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ECG, New Monitor, Old Digimon

6 months ago2,760 words

My plans were thrown off this week, though my ECG was fine, my old monitor wasn't, and I indulged in a bit of nostalgia...

My plan for this week was to get Dreamons to a point where I could write a post with a gameplay video, maybe as a first step towards a playable demo. I was almost at that point, so it seemed very doable.

Instead, though... SIIIIIGGGGHHH!!!



I'm still going through various heart checkups after fainting recently. One part of that was going to get an ECG (electrocardiogram) at the local doctor's surgery.

That was all fairly painless, and the results found nothing abnormal. So that's a relief. It was late in the afternoon, though, meaning I couldn't focus for the whole day leading up to it; I'll return to this psychological snag in a bit.

I also asked the nurse who did it to show me how to measure my blood pressure, to ensure I was doing it correctly at home. The results came back ludicrously high! I've since been doing it (mostly) regularly at home, though, and they're within the normal, not-concerning range. HMM.

The nurse said deficiencies of nutrients like iron could cause issues like poor focus and brain fog; I'm probably also massively deficient in vitamin D since I rarely go outside.

I'll be going to get blood drawn to be tested on Tuesday. I'm really hoping they can find some obvious physiological issue that I can target, and by taking some specific supplement, I can start feeling better in general. If I did, maybe I'd be able to address a ton of other life issues, too. We'll see.



So that happened, then my parents went away on one of their days-long holidays, leaving me with the house and dog to look after. It seems like cruelty to get the dog to spend all day in my room, so I try and sit downstairs with it and take a break from my screen for a while, which I did.

I had a plan: work at my PC in the morning, sit in the living room with the dog during the middle of the day (where I'd try and do some other things I'd been putting off, on my phone), then back to work for a bit at night. I felt hopeful about it!

My plans were shattered however when the day after my parents left, I went back to my PC in the evening, and my monitor wouldn't turn on for some reason. Just black. I tried fiddling with plugs, turning things off and on, nothing.

I've had it for years, and have had some issues with it before, where the colours would be significantly off if the DisplayPort cable at the back was nudged even slightly. I could usually fix it by unplugging the cable then reinserting it, but that issue occurred this time, and it just didn't come back on when I plugged it back in. I suspect it's just some faulty connection.

Any hardware issues make me unreasonably anxious these days, I suppose because my mind thinks something like "it's broken forever now and can never be fixed and my whole life as I know it is over!!". So that was fun.

It also led to me thinking the best solution would be to just buy a new monitor. I seem to have had the other since 2018 (to my surprise; I found my old order on Amazon), so I thought it'd be a good opportunity to get something that'd presumably be an improvement.

So I did a bit of searching, but not much, because the anxiety was telling me to get one RIGHT NOW!!! otherwise the world would end. My previous one was an ultrawide screen - replacing a two-monitor setup I'd had before that - and I liked that so I wanted something about the same size. I checked on Amazon, though the options available seemed a lot more expensive than I remember monitors being in the past. Maybe that's just me misremembering, though? Or inflation, or something?

I got one on the cheaper end which had at least decent reviews and had next-day delivery so then I wouldn't have to go days without being able to use my computer.

(In the way that I'm used to, at least. I have a setup where a (cheap, Chinese) graphics tablet with a screen is the second display and a third is an old monitor at the other side of my room above my piano, which I use for sheet music. I was able to use the other two, but they were too low resolution for games dev work, so I just did some drawing for the first time in a while.)

'Next day' delivery turned out to be the day after the next, though, and I spent the whole time just anxiously waiting. Typically I don't for deliveries since they're just left in the porch, but this one - being a big and fairly expensive piece of hardware - required a signature.

To focus my mind on something, I googled 'delivery anxiety' and found ∞ this thread from the CasualUK subreddit ∞, of all places, where most people were talking about having the same thing (which surprised me since it's not a mental health sub). Even more extreme than me, in a lot of cases! At least I didn't literally wait in front of the door or watch the driver from my window!

It finally arrived at like 7 or 8pm last night. The delivery guy seemed even more anxious than me! He was a young, skinny man who barely spoke English, fumbled the packages, his body and spoken language displaying submission in ways I recognise from my own behaviour (laughing a lot, leaning forwards, hands close to the chest). I asked if I needed to provide a signature (knowing I did), he seemed confused, said something to the effect of "I'll not bother", then left, only to come back a few seconds later, and presented to me his very badly cracked phone - in shaky hands - to 'sign' crudely with my finger.

I mention all that because I liked all that about him! I recognised myself in that behaviour, and would much rather have dealt with someone like that than previous delivery guys who are more 'blokey' and look at me with a kind of baffled disgust for my own anxious behaviour. I just hope it all wasn't too much for him, the job in general. Life in general.

But I also noticed thoughts arising about how me might have mishandled - and broken - the packages. The sort of things people would assume about me. Anxiety is not charming to the majority; it screams incompetence.



Anyway, now I have a new monitor. Of the same size but a different resolution! My old one was 2560x1080, and this one's 3440x1440.

Everything looks smaller, though I seem to be getting used to it now. Should be useful having more screen space.

It means that a lot of things I was used to - like layouts for Unity etc - look silly, so I'll need to spend some time shuffling things around to better fit with the new space.

I also played Dreamons a bit, though became aware of some issues with a small number of pixelated UI elements scaling poorly, so I'll need to address that (I vaguely remember similar issues with Atonal Dreams, years ago?).

I was bothered by the monitor's colours at first, though; they looked really washed-out. I spent a while wondering whether it was just because I'd got a cheap one, and maybe whether I'd have to spend a lot of money I didn't have on another since I didn't think I could live with the lack of vibrancy.

I think I've had to fiddle around with settings like colour calibration etc every time I've got a new monitor, though, so I refreshed my memory a bit and did some research about how to make the picture more palatable to me. I ended up just turning the Brightness up to 100 - and tweaking some other minor things - which has probably made it much closer to what I was used to with the old monitor?

Makes me think though about how what I'm used to isn't necessarily an ideal. Maybe I had my old monitor's Brightness ramped up to full, too? Maybe I'm used to an unreasonable amount of brightness??

I read a bit about how visual designers need expensive monitors to get the most accurate colours possible, how there are devices you can attach to your screen to automatically calibrate them to some ideal... But it all makes me wonder how much it matters, if what you're making is purely digital and going to be viewed on a variety of different displays anyway. Even if I had perfect colours on my screen, chances are low that anyone else would see exactly the same on whatever microwave or pregnancy test they usually use to browse websites and play games.

I've also noticed that the vibrancy of the colours on this one differs a lot depending on the viewing angle; my head's currently nearest to - and aimed at - the left side of the monitor, and the right side - ALL THE WAY OVER THERE - looks cloudy and greyed by comparison. Interesting, that.

Anyway. This new monitor will take some getting used to, as all new things do.





Speaking of things that aren't new, but kind of are, I used to be obsessed with Digimon virtual pets as a child. I've written about them a few times before. I never cared for the Digimon franchise as a whole - I still don't - but I had the original Tamagotchi when they were briefly a fad during my childhood, and the first Digimon were just 'for-boys' spinoffs of those.

I have a lot of fond memories of my obsession with mine, trying to unlock all the different forms it could evolve into, and - weirdly - trying to draw every single sprite of every form in Paint long before I'd ever even heard the terms 'sprite' or 'pixel art'. The Digimon never froze on any pose, so I had to watch intently for when each pose occurred and try to memorise as many pixel placements as possible dozens of times for each frame.




(∞ I last wrote about this 6 years ago ∞, I think? Hmm, feels like longer...)

My memory's foggy, but I think I was really into them when I was around 10 or 11, maybe? (Some googling says they were released in 1997.) Those would have been the originals. Then a few years later in Australia, I got into them again? (That file's from 2002.) And acquired several more, of different versions? Apparently five versions were released, but not worldwide, and maybe seeing versions I'd never before seen when I got to Australia is what renewed my interest? Unsure.

I just know that I had versions 1 to 4, but never number 5, and that bothered me for years.

I saw a thread on Reddit a few days ago where people were talking about... something, and someone mentioned that these Digimon virtual pets (or 'v pets', as they seem to be called) were cheap to buy on Amazon. It piqued my interest, since I remember looking a few years ago, only to find that they were prohibitively expensive antiques you could only really get second hand.



Turns out a couple of upgraded versions of the originals were recently(ish) released. One of them (Digimon X) has the same physical design but new Digimon and some new mechanics, while another (20th Anniversary) is basically all five of the previous versions - and more - combined into one. Both versions allow things like going on quests or raising multiple digimon, and have massively sped-up growth between stages (what used to take like a week now takes 48 hours).

I tap around on my phone throughout the day while taking breaks, and tend to do low investment things like sudokus or crosswords, which I'm at least mildly interested in, but not greatly. I thought these might be something I could similarly use to get away from my main screen briefly.

Plus they were only about £15, so I bought one of each. Maybe they'll inspire me! Maybe I'll get bored after a day or two!! Who knows!!

(So far I've already felt inspired to make my own virtual pet - for the umpteenth time - though I have no plans to actually act on that.)




I find it interesting how - despite some minor improvements - the technology is exactly the same as it was almost three decades ago. Or at least seems to be. A tiny 32x16 pixel screen, 16x16 pixel sprites. No colour, or backlight. Or apparently there is a version with both of those, but it's several times the price. It all feels like a step into the past, to the GameBoy days, and I wonder how much of that was intentional for nostalgia, and how much better things could have been considering technological progress since then. Maybe the underlying technology hasn't improved all that much since then? I don't know enough about hardware to understand it all.

I also found the packaging - especially the logo - interesting, and very nostalgic. Unlike Pokemon, I don't think Digimon's ever had a consistent logo (or 'wordmark' or whatever)? This one is the exact same one used for the original virtual pets, which I assume were made before the creators really knew where they wanted to go with them (they probably just spawned from the success of Tamagotchi and maybe as an attempt to compete with Pokemon?).

...While typing this, my Digimon X finally evolved into a Champion form (though I took that photo afterwards so it's shown in that). Unlike the old versions, these ones have a kind of 'Pokedex' with acquired forms, with their names shown (scrolling, to (barely) fit in the 16x16px space available beside the sprite). I didn't recognise this one at all, so I looked it up:



A lot of what I dislike about Digimon as a franchise comes across in that image, I feel. Unlike Pokemon, it all feels so... bootleg, almost. Like a barely-translated export, far more foreign and far less thought-out in terms of design and underlying concepts than Pokemon seems to be.

There's something that bothers me about much Asian media in general; I'm reminded of the overly busy layouts of TV shows (text all over the screen) or games, and the impenetrable tangle of lore I see whenever I look up the wiki for some anime or Japanese game series, which often turns out to have hundreds of different installments and variations. It's something I noticed when looking into Dragon Ball recently. How can anyone keep up with any of it?? How many Digimon species are there? Does anyone even know?!?



So yes, not exactly how I hoped this week would turn out! Maybe next week will be better??

It feels sad knowing other people my age are raising their children, while I'm spending my time doing stuff I did when I was one myself (I also recently started replaying FFIX), but... I don't know. Maybe I'll climb out of this pit some day. For now, having comfortable pillows down here makes the stay less unbearable. Or something.

Next week I'll be getting my blood drawn, and going to a Mindfulness class (oh whoops, forgot to mention that I decided not to go this week because the thought of leaving the house and hall 'unguarded' for hours made me unreasonably anxious; something I'd grow out of if it were a regular routine rather than unusual circumstances). Hopefully that'll work out as planned!! And Dreamons. I hope to get to where I want to with that. Finally.