Damn...winter used to be "my time", you know?

For a long time now, I've considered winter my favorite part of the year. I can't stand hot temperatures, so I thrive in the cold. All the bugs are dead or disappeared. There's a lot of break time from work crammed into a few months all at once. Winter is typically the time of year I am at my most productive because I'm not melting in my chair from the heat and I actually have the freedom to focus on what I wanna do. But alas, not this year, it would seem...

Aside from the apparently occasional and unfixable leak above our bathtub that we've been complaining about for almost a year and a half now, we've also been having heating issues throughout the apartment complex this year, and we've been told that apparently we're partially to blame. We prefer to keep our wall-mounted radiators more or less "turned off", since the building is warm enough as it is and we only need them during the extremely cold days, and I guess the HVAC system needs them ON during the winter to bleed correctly or something. So now, instead of having a pleasantly warm house in the winter, it's about 80°F indoors just like in summer, now coupled with hissing heaters and pinging pipes around the clock. It's safe to say that's really been getting to me, hampering my ability to be creative.

This is, of course, not to mention the part where my wife is losing her job and currently hunting for a new one, taxes are due soon, there's an ongoing genocide in the middle east funded by US taxpayer dollars, it's a fucking election year, and COVID cases are as rampant as ever with no one bothering to even so much as mask anymore.

The weight of the world has just been really heavy lately, ya feel me?

That said, I have been putting up a few new reviews and watching my way through some of the longer shows in my queue. I'm finally almost done with Ranma ½, which means I'll finally be able to post that review that's been half-written for months now. There's also some pretty good new anime coming out this season that I wasn't initially sold on, but now that we've hit the halfway point they're really picking up and grabbing my interest hard. Aside from Metallic Rouge scratching that sci-fi itch, I also am going to have one hell of a time writing a review for Gushing Over Magical Girls. Yes, I know. Don't talk to me about it until I finish writing the review.

On a more impressive note, I've been actually making a dent in my sizeable Unplayed Games list this year. I've been pushing to play through a bunch of smaller indies and shorter games so I can get some actual variety in my gaming adventures in between some of the much bigger ones I've meant to play for years. Favorites so far have included Gato Roboto and The Cat Lady, but also Mega Man 11, which gave me a chance to relive my childhood - especially the part where I yell at my screen for being unfair and begrudgingly memorize spike locations and enemy weaknesses until I get it right. Also, I doubt anyone frequents the site enough to notice, but I do swap out the graphic for Now Playing every time I start a new game!

As far as the new album is concerned, no concrete progress to report, but 2 of the remaining 5 tracks I had in mind are evolving nicely into their final forms. I also found a wildly interesting way to use the Marie Ork voice bank controller (like a vocaloid but not a capital-V Vocaloid) to create a sort of growled-whisper-rap effect that I'm going to use in a weird, almost funk-metal capacity for a song about the fungus at the center of the earth that eats decaying life forms and turns them into fertilizer for new life. Musically it's like a MIDI-fied blend of Faith No More's "Epic" and Queensrÿche's "Tribe", with some additional influences here and there. It's gonna be sick!

At the risk of getting found out by my boss, I've also managed to find time at work to uh...watch movies on YouTube. There are a number of channels dedicated to posting old and out of print B-movies that aren't available on streaming services, and YouTube themselves offer a surprising amount of "free with ads" type movies now, so I can just up and watch non-classics like The Black Hole [1979], Quest For Camelot (wow, my horny-addled brain literally just tried to auto-correct this to "Quest For Cameltoe") and of course, cult favorites like Blacula. There are so many movies I have just never seen over the years, so this is a nice way to tick some boxes while shirking my IT duties!

You know what, when I actually bother to write it all out, I realize that I'm really not doing so bad after all. Progress is being made, just not at the speed I wanted it to be. What can I say, this year has been making me very antsy so far, and I think the negativity is rising to the top instead of sinking to the depths of oblivion like I'd prefer.

Guess I'll just do my best to stay the course and ride out this rough patch.

Anyway, back to doing maths. What's 98.6 x 2 again?