Weeknotes #8

Posting late because I had a wild week and lose track of time when on breaks. I have a lot to ramble about.

Life

I'm pretty depressed. I don't mean this week specifically, I mean in general, for like my whole life. I've been on prozac and various other prescriptions since I was a young teen, and at this point, I want to try something new. The psychiatrist I've been seeing offers esketamine/Spravato treatment, so we've been trying to get me approved for that, but I ended up getting denied a second time. Even though I've been on SSRIs for so long and definitely think my depression counts as "treatment resistant", I've also never self-harmed or have been seriously suicidal. Obviously that's a good thing and I'm happy that's never been an issue for me, but I think it is making it harder to get approved, so it might not happen.

Additionally, we had to put one of our cats down. I'm not too distraught over this, he's been sick for a long time so there's a sense of relief. I'll probably write about this more in a separate blog post. But even if I'm not too torn up about it, it still was a stressful situation.

So getting denied for medication that might help me with a lifelong issue, my cat dying, and the stress from midterms, I decided that I need weed.

Weed is legal where I live, but I'm admittedly kinda a sheltered kid who didn't get invited to parties and doesn't have a lot of experience with drugs or alcohol. Even as I got older and had chances to go out more, I usually declined offers for a drink or smoke with a polite "No thanks." Even if I was interested, a party with people I only kinda now that I drove to by myself and have to drive home from doesn't seem like the best time to try them out for the first time.

But like, I'm trying to get prescription hallucinogens. If I can't have that I might as well just do weed at this point. I voted to make that shit legal, I think I deserve some. So I did some reading, found a nearby dispensary, got an idea of what I wanted to buy, and stopped by on the way home from my final class before spring break. I got 10mg indica gummies. The first two nights, I just took half a gummy. Felt a bit numb and sleepy, and was able to fall asleep without taking melatonin. Wouldn't really say I got "high". Then I took the full 10mg and was able to feel the effects a lot more. I felt melty, especially in my face. I couldn't really pay attention to what I was reading, so I picked out some random youtube videos and the basic jokes would send me into a giggling fit.

There were some parts where I felt a bit uncomfortable, but I think that was more not being used to the sensation and I think it'll be easier the next time.

School

Midterms! Two of my classes had take home midterms. We could start them early but I didn't. I probably should have since it ended up being difficult for me to tackle the essay questions within the time limit. I don't think I did great, but I don't think all hope is lost.

Now spring break is here so I get to relax for a bit. There's some stuff I should probably work on though. I should also brush up on math since I want to retake the placement test to see if I can get a better score and have to take one or two less classes.

Will I get anything done? That remains to be seen.

Website

Last week I added opengraph tags so when I linked to this site the links would look nice, but it turns out during that process I broke some stuff, namely, certain urls for stuff like comments. So they've been removed for now.

Basically, Wagtail has some unique template tags that are specific to Wagtail pages. But when trying to make the opengraph tags template, all pages ended up inheriting that tag, even if they aren't Wagtail specific pages, such as the comments, so an error gets raised. This isn't hard to work around, but I just haven't gotten around to it.

I also made some more generic template to replace the original collections pages, since they were too specific to a particular item type which made it harder to update if I wanted to add something different. I also just thought they were ugly. Still haven't gotten around to actually adding the page back yet though.

Reading/Watching/Gaming

Watched episode 33 of the Apothecary Diaries and finished watching Lycoris Recoil with Lily! I think I heard kinda mixed things about LycoReco while it was airing, and then after it aired it just kinda disappeared, so admittedly I wasn't expecting too much going into it. But I ended up pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable it was. It's not really like, super deep or anything and requires you to suspend your disbelief, but I don't really agree with some negative reviews I saw saying it required too much suspension of disbelief for them. That's obviously very subjective, so your mileage may vary. Though I do wonder if people find it easier to suspend their disbelief when it comes to dodging bullets and taking on multiple foes way larger than them if the protagonist is a gruff generic action hero man in a live action movie than it is with a cute anime girl.

The part where I ramble about things tangentially related to Subahibi.

Visual novels are one of my favorite mediums, but I feel like there's a certain amount of the literary canon that I'm missing out because well, I'm a bit squeamish! At least I think I am. I think visual novels role as a medium where perverts can make horny and gory stories on early home computers, and then form this community where what are considered the greatest works are straight up pornography is awesome. But! I still haven't engaged with a lot of that side of the medium. I want to, but when there's almost a mysticism surrounding some titles about how disturbing and hardcore they are, I get intimidated. It's really hard to gauge what will be "too much" for you because that's super subjective and the hype might cause some people to exaggerated what happens in some stories.

So onto Wonderful Everyday (Subarashiki Hibi ~Furenzoku Sonzai~), henceforth Subahibi. As a very well-regarded member of the Denpa genre, I've been curious about this title. But that aforementioned hype on how fucked up and disturbing it is! It made me reluctant. But it was on sale and I wanted something to read so I finally took the plunge. I'm going in blind other than knowing it is in fact a denpa game and not a sexy slice of life game. Some of the talk surrounding the game and how disturbing it is kinda led me to believe this is an eroguro game, but twenty hours in I think it probably isn't actually that. I still have a ways to go, so maybe there will be some eroguro type of scenes later, but I don't think it's firmly an eroguro game.

Don't get me wrong, there is violent stuff and sex scenes depicting acts like rape and incest, but it hasn't been a "this is the most disturbing thing I've ever read" experience so far. Who knows! Maybe I'll eat these words!

Also funny playing this after Umineko because I'll hear a song that remind me of Umineko and go "huh, I wonder if there's any shared composers, and then a character will say something kinda Umineko-like, and then I'll hear a song that's like "No wait, this one WAS in Umineko wasn't it??" I have no idea what the answer to this is. I didn't recognize any of the composers in the credits as also being in Umineko, and I went through the first few seconds of every song in the Umineko music box, but I couldn't find the one I was thinking of.

Tangents aside, I'm enjoying the game so far. I just finished the My Own Invention chapter, both endings. I've been curious about the Denpa genre and while I've played some things that I think are denpa-adjacent, I'm not sure if the greater vn community considers that "true" denpa games. Stuff like the Science Adventure series and the When they Cry series. I can definitely see a lot of similarities in Subahibi to these other visual novels I played.