel like had I not intervened in, would've lost), my toplaner was prone to flaming, and the enemy jungler killed me early-on.

Granted, the enemy team did have their toplaner dc (hard to tell if it was a ragequit or just legit dc), so in that sense I did luck out, but I still felt like I was doing incredibly well.

So in this sense.

I've been having lots of successes.

It's just.

​I've been failing on all the important stuff.

My GOD I am a wreck of a mess.

Still having done nothing.

Nothing.

​Everything I should be doing, I'm just...not.

Double failure equals back to November 13th.
I did remember another main thing I wanted to blog about, the Projection story, where I've fleshed out a significant number of the supporting cast, such that I even have the idea of the setting more or less down pat. (Basically, it's a fairly small city, but a city with a disproportionately high number of supers native to the city from phantom attacks, most of which are young. Of the two supers in the city not in their teens, one the main hero of the area and one the main villain, neither is a native to the city, but of the teenaged supers, all of them are city natives. The balance of power is loosely equal between the heroes and villains before the protagonist arrives, who thus swings the balance in favor of the side they choose. It was slightly villain-sided before, so Sam as a hero doesn't win every fight, but with Sam as a villain the city is pretty much villain-owned due to the unspoken rule of "no escalation", a code both sides honor out of their own self-interests. Villains and heroes use only the minimal amount of power when skirmishing with each other, as to avoid seriously harming their opponents, which is a recipe to cause them, in desperation, to seriously harm them. Also, Eldritch-class phantoms, and for that matter phantom attacks in general, are something that they both have an interest in fighting, so the setting has a Worm-like code in place. Not identical, but similar, based on my own logic.)

And I want to blog about it, laying out the basic exposition of the balance between heroes and villains in the city, how they operate, how their fights work. (In short, heroes have a priority on their objectives. They want to capture the villains, but stopping the villains is more important than capturing them, and not having any citizens harmed is more important, and ideally collateral damage is avoided, and they don't want to use excess force due to both the bad PR from it and the risk of villains similarly escalating. Villains want to achieve their goals, but avoiding capture is more important than achieving their objective since they can always try again. But more important than that is to make sure they don't attract too much attention, because they want to have their only opposition be local heroes; if they do something too heinous to ignore, they risk bringing down the full might of superheroes across the world on them. But it's more nuanced than that and I want to describe the nuances.)

Right now, there's eight heroes and six villains, with one character who always aligns themselves with Sam due to being their friend. There might be one more hero/villain because I remember one night having dreamed up two corresponding opposite powers, but if so I can't remember what they were so for now, it is what it is. (There is another hero who does make appearances, but he is not local, not permanent, mostly due to him being considered one of the most powerful supers in the entire world and having bigger fish to fry. Granted, Projection's power as a villain is basically a hard-counter to almost every single power in his arsenal, so he could be a permanent fixture with Projection as a villain and indeed does make more appearances on the villain reality for Projection, but even so he's just not someone I see as a permanent presence in the town.)

I suppose that's it for the blog today.
I'm making it just before going to bed, since I am for some reason just...immensely tired today and have been. Dunno why, I slept for long enough, but apparently, it wasn't enough. Oh well. Hopefully tonight will be more sound of a sleep.

Uhh. I really need to calculate that, gimme a sec to look it up.

November 15th I think?

Yeah, that's the point. Due to not working on Phyrra and Cyrus for 20 straight days or anything for that matter, my official coming-out day will be no later than November 15th, 2022. (Considering the original date was January 23rd, 2023, that says something about how much I've failed.)

So, uh.
Obviously.
I've been in a very very bad mental state for a very very long time and honestly it's not even better now, so much as it is that I've gotten stronger and stronger motivation to push me into failing less.

I could technically fail even less by working on Phyrra and Cyrus today--if I did, then it'd actually go to November 16th since the total of 15th is on the assumption I fail on the day I am making the blog (which has been the case for every time I've mentioned the date moving). 

I can tell you that's probably not happening. To use an expression, and do pardon me for the language but it's the only expression I know of right now off the top of my head which conveys the meaning I am going for and I can't think of a cuss-free alternative, I need to get my shit together.

I'm taking baby steps, and I have ideas for how I can actually stop failing.

Art is basically right now a bit of a dead end, but art was mostly an excuse to stall for time, where I would stop myself from failing a day on the technicality of having done work in spite of the art being mostly useless. I have an idea for something which might actually do work for it, tangible work.

I was considering, at the risk of it potentially being leaked, actually writing up the script for Phyrra and Cyrus in something like a google doc. Episode by episode, scripting it out. At this stage, there's tons of things that I've forgotten, that I have scattered obscure notes for that I'll have difficulty tracking down, things aren't crystal-clear and there's tons of lost knowledge...but I still have enough memorized.

The origins of why their universe is called the colliniverse (as the original title that I am using as an alternative to my preferred, but sadly taken, INFINIverse/INFIverse), why the planet Phyrra and Cyrus is called Lilim, the origin of humanity, the origin of the four realms (spirit, demon, afterlife, mortal), most of the details on how spirits work and how demons work, the basic nature of a lot of equipment, the way magic works, the existence of miasmic veins and how it works, monsters, and such.

Enough where while the details may be lost, I can still create the narrative. I still know the characters and what they do. I can make it work, if I actually do the work. 

It can start by re-organizing my desktop's scattered notes. That...that will take quite a while, and will delay things, but the payoff of that would be immensely worth it and would actually help me clean up my life across the board because these are notes for every single thing, and also contain sensitive documents that shouldn't just be lying around out in the open randomly, yet are because I've just...done nothing to clean up when I should.

Having a plan doesn't count as delaying the timer tho so today is still not a success, because planning != actual action.

Still.

I am going to try. Try. To clean up my life some.

There's so much more I want to blog about.

There's a very topical TFT mid-set update that I want to blog about (short version: I was really really really excited to read about the new units and synergies...until I saw that Riot intends to remove some as well. I understand the adding and removing of units between sets. The shift from set one to set two and the shift from set two to set three. But removing units/synergies from a set in the middle of the set is incredibly upsetting to me). 

There's a lot of changes to League, too, and I want to blog about them as well. (I'm pretty sure I mentioned the last major change I made, running teleport instead of heal, but I want to blog a bit about it as well to confirm. I also think I mentioned the rfc/runaan's I am fitting in which is pertinent due to their movespeed buff, but again, probably gonna handle those in a future blog. On that note, I also want to mention that something I want to try out is to actually commit to being a full tank on Ashe, but to do it in a lane where you're expected to be tanky, e.g. top. It's probably going to be terrible, but I want to give it my earnest effort to make it the most viable I possibly can.)

I'm pretty sure there's dozens of other things I wanted to blog about, too, but I can't remember them right now. (Maybe stuff like epic battle fantasy 5, minecraft, civ 3, how I'm addicted to watching a Persona 5 Royal playthrough and love the music from that game, the release of Minecraft Dungeons, similar stuff like that.)

But lacking the memory of them, this'll have to do for now.

I might not be in the best of mindsets.
Where I've only recently so much as started to get on top of financial stuff, important financial stuff.
Where I'm 50/50 on health stuff.
Where I'm not doing good on hygiene at all.

And I've been mentally aware of this for a long time and hated myself for knowing about those problems yet not fixing them after I promised I would.

But I am going to try and improve on these things. Because I want to take control of my life and right now in my slump...I am not.

Back to December 5th, 2022 we go.

I am just.

I am doing nothing.
I am actively doing nothing.
I am actively choosing to do nothing.
No wonder I am such a worthless piece of garbage.

I made a resolution to work.
And then.
I don't follow through.
And every chance I get to follow through.
I instead choose to do nothing.

Is it any wonder why I am such a worthless human being?

I could have done just about anything if I had set my mind to it. (Within reason.)
I could have done something with my life, if I chose to.
I could have taken control of my life, if I chose to.

And yet I refused.

And here I am.

Nothing.

As a result.

Of every choice at every turn being the wrong one to have made.

And it is so, so, so deceptively easy to do.
Because you don't think you're making a choice even when you are.

When you're spending all day every day. Watching streams. Playing various games, Minecraft League TFT Civ 3 Epic Battle Fantasy 5 and so on and so forth.

You don't think there's a choice being made then. Because you're just doing what comes naturally, what passively surrounds you. You have streams basically automatically playing, and you instinctively choose games to play to multitask during said stream which work well to play during that stream. So it doesn't look like you're making any choice, because you're never thinking of it.

It just happens, and when things just happen, surely, there's not a decision being made, right?

Except there is.
And because there is a decision being made.
It is always the wrong one.

Because spending my time doing those things won't get me to the things I want to have done.

I want to do those things. Watch those streams. Play those games. But long-term, what does playing those games, watching those streams, get me? If I am incredibly lucky, in the case of the streams, maybe maybe maybe the satisfaction of possibly having been a critical part of the community, but again only if I luck out. (And, in the case of Minecraft, possibly having left a permanent mark on a world which lasts for years upon years upon years.)

Otherwise?

Otherwise.

Nothing.

I don't get to have made a wide impact on the world.
I don't get to have created any of my projects, in spite of there being hundreds, thousands, that I want to bring to light.
I don't get to live my life as I want to.
I get nothing.

But that is the path I am walking.

I am walking the path of the worthless trash that I am.
And I am aware of it.
And I am doing nothing to stop it.

​What a pathetic loser I am.

​I think so. I have just.
Been.
In a bad spot.
And not getting better.

I came to the realization about five minutes ago that it could be simply said of me.
I need help. I desperately need help. What I need help for, not sure exactly, best answer I can really think of is "everything", I need help on everything.

But I don't want help. Help would, objectively, be good for me. But I refuse it, I reject it, I resist it at every turn. I turn it down, I lie and say I don't need it, I decline offers, I make excuses, I just. I make every reason to say I don't. When given ways I could be helped I make justifications for not doing them, I procrastinate on the few things I could do.

I just refuse to let myself be helped.

I need help.

I really think I do.

But how can I get help.
When I actively refuse the help.
How can someone help me, when I am actively refusing their help, their offers?

They can't help me because I don't want to be helped.
No matter how much I need the help.

​And that realization just makes me feel a whole lot worse about myself because a huge part of the problem is me. All it'd take to have a chance at a better life is to want it, so that when someone offered it to me I'd take the offer.

Yet I refuse.

Adamantly, vehemently refuse.

So what does that make me?

It makes me trash.

Trash that actively seeks out this pit of rot to fester in. Forever, probably, because I don't even want to help myself.
Well, I do.
But not enough to take it into my grasp.

Instead.
I am spending time.
​Playing Minecraft.
Building a hopefully-simple Civ 3 mod that would allow me to play Civ 3 as an addiction.
Playing League and Teamfight Tactics which as of today got an update (I should blog about that, too--short version, dark stars and star guardians got nerfed...which I am happy about because I love star guardian sorcerers as a comp and even nerfs to it won't keep me from running it but the nerfs will hopefully dissuade others from trying to steal the comps from me and thus I should have an easier time establishing a monopoly on the comp).
And as of yesterday.
Playing Epic Battle Fantasy 5.
Which, mind you, is a good addiction to have.

​Right now I am trying to grind the money to buy the equipment from the first shop (the...only shop I've progressed to, that screen is as far as I've gone), and to upgrade it all to the maximum level available with the crafting-items available from the repeatable enemies plus any needed from the first crafting-items shop (the steel plates are a bit painful to farm for, given their pricey 1.4k gold tag, but I think I've upgraded all the equipment that uses them).

I am so absurdly overleveled and overpowered that Matt's aoe attack that hits all foes one-shots literally everything.

There is a slight downside to this though.
While I caught almost every enemy in the repeating zone (gotta catch them all, apparently!), for the life of me I cannot capture the water slime because it'll always escape and literally none of my attacks are weak enough to not instakill it. OH WELL.

​That might seem like a grind; it is, but it's also still fun, especially when I can do other things concurrently to it. Multitasking rather than tasking to it exclusively is big.

Butyeah.

That's my life now.

Not terrible, I'll admit, it's just.
​It's not great.

And my coming out date, predictably, moves back to December 18th, 2022 as a consequence as I have also failed to work on Phyrra and Cyrus.

I've failed to do just about anything that's anything.

I've just been in a really bad headspace. I'm not even out of it, either.
Like, there's good stuff--that Projection story I talked about? I have an antagonist for it, I have a very very loose idea of the ending as a consequence, did work there plenty.
I am making this blog because I got sucked back into developing Civ 3, in this case, creating a mod for just vanilla gameplay, not a scenario, but a random map where you set the climate size temperature etc. in the menu, choose what civ you are, choose which civs you're against and how many, etc.

I'm not sure how much work I need to put in to get it working or even how to reliably test this. I think I have a remarkably good start though. My approach to this was to more or less take the idea of adding all the existing scenarios's stuff to the main game as quickly as is possible, without modifying the main game. No adding extra resources; no converting or modifying resources; nothing beyond the normal, but still having the normal be enhanced by them with little touch-ups here and there.

I think I have it more or less down, just need to put in the final few hours of work and then put it into a test.

Beyond that, also been doing lots of stuff in minecraft.
And played a fair amount of tft.
Did some summoner's rift games a while ago but not many; I've also albeit a while ago played some One For All where I tend to do well when some idiot doesn't vote on a mage whose skills do six different things and thus requires you to know the champion to not get stomped on it. (If you have a 'braindead' champion like basically every AD Bruiser champion in the game where you're mostly autoattacking and skills are meant to enhance your autoattack, that's the perfect champion for One For All because it takes no skill to play at an acceptable level. If you lock in champions like Ekko or Zoe...well mate, your funeral; even if you're a onetrick on the champion I guarantee you you're not good enough to pull off a literal 1v9 because literally nobody else on your team knows those champions well enough to play them because they require strategy, practice, and such to actually pull off. It doesn't matter if the champion is OP and broken in the hands of players who know how to use them, players in One For All don't know how to use them and if you don't know how to use the OP champion then you get smashed by the less-OP champions who require no skill.)