I've been rewatching star wars rebels for a few weeks now, kinda just jumping around thru episodes I love and I think I've decided that Trials of the Darksaber is my top favorite ep, at least of season 3. it has everything: Sabine backstory, lightsaber training, ezra being a wholesome little brother, Kanan flexing his teaching skills, Hera being his balance, Fenn Rau being a kinda weird uncle to Sabine, amazing score... I could go on and on. I love watching training montages, and this ep is essentially just that. it functions as filler within the overall storyline of this season, but it resolves the Darksaber thread from visions and voices and showcases how far Kanan has come as a Jedi master, while also sowing the seeds for the Sabine-family-Mandalore arc that takes up the rest of the show. all the subtle details from this ep make me smile: chopper purring when Sabine pets his dome, Sabine kicking Bendu in frustration, the samurai-esque score throughout the training scenes, Hera and Kanan being super married, Hera's little side eye at ezra in the beginning of the ep... this ep I think showcases Kanan and Sabine's father/daughter bond, while not sidelining Ezra and his training. it shows how much Kanan cares to see both of their training through, though he's focusing on Sabine because she is the focus of the episode.
I was on a productivity roll getting grading done, but then I could have kept going but it was making me feel yucky. I was feeling more anxious. Shoulders were tight. My mood shifted and I was feeling more bleh and less calm. I was feeling hungry and more tired.
I realized that I probably needed to stop and do something else. But, then that anxiety part of my brain blared *alert alert alert* “if you stop now, WHO KNOWS WHEN YOU WILL BE PRODUCTIVE EVER AGAIN??!?!!?”.
Then my tool kit kicked in. There was a patently untrue thought. I just kicked ass getting edTPA and my first job interview done in the same insane 3 weekish time frame! I’ve been student teaching full time since January! This break I’ve kept up on some chores. I WILL be productive again.
I shut my notebook and gradetracker thingy my CT gave me. I got up. I ate dinner. Then, I took the rest of the evening off. I focused on doing the dog walk early enough so I would enjoy it too and there would be a liiiiiitle bit of light still. I chatted to my brother about a DnD game I’m participating in tomorrow (first time!). I made my bed. I watched some bullege journal videos on YouTube. I watched some cooking videos. And now I’m blogging!
Quitting was the right choice. I had gotten things done and I wasn’t going to be THAT much more productive if I pushed myself. I would have been exhausted tomorrow and STILL had stuff to do. Instead I had a nice night. I engaged my creative brain a little. I feel a lot better mentally and physically.
Giving myself some time for myself I got thinking about some creative projects. I want to get back to bullet journaling and try out some fun nerdy ways of styling trackers or calendars. I want to do more decopauging to get better at it. I want to try to do more doodling and drawing. I want to read a new book. Just want to continue builing my ladder and taking good care of my mental health :)
been thinking a lot lately about previous friendships and especially that weird early 20s super co-dependant friendship which ended up being so formative for me in terms of how i draw boundaries with people now. i think about this former friend in fond ways but i don’t think i would ever want to re-open those doors at all.
it was not healthy. i had this one friend who, eventually became someone who constantly demanded so much of my time. talking every day or spending time with me each week. i became very empathetic about it because they had some serious mental health problems (and i’m not trying to place the blame there please don’t misunderstand). i was trying to be a good friend, made time for her etc…but i lost so many hours of sleep and free time - important time too, i was in university and working three jobs! - just to attend to her
but, it’s just not healthy at all to base your idea happiness around another person, or even an object or maybe even a piece of media you enjoy etc. sorry if that’s harsh or pessimistic but there’s definitely a dangerous side to it, where, if one day you cannot get that same fulfilment from any of them, you will spiral very very fast. and that’s not good, because you can’t place all your burdens on someone or something like that
instead i just felt smothered because if i didn’t spend time with her, she would spiral into these periods of suicidal ideation, her depression would worsen etc and i felt really scared and guilty. i put up with it because i needed some sort of validation and reassurance that i can be good to someone else. or this weird feeling that i wouldn’t find another friend i connect with which wasn’t the case at all - back then, i had many wonderful friends and now even more so. i don’t need that now anymore, thankfully.
I feel like I could say some things about TotK and my experience with it. I can't guarantee it'll all be positive! It'll be very conditional.
So.
Rauru is not as compelling or charming a character as King Rhoam was. I wish he just flat-out wasn't in the tutorial at all, that the player was running blind, loosely guided by the local robots. Rauru screws with... so much??? He gave me a weird first impression of the game's story that never went away. Maybe I just... really don't like the character design. The design of the Zonai are way too... busy for me to get comfortable with, and yet way too cutesy animal for me to get "comfortably" uncomfortable with. They're not creepy or ominous, they don't inspire awe in me. They're like... Dragon Tales characters. Maybe we needed an entire Zonai game before this one, to accustom me to them. This game, with its whopping two Zonai in it, could not make them charming to me by itself. That was a tall order for its story.
alSO IT DOES RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE TIMELINE AND I HAPPEN TO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THAT, I like knowing the loose context of Zelda games as I'm playing them, that gives the objectives weight for me!
Positively, I like that there's a new Temple Of Time up in the sky. I like that one can interpret, from that, the reason the old Temple Of Time changes location between Ocarina and BotW-- it could have gone up in the sky and moved, for all we know. That's an acceptable answer, an acceptable "maybe," and the game presented it how it needed to: not even presenting it, I just took a guess. That works. That's good. That is the narrative equivalent of the intuitive open-world gameplay. That is what "narrative interpretation as a gameplay element" looks like, and that is how fucking easy it is to include in a game-- you don't need to do anything special for it, you just need to leave space for the player to guess on their own.
But the negatives for this game, at least with my experience of this game, can be symbolized in a little example: On the top of the Temple Of Time, a glowing green light catches your attention. You figure out a way up there, and you meet a little robot guy. He offers a challenge, and his reward is "a Long Story" giving context for the Great Sky Islands. The challenge was not particularly hard, I actually had a lot more fun with it than I expected, but in the end, that "Long Story" was.... "these Islands were once on the ground below. then they raised into the air." It took, like, ten dialogue boxes to convey that information, and then that was it, he was done telling me the story. I. Felt a palpable disappointment then, and that disappointment stayed with me through the end of the game.
This is not a game that rewards you. Its most rewarding discoveries are just.. more game, more challenges, more narrative around these challenges (and "side quest dialogue" still counts as narrative, it is Controlled Dialogue that frames objectives in gameplay), and it's that narrative addition that throws me off, that is the reason why BotW was a much more unambiguously fulfilling experience for me by not having as much of it: the narrative addition makes me think it is building to something. It is not.
Here's another example, to illustrate that one another way: I spent a long time in this game seeking out the highest possible land. It took me a long time to identify the contenders for that, and an even longer time to figure out how to access the tallest bits. One tall bit seemed really promising: you get to the bottom of these floating islands and have to just start climbing, climbing, climbing, a lot of climbing. I loved this. This was clearly building to something. And even if it wasn't, if it was just a simple platform up there with nothing to do, that'd almost be better, that's a clear gameplay end-point, that's subtle and lets me decide! Hell yeah! Let's do this! Climb up the island! ...anyway, at the top was certainly a great view, that was what I wanted, but in looking over the edge I couldn't help but notice the entire path up here looks different from the top: it's a diving challenge. gotta dive and dodge all these platforms you climbed up, and land in water. and down there is a shrine, and a little robot dude who lets you keep doing that jump over and over to try and do it under fast time limits. I did all that. Because I had may as well. And then I just.. moved on to the next shrine I hadn't done yet, the next cave, the next Lightroot in the Depths, the next Abandoned Mine, the next sidequest...
Like!!! That was a mighty climbing challenge I undertook purely because I wanted to! And then I find out it's not good enough, there's gotta be more challenge after, challenge that brings you right back down, like the game is telling you "yes yes, you found your own joy, you got up in the sky, now come back down and do what we want you to do."
Like, jesus. I did the story, I do the sidequests, I fill out the map, I do what the game wants me to do, now just, let me carve out my own space sometimes!
...anyway, more stuff:
Positively, as much as I was sick of the blood moon by the second time it happened in BotW, I actually am more patient with it now, and it's almost entirely because Zelda's voice actress was given different direction this time, the cutscene is different and her voice is far more evocative and mysterious.
Have I mentioned yet that Zelda was my least-favourite part of BotW? And that I was worried, going into this one, that she'd have more of a role this time? Thankfully I actually liked her this time. She's not just introduced as "you automatically like her," she's got character, she has a range of emotions, she is lost in the world much like you are. I thought it was ridiculously bold that the plot, uh, went a specific direction with her. I was... a little disappointed that the ending undid it, but I mean, I get it, ultimately this game's a Blockbuster more than it is a Story, it's gotta have the Blockbuster ending, and it was executed almost perfectly. (..........they faded out the visuals way too suddenly and multiple seconds before the music did its tasteful fade-out, right at the very end. that's the worst I can say about the ending. so, good job.)
What else. What else.
Ganondorf, awesome boss fight. No complaints from me. He was not the hardest boss fight. I am baffled that the hardest boss fight was, like, halfway through the game. Queen Gibdo. Her. That one. That was the hardest by a lot. It's downright funny to me. Just this... big difficulty spike, halfway through the game, then the rest of the game goes right back down to appropriate levels. And in the end, I actually dug the Queen Gibdo fight. I beat her purely by learning her, and making choices about what to focus on, and steeling my reflexes for a potentially long fight. That was a great fight, and I hated it, and I have respect for it. I wouldn't mind, nor be surprised, if that fight gets nerfed in a patch. I just... I don't play video games for the difficulty, evidently. I don't get fulfillment out of that, I don't get a rewarding rush or anything like that.
Dungeons! The Goron dungeon was a lot more involved, navigation-wise, than all the others. Took me hours. And I simply did not have good weapons for the boss, that took me a long time too. And the Construct Factory was just torture. I had to cheese a lot of the puzzles, and no I'm not proud of that. At least the boss was easy and fun. BUT, every single other dungeon was immaculate. I had a blast. Wind Temple, fucking epic, incredible first impression. Water Temple, somehow, was my absolute favourite, I had the best time with that. And the Lightning Temple, I hated it at first, but ultimately I loved figuring out how to progress! Hyrule Castle was wild too, I liked the sheer navigational challenge of "how the hell do I get to my next objective???"
..uh, what else. I love the new labyrinths. The Depths blow my mind. I like navigating, I don't care so much about inventing and building stuff, I just like working out where and how to go. And then soaking in the atmosphere on the way.
I. god. I do love so much about this damn game. My complaints are all I can remember when I'm not playing it; I have to be reminded of the joys.
I still have more things to find, more locations to check out, more locations I actively want to check out, am curious about. So there's still time for me to stumble on something that, I dunno, "feels" like a better "reward" for me. Give me a really good vista to look at, that's really hard to find, and that has nothing interactable in there. And, please, give me an idea of how the fuck the Zonai actually lived in their day-to-day???
(...and, please please, just pick a damn timeline for these games, please don't make a Whole New One, we've got plenty and we've already had all this time to have to get used to them, so by now we have gotten used to them. there are ways to make it all fit. "there's more than one Ganondorf," for instance. or "this Ganondorf may not have specifically known Link, but he knew of a previous Hero, (because previous Zelda games let you name your Hero, so maybe only BotW-Hero is Link, canonically)". those would work.
(and. and while I'm at it, please, just un-tie Ocarina from its crucial position in the timeline. it doesn't need to be there. I get it, it's super cool to have this whole twist of "there's a timeline where you fail Ocarina!!!" but. if we're gonna go that route, why not say there's a timeline for failing EVERY game? it's not necessary to give one game special treatment on that. it actually makes things more complicated. nintendo, if you really want to "free up the story for future games," you can do that, don't go halfway! don't even think of these as "timelines," why not call them, like... "Legends?" there's a call for that! they're all stories, tied together in greater Legends of Zelda!)
......ragh.
ramble spontaneously over. my opinion will continue to change. I'm probably really just... in post-game exhaustion.
This is not, strictly agere content so I won’t be tagging it with things that will extent the reach of this blog.
But, I wanted to share the characters I mentioned in the sidekick regressor flag set.
OC Post
Meet Carmilen and Drop, Carmilen is the small rabbit (pixie) and Drop is the blue dude (water elemental). They are the main villains of my story, Carmilen is Drop’s sidekick and is a age regressor! Drop acts as her caregiver and actual father as he adopted her, they have been working together ever since he first found her and took her in.
Drop is a family man first before anything, so he prioritizes Carmilen’s well being before anything. So times even if the plan is nearly done and though he will stop if she where to get hurt or is in distress. Drop use to have a family but ended up losing them and is still is in search of his family now with another child under his wing. I’d love to explain more about this story but since it isn’t all related around Age Regression and frankly since these two aren’t the main characters there isn’t much else I’ll be doing with them outside this post and maybe some art with them, well unless people want more lol.
As some of you know, I recently broke my foot and as a result of that, I was on crutches for a little over a week.
That brought up A LOOOOOOOOT of shitty feelings for me because I’m incredibly bad at asking for help. I like to think I’ve gotten better over the past few years, recognizing when things weren’t possible for me to do (or do alone) or when it made more sense to attempt to do things with help. But I still fucking HATE needing to rely on other people for anything. I suspect this is due in part to me growing up in an environment where the only adult who was consistently home was emotionally abusive. It’s DEFINITELY due in part to me having had a string of partners who built up this image of themselves as someone who would always be there - until they suddenly weren’t.
I’ve spent the vast majority of the last fourteen years taking care of my own needs - both the physical and emotional ones. It hasn’t been fun. It fucking sucks to need to always need to get myself out of bed, feed myself two-three meals a day (thankfully often two in my current living situation thankfully), zip myself into dresses with high zippers, find ways to self-soothe, take myself to the movies, use the MBTA or walk much more often than not, etc. etc. A lot of people realize that I’m single, but I feel like most folks seem to miss the broader implications of that. Most people I know have a live-in de facto helper. I don’t.
Yes, I got rides to and from urgent care. Yes, I have lovely housemates who helped me down the stairs and made me food and (in one case) literally picked me up twice. But I also had Reese’s Pieces for breakfast most of those days in the week when I had crutches and was way underhydrated because other people weren’t up yet or they had work.
When my dad died there a lot of nights in which “lunch” or “dinner” was composed of snacks I had in my room because I didn’t have the spoons to both figure out what to feed myself and subsequently make it. I also didn’t have the spoons to say “Hey, [person] can you make me some actual food please?” When I was grieving, I had to take care of myself. When I’m having a bad time, I have to deal with it myself. When I’m sick, I have to deal with it. When I have to get somewhere, I have to figure out how to get myself there. I am my own primary caretaker. And secondary caretaker. All of the time. Every fucking day. It’s exhausting.
Now I don’t expect people to be at my beck and call all the time. That’s not at all a fair expectation. I understand that everyone has their own lives and their own people for whom they are a primary caretaker. I’m not angry when people can’t help me. I am, however, irritated when people who can’t help me with things later turn around and respond to me making a statement like the ones I’ve just made with “But I’ll always be there” or “You’re not alone” or things like that.
You can’t positive thinking your way out of the fact that I sometimes do need to do things myself and it fucking SUCKS. Sometimes saying sweet things about how you’ll always be there for me end up sounding dismissive because there will be times when you cannot, in fact, be there. Because of work, because of illness, because you’re in a different state than me - I’m not mad about that. I just wish people would sit with me in the fact that that’s an actual, factual thing and not just “Oh, Nikki’s being pessimistic again.”
How do you think AEW can fix their women's division to be on par with the men?
The main thing I would focus on is AEW making sure they get the right people in and use the right people more often.
I do think Mia Yim, Nixon Newell, Athena and even Taya (but i think shes going to TNA full time which is her choice) really do need to get picked up in AEW, but at the same time you don't want to debut them all too quickly, but you do need them and you also need NEED Lufisto in there.
Also aswell I do think people need to stop pressuring the women to have good matches, to be "as good as the men" or whatever, theres an intense amount of pressure on women who have had maybe 30 televised matches, it really does take time.
I agree that AEW's women division needs more but I also do think that alot of people really don't understand that these women are learning on the job.
Thunder Rosa, Serena Deeb, Kris Statlander, Ruby Soho, Hikaru Shida, Riho, Nyla Rose, Toni Storm, Emi Sakura and Jamie Hayter are really hte only women that are under AEW contract right now that I would consider good workers and that should be on TV consistantly, and yes Britt and Jade is not in that list.
Am I saying they should be relegated to ROH? In the nicest possible way yes, and thats all they need, just ring time, you can still showcase Jade (or Britt) on Rampage and personally out of the two i think Jade should be the only insanely green woman booked because of her looks alone and keep Britt either in tag teams or just on top at ROH, but literally it is just ring time.
People need to also stop worrying so much, I get it, women's wrestling has been treated like shit but you really don't need to panic this hard, ALSO GET THE JOSHIS IN NOW.
This year has beyond awful. Not just as a whole, but on a personal level. I have a friend going to jail and I'm happy, but feel awful for his family, a friend who just had a stroke (leaving her husband to have to take leave from his two jobs to watch their three kids), I lost my job, my husband couldn't find a better job, my mother is barely talking to me, I'm not talking to my husband's family. I really don't feel like this year could have gone much worse without going Greek tragedy. So fuck it. The time for hand wringing is over. I vow to take 2017 by storm, kick ass, volunteer, (hopefully) move. And the first step is something I've wanted to do for years. I've gotten permission from both my jobs. I'm going back to purple. Come and it get me 2017. I got my war paint.
