I've been, frustratingly, busy as of late.

I was on the last week of league/tft quests so needed to grind them, which ate up a lot of time.

I've been busy with work.

I literally had my car turn over sideways due to going into a ditch on Tuesday. (Surprisingly--as far as we can tell--the car is fine; I am fine. I'm not traumatized, but I am just frustrated and confused.)

I've been busy with stuff.

I don't even remember what.

Just.

I've not had free time. I don't even know why. I've had objectively more time but objectively have been getting less done. I did things. I was doing things. I just don't remember what they were. I was really busy.

Now, granted. Life stuff has happened. We're up to knowing the name of four voices that aren't soulbounds like Vee and Ruby. (Morgan, our Aussie; Bella, our southerner; Ashe, our high-pithced 'hiiiiiii' voice; and now, Amanda, our deep 'yo' voice.)

We've been doing at least some work on our novel.

We've done a little bit of work on our castle in minecraft.

We've done stuff, but we've been left quite busy.

This week started promising in terms of health between both showering and brushing teeth and now I've done neither.

I've not streamed this week and between picking up a shift on Sunday and the staff meeting tomorrow, I probably won't, which is frustrating.

So like.

​Just not a great week.

I'll say quickly; I'm taking a bit of a risk but I've opened up my current story to viewing to those with the link, on a private discord server of friends. I'm hoping it's secure and trustworthy enough that they don't abuse that power (and also hoping that it is indeed read-only for them), but I think it's worth it; sharing it with others is a goal anyway.

I've got caught up with uploading my past streams, but unfortunately, I can't stream more until Friday Night/Saturday Morning at the earliest. (Well technically, I might be able to try tomorrow? Well if I don't do things like what I've done this week and waste hours of time.)

Uh, I guess I got out of placements and into Bronze IV in double-up for tft. (I think I need more hyper-roll games now to make sure placements are finished and I'm in green.)

Anything else?

Well probably but the more we write the later we are to bed.

Doesn't mean I'm happy we basically did nothing.

We did get our laptop maybe functional again (we need to actually test things out), we got med refills and bought headphones while there, and we got closer to caught up in or vod uploads (two away from caught up I believe).

​And I guess we got a few of the placement games (not all of them I don't think) done in the team mode of teamfight tactics, so that's good I guess. (We want to get to platinum in tft, to get blue in hyper-roll, and to have enough games to be fully placed in double-up.)

But like.

Not really a productive day. I did do a bit of a story note, but no writing, no editing.

Today was largely a wasted day. I don't even remember what we wasted our time on (I think it might've been reading TVTropes?), but we weren't really productive.

We did download the audio for potentially adding alerts to our stream (altho we need to get that whole thing set up and currently don't have it), and we actually did work on the writing of our novel (rather than writing down notes and worldbuilding/character building), but even that was just editing.

We also got our laptop functioning again, which opens us up to potentially doing streams on it. Speaking of streams, we're nearly caught up on our youtube video uploads of them. I believe we're at 80/85? So like--at a couple uploads per day or so and accounting for extra streams, and we should in theory be caught up within a week.

We ended the night by indulging in Civ 3, playing a single turn all the way out.

We had planned to stream, but a few things got in the way. First was not wanting to not be part of the vibes for one particular stream (and even now, we're enjoying the vibes of a different stream that they raided in to). We could have done a stream, but we made the choice that the vibes of that stream were worth more.

After our parents came home at 4, we could've started stream, but right now, we're thinking it's best not to. We have a medication to pick up, and while we go to the pharmacy, we're hoping to pick up a few extras. (Lotions, tea, headphones, maybe a mic?

So like.

We could've done a lot more than we did.

It's not a nothingness day because if someone were to look at what we listed above, they'd say it was great, it was incredible, I did a ton, etc. But it's still disappointing, yaknow? We did basically nothing and wasted a golden opportunity to be productive. Tomorrow will be a short day (due to work on Monday), made shorter by a need to visit the pharmacist to get my medication.

Today was a day we could've done nearly 20 hours' of work, and instead, we did like...two, maybe? About half an hour for the laptop, about half an hour for the audio, about an hour for the novel, and then paltry amounts of time per video. (They take basically no time to put the info in, the rest is the upload/processing which is why we get a rate of like 1 video per 3 hours or so.)

So like--having two hours out of twenty means we were only at 1/10th of the productivity we should've been at.

Disappointing. Not shattering. But still a let-down.

Ah well.

​Is what it is.

We were up to 10:30 am yesterday, it's 7 am today.
We streamed more TFT in spite of not quite feeling it, under the belief we could maybe promote, and then ended up lower than we started.
But honestly, stupid as it sounds, the real tilting thing is the riot games client, after a game of tft finishes. They give an absurdly long wait time on the 'waiting for stats' menu, and if you skip that, you're booted out of the lobby, and if you're too fast to get back in, you're kicked from the party. (A party of one.) Causing delay after delay. (There's also no way to turn off the special executes that can't be skipped which also can delay things further.)

When I have a match end I want to be into the next immediately.

Bug I digress.

Point is, poor time management. We have it. We did a useless stream rather than a productive stream on, say, our novel.

Which has work we still have yet to do on it.

Like, the thing we want to do is quite literally just looking up terms and--*adhd kicked in and now different rant*
...And now instead of having done it, we learned why we didn't because instead of just two names to look up, we have like ten.

And it's now 8 am...

​Bed. Now. If we had thoughts, gone.

It was down for about 12 hours, which is why we didn't blog yesterday.

Pretty much all we did in that time (the entirety of it) was alpha test our Civ 3 mod some more. The mod which is, theoretically, playable--it has literally everything in the game, as we intended it to be.

But which is not actually playable, because we haven't put in any of the Civpedia files to let people (including ourselves) know what a building, wonder, or even unit truly does. So like, it works, but it's not something that people can really understand. It'd take endless trial-and-error and/or actually looking at the game files to figure out.

Of course, balance is also an issue. We wanted the "civilized" techs to be harder to get, and for tech progression to require more and more of an investment as the game progresses, and for wonders to be a dedicated investment to build, but all of them on this first alpha test were too low. (We'll need to do a second test.)

We wanted the warring AI nations to mostly be at a stalemate with each other--on the first run, an AI Persia was slowly but surely beating the AI Greece until they declared war on me, so I needed to buff the Greeks.

We wanted each of the non-original-four civilizations to have a wincon and playstyle, but while the Hordes were a terrifying success (their draw is having an overwhelming horde of units that can cross ridiculous amounts of distance), and the Celts worked well enough, the Goths were notably weaker than they were designed to be, so we needed to buff them, too. We also made Germany more threatening (they were actually doing quite fine so this buff might've not only been unnecessary but also make them too strong now), by offering them a wonder placing a free shield buff in every city on the continent, which also makes warring with them lucrative (since capturing that would instantly be a boon).

Another thing we did was nerf spies and their upgrade (originally called Ninjas, now Assassins since I gave the Hordes the upgrade of the current Ninja), because they were annoyingly annoying, menaces that shouldn't be spammed as much as they are. So we upped their cost and made them weaker, meaning sending them in for harassment now carries a greater risk.

We do need to figure out a buff for archers as across the board no civilization seems to be building them tho.

Anyway.

​Mostly, we wanted to say that we need to get much much better at self-care.

Perfection is the enemy of doing good.
We need to brush our teeth--perfect doesn't matter.
We need to change our undergarments daily--wanting it accompanying a shower isn't mandatory.
We need to shave more--wanting a shower isn't mandatory.

We need to shower--it doesn't need to be the fully full shower.

This mindset also applies to other areas of our life, too.

We don't need a win to play League of Legends.
We don't need to climb to play TFT--or even play ranked.
We don't need it to be long or good in order to stream.
We don't need writing to be perfect.

We don't need to progress much in a game to play a game--30 minutes is more than 0 minutes.

We don't need to do perfect, we just need to do good enough.

So wish us luck in actually following through on this. (Chances are, we won't.)

As a reminder, tomorrow we should start an upload for youtube of our vods and then shower.

So that's what's going on right now.

​I did agree to work tomorrow tho so gotta go to bed now.

...And then at the very last second, I had a near-miss with potential power going out. We had a storm, we had previously lost power for a week, so I instantly panic-sleeped my computer. Oh well. I made it now tho! Anyway, will be late for bed for work tomorrow, so hey, may as well be making a blog.

I've had an incredibly productive weekend. Did waste some time on TFT and League, but still made good progress in minecraft, and, notably: actually finished my art project!!!

I finished my new profile picture/avatar for twitter, twitch, discord, and youtube!

This is an image that is me.
It's an artistic depiction of me, taken from a selfie of me.
I wanted to art-ify that selfie, but have it retain the realism of the selfie.
And then I wanted it to identify who I am.
​The lesbian hair, because I am a lesbian.
The transgender shirt, because I am trans.
The gay mask/necklace because I do be gay and they are easily recognizable as such.
The hazel eyes because that's my eye color.
The plurality necklace is, as far as I can tell, the plurality pride flag for a median system, which is what we are.
And then we have the nametag to show our name, Bree (short for Brianna Danielle Lewis), with our pronouns she/her. And it's the autistic pride flag because we are autistic.
​The second necklace (as well as subtle colors throughout) has our blue, our red, our yellow, our white, and our black in it, the colors of the five groups in our brain.

It's an image that is just...it's me.
It can't fit literally everything, obv. No bipolar disorder, no anxiety disorder, no ADHD (this one I kinda wish we could fit in).

But it is a perfect encapsulation of most of who I am, in a single image, that allows people at just a glance to tell who I am, what's important about me, and is essentially a visual way to instantly tell what I am.

So.

It's me.

And I love it.

Artistically it is the best thing I have ever drawn. Which means it advertises my talents, too.

It's just.

​It's everything I was hoping to make.

There's little imperfections. But it is as good as I can do.

​And I am happy with my work.

Didn't blog yesterday since by the time I remembered I was already in bed.
Can't blog today since I am late for bed but I want to be as little late as is possible.
I need to build my youtube buffer back up since I'm pretty sure I have none.
I need to watch the rest of the debunk stream going on right now.
Tomorrow I ideally need to shower.

I should note today was an accomplishment in lore once more (writing down something I forgot to write down, a few detail things, and then fleshing out an entire non-farn realm), did a little bit of minecraft, did a little bit of progress on my art profile picture, and it's a productive day but again: am late for bed so...crud.

I had my generator running with internet every night without power, and six days into the outage, my power was fixed. So that'd be...Thursday, power, Friday, power, and today is Saturday, with me not having written a blog since then.

Mostly, that was me just being stupid and not doing the blog in spite of having it on my mind. Anyway, I suppose I should mention, I've basically caught up on life since the power outtage. I managed to finally grind out the league/tft quests, and thus my only reason to play more was if I wanted to attempt to raise my rank higher. But, I'm content to have it as-is, and leave it there.
(That said, I will have to put some time in to the preseason on Ashe, because while it certainly won't be optimal, I have in mind a hybrid poke/dps build. I already run comet with celerity and approach velocity for lane power that allows for building dps or poke, taking a tear to start. I know in past seasons Shieldbow + Manamune worked as a combo. But now I'm thinking that Shieldbow + ER + Navori would work as a combo, maybe Manamune as fourth or going full crit if not.)

I'll say that a lot of the lack-of-me-present is largely thanks to me being very unhealthy in mafia games. (Silver lining, there's like a 50-75% chance I get banned soon which, hey! Fixes the issue there. >_> <_<) I've been pouring 4-8 hours per day into mafia.

And then I tell myself. "Okay, never again."

And then I do it the next day, and say. "Okay, never again."

And then I do it the next day, and say "I can't keep doing this so this has to be the last day." And then it isn't.

And every work day, I go "okay you can use the phone but no looking at mafia".
And then every work day I look at mafia.
And then I say "okay you can browse offline, but you can't log in to post".
And then half the days I end up logging in to post.

And even though I have every reason to not pay attention to games I am not currently alive in the game as a player in, with my removal from the game as a good way to experience the sweet release of no longer caring and just moving on.

Turns out, as you might have been able to guess, I keep reading.

So mafia has been very very very bad for me.

I kept telling myself. "I'm going to be less active, I'm going to do less, I'm going to do things with more control."
And then I got more unhinged instead.

So like.

I basically have destroyed my life for the umpteenth time thanks to the game that I love but I hate how much it impacts my life. (I'd like to reiterate that I can't go too explicit because of ongoing game rules, but everything I've said here is generic not-game-specific enough to be fine especially since it's all public info and not game-reliant. Just generic things piling up tbh.)

Still.
It may be tempting fate, but I believe that phase of unhealthy mafia activity has ended in my life. (See also, may get banned soon.)

​We'll have to see.

Anyway, with my life beginning to normalize, some to-do things.

I need to finish my art profile picture, but any time I can be lucid and not absentminded, I should be working on my novel instead.
I want to work on minecraft but I know I won't finish my novel goals if I do.

The majority of my time needs to be spent on novel-writing.

Tomorrow I need to, ideally, stream, but if not, at least build my youtube video buffer back up again. (Ideally ideally, do both!)

I need to actually make the thread about youtube videos released that I said I would do.

I need to take a shower tomorrow.
I need to get back into brushing my teeth.
I need to get better at applying the moisturizer to my body to keep it from having breakouts.
I need to shave.

Which is...well. Both a lot, and yet, not a lot.

I've got less work in the next couple of weeks.
But like--on that note, I need to keep up my workouts. I've been quite pathetic there.

I developed an entire routine--and then have done nothing with it at all.

​I need to get better.