Lith's Diary - November

Dear Diary,
Looking back, I think I'd say I've had a pretty good month. I've been getting a little better about being social and such, playing some fun games, but also getting a good amount of work done. Not a great month, but y'know, one of those times when I stop to look back, and realize that yeah, actually, it's been pretty good overall. I hope I've helped you notice a few of those yourself!

I was stressing out some earlier because it kinda felt like I couldn't keep up with everything I had going on. Always more that needed doing than I had the time or energy for, you know? And... well, it's kinda still like that. But I've managed to get some of the most important stuff out of the way, and I mostly feel like I'm at least keeping up. I guess if I ever ran out of things that needed doing at this point, I wouldn't even know what to do with myself, so maybe it's good to always kinda have a queue, right?

But I've still been taking plenty of time to play games and watch anime. There have been a lot of good ones I've dipped into just recently! I actually just finished No Game, No Life, which I found very charming in that sort of... "don't let anything hold you back, overcome all obstacles!" way, that encourages you to believe in yourself. It's basically about, uh... conquering the world by playing games? With magic and stuff. I think some people might find it kinda obnoxious, but it's both very thoughtful and very high-energy, with a lot of emphasis on strategy, thinking ahead, and outwitting the opponent in increasingly elaborate ways. I guess you could say it's the intellectual version of the usual "I'll just try harder!!" kinda stuff I often enjoy. The characters seem kinda flat at first, but open up to be funny and rather charming in unexpected ways. It's also wildly colorful and very pretty all around. Just kind of a joy to watch all around!

I heard the manga version of Tokyo Ghoul is way better than the anime, but I don't tend to read manga much, so I'm accepting the anime as still pretty fascinating. It delves into a lot of heavy, dark themes around the value of life and the lines drawn between normal people and the monsters that are also people, with some very intimate, painful explorations of how we interact with the concept of death. It plays around with some ideas I kinda feel like I've already seen done too much, so it gets a little frustrating to me when it's kinda like... yet another "we're so different, how could we ever understand each other even though we both think, feel, hurt, and fear each other?" So I'm hoping they'll take that in an unexpected direction or something. But it's still a very intense show, with its own impressive style to it visually, though the gore may be too much for some.

I've also been watching Blood Blockade Battlefront. It's a mouthful of a name for a very dense anime. They pack a lot of info in pretty rapidfire and throw around some pretty complicated concepts, but they also take a surprising amount of time to slow down between the action and intrigue to give us very low-down, personal everyday experiences for the people and weird monsters all thrown together in this strange, chaotic city. It does a pretty great job of making it feel like people actually live in this city, trying to make do while all this crazy fighting is happening, getting jaded to the destruction. I'd say it has a little bit of Cowboy Bebop attitude mixed with a Star Wars feel of the gritty mixture of poverty and fantastical elements with all sorts of different creatures filling different niches. Very stylish, a bit hard to follow, very rich, but also just a little bit... hm. Up its own butt? But I guess it's drawn me in pretty well even so.

Oh! Speaking of style, I finally got into Frostpunk this month. It's kind of a village management game, but it's absolutely buried in flavor-- you're the last surviving town in a steampunk icy apocalypse, and everything is centered around surviving in blasting cold, trying to scrape by and keep as many people alive as you can. The gameplay is pretty solid, but a huge part of the experience is just how much every part of it reinforces that sense of surviving the icy death of the world. I literally had to bundle up every time I played it. Actually, I think they did a really good job of cutting a compromise where the gameplay was fun but difficult, and felt punishing but not too unfair on the little things. It was a lot of little touches, like-- your villagers don't need to physically run to and from a supply storage every time they need a certain resource, and if you aren't messing with scheduling too much, then when the workday starts, the facility starts running according to how many people are assigned there, even if they haven't gotten there yet. It's not perfectly realistic, but it means you're getting screwed over a lot less by not perfectly positioning every single building and micromanaging where people work or sleep or get food. One of the big, annoying things about these games to me can be how it can take an "in game hour" to walk a short distance just because the clock is sped up so much, but the people still walk at a normal-looking speed. So they took out a lot of the frustration in little, nitpicky things like that that can strangle your game in an unfun way, and put it instead on things like struggling to find a way to keep everyone's homes warm at night, deciding whether to amputate when people get serious frostbite or keep them in long term care (and draining resources) until you can treat them properly... Dealing with discontent as you force people to work longer hours so they can complete a critical project in time. Containing panic as the temperature keeps dropping and rumors spread that you don't have enough food. Some of it is frustrating to me just because it's people panicking and being stupid and I wish that we'd be better than that in a crisis-- but that's exactly the kind of thing you should be struggling with, in a situation like that. Not cursing your villagers for crossing town five times in a row because of lousy AI and wasting the whole day. This is a game that puts the challenge where it belongs and absolutely nails the feel of what you're trying to accomplish. I've taken a break from it for now, but I definitely intend to go back and try it again, maybe on harder difficulties too. And I never do that! But it feels like it would really enhance the experience, here.

Conversely, I kinda suddenly stopped playing another game I was really getting into because... well, it wasn't exactly a difficulty spike but effectively it was. Automachef looked pretty promising to me as a sort of "conveyor belt game" where you manage lots of resources and machines in a limited space to accomplish your goals... in this case, assembling food to order and delivering it. It's got a cute little "robots plotting to overthrow humanity" theme to it that, so far, has been played so straight I almost feel like the game is aimed at kids, but... well, it just dropped full-on programming on me. Like, I played something like 8-10 hours just stringing together increasingly complex production lines and tuning them for efficiency, and suddenly they let me build a computer that will execute a program you write 30 times a second to take orders, read inputs from your machines, save variables, and turn other machines on and off. And like... it was already getting a little slow and dense for me to really relax with before, but wow! Working all that out is gonna take forever! I do mean to come back to the game, but maybe sometime I'm less busy...

I could still be doing better in some respects, and I'll have to try and push on those soon, but... overall, I think this month has gone pretty well for me. I've covered the basics pretty well, at least. How about you? Are you getting enough sleep? Getting your work done? Remembering to find joy in life? I hope so. Just remember... I care about you, and I want you to do well, and be well. If you need to lean on me a little, I'm here. It's okay to falter now and then, and to rely on other people, because what matters is that we get there without hurting ourselves.

I know I've already been leaning on you a lot... so, thank you for that. For helping me and Lithier. It looks like I'm finally getting a break this month, in there, actually. I... I might have a spotty history with that one, but... I couldn't blame you for at least wanting to spend some time with him. He's... not bad in small doses, now and then, I think. I guess... after everything we've been through lately, it's good to just get a little time to breathe and change things up a bit before pushing on.

So... until next time, I hope you find some happiness, even just a little, wherever it may lie for you.
-Lith