welcome thatoddhaystack shareholders to another irregularly scheduled life update. one of the youtubers I watch regularly (john wolfe) puts out update videos for his secondary channel titled shareholder meeting and I thought it was really funny. so now I keep saying it for my update purposes. anyways. where have I been and what have I been doing.
gaming
I completed the latest ffxiv expansion, dawntrail! for those not familiar with my wol (tau's) lore, I decided that for dawntrail I would have tau's esteem take the wheel while tau themselves spends the expansion sleeping. up until probably post endwalker patches, I had been adhering pretty strictly to the storyline as it plays in game for tau's timeline, but after the events of endwalker I realized tau was not going to be goaded into a new expansion and new adventure easily. or at all. I had written the endwalker patches as being played out by tau's friends and light party members, but felt like I needed to bring tau back into the fold in some way... I leveled dark knight over the course of the patches and felt like letting esteem take over (eg, pilot tau's body) was the right thing to do. through the course of dawntrail I felt myself wanting to flesh out esteem more which will be fun to do whenever I can sit down and update the huge messy lore doc for the Tauniverse (tm)
overall I did enjoy dawntrail! I won't say it's my favorite expansion because endwalker left such a big impression on my psyche that I think it will be hard to beat, but it was fun. wuk lamat was a really fun contrast to play against esteem, who I portrayed as being lukewarm about anything happening around them at best. they're here to collect a paycheck, but some of wuk lamat's enthusiam might have rubbed off on them... I can't say much about the expansion because of spoilers, but there's definetely some endgame stuff I'm going to enjoy making fucked up and evil things out of (only tangentially related to the expansion in general). I played dark knight throughout all of it because I told myself I wanted to tank hard content this expansion and I was going to push through my tanking anxiety. turns out at least in casual content no one cares if you aren't playing perfectly. big shocker i'm sure. I haven't actually dipped into any of the new extremes yet purely because I've been taking a break from ffxiv after playing it pretty much every day for a week straight to get through the MSQ. also because I want to set up spreadsheets and pages in my planner for this expansion LOL.
I stopped playing honkai star rail for the time being since ffxiv took all of my attention. I did catch up with the main story for the time being. and accidentally got e1 firefly while attempting to get gallagher... I shelled out the jades to get e2 firefly and then stopped. I'm not entirely excited about getting into the harder content in hsr... the timegating involved in leveling up your units makes me so disinterested in actually doing it since in a game like ffxiv or gbf I could knock out that kind of grind in an afternoon if I really wanted to. I'll come back to the game at some point, especially since there's a lot of little secrets and treasures I have yet to shake out, but I don't know if I'll ever try hard for the endgame content.
new york (and other excursions)
I took a brief vacation to new york city at the beginning of july to visit my mom! and her cat. and the city in general. I ate so much food and walked until my feet fell off and spent a lot of money. in my defense I only bought a small amount of stationary items this time around and they were mostly from daiso so they were inexpensive. I did buy volumes one and two of the guy she was interested in wasn't a guy at all in japanese because I had been picking at the first volume digitally and I thought it would be nice to own them in physical editions... I'm keeping them by my desk right now as a subtle reminder to restart my japanese studies sooner rather than later. I also bought a tamagotchi (gen 1) with the thought that I would attach it to my water bottle and so whenever it beeps at me I would drink water. I've had to mute the sound a couple times though because it is So Loud, and then I end up forgetting about it only to remember to check it a day later and for it to be horribly malnourished...
I saw hadestown and dungeons and dragons: the twenty sided tavern while I was up in NYC. very different vibes. hadestown was very good although I do have some gripes with how they portrayed persephone and hades, but I could put it aside since I knew that it wasn't their story. I got to nerd out some about the orpheus and eurydice mythos since I am a greek mythology nerd but Also Especially a orpheus and eurydice nerd. its such a delightfully poignant story about grief, and I feel like my thoughts on the myth are summed up by this post (screenshot below in case the link is unavailable)
anyways. that aside twenty sided tavern was FUN and silly and had audience participation without feeling like i was being singled out. I do think it was light on the dnd elements but I understand that you kinda had to be light on the dnd to get the show to be shorter than 6 hours long. the favorite thing I had to eat on the trip was suprisingly a cocktail I had at the instant noodle factory. it was just korean rice wine, honey syrup, and raw honey, but it was so so good.
aside from new york city, in june I went with my sister to a local witchy/craft fair and a teeny tiny market held by a local tea house. I didn't end up buying much at either of them, but I did get a teeny tiny crocheted candy corn that sits happily on my car dashboard next to a tiny needle felted pumpkin my sister bought for me a while ago. i'm so delighted by it. I also went with my sister to an arcade/fun zone, and took a bunch of pictures of sandalphon.
other things
once again I do not have much to post about with regards to personal projects. in june I was still just kinda spinning my wheels, and in july my sister got covid after she came back from new york so I spent a week and a half taking care of her and the house leaving me with very little energy to do anything else. also, dawntrail happened and I sunk all my free time into that. I have been focusing mostly on health goals, and finally struck on something to fix my sleep schedule.
for a long, Long time I've struggled with getting to bed on time and maintaining a good amount of sleep. I've learned that I'm someone who needs at minimum 8 hours of sleep to function, which sucks because I like to get up early, which means I have to go to bed really early. since I'm on the east coast of the US, I miss out on a lot of convos my west folk friends have when it's later at night for me. such is the nature of online friends... still, I wanted to have a bedtime prior to midnight for a long time but was unable to motivate myself to do so seemingly no matter what I tried. enter: fat gengy
for quite literally upwards of a year I have wanted fat gengy, or by its proper name Gengar Extra-Large Microbead Plush - 21 In. it is a whopping $100 USD, which in my mind, is too much for me to just buy on my own, and also too much for me to ask for as a birthday or christmas present. then, very recently I realized that if I tricked myself into feeling like I was working for the plush, then I could buy it and not feel bad about dropping a significant chunk of money on what is essentially a small beanbag with pokemon branding. I set up a 10x10 grid on a whiteboard (so 100 spaces), and mark one off each time I get into bed by 10:30pm. it might seem excessive, but I have enough hangups with money that I had to make it pretty difficult to acquire in order for my brain to chill out about it. and, for 8/10 days so far since I've set up this system, I've managed to get into bed close enough to 10:30pm that I can mark off a square. really the main goal is to get 8 hours of sleep, which when I normally wake up around 7am, marking my bedtime as 10:30 pm gives me a little bit of wiggle room in case I loose track of time at night or something else happens where I'm not exactly in bed at that time. I'm hoping by the time I've marked off 100 squares it's enough of a habit where I don't need further motivation to stick to it, but I'll see in (hopefully) three-ish months from now.
I've also very recently restarted my running routine. in college I was pretty consistent with going out for a run 3-4 times a week, something I haven't kept up since then. I stumbled upon lostletter's run more easily page, and after going through a number of resources something clicked. in the past, I had tried to restart my running habit from going from 0 to 100 in trying to run as much as I used to (2-3 miles nonstop) right off the bat. I would get overwhelmed and tired and quit almost immediately. discovering run/walk method and the not your average runner's 30 day plan (which is intervals of run/walk that gradually ramp up) made me feel like this was something I could do that I wouldn't immediately give up on. I can't say it doesn't hurt my pride a little bit knowing I used to knock out 5ks with no issue and now I'm getting winded with intervals of 30 second run/60 second walk, but it is at least mentally much easier to tell myself that I only have to run for 5-6 minutes in total, even if the whole workout is closer to 30 minutes. I'm looking for a way to include strength training in a similar way by finding a workout that is so "easy" to my brain that I can stick with it and gradually ramp up to something else. in a way, this is also inspired by mini habits, which I discovered while restarting my habitica usage. I found out they had removed the guild feature, but most of the guilds had moved to a discord server, and I found there was a guild centered around mini habits. I want to implement more of them in my life, but all I really have so far is "put on my running clothes" at the time that I intend to go for a run, so that it tells my brain it's time to exercise and makes actually exercising easier.
progress with my language studies are still stagnant. probably soon I'll try to set up a mini habit for wanikani to start chipping away at the review pile because I think telling myself I need to do something extremely tiny like three cards a day will cascade into more. I also want to look into somewhere else to learn/review spanish other than duolingo because I think their usage of AI translation instead of human translators is yucky, but I haven't done any research into alternatives yet. it sucks that AI is being used to replace real human jobs, but AI discussion in general is a whole other can of worms I don't wanna open right now.
I think that covers everything I wanted to yap about... here's to taking baby steps towards restarting healthy habits and working on fun things again. see you in another 2-20 weeks!