The Springtime of Youth

[ZeaLitY]

The risk of that forum is always that it can act like a demotivator if you get out of the practice of updating it. Nothing's more embarrassing than resolving to do a bunch of stuff publicly, and following through on hardly any of it.

I ended up, two years ago, finally putting all of my ideas about the human condition and wisdom I've read into a single 17-page or so "book" for myself. The great truth I arrived at, regarding humanity, is that limits are what grant meaning, and because we're all limited in our lifespan and what we can hope to meaningfully accomplish, the choices we make on what to spend our time on become meaningful to us, in both a positive and negative sense. Desire is our natural state, but withdrawing from life in an eastern religious sense throws out the baby with the bathwater. It's been my philosophy to keep keenly pursuing desires and orienting one's life to try new experience, mindful of the fact that there is very little in this life we can truly control, and some kind of true, permanent "happiness" is beyond us.

That's the danger of the full springtime of youth feeling—it, like so many other motivational ideas, seems to promise some kind of transformed life, where problems are done and joys are plenty, simply through effort. Nothing can ever grant this, and the human condition of growing old and losing people mean that we're resigned to a downhill slide in some respects. But mindful of that, where the springtime of youth shines is spurring people to break through the nearest obstacles at hand, try something they normally wouldn't, and like Lord J said, even outright force personal growth and progress. As Clausewitz said, too, the greatest morale-builder for an army is a string of successive victories where the army has been pushed to its limit. So, too, is it in life—having goals and strenuously fighting for them and achieving them imparts a self-confidence that few other things can.

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

I ended up, two years ago, finally putting all of my ideas about the human condition and wisdom I've read into a single 17-page or so "book" for myself. The great truth I arrived at, regarding humanity, is that limits are what grant meaning, and because we're all limited in our lifespan and what we can hope to meaningfully accomplish, the choices we make on what to spend our time on become meaningful to us, in both a positive and negative sense. Desire is our natural state, but withdrawing from life in an eastern religious sense throws out the baby with the bathwater. It's been my philosophy to keep keenly pursuing desires and orienting one's life to try new experience, mindful of the fact that there is very little in this life we can truly control, and some kind of true, permanent "happiness" is beyond us.

You know, Z, years and years ago you killed any interest I had in Eastern Religion. I had grown up in a very religious Evangelical Christian home and had come to realize that I didn't actually believe any of it. I couldn't figure out if I believed in any sort of deity or religion and began to explore other options.

Eventually I started to swirl on Buddhism. It took the focus off of divine entities (which I felt like had ultimately failed me) and instead focused on philosophies of betterment, internal peace, and oneness. It allowed me to keep in touch with my own spirituality and mend my own philosophies on betterment while not putting focus on fear of a divine being and eternal damnation.

Later, somewhere here on the forum you went on a rant against Buddhism and how, essentially, it was an excuse to give up. I am summarizing and not quoting, of course, but you mused how it allowed oneself to simply accept the status quo and make peace with it instead of continuing the fight to change oneself and their conditions. Something along those lines.

It challenged me. In a very good way, and kept me on my quest. It took many more years to start refining my worldview, one I'm still working on, but I kept me from settling and kept my pushing for my own improvement, my own peace, without ever giving in. Not saying that Buddhism or any other religion is bad per se, but they simply don't offer my the answers I've sought.

[PrincessNadia78]

The risk of that forum is always that it can act like a demotivator if you get out of the practice of updating it. Nothing's more embarrassing than resolving to do a bunch of stuff publicly, and following through on hardly any of it.

I completely get what you are saying, but on the other side of the coin it can be a reminder as to things you wanted to accomplish and perhaps seeing it publicly will remind people of things they still want to do in life. I have a list of things I want to accomplish within the next few years and I actually have more support than ever; my husband, my co-workers and people here too. The Compendium has done more for me than you will ever know, I am so grateful for the people and atmosphere here.  In case you couldn't tell, I'm the eternal optimist. 

It challenged me. In a very good way, and kept me on my quest. It took many more years to start refining my worldview, one I'm still working on, but I kept me from settling and kept my pushing for my own improvement, my own peace, without ever giving in. Not saying that Buddhism or any other religion is bad per se, but they simply don't offer my the answers I've sought.

I think it's always good to be challenged, especially when it comes to things like religion. I think it encourages us to think outside of our own "box" if that makes sense. I grew up Catholic and non-denominational Christian so I know what it's like to grow up with that kind of a religion. I'm agnostic myself but it was a long path to get here and it's still evolving.

 

[Lord J Esq]

I like where I work and as far as call center jobs, this one isn't extremely difficult either. And I get to work on art. This may sound weird but.... for example, I know how to price a painting I did. But I don't know how to price MYSELF. Does that make sense? I have a lot of customer service experience but I'm not sure what those skills are worth.

It can be very hard to get a sense of what you are worth (in terms of pay rate), because there are so many ways of measuring it.

The method I like the most is to think about "value you bring to the company/client." If you're working at a call center, you are presumably resolving customer questions / problems, and that has a dollar value to the company. Companies don't just create jobs for no reason, and most would have no customer service call centers at all if they could get away with it.

When you deal with customers, you can make a rough guess of how much revenue per customer you've directly saved / will potentially generate in the future (until the next time they have a need) by resolving their needs successfully. Add this up for a few weeks, take the average, and then multiply that out by the number of customers you talk to in a year. That will give you a sense of what you're worth to the company annually. Depending on a bunch of complicated stuff that's not worth getting into, I would then say that your personal annual income from them should be worth 15% to 40% of that number.

My second-favorite way of measuring worth is to look at professional skills in the abstract, to come up with a raw potential worth, and then compare that value to the pay distributions of various jobs and industries which rely on some combination of those skills. For instance, if Skillset XYZ can earn you $18,000 a year in Job A, but $26,000 a year in a different kind of job, Job B, and you're currently in Job A, this tells you that you can earn a lot more by making a lateral move into another industry or field.

I should be clear that I have struggled mightily over the years at earning enough money for myself, and am quite poor!, so I'm certainly not the best authority to take financial planning advice from. But I really hate to see people undervalue themselves, and it happens so often, and the economic climate is set up to encourage us to do it to ourselves.

If nothing else, Nadia, when you look for your next job, and they ask you how much you want to earn, and you're in Florida, don't pick a number less than $25,000--which works out to roughly $12 an hour, so good! But don't settle for that. Don't let your income growth stagnate, because you will never get another chance to make it up. It takes most people a lifetime to build financial independence. (Which is sad.) And many never get there. (Which is also sad.) After you've earned $25k for three years or so, you should be earning at least $30k, either through raises or trading jobs. It should continue to increase steadily over the years.

The other reason I'm reluctant to leave this job is because this is my 4th job in less than 2 years. I'm making friends and I'm sick of looking. Does that make sense? I get exhausted just thinking about it.

It sure does. If you're that tired, you gotta rest.

I ended up, two years ago, finally putting all of my ideas about the human condition and wisdom I've read into a single 17-page or so "book" for myself.

I would be genuinely curious to read that, if you are up for sharing it. If it's a published work I'll even buy it![/quote]

[ZeaLitY]

I'll e-mail it. The first half is concerned over how life should be lived, and the second, how to most effectively live it (where all the savage efficiacy comes in). It draws from a few sources (the "life best lived" borrows pretty heavily from Sam Harris, but I mean, the man seems wholly correct in his conclusions...). You would not believe how much wisdom is contained in Clausewitz's On War, though, painfully diffused across the rest of the unfinished work. That "wisdom from war tomes" genre promises kernels of truth a dime a dozen, but Clausewitz was an utter genius. What he wrote on determination blew my fucking mind; real determination isn't grinding on some plan and whipping yourself, but resolutely pursuing, even cautiously, a strategic aim or desire that you absolutely do not know will bear fruit; of being able to act in uncertainty:

“Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this light wherever it may lead. The first of these qualities is described by the French term, coup d'oeil; the second is determination.

Looked at in this way, the role of determination is to limit the agonies of doubt and the perils of hesitation when the motives for action are inadequate. Colloquially, to be sure, the term ‘determination’ also applies to a propensity for daring, pugnacity, boldness, or temerity. But when a man has adequate grounds for action—whether subject or objective, valid or false—he cannot properly be called ‘determined’.”

But anyhow, I like to think that the philosophy I arrived at fully captures the spirit of that refrain from Trek: "[one] must learn to explore the moment."

Take this as an apology, too. Only after the liberation of living independently have I been able to look back and understand why I was so contemptibly fierce, especially on the forums here, where I probably drove off a fair share of contributing Chrono fans simply by going guns out on one-too-many debates (ha...no great loss in some cases...) I think that having grown up in that dead-end city, still being at home owing to graduating during a recession and awful job market, etc. left me nothing to cling to for hopes of the future but my ideals. It made me so profoundly disagreeable. Any assailment on that precious sense of identity threw the little chance I perceived of improving my station into jeopardy, and was met by a direly vicious response.

[Lord J Esq]

Take this as an apology, too. Only after the liberation of living independently have I been able to look back and understand why I was so contemptibly fierce, especially on the forums here, where I probably drove off a fair share of contributing Chrono fans simply by going guns out on one-too-many debates (ha...no great loss in some cases...) I think that having grown up in that dead-end city, still being at home owing to graduating during a recession and awful job market, etc. left me nothing to cling to for hopes of the future but my ideals. It made me so profoundly disagreeable. Any assailment on that precious sense of identity threw the little chance I perceived of improving my station into jeopardy, and was met by a direly vicious response.

I will accept that apology!

I understand a little better, nowadays, why time travel stories compel me. Not why they're fun, or gripping, or exciting. Not because of the chance to do something differently, or save the future. Not because they're often epic. But why they resonate in these ways in the first place--why it's so different to go back five years as opposed to going west five miles.

On a night like this one, the era of the Compendium's heyday feels so close that I feel as though I could reach out and touch it; that, if I but click to another thread, I'll find RD and Lensman and Rushingwind and Thought and Zephira and Faust and Syna and Sajainta and maybe even Krispin but don't tell him I said that, and then, from there, that if I look away from my computer screen I'll be in Seattle again, not so far away from the university, not so far away from that life, that world...that era.

For me the appeal of time travel, beyond its adventure value or its value of discovery, isn't to actually go to different periods in the past or the future, but to think about it, and thus to do a different kind of time traveling: to remember yourself as you were, when your life was on that page instead of this one, when the story and you with it stood at an earlier point of development, and when things were different and many long-since-quashed possibilities still lay in open view on some enticing horizon. The nature of consciousness is such that we can only ever dwell with our present selves. We can remember what it used to be like to be ourselves, but that old self is gone. Hence the saying, you can never go home. But with time travel you can do the next best thing: You can remember it.

I do a lot of time traveling, myself. I always have, too. I'm a very nostalgic person. I often and fondly--but wistfully also--remember places and moments that were sacred to me, or revelrous, or glorious. And on top of all that, events from 2015 to 2017 took a real, not-fun-sized bite out of me that's going to leave me warped forever even if I do manage to generally recover, making it even more compelling to think back on better times.

Dreaming of the future, dreaming of the past...I can only assume I'm projecting this, but it sure would be satisfying if this is what Kato meant when he characterized the Nu as describing life in terms of a dream. Much in keeping with my comments in the thread about Chrono Trigger ending when the world revived, I would be very impressed if the Nu were indeed lampshades of this very sort, existing to remind those who understand what's really happening that time is the ultimate impermeable barrier, and that all of Crono & Co.'s adventures are but a gratifying reminiscence.

All of which is to say: I am not an expert on the Springtime of Youth. And I don't think I ever will be. =]

So it's good that the Compendium's rightful authority on the matter is back on the beat. We all have our inner uglinesses and disagreeablenesses. And most of us have at least one or two personal inner demons to haunt us, whether we recognize them as such or not. I'm sure you and I are very much the same as we were then, and prone to the same mistakes, even if we are also wiser now. But we are still here, and I am happy to step into this old Chrono Compendium and see folks mulling around, even if some of the faces are gone.

That's not a very determined sentiment, but rather a ripe summer cantaloupe, juicy and simple. Unpretentious. I will never not be pretentious, but I now have this magnificent switch I can throw to temporarily pause it and go with the flow. Not many people have ever lived up to my high standards. Including, apparently, myself! And that's okay. Perhaps you have had the same thought at some point.

[ZeaLitY]

I think that was a compelling part of returning to Zeal in Crimson Echoes, or Prophet's Guile. It wasn't simply returning to a digital worldspace with rehashed art assets. No, we were back there -- to that first time we found Zeal, but the voices had changed; there were new things to discover, as if we'd picked up a book we'd set down after the newness of first reaching the kingdom wore off.

One thing about my thoughts on this subject have changed, though -- no longer would I so easily wish to go back and change something. Even six months of recent life consistently represents a basket of experiences that I would not so easily trade to have a do-over on certain things. I somehow recognize that altering even tiny choices in the past might irrevocably change my identity today -- and erase all the correspondence, thoughts, and observations I've had on this particular timeline. It's as if my identity is self-protecting on a temporal scale. I get the same feeling thinking of friends -- with most of them, I'm at a point now that, one year ago, was tangibly less close, intimate, or seasoned. It feels like it'd be a potential tragedy to wake up and be my same self in my body one year ago, with so much life lived reset.

(Obviously this doesn't hold true for life-altering events; if some titanic malfeasance had occurred to me recently I'd still be on board to build a time machine and change it, etc. And there are still plenty of events I would go back and change -- but what a price one imagines one might have to pay in the way of losing the life lived since that point in time...It might be a compelling subplot in a game -- save the world at large, but lose the one you knew entirely.)

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

One thing about my thoughts on this subject have changed, though -- no longer would I so easily wish to go back and change something. Even six months of recent life consistently represents a basket of experiences that I would not so easily trade to have a do-over on certain things. I somehow recognize that altering even tiny choices in the past might irrevocably change my identity today -- and erase all the correspondence, thoughts, and observations I've had on this particular timeline. It's as if my identity is self-protecting on a temporal scale.

Sounds like a moral quandary worthy of exploring. Time travel stories so often skip over the fallout of time travel, namely the fact that you erase the entire population (or shunt into an alternate timeline, based on multiverse theories). Chrono Cross touched on this with the whole Dead Sea / erased timelines shunted to the DBT, but it never really explores it in detail as it should.

[Lord J Esq]

It's ironic. In spite of everything bad that had happened to me over my life, I always very deliberately knew I would never go back to change it.

That all changed because of what I went through in 2015, 2016, and 2017. I would definitely go back to 2015 and change things in August.

Kinda sad, to get to a point where you're willing to trade in the life you have for a spin on the temporal slot machines. Like I said a few weeks ago in some thread somewhere around here, that's one of the reasons I've returned to the Compendium: to try and recalibrate life and hopefully get to a better place in lieu of a fancy Time Gate service.

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

Kinda sad, to get to a point where you're willing to trade in the life you have for a spin on the temporal slot machines. Like I said a few weeks ago in some thread somewhere around here, that's one of the reasons I've returned to the Compendium: to try and recalibrate life and hopefully get to a better place in lieu of a fancy Time Gate service.

Naw, that's not sad. I think that's true to many of us. ~90% of those posting nowadays have been registered here for 10+ years, and pretty much everyone has left and then come back for one reason or another. I left for years. Going full in on exposing my own demons, I have spent the past fifteen years fighting diagnosed clinical depression. I am 5'11" with a medium build and in 2013 I reached a point where I literally could not function without medication. I was down to 140 pounds, all due to crippling anxiety and depression. Some of it was chemical imbalance, but some of it was conditional. Work/career, my relationships, family stressors, etc.

I came back here late last year not only because I missed it, but because there's a part of me that connects it with a better past. I connect it to happier times. If nothing else, I've recently somehow tapped into a wormhole to that previous, less worn version of myself and I'm feeding off of the energies from the past.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

Besides, we are ALWAYS works in progress. The only time we stop changing/growing/declining is when we are dead and six feet under (or burnt into fine ash). We may never reach the same deepness of previous trenches, or may not reach the highs of previous Zeals (huhuhu), but godammit, those roller-coaster tracks never stop. All we can do is fuck off or keep fighting.

So keep up that recalibration. Buckle up. Change is coming, it will always be coming. You got this. Because you can't change it, as much as you want. But you can find solace in stupid internet forums for abandoned video game franchised. Even if it's minimal, it's something.

[Lord J Esq]

Kinda sad, to get to a point where you're willing to trade in the life you have for a spin on the temporal slot machines. Like I said a few weeks ago in some thread somewhere around here, that's one of the reasons I've returned to the Compendium: to try and recalibrate life and hopefully get to a better place in lieu of a fancy Time Gate service.

Naw, that's not sad. I think that's true to many of us. ~90% of those posting nowadays have been registered here for 10+ years, and pretty much everyone has left and then come back for one reason or another.

Oh, for sure. I didn't mean that I think it's sad that I would come back to the Compendium to do a bit of living-in-the-past--or, to use your preferable phrasing, drawing strength from it. I meant that it's sad that a person could get to the point where they would be willing to trade who they are for something else.

Even on that, reasonable opinions can differ, but my take is that it's sad. It's like looking on ruins and remembering or imagining what they used to be, or going to an empty concert hall and dreaming about the sound that once rang out against its walls. I have pretty high standards, higher than most folks, and I had clear expectations about personal success. I didn't live up to those standards and I didn't achieve that personal success. Worse than that, what I ended up with instead was bad enough that I really would go back three years and trade it all out, if I could. On a fundamental level, that's a form of self-repudiation, and, while you can describe it as you like, the word I'll stand by is "sad."

"Sad" is okay. I don't mean it in the sense of "Waaaah, pity me! Buy me an ice cream!" (Though you can and should buy me an ice cream.) I use it mainly descriptively, and I'm a very honest person. I don't want my negative appraisals dismissed or glossed over by myself or others any more than I want my positive appraisals rubber-stamped or over-exaggerated. I love to describe the world as I see it to be, documenting the facts as best I understand them, like for a good science book. I don't mind being seen in my weaker moments by others. I've never really possessed that kind of self-consciousness.

So, hopefully you'll indulge me on "sad." By all means though, do keep right on cheerleading the future! The world, and our society, and even occasionally the Great Lord of the J, have good use for it. =]

I left for years. Going full in on exposing my own demons, I have spent the past fifteen years fighting diagnosed clinical depression. I am 5'11" with a medium build and in 2013 I reached a point where I literally could not function without medication. I was down to 140 pounds, all due to crippling anxiety and depression. Some of it was chemical imbalance, but some of it was conditional. Work/career, my relationships, family stressors, etc.

You've done a good job of committing to the revival here. It would not have happened without you. I think it's deliciously ironic that my return triggered this recent spate of activity (given that I abandoned this place earlier than most!), but it was you more than anyone else (rivaled only by Mauron, so I gather) who set up the tinder and the kindling to make it possible for the spark to catch once me and my big ol' flint rock showed up. And now all these other previously hibernating users are suddenly coming out of the woodwork. Not a ton, but enough that we can already say your efforts made a difference!

On a tangential note, in 2003 due to extreme poverty I got all the way down to 136 pounds. I was eating one meal and one snack a day. When I'd cook a whole chicken--always watered down with beans or some such--I'd even eat as much as I could of the bones; I was that poor. And I didn't know I would have qualified for food stamps and food banks. I'm 5'10" and naturally larger-framed, so 136 was a weight I hadn't seen since probably middle school. It was grim! So I can only imagine what a rough place you must have been in, to get down so low yourself. I hope you are doing better these days! You certainly seem to, outwardly, but I try not to presume such things.

I came back here late last year not only because I missed it, but because there's a part of me that connects it with a better past. I connect it to happier times. If nothing else, I've recently somehow tapped into a wormhole to that previous, less worn version of myself and I'm feeding off of the energies from the past.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

Certainly!

So keep up that recalibration. Buckle up. Change is coming, it will always be coming. You got this. Because you can't change it, as much as you want. But you can find solace in stupid internet forums for abandoned video game franchised. Even if it's minimal, it's something.

These days my biggest operational ambition of the type we're describing here is simply to cultivate more free time. My job saps my time very badly. It is a long-term work-in-progress to cultivate little fertile pockets of usable time that I can then apply to my creative writing and other work.

A smaller ambition, but a worthy one.

[ZeaLitY]

Yeah, I have to admit too, in late 2016 there's something I wish I could go back and change.

It is nice to think the Compendium had a heyday. From the get-go, Ramsus and I always knew we kind of missed the real potential rush for having a busy, active site, since we brought this thing online and got it active in 2003 (and only really had the encyclopedia ready in 2006). There was always a perspective on the administrative side of tending to a garden that would and could never grow large enough to realize what may have been. But a larger community definitely wouldn't have been as unique Compendiumite, I think. We wouldn't have had the space for all our distinctive characters, and the law of averages probably would've dominated the public discourse. So things worked out. And hey, our little community has managed to be a lot more productive than much, much larger ones in terms of actually finishing hacks and modifications.

Edit: Wow, starmen.net's forums are pretty dead these days. I remember when Ramsus showed me that site at the outset, and it seemed like something we'd never surpass. (Although outliving them in relative degrees of being dead is no way to "surpass" anyone.) I guess though, for the future, it really does seem like having an Aegis project is probably the only viable way to get new blood, and even then, there's the eternal C&D risk if it operates in the open enough to attract people.

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

Oh, for sure. I didn't mean that I think it's sad that I would come back to the Compendium to do a bit of living-in-the-past--or, to use your preferable phrasing, drawing strength from it. I meant that it's sad that a person could get to the point where they would be willing to trade who they are for something else.

"Sad" is okay. I don't mean it in the sense of "Waaaah, pity me! Buy me an ice cream!" (Though you can and should buy me an ice cream.) I use it mainly descriptively, and I'm a very honest person.

Oh, I know exactly what you meant. I'm not dismissing or coddling, so I hope it didn't come across that way. But I dunno, it's not sad to me. But I'll indulge you. : )

This is classic Trek (I saw you posted earlier about a Trek crossover, so I assume you're somewhat of a Trekkie). One desires a better outcome and resolves to change history, going so far as erasing themselves from history to do so. The sacrifice of the current version so a past version can obtain a more ideal future.

And Trek doesn't approach it from a sad point of view. It's a noble sacrifice, rightfully so or otherwise.

So when I talk about it being "sad" and the ups and downs of life, I guess I look at it as a natural stance to take. When life gets miserable, it's easy to want to redo the past. Even if the current you - the version of you that exists with the knowledge of those events - is no more.

But I get what you're saying. It is what it is. So it goes.

You've done a good job of committing to the revival here. It would not have happened without you.

I seriously had nothing to do with it. That's not modesty. If anything, it was PrincessNadia who registered and started posting on like 10 threads in one or two days, and that made me respond in kind, which snowballed. Mauron, too. Ever steadfast Mauron, who has stood a diligent vigil here with a few others.

I posted a love letter to the Compendium in a thread called "God, I Miss This Place" in late 2016 as a sort of swan song and recognition that my interest in this place was dead, but that I viewed my time here fondly. In a way, that pushed me to do my part in revival. Not going down without a fight.

I also think SquareEnix will eventually do something with the franchise. Remake or new game, or maybe I'm feeling overly optimistic these days, but I do think, at some point, something is going to happen. Chrono Trigger is like the Blade Runner of video games; style and substance with a fervently passionate fanbase. Well, maybe not Blade Runner, but you get the idea. Chrono Trigger isn't a cult movie, but we are one that fans adore and refuse to let die.

It was grim! So I can only imagine what a rough place you must have been in, to get down so low yourself. I hope you are doing better these days! You certainly seem to, outwardly, but I try not to presume such things.

I'm definitely in a better place now. A large part of it came from internal change. There's so much I can't control. I gave up religion and trying to make it fit to my worldview. I recognized that the person I married wasn't who I thought she was, but that that's okay and I need to stop fighting and just accept it. I finally said fuck it and quit my job, was unemployed and trying to support a wife and kid with whatever odd jobs I could scrape together, but it gave me just enough time to jump onto something else. It's still not the career I long for, but it is sufficient and the money is good. I gave up social media and the blatant manipulation it entails.

It's so much easier to be true to oneself when you're not inundated with media's interpretation of what you should be, or by comparing yourself to the facade others put up on social media.

Are things better? From a financial standpoint, a little but not really. Our generation has been fucked over by the baby boomers and the American dream we were promised is a dead promise. The less I fight and accept that life won't be quite the way I want it, the better I've felt. Maybe it's defeatism on my part. There's peace in accepting that I'll never be some Hollywood bigshot writer like I had hoped. The dream isn't dead, but the likelihood is small. I can deal with that.

So yeah, I'm in a better place overall. Healthy weight, healthier mindset, no longer a desire to end my existence.

A big part of pulling myself up out of my rut was my child (I now have 2) and the death of my best friend, Daniel. Daniel and I were childhood friends and to this day our parents are besties. We became reacquainted after college and our friendship grew immensely. We were fighting many of the same demons with depression and started texting and calling each other daily, helping each other tread water. We lived about 2 hours apart, which is ironic, given that we both grew up ~1000 miles away from here.

He shot himself two years ago.

The only difference between him and I was that I had a child that was dependent on me, and the love for my child was a liferaft I was able to cling to. Daniel didn't have that and he chose to end it all. His brother and I had to clean out his apartment a week later. It was mortifying. They had to cut the drywall away to get ride of the mess, take the tile up from the floor. His blankets and mattress were gone. Sorry for the vivid imagery. I was both jealous and pitied him. The hole he left to myself and others is one that will never heal.

But it game just enough push up the hill to start recovery. It's stupid it took his suicide to do so, but it was a REALLY sobering thought.

Sorry for rambling. I tend to do that a lot these days. But yeah, I'm in recovery.

Are you? Not a metaphysical question, I'm seriously asking. I assume you're no longer 135 pounds and living off of measly scraps.

Wow, starmen.net's forums are pretty dead these days. I remember when Ramsus showed me that site at the outset, and it seemed like something we'd never surpass.

The Seikens (for the Secret of Mana series) is also a dead zone. The fact that we are still ticking is a big deal. Worthy of note.

I guess though, for the future, it really does seem like having an Aegis project is probably the only viable way to get new blood, and even then, there's the eternal C&D risk if it operates in the open enough to attract people.

If we ever do it, we do it smarter than before. No need to advertise it like CE did. Let it be subtle, fly under the radar, then release with a bang. That being said, it doesn't need to be to draw in new blood. Let it be for us as much as for others. A creative endeavor that should be fun for us. Not saying we shouldn't take it seriously (if we ever did such a thing) and make some commitments, but it also doesn't have to be something we force ourselves to do.

I've been super guilty in the past of overthinking fan games. At this point I recognize them as a hobby. I feel okay putting my time into a project that is just a hobby and literally has no legacy or financial benefit to it. If I enjoy it and enjoy the people I'm working with, looking at it as a hobby is good enough for me.

Now if it was my job, I'd feel otherwise.

[Mauron]

Mauron, too. Ever steadfast Mauron, who has stood a diligent vigil here with a few others.

The problem was I rarely left Kajar Labs. While it's been useful for the hacking portion of the community, it's not as good for the rest of the site.

If we ever do it, we do it smarter than before. No need to advertise it like CE did. Let it be subtle, fly under the radar, then release with a bang. That being said, it doesn't need to be to draw in new blood. Let it be for us as much as for others. A creative endeavor that should be fun for us. Not saying we shouldn't take it seriously (if we ever did such a thing) and make some commitments, but it also doesn't have to be something we force ourselves to do.

I really think it was the advertising that got SE's attention. Release a hack quietly in the ROM hacking communities and no one will notice.

I've been super guilty in the past of overthinking fan games. At this point I recognize them as a hobby. I feel okay putting my time into a project that is just a hobby and literally has no legacy or financial benefit to it. If I enjoy it and enjoy the people I'm working with, looking at it as a hobby is good enough for me.

Now if it was my job, I'd feel otherwise.

I know the feeling there. A large project seems like an interesting idea, but it takes a lot more time.

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

The problem was I rarely left Kajar Labs. While it's been useful for the hacking portion of the community, it's not as good for the rest of the site.

Regardless, take praise where praise is due. Even if it was Kajar Labs that kept you active, you were active. I would show up once every six months and you were always in the active member list and there were occasional comments you'd provided.

I think you can tell by now I have a lot of respect for you as a person (despite the fact that I know literally nothing about your personal life outside of Neko). : D

Release a hack quietly in the ROM hacking communities and no one will notice.

Exactly. No fanfare until after it's released. No website, no screenshots (although a teaser or two, as long as it's not blatant, could work). Once it's out in the public, it can't be taken back. Of course this limits adding fresh blood, but one can easily see someone's interest and abilities around the forum and then pull them in.