Early blog today or late blog of last night, is all the same.

We just learned that we missed the crystal ball picks for worlds 2022.

And this is disheartening and devastating.

We really like to participate.
We really like to predict.
And we really really really like free League rewards.

And now we've lost them all.

It's.

​It's not a great feeling.

I know it wasn't a complete waste but I sure don't remember much, aside from spending way too much energy playing mafia. (Can't comment too much there tho obv, since rules prevent it and I know my blog IS being watched and I don't wanna get banned for ooc stuff. It should be fairly safe to say I spent a lot of energy playing mafia today and it was too much tho.)

I think that ate up like 70% of the day and could maybe have eaten up more had I not deliberately stepped away. (I may have issues.)

I also spent a little more time trying out Disney's Dreamlight Valley. Its windowed mode is a joke and highly buggy, but I managed to find a workaround for the majority of my issues there so I might spend some time there. I don't think I want to stream it because I want to listen to the music as it was intended, and also because when streaming I have other better things to do.

Speaking of which, probably won't stream tomorrow, there's an earlyish stream that I want to catch.

I promised my mom I'd take a shower tomorrow, too, but it might have to wait until Monday, since the early stream announcement came in after I gave that promise.

We'll have to see.

It's an hour past my bedtime tho so I gotta leave now.

I'm doing terribly on hygiene obviously so need to get that.
Most of my health also not great. I'm barely working out at all.
But I think I can pull things together.

​Slowly.

I was trying to go to bed before 6 am, but...I'm not going to disturb her. <3

I guess that gives me some time for a better entry.

I watched the LCK DRX vs. KT matchup. I loved every minute of it.

I balanced that with the LCO. To be honest, the charm normally found in the LCO felt absent today so it was a secondary focus.

I ended up catching the last game of EDG vs RNG, too.

But mostly I didn't stream tonight because I thought I'd be going to bed at 1 am.

Why?

Because I was dead tired today again.

Yesterday, for whatever reason, I felt like I had gotten so little sleep somehow that I was potentially hallucinating. On the drive home from work on Wednesday, I legit felt like I was seeing things that weren't there. And I almost fell asleep who knows how many times behind the wheel. It was scary. It was dangerous. I was just. that. tired. Randomly. I don't know why. I slept over six hours and they didn't feel restless, but I was clearly exhausted somehow so I don't know what was going on there.

It was bad tho. Really bad.

And today, I slept extra long. I know that sleeping extra long doesn't make up for deficits in sleep, so I can't expect to balance the scales from too little sleep with extra sleep. But since I wasn't getting too little sleep, the hope from sleeping extra long was that I would end up actually fixing whatever went wrong yesterday to make me genuinely think I was hallucinating. (Could it have been tricks of the eye at night? Yes. But I swear I was seeing things that weren't there, and that terrified me.)

It probably would've worked.
I feel better today than I did yesterday...

...But it didn't work out because my family had situation after situation after situation happen. I'm pretty sure there was a fire alarm of some kind that went off? (It did wake me up, but I was able to hear my family and know it wasn't a real emergency so rather than wake up, I went back to sleep.) And then there were countless endless phone calls from scammers that just wouldn't give up, apparently. Dozens upon dozens of calls.

​And my father breaking things I think also happened. Basically my family was loud. Very loud. So they woke me up, repeatedly. (Also, needing to go to the bathroom meant not as restful sleep as it should be.)

So I was still dead tired today.

Better! My plan almost worked. Not hallucinating!

But still not great.

​Anyway, cat is very comfy, sleeping, so I could keep going but I'll wrap this blog up now so that when she hops down I can sprint straight for bed without any delay.

When it comes to activities I am pouring countless hours into playing league/tft trying to complete the quest before it ends, in spite of knowing that I can't because Riot Games made their quest basically impossible to finish. I've had to have spent hundreds of hours on literally hundreds of games and I've not gotten the epilogue completed and am not even close to rank 3 on the characters. I did the math and to just get from tier 2 to tier 3 could potentially take 1000 games in a worst case scenario, so like.

I can't complete it.

It's literally impossible.

But I am still sacrificing so much in a futile attempt to do so. Because I hold onto false hope that if I don't give up hope, if I keep pushing, that it's possible.

And when I inevitably fail, that'll mean the worst of both worlds: I'll hate myself for having not pushed further; I'll hate myself for having tried, wasting time on a game that I should be playing for fun but which I am now very very very heavily burnt out on.

I'm also quite miffed that, yeah, bot games don't count. They used to for prior events. Now they don't. Bot games took less time and less stress, so I could grind them out without burnout. But with every game being PvP, that means every game requires me to actually be pouring too much time into how to win, and then not actually manage it half the time.

Beyond that, I hate myself for what I am doing tonight which will bleed into tomorrow.

I knew when tonight was an anime night among friends that I would need to give up on something.

I can make it to work on time (top priority); I can do my proper workout tomorrow; I can take a shower tomorrow; I can get a good full proper night's sleep; I could be a part of the hangout start to finish.

But I can't do all five. I can definitely manage 3, and if I'm lucky, 4, but something has to give and I really don't like it.

I hate it.

I want to keep up my health momentum, which losing one of those is going to really hurt.

Not that I have much momentum from today as I sacrificed a proper workout for the futile league work. Which also caused me to sacrifice streaming, and/or working on my novel.

So like.

I am making decisions and most of them are not the right ones.

Hanging out tonight? A right one.
But not a decision without consequence, and I have no clue what the right decisions for tomorrow will be.

Every time we become a fan of a team and build up hopes for them, we end up having our hopes dashed.

It first happened in 2019.

We began watching League of Legends professional games during MSI of that year.

So what happened?

We became a believer in G2.

We well and truly believed that G2 could actually do it. That they could actually make the golden run.

Then they didn't.

We became fans of various LPL teams, only to have it be literally a different team sent to each event with none of the teams we were fans of prior to that year being among them. Repeatedly. Happens every year in fact.

​We've been fans of many iterations of Fnatic--only to end up disappointed in the end in most of them.

We were fans of Splyce during their miracle run into worlds. Then Splyce dissolved.
We were fans of Clutch Gaming in their final year. We knew they had something special, and we truly believed that if they stayed together, they would be one of the best teams the LCS would ever know.
Then when they became Dignitas, the team dissolved. (Partial vindication: Vulcan is considered one of the best supports the LCS has to offer, consistently among their top 3. What team was Vulcan on? That's right, the dream team of Clutch Gaming. He was always that good, and I'd argue so too were his teammates. He wasn't dragged down by them; they just didn't stick around long enough for him to be elevated to his highest level.)

We have been fans of every single team the OPL sent--then the OPL dissolved.
We have become fans of every single team the LCO has sent--but we all know how that'll inevitably turn out (where getting so much as a single victory is considered a win).

We were fans of DWK for basically every single year, but especially 2021-era, Khan's last year. I well and truly believed that Damwon could do it.

Then they didn't.

We were fans of T-1 during their perfect run during Spring of this year. We sincerely believed that they were the best team in the world.

Then they lost in MSI.

And today, once more, the inevitable heartbreak.

We have been fans of BRO since, what, 2019?
Every time, we cheer for them.
Every time, we believe in them.
Time after time, we get disappointed.

But we still believe in them.

We know they can do it.

They almost have!

If their Spring and Summer performances were flipped since Spring allows only one team to be sent whereas Summer allows for four? They'd have a very good chance of having been the fourth, with how well they did during Spring! (Granted, bad luck would have them face DWK round 1 regardless and be eliminated for good, butstill.)

But no. During the time that doing well didn't matter, they did well; during the time that doing well does matter, they...

...Are heartbreakingly doing what they have done every year:
Broken my heart.

I know they're good enough to pull it off.

They've proven it multiple times before.

They can beat the best teams in the league, and in fact can do so better than basically any other team except the other best teams in the league.

They can beat the other teams in the league, albeit far less consistently.

But today was basically their last chance to stand a chance this year, and once again...after a promising start, they just couldn't pull it off.

I don't know why I believe in teams.

My belief has never led to them achieving success. If anything, the opposite. The less I believe in a team, the better they seem to do. I set myself up to get hyped, then inevitably disappointed, consistently time after time again.

And every year, I say the same thing.
"They might not have done it this year, but if this team sticks together, then next year they should be able to pull it off."

What happens in the interim between the years?
They inevitably don't actually stick together.

And when they do, it's to disappointing results.

I might be a bad luck charm.

It's not even favoring the underdogs consistently.
It's favoring the teams that I see something special in. Something magical in. Something that is truly remarkable and makes me continue to want to watch League. Some sort of special wow-factor that is like "they actually can do this!!!", when 'this' is something that will never be as remarkable as when that team did it, even if that team ends up not having the wins to show how remarkable them having done that was. (Things like Clutch Gaming basically inventing a meta a full year before it became the meta, for instance! Basically every team ended up swapping their botlane to top for 8-minute herald fights...the year after Clutch Gaming disbanded as we knew them. Because while CG didn't have the wins to back up their strategy, their strategy was still genius, so genius that every team copied it later and it still miffs us to this very day that CG is not credited for inventing that strategy even though they did. Because they invented it but didn't get the awe-inspiring wins to make their invention memorable.)

​Things that shouldn't have worked, but somehow do.
Things that the theory is there to work, even if it doesn't.
Things where you can see the magic of the team and their genius. Bonds they have, or synergies they have, or strategies they have, or metas they invent, or champions they master (remember when Pyosik brought Udyr into the meta? I certainly do, I was a big fan of his team that year only to end up immensely disappointed as yet another letdown), and so on and so forth.

Not every team has that wow-factor, and in fact many teams explicitly lack it for me. (In the LCS, there's never been an iteration of Team Liquid which has ever made me think "this is special"; every iteration of TL since I have watched has been "this is boring" and made me actively want TL to lose. As just one example.)

But no matter how good or how special or how unique or how magical or how sound or how admirable or how whatever the team may be that gets my belief...

...My faith is, consistently, never rewarded.

​...And yet I still hold it anyway. For whatever reason.

Well, to explain: I actually had work today. Instantly, that means that the day is automatically more productive from an adulting perspective than a normal Saturday is (since those are normally my day off).

So, that being there is something that I spent productive time on.

​Of course, subjectively, not productive since it's not furthering any of my goals aside from "continued employment" (which, to be fair, is a good goal to have, it's just not really a goal as I think of goals being).

I had a streamer who normally doesn't stream today but who I try to catch every stream of, streaming today which ate up 80% of the day. This is not really productive, but since I watch them every Tuesday Thursday Friday and Sunday, catching (most of) their stream and doing what I normally do there, was worth it overall.

That streamer played Stardew Valley and it was mentioned about "have you 100%ed it yet", and I haven't, but I know the two things I need to do: fishing and mining. (Mostly, monster-slaying.)

I'm still working on Stardew Valley farm stuff. I want to reorganize my things so that every single item I'm stacking multiple of has their own chest (maybe multiple) in a logical location, and that things I'm not stacking but are related, are grouped as well. I also want more farm animals, to max out my barns.

Beyond that, I want to optimize the beach farm, to make it be as space-efficient as possible, matching the efficiency of the greenhouse.

But mostly?

Mostly, I've done everything I want to. Wife and kid maintenance needs to be done daily, but I've completed basically everything else, and achieved everything I set out to do, pretty much. (I might have a golden walnut or two not found, but I'll check that next time I do a save file check.)

So I figured, "yaknow what, why don't we start progressing the two things I haven't?", so...I did exactly that! I caught 2/5 of the base legendary fish. In one day.

It's not complete, obv, but it's progress at least!

So, like.

Productivity-wise, not much done, but it wasn't nothing!

Today was also the 1-year anniversary of my having come out as a girl in real life to my family.

It had some fanfare to the occasion, but was mostly, not noteworthy. That's kinda disappointing, I admit. It was something that to me, is a very big deal, but like...there's no festivities to it.

I was trying to celebrate it with an art piece, but...

...This was meant to be just the background.

It was meant to have a complete drawing of me in it, with text having my name in it, too.

I started at the beginning of the month.

I barely got this much done.

So like.

I didn't get the fanfare done myself, so the lack of fanfare is mostly my own fault.

Ah well, it is what it is.

It's a huge event to me, but there's more to celebrate than just today, there will be future celebrations as long as I live.

So I got home at like...9 or so, right? And it's almost 3 am, right?

So like. I should have had six hours of free time, right?

Right?

Okay, so like.

I watched my second-favorite streamer start to finish once I got home.

That took until around midnight so I admit that I lost three of those hours there; time well spent that I would gladly lose again.

But like.

How'd I lose the other two hours?!?

Apparently I spent around an hour on mafia looking at the timestamps there.

But.

Where's the other hour?!?

I know I spent time eating and expelling prior meals. I know I spent some time with kitten time. But not enough to account for a full hour; the times above (three hours at the streamer, an hour for the mafia) are including those activities since if I excluded the food, bathroom breaks, etc., it'd be less than three hours and less than an hour.

So like.

Why am I missing an hour.

What happened.

Where did it go.

I mean, it's not quite 3 am, it's 2:45.

But I've still lost more time than I thought and have no answer for how.

I was planning on doing so much. I knew I'd only have time to do one thing.

...But I wasn't expecting it to be none.

I'm getting more and more tired at nights, desiring bed a full 1-2 hours earlier. (Normally I'd go to bed at 4 am, now it's more like 3 am.) So I'm losing an hour of sleep in exchange for getting more rest and an earlier start to the day which is more energetic. (Having the drowsy medications at night helps with that.)

But like.

I just don't have the time tonight.

What happened?

I can't account for all that time.

I know I did things.

It's just like.

How did it math out to be so much time spent that I didn't do any of the things I was planning on?

No minecraft work on the castle; no civ 3; no chrono trigger grinding; no FF VII grinding; no EBF5 grinding.

Literally did nothing but just vibe the entire night pretty much.

I didn't even get to work on the mafia game I wanted to mod.

Now, granted.

Just vibing is not a waste of time.
Just vibing is perfectly okay.
Just vibing is perfectly fine a use of time.
Just vibing isn't an issue, isn't a problem.

So having just vibed, not a crime.

But like.

How did I use six hours up, while not actually using six hours?

I legit feel like I am missing at least an hour if not two of free time. I don't feel like the hours I spent vibing in a stream were lost, since I was there as a part of them. I don't feel like the hour I spent on mafia was lost, since I did it. But that's only four out of six.

Why did two of my hours I had just not exist?

I'm genuinely baffled.

But ah well.

​Gotta sleep, so guess I'll never know.

IIIIII diddddd...literally nothing I said I would do yesterday. Instead I did a depression-spurned modded playthrough of one of my favorite Majesty scenarios (The Siege).

And then an equally depression-spurned TVTropes binge which led me with, genuinely, nearly 20 tabs I didn't have before, at the cost of finishing only one or two of the ones that I had before.

So, well, objectively speaking: bit of a failure there.

It wasn't exactly time poorly spent in my opinion though, because the time I spent still helped me a lot. It was reading the TVTropes page for The Defroster->every character page for My Next Life as a Villainness, which in many ways drew me in thanks to how it just...relates to me.

I would of course: love to be successful. All the ideas in my head, the world will be a lesser place for them not having been made. And for that I can only continue to apologize to everyone. I have so so many beautiful gorgeous ideas. And I genuinely cry knowing that they will never be seen by others. If I am lucky, yes, some will--but it is physically impossible for all of them to become real. There's not enough time in the world for that; when you make 2-3 new ideas a day and some ideas you forget critical details of, how could all of them come to the world? They can't so even IF I get the best case scenario of making my ideas real, it'll still only be some of them.

And for that, I need to apologize, not only to the people of this world for them not being able to see, to connect, with the ideas in my head, but also to the ideas in my head. Every character that I cannot bring to life, I cry for not having been able to do so because they are real. Their stories, their personalities, their interactions, they have genuine lives that I am the one and only person capable of telling. I am the one and only person who is capable of sharing their experiences to others and recording them and making them be seen, be experienced, for all of time.

So every time I don't do that, I have failed them. And it gives me great pain.

​But on the note of that great pain and the doom brought to others, back to why I needed the reading of the character pages for that series. It served as a good reminder of what I strive to be.

I will always hate myself for every perceived flaw, every perceived weakness, every perceived instance of having wronged others, every instance of having failed them. Every time I have someone that could be a friend, end up drifting away from me: I consider it a failure. I almost wrote a song about it yesterday in fact. (It'd have been called "The Lone Killer", basically Killer->Impostor->Impostor Syndrome and feeling alone. I was stopped by being short on time and by having positive reaffirmation that I desperately needed to hear.)

After all, as that not-written song would have said: it is easy to remember the wrongs, but hard to remember the rights. It is easy to see the good being gone, but hard to see the good that still is. Friendships require effort from both sides, and given that I put no effort into friendships, I am, arguably, more to blame for them not forming than anyone else.

Because how can someone really be my friend if the entirety of their friendship is just them showing up to help me? If I am just giving them nothing at all, obviously, the natural consequence of that is that over time, they just...gradually, do less and less. Because if I'm not maintaining the friendship, and I never do, then how could they when friendships are innately inherently draining?

But while I may not have any long-lasting success. Or any long-lasting friendships.

I still have a clear idea of what I really want.

I cannot stop hating myself for every instance of knowing I have caused harm, or even every instance of knowing "I could have done so much more to help than what I did". Every instance of apathy, every instance of thoughtlessness. Every time where I could have done something more supportive, but did not.

But I do have a goal in mind that I wish to continue to pursue.

I wish to live a long, happy, fulfilling life. I wish to spread kindness and empathy to the world. I despise myself, hate myself, for absolute failures on my part in these fields. Some quite recent, in fact. I had someone contact me about how I had hurt them and it made me realize how dangerously close I can be to falling into the worst part of my past self when I was, genuinely, a jerkass.

There was a time when I was a very nasty person.

So I am always, always, on guard for it, fearing the return of that part of me.

But while I have continued to fail.

I still wish to try.

Because it is, I believe, what I want the most in life now.

To live a long, happy, life where I give positivity and happiness to others.

I obviously don't want to place the happiness of others above myself--I know that's not healthy.

But I want to do everything in my power that is not detrimental to my own happiness to continue to spread that positivity to others, to be the beacon of light that the protagonist of that story is. I know I won't be able to succeed, because I just don't have the skills to maintain longterm relationships. But I still wish to do whatever I can.

​Anyway, I'm literally an hour late for bed because I'm a bit of a dumbass sometimes (another common trait) so will only be getting 5 hours of sleep, but for this blog? Worth it.

Last night, I watched Dancing with the Stars and Castle in the living room, right next to the fireplace in my home. There was a spare lighter there, so as is my wont, I picked it up to play around with it. (I am notoriously bad at keeping my hands to myself; I always like to pick up objects and fiddle around with them. Be it paperclips, pencils, pens, bobby pins, rubber bands, or so on and so forth.) It once again made me think of Marie, from Disease, who can manipulate existing fire yet not create it herself. (A bit like the mutant Pyro in that regard.) She uses a lighter to create the fire, though, and from there, she can expand it and manipulate it, even engulfing her whole body in it.

I was just thinking about how she'd make the most of it. Part of the setting is that many people share the same powers...yet they're separated in half into "scarce" and "dense", with "dense" being stronger and more raw, yet more exhaustive, and "scarce" being more precise and efficient, yet lacking in energy reserves. (Or to put it into trope terms, dense = UnskilledYetStrong, scarce = WeakYetSkilled.)

She has dense, obviously, in that she requires an existing source, but can do much larger-scale things with her flames. And I was just thinking about how she would be able to use pop-cultural sources of big-time fire users to grant her better powers, especially when combined with some scientific knowledge. In short, while a "scarce" user would always be able to more finely control the flames, I want her character to be able to make the most of the bigger-scale things that can be done, simply by having been made aware of what her power truly is. 

Which comes into play in a theoretical battle (and knowing me, theoretical battle = now that I've thought about it is near-guaranteed to become canon no matter how much I must stretch events to make it so) against a scarce pyromancer. I think the battle would be incredibly interesting--the scarce pyromancer wouldn't be protected from flames burning over their whole body (because that's too large a scale for them to control for a prolonged period of time), but would be able to prevent her from creating flames via extinguishing the small flames she makes before she can expand them. He'd be able to control heat on a microscopic level, yet he can't indefinitely create that zone control (via his limited reserves of energy). He'd also be able to, on a limited scale, control fire of his opponent, AND make sure that his flames can't be controlled by Marie...so much so, that he'd actually be able to pierce through her own protective engulfing flames and cause harm, the flames piercing into her body and erupting, like a blade puncturing with a poison that shoots through her body.

...Yet she's resilient enough for that to not kill her if it doesn't hit a vital area, and she can create flames that are dense enough to act as physical blunt force on impact, launching him back. She's also no slouch in the cutting department, if she has flammable material around. (Most things are flammable under the right conditions, mind you.) While he can also melt material, and can actually melt things better than she can, Marie can actually control molten material which he cannot do, and having liquefied steel slash at you is going to be nearly-impossible to deal with.

(She first displays most of her flame powers, by the way, in the desert, when being chase. By engulfing herself in flames and making intense enough flames to singe their pursuers, she slowed them down. She noticed, though, that the sands her flames were burning reacted to her, and that halted the chase altogether.)

The powers of the two would be nearly-equal, yet obviously, Marie gains the upper hand since she's not your typical blind-force fighter. In fact, the guy thought it'd be a one-stroke battle because he shut down every source of flame she had available, and knew he had complete control of his own...yet as he launched his attack, Marie was able to 'rant' at the flame, chastising it, and asked for it to grow much larger. It did, she controlled it, and the above resulted from it. (-Mancy means more or less 'speak to'. Hydromancers ramble to water, letting their thoughts drift away. Geomancers talk to the earth, engaging in meaningful conversation. Aeromancers more seem to muse with the air, listening to it yet not seeming to say much. Pyromancers snap at the flames, having a little bit of a vitriolic-buddies relationship with their element. Technomancers, by the way, do all four, depending on the circumstances.)

You might wonder why I speak about that from yesterday. That's because, other than some stuff about HotR, I have literally nothing to talk about from today. There was something, yet I'm not comfortable disclosing it. My day has been surprisingly (and alarmingly) short.

Literally the entirety of my day has been spent on entertainment and food. I woke up. I had breakfast. I got caught up on anime, from Attack on Titan to Bleach to Naruto Shippuden to One Piece to rewatching Gurren Lagann to rewatching Hellsing.

And from there, I went straight to watching the weekly movie night livestream with some CF friends. It was a comedy night. Got to see a short, The Life and Death of Tommy somethingoranother and someone Danger (I forget her name, and what Tommy's cliched last name is), and it was awesome. There was an episode of Impractical Jokers as well. A few standup acts, including an April Fools' one, and then, watching This Is The End. (I wasn't really watching the movie, though. I mostly do it for the interaction with them.)

And now, I'm listening to a live Black Keys concert being broadcast over the radio.

Soyeah, really nothing has happened. (Mind you, what has happened might be massively entertaining to some, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not much of anything.)