2022 in review: Picking up the pieces
Dec. 28th, 2022 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoThe year is drawing to a close... somehow. I'll be honest with you; that kind of sneaked up on us. Wasn't it, like, May or something? The chronic sleepiness has gotten worse, I've been hibernating a lot, and oh heck, it's time to write one of these again? Already? Huh. Well.
For the newcomers: Yeah, this is just our big year-end recap post; we just start it out like that because I did it a few times and then it became a tradition somehow.
The fact that we had to include anything about "for the newcomers" itself touches on one thing that happened this year: as Twitter does everything it can to actively destroy itself, we're getting more people we know to follow us and set up shop here on Dreamwidth. Most came from the Dishcord, and even then, it was a small handful of people, but every single addition here turns this place into more of a movement. When I wake up in the morning and feel the need to do my morning social media check, I now think "Hey, I should see what's new on our Dreamwidth read page" before I think "Hey, I should see what's new in our Twitter feed." That's amazing. You all are awesome. Keep up the good work.
Aside from that, I guess the major theme of this has been a long, slow, and mostly unsuccessful attempt to dig out of the sort of void our lives have fallen into. Not in a despair sense, but last year's post was about how 2021 was the year everything just kind of stopped, and 2022... is it really almost 2023 already? Are you positive?
Anyway, we've been in and out of various doctors and specialists, trying to get our various physical and mental health challenges at least identified if not eventually hopefully resolved. If nothing else, I'm hoping it would help if we at least knew what we were up against.
So, ADHD, check (that one we wrote about before.) Sleep apnea more or less confirmed, too, but the treatment part is stisll up in the air. We were supposed to get a PAP machine months ago, but a major supply shortage have pushed that back and we've just been waiting for the day we'll finally be able to be fitted for one. I believe that's supposed to happen next month. Also, we may well be on the spectrum; we've gotten as far as getting an evaluation for that and we have an appointment to go over the results and where we go from here and everything... uh... next week. Really, 2023, if you'd just waited even one more month then we could have worked the resolutions to those into this post, but you really had to come now, huh. Well. Okay.
We're running very low on the money we'd saved up in a savings account back when we were still employed, that we've just been living off of ever since in hopes that things would get better someday. A temporary "between-jobs" situation is one thing, but that account isn't going to keep us going forever. The unfortunate reality is that, within the next few months, we will probably end up having to break the lease on our apartment and move back in with my parents. The good news is that I have a pretty good relationship with said parents; they've welcomed us back, and we genuinely love being here and being with them (currently visiting them for the holidays as we write this,) which is very fortunate, even privileged, compared to the situations a lot of people we know have. I know the fact that we have such a comfortable fallback plan is lucky, and I'm absolutely not taking that for granted. Still... just the principle of the thing, having to move back in with one's parents because one is broken and can't get a day job and keep one's self afloat anymore, that feeling of coming back in defeat and failure, and the logistics of downsizing everything we own from a spacious two-bedroom two-bathroom apartment to, like, one bedroom in my parents' house... it hurts. It's a very loving home but I just feel bad that it came to this.
I... dropped the ball on a lot of stuff, really. I didn't do any gameblogging this year. I'd gotten as far as posting the nominations for the 2021 awards, and we were going to post the actual winners at some point, and then do writeups for the stuff we played and beat/abandoned this year, and none of that happened. I also meant to post a big writeup about the genesis and addition of Kurt to our system, the issues he had with Ardei when settling in, just, your introduction to why there's this bird in our system now, and none of that happened either. And now Kurt changed his mind about being a bird and is now a snake, and Fang joined the party, too. I'm really behind on keeping you all up to date on our headspace happenings. I should get around to covering... all of that. That's what I said last year, too. Will I actually do it this year? We shall see!
Writing is hard when you have executive function issues (which we're working on at least identifying--see above) but streaming has picked up the pieces in a lot of ways. After a whopping four years of hiatus and lingering back-of-my-mind "man I should go back and do something with that someday" guilt, 2022 was the year we finally, finally finished our Pokemon SoulSilver playthrough. (Yes, I know that as of the writing of this year-end round-up entry, only 31 of the 32 episodes have been posted on Dreamwidth. The actual playthrough finished a while ago, and part 32 exists both in our Twitch archives and on YouTube, but we just need to convert it to a Dreamwidth post like we did for all the other ones, maybe write up a short little outro speech or something.) That was a monumental achievement, and quite an emotional one, too. That team is going to live on in our hearts forever.
In addition to SoulSilver, we've been streaming all sorts of other incredible games as well; we currently have in-progress runs of everything from Etrian Odyssey V to Metamorphosis to Glyph to Lil Gator Game, among others. All are absolute delights to stream, both to be playing great games and to have great people there watching and supporting us. Streaming is one of the few things I can still do in my current state, and it's... not big or successful enough to live off of as a full-time career, obviously, but even as a hobby it brings a sense of fulfillment and purpose, a sense that we're doing something good both for the things we believe in (such as the CD-i preservation) and for... like... brightening the respective days of everyone who tunes in. Thank you--all of you--for making the Game Room as Warm and Fuzzy as it is.
Our song choice for this year is "The Moonflower Society" by Avantasia both because this album dropped this year and because the video has a lot of the vibe we've been spending the latter half of this year capturing. An eccentric traveling the road at night receives an invitation to a ghostly circus full of even-more-eccentric eccentrics, and it feels like he's found his people. He parties with them, is welcomed, has a good time, accepts the mantle and ringmaster outfit... and then the sun comes up and the Moonflower Society fades away, leaving our hero at something of a "what now?" crossroads. The Moonflower Society, at least in our read/analysis, is something akin to the Island of Misfit Toys--a place where such eccentrics and weirdo creatures of the night can find and appreciate and be appreciated by each other. It's a party. It's a family. And... the thing about being misfits is that there's no place for any of them in "normal" society. How does Party Bug (The Bug who Loves to Party) pay bills, or deal with neurodivergencies that render them unemployable? How do we do that? That may be a struggle for us, but... well. At least the Society has each other. The spiritual support means more than you may think.
Thank you. Love you. See you next year, and hopefully I'll find a way to be awake for more of this one..?
For the newcomers: Yeah, this is just our big year-end recap post; we just start it out like that because I did it a few times and then it became a tradition somehow.
The fact that we had to include anything about "for the newcomers" itself touches on one thing that happened this year: as Twitter does everything it can to actively destroy itself, we're getting more people we know to follow us and set up shop here on Dreamwidth. Most came from the Dishcord, and even then, it was a small handful of people, but every single addition here turns this place into more of a movement. When I wake up in the morning and feel the need to do my morning social media check, I now think "Hey, I should see what's new on our Dreamwidth read page" before I think "Hey, I should see what's new in our Twitter feed." That's amazing. You all are awesome. Keep up the good work.
Aside from that, I guess the major theme of this has been a long, slow, and mostly unsuccessful attempt to dig out of the sort of void our lives have fallen into. Not in a despair sense, but last year's post was about how 2021 was the year everything just kind of stopped, and 2022... is it really almost 2023 already? Are you positive?
Anyway, we've been in and out of various doctors and specialists, trying to get our various physical and mental health challenges at least identified if not eventually hopefully resolved. If nothing else, I'm hoping it would help if we at least knew what we were up against.
So, ADHD, check (that one we wrote about before.) Sleep apnea more or less confirmed, too, but the treatment part is stisll up in the air. We were supposed to get a PAP machine months ago, but a major supply shortage have pushed that back and we've just been waiting for the day we'll finally be able to be fitted for one. I believe that's supposed to happen next month. Also, we may well be on the spectrum; we've gotten as far as getting an evaluation for that and we have an appointment to go over the results and where we go from here and everything... uh... next week. Really, 2023, if you'd just waited even one more month then we could have worked the resolutions to those into this post, but you really had to come now, huh. Well. Okay.
We're running very low on the money we'd saved up in a savings account back when we were still employed, that we've just been living off of ever since in hopes that things would get better someday. A temporary "between-jobs" situation is one thing, but that account isn't going to keep us going forever. The unfortunate reality is that, within the next few months, we will probably end up having to break the lease on our apartment and move back in with my parents. The good news is that I have a pretty good relationship with said parents; they've welcomed us back, and we genuinely love being here and being with them (currently visiting them for the holidays as we write this,) which is very fortunate, even privileged, compared to the situations a lot of people we know have. I know the fact that we have such a comfortable fallback plan is lucky, and I'm absolutely not taking that for granted. Still... just the principle of the thing, having to move back in with one's parents because one is broken and can't get a day job and keep one's self afloat anymore, that feeling of coming back in defeat and failure, and the logistics of downsizing everything we own from a spacious two-bedroom two-bathroom apartment to, like, one bedroom in my parents' house... it hurts. It's a very loving home but I just feel bad that it came to this.
I... dropped the ball on a lot of stuff, really. I didn't do any gameblogging this year. I'd gotten as far as posting the nominations for the 2021 awards, and we were going to post the actual winners at some point, and then do writeups for the stuff we played and beat/abandoned this year, and none of that happened. I also meant to post a big writeup about the genesis and addition of Kurt to our system, the issues he had with Ardei when settling in, just, your introduction to why there's this bird in our system now, and none of that happened either. And now Kurt changed his mind about being a bird and is now a snake, and Fang joined the party, too. I'm really behind on keeping you all up to date on our headspace happenings. I should get around to covering... all of that. That's what I said last year, too. Will I actually do it this year? We shall see!
Writing is hard when you have executive function issues (which we're working on at least identifying--see above) but streaming has picked up the pieces in a lot of ways. After a whopping four years of hiatus and lingering back-of-my-mind "man I should go back and do something with that someday" guilt, 2022 was the year we finally, finally finished our Pokemon SoulSilver playthrough. (Yes, I know that as of the writing of this year-end round-up entry, only 31 of the 32 episodes have been posted on Dreamwidth. The actual playthrough finished a while ago, and part 32 exists both in our Twitch archives and on YouTube, but we just need to convert it to a Dreamwidth post like we did for all the other ones, maybe write up a short little outro speech or something.) That was a monumental achievement, and quite an emotional one, too. That team is going to live on in our hearts forever.
In addition to SoulSilver, we've been streaming all sorts of other incredible games as well; we currently have in-progress runs of everything from Etrian Odyssey V to Metamorphosis to Glyph to Lil Gator Game, among others. All are absolute delights to stream, both to be playing great games and to have great people there watching and supporting us. Streaming is one of the few things I can still do in my current state, and it's... not big or successful enough to live off of as a full-time career, obviously, but even as a hobby it brings a sense of fulfillment and purpose, a sense that we're doing something good both for the things we believe in (such as the CD-i preservation) and for... like... brightening the respective days of everyone who tunes in. Thank you--all of you--for making the Game Room as Warm and Fuzzy as it is.
Our song choice for this year is "The Moonflower Society" by Avantasia both because this album dropped this year and because the video has a lot of the vibe we've been spending the latter half of this year capturing. An eccentric traveling the road at night receives an invitation to a ghostly circus full of even-more-eccentric eccentrics, and it feels like he's found his people. He parties with them, is welcomed, has a good time, accepts the mantle and ringmaster outfit... and then the sun comes up and the Moonflower Society fades away, leaving our hero at something of a "what now?" crossroads. The Moonflower Society, at least in our read/analysis, is something akin to the Island of Misfit Toys--a place where such eccentrics and weirdo creatures of the night can find and appreciate and be appreciated by each other. It's a party. It's a family. And... the thing about being misfits is that there's no place for any of them in "normal" society. How does Party Bug (The Bug who Loves to Party) pay bills, or deal with neurodivergencies that render them unemployable? How do we do that? That may be a struggle for us, but... well. At least the Society has each other. The spiritual support means more than you may think.
Thank you. Love you. See you next year, and hopefully I'll find a way to be awake for more of this one..?
we lov yew too!!!!!!!
Date: 2022-12-29 04:49 am (UTC)sorry i wish i could reply two efurrything but my slep meds are kiccing in,,,,,,
Re: we lov yew too!!!!!!!
Date: 2022-12-29 06:24 am (UTC)Thank you so much for being here, though! You're definitely one of the ones I was talking about when I said how great it is to have even a few Dishcorders over on Dreamwidth and like, turn this place into something that's alive and worth checking again.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-01 02:11 am (UTC)