Geight's making dinner so I have some time to kill.

Followup to the post about being weird about TV/PC audio: I just got around at some point to buying some bluetooth earbuds. They work for my issues, though I haven't used them in like a month probably as I haven't wanted to play anything on my laptop.

Geight and I have been watching Stone Ocean. We're like maybe 7 or 8 episodes away from the end. It's been fun.

Followup to the post about my Oktrollberfest game from last year being ported to Pico-8: I did not finish it and have yet to go back to it. This year's jam started and I got very invested in that. I'm pretty pleased with this year's entry: https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/them/

It left me in the mood to play a dungeon crawler or RPG and something to fill my evenings afterwards, so recently I went back to Legend of Legaia, a PS1 RPG I had as a kid that I never got very far in for a number of reasons. Those reasons include exp and gold gains being significantly reduced for the US release. Maybe last year I tried it again and saw how slow and tedious it would be and quit again pretty early on.

This time I found a patch to restore the original numbers and I've been having a lot of fun with it. It's got a lot of ups and downs in terms of its quality and I'm sure I'll never write a big effortpost about it, but I'm glad I'm finally seeing it for myself. It's so fucking slow thanks to how cinematic it wants every attack to be combined with its really unique attack system where you chain physical attacks together to perform arts that do extra damage. The part I'm at now just seems to have decided on some mandatory grinding? I have to buy fancy bread! To put into empty treasure chests. And it's very expensive.

But I really love the overall story, where mist has covered the land and turns people (wearing magic bracelets) into monsters and seeing how some towns have managed to survive this apocalyptic event. It would be pretty heavy stuff if the game was willing to dwell on specifics more.

I haven't played TF2 still since April. I feel like I've hit a point where I have really internalized that the way I was engaging with it before wasn't healthy, and my old ultimatum of "I have to commit a sensible amount of time to this or no time at all" now has me thinking that the latter wouldn't be so bad actually. Still I want to give it another go at some point. I feel like I would be much more capable of actually doing that. At the same time, the thing I can most liken this hiatus to is me giving up Twitter, and uh, that was a good decision and comparing it to Twitter does not look good for TF2.

Current plan is to make it to the end of the year. Have it drop off my Steam Replay entirely. After that maybe push to April for a full year break. Doing that would mean I'm only a little more than halfway through the break, but it doesn't feel like it would be any trouble at all to make it that far if that's what I go with.

I have noticed a real return of my creative drive. Between porting things to Pico 8 and making my Oktrollberfest entry, I've spent a lot more time just doodling ideas in ZZT with varying degrees of complexity. It's still a real struggle to commit to anything without something like a jam to anchor me to a timeframe, but even if I'm not releasing anything, it's still fun to explore possiblities and get a better feel for what I can do with the enhanced ZZT fork, Weave.