explicit
i don't wanna write much this month. the first half was unevenful and then... look i am fine talking about minor or general Troubles but when it comes to actual Negative Events i don't want to take up space and fuck up the vibe. i'll compromise by putting things under a details tag... if your browser doesn't support it i apologize...
um so my mom found one of my t packets and needless to say things went saurrr poorly. as an. understatement. and i really don't wanna talk much about it, i don't wanna describe the whole thing, because i'd rather shut it all down in my brain and never think about this ever ever again. #tower of babel moment but well i'm not the builders i'm the tower and brother i'd be glad to become rubble; i'm so fucking tired and i say this all the time but i swear to god i need to crawl under my bed and sleep for a thousand years, a physical response i don't think i've ever felt this intensely, like my body is shutting down, just so desperate to preserve whatever energy it can for... something? at least the energy savings mode is overruling any thought of self harm, even if i suppose thinking i should have died mysteriously at age 12 before anything could happen to me might count as passive suicidal ideation (but that's par for the course at this point ← normal brain behavior). and i get so nauseous thinking of this (have you ever gone an entire day feeling dead sure you'd throw up at any given moment?). you can see i'm talking around it, not daring touch any actual event and honestly was it even that bad (yes it fucking was. it was traumatic you dumbass but well am i not physically unharmed and at home and was this not what i wanted all along with my talk of towers being struck down? in ten years this will be nothing but an unpleasant memory, just another one of the fucked up things my mom has said and done to me and i still vividly remember for no reason, which is perfectly normal).
and what's fucked up is i still have not said anything, not really, and i don't want to. i talked to my friends (and i held the fort valiantly at that bar even as my heart raced as if i were in any actual harm there, which is also perfectly normal) and one of them said it's who i am and i shouldn't have to compromise but honestly i can't do this i cannot demand anything for myself because i can't have an honest conversation with my family. that ship has sailed like ten years ago and then sunk by missile on a fine november wednesday, just in case i had any funny ideas about going after it by rowboat. and well isn't my voice nice enough already? i could stop (i'd always stop eventually, and this is a "sober" thought; i have never aimed for full cis man passability) and we could all pretend this never happened and that i can look my mom in the face again with the full knowledge of the extent of her egocentrism, of how fully she refuses to see me as an entire human being. how can you even live under the same roof as someone you now know for sure would rather see you dead than a happy dyke. "sorry i acted as if i were a person for once, won't happen again. woof.". where the fuck do we even go from here.
i don't blame myself for being careless, not in so many words. i regret slipping up with my trash protocol but at least i'm well aware the fallout is not my fault. doesn't make it any better however.
so needless to say my disco elysium thought cabinet is fighting for its life. electrochemistry and composure and whoever else are at war in here. i just think i should be doing stupid shit for funsies but i'm a good pet and don't (what would i do anyway). but dear god i've been dying for an eternal cigarette break of the soul.
on socmed i captioned this one "having a wank. not really into it, to be honest" after one of my favorite limmy posts, because i was feeling like drawing low energy porn. someone has to do it. the process felt like milking stone tbh, the palette that comes so easily with art academy's brush engine and the 3ds just feels bad on azpainter (where i don't have any good blendy brushes for subtle color changes) and a big screen. i ended up making it monochrome partway through and using a gradient map at the end, a process that i kinda hate (partly on "ideological" levels because i don't like relying too much on specialized digital art options and billions of post-processing steps). so it's a low energy scene but not so much an easy and low energy process on my end. oh well. that's art.
you can't really see the nuances in color here, but i sketched with watercolor pencils, which led to some interesting bleed. you do have to be careful but after the first couple layers of paint it becomes less of a problem, and i used very thick white wall paint to keep the background very clean (also because i'm low on white...). plus it helped make the asemic writing very soft: i "sketched" it in red, went around it very carefully with one layer of paint, wrote it again with green, then more paint, very carefully, around the curves. it has a nice fuzzy depth to it. i'm very hesitant to properly varnish this piece, leaving it with uneven shine.
anyone remember them... do not look at that anatomy at all please and thank you. i sure wasn't. i just wanted to draw those fat rolls
still playing pokemon tcg pocket a lot, it's grown on me now i have enough of a collection to try more decks (still missing some crucial stuff like erika, and i wanna try either of the nido lines). let me go on a real ass tangent here.
tcg pocket feels really good to deckbuild in, even though the cards are boring and there aren't many options and the deck size of 20 is claustrophobic. because not only because the app is a lot cleaner than tcg live, there's a steady influx of cards, even as ftp, without you needing to do anything. due to its focus on being a collecting game, it's easy to see both your entire collection and the cards you don't own.
but the problem is the game doesn't really want you building those decks for any real purpose. for starters, a hard cap of 15 decks is insane and unjustifiable, especially when there's no way to export/import them. but even after that, the battle system crosses from beginner friendly into dumbed down. and it can be fun! i like short games well enough, but the format pretty much excludes the possibility of much deep strategy. and because there's no split between casual / competitive or in-built no-ex categories, and no elo based matchmaking, pvp quickly became dominated by meta decks that are simply boring to play against (and with, ime). and it doesn't even make sense, profits wise, imo, because most collector minded people will want to have all the shiny ex cards anyway, and the meta obsessed reddit types just need two of their drug of choice. that's damn alienating to the casual player who wants to put their favorite guys or interesting synergies in a deck and have a chance to not be steamrolled by circle circuit on turn 3.
now enter tcg live. oh yeah baby i'm in deep. tcg live fucking sucks. you get the full game, which is nice (though the power creep is even more obvious in it), but the app is really sluggish and overheats my phone badly (this might be on me for not playing on the laptop but like. i've played magic the gathering arena. it could be way better). more importantly, deck building is extremely cumbersome, and the only way to get new cards is to grind out battles with the precons, making it a place where creativity goes to die i suppose. of course, i know exactly why that is — the powers that be want people buying actual real world physical cards and playing actual real world games. but well, in this economy? i just wanted to create a deck with my favorite dark types and see how it goes, but now i have to grind using like, roaring moon, and try my luck at getting those multiple absols, who're not even in the same booster as umbreon. come on.
so what's my point here. i don't think tcg pocket needed to reimplement the full 60 card game. but dear god the battle system needed more thought put into it. just ten more cards per deck... and imo energy cards (vs the steady supply) could do a lot for this game. i expect the upcoming mini set will have spicier items and supporters, but the key thing really is that 20 cards is too tiny. we need rare candy badly for s2 pkmn to stand a chance (ideally only for non-ex though, else we're fucked). and i'd like to see discard pile interactions, though i'm not sure how they'd fit this format. idk. in the end, i like pokemon, i like the tcg more than i dislike it, but dear god they make it difficult being an adult casual fan of the franchise.
also, secondary tangent on pokemon ex: i've found that the most fun and balanced decks to play with and against are the ones with a single ex pokemon. deckbuilding this way is all about having a pretty robust base and adding in just one spicy little guy to help with meta decks. my main such deck is tentacruel / frosmoth / starmie ex, tentacruel being one of the strongest pokemon around honestly (frosmoth doesn't get played as much, but it's not weak to pikachu). beedril / eggs is also really nice, though it really needs erika, and i'm not sure about the secondary pokes (gogoat? kangaskhan?). i still think ex is a mistake and and circle circuit needed to cost 3 energy and playing moltres ex / charizard ex makes you a fucking asshole but the "lesser" evo exes can feel better on both ends. i wanna pull a wigglytuff tbh...
not sure what i'll read next, i might finish the sex life of the saints: an erotics of ancient hagiography, which is really dense if you don't know anything about ancient hagiography to begin with.
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