Thoughts On FRU Drama

28 Nov, 2024

So, I wont lie. I was about to make a long ass rant on the entire topic related to the current Ultimate drama. But I feel like literally anything I say here will be shoving my foot in my mouth. My personal feelings on 3rd party programs? I won't lie. I don't hate them. I'm not crazy about stuff like mods, but I don't hate that people use them, and a lot of them, I'm just not crazy about. I'm sorry, I think some mods are straight up ugly, but I'm not about to go into someone's house and piss in their coffee when they're enjoying what they made. As for the others, some 3P is also straight up for accessibility reasons, and people really do fail to realize that at times, but this community has no idea what the topic of nuance is. For example, they're flipping out over a literal red pixel in an image, saying its 100% a cheat, and going so far as to attack people for that. It could literally be something like using an alternate program to take a screenshot and accidentally marking it, but nope, it's decided that it's absolutely definitely a cheating program without taking into consideration how things load in during cutscenes. IDK, I'm not about to go into an essay breaking things down defending that. I want to talk about what I see as the actual issue at hand.

Literally since TEA? Probably before that even? Literally every major clear since around then has been put under a fucking microscope, and tons of players who have no idea how to play high end content in this game, or even do a basic rotation, will make up shit that they just pull out of nowhere to cast doubt on people who legitimately worked for their clear. It's so tiring to see. We have literal clear videos where people feel like they have to do wild things, like pull up their task manager and show it to a stream to prove that they're legitimate, which is quite honestly insane. I don't think a clear becomes more or less valid simply because there's a stream or not when it comes to World First. There's plenty of reasons to not want to stream when you're racing. It's already nervewracking and stressful. Factor in a bunch of people staring at your every move, trying to find something wrong? That sounds like literal hell. They're damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Basically, at the end of the day, this is a game. If someone is really cheating, I believe that Yoshida's team will go in and investigate and determine the legitimacy of a clear and if tools were indeed used. This has happened several times now, and they've proven they're willing to revoke titles and weapons. Instead of spreading harassment campaigns and making ridiculous claims about who is and isn't using tools with no proof, especially when everyone and their mother wants to fight about what is and isn't actually a tool (Seriously, I've seen arguments for ultrawide monitors to be counted as 3P cheating, as well as discord/other VOIP programs to be considered cheating. It's ridiculous.) Basically, people need to stop going around accusing people of cheating with no evidence. People need to stop looking for reasons to dogpile over nothing in this game. And most of all, people need to stop being so damn jealous over people who can do this content. Rather than doing that, simply put the effort into learning this game, learning the rotations, learning the fights, learning to work with a team. Do all that rather than acting like judgemental holier than thou clowns that need to be on constant attack any time a world race shows up. It's exhausting to listen to.

Anyways, I'm gonna go work on something else. I just wanted to get that off my chest because it keeps popping up.

Weed

24 Nov, 2024

Weed

Rambling

22 Nov, 2024

Lately, I find myself in a bit of a rut. Having issues where whenever I go to work on things, I constantly am just comparing myself to others in terms of progress, completely forgetting that this website is barely a month old and simply going "Wow, I sure haven't added all the content I want, so my site feels empty."

But then, when I get to it, it's like choice paralysis over the dumbest of things, which is simply "What needs to be rushed out first?" IDK why my brain is trying to tell me this. Maybe it's the desire to feel productive, and seeing an end result makes me feel more productive than I'm actually being.

Honestly, brains are so weird.

Either way, today you get a weird stream of consciousness type blog, maybe followed by another Pokemon TCG blog, if I can get around to that either... tonight or the next day? Who knows. Also, maybe a YNO blog because I did recently start going back on YNO. I did decide to make an effort to get all my original YN badges on the site, which is always fun. But I'll worry about those later, and start working on what I need to work on, which is finishing these pages.

Maybe I'm a little dumb for trying to push out 2 projects at once; Finally getting the art page's thumbnails up considering it'll be some time before I can Glaze/Nightshade stuff, (Unless I feel like possibly killing my GPU which, to be honest, I don't really want to do that,) and finally getting my merch page formatted. That one I feel like I'm kind of making more progress on to be honest, but it'll be a while still.

It just sucks that it's winter in Southern California, so all the days are short and the amount of sunlight is minimal. Even retaking figure photos is annoying right now. And that's kind of hindering me at the current moment. Oh well, I suppose (Says guy who had 3 hours to take photos this afternoon, but didn't take any new shots and it's now about to be sunset.)

I'm beginning to think I'm just straight up cursed. As if someone's hexing me or something. Because the instant I got up to take a few pictures, I had several things fall off of my shelf while trying to get one figure and naturally something just had to break. Luckily it wasn't a figure and it was just an acrylic stand, but thats still a broken acrylic stand. It wasn't too badly damaged, but the connecting part to the base chipped off on the biggest of the acrylic stand. To top it all off, he was the newest one too.

I was able to fix it, which is good. On top of that, fixing it got me to finally fix another small trading figure I left kinda just laying there. It just really sucks to have this happen. And we're not even done with the month yet. I don't wanna know what kind of awful misfortune will come from Thanksgiving, because everyone and their mother has drama over family dinner on that holiday, and mine is no exception. I'm just glad that this year we're not cooking. I'm still going to have to do all the cleaning, though.

I wont lie, I was going to post this all earlier. I just got sidetracked by photos, fixing stuff, dinner, fixing more stuff, toying around with my cabinet, and then messing with my cards, the list goes on. Either way, that's it for today. I guess I'll get around to putting the stupid poster that keeps falling off my wall back later, since I've been fixing things.

Anyways, I suppose I'll finally get back to working on these pages.

Cleaning

20 Nov, 2024

A bit of a small blog today, I suppose. I don't really wanna take all night writing it, but I figured i'd at least keep a log of the day because why not? Sometimes, it's neat to talk about useless things.

Either way, I spent a good lot of my day today cleaning. I never really noticed how exhausting it is to clean a bunch of windows in a single day is, but after literal years of not cleaning them, I suppose it wasn't going to be easy. Really dusty, and unfortunately there were a lot of dead bugs. I really hate dealing with them.

It's kinda dumb to say it, but I've never actually thought about how many windows are in a house until today. After counting all of them, I realized we have a total of 17 windows & 2 sky lights in a single house. Sure, they're not super large windows, and I'm absolutely counting the windows on doors as part of this, along with little side windows for bathrooms. But damn, that's a lot of windows.

It also feels a bit weird to say "Yeah all I could manage to do was clean 4 windows today over a total of about 3 hours," especially after pointing out there was like 16. However, they were really big and on the front of the house. Getting out a ladder to clean the top and taking down screens was a lot of work, as well as making sure they're not streaky. For some reason, I really struggle with that. I guess it's not the only thing I did. I made sure to clean most of the entire living & dining room area (Which we don't use much tbh. The most use it sees during a year is Christmas.) I guess you don't realize how big a space in your house is, until you either move everything out or are forced to clean it. There's still some stuff I'd like to take care of in there, like moving one of the couches to check for spiders and what not. But damn, it's been several hours since finishing and I'm still sore.

Originally, I intended to do a lot more work for the site today. I'll probably update a few pages I've been working on. Most of it is just dumping stuff into my files and making sure it displays well. Considering I'm on a pretty crappy computer until I get a new one (Which I should be able to order first week of next month? maybe?) I'll be delayed on putting up my art. I know people are saying "oh, Glaze is going to be obsolete soon so there's no point trying," but I'm conflicted over such statements. I might as well try with my art. I don't want to give up hope just yet.

That's basically it though. I think I'll vibe tonight n play some 2kki as well. Maybe I'll finally get around to taking better figure pictures tomorrow, since I'll be free for a decent amount of the afternoon. Nothing beats taking pictures of figures in natural light.

Exhausted

14 Nov, 2024

I'm sure that the title of my blog will seem like an obvious statement as to how I feel right now, but I don't think a single word (or even phrase) is enough to describe what level of stress I'm operating on. I'm close to losing 10 lb from this ordeal, and I'm not exaggerating. Last I weighed myself, I clocked in around 8 dropped, and the stress isn't exactly going away. In all honesty, I feel like it's getting worse as I find new ways to make myself paranoid.

For those who don't know, I ended up falling victim to a phishing scheme. Normally, I wouldn't give weird messages the time of day. However, my mind was already distracted considering it was election week and what not, my family celebrated by loudly proclaiming how I'm a "faggot too busy crying herself to sleep," and then going out to dinner without even offering (Though I'm sure I'd just ruin their night with the presence of my existence anyway.) On top of all that, just generally not hearing from a close friend for the 6th or so week in a row after knowing they've been having health issues ontop of their mother also having health issues definitely didn't help improve my mood either.

Needless to say, when a mutual friend of said friend I previously mentioned showed up in my DMs, I wasn't thinking of how odd he was acting. I was just wondering if this was another way to break the ice on a much worse conversation.

...And then my discord account got taken over, on top of ending up with spyware written to my board. Flashing the BIOS didn't get rid of anything, and the deep cleans weren't enough to stop the constant registry changes. Quite honestly, even on a rig I dug out of the closet and only hooked one thumbdrive that made contact with my previous rig and scanned multiple times in Safe Mode, I'm still scared that somehow something got missed. I've been checking and double checking every account under the sun and trying to go through every file I have just to see how bad things are. Considering every time I scan with a variety of tools, I just end up with nothing detected, even on MSERT's scans, I'm probably just stressing over nothing. Normally I'd just pull my rig offline, make a note of everything that I have that I absolutely need to keep and just redownload the rest, but my thumbdrive was where I kept all my art. And having lost my art before in the past, I really didn't want to go through that again. Especially after not having pc issues in such a long time. My art folder legit has 10+ years worth of stuff I've made (including some of the lost stuff I did my best to recover after a HDD failure ages ago,) and I don't think I could just easily part with it all without looking at all the things I've made over the years and making sure of what I can let go of.

With the recovery of major files out of the way, I'm sure everyone's like "So everything's good, right?"

Absolutely not.

The rig I'm currently running is so old it was on windows 7. I had to quickly upgrade it to Windows 10, but in the process I accidentally didn't just install and use my grandpa's old stuff, which would have guaranteed me an authentic Windows key. No, I installed from a flash drive that had an ancient copy of the Windows 10's installer, then made an updated Window's 10 installation tool and overwrote everything without writing down the Windows 10 activation key. And then put in my email address instead of his, so it's just yelling at me to activate Windows. That, and the PC's specs are very much not good. I can't play FFXIV, yet alone log into something like Mabinogi without this thing feeling like it's going to explode. So, I have to get a new rig, and hopefully before my FFXIV house auto demolishes. I think if I lost my house as well as my rig, I'd just have another meldown. Honestly, my rig itself wasn't exactly the nicest PC out there. I was running a Ryzen 5 1600 on a x370 Taichi by Asrock with a 1050Ti. Those were once fairly good specs, but now they're beyond dated. Needless to say, it was time for an upgrade, but I wish it was on my own terms, and not forced onto me in a rather traumatic manner. Normally, picking out parts for a build is thrilling and exciting. PC building is a hobby I totally love. But now, the thought of building something is stressful and panic inducing. I'm probably just going to get something already assembled with Windows 11 on it, solely so can play FFXIV comfortably (without having to worry about getting it running on Linux,) and maybe some new games I'd love to play, Like FFXVI or BG3, or just anything that can take my mind off being hacked. And don't get me started on Discord's amazing help. They won't even send me a ticket confirmation on my email because the account I was using was tied to an ancient Yahoo email addressI used primarily for games. Thanks Discord!

Update: So, originally on this blog I ranted about a person I used to talk to and how they've been treating me over the last few months, over petty things like shipping and what not (And the part it played in this hack.) I decided that after giving this some further thought and letting the situation sit for at least a week. I probably won't be associating with them anymore. I also don't really want to have a gigantic rant about this topic on my site. I feel like it puts out aimless negativity over essentially nothing. The entire situation sucks. I don't want to act like I'm blameless, even if I didn't do anything, because who knows? Maybe I missed some sort of social cue that I didn't realize, and that could have started it all. But either way, yeah I'm appending this blog to remove the entire rant about that. It has no real purpose outside of a small circle of people who know who the offender is, but it's still generally negative. The blog also served its purpose of letting me get it off my chest and making me feel better. I just don't think I really need any aimless negativity on my site. All I ask is that if my choice of ancient yaoi ships in a childrens card game show bothers you, just block. I'm not here to make anyone uncomfortable, but I'm also not going to change my opinions on a ship due to bullying, sorry! I also don't really agree with treating people poorly over fictional characters or ships, and I don't think shipping is a good excuse for blatant misogyny or transmisogyny. I just don't want to continue to associate with them, as I'm beginning to see it all for what it actually is. With that being said, I hope everyone has a good day.

Vote

04 Nov, 2024

So, if you're not American, I'm sure you can just disregard the entire first half of this post and probably continue reading everything under the divider. I essentially want to remind people who are registered to vote that you should vote. If you're not old enough to vote, then make sure to register when you're of age.

A lot of people around my age and younger seem to have this mentality that voting isn't worth it because it's not only a hassle, but because our votes don't make a difference. The issue here is that if you continuously make that excuse not to vote, then of course your vote won't "mean anything" because you didn't bother. So, go out there and make your vote count rather than just giving yourself an excuse not to. If you don't vote, then more hateful people are just going to get what they want. And don't just vote for president and act like the rest is irrelevant. Propositions are important too. Make sure to read into it. A simple google search on simplified versions of the propositions really helps. Sure, it takes an hour out of your time to do so, but it's an hour well spent.

With that out of the way, I do wanna talk about one other thing. Lately I've been seeing a lot of "underconsumptioncore" videos floating around, in response to the "overconsumptioncore" videos. Those ones with either the huge hauls from stores or restocking videos that tend to go viral. Especially when it's just ragebait.

I guess I'm kind of weird to say that I like to look at that type of stuff. Not just one, but both sides. I'm probably just another part of the problem. The more you look, the more you feed the algorithm and what not. And that of course, encourages the overconsumption girlies to go on more hauls with their ad revenue in search of more views.

Lately, seeing all that stuff has made me sit there and address some of my own issues. Now, I'm nowhere near as bad as some of the people who make haul videos. I can't justify spending hundreds in a Target on a whim to restock drawers with new stationery items that have perfect plastic containers to fit into, or similar stuff to that. But I'm not going to lie and pretend that I don't sit there and buy a ton of plastic either.

I guess with all the plastic that I do tend to buy, it did kind of get me thinking about the things I own, and whether or not I'm just building a hoard. It's no secret that I like to collect anime merch. And I guess having a hobby rooted in consumerism got me thinking about all the overconsumption content. Seeing people talk about the effect on the planet and how bad climate just pushes it to the front of my mind. For instance, last year during September, SoCal got hit by a cat 5 hurricane. As someone who lives all the way in the Inland Empire, being able to see the effects of a hurricane at my home was a bit surreal.

Either way, it's surreal--horrifying even, seeing the effects of what you buy and what it does to the planet. Yeah sure, I'm not the same as the "Every part of my fridge is compartmentalized with acrylic drawers" girlies. But I'm not pretending I don't own my fair share of decorative plastic. Like sure, the collection is pretty contained, being focused primarily in a single Ikea Detolf (Which is not a very big cabinet at all,) and some other pieces scattered about my room. But, I am planning to get another shelf soon, and while it's primarily a book case, it will definitely be used for displaying anime figures. Because putting one hobby on hold means diving back into an entirely different one.

I guess with people calling out overconsumption lately it's made me really reflect on things, especially related to this hobby. I love figure collecting and all, but I find myself in the debacle of "I want to have cool things that I care about" & "I love art" vs "How much of an impact is my hobby having on this planet" & "Is my consuming of this kind of product just going to help doom future generations?"

On one hand, I voted in favor of doing something for climate change, but does it really mean anything if i'm buying anime merch constantly?

I guess I can go on about my sentiments on hoarding in relation to this hobby later, because I'm getting tired, and I'm sure I have things to do tomorrow.