sometimes you just have to game

[serpentinemalign]

sorry i haven't been commenting much. i have been reading your posts, though! my rss reader extension is very good for keeping caught up. i send my love and hope you are all doing alright today. <3

for me, these past few weeks have been in something of a creative and fandomy drought. i am getting occasional ideas and write them down when they occur, but very little big labours. this may shape up to be a problem, given Big Opportunity im applying for later in the year which requires me to... finish some projects. but i guess i'll give myself until september, when creativeclash starts anyway and i will simply have to draw things.

despite my drought, i managed to get into my first zine with an original comic! that was super exciting. <3 i want to submit to more, i think. but i will need more actual comics to do that with.

but yeah... this month i've mostly been playing rhythm games.

oddly, i think the main shift was blocking social media on my phone. suddenly i needed something that occupied the time. as with last month i'm slowly working my way through full comboing everything in cytus 2. i also picked up djmax respect v in the steam sale and i LOVE it. i'm so shocked. i thought i hated keyboard-based vertical scrolling games (by contrast i love ddr because... it's ddr. but i don't like playing it NOT on a dance pad). turns out i just needed a game with STYLE and a good, easily navigable catalog. still, since playing on laptop keys is not ideal, i am contemplating investing in a k28 controller which would be a bit more portable than one of my full size keyboards. plus it would work with my rhythm games on switch and ps4, and make it much easier to play games that require keys when i eventually get a steam deck.

i always feel a little silly relying on other people and companies to build all my hardware, when i put so much effort into coding little automations and customisations and disconnecting as much as possible from unstable web services. like i know tons of people are like "build your own keyboard/controller! build your own pc!" but like i only have so much time to learn how to do these things, and i am not even particularly interested in doing these things myself. i gotta draw the line somewhere and dont mind paying someone to do it right, vs trial and erroring my way towards a possibly faulty product

on vacation, i got to play maimai (aka the washing machine game) for the first time. it is wonderful, such a fun and tactile experience. i'm considering making the trip to the arcade that has it more frequently, though it is quite a trek from where i live lol. maybe another thing yelling at me to learn to drive, which would make the journey a lot less intimidating.

since i'm not feeling making my OWN stuff, maybe this is the point where i start making TV supercuts for fics i want to write. i find myself struggling to remember character details and mannerisms... previously i latched onto specific lines of dialogue or 'best of' compilations. but, not liking to do things by halves, what i do these days is i take the source and literally just splice all their scenes into one giant movie-length amalgamation. and that tends to help a lot. i'm specifically thinking, for my office US fancomic, i will need cuts for robert (my beloved!), ryan, and gabe.

speaking of robert, i discovered that ultron was played by james spader, as he will be reprising the role in a future movie? i am very excited about this, despite not caring particularly about MCU. i guess i just didnt know who he was when age of ultron came out. i never watched past the first avengers movie... i did watch doctor strange because some friends dragged me to it lol. but that's it. anyway, partner and i watched the two deadpools and the wolverine, in prep for seeing deadpool and wolverine tomorrow. i had a lot of fun with the deadpools (though the second is worse and fucks a lot with characterisation, particularly of deadpool himself)... less with the wolverine. the action sequences were VERY good, but being a hollywood movie set mostly in japan, it felt predictable and uncomfortably stereotypical. anyway, i came out of watching those movies thinking shit, i need to read some deadpool. i'm long overdue it, and one of my favourite comic writers (gail simone) has a run on deadpool, so it's gotta happen. i think we're also gonna go through the x-men movies... should be good, bad and ugly. i like x-men better than mcu, from what i've seen, though i guess deadpool vs wolverine is technically MCU? confusing. anyhow.

i've been watching lots of movies! while i was on vacation i managed to watch 5, just from streaming and catching whatever was on TV and going to cool cinemas. i am often fatigued by choice and the possibility of picking a bad movie. but... actually, most movies are ok. similarly to music and books actually. watching ok things is not a bad thing, it just means i learned a bit more about my tastes, and what DIDN'T make me feral. movies are also wonderful because they are not a huge commitment like a tv show. today i watched a history of violence, which fucked hard tbh. i didn't realise it was a cronenberg... he is shaping up to be one of my favourite directors. he is SO consistently good. i'd like to pick up the comic of this movie, as well.

thats about it! it's been kind of nice to just. take the pressure off a little. equally, i often feel like i accumulate a backlog that is aching to get out in a creative form, and that makes me panic a little. it feels like, sometimes, i have to exhaust myself just to stop myself doing anything stupid or self-destructive. but i am hoping to get more stable with time, and be able to continue filling my time with things that are meaningful to me. i realised today that what i dismissed as a 'time wasting' month was probably very necessary after recovering from illness. but even if it wasn't, i deserved that time to rest, and the things i chose to do, i enjoyed very much.