Hyperfixations in this Particular Moment in Time

I've been going down one rabbit hole after another lately. This website actually is an older fixation of mine that I'm still well and good sunk into. Sadly at this point the website is mostly maintenance as I don't have much new content to add. YET.

I really thought the release of Pokémon Legends Z-A would break the spell that Hello Kitty Island Adventure has had over me, but alas, HKIA won in the end. I've been playing every single day for months and have long since finished the story. I actually don't have much to do on there daily anymore? Except... FLOWERS. Oh my stars the FLOWERS! This game saw the flowers in Animal Crossing and said "hold my beer". The breeding system and general flower diversity is completely insane. There's so many colors, color mixing, a bunch of different types, and then with all of that there's also patterns and effects that can be added to them. It's a lot to get into, so I'll spare you the details, but needless to say there's hundreds of thousands of possible different outcomes and combinations. So every day I'm logging in and running all over Friendship Island just to check on my flower beds. Now, I haven't gone completely unhinged yet. I don't have spreadsheets for keeping track of my flowers... yet. But I am doing research into optimal placement to get the best chances of color and pattern transfers so I can make more pretty flowers. So that's taking up a good chunk of my daily brain RAM.

For winter solstice I got an SSD for my computer (which was still running on an HDD and therefor very slow) and with that upgrade I decided to dual boot Linux Mint on the SSD (Windows is still on the HDD if I want to use it but otherwise that drive is storage). So Linux is a new thing for me and it's very customizable. There's just a lot you can do with it that can't do with Windows. And I'm learning a lot of these things I can do, mostly just for fun. Some of it to look cool. Some of it because I need it. It's got a few small setbacks but overall it's been such a nice experience for me. I never thought I was going to be That Linux Guy but here I am. I suppose it was always inevitable. I've become a big fan open source software and digital freedom and I am one of AI's biggest haters. I got tired of being spied on so much and I really got tired of having to constantly turn off GenAI slop shit that I didn't want in any of my programs. So here I am. Using Linux. Like a nerd.

Speaking of programs, I also somewhat recently discovered a whole community around an old CD-ROM game I played as a child in the late 90s. The game is called Petz, by PF Magic (only Petz 1-5, we don't associate with the later Ubisoft releases). It really is a pretty basic "here's a virtual animal running around your screen please take care of it" kind of game. I used to adore this game so much as a kid. For the last 20+ years I didn't think anyone else had heard of it. I think a while back I even managed to get my hands on a disc of one of the versions at a garage sale. I just wanted to rescue it, I didn't think I could play it. Until about a year ago, when I found a Neocities site with directions for how to play the game on modern machines. And also... custom breeds??? I didn't know that was a thing?? I guess I had other things going on because the fixation didn't stick until recently when I found a whole discord server dedicated to this old ass game. I've even been looking into tutorials for how to make my own custom breeds! I'm just shocked to find even a small active community surrounding this random game I loved so much as a kid. I truly love the internet for stuff like this. The game is not kept up by the original devs so it's definitely abandonware, but the mods for it are still very functional. I've even got this game running on Linux with zero issues. So maybe keep an eye out to see if I end up making custom breeds and posting them for download. I've got a lot of tutorials to watch and new bespoke programs to learn but I don't think this is outside of my abilities at all.

This is all to say I haven't done a lot of crochet or other art lately. I'm only going to vend at one con this year as I don't think I'll have enough stock for more than that (and I want to spend more time with out of state friends at TFF). I'm also looking to get a pet snail or two eventually if I can. And I've been playing more video games than I used to. It's very hard having so many hobbies. I feel like my free time is constantly being pulled in so many different directions and I don't know how to make the most of it. But I usually find a way to enjoy myself and these recent interests of mine are definitely keeping me entertained. I just wanted an excuse to ramble about the stuff occupying my brain lately. :3

Xenon Starz, 01/13/25