Underneath my yellow skin

Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit–A Quick Review, part four

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I’m back to talk more about Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit–A Quick Review (Spry Fox). I am aware of the irony of me calling it a quick review when I’m on the fourth part, but it’s funny (at least to me). Plus, the new season started today so let’s goooooo with new items! The game was released on July 15th, and the new season (fall) started on September 1. That makes me wonder if they shortened the seasons in this game (again, in the first game, a season was two months with a month between two seasons) or if it’s just because of when the game was released. My hunch is that it was the latter, but we’ll see when the next season starts.

I really like the start of a new season because it means a ton of new resources. New critters (bugs, insects, and butterflies), new trees and flowers, new seashells, and new fish. I had not gotten anything new in a while. The thrill of seeing that ‘new’ in the deescription in bold black ink really perked me up just when I’ve been dragging my ass in the game.

It’s the same as it was in the last game, yes (new resources at the change of seasons) except they cut out the in-between month this time. Again, we’ll see if that’s just because of the release date or if they choose to cut the seasons short. I think it’s the former because they like to have things link up with the real world. Which, again, I appreciate for the most part.

I talked in the last post, well, mostly about plats and why I hate them so much. It was related to this game, yes, but it was more me just needing to go off. I hate plats, and yet, I feel compelled to get them after I obtain a certain percentage of the achievements. Usually it’s around the 65% that I start noticing what I need to get the plat.*

Back to all the delicous new resources in a new season. If this game holds true to the first game, this means I’ll get new bears and new recipes, too. I’m not sure about the latter because the specificity of an ingredient doesn’t matter. What I mean by that is you don’t make anything with, say a blueberry. It’ll use fruit jam, wnhich you make by burning the fruits. Same with nuts. No recipe will ever ask for a pecan, for example. It’ll just need nut flour, which you get from burning the nuts.

I actually like this because it makes the cooking fairly simple. I just have to gather all the resources and burn the ones that can be born. Easy-peasy. I don’t like how intensive some of the  master recipes are (highest tier), but that’s not unexpected.


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Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit–A Quick Review, part three

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I have more to say about Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit (Spry Fox). In the last post, I mentioned my issues and frustrations with the resource gathering/management as well as my excitement for a mystery thhat is happening.

I do think if someone has not played the first game, this is a fine place to start. But, I also think overall the first game is better.

Here’s the thing with sequels. They are in a Catch-22 because they need to have the same charm as the original to appease the fans, but they also need enough new and fresh ideas in order to expand that appeal. I saw it happen with Dark Souls II (FromSoft) (which was a good game, even if ti wasn’t a good Souls game, per se), and I have seen it with other games, too. I liked Torchlight (Runic Games) better than Torchlight II, and I liked Hades (Supregiant Games) better than Hades II. Dark Souls is a more original game than the successor, obviously, but is it better? I would say the first half is, but not the second half.

All of that is to say that so far, I would say that I prefer OG Cozy Grove to the sequel. It was so fresh with its real-time gameplay, and I really gelled with the format. I couldn’t wait to play every day and to learn more about the bears. Even the excessive resource gathering (and the tiny inventory space). I only started getting frustrated when I went for the plat, which had some truly egregious achievements. So far, this game has tedious ones, but not any that are terrible. There are four locked achievements, though, which means that I’ll hold out as long as I can before giving in and looking them up.

Side note: I don’t really like hidden/locked achievements, though I understand why it evolved for them to be a thing. It’s because they are related to the story, and the devs want the players to be able to have those moments organically. At some point, though, I start worrying that I’ve missed an achievement–which means I will usually look up the full list before I get too far in a game.

FromSoft games have scarred me in this respect. I like to experience them unspoiled as much as possible, but I also don’t want to miss out on NPC questlines. Which are byzantine, obtuse, and really difficult to figure out without a guide–at least fgor me. But if I look up an NPC questline, I will get spoiled on other questlines. That’s just how it works.

It’s the same for locked achievements. I will hold out as long as possible, but at a certain point, I will give in. Otherwise, I’ll hit the achievements and get mad at how I wasted time by not looking them up earlier. That happened in Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock) with a very specific achievement that meant I had to play the whole game again just to get it. Well, not all of it, but a good chunk of it. Which infuriated me and left a sourr taste in my mouth. I still loved the game, but my enthusiasm for it was very subduued by the end of the plat run.


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Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit–A Quick Review, part two

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I’m back to talk more about Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit (Spry Fox). This is the second part of A Quick Review, and we’ll see how many posts I write about it. I have a lot to say, so strap in and let’s go.

In the first post, I voiced some of my frustrations at the way the game deals with inventory and resource management. It’s similar if not exactly the same as the first game, and it frustrated me then, too. I detailed how the upgrades work, and it’s tedious AF. As I said in the first post, give me a permanent upgrade to an unlimited inventory. Make it astronomical like a million coins, but just do it. I hate having to go back to the  fire (Flamey) to endlessly stash things, usually after burning them. (That upgrades a lot of the items to a higher tier.)

Also, and, yes, this was also something that happened in the first game–the placement of items is so frustrating. It starts with being hard to click on the item or the NPC if the NPC is near lots of items. And, given how limited space is, most of the NPCs are near a lot of items*.

I said yesterday that the cooking machine was the same as in the first game. That is not quite true. In the first game, you had to talk to an NPC bear in order to cook things. This is much easier, and I appreciate that I can just go to the cooking machine to make what I need/want. That’s a definite upgrade from the first game.

Let’s take a minute to give praise to the changes that I appreciate. One, there are ghosts/apparyitions of your troop members (who are also lost somewhere like you) that show up to help you farm resources. They help with the same chores you have to do anyway, but if they help you, you get a ton more resources. I like that.

I also like some of the different things that you can turn your basic resources into via fire or recycling. In fact, I wished they had done more in this vein.

One thing I’m very curious about is…hm. How do I put this so that it’s not spoiler-ific? There is a mystery that started at a certain point of me doing one of the new things. Which I’m not going to say exactly what it is because it’s very different and unexpected. After doing it for several days (like weeks), I got a letter in the mailbox admiring my work. And encouraging me to do more. Which, despite my misgivings, I did. And I got another letter commending me for what I was doing. And I felt even worse about it. They said they’d send me another letter soon, but I have yet to hear from them.


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Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit–A Quick Review

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I have played Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit (Spry Fox) every day since it came out on Steam (July 15th). I have enough time with it to review it in A (not-so) Quick Review.

First of all, let’s talk about how it feels. It’s very much in the same vein as the first game, which means it feels very familiar. I have a routine set up that I started in the first game, and it serves me well, here, too.

I wake up and got to Mr. Kit, the main merchant in the game.

Note about Mr. Kit: I really wanted to learn more about him in th efirst game, but that did not happen. I am not holding out much hope that we’ll get more in this game because nothing is pointing that way, but it would be nice. He just appears out of nowhere selling ihs wares, and I’m supposed to trust that he has my best interests at heart?

Well, I do, actually. I just want to learn more about him for his sake. Meaning, I find him an interesting character aand would like to know more about his background. Was he a scout once? Does he have a family? Why is he on the campground selling his expensive wares? I assume because he’s a big fox that he’s meant to represent the company?

I sell all the stuff that I can. I have around three hundo (thou) right now, and I’m trying to save up to expand the store for the third time. I think that’s 450,000 monies, which is a lot. I’m getting there, but there are other things that I want to buy, too. In fact, that’s what I do when I got to Mr. Kit’s store. He sells clothing, and I like to see what I want to buy. One of the issues, though, is that they have expanded the clothing–but….I’ll get to that later.

After I viisit Mr. Kit’s store, I go to the cooking machine and make all the foods I need to feed my animals. This is also the same as in the first game. The animals need to eat so they can level up and give me better rewards. The thing is, though, it can get overwhelming to see that I need to make seven to ten dishes, especially if I don’t have the ingredients for some of them. There are different level to the cooked foods, and when you get to the higher tier, it takes so many resources to make a dish once.

The problem is that it quickly feels like a burden to do the daily chores. This was the same in the first game, and it carries on to this game. One of the biggest issues is the item-carrying capacity, and the storage space capacity. This was also a problem in the first game, and a top-five issue.

You start with something like twenty-five or thirty spaces in your backpack. I’m not even sure it’s that many. You can buy another four spaces for…I want to say it’s 200,000 monies. Ok. I just looked it up, and it’s way more complicated than that. The first extra four slots are 4,000 monies. Then, you have upgrade the store (which, as I said is pretty pricy). With each upgrade of the store, you can buy one more packet of +4 slots, but it goes up exponentially each time.


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Angry at the world, part two

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Let’s talk more about unbridled rage and what I plan on doing about it. Nothing. The end.

Not really, of course. In yesterday’s post, I talked about how angry I am almost all the time right now. I like to use the Hulk’s infamous line, “That’s my secret, Cap. I’m always angry” with a wry smile like the Hulk because it’s true. I’m always lowkey angry about something or the other, but previously, on a scale of 1 to 10, it was a 1 or a 2. Now, it’s a 4 or 5 at all times, and that’s only because I’m suppressing it.

When I was younger, I kept a really tight rein on my anger. I was taught that my anger was simultaneously too much and unacceptable. Only my father was allowed to be angry and only my mother was allowed to be depressed. And, boy, was she deeply depressed. She used to cry and sob at me for hours about how much my father wsa hurting her by cheating on her. I don’t remember when she explicitly started saying the last part, but I knew it from a pretty young age.

Recently, I talked to my brother about it. We both had a defining moment when we realized that my father was brazenly having affairs with women from the Taiwanese church. Both of us were in our teens when it happened (he’s three years older).

For me, it was when he and my mother were with another Taiwanese couple playing tennis. A woman from the Taiwanese church called and asked to speak to him. I said he was playing tennis, and I would give him the message.

When my parents camehome, I gave my father the message. Unfortunately, I told him that I told the woman he was playing tennis. My father got made and scolded me for telling her that he and my mother had been playing with the other woman. I was so confused because why would that be a big deal, and my father gave me the inane reason that the other woman would feel bad about not being invited.

I mean, she’s a grown-ass adult. If she wanted to act like a thirteen-year old, then that’s on her. It was just an excuse, though. I realize a few decades later what the issue actually was–that the other woman was either an ex-mistress or a mistress-to-come of my father’s, and he did not want to upset her. I didn’t think of it because she’s not his usual type, but maybe he’d run out of candidates.

My brother’s example was when a woman called and asked to talk to my father. My brother didn’t say Taiwanese woman, but since that’s all my father liked, I just assumed. My brother told her our father wasn’t home. The woman asked who he was, and my brother said, “His son.” The woman gasped, “His son?!” and then hung up the phone.


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Owning the bitterness in my heart

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I want to talk about how burned out I feel right now. Emotionally, I mean. I talked in yesterday’s post about how I hated my fellow countrypeople, and I’m not even trying to tamp it down. In the past, I would try to talk myself out of it or give reasons why–no, not the latter. I could not excuse the hate even if I tried not to hate back. The thing, though, is that I hated back, regardless of trying not to.

Wait. I’m not sure hated is the right word. It’s more like raged. And wanted revenge. Which I am even more invested in now. I don’t like that about myself, but I’m also not doing much to block it. Look. If you’re trying to take away my civil rights, then I’m going to be happy when you get smacked down by your own hubris. I’m not proud of it, but I’m also not feeling too bad about it.

For a long time, one of my favorite GIFs was the one in which  Angela Bassett sets her cheating boyfriend’s car on fire after piling all his stuff in it, turns arround, and flicking the ashes of her cigarette, walks away. It’s based on this clip. Rewatching the clip, you can see how worn down she is and how much pain she’s in. But, more importantly, you can see the rage in her eyes. Even though she keeps her movements very controlled and deliberate, I can feel the anger behind each gesture. And hurt.

That’s how I feel right now. I’m trying to keep it under control, but I’m furious. I’ll candidly admit it. I have two instances that I like to trot out when I want to make this point clear. After the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, I read a story about a Texan woman who had a wanted pregnacy. The fetus died in her womb and because of the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the fact that she lived in such a regressive state, she could not get the fetus removed.

She had to drive to another state in order to get the procedure done, which meant burying the fetus in another state. In the interview, she said that she had been pro-repeal, and she never thought shewould be affected by it. She went on to talk about how traumatic it was, etc. My first immediate thought was a vicious, “Good!” I was shaken by how deep the depths of my anger was, but I was so tired by that point. I mean, if she didn’t know what the repeal would mean, maybe she shouldn’t have fucking supported it?


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Me and double empathy, part three

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I have more to say about bias, the double empathy problem, and whatever else happens to be on my mind. In yesterday’s post, I talked about how I have no heart because there is so much hatred in this country right now.

In the Discord I’m in, we were arguing about politics. Well, not politics themselves, exactly, but whether or not America is hopeless. There were those who said though things were bleak right now, there was a brighter day coming. I, on the other hand, was just done. I did not come back from the dead (twice) for this bullshit!

Someone in the Discord was saying that to believe it was hopeless meant ‘they’ won. I knew what they were saying, but at this point, I just couldn’t care. I have been a Democrat since I was old enough to realize what the parties stood for. I was a Democrat by default because I loathed them a little less than I did the Republicans.

Yes, you understand that correctly. I have never been an enthusiastic Democrat because there is just so much wrong with the party. I’m not going to enumerate their faults and flaws here, but suffice to say if I could have found any other party to vote for, I would have. Any other party would have done (except the Republicans, obviously), but that would have been a folly in a two-party system.

I’m also not going to rant about that because I’m not in the mood, but I will say that I have never voted  Republican, and I most certainly will not now. When I was on the dating apps (back in the Stone Ages), I had a bio that said I didn’t care about gender, color, religion, or anything except that I would not date a Republican. This was thirty-some years ago, and I feel it even more now. You cannot be a part of the Republican party right now and not have hate in your heart.

Do I have hope? Honestly, I don’t think that’s a revelant question for me. Hope doesn’t pay the bills, and it doesn’t help people in any tangible way. In fact, I would say unreasonable hope is wores than no hope at all. I get it. You don’t want to take all hope away from people, but I don’t want to hope for something that isn’t going to happen.

There is a very thin line between being hopeful and toxic positivity. America is heavily into the latter, and it’s working my last nerve right now. I do know that people have to have some sliver of hope, but things really are dire right now. And I know we have to keep fighting, but it’s so hard. Where is the good news? Where is that spark of things can get better? There is none. I have a hard time even checking the news on the daily because it’s unrelenting grim news.


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Let’s talk more about the double empathy problem, part two

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DEI training is worse than useless if it’s not done well. In yesterday’s post, I talked about how I was unwillingly dragged into being a DEI trainer when I was a ‘mere’ admin assistant for a DEI department (or the equivalent thereof before DEI was officially a thing).

I was supposed to just deal with paperwork, more or less, but my boss discovered that I’m really fucking good at other things–like writing and computer-related things that she did not want to do. As I said in yesterday’s post, she was in over her head and really should not have been in the position.

The one thing I learned while doing DEI training was that most of it was shitty. This was thirty years ago, and while it may have gotten better since then, I think it still probably sucks. I mentioned it at the end of the last post that I came up with an idea for a diversity town in which people who are now in the majority (cis het white Christian dudes) expreienced life as the minority for a month.

I want the actual minorities to treat the people in the majority the way they themselves have been treated, no holds barred. It’s nearly impossible to explain to someone what life is like as a minority, especially as a multiple one. There are some people who have empathy, but there are more who do not. And there are a big number of people who haven’t had to be empathetic. The same people who would benefit from diverrsity town.

The reason I dismissed it was because, well, there were several reasons. One, it’s not very ethical to fuck with people like that. Two, it would take an astronomical amount of money. Three, it would be really difficult to govern. Four, crimes would happen. I’m just speculating on the last, but I’m pretty certain that it would happen. Or rather, there would be no way to guarantee that it wouldn’t happen.

Those ore the four off the top of my head. I am sure there are many more that I haven’t thought of–such as not being allowed to do any such thing. Also, people who are in the majority are already afraid of how they’d be treated if they truly were in the minority. This certainly would not help in that area.

I think it would be a good way to really open people’s eyes to prejudice, though. And I would make sure that they got to experience ALL the harrassment, microaggressions, gaslighting, and other delightful bullshit that minorities have to go through. Which, again, is neither ethical nor moral. And probably not legal, either.


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How to solve the double empathy problem

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When I was in my twenties, I was an admin assist for the director of a diversity department. I’m being deliberately vague, but the point is that my job was, on paper, to do typing, editing, and shit like that. It was four hours a day, five days a week. I was there for four years, and over time, job creep happened. My boss was in over her head, and to be fair, she probably wasn’t getting much help from the top, either. It wsa my belief that the powers that be (PTB) really didn’t want to do diversity, but at that time, it was a hot topic–and in the place I was working, they could not afford to look like they didn’t care.

But they really didn’t.

My boss checked out mentally fairly soon after I started working. To be honest, she was not equipped to do the job, but, again, that wasn’t really her fault. She was tasked to do something that none of the PTB really wanted to do.

She was in charge of the diversity training for the department. We’re talking five-hundred or so employees. When I started, the catalog was a single sheet of paper. My boss never said what she  wanted me to do with it, exactly, but I was an overachiever. I had never used Windows…Publisher? Was that the booklet-making tool? I don’t remember, but let’s just assume that’s what it was. I had never used it before, so I had to teach it to myself.

I took that one page and turned it into a thirty-plus page catalogue. All by my damn self, thank you very much. The head of a smaller diversity department within our umbrella department began insisting that I give my template to her admin assist to do her (the department head) catalogue as well. There was no asking; there was no requesting; there was just the demand. Even worse, she wanted me to teach her admin assist how to make the catalogue. How about no and no?

I asked my boss, and she most emphatically said it was not my job and she did not want me to do that. She had beef with the other woman for several reasons, and I did not want to do anything to get in the middle of all that. Also, to be honest, I didn’t have the time nor the desire to want to teach her admin assist to do that. I mean, I taught myself; the admin assist could do the same if she so chose. And I did it in four hours a day!


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Last post about safer spaces, part eight

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Let’s talk more about safer spaces and society’s expectation for ‘normal’ behavior in general. In yesterday’s post, I wrote about masking, social norms, and how I felt forced to do so for so many reasons. One, growing up in tthe seventies, there wasn’t even lip service to diversity. It was fit in or die, and I constantly felt like I was dying. Or that I wanted to die. As many autistic people describe it, it’s like always having to dedicate one hefty portion of your brain to fitting in. That makes it much harder to focus on what you actually need to do.

When I was in school in the eighties, there was the murmurs of diversity. In this case, though, it was the melting pot theory–which, to put it bluntly-fucking sucked. The idea was that immigrants came to America and ‘melted’ into American society. In other words, they were supposed to shed what made them foreign as soon as possible. Asian people tend to be more conforming in general, anyway, so my parents were eager to fit in. Or rather, not stick out.

My brother and I were taught to be white, basically. My parents tried to speak Taiwanese to my brother (who is older than I am), but they decided it would be easier to teach him only English. When I came along, they didn’t even bothre trynig to teach me Taiwanese. We did not eat Taiwanese food outside the house, and we preferred American. (A
t least until we were adults.)

I was so anxious as a little kid. I had to make sure that I was acting like everyone else when I didn’t even know what that really meant. I kept my eyes on everyone around me, but I was convinced I was an alien. I always felt like I was failing, and I was miserable.

I want to emphasize this because even if I looked like I belonged (which I most certainly did not), I hated everything about my life. I didn’t feel like I could ever be me, which was not a fun place to be. I smoothed and sanded my rough edges until they were completely gone. I hid everything that made me me because I heard the overt and covert message loud and clear: I as me and myself was unacceptable.

That was the main message my parents and society gave to me while I was a child and a teenager. I was unacceptable as I was. I was not fit to be present in polite society, and I better hide everything and anything about myself that wasn’t ‘normal’.

Again, this was before neurodivergence was acknowledge as a thing. Or rather, right around the time that it was first being recognized at all. Except it was thought of as a completely abhorrent thing that had to be surpressed/reprogrammed at all costs. Society was cruel, and doctors aided and abetted that cruelty. Hell, they pushed it forward themselves.


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