Day 23: An Interesting Videogame I've Played Recently

I'm cheating because I've owned this one for a while, but that's not gonna stop me from plugging the game.

Crypt Of The Necrodancer is a procedurally generated dungeon crawler married to a rhythm game and the end result is a lot more coherent than you think.

The real kicker is that it works off the bat with my Dance Dance Revolution dance mat for PS3 so the name of the game is finding a control scheme that works for you and having a dance party, while also engaging with some hectic mechanics.

You can only move on the beat and your combo climbs as you tango through procedurally generated rooms as you murder and loot your way to colourful and creative bosses.

The only caveats it has is that periodically your game is interrupted by these FMV lore expositions which might harm more than help, and the difficulty curve spikes sharply at the end. But four dungeons to crawl through with your progressed saved as you beat the dungeon and the ability to choose what items spawn mean you're never left with your pants down and that mechanical mastery is how you win.

I give it a hard recommendation, go play it, it's cool, it's fun, it's interesting.

Either way, that's me, peace out, Matt-Dave signing off.

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Day 22: Bullet My Day

Keeping track of our days is something we often fail to do. It's a small thing but time ticks on and if we don't take a moment to reflect and recollect, we might lose it. Anwyay, I loved doing this one last time, so here goes;

- Woke up to three alarms around mid-day
- Talked with friends at length about ScaJo playing a trans man in an upcoming film
- Worked on the itch.io page for Starship Arena
- Had coffee and food
- Forwarded the Gamejolt and itch.io pages around a little more
- Caught up on a GDQ run of Castlevania
- Browsed Netflix some
- Looked into Mac exports for the game
- Wow, why are Apple so scummy?
- Put on some lofi mixes.
- Had dinner
- Stayed up wayyy too late
- Wrote up this little bastard.

As you can see, life isn't all that complex for me. Perhaps mundane but a good time capsule. And who knows, one day I might miss the days my life were this simple, it's good to keep track of the memories.

Love you loads, Matt-Dave

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Alex Strangelove

So Alex Strangelove is a weird little movie. It's a marriage of Superbad and the last gay foreign film you saw and a lot like Superbad, it makes me think straight people should stop being in movies.

Basic plot rundown is that Alex and Claire are dating and Alex is super psyched to lose his virginity. But then Alex meets the sexy and sweet Elliot, who Alex develops feelings for, which throws a wrench in his plans to lose his virginity to Claire.

Okay so all the schlocky tropes of the teen "let's get laid and party" film are there, a kind of shitty protagonist with shitty friends, the cute quirky girlfriend, projectile vomit, awkward sex scenes, profesionally lit frat parties and copious amounts of substance abuse. What's also there is a coming out and of age story about a boy who meets another boy and falls in love.

So the first major problem is that Elliot is barely in the movie. Past the 40 minute mark we swop from Alex's conflicted feelings for both Elliot and Claire to how Alex just having these feelings is a problem, and Elliot doesn't show up again until the very end. The big climax happens in the sex scene (in that no one climaxes and this causes a falling out between Alex and Claire where he admits he has feelings for someone else) and then we have the Chekov's gun in a hallucinogenic frog and Alex admitting that he's gay.

To backtrack a little, right after a night out with Elliot, Alex comes home and lays out two cereal boxes. Then he picks out a third one and lays it down which is a cereal with elements of the first two, and the editing ruins what could have been a pretty clever visual metaphor by just spelling out Hetero, Bi and Gay.

So Alex goes along, up until that point, explicitly stating he's bi.

And this is where I found myself disappointed in the film. It wasn't brave enough to explore degrees of sexuality and the bisexual stepping stone narrative so vastly overpowers other, true bisexual experiences that it empowers the myth of bi men just being gay men not ready to come out yet, despite us making up a pretty large percentage of the LGBTQ community. The film also has some shitty attitudes towards trans and pansexual people, in that they're represented by goth outcasts and openly mocked by Del Gato without any challenge from the voice of the writers and lens for the audience, Alex. Del Gato also then gets the girl he's been shitty to the whole movie so yeah, let's reward that behaviour shall we.

And it's also a film with the audacity to ask "Isn't anyone just plain straight anymore?" with a mostly straight main cast.

It's not a good gay romance, it's also a mediocre Superbad, but the one thing the film does well is the pain of being in a heterosexual relationship and not feeling attraction towards your partner. The care it takes to show the leads painfully breaking apart as two people who clearly love each other, while one just isn't sexually attracted to the other person, is the biggest strength and draw of the film.

It's just too bad you have to sit through a shitty version of both Love, Simon and It's Kind Of A Funny Story to get to watch that.

So if you're into queer tourism, Alex Strangelove might be the film for you. If you want queer romance to have a little more queer in it, there are better, gayer films. The biggest criticism I can level is that for a queer romance movie, there's very little queer romance. Also Elliot can father my children and the fact that he's practically an afterthought makes this film so goddamn frustrating that someone needs to put together an Elliot only cut.

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Day 21: 5 Current Goals

Goals are important. They say a goal not written is a goal that won't be achieved, so here I am, hoping to achive my goals by writing them down, in no particular order:

1. Saving Up For A New Phone

I have a little jar I call Netflix and Bills where I store loose change and as much money as I can afford to save. I started it after my phone (which might be turning a decade old, yikes) notified me that the charging port was damaged. My biggest problem with saving has always been that I always need to dip into those funds, but I've made a personal promise to not do that this time, and I've so far stuck to it.

2. Finishing My First Game (and my Second)

Which I did! And I'll tell you guys all about it soon, promise, but you can find it here and yeah. But the other related goal is finishing a game I have been working on for the longest time, based on the book I wrote (which I would love to one day rewrite). The devlog is also on Gamejolt so you can follow that there, but hey, even though progress is slow, progress is happening. I'm just glad I have a game to my name that I can use as a potential part of my portfolio when I apply for a job one day.

3. 32 Or More Blog Posts in 2018

Which we are very close to hitting, wow. I've never quite managed to top my first year of blogging, which had the most blog posts (although nearly all of them were part of a 30 day Blog challenge, so here I am, hoping to best past me).

4. Graduating Already, It's Time

Yeah, I'm still studying and I look forward to the day I graduate so I can be employed and make a living in this world. Another thing that's going slow but steadily, after this year I'll be most of the way there in credits. So, hey, hold thumbs for me friends.

5. Being Better

Which is an ongoing process but that's what self-improvement is. One of the things it took me the longest time to realize that the void someone leaves when they're no longer in your life isn't because they took anything that was yours. Someone said something really powerful to me; "You ever realize when someone leaves that you're still whole, and nothing really left?"

There was a person I'd been missing that I think I've finally let go of. And it felt like they'd left a hole but now I think I realize that I conflated missing them with missing something inside. I'm a whole person still, and I am doing pretty well, and I'm working towards my goals and laughing and loving, and that's okay. I don't wish that person anything bad, and truth be told I wish them nothing but the best. But I think in life, paths cross and then some don't ever meet up again. I think it's okay to carry on with your road, instead of missing the small patch it cross with someone else's.

But apart from that, I'm working on those bad habits and working at my passions and saving up for better days and sometimes I stumble but I try stay humble.

And like my favourite Veil Of Maya song, Lisbeth, goes,

Hold your place
And just keep still
Remind yourself;
You must fulfill your aspirations.

See you next time, dear reader.

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Day 20: My Worst Habits

Habits can make or break you. They form and change and break, but ultimately, if you don't keep yourself in check, you can find that you're working against yourself even without doing so consciously. So, dear reader, here are some of my worst ones habits:

1. Procrastination

Do I even need to explain? The amount of troubles I leave to future versions of myself are endless and present me would like to send a personal kick in the teeth to past me for all the hassle he's given me.

2. Going To Bed at Butt's O'Clock

I'm a night owl, and I can turn nocturnal *fast* if left to my own devices for too long. You ever do something and then look up and suddenly it's midday? That feels like my whole damn life.

3. Forgetting to Change The Calendar

It's literally still sitting on May right now. I look at this thing daily. And I don't change it. Why, why, why am I like this?

4. Severe Self Doubt

Which is something I'm working on. I'm taking to heart something I told a friend of mine; You can't optimize a solution that doesn't exists.

Which might not mean much to you but it's advice I've been trying to take, especially in the content I create and the things I want to make; You can't let the fear of releasing something sub-par keep you from making things. You have to create. You have to do. Even if you do bad, you have to do. You can't do well if you don't do badly first. Because being bad at something is the first step to becoming kinda good at something. And it's also the second step, and the thirty second step, you have to make a lot of mistakes before you get it right. But that's okay.

Just don't beat yourself up about it, and don't let the fear of losing or failure keep you down. To the well trained mind, failure is just another part of success.

My mind isn't well trained, so I'll let you know how that goes.

But that's all for now, hope you'll be back soon. Lots of love from me to you though, and I hope you can conquer your worst habits.

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Day 19: The Kind Of Day I Would Kill For

If you live with depression, you have to accept that not each day is going to be one with a clear head. You kind of live with at least a little bit of fog being the norm, and that pure, total lucidity is a rare occurrence. Worse are days during a severe depressive episode, or a severe manic one. So it's a little bit of a given that something you're always wanting is a day that you are neither manic, nor depressed, a day where you're just lucid.

But I think as humans, a perfect day is a combination of lots of factors and we are more than our illnesses. Let me tell you about the kind of day I would kill for.

Besides pure lucidity, a day where I slept well the night before and woke up not too early, but not midday. So let's say about 8AM. It'd be a Friday, and one I had off. So I wake up, go through my morning routine, throw on a shirt, jeans and sneakers, then breakfast. In my house we kind of have this tradition of making crumpets in the morning, and I love them so I'd want that already made, some honey, and a decent cup of coffee.

After that, it's time to decide what to do with my day. Truth be told I've become kind of a homebody so I'd hop onto my laptop and I'd open a project. Maybe it's a game I'm working on, or a novel I'm writing, or a piece of music I'm working on, but inspiration would strike and I'd just have that moment of knowing what and how to do in order to progress. So I'd work on that for a couple of hours, really pushing the project forward, then I'd put it down for the day.

Lunch is next, probably a little late considering how much I just got done, but it wouldn't be crazy.

Then it'd be some me time next, just hours to relax. Catch up on something I've really wanted to watch. Maybe just play something interesting, lord knows there's a whole lot of interesting I haven't played in my Steam library.

After that, dinner. I love Chow Mein so probably some of that for dinner. Kung Fu Kitchen's, specifically, I definitely don't get food from there often enough.

More chill time, a good long shower and then into bed.

Nothing special. Just a good little staycation, where I'm 100% lucid. That's all I want. And I hope I get a lot of days like it.

And dear reader, I hope you get all the days you hope to have. Life is hard enough without the weather raining on our parade and our everything going wrong.

Until next time.

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Quick Update (Also, I made a game!)

Okay, hey, so quick interruption. I promise I'm slowly grinding out this 30 day challenge which has now ended up taking closer to 60. In the mean time, I did a little game jam type thing and I wanted to share that with you. You can find the Gamejolt page here, and I hope you have a good time, if you decide to play it. It's called Starship Arena, and it's a twin stick shooter, although you can and probably will end up using a mouse and WASD.

Here's what it looks like in action:

So, yeah, please go check it out! It's not even a big download and it won't take up a lot of your time, although I personally find it a little too addictive for its own good.

But onto other news, here's what's happening. I'm going to finish this 30 day challenge, I promise, and after that I have a cool new series of posts I'm super excited to share with you guys. Truth be told, a lot of those posts are basically finished while the 30 Day Challenge posts sit in the draft pile, but now that the game is out and I have a few more weeks left of mid-year break, I can really knock back some of these posts (it's been bugging me too, trust me.) I'm also planning on doing a post just describing the process and giving you guys a behind the scenes look at the game I made, and I'm considering doing a let's play of it and previous builds, although I will have to see if I can fit all that into my schedule.

At the end of that new series, I'm going to probably go on hiatus for a while, and post much less frequently. If I manage to complete everything I have planned, this will be the most busy year for the blog, and I'm super happy about that!

Otherwise, have a great one and I promise I will get on those challenge posts soon.

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