Contrails: Jan '26, Week 3

I went into last week determined to bring my morale back up, and it turned out to be a pretty productive week! There were highs and lows, but I feel back to normal and motivated to do some good work! 🥹

✨ New Cover -- Ari published our short cover of The Last Frontier by AZKi and Hoshimachi Suisei!

I would have never done a song like this if not for Ari's request. 💜🥹

I've written about my friendship with Ari before, so I will refrain from being a broken record. She asked if I could cover this song with her on 13 June 2024, around the time she was contemplating returning to Malaysia, before I had my Live2D model. She has shared on one of her SNS posts regarding this cover that she asked without any expectations, but to me being called upon by a friend is always important. I knew nothing of the song or the story behind it, but I could tell that the lyrics probably meant something to Ari. So I agreed! I left it to Ari to decide how to split the parts.

Initially we planned to cover the original lyrics (rough translation):

If it's you, you can go to the frontier To a world you've never seen before I observe the names of the stars that never cease to shine Remember the Frontier Story A song dedicated to the beloved stars A song to depart for the farthest reaches of the unexplored world If we gather these shattered fragments here We'll return to that day, so let's make them resonate We sing of the present

But Ari suggested that we do the 5th Fes Live version instead:

Let's move forward together towards the frontier Expand maps we've never seen before I'll explore with you a future where we'll intersect three times. Remember the Frontier Story A song dedicated to my beloved memories A song that takes you to the farthest reaches of the unexplored world Because the shattered fragments will come back together I keep that day in my heart, and start walking We sing of the present

I'm glad that we completed this project in the end! 🥹💜 Most of the work was by Ari, so I hope she's happy with the final product!

✨ Projects -- Planning for February, and working on my solo cover.

As Ari announced on her SNS, I've been assisting her with her activities as Ari Anjou. 🥹 I know all too well how stressful it can be to have many ongoing projects and feeling like they all need to be worked on ASAP. So when Ari shared with me her concerns with keeping up with her activities, I offered to do a 3 month trial where I'll spend time every day (more like week) to plan and oversee her projects. I didn't expect her to welcome my help considering that I have 0 experience in talent management, but I figured that I'll try my best.

In my previous work I've always enjoyed using Atlassian's Confluence to plan projects and document processes, so I was glad when I found that Airtable had some of that functionality too. (I REALLY miss Confluence though...🙃) In December, I started to put together a workspace for Ari, so that she has an interface that reflects a list of To-Dos for any type of project she wishes to undertake. Why not Trello or something else? Because we were starting from scratch, so anything goes. Plus, I liked that I could work from the data entry interface of Airtable, while Ari gets to look at the curated interface that cuts out the noise. I could even pull analytics and present them as charts! It brought me back to my days of using Looker (BI tool) for work. 🥹 Long story short, I've found a lot of joy and satisfaction having the opportunity to do what I do best (according to my past colleagues, at least), and there's still so much more I wish to do to help Ari stay motivated and consistent (her goal for the year)!

But for now I just hope that she'll find my efforts helpful, and that she'll find the same satisfaction in what she'll achieve this year! 💜⭐️ We'll see if she gets sick of me by the end of the year. :P

🤍💜 2024 ➡️ 2025 💜🤍

Back to myself, I've been working on my next cover all week while taking ample breaks to have enough energy for FFXIV raids. If all goes well I'll be able to release it before the end of the week as initially planned! Fingers crossed! (I like the song, but I don't think I did a great job with the vocals. 🤔 But I can't wait to work on the next song, so I'll settle for what I've done!)

✨ Gaming -- Got stuck with achievement hunting in Sonic Racing and struggled with FFXIV Savage Raids.

I had fun! It wasn't difficult getting A for most maps, but some forced me to get better, so I think I've come out of this endeavor a significantly better player! ⭐️

My biggest regret from working on clearing all the achievements is that now I feel that Sonic Speed is too slow. 🤣🤣🤣 But anyway, the last 4 out of 5 achievements (the very last is just for clearing all achievements) require collecting tickets that you only get from races, and I need an insane amount of tickets. I love this game enough to keep playing it, but I think I'll only 100% the Steam achievements in a few months time. 🤔

On the bright side, the actually challenging ones are all done! ⭐️

On the flip side, FFXIV Raids were a huge struggle bus this week. If I'm being completely honest, I'm not the best player and I make mistakes, but I don't think that I was the reason for our even slower progress this week. 🙃 I just hope that this week was not a preview of how our progress for the last floor of the tier is going to go. On hindsight, we were supposed to raid for 3 hours 3 times a week (9 hours), but for the past 3 weeks we've been raiding about 3.5 hours 4 times a week (14 hours). Would have been a damn shame if we still couldn't clear M11S this week.

But we did, albeit at the 3.5hr mark of our 4th session of the week. 🥹

I just realized that I could have taken this screenshot in the Normal Raid and no one would be able to tell the difference. 🤔

Here's hoping that we are able to reclear this fight on Tuesday after the progress reset, so that we can spend more time on the last floor. 🥺

Cat tax! This week I learned that some small items can hold more than 1 cat! That's kinda meta. 🤔🤔🤔

Been watching my partner play Metaphor: ReFantazio here and there after he finished Metal Gear Solid Delta. I'll put Disco Elysium on the back burner for now!

~💜~

Hopes for this week

♪ Release a new cover!

☆ Week 4 of 7.4 Savage Raids: See the end of phase 1 of M12S? Not sure if that's a tall ask.

☆ Vroom vroom Sonic Racing!

☆ Touch grass to get some Lunar New Year decorations! I have some that I've kept over the years, but the house is bigger now so I'll need a bit more.

Thank you for reading! 🌙🐰