Spring 2024 September - November

November 1st

Happy (belated) Halloween! It's not really a holiday I celebrate given that it's not really a thing here, but I do love seeing all the cool and spooky things that come out at this time of year. I hope everyone's been keeping well, especially since it's getting colder for the folks in the Northern Hemisphere! I can't believe it's already November, my goodness. The days are seriously flying by at the moment, it feels like life has been going way too fast at the moment despite the fact I don't have much on. If anything, I'm just counting down days at the moment... days until I hear back about interviews and jobs... days until my Graduation ceremony... days until FFXIV's 7.1 patch releases... days until a package arrives... so much counting! Raghhh!!!! But yes, Summer is well and truly on the way. It's already been getting warmer for the most part, with a few cold spells here and there. Gosh, I can't wait for warmer weather!!!

Speaking of packages, two figures I bought finally arrived today! My brand-new Hachiware Nendoroid and Ichiban Kuji Snow Miku figure are now in my possession and displayed on my shelves! I'm actually about to get a new display shelf for my room to keep them on, which I'm looking forward to (especially since it gives me an excuse to buy more figures... like the Madoka Higuchi Nendoroid that's coming out soon, and the Suisei Hoshimachi figma... please pray for my wallet). I'm hoping to display some new acrylic stands on them when they arrive, too! Unfortunately the proxy bug has bitten me and I ordered a few more pieces of merch of my fave SideM character, so those'll be on the way soon. In my defense... someone was selling my dream one, white day, for a ridiculously good price. And one that I missed out on buying at Animate Ikebukuro before I left... and a mini collab cafe one where he's dressed like a waiter... and also a little frame from a recent unit release which is so good for taking pics with... I'm also about to drop $60 on some more acrylic stands of him since he's in the current round of the 315 exhibition in Harajuku this month. He looks gorgeous, okay. I couldn't say no. I'm kinda thinking of putting together a large Itabag for him at some point, as well... but I don't know if I want to do a repeating badge one, or a collection of all the goods I have for him... I also want to make a cute little rosette, especially since my friend's planned one for 10th live looks so gorgeous too! Ahh, so many ideas!!! But in all seriousness, it's great to be so in love with SideM again despite it's rough history as a Bandai Namco property. 10 years of this amazing idol series, and it still thrives despite having an active service game and barely being present in cross-branch console ones because of incels who don't want men near their underage anime wives. Hilarious. Anyway, I seriously want to make a shrine (and even a fanlisting, maybe!) dedicated to SideM and the years I've spent with IM@S as a whole. It's been quite a big part of my life for these past decade, and connected me with some of my best friends!

Like I said last week, I've been playing through FFXIV's most recent expansion, Dawntrail. Man, it's really good! I love Wuk Lamat and the way she truly is just a woman of the people, and I think the story is so lighthearted and fun after the last four years' updates being dominated by heavy feelings of grief and struggle. I'm also incredibly keen on Koana... to the point where I'm shipping him with my new Miqo'te It's... taking me a while to get through, admittedly. I've maxed out Astrologian and Fisher, and I want to keep chugging along with the story... but it's just so dominated by cutscenes, and unvoiced ones at that! It gets draining having to engage with these cutscenes one after the other when previous expansions weren't like that. It's no fun sitting in a five minute long cutscene only to run a few meters for another one! Grr!!! Though, I'm about halfway through now, and maybe about to play some more tonight. It's been great getting back into the swing of things and relearning how to play my roles after they were reworked over the past year (literally, my two main jobs are the ones which got the biggest rework with 7.0... my god...). Otherwise... I picked up P3R on Steam this week, as well as Mass Effect: Legendary Edition at the recommendation of my partner and one of my friends. They're both extremely Garrus-pilled, so I'm expecting to really like him as well when I get around to playing it.

I think that's about it from me for now! I'm hoping to do more coding at some point soon, but who knows with how much gaming I've been doing... I hope November treats all of us well!

October 25th

Jeez, I've gotten very bad at updating this and doing any kind of site maint as of late. I can't believe I've nearly gone a full month without blogging! How insane, who even am I anymore?!?! Just kidding. In all seriousness, the days have kind of just been flying by as of late and I've not been touching my code nearly as much. I've been doing a lot to keep myself busy, and I even finally invested in a new PC to replace my old one, so I've been catching up on content in games I loved to play before my old one died. I'll be honest, this one runs several times better than the old one to the point where it's mindblowing to me. I'm looking forward to having this one for years to come!

All fun and games aside, my brain has been a little weird as of late. Some weird stuff has happened recently that I don't quite understand, so again, I've just been trying to deal with that quietly and keep myself busy so nothing goes too badly. I am alright and very much alive, though! I've also been spending a bit of time with my partner— he actually helped me set up my PC the other week, which I greatly appreciate. Especially since he gave me his old monitor! Having two is actually insanely useful for stuff like webdev and even playing games, since I can see messages from friends and have guides up without needing to tab out every couple of seconds. I've gotten very used to it already. Since I'm working through FFXIV's Dawntrail expansion right now, it's really come in handy.

I don't really know what else to say with regard to what's going on in my life right now. Job hunt has been pretty mid for the last little while, I guess. I missed out on a pretty good job despite having a great interview, and I just feel deep lethargy towards the whole job application process due to the copious amounts of ghosting and rejection emails. I can't even enjoy all this free time I've been afforded, since I feel a deep sense of guilt about not "trying harder" and applying to more jobs, even though I've basically done all I can for now. I don't really know how to describe it, but I feel frozen by the fact I still haven't found a good job to the point where it overshadows everything and I can't really... relax. Even my sleep has gotten very bad as of late. I kinda hate it.

Depressing stuff aside, I've been doing more cooking and baking. At the moment, I've been eating a lot of chicken and rice since it's simple to make and always fills me up a lot. I even made some cookies the other week for my partner, and am planning on making more to take to him during his final exam period. I've been doing my best to eat good since I'm training pretty hard at the moment, which is nice. I'm set to be doing my grading in a little over a month now, so I'm hoping it all goes smoothly.

Anyway, that's about it for now. I hope you all have been well and taking care, especially since the weather in many places has been pretty wild lately!

October Third

Wow, it's been a minute since I updated anything in here! Life caught up with me a bit these last couple weeks, and I've been focusing on things other than my coding. I didn't get the job from my previous post, however, I had an interview last week that seemed to go well and I should be hearing back about that job sometime next week! I'm kind of hopeful for this one, as the interviewers seemed to like me, but I'm still keeping an eye on jobhunting sites in the meantime just in case. I'd actually really like this job if possible given how much it lines up with my interests, but it's out of my hands at the moment.

I started working on an updated code for a few pages since I wanted to shuffle some things around, but got distracted. I've been spending quite a bit more time offline these past couple weeks, opting to focus on cooking and spending more time with my partner. Oh, and I've developed... a mild addiction to Wizard101 again. It's one of my all-time favourite games and I've been playing since about 2010! I recently finished the first world of arc four, since I put down the game for a while in 2019 after I finished the third arc and got busy with life (and FFXIV...) at the time. There's a lot of stuff I've yet to get to, but I'm very excited to play through Wallaru and upgrading my gear. Also, I want to play through the first arc again on a new wizard if I have the time! I'm very nostalgic for the Malistare storyline, if I'm being honest. I also want to complete the Angler's log if I can! I'm a complete sucker for fishing mini-games, especially when the fish are so fun and creative! I actually started typing up a big spreadsheet of fish I still need to catch, since I only have a fraction of them from when the fishing minigame itself first launched.

Since I've been taking my health pretty serious lately, I invested in an Apple Watch. It's nice! Only downside is that the watch tends to run out of battery a lot faster than previous fitness watches I've used over the past couple years due to the extra features it has. However, I've fully given up on FitBit after my last watch fully carked it after less than a year of use due to a software bug that causes rapid battery drain... I was really disappointed in that, since my last one only "died" due to the strap clasp physically disconnecting from the watch. Whatever, live and learn. I was really glad to find out that Pokemon Sleep allows you to sync watch data now too, so I've been tracking a lot of my sleep on there as of late, too! It's a nice little idle game that's really encouraged me to fix up my sleep schedule more, lol. Other than that, It's been nice to see all my health and exercise stats again! Closing my rings makes me feel like I'm accomplishing a lot, lol. I'm hoping to lose about 10kg since I put a little on while overseas, but I'm a tad more focused on eating a lot of protein and gaining muscle... particularly in my arms and core, I really need them for Karate!

Anyway, that's about it. I can't believe it's October already! It's crazy how the time flies... I'm really excited for the weather at home to get warmer, even though this week has been rather warm already.

September Twelfth

I had a job interview on Tuesday, and it seems to have gone pretty well. I'm not exactly confident that I'm going to get the job given that it's in a field I'm not overwhelmingly familiar with (and I still don't have a restricted license, which they asked me about...), plus it's not something I'm overwhelmingly keen on anyway— it's moreso a retail-style job in comparison to admin, which is what I'm more experienced with thanks to my past customer service/admin/overall running an entire mall while being paid barely above minimum wage job. The job hunt has been pretty dire, but I've been hitting up a few recruitment agencies and whatnot for help. Only trouble is my aforementioned license situation, as many of these roles require restricted or higher for... honestly, no good reason. Why should it matter if I have other reliable forms of transport? Well, whatever, I'm planning on sitting for my restricted soon— all I really need to learn is parallel parking and maybe go over three-point turns again. One of the agencies referred me to a restricted license program even though I kinda don't need it, but it's free so I don't mind giving it a shot.

I'm going out for a lunch date with my boyfriend later today, I've really been looking forward to it since I haven't seen him all week. His Mum recommended a little cafe not too far from where he works, so we're hoping to check it out given we didn't get the chance to on Friday. Speaking of her, she's lovely. Part of why I like going to visit my boyfriend at work is because chatting to her is always a delight. She even gives me discounts sometimes, even though I've told her I'm happy to pay the full price.

I also have Karate tonight, which ought to be fun. I went on Monday after being out for a week and a half, and it was pretty good! My stamina and recovery has improved a hell of a lot these last few months. I almost miss the muscle aches though, so I think I need to put more effort in on days off! I'm not gonna go too crazy tonight, though, since I'm heading to Wellington with a family friend on Sunday for the Japan Festival. I have a cousin performing there, and I just wanted to go check it out and make a few purchases if possible. Either way, it's an excuse to get out of the house and go to the capital. I've been cooped up at home too much lately, so it ought to be good!

September Second

Wow, it's the second day of September already. Where has the year gone?! It feels like January was just a few weeks ago, if anything... now that I'm older, the passage of time definitely feels scary. On the bright side, that just means that Spring is already here for those of us safely tucked away in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, a lot of flowers have already started blooming here— the Daffodils we have in our front yard are already flowering, as are many of our trees. Though, given the heavy wind and rain that's just blown through the country this past week, many of the flowers have been reduced to a giant mess on the ground. Our driveway's drain is completely clogged right now from it all!

I feel like I don't really have much to say at the moment, but I wanted to blog anyway and show off my brand new seasonal layout. I don't know if you can tell, but I really like the colour blue. I also had quite a lot of fun chucking this together, even though I didn't get to use all of the ideas that were floating around in my head for the last couple weeks. I've been meaning to code more, but for some reason, I've just had the urge to procrastinate... thus, I'm taking it slow. I've been doing a bit of writing, though, and want to publish it on here at some point.

My life is admittedly pretty dull now that I'm back home... especially with a lack of job and functioning desktop PC, meaning many of the things I could be doing (coding with better posture, cracking into my obnoxiously long gaming backlog, etc) just aren't happening. That's not to say I'm necessarily unhappy, though. I'm in the best shape of my life at the moment, both physically and mentally. I've been exercising and maintaining a pretty good diet, as well as socialising and engaging in a lot of different activities while applying to jobs. I'm basically the epitome of mental health right now. Not so much physical health, though... I've unfortunately come down with the flu again, so I'm currently suffering through a stuffy nose while writing this, which was more than likely given to me by my partner. It's not exactly killed my mood, though! I'm bound to be better soon enough, since it's so minor... I just don't want to have to miss too many sessions of Karate. I had to skip tonight as well since I'm still ridiculously congested... I reasonably should be fine by Thursday, but I'm a tad worried about being able to keep up because of the fatigue I always get from being sick...

In the time I've had since I've been home, I've also managed to start playing Fire Emblem: Engage! I've actually had a copy since it released, but never got around to playing it due to having other games I needed to play first and being busy with uni up until... well, now. I'm about two or so hours in so far, and it's pretty fun! I really like Alfred so far, he's so cool... definitely a candidate for S-Rank with the player character! I also started playing Genshin Impact again as well. I managed to get Kazuha in two pulls, and got Tighnari from the anniversary 5* selection! They're both very fun to play with, and I'm currently hoarding all my primos to pull for Raiden in her eventual rerun. I just think she's neat (and I want a good electro character, can you blame me LOL).

Other than that... I'm in a relationship for the first time in about four-ish years? I never thought I'd be saying that, as I'd kind of grown accustomed to being single and enjoyed the solitude of it all... in fact, I honestly kind of didn't care about finding a relationship and just wanted to do my own thing for the most part. My future plans mostly involved me having a stable job and doing all kinds of dorky things like going to more SideM concerts, LOL! Though, I feel like he adds a lot to my life— even before we started dating, he'd been an incredibly supportive friend to me and the time we spent together always made me feel at ease. It's nice to have someone on my side like this, I think. Anyway, enough yapping from me. Hopefully this season is just as good as the last! Until next time!