February Luminary 2023
Writing
Indiegames
Finally shared my spoiler-free soft thoughts on Citizen Sleeper ! With the awards season wrapping up with mentions in the D.I.C.E. Awards February 23rd and the Independent Games Festival March 22nd, I may incorporate some of those games talks into one post as well, time depending. There are also lots of exciting DLC and new indie releases for the first quarter that I'm eyeing like Tails: The Backbone Preludes, SEASON, Voltaire: The Vegan Vampire, and First Bite: Bad Blood.
Boardgames
I've been going through my backlog of board games to review and finally played Trellis with my partner for date night. It's a relaxing game with vines and blossoms for 2-4 players that is very quick and easy to learn. I'll be sharing my thoughts on it within the month over on my personal board game blog The Tabletop Crier. It's been a while since I've posted over there but I'm hoping to revive it this year. Some Kickstarters I've been waiting on like Steam Up and Darwin's Journey have had some promising shipping updates lately so we'll hopefully get that on our doorstep later this year.
Fiction
I just got my first round of feedback from my partner on "Sea of Vows", so I'll be reviewing the comments and suggestions from that to develop a Version 2. Once that is done, Version 2 will be sent off to my best friend who is also a budding writer and from there the pitches for Version 3 to agents and/or publishers begins! Overall my partner said he enjoyed reading it and could see a lot of me in the main character -- write what you know, as they say -- so that was a huge relief.
Video
Streaming
Our board game stream of Azul and Azul: Queen's Garden was successful, and starting my crochet journey with the Woobles' Nico the Cat was a success as well! So much so that I've been already working on my next crochet projects: a hat for my partner (off stream) and a scarf for me which will be debuting on my Mental Health Monday streams. We've been having a lot of fun with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Rakuen so far, lots of explosions and tears shed (respectively). I also successfully recorded some content for the preview build of Tchia over on Youtube, many thanks to the team over at Kepler Interactive for the opportunity!
A couple exciting one-time only streams this month to announce, the first being a cooking stream on Saturday, February 11th around 3pm Pacific and the second being an IRL stream walk on Monday, February 20th around 8am Pacific. These will be particularly challenging streams from a technological perspective but my partner and I are already in talks to figure out what our approach will be to solve for the new environments.
Short Form
To my delight, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is giving me a lot of opportunities to do silly videos for TikTok and the clip of me being lasered to death went quite well! We're not at viral level but any time we get more eyes on the fun moments we can have on stream together, the better.
Personal
Currently Playing
At the moment all I can think about is Zelda! I've been trying to discover more of the world as I have two weeks until our next stream to uncover more locations. It's always made me a little anxious to just be wandering around aimlessly as I consider Twitch to be mostly an entertainment platform and my need to constantly be providing sources of dopamine and serotonin to those in chat makes exploration hard. In between exploration sessions I have of course been making my way through A Space for the Unbound.
IRL
I finally got my lotus tattoo! I'm really happy with it and it was such a pleasure to have a Filipino artist work on it. We shared stories while she worked and it made me feel right at home. My arm is a little angry and I kind of expected it to turn out this way as I have very sensitive skin and some health things that like to act up. Hopefully this all clears in the coming weeks so I can share more than just the first day photos. Things at work are sadly tightening up as the economy comes for all of these industries in the Bay Area, namely tech and games. I survived the first layoffs last year, fingers crossed that I take that staying power into this one.
Picture of the Month
I love eating teishoku and didn't get a chance to share the beautiful color of this matcha genmai cha we had. Enjoy!
Feel free to reply directly to this email to let me know your thoughts, or perhaps any content that you'd like to see or questions you might have. Otherwise, sending you all my kindness for the month and I look forward to writing to you in March!