This Switch 2 drama is getting on my nerves. I'm not even mad at Nintendo because I've never bought any of their consoles on release since they're ALWAYS really expensive. It's the way these overgrown children are acting like they're too good to be poor, as if they don't deserve to be punished by *checks notes* not being able to afford an extremely expensive luxury item in a recession during an economically unstable era. The sheer number of people who DO need to humble themselves and just keep playing their Switch is too high. Seriously. It won't kill you to hold out until you can afford it, you can buy secondhand, or they release the cheaper models. You don't need to play most of their release day games on the latest models to enjoy them. Playing through Twilight Princess yet again for the umpteenth time is still satisfying. There are still these miserable little medals to collect in Crystal Bearers. Animal Crossing New Leaf is still fun. My fourth copy of Stardew Valley is on the Switch. MOD YOUR 3DS, FOOLS. If all else fails and you're just dying to get your hands on a Switch 2, maybe ask yourself why and reflect on the consumer culture you've been ensnared into. Then go mod your 3DS, play ACNL, and get spendy with your bells instead. Embrace what you already have.

If you come to beef with me about this because you just really think you NEED to say the Switch 2 is overpriced and Nintendo is greedy, kick rocks. I'm actually more worried about the rising cost of living. This is me just venting because it's my journal page and I can do that. I'm granting myself permission and the right in this my domain wrought from code written by my own hands. The flames of my own outage and the steel of my determination have been crafted into a mighty fine 'fuck you'. It is my only fuck and I will not surrender it. Not in this economy.

It finally happened. Eggs are Five. Dollars. Eggs. You know, I used to raise chickens and they would lay so many freaking eggs that we'd toss them for fun once they went bad because we had so many! I wish I knew they would become such a hot commodity. If I stuck to it, maybe I could make bank selling to the local market? It's pointless to wonder, though. Every last chicken we had died in a flood that swept away even the garden. The ruined remains of the coop had been their grave and there had been nothing we could do about it without putting our lives at risk, too.

My mood tanked hard a couple days ago, but I think I've bounced back. Still have no idea what caused all that, but it was entirely overdramatic. Maybe I got used to not being exposed to petty discourse and so getting a ton dumped on me at once just did me in? Social media is the plague and yet I am glad it exists because where else would I be able to scream into the void about my niche interests for like or two people to nod and give me their digital affections in appreciation of my appreciating?

Now then, time to either throw myself headfirst into Crystal Bearers so I can finally collect that location data and snoop around OR play Twilight Princess again because I want to snoop around in that game, too. I don't have it for Gamecube anymore (sad), but I have the Wii version which is mirrored and bane of my existence because I keep running into the walls after wasting 600+ hours just poking around, exploring, and that doesn't even include the number of times I replayed it over again on another save file because I loved that game so much. Aribter's Grounds scared me so bad, though. I had been seven and armed with the knowledge of a kid who watched horror movies they technically weren't supposed to. I blame The Mummy for that. If you decide to watch it, fair warning: Scarabs, burrowing, and body horror. Yeah man. All three. Arbiter's Grounds made me cry because of this movie.

When confronted with the uncomfortable and unavoidable, I crumble and overshare. It's an overreaction to the fact I don't feel I have the right to be upset. Or that the person in front of me thinks that, at least. The closest I'd ever come to a manic crashout without being actually manic, probably. I don't know what to call it when I unravel like that, but it's fast, intense, and I have no clue what I've done or why by the end of it.

I think I'll keep these pieces of frenzied panic up, though. My usual choices lead me to scrub the incident away or delete everything to try and erase the event, but it inevitably will happen again so long as my window of tolerance is so narrow. Maybe if I just let it stay up, I can at least desensitize myself to the shame and fear of feeling distressed. I'm not sure. I'm so far out of my depth it's crazy. Nothing is wrong and it's freaking me out slowly but surely.

I have a can of Monster and it's pink. Ultra Strawberry Dreams. Next to it is this massive Stanley cup I got because the shiny stars on it dazzled me even though that's a stupid reason to want something so expensive. Off to the side, I have a porygon figure I bought at a discount because the package was damaged and an alcremie snap-together figure that I based my site's color palette on. I have a pocketwatch that stopped working when I visited my mother-in-law in the ICU and the inside has perfume in it because the smell is soothing.

Life is good and I should be grateful so I will force myself to be grateful. I will fake it until the lie becomes the truth and I've fooled even myself. It's easy to feel awful and to be upset because I've almost lost four people who were very, very important to me back to back. But I did not and need to act like it because life has to go on. Tomorrow will come.

Long And Depressingish Entry

I've been increasing my archive of stuff for Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers. It's a really small Wii game that flopped pretty hard, but it's my comfort custody battle game from when I'd been a kid. I always rented it out from the local DVD/game section at the grocery store before they got rid of it for some reason (probably wasn't profitable enough). I don't really relate to the characters as much as I do in most of my other favorite forms of media, too, so it's weird. Sometimes I wonder if I actually love the game or it's some childish holdover of my own feelings from the time, when I first started my long seven year wait for my mom to just be there. At all. I'd gotten seperated from my sisters, too, and so I threw myself headfirst into videogames until I couldn't keep ignoring my own needs as a human being. The Crystal Bearers did kickstart the phase where I wanted to be really cool, though, and I remember begging for a jacket with a fuzzy lining because of it. I wore that thing once and never again because the sleeves were so damn itchy.

That aside I'm also working on putting together a fan site for the game with some of the stuff I've rescued from the obscure corners of the internet because there's just so little to be found for this game at all. Then there is the fact I'm currently replaying the game on Dolphin so I can do the undubbed version, recording location scroller text, and just generally collecting as much data as I can so I can dump it all out onto the internet to keep any lore from this game alive as long as I can. The idea it might entirely disappear is distressing and inevitable. All I can do about that is keep churning out more information and rehashing small details in the hopes I can stave off the complete death of interest long enough for me pass away first. Since I'm in my twenties, that means I have sixty years to keep trying to drum up interest. I doubt I'd actually do it, but wouldn't it be funny to update the fan site on my death bed sixty years from now one last time?

And now something strangely funny I've done because I'm silly: I poorly hashmashed Latin phrases together into a phrase of probably completely broken Latin. The phrases are all very aesthetic-ish and I thought it wouldn't be terrible to replace Lorem Ipsum with it since I usually don't need an entire page's worth to put together a webpage. I just need enough to create a second line and can usually work from there. I haven't run into any issues with it yet and so, behold, Whatever this is:

Dolorem ipsum dulce et decorum est pro patria memento mori. Tu fui ego eris. Quod tu es, ego fui. Quod nunc sum, et tu eris.

I have the uncorrupted words from Lorem Ipsum (dolorem ipsum or 'pain itself'). Dulce et Decorum est is a poem I read in school and stuck with me but it got its name from 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' which means 'It is sweet and proper to die for one's country'. Memento mori is such a popular phrase that roughly means 'Remember you have to die'. I got 'Tu fui ego eris' from a Silent Hill 3 puzzle and it means 'I was you; you will be me'. 'Quod tu es, ego fui. Quod sum, et tu eris' is a grave inscription that means 'What I was, you are. What I am, you will be' that I got from digging around about 'Tu fui ego eris'. If they weren't completely broken in logic and were as easily mixed together as I wished, the meaning of it all would roughly be 'The pain itself remembering to die for one's contry is sweet and proper. I was you; you will be me. What I was, you are. What I am, you will be'.

It just all seemed rather cosmically poetic. In the military, we affectionately (sarcasm) referred to ourself as 'Dragon Soldiers' and our motto 'Elementis Regamus Proelium' means 'We rule the battle through the elements'. I sure as hell did not aside from the infernal heat of a massive metal box and the industrial grade water pumps we accidentally killed a fancy little robot with, but I did go through that one part where we walked into rooms full of dangerous gas that forced us to trust our equipment and training (or suffer immensely because nerve agents are no joke). Dulce et Decorum est describes the death of someone via the very things I'd been trained to handle, pretty much. I'd joined to get out of an awful situaion and because I couldn't see myself being in anyway a stable, functioning human being without guidelines to work with let alone a decently paying job with some level of security for a dumbass like myself. The momento mori part is very tongue in cheek because I did NOT remember to die and in fact ended up outliving my initial expections by like 8 whole years at this point. The back and forth of me to you to me at the end hammers home the rest. To trust that who I used to be became who I am today just as who I am today will become who I will be years from now. Change is certain and avoiding it is futile. It's better embraced because the changes I've lived to see are very much worth every bit of grief that brought me to this point.

Hahaha all that longwindedness just to say nothing much at all. Still feels nice to just take my thoughts out for a little walk every so often. I attribute it to being over the halfway point to 30 but I've always done this. Contemplating your own existence may be pointless, but it feels nice to do pointless things sometimes.

My sadness is brief, dramatic, and cheap. I devoured junk food and have reacquainted myself with contentment. Also I'm seeing the Minecraft movie tomorrow on a nice date with my husband. He wants to eat ramen specifically because his run times are always the best the day after, we want to see the Minecraft movie, and I want to keep trying to scope out a CD player (why are there so many record players but zero portable CD players man?) so I can listen to the Crystal Bearers OST on the go as god surely intended when he made it impossible to think about anything else for the past several months while making me wait over 15 damn years for a sequel. Surely.

I also made a color logic chart to showcase my broken way of viewing colors when I use the ye old colors from my early site, back when I went by Jisen. I've considered going back to them as a sort of homage to what I used to be and do, but I also know I abandoned that screenname for a good reason. It's not like I did anything terrible, but it wasn't the healthiest time of my life. Not even close. I didn't sleep, I hardly ate, and I almost died because I'd been running on less than empty for too long doing things that required mental precence and more focus than I could give.

Now I am Aspdestos and I don't have to live like that.

Sometimes I don't want to get up. The thought of doing anything at all is so heavy and I'm so tired. Waking up like that makes me want to curl up and tell the world to leave me alone. It always comes after I'm so full of life and excitement that I don't know what to do with myself.

There are a million things I want to do, but they all take up so much energy. Games I enjoy feel hollow and empty, all my theories are pointless and devoid of joy, and my writing is all tainted with a pervasive sense of ennui. Small tasks feel impossible and just convincing myself to start is a herculean effort.

Nonetheless, I do it all anyways, waiting for this extreme low to pass. It always does and that gives me some peace and comfort.