4th December 2025

Oh, maybe I am nothing, Maybe I am all

My life has entered this downward trend of falling apart, and I can't always put myself back together fast enough. My story doesn't have a happy ending—only despair. One day I will be starving and homeless. These updates will become last updated 30 years ago. There's no silver lining in the clouds for me.

But enough about that. Let's focus on the positivity that has happened since November.

Wow... crazy to think November is already over.

This probably won't actually be a big blog post as usual. But here goes.

I've been switching up my Ashwakanda dosage; I think this is proving more effective at least. Up until now, I was doing 2 tablets or whatever in the morning (notably before work) and the remaining one in the afternoon or usually after my shift ends. I think it's making me more balanced, at least the intrusive thoughts aren't as violent. No idea why that is—maybe its too effective? These are like 2,100 mg per capsule(I think), so spacing them out is helping... or maybe they aren't doing squat.

It's genuinely hard to tell sometimes. But I'll still take them since I have pretty much no other clutch to keep my mental state duct-taped together. After watching a recent Kurgesgat video on weed and its effect on the body/mind, I'm trying to refrain from taking my edibles daily; similarly, I'm trying to not indulge my sorrows in alcohol in the same vein. The other day, I had a pretty embarrasing episode where I had went overboard in a discord call and next thing I know I woke up in the morning with no recollection of what happened. Spooky. Then that same morning, it wasn't as pretty. My life is pretty much in shambles.

Anyway, I said I wouldn't dwell on the bad parts, but November I finished up Odyssey in a day or two's sitting. Currently reading Stranger in a Strange Land now... reading Odyssey, I realized I need to go all-in with revising Act 1 of A Game of Cosmic Titans. So far, I rewrote the first two chapters and I'm essentially going with a clean slate for this iteration of the Yellow Typhoon chapters.

No more is there Hoshiga space fighters, I'm shifting to Mobile Troopers/capital ships mainly. For the longest time, I reasoned there was no need to write any more Mobile Trooper scenes... after all, I reasoned, I did it in Yellow Typhoon. Why do the same thing twice? But you know what, it doesn't actually matter in the end. Nobody has read Yellow Typhoon, my work, my writing has gone unappreciated. So if I just rewrote these action scenes but with Lawrence as a (non neo sapiens) MT pilot in the Zeta conflict, nobody would care since nobody will read YT.

This allowes me to flesh out Lawrence and Victoria's actions some more and spice up the tragic drama. I can give characters like Luke, Frank, Charlotte, and Boris some more screentime. Even Kaz and Friederika, who only get passing mentions in YT and AGOCT, will probably get fleshed out just a little bit more. It's only 2 chapters, but I think I made good improvements over the story presented in YT and the first draft version of AGOCT.

I'm also taken steps to redo the outline; this time I'm going with the method of keeping it 1 bulet point=1 sentence summary of the chapter. This is pretty tough to work with, and it's forcing me to to reframe the story so it's not 7chapters=YT retold, there is, I think, going to be some more refinement and additional chapters exploring Lawrence's tragedy on Zeta.

If there's one thing after reading Odyssey taught me—I had to do away with all the Homeric Greek mythology. No more does it overflow in the text so far, but there is still hints of it there with passages I wrote like 'wine-dark cosmic sea'. I wanted to make outer space more descriptive than just bland 'black void' or such. Will it work? I have no idea. But I'm stripping away as much of the context as I'll reasonably go.

But now that Odyssey is done, reading Heinlein is a.... how do I describe it? It's a bizarre experience. I feel shaken to my core, unsure if I can actually ape Heinlein. There's something about his writing that's just a product of the 50s' that leaves me unsure if I can ape him adequately. Smith said it finely: There was so much to grok, so little to grok from.

 So beside the writing, my bf and I wrapped up the first half of Gundam ZZ. We blazed through it pretty fast funnily enough; I decided to cap it at ep25 for now. To get a refresher on ZZ has been great so far. I'm trying to give our other shows a chance like Hell Girl a chance and some other ones like one of the Sailor Moon ones (the season with the pretty boys).

This anime season is wrapping up and... it's been something. This has been the most we've seen in a while, a whole 6 shows. But my brief review for them will come later.

Beside anime, I bought Tsushima and pretty much put my Act 1 draft 2 writing on pause to play through it.

It was a great game, I don't feel like parroting what I already said in a Steam Review I wrote before this blog post, so here's my thoughts on it:

A real stunning game with a gripping storyline, but the last half of the game left more to be desired. This is one of those games where it has certainly has its highs and lows in gameplay. The combat, the music, it's all phenomenal, but it starts becoming repetitive, but never stale. This is a game that rewards you with exploration but the experience with sidequests and the actual exploring itself can be repetitive. And even so, the rewards can be lackluster, and this is more pronounced/noticeable right after you pretty much finish Act 2.

But this game is stunning, I took so many screencaps and replays because it was just breathtaking, and the ability to go into photo mode and fiddle with the settings and even choose from a selection of music was amazing.

However, by the end of Act 2 and the start of Act 3, the gameplay starts to falter a bit. I played Iki after finishing Act 2, and it was maybe a bad idea because it's very clear it was intended to be a post-game, post-Act 3 island for you to dwelve into—once you actually clear 2 and Iki, the game becomes trivial, but no means any easier. You can still die to even the most bog-standard enemy grunt when you're completely maxed out stats, moves, and gear. By the time I finished Iki and wrapped up the last part of Act 2, I just wanted to be done with the game and didn't explore sidequests or explore much of the last island of Act 3.

This game is a great experience all around, but it suffers from the same issues open-world games of this kind, where it tends to lose steam in the latter half. Exploration was enjoyable at first, but the rewards always left more to be desired.

Some of the combat mechanics you unlock seemed rather clunky, even a little buggy, but it's satisfying when stuff does register and work properly.

The various sidequest storylines with named npcs were interesting, but some of them just felt like they were there, as noted in other reviews they just don't resolve character arcs and are a little underwhelming at times. The real drama, the real meat, is in the main story, but I've noticed other reviewers and players on Reddit remark how stupid some charcters behave and react, and their actions and motives can be a little silly at times. But it's still emotionally gut-punching where it matters, so if you're interested in this for the story, it's definitely a cinematic experience.

The combat was incredibly intense for the first 2 acts pre-Iki, but after Iki you can quite easily just bulldoze everything. The music really added to the atmosphere and this is the kind of game that makes you want to check out samurai films, so it does a good job getting you into this epic, high-octane samurai mood whenever a fight comes up.

I played this on a 3700x and a 2080 Super, and I didn't notice for a while that the settings were auto-selected to the highest; so I lowered stuff like shadow details and others to medium/low and it improved my fps, especially in cutscenes, where it was noticeably laggy before the tweaks.

Even so, this game lagged sometimes and even in some cutscenes (with the Khan) it took a couple of seconds for the scene to actually load in everything so there were instances where he's standing in mid air in the open and then the castle interior materializes around him. Some of the bigger fights were also crazy laggy when there's loads of enemies but it didn't bother me too much and it wasn't too common.

This game was an amazing experience. Back then, years ago, in 2020, I was looking forward to playing it. I'm glad it came to PC and I was able to play it. I hope I live long enough to play Yotei.

And now that I finished Tsushima, I'm going to spend my time reading Stranger in a Strange Land, and write some parts of the Act 1 second draft. I also pulled the trigger on buying Part 1 of Chainsaw Man manga box set so I might get through that one day, after Rendenvous with Rama and Berserk Deluxe volume 1.

Also, I heard recently Tanya the Evil finally got announced for 2026. I can hardly wait. From what I gathered in the 1st PV, they're adapting all the way to volume 11, at the least... so that might mean either 2 things: they're condensing a lot of volumes into like 3 episodes each, or we're getting a 2cour. Fingers crossed it's the latter.

I can hardly wait! Though, if there is one fear I have—is volume 12 and onwards. I stopped reading after volume 12 because it's all too evident Carlos Zen has no idea how to advance the story, and the Amazon review I read pretty much stated literally nothing fucking happens after 12... so that's a huge shame, so I've been holding off reading/buying physical after 12 if it's true there's no character or plot developments, which makes me a little worried. That's the thing with these long-running stories... they don't end, and my spartan bookcase is ever rigidly spartan. Sure, I could read kindle(I did it prior to vol10), but, reading something in your hands is a special kind of experience digital readers can't ever replicate. I'm vaguely aware how the Tanya webnovel ends, so it'd be interesting to see how Carlos ends it officialy in the WN.

So, until next time space cowboy... if ther even is a next time. stay safe.