And By Design, I Dropped The Ball

Confession time: I actually dislike posting daily.

I've settled into a schedule that I dig, and I can be stubborn about my schedules. And I'm still caught up in the "polishness" of this blog, weirdly enough. I need the time and edits still before you see something over here. (My best posts? Are the ones I spent ages on. But also, my other best posts are the ones that forced themselves out, no filter, and I shrugged and went "sure." It's something to consider.)

And this month... I paused. I don't have a reason other than "I didn't wanna." I slept. I goofed off. I played around. I picked up a long under-worried Worry Stone that is my Portfolio, and put enough work in my Journaling 101 Presentation that it's in its final mile.

I went to a museum with friends. I finally finished the anthology of horror stories, and began another book. We made a ton of watermelon lemonade that was too tart, but we made it work. I tried going to bed early all week, to no avail. I coworked with a friend. A partner came over to eat soup dumplings and fight with streaming services.

I put off writing, except when I did the Mindful Journaling meetup at the start of the month. I argued with my Inner Critic (it's fine, it was for the writing exercise!) but it was half-hearted because (this time) my Inner Critic actually had some very good points (reminders).

I let myself be tired. Sometimes, you just gotta do that. Something told me to start pacing myself, and not attempt more posts for this month until I can actually carve out dedicated time to it.

August 07th

My current Commute Playlist has been my favorite tracks from the Legend of Dragoon soundtrack. A JRPG from the real early 2000s and a good title in its own right, despite gaming magazines(1) dubbing the main character "Cloud Strife with Brown Hair." Yet another cult classic I should dedicate a single page to (like what I'm doing with The Lawnmower Man, page still in progress).

The composers were Dennis Martin and Takeo Miratsu (who also did the OSTs for Beatmania IIDX and Jumping Flash! 1 and 2). There were a lot of scenarios and places that required BGM...that is too much for just one person. It was synth-heavy affair thanks to the limitations of the hardware– but I love synths, and why I dig this soundtrack so much. The sole outlier is the title song which is absolutely beautiful.

The official release does have some of my favorites, but the rest are only accessible via gamerip. Such as the one highly coveted battle theme that only plays in the Forbidden Land:

My other hard-to-find favorites are Magic City Aglis and Black Castle Vellweb.

Trolling

My phone also hijacked my partner's car AUX via Bluetooth connection, so I also put this one on repeat to see if they'd... notice. (And they did during it's second round.) I love me some weird shit, but even I couldn't listen to that unironically. And I have tried!

An apology for Trolling

And to make up for that, here's a real rearrangement another fan put together!

For every fandom bullshit that makes me uninstall games, stuff like this restores a little bit more faith in the whole thing. While I stumbled upon it via Youtube, there is a dedicated community you can view here: https://legendofdragoon.org/

Also, Martin did an interview with VGKAMI about this game's music.

(1) Actually, it was just the one, but I couldn't remember the exact one. I assume that sentiment was carried by the general public, to my ire, because for a hot minute everything after FF7 was "a knockoff" or unfairly compared to it. Dark times and so on.   ↺ return