Creating a Rec List

 Oh, hey, guys. How's everyone doing?

Weird, right? Having a blog post up. It's... it's been a couple weeks, huh? I'm back to having a Tuesday off, hence me working on this blog again. Hooray!

Aaaand then I'm working next Tuesday so I can have the following weekend off for my wedding anniversary so.... See you guys again in October???

My coworker says her daughter's wedding was gorgeous and went wonderfully, so yay. Also, congrats to both newly wedded daughters to both of my coworkers. My other coworker's been grumbly about not getting to eat solid foods while recovering from her oral surgery, but she had a check-in yesterday, so hopefully everything healed properly and she's back to normal.

Which means, after next week, where, as I mentioned, I'm taking a few days off so Hubby and I can just have a day to snuggle for our anniversary, I should FINALLY be back to a normal schedule of having Tuesdays and a random second day off per week.

At least, until late November/early December where I may or may not be taking time off to at least see my mom and sister for Thanksgiving. If nothing else, I'll be taking time off for Hubby's birthday.

Plus, both the coworker whose daughter just got married this weekend and myself still have over 100hrs of PTO to chew through, so who knows if there will be more sprinklings of "just taking it for mental health reasons" days. We both feel guilty about ever taking the time off though, because that means the other two workers don't get days off that week. So, who knows?

I feel like I'll be sprinkling more random vacation time in next year though....

OH! And also I want to sneak in a quick congratulations to Dragnime who just got engaged this past week! So happy for you two.

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I think that's all the extra housecleaning I had to do this week. So let's get into some writing updates for this supposedly writing-centric blog, huh?

First and foremost: there is none.

I've been super tempted lately. I've had scenes and mini-plots bouncing in my head. I just haven't had the time or energy to get them OUT of my head.

But I was tempted.

Ronoxym and ChibiSunnie had their birthdays this weekend - Happy Belated to both of you - and I figured "now's the time to break out of my funk! Write stories for them so you can still gift them something without physically delivering or mailing it."

Buuut then I remembered that my story gift for Ron kept me a MONTH to figure out last year, and I had no clue what to do for this one. Try to continue the story? Start from scratch with a completely different concept? Try to find something fanfic wise that he'd appreciate? I was at a loss.

Chibi, however, I had just talked about some fun headcanons with regards to Fruits Basket. Mostly, it was images I hoped the creator Natsuki Takaya would eventually do, or fanart people would make. Things like

Kyo proudly introducing Kazuma (Shishou) to Hajime, or Kazuma getting introductary cooking lessons alongside a 5yo Hajime. Or Machi and Kakeru fighting or Yuki's attention, creating a weird sort of poly relationship. Or just Yuki living as a normal teen/young adult as he and Machi go on double dates with Kakeru and Komaki, and perhaps Machi and Komaki are "forced" to interact as yet again Kakeru vies for most of Yuki's time.

 

Anyway, as I mentioned, these were just scenes. I could do something quick though, right? Even a little drabble would be a surprise to Chibi, and I know she'd cherish it because I gifted something specifically for her, but also because it would be the first bit of narrative writing I've done since the pandemic hit. Considering how much support and encouragement she's given me over the years, but specifically through this one, and considering how much time and effort she puts into ALWAYS making me a Christmas and birthday card each year, I thought it would be a fitting honor to FINALLY get out of my writing funk by creating a story for her birthday.

Alas. It was not meant to be. The week FLEW by (but also dragged on?) and before I knew it, her birthday had arrived and I had nothing to show for it. I debated writing something anyway and still posting it during the weekend of her birthday, but I still ran dry. All of those scenes I stated in that spoiler box above? Like I said, they would be great artwork; freezeframes of these sweet moments. Pictures that didn't need words or even actions to fully capture the essence of the scene.

That, and, while I enjoy the stories, and mangas in general are a fairly quick re-read, I still haven't really read either Fruits Basket or Fruits Basket Another more than once - aside from a couple of Furuba books - so I don't feel confident that I know the characters of Komaki or Hajime well enough to properly keep in-character and get the scenes right. Not without research - i.e. rereads - and not only did I not have the time for it, but also my mangas are kind of buried in the back of a cluttered room right now. So I REALLY don't have the free time to get any of those stories done in a reasonable amount of time.

However, as I mentioned, it DID keep me a month to gift Ron his story for his 30th, so there MIIIIIGHT be hope for me to still become inspired and get something written for Chibi. Plus, there's always the original fandom that brought us together. I just haven't touched anything "Hey, Arnold!" related in so long. I KNOW I'm rusty in their characterizations....

Instead of getting ahead of the game and doing the research I needed to write gifts for my friends, I spent the week on a completely different project that I've been meaning to do for over a month now.

WAAAAAAAAAY back during the week of August 17, the Miraculous Ladybug fandom decided to host a Positivity Week: a week for the fandom to shut down all of the salt and hate and venom flowing through the fandom, and get back to the uplifting positivity it originally had. During this week, people posted what they liked and appreciated about the show. They shared posts explaining the good qualities different characters had. They supported the creators. They supported fandom creators as well by sharing fics, artwork, gif-sets, videos, etc. Most importantly, there were fanfic and fic writer recommendation lists.

I was actually on one of those lists!

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One of the big reasons I kept falling into my writing funks after joining Tumblr was because I'd CONSTANTLY see fic recommendation lists, and I was NEVER on any of them. And it wasn't like I was simply seeing the same stories over and over again. Sure, there's some stories that just about the whole fandom seems to know about and would suggest, but more often than not the lists were all different. A large variety of stories were getting love and recognition.

But I would never be included.

Until August 22.

ML Positivity Week, Favourite Fanfics Day posted by chicoriii

I was... I was dumbfounded. This time period was probably one of my deepest bouts with imposter syndrome and there it was: my name on a rec list. Not only that, on a FAVORITE STORY list! Right above one of the fandom's favorite stories: Under Lock and Key.

I feel so guilty that I haven't acknowledged this honor anywhere yet. And for the dumbest reason too, although, I also feel the most justified with this reason???

So, along with the writing funk, I have been staying off Tumblr because I just don't have the free time or mental energy to go through my active dash. Also, as already stated, Tumblr does, on occasion, hurt my mental health because it is one of my main sources of imposter syndrome. That's mostly due to the aforementioned lack of ever appearing in anyone's recommendations or lack of likes/reblogs on my story shares. Also, because my dash would be flooded with new stories, and I would feel worse about not writing anything myself.

This is why, for months on end, I would only log onto Tumblr long enough to check my notifications, see if I had any messages or asks, and then hop back off without ever really looking at my dash. When chicoriii mentioned me in her rec list, I was still at that point of avoiding Tumblr to make sure it didn't spiral me further. So it was especially surprising and emotional for me to see that I had actually made someone's recommended fic list!

But to get to my reason about not instantly acknowledging how honored and humbled I felt. See, since I was avoiding Tumblr, I only knew of Positivity Week within the fandom in vague passing - usually something stated in the top post of my dash when I first log in - and so I hadn't participated in it. I felt guilty jumping in on the last day of it simply to gush at how honored I felt to have been included.

I mean, that was the point of the fan event, right? To lift up the creators and fellow fandom members while also bringing back a positive view of the show itself? So, to gush about how happy it made me to have been on her list would have been a pretty perfect way of closing out the week. At the time, though? Nope. I NEEDED to add to Positive Week if I were to acknowledge the honor of being on chicoriii's list.

So I decided I would thank chi while also lifting up other works of fiction. Then I quickly realized how many stories I loved, and that either the list would be a bit massive or I'd leave out some gemstones. That was when I decided my new project: write up a Tumblr post of my ML fanfic recs, and then link to it when I acknowledge chi's list.

This was a mistake.

Sure, there were the big ones that I could think of right away - usually involving EdenDaphne in some shape or form - but that list was largely stories I know are already fairly big in the fandom because they have some of the highest hit/kudos/comment counts. Not that any of that means I SHOULDN'T recommend them, because I 100% am going to still. No, instead, and especially because of how I was feeling, I wanted to make sure to also promote stories I feel aren't getting nearly enough love. To make sure I didn't miss any, I started going through my bookmarked and favorited stories on AO3 and FFN. 

I... forgot how much ML fanfiction I've actually read over the years. I did not read nearly as much HA fanfiction....

I have 42 bookmarked ML fics on AO3 alone, and I was trash at actually writing anything in my bookmark notes, so I knew I enjoyed the stories enough to want to save them, but I couldn't really remember what each of them were about per se, or why I enjoyed them specifically.

Sooooo that's what I wanted to do next: re-read, or at least skim, these saved fics to remind myself why I enjoyed them so I could better recommend them to others. Buuuut, I also had work pretty much non-stop for over a month, so I just didn't have the energy.

This week I finally did. All of my main work at my job was taken care of, and all I really had left was optional busy work. On a particularly slow day I decided it was time to finally start up this project. I figured I could get it done in the one shift.

I was wrong.

It's been over a week now, and I STILL have stories to read back through. I've been updating my bookmarks as I go so that next time I know exactly why I loved that particular story and what I felt was unique about it. I've also started writing recaps of what happened in the last chapter of on-going works, because I always seem to forget by the time they're updated. Sure, it means re-reading the previous chapter first to remind myself what happened, and I'm sure the authors appreciate the extra reads, but it also means I have to calculate reading TWO chapters whenever ONE updates, which usually results in a delay before finding time to read. This way, hopefully I can read the updates a lot sooner.

Sorry, getting off topic. Point is, I've been re-reading a LOT of fics lately, and it's giving me lots of feels. It's been really uplifting and reminding me a lot about why I love this show and the friendly bits of this fandom community. Also, while I'm still not quite ready to write anything myself yet, it HAS been helping grease those mental gears so I'm good to go once I'm back to a more normal work and social schedule.

Also also... I know how I'm going to be spending my next day off on Friday:

Official promo poster

Frozen starts at 6:10
Miraculous Ladybug starts at 8:00

The creator of Miraculous Ladybug Thomas Astruc had stated in past interviews that he initially had a whole expanded world planned with more miraculous bearers and other superheroes. He teased that back in season 1 when Alya gushed about her favorite comic book hero Majestia that Majestia was a real American superhero. Then, there was a comic book run where Ladybug and Chat Noir went to the United States and met Majestia.

This New York special seems to have been inspired by that comic run. Or that both this special and the comic books were both inspired off of Astruc's original world builds for the Miraculous universe.

Either way, I'm excited.

Also also also, to lead up to this hour-long special, Disney Channel will be having a season 3 marathon. True, I can watch them all I want on Netflix, and the airing order on the channel isn't any better than the scrambled mess Netflix has, but still....

I'm hoping re-watching this past season after such a long hiatus, as well as getting some new content to tide the fandom over until the next season arrives in 2021, will help respark my desire to write.

Because I miss it, you guys. I HURT not being able to write for so long! Especially this year when March feels like a decade ago.

Tanuki
Facebook sticker
by Yanare Ku

Here's to hoping I can get back into the swing of things finally. Here's to Chibi and Ron and their birthdays. Here's to my coworkers' daughters and their new marriages. Here's to chi and her ability to make me cry simply by enjoying my work and wanting to share it with others. Finally, here's to you, dear reader, for staying by me when I've had virtually nothing to say this whole year.

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(minor edits by me)

Catch everyone in October!

August was Trash, Okay?

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OMG, guys, August was suuuch trash!

Sorry I've been so absent lately. Sorry still that my writing has YET to return to the land of the living. This past month? Well... it IS 2020, isn't it? I'm now feeling a bit guilty about using images like this at the conclusion of last year:

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When you feel bad about how you "treated" 2019, and kinda wish to go back to THAT year? You KNOW the current year is beyond trash.

I'm just so exhausted. I've been exhausted for a while now, and August did NOT help that in the slightest.

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Also, side note, the new formatting for Blogger? 

It's supposed to be more streamline, but a lot of the things I personally do with this blog now takes extra steps. I also do a lot of HTML edits and tweaks, and reading the code is now a LOT harder for me since it all runs together. Here, see?

If you are a programmer, that might look helpful. It's color coordinated, and you're probably used to it all running into itself. Me? I am NOT a programmer. The old HTML view used to have everything set up in paragraphs that I could easily read and understand. To demonstrate, I took the above code and edited it best I could to look like how it used to.

Yeah, it was all one color, but so is just about any text I'd read. The important thing was the paragraph breaks so I could easily skim through and find what I wanted to edit. Now? Well, thank God someone created the CTRL+F search function, because I'm probably going to use it a LOT now. I mean, it's cool and all that code is red when it's incomplete, and then turns green once you've completed the line. That helps me make sure I didn't forget to close a function or something. But I tried to put a little tweak on one of the above images, then continued writing while in HTML mode - something I used to do a LOT originally, just to make sure the spacing is how I want it - and when I want to switch back to composition mode I got a pop-up saying some of my code may be invalid and may not stay if I switch out of HTML. I spent a solid 5 minutes or so tweaking what I did and reading through the above code to see how to mimic it in what I had done, and I still had no clue what I did that would have been considered "invalid." So, in the end, I ended up deleting all the coding I had done, hit "okay" to the "may be invalid" pop-up, and just continued on in composition mode. 

I hope this blog looks the same as it always has, but I may have to consider completely revamping it so I use less coding. Because right now? Well, not to be overly dramatic or anything, but check the shirt.

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I mean, when I previewed this post thus far, I noticed there was a MASSIVE gap between one of the above images and the text following it. It looked like I had hit the Enter button about 3x to create line breaks. Just a few weeks ago, with the old formatting, I could easily go into the code, see the extra <br /> or <p></p> code and know I can delete those to get rid of the surplus spacing.

With this new coding layout? And, frankly, I feel like the HTML somehow got more complicated??? Well, I spent another 10 minutes or so trying to read the code to see where the extra space came from, because it wasn't there in compose view for me to just delete. I finally saw that a line of code was out of place from when I initially tried going into HTML view to edit one of the image codes. Again, something I used to do weekly, so I thought I generally knew what I was doing by now.

Well, after shifting where the code was SUPPOSED to be, I hit Preview, and.... now the entire blog after that picture was center aligned instead of left aligned.

Yona from Yona of the Dawn
Created by Mizuho Kusanagi

Another 10 minute battle or so as I copied and pasted the code ABOVE the image - where it was still properly left-aligned after an image - and edited it to include the proper image (the one I had messed with originally) and the proper text (that had somehow become center-aligned). It SHOULD have worked. I literally used the EXACT SAME CODE of a portion of the blog that was formatting properly.

It... didn't.

After, as I said, 10 minutes of adjusting this, tweaking that, hitting the Undo button about a dozen times, and reading the code with painstaking focus to try to understand it enough to mimic it... and it STILL not working, I gave up. I just went back into compose mode, selected all, and hit the Left-align button.

And I STILL had to select 2 different paragraphs separately and left-align them independently, since apparently they weren't included in the Select All??????

Hacker Girl
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by
Birdman, Inc.

Yeah, I hate this new format...

BUT BACK TO AUGUST!

Throughout August, my one co-worker's daughter got married, my other co-worker had a bridal shower for HER daughter, the 1st co-worker had a family event, and then the 2nd co-worker's brother got married, so every weekend one of them requested a 3-day or 4-day weekend. Also, the first co-worker had needed oral surgery for about a month, so she finally managed to get that taken care of and needed a week off to recover. We all have all of this vacation time, and boy were those two using it.

And yet, one of them was particularly snarky about me taking a week off in July for my birthday, but whatever....

Anyway, because of all of that, I had to work two Tuesdays in August, the most recent time being last week. Hence me missing two blog post updates last month.

Also, on top of all of THAT, one of our branch stores had a whole new staff hired, which isn't as extreme as it sounds since it only has 3 employees anyway, but still. So I was asked to travel about 40min to the other store in order to train the new employees, as was another employee from one of the other branch stores, that way the other could cover while one of us had a day off.

I trained the new sales associate two days the one week, and then the following week the sales assistant came on and I went out to train her.

And then, apparently the one owner felt the assistant needed more training, so she was sent to my home-store for me to train her while helping cover the store I normally work in - ya know, because the tag-team of my co-workers requesting off.

Now, when I was hired, all employees had two solid weeks of training in their home-store, and then another month of shadowing the sales associates as a way to learn how to sell (back then every employee was in sales). About two years later, there was a shift to include hourly employees as sales assistants. Fast forward another 7 months or so, and that's when I started to get tapped for training the newbies and driving to the other stores for a day or so. For the most part, the "2 weeks of training" were shrunk to just one week - since the 2nd was typically training on how to sell merchandise, something most of the new employees weren't doing - and then that week of training was usually split between me and someone who worked in that employee's store. I'd start with the real meat-and-potatoes of how to run the main program we use for sales and a broad overview of what product we carry, and then the other employee would finish the training with getting into the minutia of the day-to-day and rare issues that might come up.

For the past year-and-a-half or so, this training system seemed to work. Heck, even with that sales associate I had trained early August had that sort of training regimen set up.

For the new sales assistant though? We're not sure why, but the one owner for whatever reason believes this woman needs 3 solid weeks of training with me.

Thankfully, last week and this week were in my home-store, so I didn't have to travel, but my days are completely consumed with trying to think of ANYTHING that I could still teach this woman so we're not just staring blankly at each other for 8 hours straight. Or, alternatively, so she's not like my co-workers: just sitting bored at a desk, wondering what to do, while I have a HUGE list of things *I* need to do still. Things like creating and hanging tags on the new product that comes in explaining the options available for it. Things like keeping up with the company's social media accounts. Things like keeping on top of the new company website so I can send glitches or other such errors to the web master ASAP. Things like updating some of my data spreadsheets so it's easier for us to look up things.

Granted, a lot of this stuff either of my co-workers could also learn to do - such as the spreadsheets or the information tags - but neither puts in effort to learn how to do it. So now it's backlogged by about a month.

And I STILL have to figure out what to do with this woman I'm supposed to be training despite us going through everything she needed to learn in the first 3 or 4 days.

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So.... yeah, work has been EXHAUSTING, and so all I want to do when I come home is zone out. For the most part, I've done that, with the exception of the couple of times I've GM'd our sessions of Blades in the Dark by John Harper. Those have been quite stressful in and of themselves. 

The sessions themselves seem well enough. The group appears to be enjoying themselves, and that's all that matters. Plus, with the scores I keep coming up with so the group has options, I'm slowly building a story of the world going on around the group. I am enjoying the brainstorming sessions Hubby and I have to try to come up with those world-build side-stories we could play off of. While the crew is doing this, off in the background these two warring factions are doing that. The way this score concludes affects this bit of the city. That sort of thing.

The first score the group chose my last GMing session was a continuation of one of the scores they did the 1st time I GM'd. In that first session a professor and his rival were both researching this one particular piece of technology in a race to see which of them could finally solve the problem the scientific world was having in improving the effectiveness of the tech. The professor knew his rival was further along than him, so he wanted the crew to steal her notes so he could have the advantage instead, and he wanted it to look like a random burglary.

Well, the crew did ransack her office and steal a bunch of random items that seemed valuable, along with her notes, as an effort o stage it as a burglary instead of a pointed attack. Problem is, they literally only hit the rival's office. So, I had a new score in which she knew that her rival had plotted the theft and wanted either proof to take to the Bluecoats or wanted the professor to be framed. Either way, she wanted him in jail.

The guys LOVED the continuation of this random side-plot of these two tech rivals, and got a kick out of the fact that she only knew her rival was involved with the theft, not that the crew was the one who actually did the burgling. So they agreed to set the professor up for masterminding the theft of her notes.

It's moments like that - where they gleefully passed around the index card the score was written down upon, and each of them going "OH!" after reading it - that makes me happy I've agreed to tag-team GMing with Hubby.

But then I go to write down what happened.

As I've commented throughout this post, it has been a busy and stressful month. I barely have the free time to write anything down, and when I do, it's a week or two after the session. So far, between 4 game sessions, we have played through 8 or 9 different scores. Hubby had that opening score in the first session. Then we went through three in my first session as the GM. Then we went through 2 or 3 more scores when Hubby took over again, and we went through another 2 when I last GM'd.

The fact that I can't remember how many we went through when Hubby last GM'd is part of the problem. I wanted to write the sessions down SPECIFICALLY because, especially with all the chaos and stress of 2020, my memory is trash. And yet, I only managed to write down the first 2 scores I GM'd before I ran out of time. So I'm now staring at so many backlogged game missions and struggling to remember what even happened. At the same time, as I write out what happened during the scores I ran vs reflecting on the ones I have to write down that Hubby ran, I began getting super depressed. I felt like I wasn't giving anyone any significant challenges. Which of course made me wonder about my overall writing and storytelling skills.

Was this why I have so many stories focused on inner conflict instead of outer conflict? Is this why I seem to write exclusively Man vs Self stories? Am I just incapable of coming up with external conflicts for characters?

Total. Writing. Existential. Crisis.

So even when I did have time to write down the sessions, I still didn't. I couldn't. I shut down. I just got depressed whenever I thought about my sessions. I felt like I was making things too easy for the players; that the complications I came up with the group just kind of shrugged off. 

To try to help, Hubby decided last week's Blades game session would actually be the group watching Let's Plays. That way Hubby and, especially, I could see how other GMs come up with scores and consequences/complications, and the guys could see how other groups played. We hoped it would help everyone get a better feel on how this game played different than D&D and break us from that D&D mindset.

Namely the idea of critical-failures, excessive pre-planning, the fear of complications causing us to fail the mission entirely, and the #1 D&D rule of "never split the party". The mechanics of Blades in the Dark is done so specifically to address and negate all of those issues of D&D.

In the end, Quarthix concluded that the session we watched on YouTube played fairly similarly to how we already play. Hubby more-or-less agreed. I had also noticed that the "consequences and complications" the GM came up with were things like "the floor creaked, but none of the 'sleeping' bodies beside you move". So maybe the complications and consequences I came up with weren't so mild after all. That did help my overall outlook.

Also, because we watched Let's Plays last week, and talked more about our character backstories, Hubby is still on-deck for GMing the session. That also helped because I didn't need the added stress of trying to come up with scores for the guys to do this session. Hubby's in charge again tonight, and it will be nice to just be able to play.

Especially since work wasn't my only bit of chaos. In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, today is the start of both a new month and new season. At the end of each month, the game cycles out an assortment of bugs, fish, and deep-sea creatures. It also brings in new bugs, fish, and deep-sea creatures. So I already knew there was a list of creatures leaving at the end of August. However, these were also summer-only creatures, so I wouldn't see them again until next June or July. Normally not that big of a deal except for three things:

1. I was still missing a total of 10 or 11 bugs/fish that I would have been able to capture by this time in the game. Two of them weren't active over the summer, but one came back today and the other would be back in, like, December or January, so it wouldn't be AS long of a wait.
2. I'm a completionist player, which means I try to go through 100% of the game. This is why one of my daily "chores" in-game is to go to both shops, and check the Nook Stop, and buy up everything that was "new," even if I don't like it. There's a "catalog" in-game and every time your character has possession of an item - via purchasing it, picking it up, or being gifted it - it is added to your catalog. So, I buy anything not already in my catalog, so I have a record of it, and then sell anything I don't wish to keep.
   This also means that I want to fully complete my Critterpedia: the listing of all the bugs, fish, and deep-sea creatures you could catch in the game. I don't want to have to wait until JUNE OR JULY in order to complete this thing!
3. There is a set of 6 main breakable tools that you frequently use in-game: net, slingshot, shovel, watering can, fishing pole, and axe. You can get the ultimate upgrade of a Golden tool once you achieve certain milestones. You learn the watering can when you have improved your island to the highest rating: 5-stars. You learn how to make a golden axe after breaking your regular axe a certain number of times. You get the golden slingshot recipe after popping x-number of balloons with your slingshot.
   For the golden shovel, you have to assist a side character that literally washes up on your island at least once every two weeks. You have to help him 30 times, so it will take a long time to get the shovel, but it still shouldn't be a "have to wait until next July" sort of situation to complete that task.
   The net and the fishing poles? You learn how to make the golden versions of those tools by completing the bug and fish critterpedias respectively. So, not only would catching these bugs and fish help me 100% my critterpedia, but also allows me to unlock the final 2 tools of the game. On top of THAT you also get Nook Miles - in-game points you receive for completing specific tasks - and stamps for both completing the tasks and building the resulting golden tools.

So... yeah, my Completionist Butt didn't want to have to wait until these bugs and fish returned to the game next July, and I didn't want to start "time traveling" in order to get them sooner than intended. Which all means I HAD to make sure I caught all of those bugs and fish before the end of August. Of COURSE I didn't realize how many bugs/fish I was missing until last week, so when I dropped Hubby off at work at 6am I would then spend an hour or so trying to hunt down any of these missing bugs or fish before getting ready for work myself. Then my Friday off was largely spent trying to hunt down the missing bugs and fish. Again Saturday morning - a rare Saturday off for me - I did little more than try to grind out the bugs and fish I needed, but I also had to deal with the surplus of flowers that had popped up and were going to overrun my island. 

Tanuki Facebook sticker
by Yanare Ku

Sunday morning before work and then more Sunday evening were spent once more searching for the remaining elusive creatures. Sunday post-work was also spent playing a couple hours of Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on the Switch, a game I FINALLY started up Saturday afternoon while waiting for the next time bracket where the bugs/fish I needed would spawn. Two hours of playing a game within my favorite franchise. A game I had already played the Game Boy Color re-release version of. Two hours, and I somehow managed to die NINE TIMES! This is NOT a hard game. I went through two dungeons on Saturday, and died ONCE. Granted, I left most fights with only half a heart - your character's health meter - but I still managed to survive MOST of the game session. Sunday, though? Nope. I ended up saving in a new slot in case I wanted to go back to my original file and redo everything. Which I did do yesterday and did MUCH better: no deaths. My reflexes were certainly a lot better and I was a lot more focused last night.

Anyway, I was back to searching last night, having but two beetles left to find.

All-in-all, I think I personally clocked about 15 or 16 hours of doing little else in the game other than running around searching for these dang fish and bugs! It was certainly more a chore than fun, and it was EXHAUSTING and FRUSTRATING. But, at the same time, I didn't want to give up, because then I'd have to wait a year to officially complete the game. I mean, it may take me that long anyway, and I may be actively playing the game still anyway, but I didn't want to force it either simply because I didn't catch those creatures before they left for a year.

In the end, it was Hubby, playing my game for me for another TWO HOURS while I was working on this blog post - I'll explain in a moment - for my game to FINALLY get every creature I could by the end of August.

That being said, while I do have an insane amount of hours poured into this game since the end of March - over 800 hours, for sure - my official gamer profile says I have something closer to 860hrs clocked for ACNH. That's largely due to the amount of times the game goes idle while I do things like stop to eat, forget to log off before doing laundry or going to work, or, what happened this weekend, I fall asleep while playing so it just sits there - idle - for the 6 to 8 hrs I'm sleeping.

This ended up being beneficial, however, because there's this trick with the game. You can leave your main island and go on what's known as "Nook Mile Tours" or "Mystery Island Tours". These are tiny islands you can go to harvest things, and sometimes meet new villagers you can invite back to your home island. When you're on one of these islands, time moves normally, just as it would anywhere else in the game. HOWEVER, certain creatures have time restrictions for their spawning. For instance, the beetles I still needed as of yesterday only show up in the game between the hours of 5pm and 8am. So, if I were playing the game at 4pm, the beetle would never show up, but the moment it hit 5pm they would start to spawn, only to vanish again at 8am. On those island tours, you're locked into the time-block you reached the island within. So, to again use that beetle example, if I hit up a Mystery Island at 8:45pm, I'd be within that 5pm-8am time block. Any bugs/fish that didn't spawn at 8:45pm, but might spawn at 9pm wouldn't be spawning at all on that island, even if I stay on it until 10pm. While the clock still advances, and the lighting changes from night to day and vice versa, when it comes to critter spawn restrictions, you are locked into the time it was when you first landed on that island.

So, as I said, this proved beneficial. I had passed out playing ACNH while on Nook Mile Islands both Sunday evening and Monday evening. Which means, as far as the game's creature-spawns were concerned, it was still 10pm. Hubby had yesterday and today off, so I ran around in-game for an hour before getting ready for work yesterday morning, found one of the 4 critters I still needed, then passed the game over to Hubby. He played for another hour or so before letting me know he caught the last fish I needed. Then, as previously mentioned, I passed out again last night with just TWO MORE creatures to go, and Hubby spent a couple hours this morning finding them for me.

"Crisis" averted.

But holy heck was that stressful and NOT. FUN. the past week. Especially since that meant that - except for the few hours I played LoZ this weekend - I was pretty much exclusively playing this game whenever I had downtime. And it wasn't even stress relieving like it was meant to be!

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Sooooooo, yeah. That super sucked. I'm going to try to be a bit more diligent on which critters are leaving each month, and try not to save them for the last week or so of it. Thankfully, the largest collection of critters leaving the game comes at the end of the summer - so August in the northern hemisphere and February in the southern hemisphere - which means I shouldn't be as overwhelmed again while playing this game. A word of caution for any of my readers who also play this game and are in the southern hemisphere, or at least has their game set up for the southern hemisphere: DO NOT SLEEP ON THE SUMMER BUGS/FISH. TRY TO GET THEM ALL ASAP SINCE THEY ARE ONLY AVAILABLE FOR 2 MONTHS TOTAL THROUGHOUT THE FULL YEAR!

My one co-worker's daughter is getting married on September 19th, and so she took that whole week off to prepare and then recover from the wedding. That will be a LOOOOOOOOOONG week and I'll most likely miss my September 15th update due to that, but I'll try to be more on-the-ball this week.

So long to that crappy summer and doubly crappy August. Here's to September being better over-all. And here's to games RELIEVING stress instead of adding to it. (Yes, I'm also looking at you, Link's Awakening, and your stupid 9 deaths...)

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Edited by LycoRogue

And, finally, here's to 2020 being kinder to us, pretty please!

Hope to catch you next week!