Trying to make excuses not to, trying to put it off.
This is, pretty obviously, not the blog about League. I can still try to make that later, though I have some slightly different thoughts there overall.

I admit, I don't know exactly where to begin with this.

Basically, this is something I've toyed around with blogging about before but never managed to form enough of a coherent thought on it and the more depressing aspects of it overwhelmed me anyway leading to my blogs being short ones where I noted I was feeling awful and couldn't blog, or something to that effect.

It does come from a bit of a morbid place; one of the things spurning on the urge for this blog was me thinking of "what if?" scenarios where I am about to die from diseases, and then more or less going, "why wait to be dieing to do that?".

I suppose I can start with this. I won't go into details to respect their privacy, but basically. My friend, who was my girlfriend for two and a half years, is dating the love of their life, and hearing about all the things their girlfriend does, it makes me realize how much of a failure I was as a girlfriend.

I definitely had the same love. My friend is never going to stop being the love of my life, painful as that is to me since I know I'll never be their girlfriend again. But what I did with the love, is where I more or less think the failure comes in--or rather. More or less. The lack of what I did, in that I didn't do anything. I never sent gifts. I never put real time and effort into figuring out a way to meet them in-person.

You might attribute that to differences in personality, of their current girlfriend just being that significantly different, but in many ways, from what I have heard, they have quite a number of similarities to me. They've done more to progress their relationship in less than two months, than I did in over two years.

On the one hand--that's amazing for them! That is awesome for them! That is really, really good, for the both of them. It is proof that the two of them were made for each other, more or less. They are really, really good for each other, they are better as a couple than I was as a couple with my friend. And because they are so good for each other, assuming that nothing catastrophic gets in the way of their relationship, I know that they will be tremendously happy together and that knowledge gives me a lot of happiness.

I do genuinely get happiness from seeing friends, especially this friend, happy. I want them, especially this friend, to be as happy as is humanly possible, and their current relationship gives them that more than I ever could, and I do genuinely think that is a good thing.

But, it does highlight my shortcomings. It does highlight all of the "what ifs", of things I could have done better, of things I could have done differently. Our relationship wouldn't have continued if I had done things better, if I had done things differently, mind you. The feelings they have are the feelings they have and the feelings they have are that their current girlfriend is the love of their life. Nothing I could've done differently would've done anything to change those feelings so they would still have ended up together regardless. (Which, again, I feel the need to reiterate--is overall a good thing! It sucks for me, but it is genuinely better for them and since it is genuinely better for them, is a good thing.)

So what I'm more or less getting at here, is. This is not regret of "if I did things differently, maybe we'd still be together".
No, this is more regret of, "seeing what their current girlfriend has done for them, it makes me realize what I missed out on", more or less.
I could have done so much better for them.
And I didn't--and as a result, I just feel like in comparison, I am a failure compared to what I could've done.

Basically, every time I hear what my friend's current girlfriend has done for them, I realize, it's something I didn't do for them when I was their girlfriend, which I could've very very very easily have done, but I didn't. I didn't even think of most of those sorts of things. I had the love, but I did almost nothing with it.

There were times where I considered doing more. But 'considered' isn't actually doing, and even those things I considered pale in comparison to what their current girlfriend actually has done.

And overall.

I just feel like.

Seeing the current relationship makes me realize why I suck.
I feel like a coward. Too scared to do anything. I feel like a failure. Not as a girlfriend, mind you, but more as a person, with the lens of my time as my friend's girlfriend just as a way of exposing the underlying fault I have as a person, if that makes sense.

To put it another way--I don't think I was actually a failure of a girlfriend and I doubt my friend would think I was, either. But I do think I was, and still am, a bit of a failure as a person, and it is realizing that I didn't really succeed as a girlfriend which helped expose this. (Again, to reiterate, nothing would've stopped the breakup; even if I had succeeded as a girlfriend, feelings be feelings be what they are. But that doesn't stop me from lamenting the lost opportunities that have passed me by, things that we could've done while girlfriends which we can't do as friends. I could've done so, so much more than what I did, but I didn't. And that's a failure on my part.)

Like I said.
This blog is really, really hard to compose properly.
I'm still not sure my thoughts, feelings, are being properly conveyed. I'm worried that they aren't. That the wrong message is being sent.
I feel like the part about thinking their current relationship is nothing but positive, is clear enough; I feel like the part about me knowing nothing would've stopped them from entering into their current relationship, is maybe clear enough, and as per above, that this is a good thing.

But I'm not sure I'm really getting my point across.
That I feel like looking back.
If I were less incompetent as a person, then on both ends, there would be more good memories from the relationship. More for them, more for me. (There's plenty of good memories, mind you. But I mean, so so much more than what I gave. To reiterate, their current girlfriend has given them higher-quality memories in two months, than I did in two years. And what I mean is, if I had been a better person, if I had thought to do more, then we'd have had much more, I guess is what I mean. I still feel like this is poor wording to get at the concept.)

I identified the main problem, at least I hope so. It's that I was way, way, way too passive. Just as a person. And I am still way, way, way too passive. I've more or less, just been...waiting and waiting, rather than controlling, planning. I feel like I am pathetic, that I am a coward, held back by my fears (no matter how justified or not they may be), always held back by an endless number of excuses, usually procrastinating endlessly.

Those things weren't specific to my relationship, but realizing what a better girlfriend I'd have been if not for those things is what I am getting at, basically. That's what I mean. By seeing the current relationship my friend has, it revealed to me that as a person, I am passive, a coward, too timid, too afraid, making excuses (I made so many trying to avoid this blog!), always endlessly procrastinating.

Lamenting the "what if I had those qualities" of the past for what that'd have meant, doesn't do me much good though. (It is what made me think of this blog in the first place, in tandem with the bucket list, but it is not productive to dwell on.)

But what it does give, more or less.
Is motivation.
It is reflecting on that which lets me see. "Bree, you didn't have those good qualities back then, and you have all these regrets now as a consequence...so why not make the changes now, so you don't have them in the future?", more or less.

Realizing a fault I had in the past which made life less rewarding than it could've been if not for the fault, basically. Serves as motivation to move forward in life trying to fix the fault, so that in the future I won't have regrets due to the fault. That with the fault fixed, I have no further regrets from the fault. (The regrets from, in hindsight, realizing I had the fault and what would've been better if not for it, will never go away, but having fixed it helps a lot.)

This fault will be very, very, very hard for me to fix.
It won't be an overnight improvement.
I will have to fight every. single. step. of the way to put it down--and worsening it is that the fault will fight back at every single stage.

Do you think having fears combined with excuses combined with procrastination, is a combination which lends itself to trying to correct itself? No, it's a combo which tries to reinforce itself, and every time I will be trying to push those traits away from myself, they will push hard in resistance.

I am always afraid. I am always a procrastinator. I always make excuses. I am so good, such a natural, at them. And every time in the past that I have tried to fight back, they have managed to reinforce one another as to keep me passive, keep me stable, keep me unchanging, keep me immobile, keep me rooted down, grounded, stuck, in place, not moving forward for stupid fear of being catapulted back.

In fear of losing it all, in fear of losing my life, I have lost (out on) things I easily could have not lost (out on) if I was less afraid, if I didn't put them off, if I didn't talk my way into taking the path of least resistance. Which is precisely why this is so. damn. hard. It is the path of least resistance to be passive. It is the path of least resistance to do nothing. It is the path of least resistance to do as little as is humanly possible and rely on others.

I am not happy with that.
Mind you, nothing really makes me happy right now, depression does that to you, but I am dissatisfied with the idea that I am not going to have any progress in my life.

I'm not going to proclaim something along the lines of. "That changes now!". Or "that won't happen anymore". Of overnight success, of overnight suddenly becoming somehow, mystically, magically, on track.

Like--I don't even know what I'm going to do yet, specifically, to get out of this funk. I have some very loose ideas (see below) which are progress, if I work on them, if I progress on them, but like. I don't have a plan here. I kinda wish I had one because I think it'd help me a lot, but one of the excuses I made for not trying this before was precisely that, not having a plan.

So screw a plan, I'm still going to try.

It's not much of an immediate change--but an eventual one? I am setting an absolute, hardest of hard, absolute LATEST deadline of January 23rd, 2023, for coming out as a girl publicly in real life. Everyone online has known for over six years. I don't want it to be over ten. More than that, I don't want to reach thirty years old and still be trapped in the living hell of my current life.

And to reiterate this--that's the latest point. Latest. As in. "No matter what. No excuses. Nothing. No amount of fear. No amount of backing out. No amount of cowardice, second thoughts, hesitation. No matter how awkward it will be, and it will be awkward, come out, period, end of discussion." That'll be very very tough to do, but I refuse to let myself not do it.

Preferably, I move that deadline up. Within a year, for instance. But this is a date which I felt was a good starter, because it gives plenty of time for my fatass of a dad's poor health habits to inevitably kill himself (after which I could immediately come out), while ensuring I don't wait 20 years for something to happen.

I am willing to wait two years to be myself. I feel like my dad's health is poor enough that it is very realistic that he could die in that time.
I am not willing to wait twenty years to be myself--while I feel like my dad's health is poor enough that he won't live that long, it is still a considerable chance that he could, especially if he (shock! gasp!) actually cleaned his habits up. (He won't, but if he did...)

So I am setting myself a decent deadline, so that I can actually hold myself accountable. I do have this more or less planned out. Day before, shopping for girl clothing, next day, wake up early to make the announcements publicly online on places where people in real life can see it, go to the Y and talk to them there, while there text my mom, come home with her, and face my family.

It is a plan which I can adjust closer to the time I do it.
I can do it at any time, too.

The main reason I'm not doing it sooner, I suppose.
Is.
I guess.
I want to exploit the safety for a bit longer.

I don't want to be passive with that safety.
But in a sense--I want to practice, so to speak, with that eventual outcome, by pushing myself now in other ways.

Granted, said practice could just be me failing, me not doing anything, in which case. Maybe I move the deadline up.

In fact, that actually sounds like a neat idea. I don't have any clue how to implement this. But a rule of more or less, "The more I fail to be less-passive now, the sooner I force the lack of passiveness". As in, the more I fail at my current endeavor, the more I push up the date of the coming out.

The less use I get out of my current life, the more I push towards changing my life.
Right now, I am not getting anything out of my current life--so if not for this being a change I'm making literally just today, I'd be pushing the deadline to be much much sooner.

Right now, my plan is to commit to trying to make something, screw the excuses.
I want to commit to making something.
Truly commit to it.
At work, I threw around two ideas. One being a webcomic as a safer/easier option.

The other was Phyrra and Cyrus.
I have made oh so MANY excuses to put off working on my pet project there. And some of them are probably valid. I don't have a wide enough voice range to voice every character so I would need voice actors, and I probably cannot animate things on my own (though I will be looking into that).

But a lot of the excuses, I just.
I'm sick of not doing what I want to do, because I have the thought of those things causing failure. I know it won't come out perfectly, but I want it to come out. I know that I could do this better with planning--but past a certain point, excessive planning which I can't complete, just...doesn't do me any good.

I have put it off, saying I need to plan more.
I have put it off, fearing that it'd fail.

I don't know how, exactly, I will manage to make it so that I don't.
But I am not going to succeed if I don't try and right now I'm not trying. Talk, no action.

I do have a very, very loose idea of maybe a way.
I have tools readily available at my disposal to help me.
I have had many many many times where I am watching streams and gone, "I want to watch this, but I want to do something else at the same time" where I was pseudo-bored--still invested in the stream and wanting to watch it, but wanting to do something in addition to the stream, and I did nothing or might as well have.

There's stupidly obvious things I could do.
I have boatloads of art supplies.
I have an endless supply of most things I would need to try, and if I am watching a stream I can open a tab to look at any artistic reference I want. I can draw.

Granted, yes. I have made a very strongly-standing excuse which I don't have a workaround on, not really anyway, of.
I can't scan my drawings into my desktop.
And even if I could--I don't have an art program beyond paint on the desktop.

But the thing is.
I don't need to put the art on the computer.

I just need to make the art, actually make it, stop talking about it, and do it, and then see where it takes me.

Do art while doing the stream. Concept art. Or storyboarding. Just. Working on it.

I have the tools. I have the skills, and if not, the ability to learn the skills. Like, one thing that I don't have is a video editing program or whatever would be needed to make the final version of Phyrra and Cyrus and even if I did I don't know how to use one--but these are things that a quick google search would fix.

I can literally solve one of those in less than thirty seconds, and the other can be found in the same amount of time (albeit, presumably, as a youtube video or something, taking time to watch, and practice, and such).

I made the excuse of not knowing it and it being something I won't be able to do.
Ignoring that it is something I could learn to do very easily.
And there's no excuse not to.
I've been lazy.
Not doing it when I could have.

I don't know what order I will be doing things.
I don't have a schedule, not a plan, not yet.
But I am getting started.

Because I feel like if I don't start trying to make something of my life.
There won't be anything in my life.
I was okay with not doing anything in my life when I felt like I could live a life of a nobody and be content--but I'm not happy with that anymore.
So why am I still doing what I was doing, when I was in that mindspace? Why am I still doing nothing, when doing nothing was a byproduct of a mindset that I am no longer in? Doing nothing was something I was fine with when doing nothing still allowed me to be happy, but right now I am not happy and doing nothing does nothing to make me happy.

I am sure I will invent a myriad of excuses in the future, so future self, screw you for being a self-sabotaging prick.
But right now.
I don't have those excuses.
So I am going to put in the work that I can.

"...Wait, didn't you say that yesterday?"
Yeah funny how that works out.
Turns out shortly after my blog entry, we lost it again! For almost a full 24 hours. Fun times.
Now I did try to sleep sleep sleep the troubles away and now that my power is back, hopefully for good, I have a ton of catchup work to do, but there were plenty of eventful things I think are worth talking about.

Yesterday, my family made the decision to drive to Denny's for dinner--we had no food prepared and no way of preparing food with the power out, no generator, nothing. On the drive there, my mother and my sister were both rather alarmed by my father's haphazard driving; his carelessness made them rather...on edge.

And while I have utterly desensitized myself to thoughts of various different catastrophes by playing the scenarios out in my head (I have talked about this before on my blog, about a month ago, a little bit more if I recall correctly, so you can find me talking about it there--normally, I would be all too happy to talk about it again but this blog is going to cover a ton of things which leave me with a need to rush the rest of the subjects).

I found myself sharing similar sentiments.
Which is rather surprising.

Because you know that headspace I've been in? The rather negative one where I haven't had a reason to live? I'm still in it and even now to some extent am still feeling it.

And yet.
My mind was filled with thoughts of.

"I don't want to die."
I had an overwhelmingly strong urge to live. My will to live is still there. I don't know what's driving this strong power, I don't know what the basis of it is, I don't know where it comes from. But it was most definitively, positively, overwhelmingly there.

I was sharing my sister and mother's concern, because I didn't want to die.
I don't know why I didn't want to die.
I still haven't figured it out.
But I don't want to die.
And in fact, to the quite opposite: I am afraid to die. It's terrifying me.
I haven't a clue why.
I still don't know why I am alive.
I still don't have a reason to live for.

You'd think that in order for me to have this strong, overwhelming urge to live, I would have some sort of motivating reason, underlying justification for not wanting to die.

But if it's there, I haven't found it yet.
In spite of me not having a reason to live.
In spite of me being in that negative headspace.
Of thinking.
"The world might just be better off if I were not in it", more or less.
That terrible headspace I blogged about less than a week ago, that I never left and am still in it even in this very second.

​That doesn't change that the feeling was there, that fear of death and very strong desire to never let it pass, as long as I have any ability whatsoever to fight against it. (Mind you, realistically speaking, this is a bit morbid and grim, but I don't expect to live to an old age. The two most likely causes of death would be either in a car accident or more likely, due to something like cancer from not taking good care of myself, not checking in with doctors regularly, and the doctors probably not searching for the signs of the diseases that would kill me until it's too late. If I did get, sayyy, skin cancer, and the doctors didn't notice it until it was stage four and had metastasized to multiple organs in my body...I'd be pretty much a goner in no time flat. If that happens, not much I can do about it, but you bet that I'd still try to do something.)

And knowing that deep down.
I very much am fighting to stay alive.
Even if I don't know why I am fighting to stay alive.
The fact that the fight is there is, in of itself, empowering.

It's a little disappointing, not knowing why I want to live.
But I do know that I want to live.
I haven't discovered the reason why I want to stay alive, so I need to keep searching for a reason to keep living, but knowing that I want to live is, in of itself, just that tidbit, enough to keep me afloat for as long as I remember it. (Which is one reason I'm writing this blog, mind you! It'll make it easier for me to remember the feeling that was there, even if I don't know what the feeling is for or about, so that I don't forget.)

That was one thing which happened during the outage.
There were a couple of extra things as well, though.
One thing was working on a webcomic project which has many, many, of the same themes as The Descended does, with a similar core cast size (four protagonists), following a 'villain' in his rise to power, that has a notable beginning and end, in a Fantasy setting (albeit an Urban Fantasy setting of sorts; religious notes about it but not a lot of actual nonhumans otherwise), which I wanted to blog about ages ago yet never got around to it.

In fact.

If you check my December blog entries, at or after December 13th of last year (that is to say, December 13th, 2019 or so), you'll keep seeing me refer to "I really need to blog about this!", and then I never did because I am a moron about that sort of thing.

Well, blog entry made! Or, started, anyway. Still need to finish it.

Basically, I don't know if any blog readers will remember it, but around December 13th, I had mentioned that there was an idea for a webcomic that I really really liked and which was really really fun, but which I didn't have the skills to pull off. The webcomic, Freakshow High, remains something that I cannot make for a vast majority of reasons; I would need a co-writer who would take my basic ideas for the setting to come up with characters and plots which I would collaborate with them on.

Traditionally, I have never been involved in a collaboration which went well. Admittedly, though, that was me working on other peoples' brainchilds, rather than someone who shares my ambition and can see what I am going for, fleshing out my concepts to make something of their own that I just so happen to also have credit for. Butstill, I imagine that's a bit of a tough ask.

How do you get someone to be a co-writer for a webcomic by telling them, "take this basic idea and then make it so that I can make it"? I mean, I think that some collaborative efforts actually have worked out from similar, but the question is could I do that? I'm...not so convinced. Even if I could, the point remains, by myself, I wouldn't be able to make it in any world no matter what; I'd need help, help of a specific kind.

However.

Freakshow High did revive the artist within me.
And more than that--the worldbuilding narrative-writer within me. (Which I think is reflected in my dreams. The last two nights, my dreams have been amazing, cinematic, masterpieces, beautiful, fluent, works of art with fleshed out characters and deep, intricate plotlines and amazing worlds with simply stunning visuals, that I was really bummed out to wake up from because I knew that my awake mind couldn't continue their plots and that I wouldn't get the stories back if I went to sleep so they were killed mid-project, essentially.)

I did a 5-minute drawing of the protagonist from that series, Hey You.
It was done in actually closer to three. In ink. With no reference images. And it was better than most drawings I've made in pencil, with no time limit, using reference images. Was it perfect, no, there were obvious flaws born of me improvising on the spot. But for what it was, it was the best drawing I've ever done...

...Until I drew the Dean of Freakshow High, Dean Master Satan Hercure, in a similar timeframe. I called it a 5-minute doodle concept sketch, but it was done in three, and it would be passable as being in an actual webcomic page.

I did better than that, too.

For the first time in years.

I designed a webcomic logo to apply to the webcomic. Not the most inventive of logos (Freakshow High, underlined by bull horns that surround the text, with flames on top of it), but still an actual well and true proper logo for a webcomic, even knowing that it's for a webcomic that I'll never actually be able to make on my own.

And it goes further.
That worldbuilding I said I hadn't done and was feeling uninspired to do?
That didn't last!
I created a list, incomplete, of attendees to Freakshow High, with details about them.

Demons are among the 'infernal' attendees, who more or less feed off of energies radiating from their source of specialty, particularly emotions. Each demon has a unique specialty (though these are usually genetic, with a clan of demons sharing their specialty), but can still sustain themselves off of other methods. Think a lot like Cubii as portrayed in Dan and Mab--they are usually attached to an emotion (mostly negative ones), and feed from the energy radiating from it.

They may occasionally gain abilities pertaining to their primary source of sustenance, which can include things such as minor shapeshifting or invisibility among others.

Devils who the Dean is among, are among the 'infernal' attendees, and are not to be confused with Demons. They more or less get their energy from contracts, sustaining themselves from bargains, both written and spoken. This is neither inherently nefarious nor inherently benign. They are obligated to fulfill the terms of these deals for their duration, but have the power to terminate any deal they want to at any time. They also have very loose definitions, open to interpretation, on what a deal is. (They can call things deals which weren't intended as deals, with some creativity, and with specific interpretation of wording, get away with breaking the spirit of a deal in favor of rules lawyering the wording.)

They have reasonably decent shapeshifting abilities.

Succubii who should not be confused with Incubii and should not be confused with Devils or Demons, are among the 'infernal' attendees. They are, technically speaking, all hermaphrodites, who in spite of being hermaphrodites do true to what you'd expect, usually appear female. They do indeed feed off of the type of energy you'd expect, love energy, most potently from sex, but they can recharge themselves simply by hanging around people who have a bond of any form of love--familial, romantic, platonic.

They get the most energy from having sex with someone and more or less 'draining' them, but they can sustain themselves just passively by being around strong bonds. Due to having the same resource pool as Incubii, they are bitter rivals with Incubii by and large, absolutely loathe being compared to them, will probably murder you if you make the mistake or even if not give you a rather lengthy lecture on the differences between them.

To a lesser extent, this also applies to Demons. Most demons can partially sustain themselves off of the Succubii territory resources, and some demons specifically require it as their unique specialty, but Succubii are a different species altogether.

Incubii who should not be confused with Succubii and should not be confused with Devils or Demons, are also among the 'infernal' attendees, and much to the chagrin of Incubii and Succubii everywhere, you could take the paragraphs above about the Succubii and apply them to the Incubii--they are, technically, hermaphrodites, who in spite of being hermaphrodites usually appear male. They feed off of love energy, are bitter rivals with Incubii as a result, loathe being compared to them, would probably murder you for doing so or at least give a rather lengthy lecture on the differences between the two, and these differences to a lesser extent apply to them and Demons.

Imps are among the 'infernal' attendees, who're anywhere from 25-75% the height of an average human. At their tallest, they just look like a shorter human; at their shortest, they are like the size of a dog or big cat. They make up for this by having limited illusions and shapeshifting capabilities, which allow them to, should they so choose to, appear normal size, something aided by their wings naturally supporting flight.

Fairies are basically more insectoid Imps. About the same height, with the same illusionary and shapeshifting powers, who have wings that allow them to fly.

The Fairfolk are much as you'd expect the Fae to be: basically alien in thought process, but incredibly attuned to the world otherwise. They have unparalleled hearing and sight, which non-Fairfolk suspect is the reason they appear to be crazy (because they see and hear things others do not, and can't turn this off), and like the vast majority of attendees to Freakshow High, have no limited lifespan, accumulating knowledge and also quirks as time passes and they get bored, usually choosing to obsess with something. 

Gorgons can paralyze people with eye contact--note that this is an activated power, not something that always applies at all times. Their hair is indeed snakes, but these snakes can take on the appearance of dreadlocks and can be cut to any length the gorgon wants their hair to be. These snakes are prehensile so long as they are in snake (not human) form, allowing gorgons to manipulate objects using their hair.

Lamia are basically the land-equivalent of the merfolk: they are basically anthropomorphic snakes. Think like a centaur but instead of the bottom half being a horse, it's instead a snake. However. At puberty, lamia's tails will split in two, allowing them the option of either slithering, or walking on two 'legs'. (Yes this is blatantly ripped from One Piece, I thought that was incredibly neat, deal with it.)

Lizardfolk are pretty much what you'd expect; anthropomorphic lizards of various kind.

Dragons are, well...exactly what you'd picture a western dragon to be. Gigantic creatures, winged, scaled, four legs, tail, claws, teeth, with a big breath weapon. They are inherently master level shapeshifters, though, and almost always take far, far, more reasonably-sized shapes, usually humanoid. They are some of the strongest creatures in existence and do indeed have a taste for greed, but they are not invincible and do lay eggs unless they maintain their shapeshifted form 100% of the time, so they almost never appear in their natural forms.

Merfolk are also pretty self-explanatory, with the add-on I mentioned ripped from One Piece: they are amphibious, able to breath both air and in water, are the best swimmers bar none in the water, and at puberty their tail splits in two allowing for them to walk on land rather comfortably while still maintaining their ability to swim.

Fishfolk are not Merfolk; they are basically anthropomorphic fishes. Whereas Merfolk can vaguely be thought of as terms of literally half-man, half-fish a la Centaurs being half-man, half-horse, Merfolk are instead just hybridizing human and fish features throughout their whole body. It's a little cheap to do especially given what I already stole, but again, you can more or less just look at One Piece's depiction of Fishmen to see what I am getting at here.

Insectoids are to insects what Fishfolk are to fish, humanoid versions of various different insects.

Werebeasts are pretty self-explanatory: humans who have the ability to transform into a different, usually mammalian, creature, in various different forms: full transformation (fully become the creature), hybrid form, and partial transformation (where they're mostly human but have a few features accentuating them that come from the creature they are a werebeast of).

The most common of these by far is the werewolf, but there are plenty of others like werecats as well. You can indeed be either born as one or gain it as an infection; the infection can only be transmitted on a full moon, and there is a slight difference between those born werebeasts and those who're infected; those born have full control over their transformation from birth and are not obligated to transform during the full moon, whereas those infected need to learn how to control their transformations yet no matter how much control they gain they are always going to be in either their hybrid or full-beast forms on the full moon.

Vampires are pretty self-explanatory as well. No, they don't fry in sunlight, but the sun does weaken them. They're pale in complexion. They drink blood; this doesn't need to kill the target. They can be transformed or exist from birth; transforming requires draining someone then giving them blood when they are on the brink of death. They don't explode when impaled by a stake, but leaving a stake in their heart will paralyze them and put to halt their regenerative capacities; long enough will kill them.

I'm not sure on what abilities they have for sure. Do they have hypnosis, shapeshifting, turning into a mist, etc. powers or not, more or less, haven't decided that yet, but they are more or less your standard fare for vampires who aren't ridiculously weak and yet also aren't ridiculously brokenly strong, either. Average run of the mill vampires pretty much, who don't have stupid quirks (they're not compelled to count, repelled by holy water, do not require invitations, can cross running water, are unaffected by crosses, you get the idea), but don't have dominance either.

Witches are a separate species from humans, technically, but for all intents and purposes, are basically just "humans who can use magic". This magic is genetically passed on from parent to child no matter what (general rule of thumb: almost every single attendee of Freakshow High is fertile and capable of having children with almost any other attendee of Freakshow High, which means that yes, you can have someone who has anywhere from 2-20 species in their lineage although it should be noted that you're not going to have best-of-all from this, you'll basically inherit one or two and then the rest basically don't exist aside from having a small chance your descendants manifest them, think dominant versus recessive in that you'll have a few dominant with most recessive), and on every rare once and a while, can appear in someone who previously lacked it.

They are disproportionately female, but not inherently so. (Usually any witch who randomly gains powers in spite of lacking a lineage of it will indeed be female though.) There's plenty of male witches, but they still call themselves witches in spite of that term usually having a female connotation to it.

Their magic is currently not well-defined, though what I have in mind is more or less, "very very versatile and capable of a lot, but still having set rules to follow which make it not capable of anything, with limitations to what is possible", I just didn't put in the actual work yet to set said limits and such.

Ghouls are creatures that are 'cursed', more or less a generic term that applies to many types of things. A wendigo would be a type of ghoul, for instance, due to the curse of consuming flesh until passing it on. These curses can be of numerous different natures. Common curses that create ghouls originate from Witches, but they can be from plenty of other sources. As long as they retain enough autonomy to function in the supernatural society, however, they are more than free to attend Freakshow High and work towards whatever goals they have. (Some curses can be ended, others are eternal.)

Zombies are not the infectious type--they are, specifically, people who were raised by the voodoo magic of a witch. This applies to all zombies, but normally, most zombies are automatons that have no free will, give no thought, are basically raised creatures that are slaves to the one who created them to do their bidding and nothing but their bidding. However, it is a not-too-uncommon happenstance where zombies gain sentience and with it, a sense of free will. They think, they are no longer mindless, they no longer are slaves, though they may remain servants, they just aren't nothing but a body. They have a mind and thus are entitled to everything which comes with it.

In this sense, zombies are technically speaking a very specific form of construct, but they are classified differently because constructs weren't actual people before gaining sentience whereas zombies were. The personalities zombies gain may or may not reflect who they were before. They may or may not have memories of who they were before.

Constructs are magically-created golems that have somehow gained sentience. Whereas golems are mindless automatons that have, of sorts, 'programming' that they follow, constructs can think, have free will, and are thus entitled to everything that comes with it.

The quintessential example of a construct would be Frankenstein's Monster (though depending on how much of Frankenstein's monster is nuts and bolts and how much is flesh he probably qualifies more as a zombie); that is in a nutshell what a construct would be. Something artificially constructed that has gained a will of its own.

Ectoplasmic creatures, which I am calling 'ethereal', are also numerous in attendance.

Ghosts are the most famous of the 'ethereal' species, due to more or less being the ones who overall have the best abilities. Like all ethereal species, most ghosts are not born, but while they have incredibly reduced fertility, they are not actually sterile, so it is possible for an ethereal creature to be born as an ethereal creature rather than simply randomly existing by happenstance.

They have optional invisibility which they can trigger at will. Like all ethereal creatures, they can fly--and of the ethereal creatures, by shifting their legs into a ghostly tail, they can achieve the fastest flight speed of any ethereal creature, and are basically to flight what merfolk are to water.

Wraiths are ethereal creatures who have the ability to teleport. In this sense, they can rival ghosts in speed in flight, by repeatedly teleporting over and over again, but while they can shift from one location to another instantly, this is not something they can spam indefinitely. (They can do it in rapidfire short-term, and there's no hard-limit to what they can do, but they do get winded the more they use it.)

Banshees are ethereal creatures who more or less have the ability to shout really really loudly and painfully. But it's a little more complicated than that; they basically have mastery of sound of all sorts. They can mute sounds that would normally be made, or crank up sounds that would normally be inaudible. They can't travel at the speed of sound, but they can otherwise fully manipulate sound in ways that make them basically unparalleled masters of sound.

People know them as shouting really loudly and painfully though because while Banshees are capable of really complex, nuanced uses of their power...inherent in being a Banshee is basically an innate sense of drama queen (note that there's a dead even split between male and female banshees), an inherent hamminess, laziness, desire to play things up, and the like, and also an utter lack of awareness to how they are perceived by others, who think that their loud screeches are 'true art' and that the people who cover their ears are haters that don't understand, more or less.

​Phantoms are ethereal creatures who have the ability to phase through matter. This is an optional ability. Other ethereal creatures are still very much physical, which is something you might not expect. And all ethereal creatures thus have the ability to interact with objects (which is why I didn't add poltergeists to the list of ethereal creatures originally, though I have since reconsidered), and be interacted with.

Phantoms can optionally disable this interaction and optionally pass through walls and such.

Specters are unique among ethereal creatures as having the ability to shapeshift. They can choose what form they appear as, which makes them one of the stronger ectoplasmal creatures since they can fly and more or less choose what mass and shape they have, which can have a number of rather useful effects, even allowing them to somewhat mimic the powers of other ethereal creatures. (Take on a form small enough to pass through a wall if the wall has a crack in it, for instance, or accelerate themselves by physics, and so on and so forth.)

Poltergeists were originally not in the list because all ethereal creatures can interact with objects, but I decided to add them in with them being unique among ethereal creatures as being able to do this from a range with them having telekinetic powers whereas other ectoplasmal creatures require touch.

Bigfolk are basically your Yetis, Bigfoots, Sasquatches, and such.

Sirens are similar to Banshees in being masters of musical noise, but with more of a pleasant take on it and also being more seductive, with their sounds inherently containing hypnosis to them.

Among the attendees would also be a word that I imagine exists and I could find but was too lazy to for this blog because this is a massive tangent from my true blog entry, involving a catch-all term for Satyrs, Centaurs, and Minotaurs.

I also included from Greek Mythology Harpies, Chimeras, and Sphinxes (who would also take on the Egyptian mythology there as well as the Greek one), with the intention of adding more similar with research.

I also added in Ratmen, anthropomorphic rats, and Avians, anthropomorphic birds (aka birdfolk).

One classification I also added was something I wanted to be distinctly separate from Witches, Necromancers, who more or less are masters of the dead, having a high attunement to ethereal creatures, can raise the dead, and perform some low-level magics separate from Witch magic that revolve around various aspects of humans specifically.

And that's a list I expected to be incomplete.
It's all I have.
But it's something I made on December 11th with a little added on December 13th (though for this blog I did a little bit of on-the-spot decision making, namely, including Poltergeists).

I did far more than make the attendees though.

I did an estimation of the size of the school, somewhere in the range of 200-500 students.
Given that number, I estimated that there'd be around 15-30 teachers and probably 20-60 total faculty (since not all faculty would be teachers though there would of course be people with multiple jobs).

I named the town the school of Freakshow High is in, and modeled it as being a fairly isolated town-city: not small enough to be a town, but small enough that when most people think of a 'city', they're going to think more populous than what this is. (To put this into perspective, probably about the size of Snohomish or Monroe here in the state of Washington. Not entirely rural, but also not exactly a metropolis. No skyscrapers, but a fair amount of industrialization yet enough undeveloped land that there's plenty of trees and the like around.)

The school is in Edenville, and I even gave Freakshow High its sports teams' names: the Edenville Devilsnakes.
I think that the size of a small city-town is somewhere in the range of 2000-10,000 though I admit I would need to research this a bit. (Not exactly sure where but it's not a big enough deal for me to focus on.)

I have character bios on Hey You and the Dean, a fair idea of Hey You's background and where they came from, the like. A ton of work I put in.

And yet in spite of all that, it is a project I will never make because I would need help to make it.

...So what was all of that build-up for?

...Because on December 13th, sharing a sheet of work scrapbook paper that the first half contained the additions for Freakshow High.

...Was a webcomic project that I could​ do on my own.

This is a long, long blog post, so, uhh...lemme pull it back and remind you of exactly what I was on about since I realize we went on the longest tangent ever. Go way back to the, "One thing was working on a webcomic project which has many, many, of the same themes as The Descended does, with a similar core cast size (four protagonists), following a 'villain' in his rise to power, that has a notable beginning and end, in a Fantasy setting (albeit an Urban Fantasy setting of sorts; religious notes about it but not a lot of actual nonhumans otherwise), which I wanted to blog about ages ago yet never got around to it.", section of this blog entry.

That project is what I actually set out to talk about.
I can't make Freakshow High on my own.
But if I so chose to. (I probably won't, but I have the choice that I could.)
I could make this new project.

​This new project has the first chapter more or less mapped out. It has a set beginning, end, and various middle parts set out. I know what I want to do with it if I were to do it and I know how I would do it, more or less.
I have the main characters modeled out as well as the three other demons in the setting. (The minions of the three other demons, the later lesser followers of the titular demon, the lesser followers of the three other demons, the followers of more holy divine powers, the lesser followers of more divine holy powers, and random people who aren't followers of anyone? Yeah I have absolutely none of them modeled out.)

Which is to say, the most important characters, I know what they look like more or less and know their personalities in a nutshell.

I have done rather extensive worldbuilding and can talk about every aspect of the world; it's a fairly simple world to pull off easily enough. It's neat, it's beautiful, but also fairly simple to grasp once you get into it, just get a few of the basic bases down and you can follow along rather freely. 

And like Freakshow High, I did more work than that.
I made a really really cool logo for it that I can draw repeatedly and easily because while simple, it is easily replicable. (It is probably not a very original logo concept, but it is still something I took time to design which I feel like I put my own spin on that makes it a signature of my webcomic.)

I even made the webcomic's slogan too.

During the outage, I went one step further and drew the cat in the series, too. Mind you--I did so in about three to four minutes, with zero reference images (this was at Denny's so no kitties to use) and zero erasing. I drew a cat in five minutes with zero references and in spite of that, it actually looks passable as being a cat. 

The only reason I didn't draw more was due to lacking time, usually being busy with other things.

But all of the pieces to make the webcomic are there if I were to so choose.

That project is one which I'm not sure I want to mention by name, but ehhhh...sure, I'll risk listing its name; it's Bazu's Fourthsworne.

To keep a long long story short:
There are four rulers of Hell, the Foursworne, and Bazu the Broken (full name, Bazu Fourthsworne, the Fourth Foursworn) is the weakest of them. (He is associated with snakes and the color yellow.) He was UnPersoned by the first foursworn, trapped to rule the smallest section of Hell and with no presence on earth and no followers and no means of manifesting.

The story follows his rise to power after he is, through a sheer stroke of luck, manifested by pure happenstance in a ritual that had every reason to not go right but somehow actually did go right. (It was deliberately written wrong as to sabotage any efforts to make it successful, but by a one in trillion chance occurrence, managed to fulfill the conditions that had been left out.)

The main characters aside from him (this contains first-episode spoilers by the way):
Creed, his summoned Avatar. Creed has four forms: possessing the cat, possessing the cat but transformed into a humanoid form (that of a little boy), using the cat as a way of manifesting an incomplete form (very loosely modeled off of Ryoma Hoshi from Danganronpa V3), and a fully manifested complete form where he is the will of Bazu incarnate.

Adam Caine, the person who did the summoning, becomes his head follower, basically what you'd get if you combined the Pope with a King in that he has almost absolute authority over Bazu's domain (which, as noted, at the beginning of the story...is nothing, but Bazu makes it clear that as he gains power, so too will Adam), second only to Bazu himself.

Lilith Edenson, one of the people present at the summoning, becomes a servant of Bazu by making a contract with him. During the summoning process, Adam killed his sister--Lilith, in love with her, was very much Not Okay with this. Contracts with a demon can be broken down into more or less trivial (the demon does something and in exchange the servant does a single task for the demon and is then free), difficult (the demon does something hard to accomplish and in exchange the servant has lifelong servitude, but is free once they die), or impossible (the demon, via the contract, accomplishes something that shouldn't be possible for the demon, in exchange for the person making the contract becoming an eternal servant, damned to forever be the slave of the demon), to more or less keep the long story short.
Reviving Adam's sister, whose death was integral to the success of the ritual, was an impossible feat, which via the contract, was achieved, but as a consequence, Lilith has become an eternal servant of Bazu.

And the actual protagonist of the story (because Bazu is more of the deutagonist), the one whose perspective the majority of the story is told through:
Evelyn Caine, preferring Eevee (not Eve), is the sister of Adam Caine and more or less FWB with Lilith. (Lilith is a lesbian, Eevee is pan, Lilith's love for Eevee is stronger than Eevee's love for Lilith but they have communicated their feelings. Eevee does love Lilith, just...not as much as Lilith loves Eevee, and Lilith has accepted this and is okay with the status of their relationship since both Eevee and Lilith are happy with it.)

Since Adam, her brother, becomes basically a lord of the damned helping Bazu accomplish his will in exchange for becoming more powerful, and Lilith her sort-of-lover is eternally indebted to Bazu to always serve his will, she more or less tags along with the group of them.

She is heavily a deadpan snarker, will heavily riff on Bazu, has a low opinion of him, will insult him, and so on and so forth. For his part, Bazu considers her expendable and will often trick her into doing things that are far more dangerous than they may seem, to further his own ends, and has no qualms of letting her die again and no intention of reviving her a second time should she die again. He demonstrates, both with his actions and his words, that she is essentially cannon fodder for him, a useful tool, but not an actual asset.

She doesn't really have a reason to help Bazu but more or less nonchalantly tags along and inevitably ends up helping him anyway. Sometimes by choice, sometimes to help Adam (she is his sister so she does care for him), sometimes to help Lilith (she does care about Lilith more than she cares about a friend), but often just because Bazu manipulated things that way.

Because Bazu is, specifically, the Demon of Charisma and is the most charismatic bastard around. Not the smartest, not the strongest, but his charm is why he was basically removed from the mortal realm; he was too much of a threat if allowed to roam free...

...And yet, the story follows precisely what happens after he does exactly that.
​From Eevee's viewpoint, by and large.

I love the project and I like it a lot.
I can make it, too.
Will I?
Ehhh...not sure.
But it's primed and ready for me if I ever decided to.

So what else?
I kinda have a growing urge to mod Civilization III again.
I don't want to work on the Across the Ages project--that was a bit too cumbersome. I do like what I was doing with it, but it just was something that had too many issues that I don't think someone of my skill level could work out.

Instead, I wanted to work on a more toned-down attempt at a modified version of the Rise of Rome scenario.
My first modified Rise of Rome scenario was my first, and grandest, venture into modding Civ 3 stuff.
It had a ton of stuff done but was atrocious overall and I basically made it ridiculously easy mode regardless of who I was playing on, adding everything and the kitchen sink to it.

This toned-down version would have a few modifications that would risk pushing me into that territory, but which with luck I'd be fine with.
The basic idea, 7/8 playable, Egypt still on the decline, but with each civilization having specific traits of theirs emphasized and played up. 
I'd remove pollution as much as is possible (this is just a quality of life improvement), add in Wool in locations as close to the Medieval scenario as is possible and no other locations (which would actually make it difficult to achieve for half the civs, which is a good thing!), turn silver/gold into resources, add in the wonders from Mesopotamia that aren't included, two outposts for Rome to allow for contacting the Celts and Goths (one in England, one in approximately Germany near the rivers there) with one unit on them, an extra Carthago Novo unit for Carthage as compensation, an outpost for Persia to allow first-turn contact with Scythia and similarly an extra Macedon unit as compensation, and then the draw to the scenario:

The units.
Goths would have a focus on raw offense, forgoing defense but having offense rivaling or even exceeding even Roman units.

Celts would have movement speed, traveling extra distance. Their units would have bog-standard attack/defense.

Carthage would have units that take less shields to produce, but require more resources to make, emphasizing their cheap mercenary nature. These units would be loosely equal to normal units, but some stronger and others weaker.

The Scythians would have units that treat all terrain as roads, but no extra movement speed, to differentiate their units from the Celtic units. Their units would have bog-standard attack/defense.

Rome would have their units be able to use all worker actions, have the strongest overall units in offense/defense (including a defensive horseman that'd be able to match their citizens), but pay for it in having those units be more expensive overall in terms of shields.

Egypt would have unique units, but have all of them be weaker than units from other civs, to represent their 'on the decline' nature.

The Greeks would have amphibious warriors/swordsmen (who would have stats equal to other swordsmen otherwise) and be self-balanced against the Persians for their spearmen to be loosely equivalent to the Persian swordsmen with Persian units having higher offense and lower defense and Macedonian units being equal in both.
Their units would be stronger than Carthage, but weaker than Rome.

I wouldn't touch things otherwise for risk of turning things too complex and ruining the simple idea as it is now.
Now, admittedly--there would still be about 75 units in the scenario, but that wouldn't be "75 units plus the ones already in there", it would be "75 units including the ones already in there".
Maybe bump it up to 80 when you add in leaders, armies, gallies, and workers.

But I am pretty sure a total of 80 units in the game or thereabouts, is not more than most scenarios.
I'd have to double-check to be sure, but I feel like if it's not actually much more than is in most scenarios, no real harm in striving for it.

It feels incredibly doable, I'd just need to do it.
Hmm, what else...I think that beyond that, it's just 'catching up' stuff.
I need to play a few TFT games to get the quest there.
I have eight days to play two RANKED (yes, RANKED) games of League, and to also play one of Garen, Jax, Draven, or Leona. (Sadly, I only own Garen of them. The one I'd least one to play.)
ARURF is life and I want to test if my build with a mana champion works on ARUF, where cooldowns are at 80% and every item is thus over the CDR limit. But also mostly to see if a manamune can transform into the muramana in ARURF.

I have obligations that I am days late to attending to, and these once I finally finish this blog entry (I think I've been writing this blog for an upwards of six hours?), those are going to be what I probably focus on.

I have a vod to watch and multiple videos to watch to catch up on. Probably about 12-24 in total. Most of them ~10 minutes but at least four of them are longer.

​Busy, busy times.

Funny, I seem to recall blogging, heavily, about Snowmageddon about this time last year. Maybe it was two years ago (it seems heavy snow is every other year), but I kinda feel like it was last year? Maybe it was a bit earlier so technically 2018, maybe a bit later, but I do seem to recall early circa last year, there was heavy snow.

And this year.

There is ridiculously heavy snow.
Which is kinda annoying to be honest.
Our uninterruptable power supplies aren't actually working--right now, they're glorified outlets, serving as nothing other than precisely that, something to give multiple things needing power, power...so long as you have power. The second power goes out, even if it's for a split second...BAM. Everything dies. Computer, internet, everything. Not a single thing stays up.

And our generator isn't working (not that we have internet when we have no power anyway), so no generator, no UPS, means that when we have a power hit...everything goes down until we get power back. Meaning anything I am doing, better be automatically saved and not crucial because if it ain't automatically saved or if it is crucial...I be screwed.

Notably.
This does allow me to do stuff like watch people; this does allow me to play TFT. But it doesn't really allow me to play Minecraft; it doesn't really allow me to play League.

I can.

Can.
It's just incredibly risky, to the point where it's not something I really want to do unless I have teammates who know about it in advance and can cover for me if it does happen and I leave my team in a 4v5.

Now, admittedly.
Given that I play on Oceania's server.
Me having a sudden dc due to weather? I'll blend right in! Or so I imagine. Opposite extremes, quite literally, because I'm in a land of ice, Australia is a land of fire right now, but I imagine the effects would be similar when it comes to playing the game; high likelihood of getting sudden dcs.

Admittedly, I don't really know nearly as much about the fires in Australia as I should. My close friend is from Australia, their family lives in Australia, and I have multiple friends and associates who live in Australia. I know it is really, really bad, but...I don't know as much about it as I should, and I don't know what I'd realistically be able to do to help.
(I mean. I imagine there's donations to charity and the like. But I am notoriously stingy with my money; I know it makes no sense, but I usually just...I will give hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to a friend in need. They need not be a close friend. They need not have the expectation of paying me back. Anyone I call a friend, anyone, I would give hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to if they were in need of the money, with no expectation of them ever paying me back. Yet donating to a charity? Donating to a charity which would help the friend, which would have 100% of the money go to a good cause that I would love to support and I know is a good cause and I know the money will do good...for whatever reason, I just...am incredibly hesitant to do so. I guess it's more or less the difference between knowing the face of who I'm helping, versus helping an idea which has no true face, if I had to wager a reason.)

Like...should I better educate myself on it to know about it more? What would I actually do with that knowledge? Spread it to people who could have use of it, spread it to people who with it could help? The people who I know that could have use of the knowledge, are already more knowledgeable on the subject than I am; THEY could teach ME. So that'd leave the 'spread it to people who with the knowledge can help', but even there, I'm not sure what I could do.

I don't really feel comfortable asking people to, what, give money, for a cause especially when I myself am not contributing to it. So what would they be giving? Relief supplies, maybe? Similar story there; I'm not comfortable with asking them to give things I myself am not giving. So I just...don't know what I would do to help. Write to the government asking the government to help? As one of their constituents, contribute a well-thought-out plea for them to help?

Maybe, but I'm not sure how I could pull that off and I'm not sure who I could spread the word to that would want to do it and could, who hasn't already done it. (Basically, the people with the skills to do it and will to do it that I know, have already informed themselves better than I am.)

In that sense, I just don't really have any idea of what I could do to help and I feel really guilty about it but like.
I don't really know what I could do.

But I digress.
I'm also having the obvious heavy depression. There's not much to say about that though. It's fairly self-explanatory. I feel worthless. I feel like I am a piece of trash. A failure, fraud. Someone who makes promise after promise.
And delivers on none of them.
I am just.
Objectively.
Terrible.

And it's very negatively impacting me.
Where, yes.
I have the thoughts of, "it might just be better if I wasn't around", because then people wouldn't have those false hopes about me. Then people wouldn't expect me to be any good, when I am demonstrably not. You could always go. "But Bree. Can't you just...decide to not be in those positions of responsibility?" Resign, step down, be forcefully removed, and so on?

Why yes.
I could.
And then I would lose what little hope I am holding onto.
I would lose one of the only things keeping me alive.
I don't really have a reason to live right now, but having duties, obligations, that I am bound to, helps to at least keep me floating by--losing those duties, losing those obligations, means I lose the things I am floating by on.

I would be way, way worse off if I lost them.
And yet every day I feel like I am losing them, specifically because.
I am failing at them.
And because I am failing at them.
​I am at constant risk of losing them.

And what makes it worse.
Every day.
I have visions of my jobs as they could be.
And I have visions of my jobs as they should be--not as optimal as they could be, but at least realistically humanly achievable. Things that I have no reason to not achieve and then...I don't achieve them. For. no. good. reason.

I think about the job as it is most optimal, every day--but that daydream I have no delusions of becoming real. It's fictional, unrealistic, not something that I could ever achieve. It's worth striving for anyway, but I have no disappointment if I fail because I know that it's not possible in the first place.

But I also think about the job as it is most practical, every day--the job as it could realistically be done easily. There is literally nothing stopping that from becoming real because it's not unrealistic. It's easily doable, and easily achieved. And yet I don't do them. For no good reason. No excuse, no real reason for it.

When I inevitably fail to achieve that, how could I not feel disappointed in myself? It's fully possible, and easily so, for me to do the things. So why on earth do I not get them done, when I can easily get them done? There's no excuses, no justifications. I have no alternative answer.

Other than "I suck".
I just fail.
No reason I shouldn't have done it, yet I didn't do it.
What can that be.
Other than a problem with me?

You might think.
"Maybe your thoughts of 'this is pragmatic' is off and your pragmatic is still 'too perfect'?"
Except no.
It isn't.
I know what is too ambitious for me.
I might still try the too-ambitious anyway, but I'll hold no illusions of when it fails, of it being unrealistic.
I have a very good sense of what is basic minimum, versus what is absolute maximum. 
And I am constantly, consistently, below the basic minimum.

And if you asked others who have or had the same job, they would agree. They would look at what I did versus what I am expected to do, and agree with my self-assessment of it being below the acceptable standards. That I am not performing to the expectation of my jobs.

If they said otherwise to my face.
They would be lying to try and comfort me.
Or maybe they would be delusional in legitimately thinking I'm okay, due to bias from liking me and thinking surely I couldn't fail and maybe them being highly self-critical of themselves. (Basically, there's a higher chance that they'll think I'm fine, if they are self-critical enough to think that they weren't doing what they should.)

But if they were to honestly assess me, in private, not to my face, talking to others in the business.
They would be forced to confess, to admit, to face the truth.
That I am not performing to the levels I should be.

I know that I have low self-assessment most of the time.
Where due to my ego I have high expectations of myself and due to this am largely self-critical when I fail to live up to my own self-hype.

But I know that if someone were to objectively rather than subjectively measure me and assess what I've been doing.
I objectively would not be living up to expectations and nothing they can do or say will change that objective truth.

And if I am not living up to expectations.
The only conclusion to draw from this is that I am failing.
And if I am failing at everything.
I feel like a failure.

How can I not?
I'd argue that if I am failing at everything, I should feel like a failure because if I'm failing at everything...I feel like I should feel like a failure because what do you call someone who's failing at everything? The best word for it would be failure.

...And in this regard, I was highly successful overall! I still have three, lengthy, videos to watch (one is two hours; two are each 45 minutes), but I watched about ten videos today to get entirely caught up there. There were a bunch of things I needed to get caught up on, though, and...I was...less successful elsewhere.

In Minecraft I did do some work but had the tilting experience of zombie death losing my experience and risking my items...again. And now I wasted a bunch of time for what amounts to nothing.

In Teamfight Tactics, I needed to play five games for the orb of enlightenment and play enough games to get the four quests done--this also contained extreme tilt of either lousy luck in the earlygame and by the time my fortunes were turning around...being eliminated by those who had the amazing luck earlygame and were just strong enough to beat me before I could make a comeback...

...Or godly good luck earlygame, but which was severely soured by the lousy luck lategame where I would spend 100 gold and not get a single T3, not get the key T2 that I was after, and in many cases, not get the 5g unit I needed to make my comp transition into the lategame, where I knew I had the earlygame crushed but I knew that I needed to go to a very specific comp to not get outscaled...and couldn't because no matter how much gold I spent in spite of being the requisite level and literally nobody else running my comp, the unit just. wouldn't. spawn.

Which lasted until I got a few games I considered passable enough. Still didn't complete the latter two quests but considering one of said quests requires me to play nine games to completion and each game is like 30-60 minutes long, an average of 45 minutes...that...didn't happen.

Then in League I had multiple misfortunes. I had my Ashe stolen from me; that game went predictably badly. I was assigned a game of jungle. I said that I don't play jungle, recommended a swap, nobody took me up on the offer, but fortunately when one of my teammates noticed that my champion locked in was Ashe and asked "can Ashe jungle" and I bluntly said 'no', they dodged. (I generally assume that most of the people who dodge have alternate accounts or aren't willing to play games that they know they'll lose. I do not have alternate accounts and I will play games that I know I will lose, because I figure that they might give me a learning experience.)

Then I got a game where I accidentally took the wrong runes--the runes I took were runes I use on Ashe, but in that specific game, I really really needed Sorcery, and yet I was stuck with Fleet Footwork. Sorcery would've allowed me to get a ton of kills that game that I didn't get, because I took the wrong runes accidentally due to the Vlad game. Even if it was winnable, it became unwinnable when two members of my team dc'd.

And then I got a game where my team did flame me for my build--to be fair. I was 0/8, but in this case, that legitimately was not entirely my fault. My "support" was Tryndamere. Tryndamere can be played in 4/5 positions, like Ashe can--top, jungle, mid, even in the right circumstances adc. (With Ashe's four being top, mid, support, and adc, obv.) He is very much not a support in any way shape or form.

He didn't take a support item--which meant that whenever he last hit, he was stealing my cs. Because he was stealing my cs, I had less gold than I should have had. He also took fights that would be fine for him to take, between his ult and his spin--but he criticized me when I went in and criticized me when I didn't go in because while he has tools to escape from death...I do not. And he was expecting me to have some magical get-out-of-a-2v4-situation.

Because, yes. We were 2v4'd. Repeatedly. Given that it was a 2v4, I did fairly well given the circumstance. I could burn my ult defensively and summoners to escape to safety, and did so repeatedly, which kept me from dieing like four more times than I did, and at least two of my deaths were due to me getting collapsed on by 3-5 people when I didn't have vision on them and thought that they were somewhere else. (Those are at least partially my fault, yes, but when caught out by 3-5 people, I'm dead; there's no escaping that.)

He wanted me to engage in fights that were 2v3, even 2v4. I could not, and when I tried, I died. He wanted me to engage in situations which I knew I wasn't in position to engage in--he has a spin he can use for a gap close; if he spins into a fight when we were previously together...I can't get in range to help in time because Ashe is much much slower than Tryndamere's spin.

Not helping was the fact that my toplaner lost hardcore and my jungler was also in on the flaming (the jungler and "support" were the ones doing the flaming), in spite of my jungler himself having done pretty terrible. And it reflects in their scorelines, too. I had the second-lowest number of deaths in the game, but only by one. (Somehow, the jungler had one less death than me.)

It was all-around incredibly frustrating. Ashe can engage in all-ins, but she is primarily a specialist at dealing poke damage. She is the queen of kiting--of hit-and-run. Hit, retreat. Hit again, retreat. And only after the enemy has been whittled down sufficiently, do you engage...preferably still with enough ability to leave room for a disengage or a finisher.

Being asked to engage engage engage without kiting, to go purely on the offensive especially when we were behind in every lane with only one player on our team doing even close to remotely well, is the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do on Ashe, especially when behind.

Heck, even the enemy team had a member who recognized that I wasn't the problem. And I believe it was my midlaner who shared that opinion, mentioning that Normals are a good place to practice or something to that effect, with at least one person in the game who wasn't the jungle/support saying that I could be pioneering a new meta.

Maybe they were sarcastic, maybe not, it's hard to say for sure, especially from vague memory, but if they were sincere in giving that benefit of the doubt then they were giving me far more than my own team did. (Plus at the beginning of the game I am fairly certain one or two members of my team dropped the N-word but since I was too busy playing the game I couldn't look up who it was. I have two very obvious suspects tho.)

And, heck. At the end of the game, I ended up with stats that were still some of the best on my team and I could tell that in teamfights where I was able to kite away from the enemy I was actually dealing significant damage, contrary to my teammates' claims of my build being worthless for damage. I was less than 400 damage away from dealing the second-highest damage on my team and I had the sixth-highest damage in the game; I did more damage than the enemy adc. I was one of the only two on my team to damage a turret. I earned more gold than our toplaner, which is an impressive feat mind you since, again I must reiterate: my "support" was stealing my cs so my gold income was halved. I was one point off of having the second-highest vision score on my team, and also one point off of matching the enemy adc.

I had the highest minion kill of my team...and had an exact tie with the enemy adc, down to the last number, for being second-highest in the game. The only player who killed more minions was the enemy toplaner. (Who, being Mordekaiser when Mordekaiser even post-nerf is kinda OP...was. Well. Mordekaiser.)

Are those good stats to have? No, not particularly. They are still not great. It still means that overall I was a little bit sucky. But in spite of my team having placed the blame on me and my build...I genuinely don't think that it was my fault? Like...toplane lost hard against a champion who can and did 1v5 us. Hard, HARD lost. Midlane was the best of us but even they in spite of getting the kills they did were barely going even with their counterpart and were losing against the enemy toplaner and losing when outnumbered.

My "support" didn't take a support item, took half of my cs (when I am already not good at csing), entered into areas we had zero vision of and expected me to follow, took fights that I couldn't engage in, took fights that I couldn't disengage from, and sure enough had the highest deaths in the game.

It is not an uncommon belief that in games, supports are the main difference between winning and losing--a good support might not win by 1v5ing the enemy team, so much as they win by setting their team up for success. A bad support directly loses their team the game, by setting them up for failure.

And, hey.
I didn't place blame on them in-game.
I never flamed back.
I never asked them questions about their rather-questionable tactics.
But I feel like I have the right to believing that that game was genuinely just not my fault? Like, sure. I admit. I made many, many, many mistakes. I did get genuinely caught out of position multiple times. I should have been smart enough to recognize, "I can't engage on that." I should have been smart enough to ping my teammates not to engage on that. I should have pinged when I was trying to engage on something.

And I made many misplays. Missed most of my ults. Missed many volleys. A ton of my volleys got minion-blocked where one minion (or if I were lucky, multiple minions) ate all of my arrows, meaning none of them connected. I did legitimately play a bad game, and I feel they had room to call me out on the mistakes I did make.

But they were calling me out on things that I genuinely don't think I was responsible for. Ashe needs lifesteal? I had it. I didn't have the full 12% because I couldn't farm it out, couldn't get champion kills, but I don't think that my inability to do those things lies on me. Ashe needs damage? I was dealing considerable damage when I wasn't instantly deleted. The only thing that they called me out on which I feel has merit is that Ashe needs crit, for a stronger slow. Crits double her slow and deal increased damage to slowed targets; my build didn't have the crit yet.

But honestly--in that game, I cannot think of a single time a crit giving increased slow would've made a difference. I was building defensive items that are designed to help keep someone alive, and which just so happen to on this build give me extra damage and a bottomless supply of mana. Would a stronger slow have allowed my team to kill an enemy who got away? No occasion that I can think of. Would a stronger slow have allowed someone to survive in a situation they didn't? Not when the slow would be applied to one enemy champion when someone is being dogpiled by three enemies. A stronger slow applied to one still leaves two in kill range.

I am fairly certain that there was no way I could have slowed them and made a difference.
But I am also fairly certain that I couldn't have done more damage with a different build.
The problem was that I kept dieing before I could deal the damage. There's no build in the world which can deal damage on Ashe when you're dead before you can so much as proc Ranger's Focus. If you get to only launch one volley and maybe one autoattack and are dead before you can launch a second auto...there's no Ashe build in the world which can get her a kill there. She can't oneshot like that.

And the build I go for is actually one of the best possible builds for trying to prevent being killed. It's a hugely defensive build with a metric ton of armor and a ton of MR in it as well. I was still being killed before I could get a full combo off, because I didn't have my teammates taking the damage for me. They were dead, they were fighting elsewhere, they were unable to stop the enemies from bypassing our frontline to focus on me, our backline. All three at different times.

I don't think there was any build I could have done. None. Which could have prevented that.
And sure enough.
I had a final game I played where I ended up hugely popping off.
I do admit--I had an incredibly competent support, and my midlaner won lane. I think my jungler and toplaner actually lost lane tho? I mean, I remember almost all of my deaths were in the earlygame and yet I wasn't the one who gave first blood; it was my toplaner. And I recall my jungler having died early, too. Might be mistaken tho.

And I will fully confess. Even if we didn't all play well early. There wasn't a single weak link later in the game. (The closest was us having an uncoordinated assault on the enemy base where when some of us were dead, the others were attacking, and when they died, the others who respawned tried attacking, but that was a collective int from everyone including me making miscalculations.)

So it's not like I singlehandedly won my team the game. I had the most deaths on my team and the lowest kills to my name, but almost second-highest kill participation in the game. (Highest was my support, second-highest was my midlaner, by a slim margin--they had one more than me. Though I admit, I only had one more than our jungler or toplaner who both were just one behind me. Suffice to say: we teamfought a lot and worked incredibly well as a unit.)

I had better stats than most of the enemy team and better stats than the enemy adc across the board, and overall I did incredibly well. My team was friendly, supportive, we worked together well, coordinated reasonably well enough, and even when we inted, we usually got something out of it. Securing a drake even if three of us died (not exactly worth), securing a nexus turret even if most of us die (probably still worth), the like.

And this brings the total games I've run this build in on Normals, with the runes and items, up to five. I thought it was more than that, but I could only find five in my match history. Three of them have been victories. Two of them have had teammates who hard-flamed me in the form of some combination of {jungle, midlaner, support}. 

I blooged about the prior defeat before, and this is my blog about the defeat here.

But so far I still maintain my conclusions thusfar.
It feels like the build's success/failure rate has less to do with the build itself, so much as it does, the team I am on. If I have teammates who are making plays that are blatantly mistakes who then flame me when those plays go south...it doesn't work, but I don't think any build would work for those games for a player of my skill level, which is to say, not very good. I will fully admit to being a trash-tier player and a significant portion of my losses are due to mistakes I made so I will own up to having been a significant contributor to the loss.
(Though, as I said last time: I feel like I am in the right to justifiably not take exclusive blame for the loss and that my teammates played equally as large a part in the loss, at a minimum if not more of a part than I did.)

If I have teammates who are chill, work well with me, synergize with me, are willing to own up to "whoops, that was my fault" when they make a mistake, accept me saying the same, and who have a plan to recover rather than running in and doing the same thing we just got killed trying to do...it tends to work. Mind you, I admit: given those circumstances, probably any build would work.

And I do confess, this game I had a little bit of an extra edge; the enemy team was all-AD (a fact I didn't recognize until midway through the game; I probably should have built tabis in hindsight, or rather, since I didn't notice the enemy team was all-AD until midway through the match, sold my Ionian boots for Tabis), when two of my items give some of the highest armor in the game. Frozen Heart gives the highest armor in the game (100 armor), and Iceborn Gauntlet is in the top...I think six? Maybe it's only top eight, but it still gives a ridiculously large amount of armor. (I did let my team know about this fact, which they found useful to know, because apparently I was the first one to realize the enemy team was all-AD and none of them had realized it until I pointed it out, so that was a good contribution of mine. I mean, not sure it made much of a difference; the two members who built armor were two members who are already tanks, and a third who was maybe building into tank is also sometimes albeit not always played as a tank, so it's hard to confirm for sure that their itemization was due to them taking note of the full-ad enemy team after I noted it, but hey, I'd like to hope that I made a difference in helping them.)

Obviously, in terms of games to run the build in...a build where the enemy team has some difficulty bursting me down (though Pyke could still deliver killing blows with his ult, annoyingly enough, because many times where I thought I was high enough HP to survive, I received a nasty surprise that I didn't realize would kill me until it did) is going to be a bit more successful than a game where they can kill me even if I got to full-build easily.

And obviously, in terms of games to run the build in...having two tanky frontlines who have excellent tools at protecting their backline from being accessed, preventing the enemy champions from getting on top of me (with a third who, at least with their itemization, was also a tanky frontliner that had excellent tools at protecting me), is pretty much the dream. Gnar was building tank and he can toss people around; Sejuani has multiple ccs/slows in her kit; Leona has some cc in her kit and a gap-closer (admittedly, one-way--towards her enemy. But if the enemy bypasses her and she has the ability up, she can use it to again place herself between them and me).

I played it not as well as my other two wins, which is reflected in my final gold score and to some extent champion damage and similar stats. In spite of this being probably the best comp of my three victories for the build, it was my worst performance with the build of my victories.

But that wasn't the build's fault, that was me being tired, tilted, and making multiple misplays. I would've been those things with any build. In fact I would again argue: using any other build other than the build I used, would've resulted in me being the LVP, least valuable teammate, of the game, because any other build for this game would've had me still be tired, tilted, and making multiple misplays, but with a build not suited for perfectly working with my team's comp, to perfectly counter the enemy team's comp.

Overall, my faith in the build isn't being shaken by anything.
Briefly, in the game where I was being flamed for it.
I did consider it.
Of, "is it actually not that good in spite of my insistence otherwise?".
I did.
But after that consideration.
And upon reflection of looking at how that game went, the scoreline, how that game felt to me as a player, with how at the end I did feel like I was doing the damage I was supposed to be doing, how most of my problems were due to mistakes I made as a player with my team certainly not helping, and looking at the postgame to have an intuitive feeling for what my instincts had told me about my team. (My instincts told me that my "support" didn't have a support item; my instincts told me that my support and jungler weren't really playing well; my instincts told me that the enemy toplaner had hard-stomped due to how strong he was compared to the others on the enemy team.)

I just have the feeling that it really wasn't the build's fault we lost that game, no matter what my flaming teammates might believe. And feel like I am rather justified in that belief.

I feel like the build is working for me.
Heck, even if it's not a build which works for other players.
I think it is a build which works for me. And if it works for me.
It feels good to run.
My successes feel like a large part due to the build.
My failures don't feel like they're due to the build.

Then I feel like it is the right build for me.

But I digress.
I've been writing this blog for at least an hour; I suspect it is closer to two. It's 3:48 am right now, the game I finished I believe finished at 2 am? I don't think that I went straight from it to here, but I certainly didn't do much after it before coming here to the blog.

I have work tomorrow.
I get up at 8 am for a shift starting at 10.
And, oh yeah.
I still have a bunch of stuff I need to do.
I got some stuff caught up on.

I got most of my stuff, not.
Like, I still need to get caught up on my emails and to send one to my boss about trainings. They said that the ones available were full, and that they were "looking into" options. I need to give them a reminder of, "Hey, I uh...really need this?" Because trainings are a Big Deal to keep up to date on.
And I still have a ton of daily chores to do that I haven't done yet.

I half-considered writing a blog today saying "god I am pathetic" by listing all of the things I need to do, which I promised I would do (I promised to do judging today, after having previously promising to do it on Monday and failing to deliver on that promise), because...well, when you think about it.

I really kinda am pathetic.
I watched videos instead of attending to those matters.
I played games instead of attending to those matters.
I wrote this long-winded blog post that amounts to little more than a ramble ranting about my delusions of having a good build and complaining about teammates calling me trash when I believe that they themselves more than qualify for that term themselves, something which even if it is true leads to a dangerous road of me not acknowledging my own faults. (I try to take responsibility for what was in fact my fault, but if I think that it isn't my fault and is my team's fault, even if that is true, it can lead to me thinking it isn't my fault and was my team's fault...when it isn't true. And I want to avoid that.)

I basically started today thinking, "today will be a day where I get everything I need to, done...or close to, knocking out almost everything on my immediate to-do list!".

I ended up realizing that while I did do some things and while nothing I did ended up in a complete and total waste...
...Due to tilt, I ended up doing just about none of what I set out to do. Some, I did! Most I did not.

So yes.
I do suck and am a piece of utter garbage for failing like this.
No wonder I prefer to focus on writing the gaming entries like on League.
Because at least on those I feel like I am writing about things I'm not​ a failure on.

What do I talk about? I more or less talked about my current ongoing things yesterday. League, how I need to get my second second-place in TFT, Minecraft, how the troll build I went for actually ended up working so well for me that I ended up playing the best game I've ever played...not much has happened since then. (At least, not stuff I care to blog about.)

I suppose I could mention my disdain at Kongregate selecting one particular game, repeatedly, for an "easy" badge of the day that I have never earned.

That badge being for the game indestructible tank.

I've earned the bloody medium badge.
And don't have the easy badge.
Because the bloody easy badge is nigh-impossible, highly luck based, and it is incredibly frustrating to, repeatedly, time and time again, play the game, do it for a long long time...only to end up, not actually earning it in all of my tries.

This is not the only game to have that problem.
I can think of similar games that give me issues, like Sydney Shark.

Games where Kongregate, every single year, makes them badges of the day...
...But which I can never earn them because their rating is a lie, their rating should be hard or even impossible and yet for whatever godforsaken reason they are listed as easy or medium.

I have most badges for most games.
I only have one impossible badge--there's multiple which I could realistically achieve if I put in the time and effort for them (I could speedrun MARDEK for the two there but I haven't gotten them because I want to achieve my personal definition of 100% completion on MARDEK; I could grind Hipolyta to eventually get one there; I might might might be able to get the Pandemic2 one; etc.), but it's safe to say that their ratings as very difficult to obtain are earned.

I have a ton of hard badges, and plenty more which I could easily obtain if not for a combination of laziness, time restrictions, and apathy where I'll play, work towards it, and eventually lose interest even if I was 95% of the way towards earning it.

I have medium badges for just about every single game that I have an interest in playing, and similarly so for easy badges. If the game is something I want to play, chances are, I have already played it and earned the badges for it, or if I haven't earned the badges, it's because I played it before it had badges and didn't replay it once the badges were added.

So if a game has a badge which I haven't earned.

There's two possibilities.
The first, it is a game that slipped through the cracks--I didn't play it because either I didn't know about it or I thought I played it but somehow didn't or I wanted to get around to playing it and put it on my playlist but didn't actually play. The like.

The second, there is a darn good reason it is a badge I haven't earned--idle games, p2w games, games that are utterly unappealing to me, and games that are just...like. What's the name of that sidescrolling running game which there's like five of in total? Don't have most of the achievements there because that's another example of a game where there's a lot of luck involved, where you do long runs or sometimes not so long runs due to failing early, often, repeatedly, and you just have to grind and grind and grind and HOPE that this run you just so happen to do the exact combo necessary to get through.

There are games which fit that description which I don't mind--usually, games where. Yaknow. You have upgrades? Where what you do between runs, affects the chances of you earning the achievement ON a run. Those games are fine, I play those games, enjoy them, and can come back to them time and time again.

But when every single run gives you the same start.
Except the course is randomized so you can't even memorize it.
And they require exact timing.

That's not fun.
That's not easy.
That's not medium.
That's luck, that's hard, that's not really skill, that's just tedious gameplay and the indestructible tank game which is the Monday badge of the day is such an example of a game of that type that I loathe and utterly hate whenever Kongregate makes it a badge of the day because I can't earn the badge of the day for that day because it. is. not. something. I. can. do. If I could I've have done it already because I am a Kongregate addict who plays most of the games on there.

I'll start with a small TFT update; I have one of my two second-place wins but still need the other. Been running whatever comp I felt like running, most of them being ones which an opponent stole from me for god only knows what reason given that most of them weren't optimal, and it worked out fairly well. Still need to put in some more tho.

On the main riot client game of League, realtalk: I actually really really like the troll build? It actually doesn't feel troll when I'm running it. Specifically, the Arcane Comet + Manaflow Band + Transcendence + Gathering Storm with secondary of Presence of Mind + Legend:Bloodline, building a tear into Manamune, with the ideal final items of Ionian Boots (but with the option to build Ninja Tabi if against a full-AD enemy team, Merc Treads if against heavy-CC and/or heavy-magic enemy team, or I suppose technically Boots of Swiftness if the enemy team has a ton of slowing effects that are negatively impacting engagement/disengagement opportunities), Abyssal Mask, Iceborn Gauntlet, Frozen Heart, and Essence Reaver.

For extra spice you can if you get into the late lategame and have the mindset of "boots don't deal damage, let's get an item which does" replace the boots with Righteous Glory for extra mana, armor, etc. to add tankiness, retain the 10% cdr of Ionian Boots, and give extra mana. But obviously that's kinda memeing.

The build works off of two angles. The first, a transformed Manamune/Muramana deals extra damage based off of both your maximum mana, and your current mana (two passives, one for current, one for maximum). The more mana you have, the more damage you deal. Abyssal Mask and Essence Reaver both replenish lost mana, and Presence of Mind also gives mana upon takedowns, too!

The second, cdr = damage due to transcendence. Transcendence + starting rune of CDR = 20% natural CDR. Essence Reaver =40%.

Then you throw in the extra CDR. Boots = 10% above maximum. Abyssal Mask = 10% above maximum. Frozen Heart = 20% above maximum. Iceborn Gauntlet = 20% above maximum. Combine them all into the full build, and that's 10 + 10 + 20 + 20% = 60% excess CDR.

Transcendence gives 1.2 attack damage per point of excess cdr--so 60 * 1.2 = 72 extra damage.

​Frozen Heart and Iceborn Gauntlet in tandem makes you absurdly tanky. Between those two items, you get 165 armor. 

Abyssal Mask gives you magic resistance for a start, but also in tandem with legend bloodline gives you a bunch of health. The item itself grants extra health, but more than that, it gives up to 25 HP per spell cast. Given volley spam pretty much every single second with 40% cdr and five ranks in volley (I think the actual time is like 1.2 seconds with 40% cdr and five ranks?), with volley costing 70, that's at least 14 health healed every time. (I'd have to double-check how a transformed Muramana interacts with it.)

It's not much healing. Rather than an infinite percentage, capped at a flat rate. Lifesteal items and runes, and hp regeneration items, would give more healing overall. But it gives just enough to keep me alive. The build gives a bunch of magic damage, a fair amount of physical damage, a little bit of healing, and an infinite supply of mana.

It has fairly good scaling, too; the later into the game it gets, the stronger the build becomes.

The build has a very very very heavy reliance on poke damage and really really really sucks at all-inning...but honestly? I really really suck at all-inning and rely very very heavily on poke damage so a build which plays into that style is playing into my strengths.

On a vaguely related note, in my games, I've also shifted my mindset a lot more towards a "play it safe" mentality. Specifically, "It is better to go 0/0/0 and not make plays, than to make plays that even for a good player would be 50/50 but for a player as terrible as I am are more like 20/80".

The plays that if they would work out would get me to 5/0, but have an 80% chance of making me go 0/5.

Playing to not die, to farm it out, to not get overaggressive.

I lose a ton of map pressure from this approach. I don't deal much damage to turrets. I often lose drakes. Heck, if I have to back when there's a wave dangerously close to crashing under my turret, I'll lose my turret, too. (This happens when I don't die, but get low enough in HP where I might as well have died, and need to back to stop myself from dieing, in spite of the lousy wave position, because if I stayed to try and reset/push the wave...one attack from the enemies connecting and I die.)

This is, obviously, not ideal.

But in spite of the lack of turret/drake pressure...I actually feel like I'm playing better?

Like.

I still apply a ton of pressure in terms of poking enemy champions, albeit trying to prioritize csing over damaging them (though in an ideal world, I can do both!). But I feel like preventing my own death is leading to the games stalling out longer, in my team's favor. A case of losing lane by playing safe, in order to have a chance at winning the game.

The enemy adc still gets fairly fed, from matching/exceeding my cs, getting more tower plates, and often, from roaming and getting kills which I don't match. (I've had a fair amount of times where the enemy botlane rotates mid to 3v1 or even 4v1 my midlaner. I do ping it out, of course, but if my midlaner ignores the pings or thinks that they can win a 1v4...free kill to the enemy team.)

But frequently, in the games where I've lost.

It hasn't been because of the enemy adc/support. Usually it's actually been because my midlaner/jungler both lose, and then the enemy team dives botlane and I can't win a 2v4. (Except, by playing it safe...sometimes, I do! Well, relatively speaking. If in a 2v4 the enemy team doesn't get two kills for free...that's a win. So if they lose one, or two, or if they don't kill both me and my support...well, given the numbers severe disadvantage, that's still coming out ahead overall.)

Like.

I am a dumb stupid idiot who is utterly incompetent at the game.
When my team loses because of my actions, I will own up to it, admit fault. I know when I've made a mistake and will own up to it. I know when I've screwed up. I have a fairly good intuitive sense for how things are going in my lane in terms of me relative to my opponent. I know when I've made the enemy botlane too fed to win, more or less; I have a good sense for those sorts of things.

And given that.
I will fully own up to my shortcomings.
I know that, especially given the build I am running, that I am not applying the pressure that I as the adc for the team should be applying, that I am giving up on the in-current-meta critical earlygame in favor of a lategame which may never exist at all (though again, this is mostly from lack of forward pressure, in that I apply plenty of poke damage and harass the enemy champions, but because I avoid pushing the minion wave forward due to not wanting to overextend and be caught out of position, the earlygame push just isn't there), I am not doing things optimally.

But I actually feel like I am still playing better, playing smarter, playing with a greater awareness, than I would be if I tried to be more aggressive and take the 20/80 plays that inevitably get me killed.

My team still places a fair amount of blame on me.
And not unjustifiably so.
When I botch just about every gank attempted, that is on me, so calling me an idiot when I botch the gank is something I own up to and say: "Yeah I messed that up".

But I mean.
If you're the jungler, and you keep ganking for the person who admits they botched it and says that they probably will continue to botch it.
Even after the person asks you why you don't try ganking for the other lanes which are actually doing well and won't botch it.
When I as your adc ask you, "Hey, I will botch the ganks you make bot, so why don't you gank top?", when top was winning and bot due to me can't help in a gank.

...And then you as the jungler continue to gank bot anyway in spite of that.
In spite of me warning you that I can't do a gank right, and you knowing that I am an idiot, calling me as such. You deliberately choose to gank for someone you know to be an idiot.

I mean.

...I really don't think the blame for that lies on me?
When there was a toplane winning which you could've snowballed off of, but ignoring the toplane altogether and leaving them on an island whereas the enemy jungler gave pressure toplane to reverse the lead.
That's...really not good jungling?

A general rule of jungling is to not gank for a losing lane most of the time.
And with the nerfs to most drakes and dragon souls, and with the double summon of rift herald.

It's quite viable to build a lead toplane. 
And adamantly refusing to visit top, giving the enemy team not one but two rift heralds (which results in basically two towers minimum being killed).
And not building a lead through the lane which is winning.
And ganking for someone who you said is an idiot and who flat-out agreed to that assessment, who told you not to gank for them more.
And then continuing to gank for that person anyway.

Like.

In games like that.
Is it really my fault?
Sure, yes. I'm incompetent. Yes, I botch ganks. Yes, I am an idiot. Yes, I'm playing in a way, using a build, which is not optimal, which doesn't apply good map pressure. But when I warn my team about these things. Tell them that I am playing safe. Tell them that I am going to hug my turret. When I have a visibly low mana bar due to not having my tear yet, when I am low on HP, when I am being blocked by a solid wall of minions that creepblock me preventing me from getting close enough to engage. When I own up to my mistakes and indicate that those mistakes will continue to be made.

And then the jungler and/or midlaner for my team continues to try and focus on botlane and gank/roam it repeatedly in spite of my provably, demonstrably, poor track record of actually capitalizing on that.

I really don't think that you can really say that's my fault?

I can take the blame for my own actions. I can take the blame for not being better. I can take the blame for things I mess up and decisions which result in us not having map pressure which I should be applying. But when I tell my team about these things and my team still tries to play around me anyway in spite of me telling them not to? That's...really not on me, and I don't think it's really fair to say anything otherwise.

Like, if mid/jungle have a negative k/da where they have double the deaths that they have in kills/assists and I have a neutral or positive k/da because of playing safe...I mean. Only so much of that blame can be placed on me for not taking a fight I know I'll lose, when my team decides that they want to take a fight that they should know they'll lose but for whatever reason think that they can win.

When the enemy team is at full HP/mana, and/or have a level advantage, and/or have the item advantage, and/or have the positioning advantage...I'm not going to donate another kill to them because I can take one look at that situation and know that we'll lose that fight.

I will go into a fight that I know I'll lose and die in, if I feel like our team gains something significant enough that it compensates for that death. Get a drake, probably worth it. Get a tower, or prevent a tower from falling, might be worth it. Prevent the enemy team from getting a shutdown on someone on my team who is doing well enough to get a bounty, and/or get someone on my team to cash in on a big enemy team bounty by killing them for the shutdown gold, then my death's probably worth it overall.

But if I see that we're going to lose and get nothing from the lost fight, I'm not going to fight it even if the entire rest of my team thinks that for whatever godforsaken reason the fight is somehow winnable even though it is painfully obviously very much not winnable. Being that cowardly doesn't seem like a mistake; it seems like it's recognizing the situation and making the smart call to give the enemy team the least amount from their advantage as is possible.

The enemy team will always get an advantage when playing against me. I suck. I am trash. And even if I wasn't trash by running off-meta builds like I do I am innately, inherently, playing sub-optimally because if the off-meta builds weren't flawed, then they would actually be meta builds. (Basically, they're off-meta for good reason! I suck enough to not be able to properly break down with proper reasoning why they're not optimal, but I'm not disillusioned enough to believe they are.)

The build I am running is really really fun, is quite suited to my style, has a decent theory behind it, and when it gets the items for the build, actually fares fairly well. But I know that it's not optimal and I know that I am a trash player. So given that. I want to give the enemy team the smallest possible advantage given that they will always get one when playing against someone as bad as me with a build as bad as mine.

And when I more or less tell my team that this is what I am doing.
And the team decides to make a different call.
And that different call is obviously something which will get the enemy team ahead even more than they already are.

I don't think you can place all that blame on me.
Some, yes. Due to me being incompetent and innately, inherently, always giving the enemy team an advantage.
In games where I am ahead early I fall behind late; in games where I am behind early I might go even late but I never go ahead late and frequently am still behind late. I never do well. Just adequately. So there is always some blame on me and I will always own up to it.

But I mean...I am very very very rarely getting caught out; I am very very frequently pinging things, letting my team know about positions of the enemy champions, ults usage, summs usage, when I am low on mana/hp, when I have a lot of gold and am looking to back, and when I can spare the time to type, telling them with things other than pings. I respond to the pings of my teammates, too; whenever I think that I can help, I do.

I don't ping these things perfectly. I can make misjudgments. I can think a fight is winnable, a drake can be taken, a tower/plate can be taken, etc., when it turns out that it wasn't, or when it turns out that the only way it was doable is if I didn't play incompetently and thanks to my incompetence it turns out to not be doable.

And I am sure that vice-versa is true, too. That there are situations I chicken out of, where I refuse to try on them due to my cowardice, which were easily winnable if I had actually tried. Where my team is stronger than I thought, and where we could with my help even with me incompetent, get what we're after.

So that lessens the rant above, in that there will be situations which were my fault which I didn't think were my fault because my team was stronger than I thought.

But no matter how many times I make those misjudgments.

I can't take literally all the blame for it. I still won't intentionally flame my teammates. (I dunno, is saying, "Question for you: why are you ganking for an idiot who will botch it? Why not gank for mid/top?", flaming? It's not intended to be inflammatory; it was a genuine question because I couldn't really figure out why the hell the jungler who knew I was botching their botlane ganks, kept on trying to gank botlane, ignoring top altogether. That felt like a misplay on their part to me but I know I am trash at the game so if they had a good justification for it, then that would be something that I could take into consideration. But when the only response to that question is to be told, 'shut up'...I don't get how that's meant to improve our odds at winning? So I do have to wonder if the question was taken as flaming because I mean...why would they respond to it with that toxicity otherwise?)

So even when I think that they are partially to blame. I'm not going to say as much. I'll say things like "We can't win that fight" (which is true), I'll apologize for mistakes I made, acknowledge them, admit to shortcomings, etc. But I'm not going to singlehandedly claim responsibility for 100% of the blame when my team is very obviously making mistakes that were misplays? 

And I think that's not an unfair stance to take. To admit to things I did wrong, to not flame my teammates, to advise them of things, to explain my mindset, to let them know what I am, and was, doing, and to try and direct them in the area where they can best compensate for my incompetence.

To take blame for what I did which was a mistake, and to admit to the consequences of what I chose in the game, but to not take the blame for what my teammates do.

Plus, I feel like I have a fairly good sense for what situations/games are winnable and what situations/games are not. If we have a win condition, I feel like I can usually identify it fairly well. There's been plenty of games where I've had the mindset of more or less, "Okay so we suck at this game...but so, too, do these members of the enemy team. If we can kill all their incompetent members without losing any of our own, and/or if we can down the competent member(s) so that their competent members can't 1v9, then we have a chance at winning".

And sure enough, a lot of my clutch Ashe ults have been to deliver the crippling blows necessary to achieve exactly those ends--either take out multiple less-competent members of the enemy team, or take out a single competent member of the enemy team, to give us a window to take an objective or at the very least stop the enemy team from taking an objective.

If I think that the game can be won...then if enough of my team shares that belief, often, it can be, until that thought disappears. (Often, games will have a chance to be won...but if one thing goes catastrophically wrong, that wincon disappears and the game becomes unwinnable. So, there's the mindset of, the game is winnable...up until the point where it isn't.)


But enough ranting about League. (I have said a lot on the subject; to sum it up: I am incompetent, use a suboptimal build, have a suboptimal playstyle, and I own up to that all, but I think that I am improving, can't be solely responsible for the losses and can't take all the blame, and even if what I am doing isn't optimal...it is hella fun.)

I also wanted to talk about Minecraft some more.

In the game, I've still got a ton of projects to do.
I need to build a second netherportal given that my first...doesn't work as intended. (It takes me into the netherrealm but when I leave...it takes me out at a different location than it put me in.)

I want to build the church/cathedral that I have planned.

I need to finish the documentation of my mine along with ideally using proper railings for as much of it as is possible. (Given the setup for my mine...I'm somewhat doubtful that I'd be able to get a track that can switch to be...what, eight different directions? A four-way track would need to have a way to switch between straight north/south |, straight east/west -, north-east, north-west ˥, south-east L, and south-west. Am I missing any? I feel like I am, though if I did get them all I guess that's only six. But six is still four more than I have ever gotten to work.)

And probably more.

But I wanted to talk more about the railings.

Railings are...somewhat tricky.

For railings on a slope, for the life of me, I can't figure out what I did wrong which causes the minecart to not stop at the end of the track and to catapult itself to be literally inside the block which is meant to be the terminal point of the rail. In theory, the cart could go up...if not for the fact that it keeps catapulting inside of the end block at the bottom. (I have tested it and managed to get a cart to go up--but once the cart comes back down...stuck inside the stone brick slab that was meant to stop the cart just before.)

When it comes to the railings inside of my mine, I actually have them working the way I want them to! A minecart is put at the end, you hop in, and then you move forward, catapulting to the endpoint of that railing. The minecart stays there, usually, and you can hop out just fine, usually. It sometimes doesn't work as intended, but sometimes it works the way I want it to.

But when I made a rail on the surface, going from near my house to the nearby village, it...
...Had a rather...interesting result.
Minecarts placed on the track will move from one end to the other end...and then, immediately. Start moving towards the other end. And when back to the end they started on...begin traveling to the other end...and keep going...and keep going...and keep going...

...And never stop.

There's like, 3, 4, minecarts on the railing.

And they are.
Continuously.
Moving.
From one end to the other end and back and forth and back and forth.

I accidentally invented an automatic public transportation method.

Where I can wait.
And wait.
For the cart.
Then hop in.
Get to my destination, hop out quickly.
Then wait.
And wait.
And hop back in.
And return to my origin point.

The travel is fairly fast!
It's just that it's a little inconvenient.

I find it fairly neat and kinda funny; it feels somehow appropriate and rather suiting that I somehow managed to completely and totally accidentally invent an automatic transportation.
So if there's a fix for it...even if the fix would make it function as intended and make things more convenient...I'm not actually sure that I would want to?

Soyeah.

That's what's been going on.

Mostly I've been focusing on refurbishing my mine to make it aesthetically pleasing, making the travel time between locations less, getting the appropriate farming network so that I have a near-infinite amount of the resources I need (especially for trading--I want to stock up on Emeralds and need Wheat, Potatoes, and Beatroot for it; I also need to get more leather even though I really don't like killing cows because I find the animals in Minecraft to be so cute and cow, pig, chicken, sheep, doesn't matter: if they are staring directly at me they are adorable and I feel like a monster when I need to kill them).

Eventually my goal is to more or less instantly be able to travel anywhere I want to go. Some via Netherportals, but mostly by minecart since it's one of the fastest methods of travel. (I realize another method of fastly traveling is to have an animal you ride, e.g. a horse. But minecarts are something I have access to and some knowledge of, and don't require me to drag around an animal everywhere.)

I'm also working on exploring. I've done a little surface spelunking, but my current undertaking: taking a glass bridge to island hop. Working my way to a sunken ship which I believe my friend looted when I was new to the server. But which if it isn't already looted...might be worth exploring a bit. (Yes, a glass bridge. I stole the idea from a streamer though I am putting far far less glass and far far less effort into the glass bridge compared to him.)

I'm hoping to at some point to be able to map out my area so that I, personally, can navigate between important areas in the server, without a need for a netherportal. Like, to know how to get the fastest route from the spawn area to my house, and maybe vice-versa. And other similar things.

So, I've been keeping busy there. Been playing almost every single day.

It's actually been rather successful, but there's so. much. stuff. to do that it'll take me a while to get literally all of it done. I signed up for a secret santa event and today I finally started the project. It's...a little less than a third complete, but hey, before today, it was 0% complete! And I've still got five days to finish it, so if I work on it the next few days the same amount as today, should be done before the deadline.

I believe I caught up elsewhere on that site as well, for the most part. And in minecraft I knocked basically every single item off of my immediate to-do list. Some items will require a lot more resources to complete (eventually, I have the end goal of making the main pathway in my strip mine have smooth stone slabs as the path with railings on top and after I look at a tutorial on minecart railings, with the appropriate extras--this will take a lot; eventually, I have the end goal of making the main pathway in my strip mine have entirely stone brick surroundings, which will take a lot; eventually, I have the end goal of having every major point in my strip mine network be appropriately signed and marked by railings, which will take a ton of resources and time), so I still have those to do.

There was one project which I have the resources to do, I just need to spend time and pickaxe durability on actually doing, but which I didn't actually get done; another thing which I want to do is to stock up on emeralds which requires getting resources that the farmer in the nearby village will buy, which takes a ton of resources to get even close to a reasonable number of emeralds. (I think, for instance, it's something like 10 wheat for 1 emerald? And while I have a rather extensive wheat farm network, it aint extensive enough; I get like 2-3 stacks of 64 when ideally I'd get 9-10.)

Also, when I made my latest wheat farm I neglected to actually put the water into the central port so I need to stop being lazy and actually do that, but that's a small thing.

In TFT I completed a quest--I didn't really feel like playing TFT today (shocker! The girl who plays TFT nearly every day, actually had a day she didn't really want to? I know, right?), so the one game to complete the quest was all I did. (Surprisingly, it was a game where someone midgame stole my comp and I finished seventh as a direct consequence of them stealing my units. Incredibly tilting also was getting two Braums with giant's belts but for the whole game, not getting a single third Braum to make a T2 Braum with Warmogs. Incredibly tilting game where everything which could've gone wrong, did...and yet I didn't feel like playing another game? That never happens, I always feel like continuing until I get a game I'm satisfied with, but today I just...didn't want to play so completing the quest was satisfaction enough.)

​In League, I haven't played a match today yet so I still need my win of the day. And the ongoing event has three unfinished quests (which TFT games also count towards), which getting a win of the day helps with. There was also a new patch which went live, which was disappointing for TFT (remember when I said I was expecting the new lunar trait to either be nerfed or cause both electric and assassins to be nerfed? Yeah, well...Riot went with the latter rather than the former, and to add insult to injury, the lunar trait isn't live yet and won't be live this year from my understanding), and which vastly nerfed dragons and dragon souls in league.

Which, honestly, I am rather fine with. The only time I hold no accountability for drakes is when I'm a toplaner (where I'm instead accountable for rift), basically. (I mean that's not exactly true, toplaners can and do have an impact on drakes especially post-laning phase, but IN GENERAL, toplaners are mostly responsible for the top half of the map, not the bottom half. My friend if they are still into league at all could probably rant at me for my portrayal here and I'll just say, YES I KNOW, let me just talk it out a bit.)

WHAT I MEAN BY THIS, is.
I am a trash-tier player.
We almost never get drakes in games I play in, because I am meant to play a key part in securing them. Midlaner, botlaner, support, my job as any of them is to help out there, and that is something which I consistently fail to be anywhere remotely competent at helping with. If we go for a drake and come out behind, I am safely the one who bears the most blame. Yeah, maybe my teammates make mistakes as well, but their mistakes are compounded by my own and my own are usually worse than theirs.

So drakes being nerfed?

Helps me a lot because my team rarely if ever gets them due to my own incompetency, meaning the enemy team gets less from having secured them so easily.

So the patch helps me in league by virtue of me being the one who was getting more hard-crushed by drakes being secured. Which helps me play and will make me want to play more and which might mean my team flames me less often. 

Most of the catchup I need to do though is still videos. I did a fair amount...was it yesterday? It was either yesterday or Monday. But I need to do more today. I have at least six to watch, though probably no more than ten. Most of those videos average ~10 minutes each so that's about an hour minimum, though because one video is an average of 45 minutes (give or take 30, being as low as 15 and as high as an hour 15), that bumps my estimated total up to about two hours to get caught up there.

There's also still the art blog I want to make--I could make it now I guess, but while I have plenty of time to do so, this...is actually plenty long enough a blog for today? I mean, I can and have made blogs which were ridiculously long which switched subjects midway through and people probably end up missing the content as a consequence thinking it's entirely the one thing when it transitions to the other. (Trust me, I know this because it's happened to me; when searching my own blog for specific things, I had trouble finding them because I started reading an entry thinking it was the one thing, not realizing it transitioned into the actual thing I was looking for later.)

Heck, this blog itself while it is fairly coherent and mostly on the same sort of subject line (about my efforts to catch up on stuff with small quick updates) has already been like that a little, having mentions of things which would themselves normally be individual blog entries. So I don't really want to blog about it now, even though I realize there's the very real chance that I never end up blogging about it because when that happens I often never do.

In the eventual future I'll also need a real-life thing of signing up for a training, but that's more of a thing which can be done last-minute and the closer to the due date the better actually, within reason. (Basically there's a training I need to do for my job but I want to take it as close to the expiration of the original as is possible.)

So basically.

I'm kinda sorta actually staying on top of things?

Not as much as I'd prefer.
Not as much as is ideal.
And I'm really not doing much in my life at all (among other things I'm not doing, not really spending time with my friend and hanging out to do things like watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, One Piece episodes, have me play the third Danganronpa, and such, though that is at least partially due to how busy they are right now and also how they have others to spend time with than just me so they have not only their own real life to try and stay on top of but also others in their life they try to stay in contact with other than just me which I recognize eats up their time).

So it's obviously not the maximum optimal situation.
But.
​It's pretty darn close?

So let's blog about the story idea I had yesterday!
I envisioned it as a manga-styled (probably not literally right-to-left, but art-style, plot, the everything, stereotypical shonen manga) story, and named it 'SirPlus' (because while I imagine that pun is known, it's not something I think would be an actual story's name, whereas Surplus, the title that I'd otherwise want, would almost certainly be taken), after the titular character's eventual codename.

So to describe this story, I need to give some background info. The main inspiration is YuYuHakusho, with a significant dash of InuYasha but with sides of various other series which feature things like Ki or an equivalently-named body energy source.

The idea spawned from wanting to run a series featuring five energy types--and this being a stereotypical shonen series, yes, the protagonist can, eventually, tap into all five of the energy sources (and his codename derives from his ability to do so, thanks to a commonly-used reference chart for the nature of the five energy types).

The five energy types are as follows:
Holy Energy, considered the opposite of Demon Energy, has a few requirements. The user must be pure of heart (but mind you, 'pure of heart' has a very very loose definition; a chivalrous pervert can still be considered pure; someone who is pure evil is still pure; a well-intentioned extremist with pure intentions counts, and so on and so forth).

You must learn how to use Holy Energy while you are currently alive. (Mind you, you can use it if you've learned it even if you are dead; if you were a spirit who was through any means given a 'living' body, you can then learn it while using this body even if said form is only temporary.)

You cannot be a pureblooded demon; no demon can ever learn holy magic. Heck, while means of becoming a demon (though rare) may exist, if someone knows how to use Holy Energy, they cannot become a pureblooded demon. To become one, they'd have to give up their Holy Energy capacity altogether.

And finally, you must have training in how to use Energy--usually, this is easiest done if the energy you are training in is Spirit energy, but Body energy is just as commonly used (mostly because Body energy can be learned by literally anyone with training whereas Spirit energy has some requirements of its own).

With the exception of Kekkaishi, Shrine Maidens, and Holy Monks (each of which is a special exception because they use a specific variant of holy energy), this energy type is not inherited genetically. You can be born the child of a Holy Energy user and be unable to use it; you can be born the child of a family who nowhere in their family has anyone ever used Holy Energy and yet have the capacity to tap into it; you can be surrounded by Holy Energy users and never learn it yourself; you can have never ever ever encountered a Holy Energy user in your entire life and yet still pick up how to use it.

Literally any non-demon can use it, so long as they meet the specified criteria; pure of heart, currently alive, not a pureblooded demon, and trained in how to use Energy (so basically, Holy Energy is almost never the first of the five energy types learned unless you're a Kekkaishi, Shrine Maiden, or Holy Monk).

However, in spite of this capacity of anyone being able to learn it, it is the least-learned type of energy out there of the standard four. Its primary users are the Kekkaishi, Shrine Maidens, and Holy Monks, who learn it as part of their family legacies. (You don't need to be born into one of those three to take it up, but it is certainly much easier if you are born into a family of one of those three. You also aren't required to use that specific form of Holy Energy. Someone who is the child of a Kekkaishi can learn customized Holy Energy magic which doesn't involve Kekkaishi barriers at all.)

Kekkaishi, Barrier Warriors (who have an approximately equal number of active female and active male members), are mostly defensive. Their barriers can purify evil within them (which also gives them minor healing abilities, a frequent attribute of Holy Energy), but otherwise it takes creativity to use them offensively. Creating small spear-like barriers; crushing someone between two barriers; creating a barrier and removing the oxygen from within to asphyxiate those within; creating a barrier and exploding something within to create a contained localized explosion, etc.

Shrine Maidens (who are mostly, but not exclusively, female...though they are still called Shrine Maidens even when male and wear the Shrine Maiden clothing regardless of gender) are mostly offensive. They have limited healing abilities and are very skilled at detecting evil, finding weak points in enemy's defenses, and offensive usage of magic, mostly through either enchanted physical arrows (these are more powerful) or outright pure energy arrows (these are less powerful but have unlimited ammo and don't require lugging around a physical bow/quiver).

Our protagonist's mother is a semi-retired shrine maiden. She no longer travels across the country (something active shrine maidens are expected to do), but she still helps out at her shrine, around town, and trains the next generation of shrine maidens. Our protagonist refused to take up the family tradition, so isn't trained in shrine maiden holy magic, but he is trained by her in how to fight, skills he'd later transition into his own style. (He ends up using customized Holy Energy eventually, although it is not the first Energy type he learns even though he's obviously known about it his whole life.)

Holy Monks (who are mostly, but not exclusively, male) use a balance of offensive and defensive applications of their holy magic. They use charms, they use enchanted staves, they use holy fists/elbows/knees/feet, can launch some energy attacks, ward against attacks especially from evil, purify evil from an area, etc. 

All three have plentiful membership and all three have similar tendencies. Some stay local, to help out around the town, whereas others roam around the country (even world), helping out others, and it is expected for them to protect, to heal, to ward against evil and so on and so forth.

All three also happen to have been taught and learned that while a fair share of their enemies would be demons, demons are not inherently evil nor are all evils in the world originating from demons and are quite aware of what their fellow human beings are capable of, both the good and the bad.

But speaking of demons...

Demon Energy, on the opposite side of the spectrum from Holy Energy, is innate to anyone with demon blood in their veins. It is also exclusive to them. There's not much more to say than that. Only demons can use it, and every demon inherently uses it. Obviously, some demons use it more than others, but every demon has the capacity to use it to at least some degree.

Spirit Energy has similarly complex requirements to Holy energy. The user must have died--but mind you. This death doesn't require you to currently be dead. Clinical death counts. And, yes. That loophole you probably just thought of? It is exploited. If you are dead for less than a minute, it still counts as a death even if you are immediately revived.

Because this aspect of spirit energy is known and well-documented, it is commonly exploited in fact. Obviously, unlocking it via this method is considered dangerous (there's always the risk the revival fails), but it is still an oft-used albeit slightly dangerous method of unlocking this energy type for use.

In extremely rare cases, near-death experiences (especially accompanied by some combination of: latent untapped body energy potential, extremely strong presence of Spirit Energy in the area over a sufficiently long period of time, a brief comatose state accompanying the near-death experiences) can unlock it.

Spirit Energy also takes training to unlock and master. One need not unlock another type of energy first to use it, but it's certainly easier to learn spirit energy if you know how to use a different type of energy first. It is also much much easier to learn if you are a spirit, especially in a currently-not-in-a-living-body state.

Mind you--spirits who have obtained a living body don't magically lose access to their spirit energy; once unlocked, it's unlocked permanently even if you're well and truly fully alive the entire time.

Life Energy, on the opposite side of the spectrum from Spirit Energy, is never used by anyone even though almost anyone can use it. The 'almost' comes from it having a pretty simple restriction: its user must currently be alive, thus, spirits can't use it (and thus why it's considered to be on the opposite side of the spectrum).

Only a spirit sacrificing a revival method can use it without consequence; only a spirit with a currently-living vessel can use it, but doing so drains the life of the vessel. Life Energy is, simply put, sacrificing your lifespan. All beings, even demons who have lived for millenia, have a lifespan, and using life energy shortens it. It is irreversible; it is not something which you can just go use and then try to replace by using a different energy method (say, a demon trying to use a demon power to maintain their immortality).

Once gone, it is gone. It will shorten the time you have alive, permanently. It is finite in its supply. It is a measure of last resort, to be used only when you are ready to give up your life in a last-ditch effort to well and truly fight to the bitter end in defense of your objective. It cannot be forcefully used. It cannot be coerced out of someone. If you were, say, controlling the body of someone you wouldn't be able to kill them by making them use life energy. It requires conscious, deliberate, fully willing, thought to use as a measure of last resort, where you have pushed yourself to your limit and need a final push to actually accomplish the job.

As a consequence, unlike other energy types, it usually cannot be drained from others. (Energy drainers are in of themselves fairly rare, but they exist. Yet none of them can drain life energy. Well, almost none of them...) There's a minor exception; an antihero character (might be a rival to the protagonist? Not sure yet about that) can drain it...but only from those who consent to the drain. He tells them that he can fight, he can save them, but that they need to, say, give up one year of their life to do so and asks them if they accept; only if they do does he have the ability to use their life energy in the amount quantified.

There'd also be one vampiresque villain biting the neck of a victim with the ability to drain it--but only if the victim has absolutely no defense, no way of fending off the attack. No training, no resistance, no awareness, and no incredibly strong latent energy of any type.

The protagonist only uses it once, but it was a very notable instance.

The final type of energy, Body Energy, also called Ki Energy, is something literally anyone can learn to use. Everyone has it; everyone can use it. There's no restrictions; there's no limitations. All it takes is to train in it, or to be innately gifted with it and exposed to a sufficiently large trauma as to forcefully unlock it. (And for obvious reasons, the former is far more common than the latter and is the preferred method.)

None of these energy types are limited in what they can do; the only limits to them are the aforementioned requirements to be able to use them in the first place. They can do literally anything the user wants them to, provided the user has both the sufficient reserves of the energy (again, none of these energy types exist in unlimited quantities for a person; everyone has a finite supply at any given time) and the sufficient training in mastering what they want to do with it. (If you want to launch a fireball, you can't just spontaneously think 'launch a fireball' and it'll happen; every technique you use is something you need to train your body how to learn how to use.)

Now, there is a bit of a 'trump triangle' to energy types. Holy will, usually, be able to overcome Demon energy. Demon energy will, usually, be able to overcome Spirit energy. Spirit energy will, usually, be able to overcome Holy energy. But these aren't hard rules so much as general guidelines of "all other factors equal, one energy type has a slight advantage over the others".

For what it's worth, Ki is mostly neutral to all three but could potentially overall be at a slight disadvantage; Life energy is mostly going to have the advantage over all three but harvesting it is not going to guarantee victory.

Now it is worth mentioning: you know how in basically every single anime show ever, each and every single person has different moves and techniques? How they are customized to the individual; some series may have some standardized techniques and some series may have characters who trained together using at least one of the same moves while having personalized unique individual moves to not be completely identical; same principle applies here.

Energy, regardless of type, is highly customized to the individual. Each and every individual learns their own techniques. They name their own moves, they discover the motions for their moves on their own, they learn how to channel the energy and how to shape it to do the desired effect, all on their own.

They can also be taught by another how to do it, by being trained by them. Seeing it done, going through the motions of it being done, and so on and so forth until they learn how to accomplish the technique.

Thus, while there are standards, while some abilities (e.g. Kekkaishi/Shrine Maiden/Holy Monk ones) are standardized, most powers are unique to the individual. And even said standard abilities? Can be modified/customized by an individual, quite often, to somehow mold them differently from their original form/shape.

So these energies both simultaneously are and are not "magical do anything" energy types. You can do anything that you have trained yourself to be able to do. Shoot a spear of energy is something that if you trained how to do you can do, but if you wanted to spontaneously shoot a spear of energy, good luck. Create an energy shield is something that if you trained how to do you can do, but if you desperately needed to defend against an incoming attack and shouted 'shield!' without having actually trained yourself in how to create a shield...good luck.

This training isn't just mental, nor is it just physical; it is a combination of both. You need to actually practice, you need to actually learn, you need to actually figure out how something works, in order to do it. And skills don't instantly transfer from one energy type to another (with the exception of life energy which would never be used if it didn't have this ability setting it apart from the other four; nobody's going to willingly burn off their lifespan to train in how to use it, obv). You can't practice a skill using demon energy and then try to use that same skill using spirit energy; to pull off that skill using spirit energy, you need to practice using it with spirit energy and figure out the difference.

Mind you. Once you learn how to use one energy type, it's usually not that hard to transfer this knowledge into applying a different energy type. If it took you ten years to learn Ki, it might take you only ten weeks to figure out how to use spirit energy techniques that are similar to your body energy ones. But it is not an instant "it's active, therefore I can transfer one to another".

The main advantages to having access to multiple types of energy are as follows:
-As mentioned, certain energy types can have the edge over other energy types, situationally. So knowing how to use multiple types allows you to respond in the way most likely to give you the advantage.
-Certain energy types are more easily suited for certain skills than others. While every energy type can do what the others can, certain energy types have easier times doing specific tasks (say, forming an energy blade) than others do.
-The body only stores a finite amount of every given energy type at a given time. You don't have unlimited body, demon, holy, spirit, or life energy; they are a resource that is depleted and needs to be restored with rest and recovery.
...However. It's not "your body only stores a certain finite amount of total energy"; it's "your body only stores a certain finite amount of each energy type".

So basically, having access to two energy types doubles your energy pool; three, triple. Four, quadruple. All five, you can fight until you drop dead from expending your life energy which would presumably be the last to be fully depleted.

I wanted to make a story based around that concept.
What I came up with was that the protagonist was the son of the aforementioned Shrine Maiden and, secretly, unknown to him until much much much later in the story, the demon Rakan. (His father's actively involved in his life. Has a part-time job, is involved in housework, and the like. So the reason it's not known isn't because his dad's not around; it's just that his parents never told him that he's half-demon and never told him about his demon lineage so while he knows about his mother being a semi-retired shrine maiden, he has no clue that his father's a semi-retired monster.)

Rakan is...well, the pioneer of the Demon Bullet and Demon Blade techniques (the protagonist's first techniques were ki-based versions of these techniques); for centuries, he's been known for his rampages where he slaughters and literally devours humans.

He derives no pleasure from consuming human flesh, nor does he need to in order to survive. (He can live just fine off of normal food.) However, whenever he consumes human flesh, he gains a temporary huge boost to his power...and 1/100th of this boost is permanent so if he were to consume 100 humans he would effectively permanently boost his power as much as he would temporarily from a single serving.

He does like to fight opponents who put up a fight. Mind you, 'putting up a fight' does not translate to 'can actually threaten him'; usually when he went on his rampages he'd find the people taking up arms against him and shred them to pieces slowly. Enjoying the hunt, in a sense. And if someone tried to just...not fight him, he'd find a way to incentivize them into doing so.

In his own words he fully admits that while demons are not inherently evil, he is. (Well, mostly. He's under no obligation to his wife not to commit such acts. He never promised not to, he was never asked not to, she never instructed him not to, but out of love just chose to not do so anymore. Not because it'd be preying on her kind. Just because it seemed like a romantic gesture to him. He's got no intention to start eating humans again, but he didn't change his morals or anything of the sort. In his own words, "I fell in love with her, not the human race she belongs to.")

It'd have been fully possible for him to increase his power by nonlethal methods: consuming recently deceased corpses (they need to be fairly fresh for him to get the power), or even taking nonlethal bites out of a person (which even with the best of healing abilities will leave a scar, but which is easy enough for him to do). He killed humans because he thought it fun to do.

This earned him a lot of titles.
Rakan the Devourer.
Blood Bullet Rakan.
Demon Blade Rakan.
SerpentSlayer Rakan.
Lord Rakan. (The title demons, particularly those who consider themselves his servants, call him.)
Ninth Hell Rakan. (Basically, the ninth demon to be considered so powerful as to be hell on earth.)
Rakan the Slasher.
The Striped Tiger.
Crescent Heavenkiller Rakan.

He insists "most of those titles I earned by killing some dude who had a few of his own"--
Said person those titles were earned by killing? A demon by the name of Ivan the Unkillable, AKA, The Unslayable Serpent, AKA, DragonGod Ivan, AKA The Hand of Heaven. (He was later revived and thus, is still actually alive. Still, the act of killing him was enough to be worthy of attention.)

Ivan was a demon considered powerful enough where if he were so inclined he could've been powerful enough to be a Hell--and only wasn't one because he was actually fairly saintly in that he was a genuinely altruistic demon with no ulterior motive, a down-to-earth demon who was friendly and amicable...just, immensely powerful. (And is half the reason why people know demons aren't inherently evil even though quite a lot of demons are.)

Rakan insists that the only reason he was able to pull it off was that he had just fed on an entire city's worth of people and thus was at the absolute highest possible peak of his power, and in his own words, "I thought he was just some schmuck who objected to me slaying a city; if I had known who he was, I would've run."

Rakan certainly didn't help his reputation when, after the aforementioned event, there was a conference held in the afterlife on whether to hunt him down and kill him due to him being such a large threat. Rakan killed himself (after setting up a revival mechanism so that he'd be brought back to life) in order to invite himself to the conference and offer his viewpoint explaining the matter.

This would basically be akin to party crashing in on heaven when you're Lucifer and saying, "Yo, God, sorry about the mess I caused downstairs, but it was an accident, I swear; I came here to apologize for the misunderstanding." He said that the city slaying was done as an experiment, he found it boring, he promised he would never do something on that scale again, explained he had no intention of challenging people like Ivan, and promised to do them a favor so long as they didn't put out the kill order on him.

He got what he wanted; they decided not to put out the kill order on him...by instantly on the spot classifying him as the Ninth Hell--threats so dangerous that nobody is to try and kill because they are just that dangerous. (He later paid off that favor simply enough; they asked for him to be present in a place, which convinced one of the other nine hells to negotiate rather than fight as they were originally going to until Rakan was there.)

He also said that he would mitigate the damage he'd do by continuing to do what he was already doing: hunting down demons (particularly evil ones) of notable strength and killing them, so that they wouldn't menace people. He had ulterior motives for this, of course; not done out of any sense of altruism, but simply done to seek a challenge, in that he wanted to have some good fights against opponents he knew he could beat but which he'd still have some difficulty in bringing down, where it wouldn't be easy to massacre them.

So he is, as far as demons go...rather noteworthy, rather notorious, both by spirits and by other demons because of his actions over the course of centuries of carnage and mayhem. 

The protagonist inherited his father's powers, albeit dormant. As he is half-human, his demon powers passively grow stronger with time without him needing to consume human flesh. (He can consume human flesh to gain that immediate power spike and 1/100th of said power spike permanently being added...but as he's no desire to partake in cannibalism, for obvious reasons, opts not to.)

There's a tradeoff, though. Our protagonist is a really big eater who needs to eat a ton of calories to fuel said demon powers. In fact, when activating his demon powers, he consumes his own body fat and looks unnaturally muscular as a consequence when using his demon powers. He has the power to surpass his father quite easily, it's just that in his current state he can only use his demon powers at their fullest for a limited amount of time as a consequence of currently requiring that consumption of his own body to activate them.

Mind you, that is not a normal demon trait; it is a trait specific to "newblood" demons, where their demonic powers can only be activated by a trigger mechanism of some sort. His trigger mechanism just so happens to be his father's trait of consuming flesh. Given enough time to develop, he'd be able to use his demon powers without the need to consume his own body flesh, and consuming his own body flesh would be an optional thing done to give his demon powers an immediate power boost.

I guess I should talk about the world the setting takes place in.

In this setting, demons have faded in and out of common knowledge. Sometimes, they're out in the open and everyone knows about them; other times, they're in the shadows and very few humans are "in the know". In the current modern era the story is set in, people are slowly transitioning from a long period of the former into the latter; demons aren't completely out in the open, but they're less and less secretive.

There's not an unlimited number of afterlives, but there is a very large number of afterlives for dead people to go to; they will go to the afterlife most suited for them. Some could be described as 'hell', most would be described as some form of 'heaven'. There's a transitionary realm between our world and said afterlives, where there's a collective bureaucracy of spirits who help make the transition of spirits into the afterlives easier.

The existence of spirits is not public knowledge, but it's a bit of an "open secret"; basically everyone who uses energy or is closely tied to someone who uses energy has some awareness of spirits' existence. They are, after all, heavily involved with the world.

Usage of ki is something everyone knows about, though. Everyone knows how ki works; everyone knows ki exists; everyone knows what ki does, and so on and so forth. Not everyone learns how to use it; in fact, most people don't. But it's a thing that everyone knows about.

Martial artists are a big thing, as are organizations that travel across the world. Some official, some unofficial, some international, some by country. Militaries and Police Forces usually have many members trained in the usage of at least one form of energy; Detectives with powers investigating usage of powers are a thing; etc.

The setting would, obviously. Have Loads And Loads of Characters. Some muggle, most not; some who start muggle and gain powers, most who were already using energy of one form or another at the beginning of the story. (Our protagonist starts off not having any, but very very very quickly learns ki, as the need arises.)

There's probably more details to the story than these, but this is most of where the idea came from.

It's a big​ project and you can maybe see why I wanted to make it. I really love the idea.

Mind you, I chose that wording carefully because while I'm not as bad as I was yesterday, this is more a reversion to be what I was two days ago--that being, still depressed, just...not as painfully so. I am still down and can feel that I am quite down, I just am not as horrifically down as I was yesterday.

I'm not upbeat, I'm not energetic, I'm still fairly lethargic, I'm down, and I'm just not enthused by most things, but I'm at least at the point of feeling like I can live, whereas yesterday was actually kinda DANGEROUS levels of low.

Soyeah. Not gonna lie. I could be better. I could be much, much better. I would love to be absolutely entirely better than where I am at right now. I even kinda have an inkling of a desire to be inspired, a desire to work on something, a desire to be passionate, so maybe I'm on the rebound.

...But I know I'm not recovered yet, because while there's that small portion of desire, it's not actually focused on anything. If my lack of focus were because of too many things, I'd know I'd be recovered, but my lack of focus here is because there is no thing. No single thing, and no more-than-one thing. Just nothing. 

I have the desire to be inspired, which is good, but nothing actually inspiring me, which is not as good. In actuality, I feel like I can kinda sorta express where I'm at with this, kinda sorta. I feel like what I want to do isn't so much as work on anything, so much as I want to talk about something. On here. On my blog.

I want my blog to basically, were it to actually have readership (which I know it doesn't, stats be damned, because I know there's no way that I'm getting at-lowest 30 readers a day, at-highest 110 readers a day; I'd expect maybe one tenth of those to be real, 3-11 people per day).

If people were actually reading what I was writing. For it to actually be something that was inspiring to them. That was uplifting to them. I need not write uplifting content myself. My blog entry could be entirely a long entry about why my day sucked, but what I kinda want is that if people actually read my blog, for them to actually have some thorough enjoyment, entertainment, enrichment, enlightenment, from it.

You know.

Basically.

It's the same dream I had when I first became a writer which kept me being a writer for all those years that I was a writer.
It's the same dream I have for being a webcomic artist, and for sharing Phyrra and Cyrus with the rest of the world, even after having had the writer within me be basically dead for novelwriting.

It's to have others feel the same way about what I wrote, that I feel about things that I read. You know how I go on about all these things that enriched my life? How Dan Shive was a massive inspiration to me once I read his work. How Grrr Power was a massive inspiration to me once I read the comic (okay admittedly you never got the full blog entry there but you did get a part of it).

How Worm was an incredibly uplifting, inspirational, piece of work in spite of it being incredibly dark, just because it represented how you can do so much and make a work so incredible online using just sheer willpower combined with clever planning basically, determination combined with competent storyboarding, to lay out a guideline to a plot.

And so on and so forth.

That's been going on since I was a kid. When I was young, I saw that Eragon was published by a person when they were a teenager--I knew that the Inheritance Cycle was, objectively speaking, not a too terribly well-written book series filled to the brim with flaws, but the inspiring fact about it wasn't the quality of the books (which I felt were entertaining in spite of being flawed; think basically "like most mainstream films these days" which are absolute junk in so many ways but can still be mindless entertainment that you get creative ideas from).

It was that a teenager managed to write, then successfully sell, the book he wrote. The books sold, and they sold well. That they sold so well, no matter what you think of the quality of the material, means that the author did something right. Same principle applies to the Twilight Saga. I enjoyed reading it, and the books sold well. I objectively know about all of the flaws in the series which have been pointed out to the point of being old, boring news.

Everyone knows the books are objectively junk--but they were still enthralling enough to be an enjoyable read in spite of knowing all the flaws therein, and the books still sold incredibly well. You can say whatever you'd like about the author; you can say whatever you'd like about the quality of the books. But the fact that they sold incredibly well, combined with my subjective experience of enjoying them in spite of knowing that they were flawed. Means that you have to acknowledge that objectively, she did something right.

She was able to sell something that was flawed, and make people buy it in spite of its flaws, and even enjoy it knowing all of what is flawed within. For all the flaws of the writing you can find, the fact that it had that effect, again, means that there was something being done right.

And that's the effect which has always been inspiring to me as a writer. Knowing that in spite of the flaws of the writing, it is still possible to make a product that people genuinely enjoy, and can derive entertainment from. More than that! That they can be enriched in their lives from having read a work in spite of the flaws of that work. That they can be inspired, that they can be uplifted, to the point where they dream big and can maybe do something that they otherwise wouldn't.

In other words.

My dream of dreams is basically. To be able to have it so that I do for others, what others have done for me, throughout my life. Picked me up, made me stronger, made me more enriched, made me more inspired, made me the dreamer that I am. I want to make other people dream. I want to make others be picked up by what I do.

And right now the only way I have of doing that is through the one thing that I've never consistently failed at for the longest time of anything I've worked on. Which is my blog. Yes, I occasionally for whatever reason miss an entry in spite of the aim to be a daily blog. But the simple fact of the matter is. By and large. For four and a half years.

I've kept this going.

Do you know what else I've kept going for four and a half years?

Pretty much nothing.
Nothing that's me, at least.
Sure, job; tae kwon do; dancing; counseling. Stuff like that, been doing longer than four and a half years. But it doesn't really count as being me. Those things are a part of me, but they aren't a part of my expression of me.

Every dance I try to write, I don't finish.
Every time I take up songwriting I never go anywhere with it.
Every time I try to compose music, I keep it in my head and do nothing with it.
Every time I write a story, I never end up following through with it and publishing it.
Every time I start a webcomic, I end up abandoning it, even after having taken precautions against abandoning it.
Every time I work on a project, I end up abandoning it, even after knowing about my bipolar disorder and taking steps to counteract it.

I have listened to uplifting speech after uplifting speech. People who succeed say the same cliched lines about why they succeeded, not because it's a cliche, but because the cliche is cliche because it is true to reality and they all say the same thing because the same thing held true for each of them. I forget the exact words, but something along the lines of willpower being temporary, of how the drive to work is temporary, but you need to keep doing it, keep efforting at it, even when you don't feel like it, force your way through it, keep at it, and if you really want it, you will put in the work necessary to get it done.

More or less, something along those lines at least. And I have tried to implement that advice before--tried...and failed. I have, consistently, failed. In spite of knowing about the autistic concept of inertia. I know that once I get rolling I can keep things rolling but that when they screech to a halt they stay stopped with a near-impossibility to get started again. I take measures to prevent the stop, and even if the stop happens, I tell myself that I have the strength of will to push the stopped train, inch by inch, until it's moving again.

...But I never actually do and all the planning in the world falls apart because I, frankly, just suck. I dream. I dream the dream, I never bring the dream to reality. For all of those things. For all of those ideas. They all fail. I've gone into this before, about how while I dream of succeeding, I'm actually happier in my failures, and hypothesize that's why so many people who don't make it big can still be happy and why quite a number of people who do make it big are often not-so-happy in spite of having made it big.

Who knows, maybe that is true. I honestly don't know anymore. I am a contradictory being. Old enough where I'm expected to more or less be solidifying myself, young enough where I can't actually do so and am constantly, consistently, second-guessing every single thing about everything. All my beliefs, all my thoughts on myself, how I view things, everything, I doubt it all and I constantly revise everything including my outlook on life.

But I'm going on a bit of a tangent, there. My point is...I generally am just. A failure in general. Yet this blog is pretty much the one thing which I don't think I have failed at.

I've had plenty of blog entries where I didn't succeed.

I like to pour my heart and soul out every single entry, so when I am forced to blog-dodge for whatever reason. Forced to make an empty, substanceless entry. Forced to make nothing. Or whenever I forget to make an entry. When anything like that happens. Obviously, it's not a success.

But by and large. Four and a half years. Four and a half years, I've been doing this blog. And by and large it actually has succeeded. It hasn't succeeded as often as I'd like. It certainly hasn't succeeded in all the ways I'd hope it'd succeed, in part because those hopes are by and large contradictory. I've wanted different things out of my blog at different times, so of course my blog can't be all of them.

But it's still been most of them, most of the time. Even this entry. It started out as any other would, and yet now has been built up to be something actually unique. And there's the charm, I feel, in my blog writing. There's where I derive some hope from.

I want what I write on this blog. No matter the subject. About me. About me talking about my latest passion project. About whatever caught my fancy. About something I read, something I watched. About whatever I have on my mind when I make a blog entry. I want what I write here to be something that readers can get some enjoyment from.

I want as many people as is possible to read my blog, so that as many people as is possible can find something, anything, in my blog, which made it worth the read. I want a blog which is worth the time and effort to read. After all.

It's four and a half years.
And counting.
Of content.
Filled with entries that are this length and longer.
Like, what's my longest entry? I wouldn't even know, but it'd have to be something probably ten times as long as this already-lengthy blog.

I know that even I can't read all four and a half years of my blog.
I can't even really stand to skim too much of it. I just don't have the time/focus to review it all, even though I know that I'd actually be better off if I did review what I wrote/said from time to time so that things that I said that I didn't want to be forgotten, aren't actually forgotten.

And if I.
The girl who wrote the blog in the first place.
If I.
The person who made the entries in the first place.
If I.
The person who can read 800 pages in a single night and then some.
If I.
The person who could read almost all of Worm in the span of weeks, and then finish the rest in the span of days. When that work is over a million words long by some significant amount.

If I can't do it.

Then I doubt anyone else could. And even if they could, I doubt that they would.

Sure, some people like to stay fairly current on my blog; they read it every day, or if not, they binge-read it every few days, every week, every month, you name it. Some people do that, and can do that. That's not too hard to do; keep current on something updating every day.

But starting from the beginning? Yeahhhhhhh nobody can start from the beginning, read every entry, and get caught up, while having read it all well and truly having read it all. It's impossible.

But believe it or not.

I'm actually kinda proud of that.

It's enough content that it's impossible to keep track of it all.

Instantly that means it's worth more than most other things.

I know that my few readers, such as they are, have changed over the years.
I know that they come and they go.
That I legitimately do have a small readership who stay...but who said readers are that stay, tend to change.
But right now the closest I have to inspiration to do something is...well. Just this. My blog.

At this point, I think that the closest thing I'll ever have to a lasting legacy is in fact this blog.
Not any story I'll write; I won't probably ever publish even though that's been a lifelong dream of mine.
Not any webcomic I'll start; I won't probably ever finish any of them no matter my desire.
Not any ambitious project, e.g. a video game, Phyrra and Cyrus; you actually think that I, me, Bree, could actually have the conviction necessary to see it through, by myself? Nooooooooot a chance in hell. Maybe, maybe, MAYBE with the right support network I could see them through, but that would require that support network be perfectly placed and able to push me in that direction actively and consistently and continuously and to keep me from slacking.

Realistically speaking.
This blog is it.
It's all I'll ever actually have as lasting proof.
Because after I'm gone.
You'll have random scattered notes everywhere about random scattered ideas I had. In bad handwriting, with most of the papers having long-since deteriorated due to whatever various poor conditions they were stored in having withered away the penciling/ink to the point where the already-basically-unreadable writing is turned utterly-illegible. 

The ideas die with me.
And because I will probably never actually get those ideas to reality.
They will never be made. They will always just...disappear, when I (hopefully very very very far away) eventually die.
Which, mind you, I know is morbid and is obviously something which isn't something that many people (including myself) like to dwell on, but is a hard fact of life. Much as we like to dream of being immortal and plan on living forever, everyone including myself dies eventually.

Since I don't want to really ponder on it much further, not going to say more on that than that, but what I'm focusing on is how this blog is basically...well. Assuming it isn't taken down at some point. (Which would really really suck and screw you weebly if you ever do that to me.) It's the proof I was alive. It's the proof I was a person. It's the proof I existed. It's the best insight into my personality, my being, my existence, that will remain. It's the record of who I was as a person.

It's not a perfect record, of course. But it's a lasting insight into who I am--and it is something which is there available for everyone to see. It is available to all, which is one of the things which I've always wanted. I've wanted to share myself with the world. I've wanted to share my being with others, open up and just. Tell them about myself. Tell them anything and everything about me.

Basically lay out my life's story, except for the things about my life that I want to keep private to only me or those that I choose to share those things with. (E.g. things that I tell my girlfriend and only my girlfriend are...pretty self-evidently, going to have a level of intimacy to them.)

This blog is who I am. It's not all of who I am, but it is who I am, as is recorded in time, in history. And I know nobody reads it, in spite of my dreams otherwise. But that doesn't stop the dreams from existing. Of this blog. Of my writing here. Being the thing that I get from others all the time.

Of being something that enriches the lives of those who read it. Of being something worthwhile to have read. Of being something that people actually enjoyed experiencing. Of sharing my visions with others, and those visions having inspired those others, in spite of them having been mine.

I guess that typing this out has made me feel even better than I was before, a little. Because that spark is there. Mind you. Beyond continuing to blog every day, not gonna do anything with it. I could, theoretically, have ways to spread my blog to others. When I comment on webcomics that allow you to link to a site, I deliberately avoid linking to any site including this blog, even though I could easily do so without consequence and have said link theoretically lead to potentially more exposure. Same for comments on Worm; I left a few and had that option, but chose not to take it.

I could theoretically explore post options more; there's options for search engine optimization. There are sites which I have profiles on that don't link to my blog even though both ComicFury and the site I play mafia on contain the blog link; on the ones that don't, I could add it in.

By having an increased presence on other sites, with a link to the blog, I would in theory be able to get an increased number of readers. Heck, all of those are free but if I really wanted to, there are paid options to expand what I can do using weebly's software (paid options which can go to hell as far as I'm concerned; I'm never paying so much as a cent to weebly and if they try to force me to, they can kiss my presence goodbye; I'd find somewhere else to blog).

That I can list these options but am not going to do them tells you what I mean--I could do more with my blog to increase its exposure, and with luck, increase the odds of my dream coming true, of me succeeding in having it be what I dream of dreams it being, of it being uplifting, inspiring, and so on and so forth.

But beyond making entries like this.

I won't actually do that.

So the dream will remain just that, a dream.

​But it's a nice one to have, isn't it?

It's just that with shutdown week at work, I don't work for six days (stupid bloody staff meeting scheduled during last day of shutdown week means I don't quite get the full week). No work, no need to go to bed at midnight. Also, with depression set in as well (it comes and goes but is still definitely here to some extent), I had free time.

Lots of free time.

As in.

"Binge-read about 840ish comics in a night", time--albeit spread out across two comics. One appears to be on a hiatus for whatever reason (the tvtropes page didn't mention why, but it's probably something which I could track down the info on why if I searched, but I don't need it to recognize that not updating for a year is a hiatus for some reason), but was quite the good read in the form of dream*scar.

The other still updates, and is called The Fantasy Adventures of Jack Cannon. Though I haven't read them yet, I also picked up two extra comics which I may or may not get around to binge-reading this week. I just...kinda...felt like reading, I guess? Depression tends to be the time I do a lot of that. Comics can be kinda uplifting to read (even if the content is anything but--within reason), and for some reason I just am really good at reading stuff.

Those 800 pages? It was done in less than three hours. That's about my estimate, at least. Didn't mark the exact begin time, but I know that I started well after midnight--I started on TVTropes, with a browse based around the EGS trivia page (image liiiiiiiiinks), and it was only from there after reading multiple pages (well parts of them anyway) that I found the comics, which is where my estimate comes in.

I'm guessing that the TVTropes browsing concluded at about 1:30ish? Okay so maybe it was under four hours, but I was finished before 5:30. Depending on my start time, then, guess it may or may not be that impressive. But to give you an idea of the TVTropes browsing I did, it was the pages The Atoner, Chirping Crickets, Conveniently Seated, Deadly Upgrade, Defensive What, Defrosting Ice Queen, Differently Dressed Duplicates, Distracted By My Own Sexy, Dope Slap, Education Mama, Fantastically Indifferent, Faux Yay, Filler Strips, Flat What, Gender Bender, Hates Being Touched, Humanity Ensues, and Hyperspace Mallet.

I started after midnight, made my way through all of those, then started the webcomics, and did that in less than five hours, sooooo. Reference point, kinda sorta. Point is. Pretty sure that's not a normal reading speed and that most people can do less than that in that amount of time.

One of my gifts, I guess.

Once more, by the way, my conclusion's the same as I made originally; reading vastly enriches my life, but largely gives me nothing except a method of doing something other than sleeping to deal with the depression. When you don't feel like doing anything else...it is something that at least feels like it had purpose, because, again. Enrichment. I feel genuinely enriched by the experience.

Not, mind you, particularly inspired (though there's a really good EGS sketchbook entry I'm deliberately not moving past because reading it was incredibly inspiring and I'm hoping that rereading it will get me reinspired when the depression wave has faded), but still enriched. I don't see anything productive from spending the time reading the stories/tropes. But it still felt good, and it felt like it was something that I was better for having read. 

Which, given the depression, is about as much as I can really ask for.

Oh and by the way--speaking of the time. Did I mention it's almost six am? I should probably go to bed soon. The coffee I had six hours ago's by now fully worn off. Not that that was what was stopping me from going to bed mind you. But. It contributes. I'm not particularly tired (tired enough to go rambling on in the magic productivity zone of "tired enough to wander, not tired enough to not be able to be any semblance of coherent"), but I can feel the sensation of tiredness and even if I couldn't...

...Objectively. I kinda know I should be going to bed anyway.

Soyeah.
Spent the night reading.

​Now to spend half the day sleeping.