"Pikmin Puzzle Card e+ is so hard..."

originally created February 10, 2024 ✦ republished February 8, 2025

(Originally posted on Instagram. This retroactive post is copied from the Instagram post.)

As a kid, I was OBSESSED with Pokémon, and I would fall down ALL the rabbit holes. Now, as an almost-legal-adult, I am OBSESSED with Pikmin, and I am falling down ALL the rabbit holes. In one of them, I tumbled many meters, broke many bones, and discovered a cute little collection of Japan-exclusive Pikmin minigames stored on Nintendo e-Reader cards. "Pikmin Puzzle Card e+" is a thing that I randomly felt like "yeah I just wanna emulate that for fun times". It is fun times, because Pikmin things are fun times by default. It also is harder than the actual game somehow, wtf?!?!?!?

The past few weeks, I've been SUPER-stressed-out with so many goddamned college- and financial-aid-related things—planning this visit to this college, why did you miss the college Zoom call, you need to give us your mid-year grades, you need to fill out this ridiculously-long form and also submit these other documents after you fill out the hellishly-long form, and my head hurts and I just want to tear my hair out and burn all the forms 😃😃😃🔥🔥🔥

I believe the hill has been crested, though, and so I figured I'd try to regain my sanity by taking advantage of the surprise 70°-in-the-middle-of-winter weather, and also drawing something! I've been trying to break into SwiftUI, and the Pikmin fan comic has been in the back of my mind for a while. Because of how preoccupied I've been, trying to adjust to 4 new classes (2 of which are pretty lame ngl) while also juggling homework and college work, it feels like my interest in the things I used to still be interested in 3 weeks ago has just vanished. It's a freaky feeling, like "but what about all that time and effort? Why does it feel like my functioning's been blocked??", but at the same time "I can't force anything or cling to things, I don't want to make the same mistake as before". It's slowly starting to come back to me though, the memories of the ideas I came up with and the reasons and feelings behind wanting to follow through with them, so I think I'll be alright soon, if I can find a good rhythm with this last semester of high school.

That's my TED Talk, ok gnite 🤤🤤🤤