Mid-2021 Update and what it has been to me

Introduction   

  Hey y'all. Got a bit of a different thing here for you than what you may have found previously. You're about to get a bit more of a personal look at what has been going on for me. I haven't posted here in quite a while and it's not really for any reason in particular, I just haven't had a whole lot going on that can be brought into a singular entertaining piece. Now that I've addressed the obvious, I'd like to tell you, the reader, and possibly future Kalahn, about what is going on and how it has me feeling. 

    This year has simultaneously been a lot, and nothing all at once. I'm hoping that this post can sum that up to make sense. It's hard not to draw comparisons with how things were last year and how they are now so you'll probably see me doing a lot of that. It's hard for me to even get a clear picture in my head of how to put this all into a post so I think I'm just going to start with the beginning and work my way to now. Also, if this seems messy it's because I didn't do any editing or proofreading. What you're reading are my pure, unfiltered thoughts and feelings however they come to me.

The Modding Business

    It all starts a year ago, around this time actually. I took my fantastic solo road trip vacation and was looking forward to the wonderful things awaiting me when I made it back home. I had some plans for things to do like starting a gym membership and stuff that would ultimately bring about a better me. Nothing at that time became more important to me than my modding business. Every day I was researching Xbox 360, trying to understand what has been understood for the past decade, and applying it to my own practices. I learned soldering, bought a whole bunch of tools, and was well on my way to opening up shop. Until the start of this year, that part was actually great. I felt like I was always being productive and putting my money towards something that will eventually let me stop working all the time. Even now that still hasn't changed much.

    That brings us to the start of this year. At that point I think I had learned basically everything I needed for Xbox 360 and had sold a couple consoles. Things were looking bright. I brought myself to a point where I needed to greatly improve my service for it to be any better and make me more money so I began to do that. I got a big ol' hard drive for games, bought even better tools, and really just honed my skills. I still make rookie mistakes sometimes but I can now mod a 360 in about 4 hours if not much if anything goes wrong. The biggest part of this upgrade was switching from 1tb drives to 2tb. That didn't mean I only had to buy bigger drives, I needed games to put on them. Up until this point I had gotten all my 360 games from a certain website that was very easy to access and was quick. That didn't last long. That section of the site was pulled because of hosting issues and still has no signs of coming back, which means I had to look for another source. I found it, but there were some major cons to it. I could only download 1 game at a time (roughly 8gb) at about 10mb/s if I was lucky. This wasn't something I could automate either, I had to be there to start each and every download. I did that for about 5 months. It drove me crazy. My collection definitely isn't complete but I was glad to have everything I did when I decided it was enough.

    At the same time that I was doing all of that, I also work about 8 hours 5 days a week (it used to be more but I don't remember my schedule) and have other consoles I want to start modding. My first real side project to 360 modding that I wanted to do was Gameboys, but that quickly had come to a hiatus after my first GBA SP was ruined by a botched USB-C charging port replacement job. Very sad I know, but I had more plans for it that would just require some time and a lot of money spent on Sendico. After that crumbled, I had to do something with the extra time I was allotted and began to look into modding PS3. This has been an endeavor that I simply have not had the time or focus to put much effort into so even now I still don't have my own CFW PS3 fully up and running. In the background of all of this is the used console market. Last year was amazing because it seemed like everybody was pulling out their 360 and just thought it was trash, so they would throw it on Facebook Marketplace for cheap. That doesn't happen anymore. Now everything is overpriced, found by other people in a matter of hours, and mostly just too far from me to waste my time on. With the amount of time I actually have for modding this hasn't been too much of an issue but now I have more systems I'm not prepared to mod than ones I can make money on and it feels a little bit like torture knowing that the only thing standing between me and having these out of here is time. Everything is always about time now.

Time

    Whether we want to admit it or not, time is always ticking away. It's a very real problem to me this year. I feel my life diminishing with every day that I'm not able or willing to work towards a better future for myself. A future outside of this apartment, without having to rely on a job, and most importantly, a future I can call my own and not one that's just an outcome of circumstance. It sounds like a dumb and obvious thing, but I can't keep doing all of this forever and sooner or later I'm going to need to be able to change or else everything and everyone is going to surpass me. 

    A big issue that has become apparent through my new perspective of time is my willingness to use it. I've always had problems with staying motivated to keep doing something or see my projects to the end. I can see the core things I want to accomplish but when I think about approaching them it always becomes this greater picture of obstacles and other projects that need to be done first, which totally crushes any motivation in me most of the time. Even tonight as I write this, I came home from work and spent a whole hour in bed with my mind racing with ideas and things I need to do, but I can't bring myself to stop burying my head in the sheets with frustration. I don't know where this issue stems from, maybe the sheer amount of projects and things I want to do all at once, but I don't quite know how to fix it. Every time I bring myself to accomplish one thing, a bunch more take its place. The obvious answer is to tell me to get off my ass get at it, but it's just crushing me. 

The Good and the Bad

    Now we're going to talk about my home life and my friends/family. I live in an apartment with a friend, my brother-turning-sister, her (now) ex-gf, and my long time best friend. As you can probably tell, a big part of this is going to revolve around the relationship of my sister and her ex-gf. I always thought it was a stupid idea for them to not only share a room, but rely on their relationship for the sake of all of us. I even told them that when we were all trying to get a place together, but nobody listens to me. Now, we have all these new problems, like my sister and my best friend needing to swap rooms to accommodate and making the upstairs part of the apartment feel that much more lonely, the non-mutual end of their relationship creating a ton of stress and tension in the household and making us divided, the way that I have to be my sisters crutch 100% of the time for literally anything, the list goes on and I could talk forever just about the things I mentioned. It's really unfair to all of us and the two things I've felt most from it are the need to escape my surroundings and just being totally unappreciated. I generally have a hard time feeling any appreciation from anyone unless they straight up tell me that they appreciate what I've done, but I almost never get that from anyone. It really eats away at you. There are some other things that have happened, like my Mom's household needing to move back to somewhere she promised she would never have to go back to, and yeah it sucks, but I don't have any room in my life to deal with that in any way. 

    From the sounds of it it probably seems like this has been a totally shit year for me. I've been pushed around by others and myself way more than I would like and honestly the way I feel about this year is just really... blah. Especially if I compare it to last year. But, it hasn't been all bad. I know I talked about perfecting Xbox 360 modding and that's been great, but that's still just work. One thing that has really brought some light back to me is having a bike again. I used to ride my bike all the time but eventually it ended up sitting in a garage and then I got a car, so I completely forgot about it. Thanks to the help of another friend I have I found the encouragement to get it back up and running and man am I glad I did. I can save a ton of gas riding to places like work and stores instead of driving and it makes me feel alive. Every time I get on my bike it makes me smile. I love the intimacy I get with the community as opposed to getting in my car and thinking of everything else as an obstacle. It has also given me more exciting things to do with the friend I mentioned and more reason to make the 50 minute drive to his house. He has also consistently brought happiness to this year. I'd probably say I enjoy my time with him much more than with anyone I live with and it's a shame that we can't live together yet or spend more time together. I cherish every weekend I get to visit him.

    If you know me well you might have expected me to go on to say how much I enjoyed whatever games I've been playing too, but it's not quite so simple. Up until recent years I would have considered myself to be a gamer, loving the stories I find myself playing through and always looking for the next best thing. That feeling has slowed to a crawl now. I'm not saying I don't enjoy games or anything like that, but it feels so different now that I don't think I can even call myself a gamer. Bringing myself to even pressing the A button to open a certain game feels like such a daunting task. I feel disinterest, like it's not worth my time or that it's a waste of time, guilt for not finishing that game, shame for every time I play something else and not what my mind is telling me I need to play. It's a lot. There are some good games I've played this year, like Banjo-Kazooie and Sonic 2, but I don't feel the same excitement I used to. Maybe it's just me aging, but it really sucks to feel so convoluted about something I used to so avidly enjoy. 

    The last thing I want to touch on is what I would consider a very internal struggle of my frustration with my inability to express myself. I have a lot of pent up energy and excitement for certain things but I really don't know what to do with it. Sometimes I think of things I'd like to draw, a song I'd like to make, a thing I'd like to create, but I either don't know how or the end result doesn't reflect the feeling that made me want to do so in the first place. I'm not going anywhere with this, it's just a huge thing that weighs me down any time I feel that excitement for making something and I wanted to get it out there.

Conclusion

    I'm going to wrap this up now. I don't know why anybody else would take the time to read this all the way through or at all, but if you did go ahead and let me know how you feel about your year in the comments. I'm sorry this was pretty depressing, I'm sorry I haven't posted at all this year, I'm sorry I can't give you the entertainment I would like to. Regardless of the achievements I've made this year, it feels like nothing; And while I would like to change that, I'm really just not sure how.