I mean, historically, my blog has been a blog about...literally whatever I felt like talking about. A lot of it sharing a lot about what's going on in my life, a lot about games I was enjoying at the time, a lot reflecting the corners of the internet I was in at the time, a ton about my various ideas for video games, stories, and songs, and a lot about my evolution of personal beliefs.

A lot about my health, a lot about my neurodivergencies, a lot about my journey through life and self-discovery. A lot about my current hyperfixations. You get the idea. But I'm both running out of interest in my current Civ 3 hyperfixation (a third Carthage playthrough might revitalize it, but the double long turns is kinda draining my interest especially given the amount of save scumming), and there's other things I want to talk about.

I want to share a lot more of my beliefs. I know a fair number of those beliefs can be heretical, can be slightly alienating, can be radical, but I want to share them all the same, despite how I know smarter people than me who do more research than I do can likely give better breakdowns of those things.

Namely I have a lot of things that I feel like could help challenge the, so to speak, 'programming' of many of the demographics who typically hold beliefs that are largely detrimental to people like me. I wanna give out, for instance, a 'cure' of sorts for the male loneliness epidemic by giving a breakdown of what these men who have been poisoned by toxic masculine podcasts can do to help reconnect with humanity. I've mentally had a lot of ways to break down the walls there in a calm, gentle way that can help ease them into it, and I wanna follow through on how to basically hand them the instruction manual on how to improve themselves to be the actual best version of themselves.

​I wanna give out breakdowns of Christianity and spirituality and religion, laying out how basically the teachings of Jesus are incompatible with Christianity but at the same time the heart of Christianity through the messages given mean that there is good beliefs within, but they come only after deconstructing an entire religion that was never designed to be a religion in the first place.

And I wanna also tackle the mindset of those who think they follow logic and science but have poor choices in sources that lead them to believing conspiracy theorists and worldviews. The people who have this genuine belief they are in the right, that they know the way the world works, but have these glaring blindspots in their sources and their information and lead to some warping of facts to fit the worldview rather than adjusting world view for the ever-evolving information.

​I know nothing I do will be the best, and I know I have no platform and no reach. I love being a content creator even if I've stopped really making content (although I still plan on making music and songs regardless).

But at the same time, these are ideas I've had to talk about for the better part of three years at least, I just thought I'd never be able to do them, I'd never do the research for them (to be fair, I probably won't, this will be a lot of talking out of my ass), I' never have the energy to, I'd never have the words to, etc. I made reason after reason for not pursuing talking about it, despite how in private I would freely share these ideas over discord and thoughts and lay out these trivia and beliefs and so on and so forth.

And I also wanna include my spiritual beliefs, and my view on healing, on communities, on helping people and oneself, on growth, on all of the things.

But for the time being.

You get one more blog about Civ 3, and my playthrough of a modded Rise of Rome scenario. I'm once again playing as I'm blogging, but the tl;dr of it is, I've found out that with enough pillagers to bombard the 3/5 defenders down to one hp and then another pillager to kill them, that I actually was able of capturing a whole lot more than I realized. I'm pretty sure I've mostly done what I can for Egypt this turn, but suffice to say even if they do produce pillagers they're not gonna be able to snowball it into retaking much territory at this point. They've got only seven cities left in Africa, Heliopolis will fall next turn, Kahun and El-Amunra will fall next turn, and while not certain, Pi-Ramses and Heirancopolis are both vulnerable and potentially enough to be taken.

Bubastis and Alexandria, the two I really want, are gonna be harder to take, with Bubastis taking at least two to get my troops there and Alexandria requiring a proper siege unless Egypt actually sends their forces out to try and retake cities (which is likely to fail, barring pillager snowballing).

Scythia is where I'm mostly finishing up this turn right now. Sadly, Asiopolis (iron) and Saka (horses) are two cities I lack the resources to take, and are connected to two to four other cities I can't take this turn. It's the last bastion of Scythian strength, so they might launch a counter-offensive, but at the same time, they can only field swordsmen (3/2/1) units that have 5 movement and their cavalry with 10 movement and they can only produce a maximum of 5 and they only have 10 horseman units right now, so I'm not too worried about a counter-offensive. I've got like five cities which might be vulnerable, but those cities are not going to give them momentum.

The main problem I'm going to be facing is actually going to be from one of the two civilizations I'm not at war with.

...Yeahhhhh. That's...a lot of pillagers being produced. I've basically swapped all of my cities in the area to pillager/Praetorian Guard production, because my only real recourse is to surround all their cities, then create a wall around my borders. Normally I make the wall first, but I don't have the time to build it up, it takes eight units to surround a city but it takes 12 to surround boarders.

I could be mentally mathing that wrong, but yeah. Persia is on basically pure Pillager production. I need to try and contain the pillager production, which will have the side-effect of limiting Persia's angle of attack for the Macedonians to be purely by sea. (By the way, I buffed the Macedonians' supply of naval power because Persia is overwhelming the Macedonians with their fleet which should be the other way around.)

Now, there's probably a lot more I can say, but I have two options at the moment. Option one is to leave this blog to be completed later, option two is to post it as-is and if I wanna make more go make it later. If you're seeing it as-is, I chose the latter, which makes sense, because I badly hurt myself when taking our puppy out. Again.

I don't think I blogged about how I badly fell and SLAMMED my back, slightly on the right side, back in December.

This time I slipped and got dragged down concrete stairs, and have scraped myself very very very badly in three different areas.

I already needed to run errands, but now said errands involve getting medical supplies because while we have medical alcohol and while we have band-aids...these are some GNARLY wounds. Like, we're talking, my left thigh is scraped badly enough to have instantly swollen up and it's covering nearly the entirety of the thigh (bad enough I would never take a photo to share how disgusting it is), my right heel has a deep cut, and my right hip also has a deep cut. The right side wounds are deeper but cover less surface area, the left side is something no bandaid can cover because we're talking a scrape about the side of two hands at least. Soyeah. Gonna need to get treatment. Not hospital-visit-worthy, but I'm badly banged up rn.

​Gotta go.

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.

Our dog passed away.

I'm...honestly not sure how to feel.

Part of me is glad that his suffering is over, because he was suffering, quite a lot. My dad thought that the sounds he made were him making those sounds while dreaming, but to me it seemed like he was still awake during the times my dad thought he was asleep. Awake, and in constant pain and constantly afraid.

He was blind, deaf, senile, and heavily arthritic. In the last couple of weeks, he lost his ability to stand at all, and then stopped eating/drinking. Even before that, in less than a month he went from appearing normal to looking outright skeletal. And before he looked skeletal, he gained a constant hunch in his back.

So he was not living a high quality of life. He was mostly isolated, ignored, etc. And now he can finally rest.

But part of me is sad. Because he is gone now.

So I just...don't know what to think or feel.

This morning was a fine demonstration of why I love having them. To understand what I mean, I have a small dog, and a decently-sized cat. The cat last night ate some of the dog's food, and we had to intervene to stop that. (AKA, use a squirt bottle.) The dog has a sweet tooth for cat food, and every time, we have to intervene to stop that. (AKA, use a squirt bottle.) The dog stole one of the cat's previously-favorite toys and made it his own. The cat is not immune to doing the same thing. They frequently steal each other's favorite spots to sit, as well.

And today, the funniest of them all was shown: jealousy. When my dad petted the cat, the dog went absolutely nuts. But the cat isn't exactly above that same attitude; if another animal (the dog included) is receiving too much attention, he will rush in and try to get some himself, intensely jealous of the other animal.

It sometimes seems to me like they're almost siblings. (It sort-of fits, even: both were originally the pets of my younger sister, who is currently away at college, thus, both have the same "mother", and we're looking after them as grandparents and aunts.) Heck, there's even a bit of a big-brother, little-brother relationship based on their size. The big brother cat intimidates the little-brother dog, so much so, that it can be hilarious watching how much the dog avoids the cat.

...But when the dog is oblivious to the presence OF the cat (e.g. he's really, really excited), especially if he gains momentum in his movement, the tables turn and the cat is visibly nervous of the dog, even running away. Which reminds me of how--while I always was afraid of my brother--he could occasionally be scared of me when I got really angry.

Animal experts may equate this behavior that I've described differently, but I am of the opinion that animals are a lot like humans. (Well, technically, I'm of the opinion that humans are just animals like any other, but some people take offense to that wording thinking I'm cynically implying barbarism when I'm actually optimistically stating that animals can feel basically everything we can feel; we just don't recognize it.) Thus, even if it may not be technically true, I like the idea.

I should clarify that my day has effectively just begun, thanks yet again to my habit of waking up late after having stayed up also-late. However, I have already had rather a number of things that I consider to be blog-worthy material. I woke up today feeling rather sore in my legs, so it hurts...but it's a good hurt, because it was from my recent workout.

I also remember that one of the things I dreamed about was meeting someone who has effectively become a bit of an idol for me, Jocelyn Samara, the creator of the webcomic Rain. It was partially through reading that webcomic start to latest update (it is currently on hiatus because the author is dealing with cancer; if you can help, please do! It's more than a worthy cause) that I was able to discover my trans status. 

(I had been introduced to the culture some number of months before, which awakened lingering feelings that had been buried under layers upon layers of cultural enforcement from my upbringing, and yet, the more I began to explore, the more I found that identifying as male was unsatisfactory for me. With proddings and encouragement, I went deeper and deeper. I saw in my dreams a picture of a female person, and I wondered who it was...and eventually, I realized, "that's me...just me, as a girl." And that image slowly began replacing the image of myself as a guy in my mind, of my mental picture of myself. It culminated when I was in a car crash, and though at the time I was too much in shock to know what I was thinking, a few weeks later, I was able to remember my thought, and it was, "Oh, God. Please don't let me die before I've had the chance to discover my true self." And that was the moment I knew.)

The dream more or less went with me observing her interacting with people, and being all awesome about it. I heard her voice and it sounded nice to my ears, and there I was thinking, "she's so awesome." She was right there, in front of me, human, and yet seeming to be much more than that. I could probably go into more fangirlish descriptors of the dream I had, but I think it conveys the point. It probably isn't much like what she'd actually be like meeting in real life, but all the same, I was glad to have had the dream.

I've also been practically stalked by my (read: my sister's) cat, who seems to instinctively know the perfect timing. When I'll leave my room, when I'm about to finish my breakfast, what direction I'm going to walk through the house, and he'll be there, waiting for me, under my foot, rubbing it and lovingly asking for attention. (How could anyone ever say no?)

Additionally, I've done some HotR work. I really should describe that game to people in more detail in a future blog update, but I have a slight errand to run in there first. (The short version, it's like a Twilight of flash games: nothing special about it, and yet once you get into it, it's immensely addiction, having quite the fanbase as a result yet also a fair amount of haters. Neither side is unjustified, since the game is filled to the brim with flaws yet somehow if you can tolerate it long enough it becomes so immensely thrilling that you can't help but keep going.)

I'm experiencing some minor technical difficulties with the blog.
To be expected, I guess, when I'm just getting started.

Anyway, on non-site-related issues, my original title for this blog entry before techy-stuff happened was "I'm a beauty queen", because I slept through half the day, today. And I'm proud of it! Other noticeable things from today are the temperature. It's cold. I've also had a lot of cute interaction with one of my (by which, I mean, my sister's) cats, who like normal once let out has an uncanny ability to know precisely when I am available for him to be pet by me. And even when not, of him doing cute stuff anyway, such as his love of boxes.

Stand by for me maybe doing more. (Don't count on it, though.) My day's just beginning; I've done my morning routine and logged into Heroes of the Realm; that's about it for today so far.