life updates

Not a lot has been going on this month. We have continued to set up our new place and solve problems as they arise but most of my time outside of work just relaxing. I've played games a lot this month and read a bit.

During the first half of the month I was having pretty bad allergy symptoms that seemed to be caused by our new bathroom. Additionally our dryer is awful and takes two to three hours to dry a single load. The allergies seemed to mostly go away after my partner cleaned the bathroom again (she is still doing a lot to keep the place clean while I am at work) but I still don't know what could have caused them. I was extremely stressed for about two weeks thinking it must be some sort of mold but I'm hoping it going away after cleaning means it was dust or something less harmful. We had the dryer looked at two separate times but apparently nothing is wrong and I just need to get used to laundry taking most of the day.

I haven't found the time to do a deep clean to actually check for any potential bathroom mold, or frankly even tried to find the time. I know I am having a really lazy summer but I think with how busy I have been I shouldn't feel too bad about it and focus on actually relaxing. That has been a lot easier this month, or at least for the past few weeks, and I actually feel comfortable and relaxed for the first time in a while. I am putting actual effort into not being as negative as I have been the past year and that's helping, though there are still days where I get angry and annoyed too easily.

figure packing

I've been slowly clearing my figures out of my previous room. Every weekend I go back and spend an hour or two packing them up. For now I plan to just put them all in storage aside from some of my favorites, but I don't really even know where I would put the ones I'd bring over. It feels weird to see all these things that I loved so much just a few years ago yet now don't know what to do with. They still make me really happy and if I felt I could get back into figure collecting I would but it just takes too much energy and money from me.

I don't really know what I'll end up doing. Maybe in a few years I'll stable enough financially and living-situation-wise that I can unpack all of them and look back at all the pretty figures I missed the past few years but even if that happens I don't think I ever really want my collection to grow as big as it is now. I would prefer a smaller more manageable shelf with only my absolute favorite designs and probably limited to just scales. I large part of my stress with such a big collection was having so much little merch scattered around and prize figures that just crowded shelves. When I finish packing all of it up I'll add a picture of the stack of figure boxes here.

I occasionally see new figure releases that I really like. There were Mesmerizer Nendoroids announced, and of course the project voltage figure I loved...It really is upsetting that my old hobby is just a source of stress now. I would like to keep up with figure releases but it just feels like so much to pay attention to. I wish I could still be on MFC or sign up for TOM or GSC email notifications again but it just does something to my mind. It's just too much to think about.

what ive been playing

Most of my free time this month was dedicated to playing Fantasy Life, an RPG on the 3DS that I absolutely loved as a kid. Replaying it now I can pretty confidently say that it is one of my all time favorite games. I really love the vibe of the world and how much there is in what feels like a pretty compact package, though it has a pretty big world for a 3DS game.

The main reason I love this game is that there is just so much to do. I am a sucker for games that emphasize a completionist mindset. There are twelve different Lives (essentially jobs ie blacksmith, miner, mercenary) that each have their own set skills you can level up that help you complete more of their Life specific quests which help you rank up that Life to unlock more quests and so on. All the quests encourage you to explore the world deeply and there are satisfying loops you get into where resource gathering and combat Lives help get better resources for crafting Lives which help make better tools and weapons for the resource gathering and combat lives which allows you to find better resources.

I've been working simultaneously on completing the life quests and going through the main story, alternating between doing a story quest and ranking up each Life which for the most part keeps a good pace of introducing a new area in the story then heavily exploring that area to do quests. Right now I am in the process ranking up all my lives to "Master" (third to last basegame rank) through quests mostly in the desert area. The story and writing are both super cute and silly without much tension or drama which leads it to being mostly about how easy things are when everyone gets along and how easy it is to get along with everyone. Real feel good stuff. Despite how simple it is a lot of the characters and story moments are ingrained into my brain. I love the world, Reveria, and absolutely adore one specific character, Yuelia. It's a similar vibe to how I and many other people feel about Wuhu Island, like its an actual place I grew up in. There are so many little details I remember so strongly. One specific cutscene, which showed all the leaders of the world right after your first quest before you went around to meet them, had a hold on me as a kid and I ended up watching it over and over again. I feel it is one of the best cutscenes in any game ever but when I showed it to my partner she laughed at what was supposed to be a big reveal. It was devastating.

I love Yuelia. She reminds me of a bunny in one cutscene. She is really funny and too honest and rude a lot of the time but for the most part she tries to be nice.

An important thing to know about my history playing games is that as a kid I was absolutely terrible at them. Up until I was in my mid teens it was rare that I would ever get halfway through a game before being too confused or unskilled to continue and just resetting to the beginning. Fantasy Life was probably one of the first more complicated games I ever beat and even that took me years. I remember going through the first story mission and starting each Life maybe half a dozen or so times before I finally realized that you had to do certain quests before being able to unlock the next story section, and even more resets on top of that to realize the quests were all listed and I didn't have to just run around everywhere hoping I stumble across them.

Because of that, despite having played the game heavily as a kid there is so much more for me to do now that I understand that each Life has there own questline and that I can actually rank each of them up and make better tools to get strong enough to explore areas I could only run through as a kid. It feels like I saw less than 10% of the game despite loving it so much, making this new playthrough akin to experiencing a favorite piece of media for the first time again. Additionally even when I finish the main game there is a DLC with a new area and an additional few ranks for each Life that I never got to as a kid due to having to be at a high level to start. I vividly remember begging my mom for the DLC then being devastated seeing what felt like an impossibly high bar to clear just to get into it. I think that was before I ever even finished the base game. Once I complete the base game I will avenge my mother's purchase all those years ago.

There is actually a new Fantasy Life released over a decade after the first called "Fantasy Life i" that I have which I plan to play as soon as I complete the original. I played it for a few hours when I first got it but decided to go back to the original after remembering how little I actually saw of it. I remember it being revealed in a Nintendo Direct a long time before it actually came out. A few friends of mine gathered together to watch the Direct live and I got pretty excited when I saw it, of course I was the only person there that actually recognized the series. From my impressions of my brief time playing it seems to do a lot similar to the original, giving the player absolutely loads to do, but it lacks a lot of the charm the original has. The artstyle is basically just an upscaled version of the original's but as always HD doesn't seem to mean better and the characters seem to have less personality then they did when you had to imagine and project facial expressions and detail onto them. The world itself is a similar story and the ability to see and go anywhere makes the world seem lifeless and sparse in a lot of ways. Additionally some "quality of life" gameplay changes make me annoyed because they remove a lot of meaningful decisions you had to make in the original. Still, I really am sure I will love it and am really looking forward to restarting it even if it seems like I have a lot of complaints. I'm excited at the prospect of seeing Yuelia again as you can add past Fantasy Life characters to your party. I wish more games wouldn't lean so hard into HD visuals. Lots of indie games use low poly or similar artistic directions and have tons of character. My ideal fantasy life sequel would follow a similar style to the original just in higher resolution.

There was actually ANOTHER Fantasy Life game that I didn't even know about until recently: "Fantasy Life Online." It was a mobile game that ran from 2021 to 2023 and oh my god do I wish I could play it. I haven't looked into it much but it seems like a fairly standard pretty predatory phone game still oh my god I can't believe I missed it. It had a focus on building up your own village of Fantasy Life characters which would be wonderful. I love these characters so much and would definitely want to carry them around in my pocket all day. Very sad I can't play this game. I wish more people prioritized game preservation. When the Animal Crossing mobile game shut down they released a "complete" version with no micro transactions where you can essentially play through every aspect of the game on your own. Something like that for FLO would be nice. Maybe I'll look into if there is some way to host the game for myself but I would have no idea where to even begin with that. This is so sad its such a sad thing. There is more Fantasy Life out there that I will never experience.

I at least hope Level-5, the company behind the series, continues to make more console games. They made loads of great games (Fantasy Life, Professor Layton, I'm sure more that I never got a chance to play such as Ni No Kuni) but from what I heard pivoted to making predatory phone games and just recently have started releasing things for console again. I hope they end up being as good as their previous games.

Splatoon Raiders came out late this month. I am a big Splatoon fan, especially the singleplayer campaigns, so I was really excited for it. I am still playing through the post game and am around level 50+15 right now. Clearing the post game raids is a bit difficult as getting stronger is a slow process at this point but its nice to have a new grindy game to play in the background while watching stuff.

The gameplay is fun and I don't really have any complaints there. The story is ok but I felt it lacked a lot of what I was really excited for, aside from having dozens of thing to try to collect. It was nice to see "deeper" Salmonid lore in game finally. I really liked the artifact descriptions being written from a perspective that clearly looked down on Salmonid, assuming they are primitive and thus completely missing the obvious function, and thought that was great world building. Additionally the new background we got on the Salmonid and the new area was great. That said there was a massive elephant in the room the entire time.

The Salmonid as a species have been mistreated every single game they are in. It is a really interesting dynamic and interesting world building and it adds so much to the world of Splatoon and on its own I think it is a great addition to the story but there is a point where it goes too far and that point was Splatoon 3 when it was clear that the actions of Grizzco were having a big impact on the Salmonid population. I figured we were due for a Salmonid truce or mutual understanding story and a full game focused on the Salmonid seemed like the perfect place to do it. Instead we got a story about going into a Salmonid population and stealing all their native artifacts to sell all while killing any Salmonid that got in our way. To me this is tasteless. This is a thing that happened countless times throughout history to real people who's cultures were destroyed. This is a game about colonization and imperialism and it's celebrated and not at all addressed as a bad thing. Again I love the relationship between the Salmonid and other species as a world building concept and think it is a boon to the world of Splatoon and I don't even expect for there to ever be a clear resolution with Salmon Run likely never being replaced (I personally hope one day it will be reskinned or something, or a completely new co-op mode will be created, too much to ask probably) but like this is way too far. It's ridiculous. Maybe it is just going over my head and it's supposed to have that undertone and is clearly leading to a future story where there is some understanding.

It makes me have such conflicting views on the game as I think it is fun and the characters and surface level story are great but then there is this thing. The elephant. I don't know maybe I'm too woke. I definitely don't have enough knowledge to say something intelligent about this but also isn't the art the Salmonid make clearly based on Native American art what is up with that. If this is how they want the Salmonid to continue to be treated in the future why did they do that. I feel like there was a minor attempt or at least suggestion in the game along the lines of retconning Salmonid culture lore where it was implied they were actually advanced way back in the past and now they are just mindless beasts and honestly I would almost prefer they continue in that direction to this. Not that it would really work as we know they can still make complex machines. I don't know. Who knows. I don't think any form of trying to make the Inkfish more victim-like or trying to make the conflict more even will work because any amount of retaliation seems justified after this. Like am I supposed to feel angry that Big Runs have become more common or that in the past Salmonid attacked Inkfish settlements because I don't.

what ive been reading

For a long while now I haven't been reading as much as I typically would. Books are really expensive compared to the other things I like to spend my free time on so just haven't had any new books to read. To be fair I read a lot of comics which are much more expensive price-to-time wise than novels but still if a $20 novel is really good it may only take me a few days to read whereas most games I get I spend at least dozens of hours on and replay pretty often. I know price-to-time isn't the best measure of a thing's worth but I've been trying to keep it in mind since we aren't very financially secure. I wanted to take advantage of the local library but they never seem to have the books I want and there is some part of me that demands I own everything I like.

Recently (as in a few months ago) I read Project Hail Mary and absolutely loved it so I had been wanting The Martian but didn't ever end up getting it due to the cost. We have also looking for Blindsight by Peter Watts but couldn't find it anywhere. This month I was given a copy of The Martian as a gift and read it over the span of a few days. I think it is a lot worse that Project Hail Mary. We also rewatched the movie and I thought it had some weird moments in it, like how it made a big deal about one of the only female characters not knowing what the Counsel of Elrond was and how she was treated as a nuisance anytime she was on screen. It just had a vibe to it like it was written by a stereotypical mid 2010's nerd getting revenge on the popular kids. I don't really know how to explain it without just showing the scene. My partner and I joke a lot about how it is important for STEM people to have basic education in Humanities because if not they wont value the importance and difficulty of communication and interacting with other people. This movie, and to a lesser extent the book, felt like it was written by a STEM person who undervalues Humanities, and thus made "SCIENCE!!!" the solution to everything and the PR person a punching bag. Not a super prevalent complaint but just a vibe throughout. To be completely honest I recently learned that the author is a bit of a "tech bro" type of person and that may just be influencing my perspective.

While we were at the store where I was gifted The Martian, my partner got the book Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky on a whim. She read it pretty quickly and said it was one of the best books she has ever read. I finished it a few days afterwards and completely agree and highly recommend it. I don't really want to talk about the plot too much because it does something really cool and unique and I don't want to risk spoiling it for whoever reads this. Essentially it's about two people crashing on an extremely inhospitable planet and trying to make their way off. It was really well written and had an extremely interesting setting. Definitely one of my all time favorites now.

what ive been watching

We watch a whole lot of YouTube. I know it isn't the most valuable way to spend time but most days I just let our shared Watch Later play all day in the background while we either read or play games. We have been really into Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities and a guy called Mahjong Blonsky who posts gameplay of old Minecraft versions and a game called Vintage Story which could be reductively called a more complex version of Minecraft. I really like him as he is low energy and just comes across as a fairly normal person posting videos because he actually enjoys it. I have also been getting back into BdoubleO. Overall it is mostly just something to have on in the background but it still isn't a great vibe that it was essentially the main thing we did in our free time this month.

Other than that we watched a few movies this month, I mentioned The Martian already but we also watched the new He-Man (I am a moderate fan of He-Man and spent the whole time complaining about Orko not being there) which wasn't that good and Micky 17 which also wasn't that good. I've also been watching a bunch of Marvel movies just to have something brainless to put on at work which also aren't very good. Not a lot of good watching this month but we recently started a rewatch of The Last Airbender and will watch the new movie afterwards. I am a little excited for it, but I don't really get as excited for the series as I used to. My partner hasn't seen the Legend of Korra so we might watch that too.

conclusion

This month has mostly been nice. I feel like I am pretty much fully adjusted to the new place and don't feel as stressed as I have been. I am enjoying the ways I have been spending my time but I think it would be a good idea to have a project to work on besides completing games. I wanted to make a site for my partner and update this one a bit more so maybe I'll try to do that if I feel like it. I also want to continue to get back in the habit of writing every day, as I still just do short catch up writing most days. There are only a few more weeks until I am flooded with coursework again so I am not looking forward to that.

I hope everyone is having a good summer. Thank you for reading.