#alterjournal

[pixies-and-poets]

The most important thing I've realized about myself in the past couple years is that I would rather make art that only five people care about but it makes them really happy, than art that a thousand people see and are moderately pleased by for a few seconds.

[pixies-and-poets]

Finally got around to finishing the main story in Pokemon Scarlet a couple days ago. I liked playing it as a relaxation game in small bursts, hence why it took me so long- but I really enjoyed this game. Technically-speaking it’s a rushed mess, and not all of its parts come together into a satisfying whole, but the good parts of this game really shine and surprised me for Pokemon’s standards. At its finale, it felt like playing an entirely different RPG, with writing that was far more engaging and emotionally-investing than I would have expected.

Human characters in Pokemon are really hit and miss for me, with a lot of fan favorites just totally failing to do anything for me, while others do capture my heart. I have to say that generally the cast of this game was outstanding and full of personality, from the gym leaders, Team Star leaders, and Director Clavell, to the main team of youngsters who ended up having such naturalistic and fun banter when they were brought all together at once.

With that said, there’s still plenty to criticize with Pokemon’s crunched dev cycle and the way it impacted this game and supplemental material (i.e. some lifeless-looking official art). I look forward to where the series goes in the future building on this formula, but more than anything I hope they’re able to slow things down. Games are taking longer and longer to make, with there being massive gaps between mainline entries in many of Nintendo’s system-seller franchises, but Pokemon has not been allowed this luxury. I’m not holding out hope too much but maybe the negative reaction to this game’s bugs will move the needle a bit, which is why I think it’s important to be honest here. You can enjoy something and still be critical!

[pixies-and-poets]

Found this stray on the way to work. Can anyone identify what type of animal it is

[pixies-and-poets]

Sorry I've been scarce today! I know I have some stuff to catch up on but it was a really stressful workday and I have to get up early for a doctor's appointment tomorrow so I'm kinda just taking it easy.

My newer friends probably don't know this, but I was born with a rare heart condition which is complicated to explain and I don't fully understand it myself; basically some of the electrical impulses in my heart straight up don't work. It results in a very slow resting heart rate and I've had a pacemaker since I was 16. That's why I never have any energy... yaaaay for invisible disabilities, the kind even I constantly forget I should cut myself slack and give myself compassion for! (The pacemaker only kicks in to prevent my heart rate from getting DANGEROUSLY low, but it's still lower than the normal human resting average at pretty much all times.) After putting it off for years due to moving cities and then covid, I've finally gotten myself set up with a new heart specialist to make sure everything is still working as expected in there! It's long overdue so it's a pretty big deal.

There is a small chance I learn my pacemaker has failed and I will need surgery soon. But it should have years left in it still.

[pixies-and-poets]

I'm in a good mood today but also having severe stomach pains for some reason and a steadily escalating panic attack at work but I'm still in a good mood, idk how to deal with all this. My brain is overloaded

[pixies-and-poets]

Shout-out to when my partner and I made Christmas peppermint cookies but we misunderstood the amount of butter it was asking for and put twice as much and this happened

This was a greasy loaf (but good)

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Waiting for it to hopefully stop frigid-raining so I can take my dog to pee without the both of us getting cold drenched, and then I look out the window and it's snowing buckets instead

[pixies-and-poets]

2022

This past year was the best I’ve had in ages, by a long shot. I decided to get some thoughts out, and this is mainly for my personal benefit to record this moment in time, but if anyone is curious you can read through. I hope you can share a little bit of my happiness, and that the next year is as good for you as this one was for me.

Now to set the scene: at the beginning of 2022 I was mostly feeling lost, aimless, depressed. BUT I had two creative projects which gave me some grounding and direction: my ongoing webcomic, the current spinoff story of which started in mid-2021, and... the D&D campaign I was in the midst of with my friends; the one and only successful long-term tabletop campaign I’ve ever been involved with. Although it was still relatively short, each one of its seventeen sessions was packed with hilarious and memorable moments. At the time it was, in addition to the comic, my greatest creative passion and my major light in the darkness. I was in charge of recording the sessions’ audio, listening through them again so I could write them up as a narrative, and I also did lots of illustrations as a bonus. It was only a few months into the year when it ended, on a dazzlingly high note, and left me with a big hole in my heart. I’ve gradually been working on a way to get these characters together again, but it involves me doing something I’ve never done before: running a mini-campaign, being the DM. I hope in the new year I finally work up the courage to take that step.

I should point out that this wasn’t just any generic D&D campaign, but a fandom one based on the Donkey Kong/Rare and Mario universes. This is important because before this experience, I had started to become kind of disillusioned with the concept of fandom in general. Sharing mutual love of something had always been a big part of what my online presence and community-building had been based around, but over the past few years I had grown to feel worn out by the whole thing, whether it was because I myself felt used/manipulated, I felt like I didn’t fit in with certain communities, a meta cynicism with entitlement and toxicity in fandom in general, and other reasons. The D&D experience taught me something important though, which is that there’s still great value to be had in this type of community based around mutual love of something; it just often has to be on a smaller scale, something more intimate, which allows you to dig into the source material in a deep way while also creating something that has personal meaning for the parties involved. I also found immense value in making illustrations for the campaign even though it was for the enjoyment of quite a small audience; noticing how much more happiness that brought me compared to making things that did far more numbers on social media was revelatory for me. And so this was step one of coming to a new acceptance of how I could continue to use my art and my nerdom to make things that I found meaningful, not just for myself but for others.

Now just about concurrently with the last few sessions of our game, something huge occurred in my life: I got a full-time job! The past five years, after a really unhappy experience at my last workplace, a cross-country move, and a spate of unsuccessful interviews that broke my spirit, I had pretty much given up on having a “normal job” and was trying to make it full-time as an artist and content creator. This worked out fine for a while, although I never did better than “just scraping by” and never felt like I truly had any spending money or wiggle room. I live with my partner and this was hard on both of us as neither of us felt we had much money to spare for years, but I was trying to make a life in which I could be happy.

Well, after years, I learned that such a life didn’t even make me happy, let alone the monetary issues. I was burning out on doing commissions, and trying to make money on streaming left me feeling trapped as the things required for success on twitch (streaming a TON, hyper-focusing on one game or a “niche”) were not things I wanted to do. So in late 2021 and early 2022, feeling hopeless and tired and like a failure, I hit the job hunt again and it was very hard for me. Stressful interviews and constant rejection after years of having a weird resume gap which could only partially be explained by COVID.

But in March, I was super fortunate to be given a chance to more or less pick up my career as an administrative assistant right where I left off. It’s not without its stresses, but overall the people I work with are very kind and I have greatly enjoyed the life of a city girl, taking the bus downtown and working in a massive skyscraper. It’s much harder to get enthused about all those things in the winter, but nevertheless.

This has revolutionized my life, as I have already learned to be frugal after years of being forced to live as such, and I have learned to a large degree not to value or need material possessions - yet now at least, I have the freedom to make the occasional fun purchase for myself or friends, travel to visit my family without feeling bad about it, support local restaurants more often, and so on. Moreover, it’s allowed my partner and I to buy plenty of things that we needed for home improvement projects, and begin our hobby of going out to garage and estate sales for fun.

There’s a number of great things that happened over the summer, such as getting to see a friend of mine from out of town, participating in a super fun community gaming event, and doubtless other things I’m forgetting. Getting into the fall/winter though, the most important thing is that I started some therapy sessions and was also able to get a prescription medication for depression and anxiety. This is the first time I’ve tried such a thing in years, as the other time it just kinda stopped working for me after half a year or so, and I’m hoping this is more successful.

To be honest I haven’t noticed a huge difference since starting the meds. It coincides almost exactly with me re-joining tumblr, and maybe my lack of inhibition with being cringe and free since coming here, and my ability to see twitter as a dark place that was bad for my mental health and my ease with giving twitter up almost entirely, has something to do with a change in brain chemistry. Mostly though, I think it’s carrying me through the winter when I’d normally be miserable (along with the vitamins I’ve been taking starting at the same time). I don’t feel much different since I started, but normally I -should- feel awful by this point in the year, and I don’t- so I hope when spring comes around I’ll feel like a gleeful superhuman.

I suppose the most important thing is - it hasn’t gotten rid of all anxiety or dark thoughts, it hasn’t rewired my whole personality, but I’m a lot better at letting things go. If I feel something awkward happened while I was in public, I can stop thinking about it once I’m home instead of ruminating on it all night. When my brain says to me “you’ve utterly failed to reach your potential, and when you die no one will miss you,” instead of letting this consume me and feeling like useless shit for several days, INSTEAD!! another part of my brain says “well, I can think of like, at LEAST five people who will for sure miss me, and maybe that wasn’t enough for me in the past, but it is for me now. And furthermore failure is relative, and subjective, and I’m just not going to think about that whole part,” and so I don’t. And I move on. And I get back to work or I play the funny video games.

To wrap it up, I just want to say that coming back to tumblr has been an absolute joy. I was really unsure about rejoining because it felt like my time on this site belonged to a past era of my life, when I was a slightly different person, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to ever pick up where I left off without feeling like I was still carrying around baggage. Turns out: it was actually fucking easy, haha. I’ve been so happy to be welcomed here by some old friends, and to make new friends already. Even if I’m slow answering asks sometimes, the fact that people out there ask me things or tag me in things and want to know my opinion or analysis is like, enough to make me cry. I’m in my happy place, and my happy place is currently talking about the silly bunnies mostly, but I look forward to hanging onto current joys and discovering new ones to share in the coming year. This goes back to the thing I was talking about early on in this screed, where my continual aim is to use the fandom experience to create something meaningful and personal shared between people. It’s something I’ll keep considering and working on.

If you reached the end, thank you so much! I hope if you are going through dark times that you know, things can get better and you can reach a point in your life you are happy with, even if it looks different from how you might have planned or expected. Thanks for being here with me and happy new year.

-Courtney

[pixies-and-poets]

I just want to say that I *love* talking about silly bunnies, genuinely, please don't stop sending me M+R asks, I never get tired of them!!

BUT, my ask box is always open to talk about my other interests too!! Feel free to ask me about Donkey Kong or Banjo-Kazooie or other Mario RPGs, or anything else you know I am interested in... even if (especially if!) you don't know much about them yourself and want to know something!

[pixies-and-poets]

My phone gave me "look back at three years ago today!" Which is when I was at Disney World at AGDQ meeting some of my twitch friends in person... That was one of the best weeks of my life and the memory I clung to all through 2020 and beyond in some very dark times. Just recently I've started to feel that joy again, or at least that it's possible to be that happy, and that times that good could happen once more. Had I seen this a year ago I would have broken down thinking I'd never feel that way again, and that I didn't deserve to even if I could.

[pixies-and-poets]

The Gamesdonequick commentator before the DKC3 race just said it was time for a “bramblin’ scramble” and I was like, hey that me, but also wrong game, but also I appreciate the spirit

[pixies-and-poets]

Since we were talking about gramophones.

Over the past year or so my partner and I developed the hobby/pastime of going to garage and estate sales. Pretty much every weekend we find at least one sale to go to, and we like collecting old things to clean and fix up, and give them a good and loving home in our old house. He likes clocks in particular.

I decided this coming year, to give myself something to always keep an eye out for, my main goal is to find a gramophone. I haven't seen one in any of our ventures yet, but considering we recently got a sewing machine from around 1910 (for $25), stuff like that is definitely out there and I believe we can find one someday. Sure it will likely be expensive, but I think it would be worth it.

If I ever find one, I look forward to showing you all!

[pixies-and-poets]

Normally I make fun of tumblr's "based on your likes" for showing me 1) posts I've already liked, and the same post over and over or 2) Literally My Own Posts or 3) something completely random like a post with 20 notes that just says "piss" ..... but today it gave me something from a self proclaimed and proud terf and it's like ....... this should be the opposite of my likes.... go back to the other stuff please

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I was in the bathroom at the office washing my hands just now and someone like, basically RAN in and into a stall and fucking KICKED the toilet seat up, I saw it in the mirror and it made the loudest noise possible and I jumped

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Ok I have to tell you all about the dream I had last night. We were just talking about prophetic game dreams and stuff too, but I really don’t think this one means anything, lmao. You’ll see. I swear I don’t actually dream about video games that much BUT:

So in the first part of the dream I was Princess Rosalina IRL, and I was flying through a city trying to get to this big Nintendo event on time. Except I couldn’t fly very high, so I had to dodge and weave through buildings and I even went through windows into people’s apartments and came out on the other side, etc. This was actually a super fun part of the dream as it felt very vivid and thrilling.

I finally got to where Nintendo was having this huge event in the city park (it was like central park in New York or something) where they were going to reveal their latest groundbreaking technology to be incorporated into their next console. (At this point the fact I was Rosalina ceases to be relevant and I’m pretty sure I was just myself from here on.) Koizumi was there wearing a Mario hat, and possibly Miyamoto as well, with translators. They got up on stage and revealed that their latest new innovation was... some goop/slime?? It was a lot like silly putty, except stickier and squishier, and clear with little bubbles inside. It was easy to break it apart or morph back together, and managed to never get dirty no matter what you stuck it on.

So what you did with this goop is put it on something, and similar to how silly putty can capture the ink off the page of a newspaper, this goop would “capture” what was under it and send the data into a game. It was like that 3DS game where you took a picture of someone’s face and then their head became a little enemy drone, except instead of taking a picture you would just put this goop on a photo of them or possibly their real face and it would do the same thing. Now I know what you’re thinking, “you just described something you can, and literally do, already use a camera for” and you’re right!!! But Nintendo is extra, so they invented GAME GOOP!!

Koizumi threw out a bunch of goop into the crowd and you could also get a chunk from assistants that were walking around, and everyone ran around the park sticking the goop on things: statues and signs and other people and photos they had in their wallets, and all of that got recreated in a game world. Their demo game for the system was some kind of Miitopia type thing.

I just wanted to write this down so I didn’t forget it because it was so goofy, lol. Goofy AND goopy

[pixies-and-poets]

I need to do laundry but I also need to go pick up my meds so I'm at the store in my black pants and my black coat and my black boots, I feel like a dang stagehand