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

This blog was designed to be daily.

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

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

I kinda suck.

That said.

At least I've been fairly productive.

I literally did a ten hour stream yesterday.

TEN hour stream!

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

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

Granted, it's not without consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, uhhhh...oops?

I am many things; smart is not among them.

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

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

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

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

​Sometimes, being responsible sucks.

Probably still won't be much of a blog but that's more due to the fact that I'm not really sure how to make the thoughts into my head become a proper blog, but hey, at least it's already better than yesterday!

Anyway, today went quite well. Work, I didn't feel incompetent but I do know that I can become more competent than I am. After I came home from work, I worked on my Civ 3 mod. I went from ~40% finished on the second era tech tree to maybe-possibly-100% done on the second era tech tree? (It's hard to tell for sure, and will probably require more tweaks, especially in positioning. Techs' appearance can change based on the civ being played thanks to what units they get.)

It seems like it's mostly flowing as I want it to (although there's a couple spots that are basically impossible to rectify so I will need to figure out how to edit the background of the tech tree to put in the arrows in the needed places).

I think that I got the units placed in ways such that while it's not necessarily mandatory to get the prerequisite unit, it is far easier and earlier to get. That having been said, I do need to tweak the tech tree's technology cost, because right now it's fairly universally the same value which may be too high or too low, I honestly don't know.

This actually puts me within striking distance of getting the tech tree entirely finished though. (Well aside from detail work like exact pixel positions, technology value, etc.)

Since I am updating the buildings and units as I am creating the tech trees due to needing them there to help visualize the optimal layout for the techs (I'll obviously need to double-check this though to make sure they're accurate), that means that when I complete the tech tree, 1/3 of the hardest parts of the mod will be complete!

Now, granted.

The hardest-or-second-hardest (hard to tell if it's the hardest or the second hardest), building the map, might spell the death of the project if my idea for how to build the map ends up not being something that I can actually do. (My basic plan for the map is to start the geography looking close to the Rome scenarios, but modifying it to accommodate for all of the cities from all of the scenarios--including making room for cities that are identical but owned by two different civs in two different scenarios, e.g. Londinium being at least a few blocks from London. There will be some limits to this, obviously; the Turks aren't going to have Istanbul next to the Greek Byzantium/Constantinople for instance. But by and large, mostly, I want to have all the civs have all their cities from scenarios, within reason.)

Even if that doesn't kill the project, the second-hardest-or-hardest very well could. The civilopedia will need a complete and total overhaul, top to bottom, of literally everything. And I do mean, everything. Every Wonder/Building/Unit will need to have entries created (not to mention, have their BLDG/PRTOs adjusted from their current defaults into actually more suited ones).

But it doesn't stop there.

Governments need to have their entries be accurate.

Resource pages need to have their values be correct.

And then every concept needs to be updated, with some outright created.

The map is a daunting, perhaps impossible, task, of making a map that actually manages to encompass the entirety of what I am hoping to create.

But the civilopedia, the thing needed to make my mod actually playable without being the mod's creator (and even then I often have to refer to my notes and am not entirely 100% positive), is definitely going to take me the most time.

This mod as a whole, I've been working on for a couple months by now, probably have sunk like ~30-60 hours on it so far.

The civilopedia work will at least double that if not triple it before I get close to finished.

Of course, once I get the civilopedia work finished, the mod is actually in playable format. It could use a lot of detail work to do. I want to, for the first time ever, put in the art for the buildings so that the building art is what it should be. (I think I know how to do this in theory, but I was really hoping that I could be lazy and just copy someone else's work, like I did for the "all resource icons" one. Alas, no such luck.)

I need to figure out how to do the Science Advisor's Tech Tree descriptions.

If I can, I need to figure out how to modify the opening screen message that you get. (I never could figure that out before.)

I believe that, as this is technically a modified Rise of Rome, my advisors and units-with-multiple-eras are all set to have their ancient era art for all four eras. I need to modify that to be my intent (ancient, medieval x 2, then final era as industrial art).

And I want to add in extra music. I want normal-vanilla-game ancient-era music in the rotation for the ancient era, for the Medieval Era to have the Medieval Era scenario music but to keep the ancient-era music (including the general Conquest theme song) in the rotation and add in the standard Medieval Era music from the normal vanilla game, and to have the final era have the extra music beyond that.

That aside from how I have a couple of easter eggs that I want to program in. One, a near-impossible unit to achieve, something theoretically buildable but which is pragmatically nearly impossible to pull off, and yet it being basically an instawin cheat code for anyone who does go through the ridiculous trouble of getting it to actually work.

The other, 2-4 barbarian encampments which have 5 (slightly nerfed in bombard range as a precaution) elite-experience versions of said easter egg unit, each. As in, 10/20 total, on barbarian huts at the corners of the map, surrounded by ocean (as to make sure the barbarian units cannot actually leave their encampment), designed to be raid bosses of sorts.

The units in question have maximum bonus health, maximum attack, maximum defense, maximum bombard, maximum bombard rate, maximum movement, long bombard range, blitz, lethal land/sea, and enslave (with enslave creating a copy of themselves), making taking so much as one down a fairly hard feat (at least in theory, it might be easier in practice than I give credit for).

So the mod is progressing along quite nicely, but it's still far from even 50% complete I'd say.

If I got the map complete, including all civilizations with all their cities and all their city improvements/wonders and all their starting units and the tech tree values appropriately set? I'd call the mod probably ~50% complete.

But as-is we're probably less than 25% complete.

Still, tho. Is fun to work on it and if I keep it up, if the big hard-to-achieve things don't kill the mod, it will get done, and it will be something that I will then proceed to show off.

I am, after all. A streamer now.

I have a streaming schedule and everything!

Now, granted.

I'm a variety streamer and that means I get 0 viewers because streaming variety is not the way to grow your channel.

And I stream at a time that nobody else is awake, meaning even the people who normally might want to (friends, associates, etc.) literally can't because they are asleep. Meaning 0 viewers because streaming at a time nobody is awake is not the way to grow your channel.

My hope is that, eventually, I can settle into mostly doing a single viewer-dense but streamer-light game that I genuinely have fun playing, which would then set me up for success big time because if I am doing the same thing, at the same time, every time, and am streaming at a time nobody else is streaming, then that means I have a fairly high chance of viewers stopping by and maybe staying because the few viewers who would be awake at that time would want to find the game content they're looking for. (Dead by Daylight would be an amazing game for this as, me following basically every DBD streamer, I know for a fact nobody streams DBD at that time because literally all the DBD streamers are either asleep at that time or streaming a non-DBD game at that time. Alas, I don't own DBD and I'm not even sure I'd have fun playing it even if I did.)

But for now, lacking that, I do whatever I want. I streamed me going through my blog twice! And recently, have streamed pretty heavily TFT.

Speaking of which...I was within striking distance of Platinum IV as of my last stream (Gold I 29 LP), but then I played yesterday and...well, let's just say, I ended up falling to barely Gold III. (21 LP if I recall correctly.) Well, another reason I feel pretty good today is that I've mostly recovered. I'm not quite back to where I was (still Gold II but at like 89 LP or so), but I got basically exclusively wins today which was much-needed since yesterday was basically nothing but losses.

I'm not going to make it before Tuesday, so there might be a patch requiring me to re-learn everything. (This was why I even played on Sunday to begin with: I wanted to get into Platinum IV before the new patch, so that I could spend time learning the new patch without tanking my rank. Alas, if the patch is tomorrow, that's not happening. It might not be tomorrow, mind you, depends on Riot Games' schedule honestly, but if it is I failed. If it isn't, still got plenty of time, but we'll see after I'm home from work tomorrow.)

Still tho. While it's at least 1-2 more wins away than it was when I last streamed, I still consider myself within striking distance of Platinum IV. And even if the patch is tomorrow, there's no guarantee that the comps I best know how to run get hit. I'm afraid they will be because I am a dirty filthy Mutant spammer in 60-80% of my games (Void makes every Mutant a carry; Omnivamp makes your whole team a carry; the increase in combat makes all mutants carries; the increase after allies die makes all mutants carries; the only times I don't abuse Mutants are the Cybernetic mutants which limit carries to Kai'sa and Kog'maw with a side of Mundo, and the mana-reduction which gets the most mileage out of non-mutant units having 20 less mana e.g. Lux + blue buff + mutant) so I imagine the mutant comp is going to get gutted when the next patch rolls out.

But if it doesn't, then hey...I might actually be better off. If the strategies being used at the highest level aren't the strategies *I* am using, then I am probably fine.

We'll have to see.

​Anyway, I've gotta eat dinner and then go to bed so wrapping this up now.

Was it four or five days that I went without blogging?
I only have excuses for four.
Yesterday, something I thought would take like 15-30 minutes ended up taking 1.5 hours and I still didn't get it perfect (I gave up on making it right and just posted it as-is in spite of the errors within), when my plan was very specifically to go to bed early so that I could wake up early enough to take a desperately-needed shower. (Which I did, it just meant that I went straight to bed.)
Saturday, I went to bed before midnight because I need to get up early on Sundays for work. Really early. Like, need to go to bed at 9 pm (10 pm due to daylight savings time this week) to get up at like 5 am or so, which meant no blog then due to poor time management.
Friday, well, I watched the entirety of the League of Legends Worlds 2021 final live. (Well...except for the postgame. When Damwon lost, I just left immediately. Nothing against EDG, they earned their win; on the day, there is no question that they were the better team. But like, I really wanted DWG to win, so when they didn't, I just lost any interest in watching the aftermath.)
Thursday, I streamed Kingdom but while I ended my stream due to my parents getting up, I kept playing until 8 am. (Whoops.) "Just...one...more...night..." applied.

Of course, stuff has happened!

I got the answer I was looking for on the character from Phyrra and Cyrus. (The term I was looking for which applies is Gender Non-conforming.)

I came up with THREE horror stories on Sunday!
Two of them formed instinctively in my brain when I had the idle thought of, "what would an inverse-Freddy be for horror?", and my brain quickly, automatically, gave me the answer in the form of two fully fleshed out takes that both qualify as being inverting the mechanics of Freddy.

The first, a story I am conditionally calling, "The Darkest Sleep", I can best describe as "Inverse-Freddy meets Final Destination meets Alan Wake". Basically, in a small town, a darkness comes upon the citizens, a darkness that brings their nightmares to life, with the nightmares able to hurt everyone, but hunting down to target the source of the dreamer.

​In other words, every time someone goes to sleep (making sleep dangerous), instead of the danger being in their dreams invisible to the real world but capable of hurting them, the danger is visible to everyone except the dreamer, and very much real. Being manifested from darkness, they are weak to light, but they are very much capable of killing multiple people and even in some cases outlasting the dreamer's nightmare. (For instance, a zombie apocalypse doesn't go away when the dreamer wakes up, at least not entirely. It's weakened, it's lessened, but not removed altogether. A tornado might start to dissipate when the dreamer wakes up, but doesn't suddenly vanish in an instant.)

The story would cover the outbreak, covering multiple characters and what happens to them and how they eventually manage to fight the darkness/dreams.

​The second, a story I am conditionally calling, "Don't Wake Up", I actually lowkey think would be better as an actual horror game, but I still think it's definitely writeable as a novel.

The basic premise: a family in a car uses a 30-year-old map instead of their GPS, taking a turn onto an old disused road instead of the main path because according to the map, it was a more direct route to their destination.

Predictably, this does not go well.

Their car takes a beating, and ultimately, it just barely manages to limp its way into a town;
Farmville, a town with the slogan "Where Dreams Come True".

But immediately, things are a bit eerie. The town appears to be basically a ghost town. Everything is 25 years old, dated, beaten, worn, etc., and yet the town still stands in spite of the disrepair. If it were fully abandoned, things like foliage should've taken over, buildings should've collapsed, etc. But while the town is in a state of disrepair, with basically no technology working, the buildings are still intact. Beaten, but not broken.

Around the town, there are a bunch of "graffiti", red words spelling out things that mostly just look like nonsense, naysayers, paranoia, "end of the world" talk, propaganda, etc., to an uninformed individual's eye. Messages like "There Is No Escape", "Don't Trust The Farmer", and such are strewn about.

And the family of four comes across a Farmer. Wielding a shovel, wearing a straw farmer's hat on his head, in blue overalls with a plaid/red shirt, big brown boots and gloves, the full look. He smiles at them, acts friendly, and gives them the suggestion that they can get help by waking up one of the denizens inside a building he leads them to.

After they do what the helpful farmer asks them to (you can guess where this is going), the citizen woken up goes "Oh no...", and the farmer reveals his true colors.

The protagonist, the older child, manages to flee, while his(well, ambiguously-his, this story is written in first person, protagonist is named Ash, is masculine, but is not actually strictly speaking gendered as I want to leave it open but for the sake of the narrative I use 'he' for the protagonist here as the main reason for the ambiguity is the potential for gender-flex if made into a game because before I had the idea of it being a game he was just a young teenaged guy unambiguously) younger sister faints as the three present (their parents and the woken up person are slaughtered).

​So how does this inverse-Freddy work?

In the town of Farmville, The Farmer is an immortal serial killer. He cannot be killed. And he is out to murder everyone. However, he has certain limitations. He cannot leave the boundaries of the town, permanently trapped in Farmville. And secondly, more importantly, he can only appear when someone is awake within the city bounds of Farmville. If nobody is awake, he disappears, he vanishes.

When someone does wake, he spawns in the town center, and from there, knowing someone is awake, he attempts to hunt them down.

Of course, things aren't as easy for him as they might seem, and not as easy for the denizens of Farmville, either. You can see some obvious loopholes he could try to exploit and some obvious loopholes they could try, but as it turns out, there's more rules to The Farmer's "Game".

The citizens of Farmville are themselves trapped inside the city bounds. They are just as trapped with The Farmer as The Farmer is. They can't just leave. 

​However, when the citizens of Farmville go to sleep, they are completely immune to any form of harm. They cannot be harmed by any method. And The Farmer is incapable of waking them up, by any method. He can't do anything to harm them or wake them up...if they are sleeping.

That, aside from the fact that if everyone is sleeping, he vanishes into nonexistence.

The rules partially apply to visitors, but visitors don't work identically. The Farmer still spawns if visitors are awake, and still despawns if those visitors go to sleep, but visitors do not get the perma-sleep that the natural citizens of Farmville do. They will wake up. They don't have total immunity while asleep, but do have partial immunity while asleep. The Farmer can't hurt a sleeping visitor. The Farmer can't force a visitor awake, either.

So, visitors sleeping get more safety, and if everyone is asleep even visitors, The Farmer despawns.

But, visitors, unlike the citizens, can and do wake up.

The citizens can only be woken up by force by the visitors (think kinda like Inception style with a "kick").

And with Ash's family entering Farmville, The Farmer began the latest round of his sick game. With Ash trying his best to survive/escape with his sister.

There's a little bit of extra.

Every individual killed by The Farmer doesn't leave a body--they dissolve, and then their dissolved form takes the shape of red letters...which record their last thoughts. "What's going on???" "I don't understand..." "They've doomed me!" are red letters that Ash sees when revisiting the building where The Farmer revealed his true nature to Ash's family--visitors leave red stains just the same as citizens do.

​This has been going on for 25 years, but the government didn't ignore things altogether. They investigated Farmville, and were able to, eventually, verify the supernatural nature of the ongoings there, and discretely took action, removing Farmville from the map, creating detours around the city on all four sides, but also did their part to try and help the citizens, by dropping in a bunch of equipment for forcing sleep. (Taking the form of needles to inject, forcing immediate sleep.)

The fewer knowing about it, the less there'd be idiots going "Don't go there? Pfft, yeah right! I'm going there!!!". Including some idiots in the government because if it were widespread knowledge in the government then it need not be a citizen going there, it could be someone who has the information but doesn't believe it all and wants to see it for themselves.

So instead of a hard-quarantine where they blockade it off, they took the much subtler route of making the old road be, well...an old road, that basically nobody would go on, and made it as hard as possible to stumble upon Farmville. This has a very high success rate, albeit not foolproof, as proven by Ash's family.

The less it looks like the government was trying to hide something, the less it'd be investigated, basically. So with it not looking like the government was hiding anything, nobody investigated, so the government kept the world as safe from The Farmer as possible and the denizens of Farmville as safe from harm as they could. Knowledge of what happened there became strictly need-to-know, with basically nobody in the know.

The denizens of Farmville did their own part as well, trying to create hiding places, stashes/caches, etc., where The Farmer couldn't find individuals, couldn't destroy their equipment, etc.

So Ash has been given the tools, from the sleep serum to the hiding spots, to survive, but it's still...well. Not easy, because The Farmer has been hunting the area for 25 years and knows when something is amiss, knows when something has been disturbed, knows when something has changed, having stalked the entirety of the town over the 25 years and scoped it out.

He doesn't know every nook and cranny, but he's found some hiding spots, some things, just by time. He's got very good knowledge, but also a disadvantage of not instantly knowing where the waking person is. He has to guess. And even if he guesses right, there's travel time from the town center.

Which gives Ash the fighting chance needed.

​The third horror story is a short story about a possessive tool coming back, not as well fleshed out but basically, person finds tool, tool is useful, keeps coming back...but then won't leave and can cause harm to others. (A bit more cliche admittedly.)

And in more recent news, today I basically made a friend! I don't want to share details because details are details that go beyond what should be shared publicly, but saying I have a friend now is still okay, so like. I have a new friend! That's legit something I've not made for YEARS. And it is AMAZING.

Sadly, it does happen sometimes. Where in spite of having time, I end up not getting anything done. I don't really know what happened to my time. What was I doing? I had to have been doing something, I didn't do literally nothing in that time.

Like, I know I was multitasking. As in, listening to 1-2 streams...but doing something else on top of those streams.

But like.

I genuinely can't remember what it was.

It wasn't anything on steam; at the time, it wasn't anything on League (I did waste some time later getting my 50 daily blue essence since I kinda want another rune page for when First Strike goes live since I believe First Strike will genuinely be very good on Ashe); it wasn't Civ 3; it wasn't minecraft; it wasn't nothing, so I was doing something, but I legit don't know what it was I spent time on.

I know I put some time into mafia to try and do daily stuff there but like...that was some of my time, not all of it.

It's almost 3 am here and I've been home since like 8:45 or so.

Like, I estimate I took 45 minutes for League and ~2-3 hours for mafia, but...where the heck's the rest of that time? What on earth was I doing for the remaining like...2-4 hours?

It's genuinely baffling. I legit don't know what happened to my time.

So whatever it was I did.

It certainly wasn't something memorable enough for me to remember doing it.

Meaning I did basically nothing.

Oh well.

It does happen. Not every day is a good day.

It's not like it was a total wash. I did complete my "Dumb Ways to Die: 2021 edition" outline, which previously was missing 2 ways to die. (I thought I had 16, but it was 18, so I bumped it up to 20 today. Which is around the amount of the original video.)

But like. I know I only have 5-7 hours' worth of free time after work when I work the next day (5 if I go to bed as soon as humanly tired, 2 am; 7 if I go to bed at the latest time safe for a full nights rest, 4 am), but...

...5-7 hours is still a LOT of free time. And I feel like I can account for, legitimately, genuinely, less than half of it.

What the heck did I do? I remember doing so little.

Ah well.

While I didn't get much done today, I did lay the foundation for something that I want answers for in Phyrra and Cyrus. (Basically, one of the characters has some fluidity to them but it is purely in how they present, not in their gender, and I don't know the term for that but surely there is a term.)

So, payoff will be there later. Just, not yet.

Okay so I'm probably not on top of everything, but today, I've felt like I'm on top of basically everything. Compared to yesterday, that's progress! Now, granted: still got a lot of things which I probably am forgetting about. But I'm mostly on top of things. I'll need to brush my teeth and such before I go to bed, buuuuut, I showered, changed clothes, kept up to date on emails, did my daily internet stuff, basically everything I need to do, including my squats and crunches.

Right now as I write this blog I'm doing an update to XSplit for my stream tonight, and I'm actually writing a blog! Now, granted: I hated yesterday's stream. I actually had people show up for it! Which you'd think would be a good thing!
...If it weren't the worst stream I've ever done.

I had no idea what to do.
I had my power go out on me, so that killed my first stream.

And then on my second stream, twitch decided to basically kill the stream as everything was fine on my end, but I was dropping thousands of frames.

I was doing nothing.
And the stream had difficulties.
So what did those people who showed up see?

Basically the worst streamer of all time.

​Speaking of stream, as I was writing this, XSplit did update. The new update looks all fancy and such, but it did remove all of my prior settings. I had to re-enter them so my next stream might be a little bit...well, glitchy. We'll have to see.

Anyway what I wanted to blog about is that yesterday, I forgot to blog about a dream I had.
It was an anime (kinda like how I got a dream about Phyrra and Cyrus being an anime), this one set in a high school that is mostly our earth but has some minor Fantasy aspects to it. There's Alchemy, but Alchemy is an artform mostly seen as 'obsolete', as technology has grown to do what Alchemy used to be the only method for, and technology (while it requires building and maintenance) isn't one-time use and isn't something the user needs to know a lot about in order to still make use of it.

The setting is actually an all-ages school, K-12, which pioneered many groundbreaking things in the past. No discrimination based on race, gender, age, social background, income, physical/mental ability, religion, orientation, etc.

However, though the school did do those groundbreaking things, including co-ed sports that allow for everyone of all ages to participate (to a certain degree; they will still try their best to sort people into appropriately-sized groups where they are matched with individuals with complimenting skills), and those things are ingrained into the culture, in more recent years, the school has become notably more...decrepit. 

The school's main focus of Alchemy has fallen from their main draw to a mere shadow of what it was, and while most of the staff and students are genuinely caring individuals, there's a fair amount of corruption and darker elements going on in the school, including shady business and outright immoral actions.

The protagonist (modeled after Lelouch from Code Geass), a prodigy who is the latest generation of one of the founding members of the school (and thus, knows the ins and outs of it), sets out to change that, with his knowledge of Alchemy. He sets out to create an elaborate ruse:

Taking advantage of legends of demons, he creates the guise of him and his younger sisters being a trio of female demons (he is androgynous enough to pull it off, with the aid of a wig). Employing a lot of theatrics as well as mastery of the hidden areas of the school, combined with extensive Alchemy knowledge, he tackles issues with the school's corruption. Alchemical potions allow him to see the memories of others, and from that, witness the issues not seen in the school, and then he sets out in a Phantom Thieves style heist (taking cues from Persona 5) to select a target and then, again with alchemy, basically show the target the consequences of their corrupt actions, the suffering of all their victims, how much harm they've inflicted and to have it affect them.

There's more to it than that but I genuinely think that it could be the next big thing after Phyrra and Cyrus if I expand it out the way Phyrra and Cyrus was expanded out. The foundation is there. Like, this is the most foundation for a dream I've had since Phyrra and Cyrus (well, with the exception of the one lucid dream I had where I wrote it down and lost it all).

It's entirely a different take than Phyrra and Cyrus other than having very small fantasy elements like Alchemy and maybe some fictional pseudo-magic materials that are considered technology (plus strong superstition and belief in spiritual things that are widespread in spite of the dominance of science).

But it literally wrote itself. Dreams don't do that often.

This one did.

​That's a sign for success.

...But I am working on being a much much better person overall.

There's still a lot of things I need to do.

I've been compiling a list of questions that I need to ask my supervisor at work.

I need to stay on top of a lot of stuff that, right now, I very much am not. (Showers and dental hygiene mostly, but also to some extent my lesser obligations.)

But while there's a boatload of stuff that I need to do.

I'm still making a lot of progress.

I'm hoping to commit to streaming with a schedule, 3 days a week (Wednesday night/Thursday morning, Thursday night/Friday morning, and Friday night/Saturday morning, all at circa 3-6 am, give or take an hour for both the start/end times being as early as 2 am starting or as late as 4 am starting and going until as early as 5 am but as late as 7 am).

I'm furthering my work as a content creator, too, by compiling an entire list of things I want to make.
I'm working a lot, so like.

I'm making progress!

I feel like I am taking control of my life.

Very very slowly.

I'm still not quite doing everything I want to be doing. Not doing the walking (which I desperately need to do because I have zero stamina right now and get out of breath quickly and winded easily) yet, not brushing daily, not showering as often as I want to, not staying on top of everything I want to be, but like.

I'm getting more and more and more with time.

So like.

I'm thinking.

I can do this.

Phyrra and Cyrus, my dream of dreams to make, might be a long long ways away, but it starts with doing what I am doing. I genuinely think that the best way for me to make Phyrra and Cyrus a reality is for me to get people hyped about me making a project. Which I do by getting people to know me and know what I am doing.

It's slightly roundabout, but I also need the skills I am setting out to acquire. Video editing for a start, also sound editing, also animation.

Now, for Phyrra and Cyrus, I will need to hire people better than I will be to do that sort of thing.

But I still think that the content creation ideas that I want to make involving teaching myself those things...
...Will make making Phyrra and Cyrus that much easier as I will be able to demonstrate what I want to create easier and have a better idea of what needs to be done and so on and so forth.

(Also on that note, I still need to write the blog I have on Phyrra and Cyrus. So I don't forget about it altogether, it involves our alchemist and her aesthetic and how she presents herself and the breakthrough I had there in realizing something about her but again, need to do that later, can't do it tonight.)

Side-note, today marks me completing the first stage of units in my Civ 3 mod.
Next up is the buildings/wonders (I won't need to make the wonders for every city yet but I do need to make the buildable wonders at the very least), and then the governments, and then the techs, and then revising the resources/units/buildings/wonders/governments to fit the techs, and then manually building the map.

All in all I'd say that I'm about 12.5% done with the mod since getting what I've gotten is a significant amount of the work but there's a looooot more to do there.

​Also also: refill of hormones picked up, but the T-blocker's not as effective as I'd prefer. After my psychiatry appointment in November, will be needing to go back to the endocrinologist about this.

Yaknow, the thing that's meant to be daily which for literally 6 years straight was precisely that but in the last year or so has begun to slip to be much much lower and be closer to like once a week because of my incompetence?

That daily thing?

Well speaking of incompetence, that brings me to a thought I wanted to voice and the actual reason for me blogging today;

My new job as a lifeguard.

Right now, I don't feel fully incompetent, but I also don't feel competent.
I want to be an investment: not an employee hired because they were short on staff, valued for being an extra body, but actually someone who was worth hiring and keeping even if they become borderline-overstaffed.

I want to become the best lifeguard they ever hire.

Someone who starts out with the very very big growing pains. Who is genuinely not very good, just adequate (and barely so), but who will grow to become a basically perfect employee.

I'm not there yet.

But I genuinely think I could be.

I don't feel like I'm an impostor, a fake, a fraud (feelings I had when I worked before at my old job especially since my hiring process was somewhat...unorthodox).

I feel like I was hired on the merits of having earned it, been worthy of it, working for it, and that I can live up to that promise.

I want to be better.
I need to be better.

There's presumably an acceptable growth period where they know I won't be really prepared for the job, so won't be fully competent, won't be fully adept, won't be doing everything I'm meant to, will make mistakes, will need help, etc.

But that period is temporary and I need to be capable of doing my job basically on my own after that grace period has left.

I have a genuine desire, a genuine drive, to be better, to become the best.

I want to become an employee seen as the most valuable lifeguard to have ever been hired.
I want to become not just an extra body, who is okay at the job but is clearly not great at lifeguarding, to becoming a model lifeguard for all other lifeguards to strive towards becoming.

There's no fear of losing the job behind this drive.
There's no feeling of needing to prove it to myself behind this drive.
There's nothing ulterior in my motive here, although I will admit to bonuses like the above and similar and more.

It genuinely comes from a deep-slated desire to just be better at lifeguarding.

I always knew I enjoyed being a lifeguard, and that I genuinely wanted to lifeguard, not just as a job, but because I know I can be good at the job, and it's one of the few jobs I know I can be good at.

But the more I lifeguard again, the greater this desire to just be better at lifeguarding becomes.
I don't want to slack off.
I don't want to become lazy.
I don't want to become so-so.

I want to excel. I want to do the job right. And that's just a passion. Just a genuine desire to do the job not just well, but as close to perfect as is possible for a human.

To be better than I was before.

To improve at my job.

I know I'm not there yet.

But I WANT to get there.

​Sooner rather than later.

I did have a desire yesterday to write a blog about my plurality (the nature of my median system), but I ended up getting too tired to write it. And as for tonight...well. I got nuthin'. I don't have the mindset to write about the thing I was going to yesterday, and for things for today...coming up empty. Still not in the mindset to write the misophonia blog, either. I already blogged about the progress on Civ 3.

And I'm pretty sure my last blog mentioned Epic Battle Fantasy stuff? I guess just in case I can cover it again. Basically, I spent an entire night just listening to Epic Battle Fantasy music, because I just...wanted to, the nostalgia was strong. It was on a whim that I went to spend the night listening to EPF 3 music (particularly the normal battle music and boss music from that game).

Since then, I've actually made good progress in the game. I beat a couple of bonus zones, and I even managed to beat one of the bosses I thought would be among the hardest in the game; the underground Neo Valkyrie fight where it regenerates health every turn, makes two bombs that can TPK every four turns, deals ridiculous damage, and has over five million HP.

It did take me multiple tries, mind you, and tweaking my strategy multiple times, but I ultimately pulled it off by giving my main party 100% bomb resistance (130% for NoLegs, the member with the weakest ability to heal), high wind resistance, immunity to most of the status effects, and lots and lots of haste (between Viking Monolith procs and casual haste procs which in some instances stack). From there, I used Temperance on Matt to boost his attack power to the max and spammed the earth spike, with NoLegs applying max curse and weakness and Natt healing, syphoning, and when free to attack, either applying weakness or applying tiredness from gaia blossom (which deals good damage, too).

It was very very close, since I ran out of SP on the bombs, Natt couldn't syphon both the spawned bombs, the bombs were one turn from exploding, and I was out of revives, low on health, with the bombs going off spelling out a TPK--but I did end up eventually pulling through, barely, to finish it off, on my last party member's last turn.

I'm basically, slowly, progressing through all the top half of the map. After that, I know there's a really really really nightmarish fight in the snow area of the bottom half, which I'll get after going through the river and doing a full cycle or two of the frozen area before steeling myself for the fight that isn't technically a boss fight but which is still nightmarishly difficult. (I don't even remember the enemy, probably either a Mammoth or a Monolith that's gargantuan.)

After that, we'll be getting to progressing the game with the fall area with the tomb and such, which will take us into new content for the game.

​I'm slowly progressing.

The mod I am working on right now, MegaMediterranean, is basically combining aspects of the Mesopotamian, Rise of Rome, Fall of Rome, Middle Ages, Age of Discovery, and Napoleonic Era (with the faction I called 'The Hordes' taking a little extra from Sengoku Sword of the Shogun).

It is a scenario with four ages, covering the Rise of Rome, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and what I called the "Imperial Age". (Beginning of industrial age, so there's coal and railroads but not really units from that era.)

It has 16 civilizations, 15 of them playable:
Rome (allied with England), locked in war with Carthage (and France), has units that are incredibly powerful and have terraforming capabilities, but their units are at their strongest soon after the beginning of the game. Though they retain relevance into the midgame, their Imperial-era units are not as good, and they lose their uniqueness down the line. Though all their units are strong, their Legionaries are their strongest.

Carthage (allied with France), locked in war with Rome (and England), has the cheapest unit line in the game and their War Elephants are their staple power, able to absolutely decimate opponents. They require gold/ivory/silver to build most of their units, but they are cheap, the idea being to overwhelm with sheer manpower advantage.

Greece, locked in war with Persia, has the best spearman-type units, as well as having early access to amphibious assault and hidden nationality units, making them adept at naval warfare. They also have access to certain otherwise-exclusive-to-Rome things in the midgame, owing to Byzantine heritage.

Persia (similar to Russia), locked in war with Greece, has a gigantic land mass, and similar diversity in units they can field, albeit exclusively early-focused compared to the late-focused Russia. They have Immortals who have 1 more attack than Hoplites but one less defense (so that whoever attacks has the advantage), but also have a wide array of units, including access to the Barbarian tree of units and being able to field Ansar Warriors. However, their units fall off in the mid to lategame.

All four of them, plus Egypt (who has the unique trait of chariots, but otherwise has nothing), have access to multiple techs at the beginning of the game.

England (allied with Rome), locked in war with France (and Carthage) is an Imperial lategame powerhouse, with the strongest naval units in the game, and second-strongest Imperial age units. Though they require getting to the lategame to get to their units, once they have access to them, they can absolutely dominate. They have both the strength (hard to reach), and weakness (hard to invade), of being on an island.

France (allied with Carthage), locked in war with England (and Rome) is an Imperial lategame powerhouse, with the strongest musket-aged units in the game. By sheer raw numbers, they have the strongest most powerful units in the game. Though they have a rough early game (given they need to survive the onslaught of Rome), if they can get through that, they can conquer the world.

Germany has nothing noteworthy to it until the very very very end, at the absolute last section of the tech tree. At which point they get access to three gamebreaking units, the Ironclad (better even than the English naval unit), the Artillery (best artillery unit in the game), and building 'mobile fortresses' (tanks), the best "Cavalry" in the game. However, they lack any special units until then, meaning that while they are the latest of lategame powerhouses, they have literally nothing until then.

Spain starts fairly weak at the beginning, but in the midgame gains access to one of the strongest units in the game; their Conquistador, with the full movement of an Explorer (buffed to be 4 movement with all terrain as roads), decent attack/defense, amphibious assault, blitz, and multiple other aspects, for the cheap cheap price of 30 shields (and they can be drafted, too), meaning that one unit can be built and spammed to basically sweep the map.

Portugal starts fairly weak, but has access from the getgo to a couple of minor Wonders that allow them to have sea capability. Their Carracks are some of the best naval transports in the game in being both warships and transports.

The Celts have the unique trait of all their units having one extra movement point. At their highest level, these units also ignore the movement cost of mountains, hills, and forests. They also have the most units capable of enslaving, giving them a dedicated workforce which can be sacrificed for cheap culture points. They also have access to the Barbarian line of units.

The Goths have the unique trait of sacrificing defense for pure sheer raw offense, having THE strongest overwhelming offensive advantage at every tier of their units, at the cost of having basically zero defense. (For instant, Teutonic Warriors at 10 shields have 4 attack, higher than any other unit's attack at that shield cost.) They also have access to the Barbarian line of units.

The Hordes have the unique trait of all of their units treating all terrain as if it were roads. Beyond that, they have some of the most diverse units, including horse archers, extra cavalry levels, incredibly powerful swordsmen, and all around have the strongest overwhelming potential with sheer mobility and strength. However, they start with the smallest amount of territory. They do have access to the Barbarian line of units to help them though.

The Vikings have access to some of the best midgame sea transports in the form of the Longship, while also being classified as a Barbarian civilization and having access to the ultimate unit from that line of units, the Beserk, an amphibious assault powerhouse with huge attack and decent defense and good mobility.

The Russians also have access to the Barbarian units and also have access to some Byzantine units while also having Imperial units of their own. However, while they have access to the Viking Beserk and Longship and Byzantine Dromons and Cataphracts, their Imperial units aren't the strongest. They have a huuuuuuge amount of landmass though, enough to rival Persia, so can remain relevant at every stage of the game.

The Turks have a somewhat sizeable amount of land, while having access to some incredibly powerful Imperial units. They have earlier access to Imperial age units, and while their Imperial units aren't as strong as France/England, they tend to have longer range, tend to have access to them earlier, allowing them to reach their peak power much sooner.

The idea is for each civilization to have unique strengths that allow them to dominate through fairly clear win conditions. 

I'm working on putting all the units into the game.
Units put in have multiple levels. Initial level puts them into the game with all their final values and functions.
Then there's the next level which adds in their tech requirement.
The final form is renaming each unit to have a different PRTO and have a unique civilopedia entry, but this is a luxury.

​I'm about 3/8ths of the way finished in this task.

Once I get all the units in at their initial levels (where they don't crash the game and are in with their final attributes), the next thing to do is add in all the buildings/Wonders that I want to add in. They, too, get an initial level and the next level which adds in their tech requirement, before a final form renaming each building to have a unique civilopedia entry.

​Then comes doing the governments, tweaking them to be where I want them to be.

And then I tackle the tech tree. I have the techs, all of them, start to finish, worked out. I just need to put in the work there.

After the tech tree, I go back through the resources, all the units, all the buildings, and the governments, to set their tech requirement to the next level.

And then, I work on building the map for this scenario.

Once the map is done, the game is in a state where it's playable. It'd be messy, because it requires knowing all of the changes made due to the civilopedia not listing things correctly. But it'd be workable. (And the next step would be changes to making the civilopedia accurate. For the civilizations, for the units, for the wonders, all of it.)

It's a lot of work but I still am working on it gradually, bit by bit.

I missed a day of blogging.

As much as I am trying to attempt to stay on top of things in my life, some things slip through.

I need to do followup doctor stuff for instance (they've slipped through) for instance even now, though today has been better than most for staying on top of things.

It's still got weaknesses, but it has also gotten a lot done, including a comic showing off my stupid sense of humor.

I didn't quite nail the execution behind this comic though. It was difficult to capture the whole concept.
My basic concept was: person comes up, reads the door.
Person knocks.
Person is told to read the sign.
Person tries to use various secret knocks.
Person leaves out of frustration.
Person returns, with the epiphany.
Person speaks 'Secret Knock', and is allowed to enter.
(Kinda sorta in the style of, "Speak Friend, and Enter" made famous by Lord of the Rings.)

Unfortunately, showing in a comic various different forms of possible secret knocks is rather difficult. After all, to display variants on knocks you kinda need sound, and all knocks written are written the same. I could maybe have attempted to show different variants on knocks, but space was also an issue in that I could only fit so much in a panel and also I could only make it be so long in a comic.

So unfortunately, I had to basically skip the "person tries to use various secret knocks" step and leave the comic's contents far more implied than explicit.

So I didn't get the comic quite as I liked it, but for a comic I made in MS paint in about an hour's worth of work while multitasking, that's still not too shabby. It could be better, obviously, and didn't get what I wanted, but I still think it works because when reading my own comic, I DO laugh at it.

If I laugh at my own comic, that means I have succeeded in the end. It was funny to ME.
And while I realize it's probably not funny to most people, I knew that from the getgo as the humor style is rathe niche and something fairly specific to me.

Still, tho, I'm ultimately satisfied with it and rather proud of what I did.

I'm slacking in other areas of my life I'm sure.

I can't stay on top of everything, after all.

But I AM trying to do as much as I can to stay on top as much of what I can.