Adjusting back to productivity

It's been a very slow transition for me to get back into being productive, and I'm still wasting too much time in the day to get any work done.  I've finally cut down on obsessively playing VR this month reducing it from around 28 hours a week to around 8 hours a week.  I've gotten back into Ring Fit Adventure into my weekly routine so that I get a more balanced workout.  I do Ring Fit Adventure on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for muscle training and harder cardio workout.  I play VR on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for back/sides stretching, arm/shoulder training, and squat repetition with light cardio workout.  And then I try to relax on Sundays to give my body a break.

Having gotten a more normal workout routine in place, I then focused on reducing my time on doing dailies for Genshin Impact and Phantasy Star Online 2.  I stopped doing anything that required resin (stamina points) in Genshin Impact which reduced my gameplay time of 1-1.5 hours down to 10-15 minutes as I only focused on daily quests.  For Phantasy Star Online 2, I stopped doing dailies if the mission pass didn't have rewards I wanted out of them and have tried to progress story missions instead.  I am spending less time on both games daily as a result, but they still take up a lot of time during the weekends when I decide to do a little more.  With more time saved up in the day, I wanted to be more productive.

During my time playing VR, there were a few times I played VR Chat and tried to practice speaking Japanese and ended up meeting people from all over the world who were also learning Japanese and/or other languages.  I've always been interested in learning other languages but never made a real effort to try.  Early March, news made its way to me of Moses McCormick's (also known as 老鼠 - lǎoshǔ 'Mouse') passing.  He was a polyglot Youtuber who spoke 20 different languages and I liked watching him connect with so many different people by speaking their native languages.  It was sad to hear of his passing.  Watching some of his old videos and then transitioning to watching a few other polyglot youtubers, I finally decided that I wanted to learn some different languages.  I knew learning a new language was going to be difficult and that I would likely forget everything I learned if I don't use it, but I fancied the idea of learning just a handful of words and phrases for each of the languages I was interested in.  Besides learning some words, I also wanted to learn how to read and write in Korean and Russian because I realized that despite rarely ever writing or speaking Japanese, I read and hear it a lot which has helped me practice and learn a little on my own.  In the past year, I noticed I understood more words in the animé I watched than I used to and that I was learning new words along the way.  So I've been trying to expose myself to more stuff in Chinese and French, hoping to learn more.  And since Korean and Russian use a completely different alphabet system, I figured I could learn more if I learned how to read and write the alphabet for them.  So for the past 2 weeks, I've started preparing myself to learn the very basics of: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, Russian, German, and Italian.  I don't know how far I'll go with learning any of these, but I hope I can improve Chinese, Japanese and French the most.

My main focus this past month has been practicing Electric Guitar and learn a particular song.  I've been making "okay" progress, but I would like to learn faster as I still have a lot planned this year and I'm getting nothing done.  I still feel a bit lost in when it comes to my long term goals as I can't see them coming to fruition any time soon and have no idea how to reach there anymore.  But my short term goals are clear and exciting, so I have no hesitation striving to better myself with them.

What a crazy week

 Let me start off by saying that nothing serious happened.  Nothing truly THAT good or THAT bad happened.  But the ups and downs of this past week has affected me enough where I contemplated on why it did in the first place.

Leading up to the start of last week was the Lunar New Year's sale on Steam and many other platforms.  I've been playing a lot of Virtual Reality games and wanted to pick up some more.  I got a decent amount and was mostly happy with them.  I tried them all out and felt a bit of regret on two of my purchases, of which I couldn't return because I went beyond the 2 hour limit before I got to that conclusion.

Then the week started off with the announcement that SoulWorker was going to close its servers at the end of April.  I was sad to hear the news and figured it wasn't doing too well as time went on anyways.  To my surprise, it had a steady stream of players throughout its run on Steam.  They probably weren't making enough money to make up the difference.  I'm hoping to make some time and play as much as I can of it before it disappears.

On Monday, I was doing my daily logins on my mobile games when Another Eden suddenly kicked me back out to home screen.  I thought it was strange and tried starting it up a couple of times and it still kicked me back out to home screen immediately.  I restarted my phone and to my horror, all my applications were greyed out.  None of my games or applications started up.  I checked my storage and realized that my Micro SD card had corrupted and so I tried to recover the files on my PC.  It seems a majority of the files were lost and the ones recovered weren't important.  While annoying, I wasn't too worried as I had linked all my games to an account that can be recovered.  I tried formatting the Micro SD Card and it didn't work.  It seemed the structural integrity of the memory card was compromised beyond repair, and so I reluctantly ordered a new one.

On Wednesday, Nintendo had a Direct in which they haven't had in over a year.  And the very first thing they started off with was something I didn't expect to happen.  As soon as the stream started and I read "Not actual gameplay footage", heard the music and saw the skyship, I gasped and thought "omg, is Pyra being added to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate?"  For context, I've wanted Pyra/Mythra (Homura/Hikari) from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in SSBU since its launch and gave up hope that they'd ever make it in after Rex was shown as a Mii Costume and Pyra/Mythra were shown as Spirits in Spirit Mode.  What gave me a glimmer of hope was Min Min's addition to the roster when she was a spirit as well.  When Rex said "One day, Pyra just disappeared...", I started freaking going "OMG, IT'S HAPPENING!"  This character reveal brought me to tears and I didn't think there were any character reveals that could do that anymore.  The last 2 DLC characters have a lot to live up to.  The rest of the direct was okay with most of the announcements being updates on previously announced games and remakes/remasters.

All that good feeling was quickly dashed as I couldn't link my account to get my save file back for Another Eden.  All my other games easily got me back to where I left off, and I couldn't figure out how to do it on Another Eden.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize it until the next day that I had accidentally started a new game and overwrote my save file with it.  I contacted support to see if they could help me, but all the required information were things I didn't know about (user ID number and such).  They weren't able to find my account based on the little information I had, which is understandable considering how many accounts were made for their game.  I was heartbroken and sadden by the loss of 2-3 years of grinding, progression, and collecting characters.  But I was also mad at myself when I realized I could've gotten it back if I hadn't overwrote my save file.  To make matters worse, I found out the day after that there wasn't even a save file found on my account for BangDream (all those Animé and Persona songs I got)!

Then little things started to bug me.  A friend found a good deal for the pre-order of Guilty Gear Strive Deluxe, which I was definitely going to get.  Unfortunately, my payment couldn't go through and I wasted over an hour trying.  I tried the next day and it still didn't work.  By this point, I was feeling emotionally miserable and I couldn't understand why I felt that way.  I tried to tell myself "It's just an online game that's closing down, that happens all the time.  I just lost some mobile games, and while it sucks it's not THAT bad.  Sure, I could've saved $18 with that deal, but if I had to pay full price for a game, I'm glad it's Guilty Gear Strive."  While I didn't quite convince myself that day, I felt much better the next day.

After that, a bunch of fighting game news made its way with Tekken 7 DLC character teased, a guilty gear character teased for Samurai Shodown, Chizuru Kagura making a surprise return to The King of Fighters XV, and Guilty Gear Strive revealing I-No as the last base roster character.

So I had to think to myself "why was I having such an emotional rollercoaster ride this past week?"  In all honesty, all these good and bad things are pretty normal and non-consequential.  I think that's what helped me get over the bad stuff and focus on the good stuff; that I can live and enjoy such frivolities at a time like this is something I won't take for granted.  I'm glad COVID-19 cases are dropping, but the world still feels unsafe with new strains, mutations and other possible virus outbreaks happening overseas.  I hear that Texas has power outages as the temperature continues to drop throughout the country the past 2 weeks.

I am a bit worried about not being productive as I've been playing a lot of VR, but that in itself has been a stepping stone towards self improvement.  I've actually been losing weight from playing VR and I'm down to a weight I haven't been at in nearly a decade.  As I try to move away from mobile games, motivate myself towards working again, and focusing on more things I want to do (get through more console games, reading, learning new languages, practicing more music, etc.), I'm slowing planning out my year and figuring out my priorities.  But yeah, what a crazy week.  I'm so happy Pyra/Mythra are in Smash, I can't wait to play them next month!