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.

...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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I realize I've got important blogs to make. (There's a really REALLY important one to make about Phyrra and Cyrus.)

However.

I'm honestly a little bit...well, "kept busy", by work, and the aftermath of work.

Aftermath in this case meaning, I'm days behind on watching League of Legends Worlds, watching EDG vs. T1 (D5 of playoffs), because I've not had the ability to watch the more recent stuff yet. Among other things.

I'm in for another back to back to back to back work week, Sunday and Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, all requiring me to go to bed about when Worlds starts (circa 4 am) and wake up when it ends (circa noon) and go to work and come home at circa 9 pm, leaving me with ~5 free hours...when Worlds days are typically ~7 hours long (give or take).

While at 1.5x speed, that's doable in a single day, it's only doable if I'm not spending time watching another stream that I consider that important to watch. Meaning that on a day like Sunday when there's other things I want to do until circa midnight, I've only got ~3-4 hours, which is a tighter fit, and one I often can't squeeze in the entirety of.

I will have more control over my life going into the future.

Worlds will be ending fairly soon.
I will get acclimated at work, finish all the work stuff that I'm struggling with now, have a more established normalized work schedule, etc.

​But it'll take me some time to do so and until I get there, my life will be a hectic chaotic mess.

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.

In my defense...

...I've been really really busy with work.

Work has been going really well.

It's just that I've been way way way too swamped with the growing pains there for a blog.

I'll be blogging later in the week, doing more, but right now, just trying to work, do all the work, get in to work, and be good there.

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

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

I'm having a lot good happen.

Like having started the script work on Phyrra and Cyrus.

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

I've actually been fairly on top of my emails, and I've been doing well in my job interviews, so it just means that I'm doing a lot of what I need to do.

Now admittedly.

Still falling short in lots of places.

But I'm mostly on top of things.

I'm even finding the time to do a little bit of extra.

Granted, the extra I focused on was the most worthless of the extras I could focus on. There's no way to make the Civ 3 mod be useful, but I've done a lot of work there. I've still got a lot of work to do. Resource tweak, terrain tweak to accommodate said resource tweak, creating all the units with initial parameters, creating all the buildings with initial parameters, creating/modifying the wonders with initial parameters, adding in the new governments and tweaking the existing ones, doing the entire tech tree, and after having done all of that:
Retweak civilization starting techs, retweak resource requirements, set the unit final parameters, set the building final parameters, set the wonder final parameters, and set the final government parameters.

After all of that? Then I can start building the map.

Is a lot of work to do, especially the map, which will basically be made on the fly, from scratch, by feel, with me "feeling" what is appropriate by having the land masses of each scenario before me and me making approximations of it. (I've tried to build a map before but I was a bit too rigorous and scientific with my approach. An approach that relies more on feeling is better in my opinion. Also, that was for a base-8-civ version of the modified-Rise-of-Rome so each civ had a lot more than they should have, being a bit too cumbersome. By dividing the civs up more appropriately I get things to be more manageable.)

Another bonus thing to do is to check each civ's city/leader names to make sure that I didn't include them multiple times (probably gonna use a word counter that can check for word frequency for that), but that's a lower priority thing.

​Anyway feeling pretty good right now.