i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

Got back to Gwyliau aka holiday island. I hadn't logged in for a year but it seems to have survived. It's still in the "get to three stars" part of the storyline.

Because brains are weird, and memory is weird, I apparently invented a villager: Sakura, a mostly-pink cat. The remembered details are fuzzy but the name and pointy cat ears were solid. ...This villager has never existed, and as far as I can make out is some weird mashup of Pekoe (bear cub) plus Merry (cat, not pink) plus general sakura (cherry blossom) terminology.

Anyway. Current plan is six quadrants: early spring (cherry blossom stuff with Pekoe and ??), late spring (bunny day stuff with Hopkins and then one other bunny or chicken), summer (Pride stuff with Dom and either Stitches or Judy), early fall (Maple? Chief? Poppy?), late fall (Halloween with Lucky), and winter (Sprinkle or Aurora, Erik)

I'm not sure about the generic fall area. Even if I convert it to Turkey Day stuff so it's an actual holiday. If I drop it I get five areas which makes villager distribution easier (2 ea) but there's lots of good fall items. Five areas is also harder to block out, compared to six. Though I'll need a main plaza area...

Meh. I have time. I just overthink things like this (I'm sure y'all couldn't tell)

Last year I was super into Animal Crossing, though by December I was kind of burnt out ... not completely, but between Halloween and Toy Day there was a lot of eventing. But also I was bonding with my aide S, who also played, and I was planning island designs and stuff.

January was when S got hit by a car, and had to stop working abruptly because badly broken ankle; I heard from her once maybe a week oater, and nothing since. I don't know how she's doing, if she's still in the area, if she's even alive.

In some ways it feels like I had a trauma reaction, like my brain just shut down. I recruited a friend L to take over scheduling my aides, which is probably the only reason I survived January. (L has been helping since, because she likes doing it.)

I don't think I've touched my Switch since. Not just AC but anything. The Yoshi game had gotten to too hard levels, I never got far into Unraveled, and AC was just ... I couldn't. At some point I figured out the link with S and grief/trauma, so I figured I'd wait it out.

Recently Nintendo announced the Nov update for ACNH, and it's fucking AWESOME. I'm not as rabid about Brewster as some people are, but. Fences! Accent walls! Lights! Permanent ladders! Crops! COOKING!! New islands to visit! And it's the day after my birthday so basically a free birthday present? Hell yeah!

(The paid dlc looks awesome too but I'm waiting; I can probably afford it but I want to make sure I actually get back into AC first.)

The update literally had my jaw dropping, and I was getting excited about the game again. Yes there will be many weeds and things to clean up and stuff, but I have online friends that promised to help if I wanted.

Only...

I still haven't touched the Switch.

Partly it's that I'm out of the habit of having my aides get out the Switch as part of the morning routine -- all but one of my aides are new to this year. Partly I kept forgetting about it until after I'd in bed, and I'd think "tomorrow I will remember" and then the next day would spend the whole day on Twitter again.

Today I actually thought of it, during the day, when an aide was even here. And I couldn't do it. Couldn't even ask.

I feel so fucking broken.

So ... I may have acquired an animal crossing themed Switch as an early birthday present.

And I may have decided to create another AC island instead of transfering data over.

Because, erm, utter dork.

I am doing a specific theme: holidays, with one area that's (non-Christian elements of) Christmas with a penguin resident (Sprinkle or Aurora or both), and one area that's Halloween with Lucky the mummy-bandaged dog as resident, maybe a fall-thanksgiving-y area (not sure if phoebe, who's a phoenix, counts as turkeylike?), one area that's (non-Christian) Easter spring stuff with a bunny resident, probably a cherry blossom festival area with Pekoe. I don't have a summer thing -- I considered Independence Day, with fireworks and red/white/blue color stuff and Apollo the bald eagle, but I'm not very rah-America right now.

It's going to be a Project. Especially looking for particular residents. On my first island I could just look for anyone cute, but this requires specific individuals. Plus specific furniture.

But first, I have to get through the story parts of the game.

I set things up yesterday. It took several tries to get a layout I wanted plus a suitable airport color (which I wouldn't care about except for the thing where the color of your airport affects the color of some of the items you can buy). But the island is going satisfactorily, and today I got stuff done such that tomorrow I will have a house and also a Blathers arriving.

It's kind of interesting doing early game stuff now that I know what's going on. A little frustrating at times (e.g. very early on it didn't let me pick things up until I'd learned how; I also couldn't memorize diy recipes until I'd learned how to diy) but also I better understand the context for various things.

I was going to write a huge long thing but stuff happened and now it's basically a choice between a) monstrously involved Impossible Task that will never get written, or b) short teal-deer summary. So I'm going with b.

I have (as of like three weeks ago) a Switch, and of course Animal Crossing. I'd played AC (new leaf) on the 3DS but that's a little too small for me to handle easily now; the switch is enough larger that I can do it, with minor effort. And AC is fucking adorable and also a good way to feel productive when my life is going to shit. I do pocket camp too but it's less AC-ish than new leaf and new horizons.

(For those not familiar with it, AC gameplay is basically ... catch bugs and sell them, catch fish and sell them, shake trees for fruit, dig up fossils for the museum, craft things, and make friends with anthropomorphic animals that range from cute to weird. It's very relaxing imo. And there's really no way to lose.)

I didn't get it as soon as it came out, so I'm behind in terms of "progress", but I finally hit three stars, which is kind of the end of the storyline part, and the beginning of the design part. Terraforming reminds me of a really slow way of doing Minecraft, but oh well. I have no clue what I'm going to do! Too many possibilities aaaahhhhhhh.

Also my house is up to having three extra rooms, thanks in part to a friend having turnips selling for 570. (Turnips are a ... thing ... in AC. You buy them Sunday, and then the store on your island has varying prices during the week, and it's kind of a gamble because the sell price can be higher or lower than the buy price; but you can also visit friends if they allow it. 570 is an amazingly good price, and so I made about 500,000 profit.)

I mostly play during the day, but sometimes take the switch to bed with me. Yay fireflies! I've only done night play a couple of times because it's kind of awkward juggling everything. I'm thinking about changing the time zone on my switch to give me, like, some combination of daytime and nighttime -- like, instead of 11am-6pm, maybe 3pm-10pm? Or 2-9 which would be eastern time? -- but then I wouldn't be able to buy turnips.

Also I am so fucking excited about the summer update coming up. Swimming omg yay! It's been a little frustrating being on a (tropical?) island and not being able to dive in.

#

I'm also open to suggestions for other good switch games?

In addition to AC, I have Unravel 2, though I don't quite have the coordination to do well, lol. Im aware of Mario Kart but am crap at it so don't know if I want to spend the money.

As a general thing I prefer low stress games; untimed is good, though not required; competitive, especially multiplayer, is not what I want right now. Puzzle games are good. Smashy-smashy games are good as long as they're not too complicated. (Back when I could do computer games more easily, things like Diablo and Torchlight, where the gameplay was more or less "run around bashing monsters in the face", were very therapeutic, lol.) The last several years, most of my games have been things where there isn't a way to lose: zen koi, neko atsume, merge dragons, pocket camp.