Lith's Diary - January (Patreon)

Dear Diary,
The last month has been kinda... intense! In several ways? I just glanced over my last entry and noticed I was talking about having some trouble with work/play balance, and my first thought was how for the last week I've been way behind on work and having a lot of trouble catching up. Oh no, I thought! I'm having even more of those troubles now!

But I thought about it for a minute, and that's not quite true. It's true that I've gotten into a lot of silly, fun stuff lately, too much to really tell you about it all, but I don't think that's necessarily why I fell behind. Actually, I've been focusing a lot of my time and energy lately on self-improvement! I've gotten to a better place in my life after all the big crazy transitions last year, but there's still a TON of stuff in my life I'm not satisfied with. Skills I'm lacking, things I've been meaning to do and never got around to, bad habits and slowly looming concerns. So I've sat down and started sorting it all out, rolling out a lot of my tools for improving my habits and day-to-day productivity, and while it's been tough at times, I think it's doing me a lot of good!

I've also... well, I've started taking an anti-depressant. I've been putting off talking to a doctor, and when it got down to it, I was showing a lot of the signs. Since then, I've had a lot more energy, but I've also had some trouble focusing on my work. Actually, I'm not even sure if that was the pills-- the day I visited the doctor, I got a lot of little worries off my chest and... I dunno. I think it kinda flipped a switch for me, that maybe things will be okay. How weird is that? Like, I've been living in a nice, new place where things are a lot better for months, I've been working hard on making things better, and suddenly after visiting the doctor (and the dentist, actually) it's like, the sense that I'm in a good place just finally kicked in? I guess looking after your health can be important to feeling better about yourself. Still, it makes me wonder if I might be a little premature starting these pills... it's hard to tell how much will come from what, you know?

Well, we'll see how it goes. The important thing is, I'm feeling better, doing better, and I have been having a lot of fun and have a lot to look forward to! Pretty much the only bad thing is that work was really rough the last week. I should have gotten more done sooner, and maybe it was the balance paying attention to work vs. working on myself more than anything that caused the problem. Another thing I'll have to be careful about, but I can't feel too bad about putting a lot of effort into self-improvement!

So enough serious talk! I've been watching so many different anime lately, I couldn't possibly do them justice. I did play more Jurassic World, but I ended up playing a lot more Railway Empire. Been playing a lot of Monster Hunter here and there as well, I finally surpassed the point I'd quit in the xbox version of the game way back when, and I've actually been having a ton of fun with it recently. I feel like a relentless machine with the lance! And I jumped into Shoppe Keep 2 as well, which has been pretty great at eating up hours of my time, but I'll probably wait to talk about that till I've finished what's available so far.

Actually, that dinosaur game was really good at making hours of my life vanish too. Which is surprising! There are a lot of mechanics in it that feel kinda... dumbed down and casual compared to the usual game in this genre, and it ends up forcing you to do a bit more busy work keeping things going than is really necessary, stuff like not letting you queue actions at a lot of the buildings, combined with a lot of real-time waiting periods that feel kinda pointless. Nothing too bad, but it's got just a little too much taste of a mobile game to it here and there. But that's why I'm surprised how engaging it's been running my own lil dinosaur parks, trying to maximize the exposure of dinosaurs, milk the guests for all their money with dumb concession stands and such, and struggling to find a way to stop the raptors constantly breaking out.

For the deeper strategy, though, Railway Empire has definitely been more rewarding. I've poked at a lot of these railroad games, and this is the first one to really capture my attention. The mechanics for laying track are always sticky for these kinds of games, but this one, at this point, seems to be just about impeccable. It's still a little weird or fidgety here and there, but for the most part, you can actually get really realistic and really satisfyingly challenging layouts going to connect all the towns and rural businesses and flood them with business, making them grow to give you more profit. The big emphasis is basically to work out ways to fulfill all of a town's needs so it can grow, which means more passengers and mail they want to ship to all the other towns (which is where you make the serious money) but the bigger the town, the more resources and the more variety of resources it'll require to grow further. You can build businesses in the towns to fill demand and make cash hand over fist if you're good at predicting where there'll be gaps in production and where the big demand will be. Tons of economic interactions to manipulate!

I do have some small gripes with the game, but overall it's been pretty dang addictive. On the large scale, I'd say it feels like there's something missing that makes it not quite perfect, but I can't put my finger on it. It's still not as satisfying as that old, obscure trading game, Merchants of Kaidan. That game scratched an itch for me for trading games like no other could, which is weird, cause it's a janky, poorly-designed mess with so many bugs and such a brutally demanding endgame I've never actually finished the main campaign. But the core mechanic, just trading between cities, trying to exploit big surpluses and swings in demand, was so dang satisfying! We need more trading games!

But yeah. Overall, I think this has been a pretty good month, now I stop to look back! I'm feeling healthier and happier in several different ways, and I'm still working on more ways to improve myself and what I'm doing with myself. That's the important thing in life! No matter where we are now, what matters is that we're pushing to make things better!

I hope January has treated you well, too, Diary. And I hope you've been working to make things better! Honestly, even simple little steps can help. It might sound silly, but I sat down and started writing out the things I feel I could improve in myself, why they're important, and how I might be able to work on improving them... and just taking the time to put all that down has helped a ton with focusing my efforts and getting myself into better habits. If you're feeling aimless or like you're not getting much done to better your life, maybe you could try it!

Either way, I want you to know I appreciate all the help you've given me. I'm still struggling to improve myself in the void, too, even if it's been a... strange, wandering path, and you've been there to help me every step of the way. That means a lot to me. I guess that's why I'm hoping I might help you with your own journey too, just a tiny bit. I want you to be happy, and accomplish everything you want in your life. So try your best, okay?

Thank you, Diary. For all your help, and for being... you.
-Lith