Lith's Diary - March

Dear Diary,
Things have really gone crazy in the last month, huh? Well, I've been managing okay so far. It's been a bummer, dialing back the socializing in person, but I guess that makes more time for being a nerd online and such. I've never considered myself particularly good at adapting to disasters and hardship, but this is one change of lifestyle I can deal with pretty easily, that I guess a lot of people have been struggling with. I hope you're not going too stir-crazy, Diary. And that you're staying healthy!

To be honest, I think when I wrote you last month, I was still struggling through some bad stuff, because I remember lapsing into some serious valleys in mood early this month. But... I was able to pull through, and I'm mostly feeling better now, I think. I can still have some trouble focusing, but I've been getting things done again, and that's been feeling good. I think a lot of my depression really might be tied to my sense of productivity. If I let things I want or need to do stack up, it gets harder to motivate myself and I start spiraling. But if I can keep making progress, then I can work through the pile and feel better, which makes it easier to get more done. I do suspect that I have a hard time really... feeling happy with things I've gotten done, though. Like... you should feel proud, when you accomplish things, right? You should feel good. But it tends to be more like... a sense of relief, that things are a little closer to how they should be, and then I go on to the next thing or take a break. Something in how I look at my work tends to make me see it less as a personal achievement and more as just... fixing problems? Filling a void, or erasing a negative feature in the world? It's kinda hard to describe. Maybe I just always feel like I should have gotten it done better, or faster. Maybe I still have a ways to go in just... allowing myself to be happy with what I've done, to take pride in it.

Well. For now, getting things done again was enough to break me out of my spiral, so I'm glad for that much. And like last month, I have more things to work on, but at least as long as I know what they are, I have some idea of where to go from here, something to look forward to trying to improve on.

This month, I re-watched the whole series of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's been a good, long while, and I found I'd forgotten just how strange and out there some parts of the story got, including a full 1984-type section with a population's very understanding of the world controlled by the government. I'd mainly remembered wacky adventures flying around and meeting weird benders. Well. If you haven't seen the show, I definitely recommend it as an exceptional example of how they can do kid's TV right, to not only be fun and entertaining, but to explore a healthy variety of ideas and worldviews, forcing the characters to struggle with a lot of serious questions of morality and interpersonal relationships. The show, even while being whimsical, has a dignity and a "wholeness" to it that can be hard to explain. It's a little like a mysterious, wise monk that teaches you things, while also having a silly sense of humor. The show has still aged well, though the humor and such can be a little more entertaining when you're still a kid at heart, I think.

Other than that... I tried a game called Megaquarium, it's basically an aquarium management game. I think I was still in the early progression, and it felt pretty nice, but it was turning into a lot of solving little puzzles over and over of which fish can go together where without eating each other or making too much work and such. I've put it aside for now, but hopefully I'll give it another try sometime I need a super chill game to play.

I think that was my main new game this month, but I also returned to a couple games I've played before, but that got some updates. I was really frustrated with Raft last time I tried it, largely because it created a really heavy sense of time pressure between your rapidly draining thirst and hunger meters and the game not letting you pause, and then I bumped an island and found out you can never turn your raft back "the right way," which crippled my resource production.

Well. Between discovering a few silly things I hadn't known and what was either an upgrade in a patch or just a tech I hadn't seen before, I was able to fix all that! I set the difficulty to easy, which literally just makes food and water drain slower, and I still spend so much time messing with that stuff, I have no idea how anyone has the patience to play on normal difficulty. I found I couldn't pause the game because I'd left it set to "friends can join," and apparently if there's even the possibility of a friend joining you, you can't pause to go to the bathroom or anything. And while I never found a way to "turn my raft back," I did find I could partially set my own direction of movement with the sail, which is... almost as good, and helpful in other ways.

So this let me finally play a lot of the game! And... it's pretty fun? It has a pretty decent gameplay cycle to it, and a lot more content in it than I was expecting by this point. It gave me a lot of those "whooaa, no way?!" moments as I discovered more, though some of the creatures I encountered were incredibly annoying, and your options for fighting are very limited and very expensive. Overall, I had a lot of fun with it, but I had to take a break after getting really mad at a bird with a really dumb fighting mechanic. There's still more game in there for when I'm ready to get back into it, I think.

In the meantime, I've come back to what's become a very familiar guilty pleasure of mine. Satisfactory finally got another update, adding lots of silly little quality of life upgrades you can unlock by feeding all your excess resources into a grinder, and now there are pipes for liquids, which is neat. Every time I play this game I end up setting up a bigger, more ridiculous factory complex to work in, because I never remember how big it actually needs to be. Now it's so big that just running across it takes forever. Thankfully, this update also added zoomy tubes! Like... what were they called? Pneumatic tubes, I think. Big pipes that suck you in, Futurama style, and zoom you to the other end! That was pretty much perfect for me, and I can finally zoom all around my way-too-big factory floor that's mostly empty to go handle whatever resource nodes are on the outer edges, and the refinement chains set up next to them. I really just lose hours and hours into this game way too easily, sometimes on the most mind-numbing processes of building out infrastructure and setting up chains of machines aligned just right, but... it's satisfying, and relaxing, like almost nothing else. So I guess it does its job? I just have to be careful not to lose half my day to it anytime I open it up, haha.

It still strikes me as an odd balance sometimes, when we do something "meaningless" to feel better in the short term, but need to keep doing things that actually matter to feel better in the long term. One is so much more tempting, and the other seems so much more noble, but once again, it comes down to balance. You need both of them to really do well in anything.

I hope that in the midst of all these troubles, you're maintaining your own balance, Diary. Not just in doing things for yourself and for the world, but in all things. When the pressure is on, it's up to each of us to show what we're truly made of, to be strong, but also to keep our balance, lest we forget about other important things and let these hard times do even more damage, indirectly. Take care of yourself, and others.

Thank you for taking care of me all this time. It's dizzying to think we're just about at the end of our journey, but there's still more to be done, and new hope on the horizon. I know you'll be ready for whatever comes next.

Thank you, and stay safe.
-Lith