So.  It's been a week.

Honestly I haven't been okay.  Why would I be?  Some days have been easier than others, but the not-easy days, just doing anything has felt like it's taken extra effort.  Even just stuff like playing games.  I finally feel like I've gotten over the shock of it all; it's not occupying my mind 24/7 like it was, but I still don't feel like I've come to terms with it.

I've spent a lot of the extra time I've gained making .gifs of past Left 4 Dead moments out of screenshots I took with the intention of making .gifs of them at the time, but never did.  I've also been spending an hour or so each day recording video footage from the demo files of our last few games together.  I've been focusing on Left 4 Dead 2 since it's more prone to updating, and then I'll record our last few Left 4 Dead 1 games together (including THE final game we played).

I feel really silly though.  Even though I have to get this stuff recorded - they were fun games with a lot of funny moments, worthy of making videos of as usual, and it'd be ridiculous to not jump at the opportunity to preserve my final experiences with her online, I know half the reason I'm doing it is just stalling for time.  I just sort of got hit by a wave of sad today when I realised, no matter how much I've been enjoying watching back the footage and recording it to put on youtube, eventually I am going to run out.  And then what do I do?  It feels like I'm just wallowing in some kind of little safe bubble when I watch old videos, as if I'm somehow kidding myself I can still "hang out" with her that way, but it feels so unhealthy somehow.

I've been trying to branch out a little in my online time.  But everything just feels like I'm killing time for the sake of killing time, not actually because I want to.  And I feel pretty ungrateful because SO many of my friends have opened their arms to me to say they're always there if I want to talk but the problem is the only person other than Molly I'm ever comfortable talking to about heart to heart stuff was Audi herself.  Molly has been supportive as ever and just her mere presence usually keeps me in a good mood (she's had to go up to London today for the launch of her Creative Writing anthology so that's prolly why I've finally broken down a bit this afternoon), but I don't feel I can talk to her because opening up face-to-face like that, I just end up crying and I don't like crying.  I can't cry stuff out, it doesn't make me feel better.

Audi was just always there in the corner of my screen regardless of what I was doing.  I don't even miss playing games together or the actual stuff that physically took up time in my day, there's just a presence that I took for granted that is just gone now.  There's no way to replace that.

Okay I think I'm drawing a blank now.  I just needed to vent I guess.  Before I move on I'll just add, for any of her friends reading this, her obituary is up with a guestbook.  If you wanted to leave a message or just read other people's you can here: [link] was meaning to announce this to you guys with an update in our Steam group but there never seemed to be a time where a good majority of people were online, and Steam groups tend to only notify once, at the time, when you post announcements.



I've still been working hard on Phantasm Dyad.  If nothing else I've learned I can really treat that like a job even through adversity, which is good.  I've done enough to start posting but if I did do so now the updates wouldn't have finished by the time Molly and I are going away for 5 days at the start of June, so I'll hold off on that until I get back, but at least I'll have a nice buffer of pages to attempt to do the entire thing in one go again.

Molly, my Dad and I also went to a pay-what-you-want vegetarian night at a local resturant the other day because they wanted to try out some new dishes.  Was all pretty tasty but unfortunately fairly unsurprising.  Quite a bit of spicy stuff including a curry for the main course.  Still, it was fun and I appreciated the mere gesture of doing an evening like that so I paid a little more than I wrote down I'd be willing to under normal circumstances on the feedback form.

Sonic 4 Ep 2 is properly out tomorrow so it'll be nice to play Episode Metal at last and see if there's any differences at all in the final version.  General opinion appears to be: no.


Annnd that's everything.  Thanks for reading, I just needed to yak the stuff I wasn't comfortable yakking to anyone directly about.






Bleh
Sonic 4: Episode 1
Vegetable Fingers
"Aubrey" by Bread
Nothing
Sarah and the Seed

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