2026-03-05 february in review
despite starting a portion of this entry quite early in the month and fully drafting it by the 22nd, i couldn't muster the time or energy to finalize it until it was past the beginning of march..... i tend to be extra busy at the end of even-numbered months due to work, so this will likely happen again.
the subject of sleep, as it pertains to the people around me, always pisses me off. one of my brothers goes to hang out with his friends every friday, stays out all night, and either doesn't sleep or sleeps until the afternoon. then he goes back to his day job on monday and complains of being too tired in the evenings to do any meaningful work on his 5,000 white guy project ideas. it's so stupid it drives me insane. regular sleep!!!!! it has to be regular!!!!!!!!! and it has to be enough!!!!!
i knowwww everyone has different sleep needs. i had a boss who was apparently just peachy living on 4-5 hours, which i kind of didn't believe, but anyone who sincerely needs anything less than 8.5 hours makes me intensely jealous because they simply have more time in the day-- more time in their life-- than i do.
i have a sharp one-to-one effect on lost sleep and my performance in the following days. losing half an hour for a few nights in a row or staying up a couple hours late for funsies will leave me sluggish and unfocused for days afterward, even if i sleep longer or take naps to try to make up for it (which seem to actually make it worse; as i've known, i operate on "momentum").
i did stay up a bit while hanging out with my sister one random thursday, and i did have a late night emergency1 this month, inconveniently spaced so that the second occurred right as i regained my momentum after the first. every time this happens, i renew my commitment to getting sufficient regular sleep, and then it happens again.... don't hypothetically ask me about caffeine or i will be extra pissed off.
a weekend during which i was feeling the effects of lost sleep was spent on my "backup" activities; that is, the easy games i fall back on when i don't feel like doing anything else in order to avoid wasting the day away on something even worse (aka meaningless browsing).
there's always some progress for me to make in genshin impact, and i enjoy exploring the open world and inching up the area completion percentages to 100%. there was also an event card i wanted to earn in umamusume, which requires a mild bit of grinding.
by the end of the weekend i felt a crisis coming on. in genshin, i'd just finished an 8 week, 5 days per week daily chore path to redeem a 5 star character of my choice. the one i chose would improve my favorite character's team and boost his damage: c2 shenhe for my kaeya team, which is a nearly meaningless improvement in any context. and for that i spent 8 WEEKS, 5 DAYS A WEEK on bullshit daily chores. which of course were designed to make you engage with the game more, and then to Want more, then to Spend more.
and did i even like exploring that much? did i like completing dozens of menial open world puzzles more than anything else i could be doing? i've been playing genshin for over 5 years. i have other games i want to play. i've previously "soft-quit" genshin during the year i was absorbed in persona 5, and i think it's time to bring that back. i'm still genuinely invested in the main story of genshin, so from now on i am only going to play main story updates and MAYBE major events that feature my favorite characters.
in the horse realm, i'd earned 4 out of 5 copies of the event card in umamusume by the time i realized i just don't really like playing umamusume. i still like the characters and horse racing (my brother and i have been going to irl racetracks) so i don't mind keeping up with it, but i'm pretty much done with the game. i knew from the start i would end up quitting at some point; it was just a matter of when.
feh is being spared from my gacha culling because me playing it as much as i want is usually just 5-10 minutes a day over breakfast or on the bus. i do rack up some hours when new things get added for my favorite characters, but otherwise i'm able to keep up with and enjoy feh with very little time investment. but i am going to put a lid on spending: no more random 50 bucks to pull for a character that i could have saved for if i wasn't so flippant with my gacha currency. i don't know if i will be that strong if ash or elm get a really cute alt though.....
untethering myself from the clutches of 1.5 of my 2.5 gacha games (i've counted umamusume as a half since i played it so minimally) should be freeing up a lot of my time. i am in fact a bearer of a steam backlog.... the greatest irony, however, is that i've recently felt like i want to play minecraft, a game i've owned and sporadically returned to play exclusively vanilla survival since around 2013.
last year, for my sister's birthday, i got some ink pads and cheap little slabs of stamp material and hand-cut some stamp designs with an exacto knife. i made custom sized gift bags out of paper bags from the grocery store and tied it up cutely in a ribbon i had lying around. my sister was delighted and uses the stamps on order slips for her art store.
this year, i turned her on to the idea of fountain pens, so i picked one out in her favorite color and started filling the cart with other stationery to complete the package, totaling up to $85 worth of stuff. i'm certain she'll love and use all of it (probably), but i kept thinking about my nice handmade gift from last year.... obviously i'm not going to have fresh ideas of makeable things every year, nor the time to execute them, but i really do spend a lot of time looking at and occasionally buying a heap of things i think are neat, including stationery for myself.
this is especially bad in the realm of my merch collection. i'd started out quite strict-- i only wanted ONE pair of acrylic stands of my two favorite characters. then i started wanting, and wanting, and i had my first real job and no bills at the time, so it was easy to keep getting stuff. a few years on, i do have bills, but i don't spend much elsewhere (no car, i don't eat out, etc) so affording merch wasn't really a concern.
and then emergency bills happened, and then tariffs happened, and then i wanted to start building up savings and retirement, and suddenly 70 bucks of stuff that cost 120 to ship every other month stopped looking as good for my bank account. i realized i don't even really want all of this stuff that much.... i have these birthday merch sets for my two faves, consisting of like 7 different pieces of plastic each, and in the end i only value like 2 of them. my original ethos of keeping the collection small so that i value each piece more-- "i like these ones more than anything else, these represent the facets i like best"-- is something i wish i'd stuck with.
my favorite franchise is going on indefinite hiatus, which partly spurred my recent buying spree since many fans were quitting entirely and offloading their collections on secondhand sites. i think the process of hunting and buying items was becoming the sum of my enjoyment, rather than actually having and displaying the items themselves.... in the long term, the hiatus it will give me a break from new temptations, so i can start looking at what i have instead of what i don't.
when i thought about this alongside the comparison of my sister's birthday presents, i realized i should really just be making my own stuff instead of buying merch. i do have the capacity to draw art and get my own acrylic stands produced, but what i really mean is printing out pngs on my shitty printer and gluing them to diy cardboard standees, as an old twitter mutual of mine with no artistic ability and a tight recreational budget did years ago. that's what love is made of, i think.
i'm going to pursue this new form of enshrining character love with ash and elm, as they only have one real collectible to speak of and i already own it (a framed print of the book vi splash illustration). ashelm has always been a castle of my own making, so i feel a shrine consisting of handmade creations is the truest way to go with them. since drafting this journal entry, a friend of mine unknowingly beat me to the punch by mailing me a drawing of ash they made for me-- the shrine is already getting started.
the prior sections all boil down to optimizing my time and money. while i was trying to get back in the groove with lesvn this month, i was feeling an increased panic about my job prospects if i were to lose my current one. my job history has been a series of profoundly good luck while holding barely employable general skills, and years on this hasn't really changed. so my question became: do i want to dedicate so much focus to a project that isn't going to help me if i become unemployed? that's the kind of reality i'm facing as someone who lives alone and has no one to financially rely on should things go south.
it's also that lesvn has slightly evolved in scope from my original vision (as is always the case) as i came to understand how i would best utilize the visual novel medium for the story. i think it's a reasonable scope expansion, i.e. i wouldn't scope it back down just to make it more achievable, but it does make the project a little more daunting and a little less tenable to keep on my plate.
i think having ONE programming language solidly under my belt would increase my future job prospects significantly, and enable me to learn others more easily (yes i know the tech job market is especially bad. it's still my best choice). php (YES I KNOW), which i can use in my current job and for a million and one personal project ideas, is a much better use of my time to learn and play with, precisely because it can fulfill both my need for employable skills and my need for creative projects. i get excited thinking about the little web tools i'll be able to make down the line.
additionally, i was finding lesvn an ironic impediment to my goal to draw more, as any time i wanted to spend on creative things, i felt like i had to be prioritizing and progressing lesvn, which is not really a drawing activity in the current stage of development. i want to have room to pursue smaller things like short comics, minizines, or even just doodling sessions without feeling like it's not what i "should" be doing.
so with great sadness i will be shelving lesvn and removing it from my new year's resolutions. maybe in another 5 years....
i'm 26, i live alone, and i can't drive. this is not a convenient reality in a city where the transit fucking sucks. case in point: it takes me two buses and 55-60 minutes to get to work (assuming the buses even show up on time or at all) which is only 20 minutes away by car. i didn't want to drive for a very long time because, honestly, it just seems scary and stressful. i love being a passenger and not having whatever is going on be my problem.
but i've put up with the inconveniences for too long at this point; it's just not tenable in such a car-centric city. i'm very stressed by the amount of time i don't have in my day because i spend 2 hours of it on a shitty noisy smelly rattly bus in which it is impossible to work on basically anything while i'm sitting there. i did manage to ply enough sympathy from my boss over this to get two days a week working remotely, but even then, i feel like i spend my four days at home just recovering and preparing for the three days i have to commute.
the turning point was when i was watching a clip from a video game cover pianist i like and i saw her backyard through the glass doors behind her piano. it was lush and suburban and achingly reminded me of what the world looked like when i was growing up in my own suburban hometown. i knew i was never going to get a home like that without being able to drive-- there just aren't places that look or feel like that within range of transit, not without a miracle i don't want to bank on anymore. i need some goddamn trees.
so i give up! i'm planning on getting my license this year, and ideally a car too. conveniently, my father is an automechanic on the side, so i've enlisted him to help me find a used car that he's voted on to be reliable and cheap to maintain. i'm not looking forward to the actual practice of driving.... but i have to think about how easy it'll be to get places without begging my family to help me out.
i'm still a fan of transit and i am dreading the idea of parking anywhere in the city proper, so i do plan to keep making use of the buses and rail options when it's reasonable. i just want to get to places in less than an hour..... i'll have this replace lesvn in my new year's resolutions.
figured i'd provide an update to the "tools" i outlined in the december review and how they're working out for me.
officiating this section with what it really is: a replacement for the separate media log page i haven't used in over a year. i thought about recompiling the bits i write here into that log, but i don't really.... feel like it.... and i think that's repetitive. my site rehaul will likely shed that page, among other things.
books
shows & movies
the gacha crisis on the first weekend of february had me drafting this entry early on, and it makes me kinda pleased that this has become such a useful outlet, especially because i already do daily writing in my hobonichi planner. looking back, i must have been more pent-up than i realized before i tried out journaling a couple years ago.... or rather, maybe i had been channeling it all through the characters i drew instead lol. it's quite different and certainly more effective to face and address my stresses head-on, though this also means art production is down 200%..... troubling realization here. what is the source of my art if my pains are diverted elsewhere.....!?!? no wonder i've been more into fluffy pairings lately....
going into march, my primary aims are:
until next time.
1my cat was showing signs of a urinary blockage, which google said (and the vets later confirmed) is extremely serious and you should always take them in to an emergency vet asap when you notice it. my cat turned out fine; just a random Bad At Peeing event with no discernable cause. but i am now down a thousand dollars out of pocket, which has put me as close as i've ever been to my floor of "i can afford all my bills next month without touching my meager savings". hence my starting to worry about money a bit.
my roommate, on three different drugs, after costing me nearly 1k for the SECOND TIME after getting him barely 7 months ago:
