sims 2 double deluxe

i'm having a phase of being really into neutral milk hotel. like, _really_ into neutral milk hotel. i don't know how this happened. one day i decided i wanted to listen to "in the aeroplane over the sea" front to back and that line in king of carrot flowers pt. 1 where jeff mangum is like "as we would lay and learn what each others' bodies were for" really got me. my work friend kristine said she used to love that album, esp. in college when she would walk around listening to "the fool" and think to herself, "yup, this is me." this job is the first work environment i've been in where people have the desire and agency to work on all these random side quests unrelated to their assigned project work, and i feel like in my first couple months here i was having all these ideas for improvements i wanted to make. i'd then be in this weird limbo where i'd feel hindered by some blend of insecurity that they weren't actually good ideas or like i needed someone's permission or some official path to do them, and so i'd spend a couple weeks telling people i was thinking of doing something, maybe doing a little of it, and sometimes then abandoning ship because at that point i was over the idea. in the process of actually giving some of them a stab i learned that (1) some of them were actually bad ideas in ways that i couldn't have predicted from the outset, and (2) the best way to learn whether one of my ideas was worth pursuing was to actually just try doing it and see what happened. in retrospect i was spending more effort trying to philosophically validate the purpose of my ideas than actually trying something and verifying that it was practically useful, and as such there was always some drift between what i was seeking to achieve and the needs that i was trying to meet. i feel like i'm learning some adjacent (but maybe different/opposite?) lesson when it comes to my interests/hobbies. when i finished my dpr episode earlier this month (airing 1/9!!!), i felt this enormous sense of accomplishment and relief, like i could finally think about and look forward to the next thing. but while i've been brainstorming my next projects to work on, everything feels kind of dumb or useless. i had this realization today regarding my fixation on zines, how i've always been drawn to them and love reading them and therefore want to make one, but then when it comes to actually creating one i'm just like, "why would anyone ever read this?" and consequently feel challenged to come up with an idea that's more interesting. but i'm also starting to internalize that, at the end of the day, any creative pursuit i undertake will probably feel to some extent like i'm shouting into the void, and i just have to trust that doing something like making a zine is worth it no matter how dumb it might sometimes feel because (1) finishing a project always feels good, (2) i'll probably enjoy or discover something while i'm doing it, and (3) at the end i'll be less mystified than before on how to make a zine, and that confidence will enable me to experiment more should i choose to make another one in the future. something i was genuinely surprised by when making the dpr episode was how much random shit there was on the internet to trawl through, from old early 2000s documentaries or random blog posts, and it was really fun to sift through these artifacts and figure out how to tell a story using the material that stood out to me the most. i had no idea that i'd experience this, and it was so rewarding to be able to create something out of all that digging. the process reminded me of trying to write papers in college - how i'd sit in a cubicle and try to formulate an outline simultaneously as i was reading the assigned texts and each time magically an idea would sprout as i was brain dumping my analysis of the readings into a google doc and somehow it would develop into something that i could create an actual outline around. i had completely forgotten about that, how the essays i wrote weren't just things that i created from thinking about them for long enough until i was ready to write them, but that i had needed to actually enter the process before i could get a sense of what would come out of it. i am trying to remind myself of these things whenever i think any of my ideas are probably not worth doing because they're not cool or interesting enough. this week i started coding the lo-fi running website again from scratch because i decided i actually wanted to learn about what i was creating instead of just vibe-coding the whole thing, and there were so many points at which i was like, literally nobody will ever use this website who cares maybe i should just stop making this. but i learned about bun and supabase and next.js so it was worth doing!! and honestly it didn't even take that long! and also i'm supposed to be starting #myrunningjourney so i should make a website for accountability anyway. i did a journaling exercise today about "reflecting on your year" where i titled 2025 my year of "rebuilding through denial" lol. next year will be my year of experimentation!!