This month flew by. I can barely believe all the events and milestones that took place for me personally. In less than a month, I have:
- Started a weekly Livestream
- Created a Game Jam event
- Picked up meditation
- Ran an art event
- Ran a booth at the local Science Center
- Bought my first-ever Plushies
- Made preparations to induct new moderators
- Did lots of miscellaneous stuff
It seems like September is usually a period of increased activity or new ventures for me. I don’t really invest my faith in astrology, cool as it could be in theory, and yet it feels like a pattern. It does make me wonder what new stuff I might discover a year from now. Insert upside-down smile emoji here.
In the wake of all these new developments, in addition to my existing rotation of things I put my time into, I have some catching up to do. I am setting a new bi-weekly requirement for myself, at least for the time being, to ensure I provide consistent updates to my ko-fi supporters. I will inevitably post more often than that – and have done so before – but I should set this baseline while things are frenetic. Anywho, I should provide more detail about that bullet list above.
The Weekly Livestream is a series showcasing an exciting new community project for Legend of Dragoon. Helmed by Corey aka Monoxide, this project is all about reverse-engineering the game – without the source code – and refactoring it to be more optimized and support even more mods than emulators could. It’s already a joy having unlimited save slots (prev. 15) and near-instant loading times when changing between screens/areas. The project is still in early stages and ongoing, so for each successive livestream the game will get better and better. You can catch the livestream or the recordings on the LoD Community’s Youtube channel.
The Art event is also for LoD – this time focused on Dragoons, the main highlight of the game. A decent variety of submissions came in, and I’m excited to write the article showing off those works!
Lastly for the LoD realm, I set up moderator applications. The short version is that ever since I picked up community management and organizing for the LoD fandom at large, we’ve had next to no moderators besides myself in terms of regular activity. There were a decent amount of applicants, so in a few days I’ll be selecting who to add as new moderators on Reddit and Discord, both of which I simply can’t cover 24/7. In a volunteer space, it’s vital that we have extra coverage and some redundancy so that no one person – myself included – can become a bottleneck by virtue of real-life priorities coming up.
The Game Jam and Science Center events are some things I did to help the local game dev org, the St. Louis Game Developer Co-op (STLGameDev or The Co-op for short). They’ve been around for many years, hosting game jams and topic lectures and so on. It had been awhile since we had a game jam event, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so I offered to run one and got approved! That just finished last weekend and it went over really well – lots of cool games were made. It’s usually hard for me to pick a favorite, but in this case I’d say Scaredy Cat or Space Plant Delivery Service stood out to me.
Funnily enough, we also had a workshop event during the game jam where I met a local dev who happens to love Legend of Dragoon. I took some pleasure in teasing them with all the community news they’d never heard of before, heh.
We used to demo at the Science Center here and there for First Friday, but they’re understandably really strict about no-showing at a booth to the point of issuing a ban. In short, there was a miscommunication and we were mistakenly assigned to a booth and our board leader needed 1-2 people to run the table with something. Turned out I was free that night and I volunteered, as I used to run booths for the co-op before. With some lucky timing I managed to quickly make and print a quarter-page flyer for the game jam event I had just created, and advertise that at the booth. Thanks to Timconceivable for running the booth with me that night.
With regard to meditation, I have practiced before but it was really sporadic. I ended up being more consistent with yoga, though that fell to the wayside for most of the pandemic. Getting back into it has been great, but I felt I needed more than that, an activity dedicated to the mind without the stretches and poses. Sometimes it can be a meditation of quietness, or of imagining things, or a mixed bag. It really just depends on what I feel or need on a given day.
I used to see myself in a small or medium-sized workshop, or just a studio apartment with a crafty section. Thinking and wondering and creating as a matter of habit. Over the last several years, I seldom spent any time specifically just imagining things; I think that was a mistake. This is my way of mending that, and also taking the opportunity to improve my self-care. Someone showed me a really cool spot in town that has a circle of big trees to sit alongside or in the middle of. I already went a few times and will be looking out for more choice spots before winter.
Lastly, I’ll mention some silly plushies I bought with store credit at a local retro gaming store. I have been periodically going there to trade in some of my old videogames and consoles, most of which I’ve had since I was a kid. I won’t be letting go of everything, but it just felt like the right time to shed some of that old stuff. Back to the point, I have a ton of store credit. While I’m hoping that they eventually get a PS3 in stock (non-slim), I also want to spend that credit on a few physical merch items.
My first pickup was a set of drink coasters with the four Playstation shapes on them – using the Circle as we speak, haha. I later went back and bought a few plushies, including a standard Kirby and a Porg from Star Wars. Basically I’m amassing a few background items to display for some scenes in my videos and livestreams. They only have popular stuff for the most part when it comes to merch, which is understandable, but I may still get a few more things from the store over time. For the rest I’ll have to make custom fan merch for all the obscure stuff I want to display.
I got the Porg because its fur pattern matches my cat, Purrdy. She’s a peaceful and kind cat who likes to play on occasion, but once in awhile she just lunges and bites at peoples’ legs and arms. She turns into a total vampire out for blood, and she gets this crazed look in her eyes. The Porg plushie ended up having suction cups on the end of each flipper, so it is now mounted proudly in the back window of the car, and I’m calling it Porgy. Apt, no? I’ll talk more about Purrdy in a future blog entry – there’s a whole story there.
Anywho, that’s some of what took place for me this month. If I add any more this will turn into a short novel. Thank you for reading!