📓 Edmund's Blog 📓

Welp! Final blog post of the year. I might actually keep this as a placeholder because I didn't think up anything to write on this one. Watch this space, I suppose?

EDIT: I'm honestly not got anything to say this go-around, my energy is really low for the start of a new year right now. I'll be back next week!

Okay, back at it, and more charged up than I was before the vacation...still don't actually have a lot to report, it was more of a staycation then anything else, naturally played through some Doom WADs and ZZT Worlds as is my wont. Unfortunately I got hit with a strep flareup again before work started back up so I've been congested and crappy-feeling.

As usual, the main thing I take away from a vacation is clarity. I'll have to make good on keeping that energy up because I know it'll leave as quickly as it came. I'm hoping that I can make a schedule and make it work so I can start working more regularly instead of doing uncool stuff like not drawing for months on end or dropping a comic because I hit a wall, that sort of thing!

I don't know. I try not to fuss and moan on here because I'm pretty blessed, and it's annoying to listen to anyway, but I look at this site and what I do with it like a mirror. When I'm working, I feel good, because I see legitimate progress happening right in front of me! That's one of the few things I miss about posting art on DeviantArt or Furaffinity, but that's not what I'm trying to do these days.

Alright, I have a double dose of NyQuil rolling around in me so that's as much as I've got this time. Wishing y'all a Merry Christmas!!

Not much to report this week, just going to try to take it easy since I'm on vacation. I'll see y'all next week!

Hey again! Hope the holiday season is finding you well!

My work with games studying continues, this time with a title called SQUID'S MANSLAUGHTER. I can't really make heads or tails of what this game is putting out, the text is saying one thing but the metatext is clearly saying another, and I can't figure out what that something is. My gut feeling is it belongs in the recommendations but it's such a difficult piece of art for me to get behind...but isn't that ultimately the point of trying new things in general? The fact that this game in particular is pushing me so hard out of my comfort zone is a good sign.

On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, I've also been playing Antonblast since that came out this week! That's absolutely going in the recommended slot, but I still have to figure out how I'm going to write up that review with something other than 'funny cartoon man smash and jump good'. It's excellent, though! I had to kind of remove my expectations for it to play like Pizza Tower because, well, the lack of a combo-based scoring system means it's substancially easier than Pizza Tower, but I still find it really difficult!

Last game I've been putting time in is a relatively new title called DEMON COMPASS. It's good so far, I'm on the fence about a recommendation just yet, but I'm unsure if it's because I'm so used to looking at the style of PS1 graphics horror games that the Haunted PS1 Collection(s) have ushered it...but it would also be mighty hypocritical of me to recommend some material that I have, and not this one - it even comes with an artbook! You know how many games I play that bother to feature enough material for an artbook? Not many, and more than that, the existance of an artbook tells me that this game has a lot more under the hood than I realize at this point.

I did end up re-installing RPG Maker VX Ace this week - honestly kicking myself for it, I find it utterly infuriating to work with. My current project with it is an old one I left on the cutting room floor about...jeez, like a decade ago. The basic idea is to do the Undertale thing where you have the option to kill or spare enemies. At present, sparing is a crapshoot of doing an action that decides if an enemy can be spared, and then sparing them in another action. This means that I've got a system where you waste moves on something that may or may not work to get out of the dramatically simpler solution of just killing the enemy. This led me to a conclusion that the existance of the minigames in Undertale and Knuckle Sandwich that can be played well enough to evade damage entirely might be the way to program something like this...but then we get into how to program something like that in RPG Maker in the first place. Like I said, infuriating.

Games aside, I did actually participate in society this week - I ended up at a local mall and picked up some Christmas goodies for the family - nothing big, my stepdad got a record and my mom got a rubber ducky (I'll see if I can't find her a proper present she'll like later)

Well, that's all I got this week! Hope you see you again soon! <3

Greetings, all! It's finally December! I feel like the mindset of an older person is setting in fast because I'm really pondering where all the time went!

Starting off with not so great news, I managed to get myself sick before Thanksgiving - nothing serious, a minor flu that was knocked out with a single dose of DayQuil, but the strep throat-like conditions persist with me.

On to nicer things, I had a lovely Thanksgiving with the family. I wore my mask for most of the time I was there just in case, but otherwise not much noteworthy going on. My aunt got a Starlink at her house that gets impressive internet speed for satellite. I'd make the change over but I really don't want to give Elon my money if I can help it.

As a follow-up to last week, I was able to set up Windows 3.1 on Dosbox! I feel very accomplished, even though I mainly just followed a set of instructions to the letter, it still required a lot of fiddling with processes I haven't so much as thought about in years. At any rate, I've spent a fair amount of my week filtering through some old Klik n Play games, and took the liberty of downloading the Exile CRPG series from Spiderweb Software since that version is freeware now.

Well, as the end of the year is upon me, I'm updating my five year plan and trying to make some decisions on what to do with the site. I'm thinking about the possibility of turning the game recommendations into a whole subset of the site, and make it look like a magazine catalog! That would take a lot of work, however, and if I'm being honest, I think it's high time I figure out if there is any way to take the reviews I have up now and have them paste onto the site via a Javascript array or some such. It has been a loooong time since I tried anything of that sort (the last time was that solitaire game I was trying to make for the site that never went anywhere) but I feel strongly I need to try something different.

All right! That's all from me this week! I'll see you later!

Hello everyone, and how are you!

Can't say I have a lot going on this week, it's mainly just been working the typical blockbuster shifts leading up to Thanksgiving. The stress is getting to me in a big way, but at least it's a collective problem with all of us working right now. It's going to be weird coming back after Thanksgiving to see everything in Santa Mode.

I've been trying to get more diligent with my spreadsheets of games to try out, I've got a ZZT spreadsheet and a Doom WAD spreadsheet so far. I want to get into recommending old Windows 3.1 games but that's going to involve some extensive work on my end to emulate the conditions in DOSBox. I tried to make it happen in a virtual machine once but I set it up wrong. There's so much...technical knowledge that you have to understand to play some of this material that it's no surprise when people really only play games on console. You start to realize that the barrier of access is only part of the issue with people playing older games, like, even if I do get DOSBox configured it's not entirely fair to people to expect them to do the same kind of work, you know? Especially when Steam and GOG side-steps most of those problems. But I feel very strongly that having that access is important to understanding where we came from in terms of game culture. So, I suppose I'm going to put the work in!

Speaking of games, it probably comes as no surprise that I've been playing Mouthwashing this week! It's a miserable experience, and it's all up on the recommended games section, but the sheer memetic explosion that game has left in the current time meant I was going to play it no matter what. I have to give Wrong Organ credit, for as much as I expected an emotional gut punch, I wasn't expecting it to make me think and revisit memories the way it did. I can't say that about most games.

That's pretty much it for me this week! I'll see you all after Turkey Day!

Doing slightly better this week! Hope everyone else is, too!

Did some test work on the OHRRPGCE engine and I must admit I'm liking it a lot! It's very direct and bare-bones compared to the RPG Maker series...I don't know how to explain this but it feels more like the options for interesting work are less limited than they feel working in RPG Maker, at least in my perspective. It's not that there's fewer limitations, there's way more limits than there are on even early RPG Maker versions, but the limitations are less obvious because the engine itself hasn't gotten a lot of play.

This is going to sound odd but I feel like I can tell my work on the game recommendations is getting better because I'm realizing just how pedestrian some of my tastes run. At first, I was all about how 'unique' and 'interesting' some of my game picks were but once you look past those? Not a lot of games I have recced that aren't at least things people are already aware of. That's not even getting into how difficult it is finding games that came out in the 90s, because unless I just fill the whole decade with ZZT worlds and Doom WADS (which is probably going to happen anyway if I'm being real) most of those picks are going to be like 3D Realms titles or Lucasarts or games that people are already familiar with.

One thing I am doing that's noteworthy is that, since it's becoming increasingly obvious that this game rec thing is going to be a main component of my life, I've decided to do more overall research of games in general. To that end, I started auditing an edX course to learn more about games from prehistory and how they would go on to influence modern gaming. Two core things I'm learning is that most early board games like Senet and the Royal Game of Ur were mainly 'racing' games meant for two people, with the principle goal being to outpace and outwit the opponent. This is to say that the arcade traditions of things like PVP fighting games are as old as the tradition of gaming itself.

Well, that's all from me this time! I'm looking forward to making more game recs soon!

Well!...well well well. What a week, huh? Another...another four years of Trump. I'm gonna bite my tongue a bit here because I still want this site to be at least superficially SFW but sheesh. I really feel for literally everyone. all of us, in this situation - not that that's worth much...

In slightly brighter news, I've been getting deep into ZZT games after ignoring them for a while and am having a great time! I feel silly for not getting into these things sooner because there's so much going on. You have the sort of Nethack style movement and concept, sure, but there's also the factor of ZZT itself being a product of Epic Megagames. The more you start to dig into the history of game dev, the more obvious it is that the existance of platforms that double as development tools is outright essential to the creation of developers and indie games. You can see traces of ZZT's influence in how platforms like Roblox has brought forward a whole fork of devs doing incredibly fascinating work, and that's yet another aspect of games history I'm planning to jump in on. Not quite yet, though! I wanna see about getting more off of my plate before then, there's still tons of Doom WADs I haven't looked at, ZZT worlds, the romhacking scene, etc. Well, it's keeping my mind on other things, at any rate!

So, here's hoping next week is a little nicer, for all our sakes <3

Welcome back, everyone! Happy November! Happy Daylight Savings! Happy(?) Election Day!...I feel like that celebration rabbit character from the Pogo comics.

I can't say I'm looking forward to the 5th, standing in line to vote. I get irritated every time the elections start and I never do absentee voting, but I have so much distruct for the system that the idea that my vote will count as an absentee vote feel absurd. When I spend time the day of to do it, it feels more real, you know? But I'm certainly not looking forward to it.

The good vibes from the vacation are but a distant memory now, and my headspace is feeling pretty much what it felt like for months now. I keep thinking about how the only thing I'm staying on top of is game recommendations - I haven't done any game work in weeks and no drawing in months. I don't get myself sometimes - I know for a fact that the things I would want to do are going to have to happen through force of habit, and this blog is proof-positive of that...I could always do the '1 Game A Month' challenge since it's really early in the month still, but that begs the question of what I'm going to do artistically. Maybe this month's 11 Second Club animation? Haven't attempted one of those in a while...I have ToonBoom Harmony on my laptop but it's just not the same as working in Flash, even after all this time it still just feels WEIRD to use.

That's pretty much all I got this week. Take it easy out there!

Hey, everybody! Hope everyone had a decent week!

I had a very relaxing vacation that I really needed! There's this unspoken assumption that the value in a vacation is in relaxation, but I've always found the true gift of time off is the feeling of clarity following after. My mind feels so much clearer and less distracted by pettiness then before I left, and I've been focusing a lot more on the long term. It's a good feeling!

One core thing I've been trying to focus on is tightening up my budget and being more proactive about paying bills before the autopay kicks in. It's a shame that money is such a problem, but I can either deal with it or deal with the consequences of not dealing with it. You know?

I keep dwelling on the upcoming election, and the mounting escalation of Israel's assault on Gaza and Lebanon, and I can honestly understand where a lot of people come from where they need to be plugged into this news on a daily basis as a sort of moral code. It is no small thing to admit that most world events will only effect me on a superficial level, but God, isn't that grotesque? Isn't that vile? Doesn't it make you want to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? There's that quote attributed to Mr. Rogers to 'look for the helpers' and there's always that question of why one can't find a helper in the mirror. Anyway, that's where my head's at.

Alright, I think that's all I got this time. See y'all next week!

Hello, all! Having a wonderful weekend as I'm on vacation at the moment, hope everyone is doing well! Not much to report on here, just enjoying some away time from work before having to go back to the grind later next week.

Well, here we are again! Hope everyone had a good week, I know I did!

I found 20 dollars on the ground while at work, did the honest thing and gave it to the front desk. I feel like a rube, frankly, but I made a decision and stuck with it. My internal monologue was full of excuses like 'God probably meant for you to have that 20' or 'Nobody's going to miss that cash' and I have to stand up and go 'It's 20 bucks, you stooge, of course someone's missing it.' I feel like a rube all the same.

Went to a new pizza place this week! They had Fox News blaring at full volume but aside from that, the place was great. I had their meat lovers since it included the fancy-pants meats like cappicola and such, though it was mostly the usual suspects for a pie like that. Still good, though!

Had a weird day off this week: someone needed to borrow my car because they had a flat tire on their vehicle, went back to bed and had menacing dreams about meeting strange men in the dark and exploring foreboding lakehouses. The AAA man informed me that the flat tire had a lug lock that my friend never recieved when they bought the car, and so the whole day took a backslide into unpleasantness.

I've recently become enticed by the concept of a specific kind of note-taking known as the Cornell method, because I can use it for a multitude of different application - i can use it to study the games I recommend in greater detail like they're part of a literature class, or possibly applying the notetaking to my game dev work and try to keep a catalog of certain game dev ideas. Of course, I always have the Obsidian app for note-taking, but I do really think there's so much more I could be doing!

Oh, and I also released a small video game this week, but that's more of a relief for me than anything else. I really needed to make some art stuff before the year closed out.

Anyway! That's it for me this week! Looking forward to seeing y'all again soon!

Hope everyone's doing well this week! I'm feeling much better, myself :)

Made a dorky meme out of a bit joke in a Discord server, which, God does it feel good to go back to the old me, if only for a minute. Nobody reacted to it, probably because it didn't make any sense. Oh well.

Been getting really into sudoku recently, playing two puzzles on a daily basis recently. I don't really know if the bit about sudoku promoting brain health has any factual basis to it, but it's nice to imagine that this works as a form of self-care!

My department manager at work is getting transferred and we're getting a new one. It's a shame, we'd been working together for years now. It's pretty messed up to think you can be in a position of importance and then get dragged into a whole other position like a chess piece without more than a week of notice. I can't say I'm a fan of being at the bottom rung of the ladder but I at least know where my job's going to be tomorrow...maybe I'm a little too covetous of stability for my own good.

Had a lizard take a surprise ride on my car while I was out on my day off! Took me really off guard to see the little thing jump up from my windshield wipers - thank goodness it wasn't raining! I have to admit I hate the thought of animals in my car, like baby kittens hiding under the hood for warmth, but the lizard was getting plenty of sunlight while on the roof. I hope it's doing well now.

I watched #CHADGETSTHEAXE earlier this week, it was a fine slasher, and the ending made my heart hurt. Naturally, that means that it was a successful horror film, but it makes me dwell on dark things. It's common knowledge that being famous just makes you a pariah in the worst way, but we show so much inhumanity to our fellow man. Needless pain and suffering for nothing but a pound of flesh and some stones to throw at someone we barely understood...it made me think of the tragic PioneerProductions case, how his last video before shooting up a supermarket he commented something chilling: "Nobody watching tried to stop me."...it made me want to pick up Schopenhauer to get some clarity on things.

Hope everyone is recovering well after Helene, I look forward to see you all next week!

Hello all! This blog post is a little late this week due to a personal problem called "Hurricane Helene did an outright blitz through my general area and I've been out of power since Friday up until just now." I'm remarkably fortunate in how the storm didn't cause any flooding in my house, but you know, I don't feel terribly fortunate.

There's so much about my life right now that I simply don't want to delve into. Frankly, that would've been the case even if there'd been no storm at all, but it didn't help matters. Well, okay, that's a half-truth - I've been getting to bed early and doing more sketching (read: any) in the absence of any viable internet options. Most of my time on the computer was spent playing Solsuite Solitaire and listening to music...it wasn't bad.

Of course, having power again means I'll have to clean out my fridge, can't say I'm looking forward to that.

Hello everyone! It's good to be back for another week.

So, I'm officially 35 years old! Yep. I'm honestly feeling better about it now that it's here. Studying for that Inherit the Earth writeup has hit a snag, I'm not gonna lie. I'm gassed, and I'm honestly surprised I got any work on the shump this week. Tired tired tired. I don't know. I feel alright but not in a way that plays well in text.

Yeah...short entry this week, not a lot to say. See y'all next time!

Well, gee whiz, it's me again!

So, it's not quite open to the whole website yet, but I've been doing a writeup of Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb as a way of getting more out of the video games I recomment. I'll tell ya, pouring through databases for intel on voice actors for games, even games with a fair amount of information floating around, is grueling. If nothing else, it's giving me a lot of characters from shows I've never heard of to hyperfixate on...it's weird to have been basically glued to cartoons back in 1998 and this week is the first time I've ever heard of Walter Melon. Hopefully I can get that work done before too much longer because I can already feel myself losing steam.

Of course, as a natural consequence of studying a point-and-click adventure game, I finally re-downloaded Adventure Game Studio after a few milquetoast attempts at working with it over the years. I'll keep y'all posted if I make anything cool with it!

I know, I've already got a shump in the pipeline, but the thing is, there's not a lot that inspires me about it and it doesn't play to (what I assume are) my strengths. With AGS, it gives me an opportunity to do a lot more drawing and storytelling and making puzzles than the current project will...but I still gotta work on that game because I promised, and I don't want to be the sort of person who makes excuses any more.

I'm about to be 35 next week. Trying to be positive about it. Not much else I can say. I'll see y'all next week!

Hey, everybody! Edmund here, as per the norm.

I honestly think I may have hit my limit as far as game recs is concerned. I counted it up earlier last night, and that page currently has 123 game recommendations on it. I feel like Skyler White in that one scene in Breaking Bad - "How big does this pile need to get before it's over?" - and the thing is that I've been trying to link up the data I'm collecting in a meaningful way but that meaning has been lost in the shuffle of just constantly looking for new things to recommend. What difference does it make if I can pinpoint a developer as being from Yekaterinburg in Russia if I can't even tell you what that means in terms of how game development takes shape in Russia? Or what Yekaterinburg is like in general?

I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that I don't want to quit doing this thing, but it's got to get more complex and change shape a little bit. I'd already been planning a makeover of the page for 2025 but I'm trying to decide how and where to talk more at length about some of these games. Like, publishers? The nationality and market share of certain publishers will make a crucial difference in what games are coming out of what country, and I'm reasonably certain an abundance of American publishers are the main reason so many games about American war have come out of European devs - but I can't prove it without the data. That's not even getting into game dev initiatives like game jams and No More Sweden and TIGSource and so, so many other factors.

I can't believe I'm going to be 35 soon. I really need to update parts of my life and get some polish into my 5 year plan and such. Even before the car accident in May I was a homebody, but now it's at the point that the idea of driving more than 10 miles out of my way sets my teeth on edge, and it's not healthy. We'll see if I can't negotiate that in a meaningful way.

Alright, that's all I've got this week! Hope the shift into autumn is finding everyone well!

Ah, Labor Day weekend. Nothing quite like a pro-labor holiday while working in retail. Gosh, I'm tired. Anyway, hi!

I saw Longlegs this week! It sent me into a tailspin emotionally, which I assume is the hallmark of a great movie, but it was ultimately just fine? I knew off the bat that it wouldn't be able to live up to the stellar ad campaign on NEON's YouTube, but it's interesting to see what starts as a homage to Se7en gradually reveal itself as a giallo film. Sure, it's a little mean to describe a movie by an American director as an Italian genre, but if you've seen the movie, I'm sure you get what I mean by that.

Honestly, can't say I did much else this week. I gotta see about getting more work done on the shump. I also signed myself up for a Halloween game jam but I earnestly don't think I'm going to end up making that happen. Either way, y'all have a good week!

Hello again! Another week come and gone, hope it's finding you well out there!

Finished TNT Evilution earlier this week, finally - wasn't the tooth-pulling experience it was made out to be but a lot of maps dragged and dragged. Maybe don't sell WADs that people thought were going to be freeware, huh, Romero? At any rate, cruising through Plutonia and I do mean cruising, on map 11 now and I only started last night. I'm honestly considering putting it on the game recs with the other Doom 2 WADs, I'm having that much fun with it.

Speaking of game recs, I've gotten more granular with the 'Country of Origin' statement in a lot of the games released because 1. I really get a kick of making small icons of different maps and seeing them on the website, but 2. it's also a matter of how much difference it makes where in a country a game was developed - take Creepy Castle for instance, it was developed in the US, but it was developed specifically in Alaska, and that's crucial because the cost of living is so much higher, the economy so much more dependant on tourism, that the fact that it barely broke 8k in net revenue over eight years is gut-wrenching. Compare that to something like SLUDGE LIFE, a great game but was also much more successful due likely to the fact that it was made in California. This sort of thing eats at me, because you can clearly trace the kind of inequalities of this industry, from AAA to indies, through the revenue and area it was produced in. That's not even getting into how messy publishing can get, which is a whole other can of worms.

More of a footnote to everything else, but I ended up stumbling upon a very vibrant community of I Wanna Be The Guy fangames that's releasing work as we speak! It's a marvellous thing to witness, and I'm hoping at some point to give some of these titles a spin.

Alright, that's all from me this week! Ciao!

Hope everyone is doing well this week! I'm not chillin' but I'm as close as I can reasonably get at this point in time!

Got a haircut this week for the first time in months. I have a weird relation to hair where I like having long hair and I like how it looks on me, but I simply don't have the ability to maintain it. So, I'm back to short hair again. I've been getting plenty of compliments on it, which I'm taking to mean that the people working around me were a little concerned about my hair for a while. I don't really know what to feel about that.

Well, with the release of Doom + Doom II, the chances of me doing too many more game recs for WADs has gone by the wayside for the time being - I've been playing every day trying to get 100 percent completion and I'm only on map 9 of TNT Evilution, so I'm going to be a while on that.

Intravenous II came out this week! There's going to be a game rec forthcoming once I beat the main campaign but needless to say it's terrific. Roman did a really good job on improving on the first game's accomplishments.

Not to get all mopey again but I feel like...I always make excuses about making things like that webcomic that's been on the wayside for months. Every so often I'll go to Comicfury and look at the numbers of people who are still reading Newheimburg when I feel like I need a dopamine hit, but that's...that's borderline offensive to the past me who put in all that work and toil to make that material happen, you know? I have a real sense of shame about the sort of life I lead, I honestly just need to do better and quit making excuses. It's like, even with this game thing, right? I'm constantly having to bat away this impulse to just stop trying, to stop working on it. The will to surrender is a constant fixture and I don't know if it's as universal as I'd like to assume it is? There's like some kind of deep-seated anti-resolve I need to work with.

Whew! Okay, that's pretty much it from me this week! Have a good rest of the weekend!

Okay, so I feel a tiny bit better overall this week now that a lot of stuff is off of my plate.

The Recommended Games section continues to balloon out of control. I hate to admit it, but it's been constructive for me because I'm actually keeping a spreadsheet of what games to try/cover next, I've got a lineup of what months to cover...it really is helping me feel in control of things in general. I don't know, there's just a certain amount of fear that is removed from my life just by the knowledge that I have this work I'm doing to keep evidence that some of these games even exist up in a modern sense.

Hurricane was thankfully merciful to my part of the world, ground is absolutely sopping wet still but everything held together, no major driving hazards left out there! Sure got hot again pretty fast. >.>

So, depression's still on and will likely be on until at least September or so. I always get like this in the tail end of summer. There's stuff to talk about but it's all really personal and I'm not really feeling it right now. First car payment coming up tomorrow, vet appointment and bi-annual checkup at the doctor this week...adulting, yeah? This is what it's all about.

I need to get better at money management. I've been budgeting just fine but it's not enough. I need to be saving more and I don't know how. There's this education sim on Steam called Timeflow? I feel like that might help. I shouldn't be relying on video games to teach me this stuff, and I know that. So much of my life is bundled up in what's on the computer, even to this day, and I don't know how to feel about it other than to just try to not get discouraged.

I just gotta get my life together and I have less than half a clue what that looks like, you know? I'll see y'all next week <3

Well, the slowing down on the game recs page didn't happen and I ended up putting in like 6 games over the span of the week. I don't get it, I got my vacation out of the way and everything but I'm just as pent up as I was before I left. I don't understand why my expectations were to have anything else happen, the driving alone taxed my senses something fierce. I'm just on the cusp of so many major life changes that I am outright never going to be ready for, and this website is one of the main things going right as of late. I want to stay motivated to get some property but you know how much people want these days just for a lot? And the land that is affordable is part of a subdivision and buying a house on my salary is just out of the question...shit. There's just too much going wrong. How am I supposed to pull through in this country? You used to be able to afford a house even on a wagie's salary. You know?

I apologize. I'm just so discouraged. Evidence suggests I should be more relaxed but emotion-wise, I may as well have not even left the house. So much is happening and I have NO plan! I worked for a decade and it didn't matter! I graduated from college and it didn't matter! No one's mid-30s should find them feeling this insecure.

I dunno. Hopefully next week I'm in a better place mentally but it's not happening this week. Peace out!

Hi, all! My mood is all over the place lately and I feel like it's probably just lack of sleep at this point. It makes more sense than anything else, honestly!

I don't know if this is going to be a hand and fast rule, but I feel like it's about time for me to slow down on the game recs page a little bit - not that I want to stop entirely, but it's kind of gone from 'fun hobby' to 'obvious coping mechanism'. I expend SO much energy recently on getting screenshots and looking up game releases. I actually have an entire spreadsheet listing out a majority of the games available online. I don't mind the work at all, but it's gotten to a point where I'm outright not playing for pleasure anymore as a huge amount of my energy is spent on research. I'm thinking that I'm going to keep my game recs starting from today to once a week at most, because that'll allow me to breathe a little and actually examine some of these games, because my mad dash for games to recommend means I'm not digesting any of the material carefully.

My vacation starts up this week! After some time worrying about what will come of it, I think I'm ready to calm down and embrace whatever happens. I can't tell if it's generalized anxiety or what, but I feel dead certain something bad will happen. I can't tell why other than feeling there's a lot riding on this vacation going well.

So, yeah! Lots of nervous energy I've got pent up. Maybe I'll resolve it, maybe I won't! Anyway, I'll see y'all next week!

Not very happy this week, I'm afraid. I'm trying not to dwell on the election situation because it's all I can do to keep a positive mindset recently. I've been having autistic meltdowns more frequently and over much smaller stuff. I desperately need this vacation coming up :(

Still trying to continue apace on the game recs page which has become a whole project. Of recent note is trying to get back into playing Doom WADs since WADs have some of the longest most storied history in independent game dev right next to Flash. The only major problem is that some WADs are from SO long ago that there's not a reasonable way to access some of these maps without getting a virus, and I've really been trying to make the selection on the webpage as risk-free as possible. Just something I'll need to figure out!

Okay, that's all from me this time! Stay frosty!

So, wanna start off my saying y'all should check out Prophetesque's website, not just because it kicks ass in general but because they've made a game recs page! I always love seeing what people love about games they've played :)

I'm thrilled to say that I'm pretty sure the depression period from the whole car debacle has finally flowed away. I'll be heading out on a vacation soon to visit with family and show off the SUV a bit. No idea what kind of antics and shenanigans I'll get up to but I really am looking forward to a vacay. I don't think about it much but my last vacation was in November, so I've been working for 8 months straight. i truly don't get how I do it sometimes.

I've been switching gears as far as game development is concerned, making a horizontal space shooter in Clickteam. I gotta say, the sheer *ease* of making the initial prototype for that game is astonishing. I truly don't get how the beat-em-up format gave me so much trouble, but it goes to show you don't know what you don't know, and I did not know beat-em-ups. I'm sure I'll go further with this game idea but I also have to make a point of working on it regularly. I get so distracted playing other games!

Speaking of which, the 'mission statement' for the Game Recommendations at this point in time - the golden egg, as it were - is to see if I can't make a recommended game for every month for the respective years that games were out on PC. A really hefty mission, but I do feel like this is giving me a lot to chew on in terms of where we were gaming-wise in certain periods of time, like how David Szymanski was working on a lot of 'walking simulators' around the same time that the style of game was getting scorned, or how several games like Yume Nikki have such a massive reputation that they've spawned a whole subgenre of fangame titles. This isn't even getting into the things I know nothing about, like how Roblox became so vital for a lot of early devs like Zeekeers. I have so much research to do!!

Well, that's all from me this week! Thanks for reading!

Finally decluttered the blog page a little bit, feel a tiny bit better about that. Anyway, hi! I'm gonna keep it sparse this week since I'm feeling pretty low. Currently dogsitting, got a recall on the new car over and done with this week, cortisol is absolutely pounding on the front gate of me and I have no clue why taking care of things isn't resolving it. I think this next month might see a shift in how the dev diary is used, because right now all I see is a sad old enby banging their head on making a beat-em-up enemy when they could just as well make something in RPG Maker and have a little more to show for it. I've been looking at Riggy2k3's YouTube channel and am getting that old spark of inspiration that I missed. Game Recommendations page continues to grow at the detriment of every other part of the site. Feeling really bad considering how blessed I've been when all's said and done.

That's it from me, I think. Hope y'all have a good week!

Hope everyone had a great week! I'm thrilled to report that after a month and a half since the accident, I finally have a car again! An SUV this time! It feels so good to have a set of wheels again, I can't believe how much I missed all these things I'd taken for granted like being able to go into town pretty much whenever I want. I still feel the fear that I'm going to get hit again, but hey! That's no way to live, you know? I'm going to make the most of my new car as much as I can!

That all being said, it's also officially the one year anniversary of the site going live. A lot has changed since I first started this endeavor. I never imagined half of the things I've put on here to be a part of what I'm about - I definitely never expected the Game Recommendations part of the site to balloon up to such a degree that I'm actively seeking out games to look into. It feels good! I feel proud of what I have here :) That said, this site's getting a little heavy in terms of page size, and I'm thinking it's about that time that I start archiving some of this material so that people aren't overwhelmed.

You know, something about the amount of 'adulting' I've been doing recently has me thinking about the number of times I didn't take chances. A weird train of thought given everything else that's happened since May, but...the dev diary was created as a sort of way to gas myself up about making games. I'd always envied people making games, especially when I was young and seeing what people were making with tools I knew about. The thing that grabs me about that time period is it never occured to me to start a TIGSource account and start learning Multimedia Fusion. It never occured to me, you see, because it was the answer to the question of 'how do I become a game dev?' that I never asked because I didn't have the self esteem back then to honestly pursue my hobbies. And now that I have a vehicle again, it makes me realize in a brief moment of clarity just how much of my valuable time had been wasted by worrying about things or deciding things were too hard for me to do. I have to move past this line of thinking somehow.

That's all from me this week! Take care!