Drifting, drifting-
Today there was snowfall, and wind from the east, and so easily It feels to me like it's finally time to write something here again - after all, I've managed what, two months without a single update?
That's appropriate, in a way. To be honest, as of late I've been feeling... stuck, in a sense. The fact is, the last couple of months haven't been particularily stretonous - nothing compared to the sheer amounts of work and stress I fought through last fall - but even so, it feels like I can't quite get a grip of the time, you know? That is the constant, overarching theme of these last few months. The Christmas vacation felt shorter than it was, and was largerly spent mulling about my essays and playing God of War, a game which I ultimately didn't even like. Another thing that dragged was the latest Eternity tournament, which lasted nearly three weeks - and since that ended, what have I done? Schoolwork, two weeks of the most bizarre flu and nothing.
This is... frustrating to me, like a dull headache at the back of your mind that doesn't really hurt, but you know it's there. It's particularily galling, because it's so like me. I gravitate towards these kinds of periods of stagnancy between bursts of activity when there's nothing to stop me. How to put this? When pressed for time, beset by deadlines and demands, it becomes so very easy for me to work myself into the kind of excitement and energy that I need to get things done, right at the nick of time. It's kind of a horrifying thought - do I really need stress this badly? Now I have too much time, it seems, and I can't seem to do anything with it. This is unbearable.
One thing that hasn't helped is the weather. Finland is a country that's supposed to have a decent winter, right? But all this time, it's been like... autumn never ended. All this time, throughout what are meant to be the coldest months of the year, we've barely seen any snow. A lot of the time, the temperature hasn't even been sub-zero! Barely any snow! You might think it's odd that I'd let something like that get to me so much, but it's left me feeling ajar.
In fact, what finally impacted me to write this is that today I woke up, looked out of the winter, and let out a sigh of relief, because I saw snow outside, a pristine field all around, large snowflakes coming down, thick sheets of snow covering all the tree branches. How can I say this? Seeing that made me feel like a crucial piece of my universe had finally realigned itself. Late is better than never.
This is a break week from university now - I can hardly believe that nearly two months went past, just like that! But perhaps, perhaps now I can finally get things moving again. Because there's always things waiting to get done, aren't there now?
And ah, where to start - well, since I'm writing here now, there's the issue of Wayward Dawn, which ended a month ago already, lasting nearly three weeks and all; it's been a while, but I suppose I might still do a short retrospective on it.
Wayward Dawn was, to describe it in the simplest of terms, a reasonably fun tournament riddled by some severe issues. As always, the sponsors saved it, but... well, I can ignore and handwave a lot of mess-ups, but this time around, it genuinely got on my nerves. That's a first, I think. Between the initial, repetitive rounds, a vast cast of characters that seemed highly arbitrary to me, a story in which very little happened, the constant inability to keep up to schedule and well, everything dragging, for a moment I seriously considered quitting. Of course, that would have been a mistake. All the more troubling that it made me feel that way.
The tournament picked up enormously on round 5 with a really strong round location, and the rest was pretty much awesome, as it were. But there had been one pretty crucial effect, and here's the part that really ticked me off - a fair few people I'd wanted to interact with had dropped out by then. That is always an issue, but rarely as pronounced as now, and a part of it was because of the way the tournament was - and since the sponsors are what makes the tournament, that's about the worst thing that a tournament can do.
Even so, though, I'm glad I did do it. Because these issues aside, writing Jane Maxwell, Wild ARMS' treasure huntress extraordinaire, was a great choice for me, however. I entered the tournament at nearly last moment, with very little planning, since school was just starting, I still had essays in my backlog and in general, I couldn't really say how much effort I could spend on the tournmanent. I needed a character that I didn't have to think about writing. Jane, ur-tsundere, nothing if not personable, naturally contradictory and wildly impulsive, was essentially that.
It worked... in a sense. Strictly speaking, this performance wasn't as flawless as Mustadio, last time around - what made him special was the sheer scope with which I could involve him in the tournament. That was tour de force. Jane, on the other hand, was virtually all just talking to characters, or thinking to herself. I wrote a few battles, sure, but I didn't really care, because writing anything other than succulently dysfunctional character interaction or snarky commentary on the proceedings was basically wasting what made her fun to write.
Of course, I'd never written a character like this before - character like this meaning an imperious fourteen-year-old girl before, for starters. How does one write one? With subtle sarcasm and complete indulgence, apparently. Jane was at her best while doing the most contrary, most improbable things, like going fishing while the world was ten minutes away from certain destruction, beating the crap out of a princess with her bare hands or going on an extended shopping trip during the final battle.
Which is what I really liked about writing Jane, actually - that I could do either dramatic, comical and absurd things with her, break the fourth wall with impunity and and write her in conjunction with any character from the tournament, without breaking the suspension of disbelief. You could say the crucial tension of her character was precisely in how far I could stretch those things about her. The solution to that recipe was, I ended up writing her like - well, this image is fairly descriptive of the tournament experience, I'd say. Which, altogether, isn't at all bad!
So much off my chest. Now how odd is it that I already feel... better?
That's appropriate, in a way. To be honest, as of late I've been feeling... stuck, in a sense. The fact is, the last couple of months haven't been particularily stretonous - nothing compared to the sheer amounts of work and stress I fought through last fall - but even so, it feels like I can't quite get a grip of the time, you know? That is the constant, overarching theme of these last few months. The Christmas vacation felt shorter than it was, and was largerly spent mulling about my essays and playing God of War, a game which I ultimately didn't even like. Another thing that dragged was the latest Eternity tournament, which lasted nearly three weeks - and since that ended, what have I done? Schoolwork, two weeks of the most bizarre flu and nothing.
This is... frustrating to me, like a dull headache at the back of your mind that doesn't really hurt, but you know it's there. It's particularily galling, because it's so like me. I gravitate towards these kinds of periods of stagnancy between bursts of activity when there's nothing to stop me. How to put this? When pressed for time, beset by deadlines and demands, it becomes so very easy for me to work myself into the kind of excitement and energy that I need to get things done, right at the nick of time. It's kind of a horrifying thought - do I really need stress this badly? Now I have too much time, it seems, and I can't seem to do anything with it. This is unbearable.
One thing that hasn't helped is the weather. Finland is a country that's supposed to have a decent winter, right? But all this time, it's been like... autumn never ended. All this time, throughout what are meant to be the coldest months of the year, we've barely seen any snow. A lot of the time, the temperature hasn't even been sub-zero! Barely any snow! You might think it's odd that I'd let something like that get to me so much, but it's left me feeling ajar.
In fact, what finally impacted me to write this is that today I woke up, looked out of the winter, and let out a sigh of relief, because I saw snow outside, a pristine field all around, large snowflakes coming down, thick sheets of snow covering all the tree branches. How can I say this? Seeing that made me feel like a crucial piece of my universe had finally realigned itself. Late is better than never.
This is a break week from university now - I can hardly believe that nearly two months went past, just like that! But perhaps, perhaps now I can finally get things moving again. Because there's always things waiting to get done, aren't there now?
And ah, where to start - well, since I'm writing here now, there's the issue of Wayward Dawn, which ended a month ago already, lasting nearly three weeks and all; it's been a while, but I suppose I might still do a short retrospective on it.
Wayward Dawn was, to describe it in the simplest of terms, a reasonably fun tournament riddled by some severe issues. As always, the sponsors saved it, but... well, I can ignore and handwave a lot of mess-ups, but this time around, it genuinely got on my nerves. That's a first, I think. Between the initial, repetitive rounds, a vast cast of characters that seemed highly arbitrary to me, a story in which very little happened, the constant inability to keep up to schedule and well, everything dragging, for a moment I seriously considered quitting. Of course, that would have been a mistake. All the more troubling that it made me feel that way.
The tournament picked up enormously on round 5 with a really strong round location, and the rest was pretty much awesome, as it were. But there had been one pretty crucial effect, and here's the part that really ticked me off - a fair few people I'd wanted to interact with had dropped out by then. That is always an issue, but rarely as pronounced as now, and a part of it was because of the way the tournament was - and since the sponsors are what makes the tournament, that's about the worst thing that a tournament can do.
Even so, though, I'm glad I did do it. Because these issues aside, writing Jane Maxwell, Wild ARMS' treasure huntress extraordinaire, was a great choice for me, however. I entered the tournament at nearly last moment, with very little planning, since school was just starting, I still had essays in my backlog and in general, I couldn't really say how much effort I could spend on the tournmanent. I needed a character that I didn't have to think about writing. Jane, ur-tsundere, nothing if not personable, naturally contradictory and wildly impulsive, was essentially that.
It worked... in a sense. Strictly speaking, this performance wasn't as flawless as Mustadio, last time around - what made him special was the sheer scope with which I could involve him in the tournament. That was tour de force. Jane, on the other hand, was virtually all just talking to characters, or thinking to herself. I wrote a few battles, sure, but I didn't really care, because writing anything other than succulently dysfunctional character interaction or snarky commentary on the proceedings was basically wasting what made her fun to write.
Of course, I'd never written a character like this before - character like this meaning an imperious fourteen-year-old girl before, for starters. How does one write one? With subtle sarcasm and complete indulgence, apparently. Jane was at her best while doing the most contrary, most improbable things, like going fishing while the world was ten minutes away from certain destruction, beating the crap out of a princess with her bare hands or going on an extended shopping trip during the final battle.
Which is what I really liked about writing Jane, actually - that I could do either dramatic, comical and absurd things with her, break the fourth wall with impunity and and write her in conjunction with any character from the tournament, without breaking the suspension of disbelief. You could say the crucial tension of her character was precisely in how far I could stretch those things about her. The solution to that recipe was, I ended up writing her like - well, this image is fairly descriptive of the tournament experience, I'd say. Which, altogether, isn't at all bad!
So much off my chest. Now how odd is it that I already feel... better?