It's quite sad that I've got an apt chance to use that old pun/joke in a title, but it is well and truly appropriate as there's no other way of saying it; I've dropped the ball again on blogging.

This blog was designed to be daily.

I ran the blog daily, sometimes more than once daily, for...well it started slipping some time in 2021 so like...6-6.5 years?

What the hell happened to me where what I did without fail religiously for 6, maybe six and a half, years, suddenly became something I'm lucky to not slip up on?

I kinda suck.

That said.

At least I've been fairly productive.

I literally did a ten hour stream yesterday.

TEN hour stream!

Granted. Quality wasn't high at the start and tanked after my family got up.

But ten hours of streaming is like...a lot.

Granted, it's not without consequences.

For our Thanksgiving celebration today, I ended up getting only ~3 hours of sleep, and not the highest of quality sleep because I slept in the room everyone was talking in, with all the noises of phone calls, cleaning, etc.

While tiredness isn't an issue for me, potential sickness is.

I made a bit of a miscalculation when I streamed that long:
I thought that the main issue with me not getting a good night's sleep would be things like,
Throwing off my sleep schedule;
Making me dead tired;
Making me exhausted;
Messing with my circadian rhythm;
Things like that, where I would struggle with lucidity, but otherwise be fine and recover quickly.

Turns out that I forgot the most important thing sleep is for:
Keeping you from getting sick.

I didn't get zero sleep, so I might not get sick, but I need to be really careful.

It doesn't matter how little contact I've had with things that could make me sick; if I don't get the bare minimum amount of sleep my body needs, it can succumb to illnesses that it by all rights should have great ease in repelling just by virtue of the body needing sleep to combat sickness.

So, uhhhh...oops?

I am many things; smart is not among them.

That's also a contributing factor to me being unable to stream tonight.

I also have labwork tomorrow, at a scheduled time.
Which means that I have to get up at a certain time--earlier, if I want a shower, too!

I might've been able to stream if it was just one of these two, but added up, probably both smarter and safer not to, both for my body's health and​ for safety tomorrow.

Is unfortunate, but hey, we all make mistakes sometimes and must live with the consequences of them--in my case, being that I need to take extra self-care steps tonight to prevent issues down the line.

​Sometimes, being responsible sucks.

Trash at blogging, given the gaps.
Trash at getting better at my job; I swore I'd be the best possible lifeguard by the end of October but I've less than a week before I break that promise to myself unless I step it up in that time.
I'm barely staying afloat otherwise, functioning, performing, suboptimally.

I also was basically a failure today in that I had ample opportunities to be a good Samaritan (literally passed FIVE blinking light vehicles without stopping at any), and the thing that I set out to get today (refill on hormones), I couldn't get, and won't be able to get tomorrow, either.

Plus with the internet out for the majority of today I missed out on a ton.

The silver lining to this is that I've still got ideas for creating stuff and I did make significant progress on my Civ 3 mod (I'm almost finished with the first pass on the units, where I have all of them in the game, functioning--granted, after that comes a need to set their technologies, and after that comes renaming each PRTO unit I've added to have their unique name ideally with a civilopedia entry, butstill, almost done with the first pass there!), both getting units and also some preliminary work on governments.

It's far from the most productive of things because what good is the civ 3 mod even if I DO manage to finish it? I guess I could maybe maybe stream me playing the mod, but like. What is there to do beyond that? Who would I really share it with? And how would I share it with them anyway? I genuinely don't know why I'm spending time on something that I don't really see what good will come of it when finished.

At least my Castle 4-0 in minecraft serves a theoretical purpose when finished. Since it's possible to import solo worlds you make in creative into a multiplayer realm, I can shill out the cash for a minecraft realm when Castle 4-0 is actually completely finished, and then share the world I made for others to explore, appreciate, enjoy, etc. Is probably a long long ways away but I at least know its theoretical value when finished. (Speaking of the castle tho, did share my work on both 3-0 and 4-0 which has inspired me to keep working there more.)

With the Civ 3 mod, though? I genuinely don't know what the endgoal is. In that I know precisely what I want to add, what I want to build, what I want to create, but not what to do with the finished product.

Either I'll figure it out when I get there or I'll abandon the project altogether, we'll have to see.

I wanted to make a misophonia blog today.
But I'm not in the mood.
I wanted to do writing for Phyrra and Cyrus earlier today.
But I'm not in the mood.
I played both League and TFT so am not in the mood.
I got to MY personal-100%-complete mark in Stardew Valley (not actual 100% but accomplished everything short of that which I have an active desire to), so not in the mood for that.
Not in the mood for Epic Battle Fantasy 5 right now.
Did a fair amount of work on Minecraft but am no longer in the mood there.
Did a ton of work on Civ 3 but am not in the mood to do more work there.

All in all I want to do nothing, not even sleep.

Which means.

​Depression. Bad.

I am having my endocrinology appointment this Friday. (I realize there is a very small risk, technically speaking, of me saying this publicly given that I don't want to tick off my brother on that day, however, literally the only way he'd find out is if he decided to track down a place where I said it, such as this blog, which I get the impression he refuses to do, so I should be safe.)

I got a job offer today. Gonna ponder for a day or two on whether to accept it or not, but it's a big thing.

I'm having a lot good happen.

Like having started the script work on Phyrra and Cyrus.

I'm in a big depression zone tho as right now...I don't want to do anything. I had more on my mind to blog but even that I can't find the words for.

...But I'm pretty darn surprisingly close.
I'm taking the day off of mafia stuff (as I normally do on Saturdays), and health stuff continues to not be the best of things, but I am mostly on top of my life right now, because I just felt inspired today. It sounds weird to say, but it honestly feels like a mixture of simultaneous mania and depression coexisting for different areas.

Maybe a touch of autism/adhd in there as well.

Basically.

I started the day working on the civ 3 mod--the most worthless of the worthless thing to do. I made very very good progress there, but I got burned out from working on it so much so I didn't want to work on it more today.

But the usual timekillers aside from it I felt apathetic about. I don't feel like playing League tonight, or TFT tonight, or Epic Battle Fantasy 5, or offline Chrono Trigger, or Stardew Valley, or offline minecraft work. That leaves precious little on the list of timekillers.

So what came to mind that was left?

Two things. Neither a waste. Both which I should be trying to do more of anyway. Not mutually exclusive, either, as one is better later at night when my family is asleep and the other can be done before then.

I basically...came up with streaming (probably building minecraft), or...working on Phyrra and Cyrus. I was thinking of things to do, and the folder with my Phyrra and Cyrus stuff just...caught my eye. I kept staring at it, going back to it, and the inspiration just...struck me. Because it called out to me.

I don't even know what I am going to do there, yet. I think it'll be script-work though because it all starts somewhere and there is a very good place to begin.

​Wish me luck.

I'm surviving, but not thriving. Still doing only the bare minimum and continuing to fail to progress.

Depression has somewhat gotten the better of me today.
I've kept on top of job search stuff, but I've still not done medical stuff.
I've again slacked on mafia stuff. (This is becoming a recurring issue.)
I'm only somewhat managing daily self-care stuff.
I'm also not progressing productive projects like the card game idea I have.

It's not a total collapse, so depression hasn't completely consumed me.

But the depression is still there, strongly enough to be crippling in effect.

I'll take the little win that it hasn't consumed me entirely but I'm worried that if it's this bad now, it could get worse if I don't get better at staying on top of things.

On the bright side tho.
I have maybe figured out how to make a proper drawbridge. Maybe. I've not tried out the science behind it, but if I can figure out how it works, what makes it tick, then I might be able to incorporate that into castle 4-0 for the castle gates. Probably not for the multi-leveled keep, unless I can make it compact.

Still though, castle 4-0 is coming along quite nicely. I'm most of the way towards completing one of the four walls in its entirety. I still need to do one side's tower, and I'm working on chiseling out the archery level and the cannon level, and I haven't done the outsides yet (the moat, the palisade, etc.), but completing that will give me the template for completing the rest of the walls and once I finish the walls, I can get a gate, and from the gate, build the moat and palisade and barbican and after that, I can create the contents within the castle.

Well, I'll probably be making the keep once I finish this wall (as my mental map of castle 4-0 has the keep be on the wall I am making right now), but most of the interior of the castle I want to craft after the exterior. Castle first, interior of the castle second as it's not much of a castle if there's no walls in the first place.

It's literally nine fifteen in the morning and I've yet to go to sleep...because I legitimately genuinely didn't realize what time it was.

I still thought it was like three am in the morning.

Maybe six am at the latest.

In my defense, my family never turned out the lights or said goodnight to me so I was under the impression it was still much earlier than it actually was.

Butstill.

I was already suffering from depression.

​And now I'm going to have one HELL of a time trying to recover.

I haven't failed-failed but I've definitely fallen to depression again in that I am not progressing my life at all today and doing the bare minimum, if that.

I have utterly failed to do anything in spite of having ample opportunity for it.

No true blog. No job stuff. No life stuff. Nothing. Not even mafia stuff. Heck I'm delaying a shower from the scheduled today to tomorrow!

I suck right now.

I need to do better.

Amazing what one day of, so to speak (and I do ask for a pardon on the language, I don't usually cuss especially on here but it's an expression), "getting your shit together", can do to make your life less of a hot mess.

Now, granted.

I had very strong incentive to do so.

I needed to catch up on my emails in order to get into my online health stuff, which I needed to access in order to schedule my endocrinology appointment, which is how I start a physical transition.

And I did so (well, mostly; still have some work-related emails from my mom I should read, whoops, forgot about them), meaning that I will be starting my physical transition a little less than a month from now if all things go well.

I still have a long ways to go before I get everything more or less on top of. There's still a bunch of things that I need to accomplish and it's a long list--but I have started it and I am making very good progress on it. I am actually close to being where I need to be, and that's better than I've been in literally months.

I am slowly retaking control of my life, and that is a goal I have had all year long.

It's slow progress. Two steps forward, one step back. The step back each time being rather costly, not insignificant, not something trivial, but the two steps forward also being the same, being important steps towards the future I want to build for me.

I have to keep moving forward.

Tho I should also note.

In spite of the need to look forward, I am doing work towards looking to the past--via slowly updating the blog's archives with tags. I had to revisit the first month of my blog because I realized I had use for a 'food' tag and this may continue to happen if, when I am doing tagging work in the archives, I realize "okay this is a tag that I actually need" and new tags mean that even after I get to blogs that have tags, I need to add any new tags that weren't there that would've been there had I had the tag earlier.

Examples of this include my The Descended tag (the tag used for the webcomic I have the most work on aside from Red Hood Rider) and the Pets tag (why tf did I not already HAVE that tag and only think of it a few days ago???), but also this is the whole reason I want to embark on this endeavor, as it also covers the birth of Phyrra and Cyrus.

Phyrra and Cyrus were not tagged with that tag, because at the time I didn't know how much of the blog would have them in it--it was only later, after much much work was done, that I added the tag and did not apply it retroactively. I want to have, via the Phyrra and Cyrus tag, an easy to access list of every blog entry I made there.

This, while technically a look at the past, is still a look towards the future.
Because if I have an ease of access for all the Phyrra and Cyrus content, that makes it easier for me to work on that project in the future.

Which I still have an ambition of doing.

I've got other things right now that are higher priority and I don't know how I will actually pull off Phyrra and Cyrus. But I want to make them real.

I don't think anyone really thinks I will make them real. For a start, thinking I will make the colliniverse real requires you to know I have thought up the colliniverse (the name of the universe for Phyrra and Cyrus since INFINIverse and variants thereof are sadly already taken) in the first place, which only a select few do.

And even if you did know, do you believe that someone with no experience, no credentials, and no money, with zero experience or real ability to edit or animate can, with their amateurish scriptwriting (which is a form of writing they have zero real experience with), manage to make an entire Animated Series from scratch?

You'd have to be delusional to think it could be done.

And realistically speaking, most of the time I am not delusional. Meaning most of the time, I don't believe I can actually do it. After all, I've got nothing. No connections in the industry. No education in any aspect of the industry. No manager to help me manage things. No clue how to make it happen. No idea how to get the funds necessary, no idea how to present a project that can be funded and to get the funds without having gotten the project done, leading to a loop of "can't fund the project without showing it to the world, can't show the project without funding".

How could I believe in me to be able to do that? I can't, most of the time. And if I can't, why should someone else? Why should someone else believe in me when I don't believe in myself?

But I still want to try. You fail every shot you don't take, so a shot at success is better than no shot at success from having not tried at all.

And right now I am, perhaps due to the euphoria of the chance to start transitioning: feeling rather delusional. So I think I can do it. I can have it all: transition, and make my work a reality for everyone to see. Are the chances of this high? No, but they're not nonexistent, either.

It can be done, smartly, methodically.

I don't have a plan yet because, again: I have some more important, bigger things on my mind at the moment, understandably so.

But sooner rather than later, when I have a better hold on my life and future, I want to steer that future towards making a difference, in a big way rather than a small way. Being parts of communities and spreading positivity within them is nothing to be laughed at; it's nothing to brush off, it's something significant, but it is in the grand scheme of things still smallscale.

And there's nothing wrong with making a difference on the smallscale, is better than not making a difference at all and is better than making things worse.

But I still have the ambition to make things better in a big way.

It all starts with taking control of my life.

And that starts with me transitioning.

Which I am getting closer to, now that I've booked that endocrinologist appointment.