miss y'all. i wish this was more popular with paradise peeps!! maybe we should bump the link every so often

blogging about my unhealthy relationship with league of legends

EZstreet, my ranked solo/duo partner, has not logged on for three days. Without him, who logs off without fail circa midnight, i am freefloating through a boundaryless void. what used to be a ritual 2-3 games of league a night for the both of us— HEALTHY— has turned into my dumbass playing for sickening quantities of hours in a row until i can literally feel my body begging for me to take preventative measures versus rot and decay (i dont listen).

i am having so much trouble hitting platinum. gold this season is the stickiest thing i have ever experienced. one tricking belveth doesn't feel very impactful (and let's be honest . . i felt like a support character when i one tricked her a coupla years ago all the way to emerald rank. the joy of singlehandedly carrying the game just doesn't come to me in ranked games) and singed is like,, okay,, but also kind of whatever. and adc is fun and good and honestly might be my ticket up, but glass cannoning is SO much mental tax. i grow tired after like 2-3 games.

all this to say i am once again coming to the conclusion i came to so many times before: league of legends is EMOTIONAL GAMBLING. matchmaking seeks to give you a 50% winrate. 2025 year of the coin. also my bedtime protocol of needing to end on a win is soooo slippery lol. fail to notice a babana peel and whoosp! it's 3am.

i hate my relationship to this game. playing it feels SO good. i have likened it to coffee before. it is a very easy way to get adrenaline pumping through your system. and i have played for so long that the mastery of the skill and the familiarity of the game's systems are honestly kind of comforting.
...
but like.. i probably need to start completely ignoring ranked mode. i want to unlock the green variant of the Victorious Skin end-of-season reward. like that's the only reason i am subjecting myself to this, lol. i like the color green AND, and this is sickening: they don't tell you which character the end-of-season reward skin is for, so i'm left FOMOing my way through samsara circle of hell because, on the off chance that the victorious skin is for one of the like,,,, 8 champions that i actually enjoy playing, and i didn't grind my ass up to green rank? i will forever be marred by my lack of dedication to my children. i would not be beautiful. it would be an eternal mark of shame on my videogame account.

typing it all out, yeah. it's very silly. but i dunno man. i'm going to play one more round before going to bed tonight.

you know I have been thinking about sequels on and off all week and I started at the position that sequels are only ever a necessary evil to get more out of an intensive creative effort, there are some sequels I like more than the original media. the geller examples are good too but haven't personally played 'em :P

but maybe people wouldn't really consider these sequels though... transistor to bastion, majora's mask to ocarina of time, frog fractions 2 to frog fractions, apollo justice: ace attorney to phoenix wright: ace attorney. I think what's common between these is like taking a bunch of resources and processes and making them common between sequel and original work while make a whole other part completely different.

maybe, or I'm trying too hard. Hades II/Hades has about the same similarity as the ace attorneys but one sequel I think is trash while one I think surpasses the original (pending a replay)

upon rewatching the linked jgeller video i do agree that world of goo 2 and stanley parable 2 are kind of self-hating and wasteful, but omg the other two. gazing upon the earth defense force narrative spreadsheet was wondrous in a freak way, and the story of his experience with dragons dogma (2) was lowk beautiful. the scene where the ghost of the narrative summoned woman npc to beckon you back to the on-rails experience really plucked at my strings, esp. considering he was 35 hours into looping through what felt like a questionable remaster.

i think it's kind of a delicate line to tread. the spectrum between "i made something that got really popular and [it doesn't feel like mine any more] / [i don't know how to deal with the fandom wanting more] / [i don't know how/want to move beyond it]" VERSUS "making a statment on the metanarrative of revisiting stories/remakes/genre pillars/longrunning selfsimilar franchises".

unnecessary sequels
there's this jacob geller video about sequels that talks about world of goo 2 and stanley parable: ultra deluxe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI-v60Q-izA

both these sequels go inward and are very tongue-in-cheek about the nature of their sequel projects. basically questioning why they exist. but why do they exist. could there not have been creative effort towards a new original work. did they make more money for a sequel they themselves have demeaned the existence of over something new?

sad to think about

blood
I have a pretty mundane relationships to nosebleeds these days. It's getting colder and sometimes just means I have to deal with a bloody nose in the morning. sometimes I wake and it has already happened. sometimes I awake as it starts. either case leaves me with a headrush and a headache.

but the latter case, I'm a bit tired, and don't want to deal with the fuss. so I just walk up to the sink and watch my nose go drip drip drip

blood is such a strange fluid. all those blood cells makes it misbehave. the splash of a droplet creates such a strange pattern- surely the result of all those coagulating agents. in our bodies, huh. random evolutionary processes figured all that out?

anyways, my tip for bloody noses? saline spray really works. just spray before you go to bed and once you wake up. don't forget for like a week and your body will probably acclimate to the new dryness. probably

only three hundred and sixty two days left 🎃🧡😻

happy hall of ween 🎃

the bandcamp daily is so cool, it's my only real music discovery tool. I also follow random people on bandcamp that have bought similar albums to me and "find" music through what they buy, it's great. youtube music in theory could be better for discovery but there just isn't the same support there

thinking now its cool how itch is naturally explorational. click on a game that was submitted to a jam, on the jam to find more games, on a user to stalk the stuff they commented on... it's not just an index of games or tags you scroll through