So there's an the global pandemic of COVID-19 going on. Nearly everyone in every country in every single continent is recommended to stay home, self-isolate, help stop the spread of the virus just by not meeting anyone else.
My reaction, like other introverts: "oh boy, staying at home and never seeing anyone? I've prepared my whole life for this."
It helps (in a way) that I'm working from home already anyway. About a week before the outbreak here, I got laid off my college-assigned unpaid internship position and the school wouldn't get me another position elsewhere, so I'm pretty much wasting this semester away anyway. I got a couple of personal and projects upcoming and I've been thinking of getting a professional presence online, get some more paying clients, build up a life so if this whole college thing doesn't pan out I don't end up unemployed.
So I'm already working from home. Even with the quarantine on, there shouldn't be any changes, right?
Well, I've been failing to be productive for the last week.
Working on anything makes me anxious. Even picking up a pen is makes it hard to breath. I just open Twitter a lot, and you know what, hearing that the whole world is also staying at home, that helps a lot. That helps a lot but also I'm even more acutely aware that the world is falling apart around us. I can't say if it's the global panic causing my repeated failures or if I'm just getting even worse at managing myself.
I still play games. I still read books. It's good to have someplace to go to when my head is tripping over itself.
Games
I'm still not done with Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I've been playing it since getting the game at the end of August, and it just hasn't gotten old. I'm on my third playthrough, and it's quite a thing, isn't it, having three separate timelines, universes, inside of your head. Each playthrough of Fire Emblem is different; at the very least because of units you use and their utility and how they work together in battle. And then Three Houses have the audacity of having four separate paths, with wildly different second half of the game. Different timelines, different universes, different friends and enemies, different goal, slightly different dreams with wildly different ways to reach it.
I'm interspersing that with Octopath Traveler. I adore it in ways different from how I adore most other JRPGs I've played. For one thing, I like how it leaves a lot for the player's imagination. It has a story---8 stories in fact, a separate story for each of the 8 protagonists---and the story is linear and clearly told with dialogues and cutscenes. But what happens outside of the script also matters to me. How the eight characters interact with each other during their travels (which the script sorely lacks), the sense of awe I/they get when they enter a new area, see a new city, discover a new and exciting tactic. It's an exploration game as much as it is a cutscene-dungeon-combat loop.
Also, the beautiful beautiful soundtrack. I found myself humming the battle theme a lot while playing.
Everybody and their mum is playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I love this new trend. My Twitter timeline is full of wholesome and creative Animal Crossing content, even from people who I didn't expect to be a gamer. I don't play it myself, though. Can't really justify spending 60 American dollars for a genre I've historically had trouble enjoying. So I'm just vicariously enjoying it through my friends. I'm okay with this. Truly, Animal Crossing is the game that will unite us all.
So I didn't spend 60 dollars on AC, but I spent 7 dollars on Minecraft (pocket edition) instead. This is... this is good enough, yes. I bought it mainly for my sister, who's been a Minecraft fan for years despite never being able to play it (except for a short jaunt through the, cough, high seas, if you catch my drift). She plays more like a homebody, creating a nice house, constantly improving it, and never daring to go too far from it. By contrast, I'm an explorer. I have a rudimentary headquarter, but most of the time I'll go buzz off and get lost in the wilderness.
I'm also currently obsessed with Picross. It's a nice way to pass the time without worrying about things. My preferred version right now is the Android app Picross Galaxy. It's clean, the puzzle are solvable without guessing (most of the time), and the interface is mmm yes, perfect, yes. There are ads, but they're non-obstructive.
I still log in daily to Fire Emblem Heroes because I'm a Fire Emblem trash but also it's a good game, guys. It's a gacha game that's good. It makes me happy just collecting pretty anime pictures and then make a wild number strategy with them. Husbandos and math: that's peak Fire Emblem already. Its optimization is also probably the best among all mobile games, with it running smoothly on potato phones with minimal loading time. Sorcery!
Books
I recently finished Neil Gaiman's Stardust. Gaiman is one of my favourite writers, but Stardust is one of his older works and I tried not to expect too much from this one. The novel he wrote before this one, Neverwhere, was mostly forgettable, and the one he (co-)wrote before that, Good Omens, was brilliant but exhausting to read.
By the end of Stardust, though, I was just in awe. It's a fairy-tale with lots of fairy-tale nonsense, but it weaves them together into something solid. I'm most impressed by the mastery over foreshadowing, how some throwaway-sounding line in the first parts can have huge impact towards the end. No deus ex machina here, not if you pay attention. It's good.
I'm currently reading Invisible Planets, a collection of short stories by Hannu Rajaniemi. I will never stop yelling about how good his stories are. Have you read his novel The Quantum Thief yet? Please read The Quantum Thief!
The stories in this collection are much less intricate and less deep than The Quantum Thief, what with being finish-in-on-sitting stories and all. And yet they're all still full of the Fantasy-Sounding Nonsense and lightning-speed narration that defined the novel. Some of the stories are good, some are meh, but all of them has some form of wild futuristic worldbuilding, so if you're into that, this is good.
On my backlog I have Joanne M. Harris's The Gospel of Loki (it's fun to see other people's headcanon of Norse mythology), S.A. Chakraborty's The Kingdom of Copper (it has lots of boring parts, but I enjoy the middle eastern myth-flavored political drama), and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (it's good. I don't know why it's taking me so long to finish it). If I manage to finish them, I have plans to get Paul Kruger's Steel Crow Saga, Chuck Wendig's Wanderers, Scott Lynch's Red Seas Under Red Sky, and Sam Sykes's Seven Blades in Black. Amazon Kindle gives sizable free samples to every book it has, which is terrible because then I keep adding books to my wishlist.
Projects
I've been having trouble writing: each time I pick up a pen, each time I open a blank document, something fierce in my head starts fighting me, and fighting back hurts. I keep looking for opportunity to maybe get a word or two down, but even that hurts. I don't know if I should fight back or if I can just wait it out.
I was trying to write a Guide to Modern CSS, but, yeah, that writing problem persists even when I try to write something technical.
I still work on English-Indonesian translation. Got a small paying gig on. Slowly chipping away at it.
I'm getting back into programming with Python again. I mostly do front-end web programming and was thinking of getting into back-end programming. It has been one billion years since I last code with Python (JavaScript is my bread and butter now), but my computer lags horrifically when I try to get NodeJS to work properly for back-end, so a Python back-end it is!
