Update

Hey guys, time to touch base again. I don’t have any amazing news to share. I haven’t done any work since last time I posted and have been letting my meds adjust. Overall I feel a lot better but the last week has prevented me from seeing where I’m at for several reasons. If you recall I mentioned that I hurt my back while cleaning a few months ago and it suddenly relapsed to the point where I was bedridden and couldn’t walk for a few days- and on top of that I had what I believed was an ear infection. I went to the urgent care unit last night after waiting the ear thing out for several days. I had antibiotics leftover from something so I thought I’d take those and it’d go away. Turns out it wasn’t an infection, it was a humongous wax buildup and they had to power wash my ear to get it all out. Seriously, I don’t mean to gross anyone out or anything but it was huge. My ear still isn’t fully better but I’m getting there. Some hearing has returned, it just feels like I’m waiting for a huge ‘pop’ to depressurize it and it’s quite uncomfortable. Nowhere near as uncomfortable as it was, though. The pounding pain was so intense a few nights ago I could barely sleep.

So, yeah. I have not been having a good week to say the least. It’s hard to tell where my mind is at because of all the physical pain but I do think I’d have gotten back to work by now if it wasn’t so bad. I’m much more relaxed and calm now that it’s been a few weeks.

As for how I’ve been passing my time recovering this month, my Dragon Quest playthroughs continued since I last posted. I beat 5, which is now one of my favorite games of all time and I could write a whole blog about it, then I beat 6, which is… one of the games of all time. It’s not bad. Not at all. It’s quite good. But compared to 3, 4 and 5 the quality is just not there. It’s one of those kinds of games where there’s a lot of really high highs and a lot of low lows. Inconsistent. Still worth playing and I’m glad I did but it just had so much missed potential. The lead developer of it, Yuji Hori, was also co-creating Chrono Trigger simultaneously as he worked on 6, meaning it didn’t get his full attention. I think it goes without saying that a single ‘sub-par’ Dragon Quest was well worth that trade off.

DQ7 is a massive game. After starting it I decided I needed a break after about ten hours in and I just replayed Undertale yesterday and am now playing Omori for its similar vibes.

That’s pretty much all I’ve been up to aside from one other thing- learning kalimba. It’s an instrument called the thumb piano, and I’ve been playing around learning bits and pieces of songs here and there just so I have something else to do that isn’t staring into a screen all day. It’s nice, very peaceful. I like it a lot, though it’s a very limiting instrument and as such there aren’t a lot of songs transcribed for it. I kind of want an electronic keyboard now for that reason. Might be harder to learn than kalimba but literally every song ever made has notes for piano so there you go lol.

As for my plans, I might just relax the rest of this month since it’s going to cause me a lot of mental energy to deal with having to see people irl and all that. It’ll give me time to further adjust to the meds too, though if I feel like writing before then I’ll still do so. Hard to predict my future self’s actions, obviously.

For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s my birthday in five days. If anyone wants to give me anything for that, it would be very welcome but is completely unnecessary. https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/claytonsummers

You could also just go find an artist and commission something LARPG related, too! I can provide everyone’s references if need be- I just don’t want to have to be the one to talk to the artist. Still not in the mood for much socialization.

All in all, I’m looking forward to the new year. This year was a conflicting one for me. I had one month where it was the happiest I’d ever been, my first big success, and then the whole rest of the year felt like falling violently down a mountain, but like in a comedic sense where I keep hitting my head against everything on the way down.

The good news is that I already hit rock bottom and have now restarted the climb back up. I’m getting better, and I can feel it won’t be long till I’m back to my full strength. When I’m there, finishing volume 2 should be a straight shot since it’s already halfway done and realistically only needs a month or two of me at my best to wrap it up. From there I hope to get back to my old speed and release a lot more than just that.

Thank you for being patient, I’ll be in touch with any more updates that come up and will try to post some art I haven’t gotten around to soon.