#in my defence I’ve been trying to do a bunch of self improvement stuff

[portofshia]

feelings about toxic coldflash again🫠 I need the angst i need to write it i need to break peoples hearts

[dukeofriven]

Frisk on the Road to Damascus: A Pseudo-Essay on Converting to Undertale

So 664 days after it was released, and 382 days after I purchased it, I finally, finally, finally beat Undertale.

And... I loved it. Controversial opinion: it’s really good.

But it took me a while to love it. Let me explain, because I’m sure y’all are super interested in me doing so.

I had about five false starts playing Undertale, and all five of those false starts was how fucking irritating I found the sound of Flowey and Toriel’s dialogue. I have a hypersensitivity to sound, especially frequencies, and the sound of Flowey and Toriel’s dialogue is... not pleasant, especially at first aural blush. I got used to it when it when I finally powered through it, but if there were any major changes I would make to Undertale it would be better sound controls - being able to cut the audio down on the dialogue by even 25% would make a big difference to it on an accessibility ability level* ** It was Undertale that first ‘inspired’ me to get Tumblr Saviour - first because I didn’t want to be spoiled by a game I heard was good and wanted to play relatively unspoiled, and later because  I didn’t want to be reminded of the game I was having so much trouble with.

What was it that made me pick up Undertale long enough to get through it? As usual, it was podcasts (there’s a small paper to be written on how podcasts got me interested in pro wrestling, but that’s a whole other story.) The superlatively good Let Me Tell You About Homestuck podcast relaunched a little over a year back (shoutout to excellent co-hosts @yuri-librarian and @betgirl ), and when I found out I dived back in, and in the process rediscovered my love of Homestuck. Homestuck and I had a falling out during the gigapause and Homosuck - at the time it felt like the webcomic’s author was pissed at his own comic and actively self-sabotaging it, and even though I caught up with the comic before the ending I was still disgruntled with it and not willing to engage with it much.

But listening to LMTYAH re-ignited fandom joy within me - a euphoric Road-To-Damascus re-conversion I can only describe as ‘George Bailey coming back to existence at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life.' I gleefully snatched-up the pesterlogs and clutched them to my chest. I waved cheerfully at [S] Descend and [S] Cascade. “Merry Christmas you old mspaintadventures!” I shouted at the top of my lungs as I pelted through the snow to hug my beloved Beta Kid family again.***

You can’t discuss Homestuck anymore without discussing Undertale, which was so clearly fed by Homestuck, which was in turn fed by Undertale, because media is an incestuous slurry. Part of the issues with coming back to the Homestuck dialectic table is that you can’t ignore that big ol’ bowl of Undertale sitting between the roasted trans-media experiments and the mashed potatoes. If, every time that bowl gets passed around, you put your hands over your ears and and scram ‘LA LA LA LA LA I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT’ then the other guests are going to look at you funny and your nearest neighbour is going to conclude that they’d rather sit through that pompous lecture by the vegan on the other side of them after all.

It’s not a great dining experience, is what I am trying to explain with this increasingly overcooked analogy. I wanted to eat with the rest of the guests - I wanted to watch @revolutionaryduelist’s video on Undertale themes and Homesick themes. I want to suck it up, be an adult, and eat like a goddamn grown-up.

So I grit my teeth, grabbed the bowl, and started shovelling large spoonfuls down my throat. I think this is how grown-ups eat right?

I didn’t like the taste at first. What brought me to Undertax more than anything was the idea of the pacifist run. The games that have this as a legit option are few and far between, and some of them (e.g. Dishonoured) get downright nasty about it. Undertake wasn’t nasty about being helpful, but it didn’t make it easy, either.

Some of you may  feel the need to note that ‘the pacifist route isn’t supposed to be easy,’ to which my response would be ‘shove it up your bum you git-gud wankeroos.’ There are two types of ‘hard’ in video games - one of challenge, and one of ability. The excellent puzzle game The Witness doesn’t greatly challenge ability (for sighted people, at least) - by and large almost all of its puzzles just involve drawing a line. The Witness is hard because the puzzle are so tortuously, mind-bindingly challenging. By contrast, a platform like VVVVVV doesn’t preset much mental challenge - it barely has anything like a puzzle that I can remember, but in terms of ability it requires lightening-fast reflexes and great timing (Somehow I beat that game -I still don’t know how).

Undertale is not a hard-challenge game, it is a hard-ability game, and I flat-out suck at its bullet hell mechanics. All my frustrations with the game were met at the bullet board - if I could make one other major change to the game it would be slightly improving the speed of the heart cursor. Time and time again I violently cursed because I had just missed getting out of the way of something with a cursor I found sluggish and unresponsive, as though my keyboard was laggy. A poor skill level coupled with what felt like hardware problems made for an increasingly difficult experience, one in which I felt like the game was almost taunting me: “oh, you want to be a good person, huh? Too bad - you lack the skills to be a good person. You’re not going to get through this without resorting to killing, you intrinsically violent, terrible person."

Staying alive through the confrontation with Undyne drained me, and by the time I was on my second iteration of Mettaton being a shitheel I just felt burned-out. The story still felt pretty flat, and wasn’t really drawing me in. The hardest decision I had had to make was at the very beginning of the game - Toriel’s home, and Toriel herself, were so lovely and sweet that I still resented the game for making me have to break her heart. I didn’t want to leave her house, I just wanted to stay and live a nice life with her in the Underground. But no - the game wanted me to have  heroic destiny and shit so fine, guess i’ll go back to the surface I don’t have much interest in seeing. Since leaving Toriel’s house all I had wanted to do was return to that tranquility and warmth, and instead I just got more monsters trying to kill me. The stuff with Papyrus had been very funny, but the game still wasn’t sinking its claws into me - it was a quirky but light RPG, funny, but not funny or deep enough for me to understand why a big bowl of it was sitting at the Homestuck dialectic table other that Toby Fox had worked on both things - which seemed like a weak reason to include it. (Remember the Homestuck dialectic table? That didn’t stop being a thing or anything)

So I walked away again and did other things over several weeks, possibly months. I finally came to terms with the fact that my vision is permanently damaged and got myself a Kindle so I could read again. I read a book on the Apollo programme and took another crack at Bleak House. I watched an episode or two of Lucha Underground, got caught up on The Adventure Zone, and went through every post ever posted on @revolutionaryduelist’s Tumblr. I fantasized about buying a new computer. I told myself to watch the Little Witch Academia TV series and forgot every single time - and so on.

And then I watched Car Boys.

Car Boys is one hell of a ride, no pun intended, a strange mishmash of video game fault testing and emergent meta narrative that ends up surprisingly emotional and affecting - and as the credits rolled I made the always unwise decision to wander down into the Youtube comments, where I discovered the fun ‘Car Boys is just like Homestuck’ argument which, natch, led me back to thinking about Homesick and Video Games - and, ultimately, Undertale.

“Fine,” I told myself, “I guess I’ll beat it, at least to finally have one thing in my over-glutted Steam Library I have actually seen-through to completion.”

So last night I booted up my Steam, made the conscious decision to stop trying to get my just-bought 360 controller to work with Sonic Adventures DX via wine (it keeps crashing), and booted up Undertale.

For a while it was just fine again. I don’t like Alphys, even after beating the game: she reminds me of a lot of shitty people I’ve known in my life, and the story uses her lack of self-confidence as sort of a moé defence - ah, look at how cute she is, isn’t that adorable, she feels bad about what she’s done - without ever actually examining that behaviour in any critical detail. Alphys being an adorkable anime fan and her relationship with Undyne are all great character traits - but it doesn’t make her a good person, and the game never truly calls her to the mat in much the same way that it sort of glosses over Asgore having condoned the murder of six other humans (but he comes into the story so late I find him less of a character and more of a symbol.) Alphys gets a whole ‘trip to the dump/romance role-play’ subplot after being revealed to have deliberately ordered a bunch of monsters to at least make a pretence of killing you in order to make herself look like a hero - and that's before you get to go into her basement and learn the really shitty shit she did with dying monsters' souls. I mean Jesus Christ Alphys how come nobody calls you on this!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I helped Mettaton’s ratings, left him to be patched upped by Alphys, and made my way to the castle walls - and the writing started to get really good. I loved meeting with Sans and his talk about the true nature of EXP and LOVE, loved walking into the throne room for the first time, loved the moment when I realized Toriel was the Queen-in-Exile - coming upon the New House was genuinely moving… but then I reached Ashore, and it wouldn’t let me TALK to him, and I didn’t like having to fight him after a full pacifist run, and also he was really hard.

So I swallowed my pride a little and googled vague hints for ways to make the fight easier. I learned that yeah, I absolutely had to fight him, and then I went and ground Cloud Glasses back and forth to the Temmie Store to unlock the Temmie Armor and earn the cash to stock-up on my beloved Bisicles. So equipped, I went and fought Asgore for the final time, thus beating this game that everyone raved about for reasons I could not understand.

Then the game ended and suddenly started to get really, really, really good. Much like Homestuck in Act 6, Undertale’s starts pushing the boundaries of games themselves, using save files against you and deliberately crashing the game. Omega Flowey is a goddamn nightmare, a visual headache who rails against you and the concept of friendship, and while he was a frustrating fight for the first time I felt like this was less a reflection of my shitty skills and more a deliberate choice of the part of the game to show what monstrous power he wielded.

As I was sent back into the world, I was eager to go find Undyne. I had to look-up where she lived because I had totally forgotten that her house existed - in fact, I had forgotten Papyrus had ever said anything about meeting up at Undyne’s house, so I never befriended her in my original run. The moment Undertale moved from a game I was starting to enjoy to one I knew I loved was the moment Papyrus leapt out Undyne’s window - late in the process to fall in love with a game? Perhaps, but so it was.

Missing Undone the first time through felt so narratively satisfying to me that it wasn’t until writing this that it occurred to me that it was something that didn’t have to have been missed - the run-in with Undone hardly ends on a high-note: after a miserable shield-fight and a whole lot of fleeing you give her a cup of water and she slinks-off into the night. It wasn’t something that exactly screamed ‘She’s Ready For A Friendship Lesson.’ I kept expecting her to show back up somewhere in New Home Castle for Round 2: Redemption Boogaloo, but it never happened. Then Sans got Anubis on my ass, the King of All Monsters got murdered by a flower and my game crashed on purpose - sort of forgot about her no-show appearance.

So there we were: breaking windows, sipping tea, making the worst goddamn spaghetti it’s ever been my misfortune to make**** and having a wonderful time. Other than my general misgivings about Alphys being let-off way too lightly by the narrative*****, after that first reset Undertale was practically a perfect game for me. The ending made me feel mushy and sappy, the epilogue where you get to pace around and talk to just about everyone felt so unbelievably RIGHT - if you want to head out and make one last personal connection with everyone you’ve ever met, you can pretty-much do that. Ben Croshaw wrote quite elegantly that Undertale represents “the triumph of kindness, reminding people of who they were before tragedy twisted them.”****** That kindness is what makes the game so compelling - what makes reading-up on the Genocide route feel so legitimately horrific and transgressive. It’s going to stick in the back of my mind every time I am needlessly rude to someone, overly sarcastic, or just my usual ‘less kind than I wish I was’ self. Homestuck wallets just went on sale today and I immediately bought one and then felt bad for all the Tumblr posts I saw for worthy causes - I SHOULD GIVE UP ALL MY WORLDLY POSSESSIONS TO THE POOR AND GO PREACH THE GOSPEL OF ACTING WITH MERCY as Undertale teaches.

It’s the kindness that will stick with me - and dear God, reading about the Genocide routes makes me nauseated. I’m the guy who claims that this time his Mass Effect play through will be Renegade and then goes 100% paragon again except for being rude to Anderson (because screw that dill weed - oh, geeze, I have failed Undertale again.)

Anyways, long, convoluted, not-very-coherent opinion: Undertale is a good game. Sorry it took me so long to learn that.

*but if we’re going to talk about accessibility in video games we’ll be here all year: an especially big fuck you to all those games who don’t let you change the font size for all of us with really poor eyesight (which is to say essentially all games).

** And what is it with games being embarrassed to have their text dialogue scroll past without some kind of irritating sounds? Undertale at least uses the noise as a form of expanding character identity, but the world is littered with sprite JRPGs who think dialogue is best accompanied by a garbled, repeating beep.

*** Re-experiencing the comic multiple times gave me so many more insights I never used to have. Revisiting Act Six and Homosuck, especially through @betgirl‘s eyes, I found so much to love. Which there is some serious problems in it (The Dancestors and Abuser Gamzee), there’s so much more joy, depth, and thought then I remember. I don’t know if, at the time, with the broken pacing, it was possible to see the shape of the narrative arc that Andrew Hussie was trying to tell - the deconstruction of the nature of storytelling, video games, and the ‘Problem of Mario.’ It’s really good, you guys, and you do yourself a disservice if you have never read it.

**** Undyne is right, by the way: homemade pasta is unquestionably the best and super easy; its only major flaw is that it’s just time-consuming, especially if you’ve got to hand-crank an antique pasta machine to roll it out. KitchenAid sells a pasta roller attachment for their mixer for an amount that justifies a class uprising all on its own.

***** I’m not some weirdo going ALPHYS MUST BE PUNISHED but Alphys should really, you know, actually apologize for the shit she pulled. Yeah, she says ‘I got scared of my amagalgamtions and cowardly didn’t tell their families about it,’ but not being honest about it is the most insignificant issue here. Much more pressing and things like Experimenting On A Human Soul, Actually Making the Amalgams In The First Place, Setting Up A Bunch Of Death Traps So She Could Insert Herself Into Your Life As A Hero. I can forgive Alphys - I think she is a genuinely good person who made misguided and out-right foolish mistakes and should never have had the job she had (I hear Toriel fires her in one ending which fuck yeah Toriel, only one with sense.) Undertake doesn’t need to re-write a damn thing about Alphys - I would just like one more scene in which Alphys admits culpability for the original problem rather than just an aspect of the fallout.

****** And it should be stressed: Alphys deserves kindness (and a good therapist). I don’t want a kangaroo court or anything like that - my issue is with the narrative, not Alphys personally.

Asgore, though… dude kinda murdered six children? Do people talk about that, because they ought to.

[tanksfrthmmrs]

Los objetivos del 2017

Now we finally come to my objectives for the year! A sort of New Year’s Resolutions which I had formulated at end-December 2016, but am only crystallising now, almost halfway through February of the new year.

Give me a break hahaha. I’m lazy about blog posts.

But I think I need to do this to give me a sense of direction for the year. Not that I’ve been drifting aimlessly for the past month and a bit – I’ve been quite busy with my schedule (which I draw up every week) but there hasn’t been an overarching aim to my activities.

Right, so, I’ve got a bunch of things lined up for this year. The first is, of course, to go to university (Cambridge!!!), and before that, find some way to (at least partially) fund the massive expenses of the course. The course fees alone are 40 000+ pounds per year, not to mention cost of living and college expenses.

Halp.

Okay, so I need to find a scholarship, bursary, or something to ease the financial burden. I’ve been looking around and found a few, now just have to apply and hope for the best!

(By that I mean apply and slay the interviews)

Next up, get a job. I have 2 offers, both in retail. Mum and Dad recommended I try retail because it’s not something I’ll probably ever do again (going to become a high-flying doctor lewl), and I agree. It’ll also improve my people skills and teach me how to be a salesman – the ability to sell things is always good to have in one’s bag of tricks. I’m more interested in one particular job which involves selling an air purifier, and I’m aiming to work part time so I can still do all the other things I want to. Let’s hope they take me! I’m not too worried about the money. I’m hoping to get like $1000 per month – I only want to work 3 days a week. Anyway, I’m not spending much at all – just last month my cash expenditure was $46 for the whole month. There’s not much for me to spend on, so I think $1000 per month is okay.

I’m also going to start volunteering again! I’ve already started with the Amriteswari Society at Bo Tien Temple. It felt good to go back to the food drive and help out. The people there are the same – just as friendly as before. I’m also trying to secure a spot in a nursing home right beside my own home. The volunteer co-ordinator lady said I could help out with Occupation Therapy and Physical Therapy (OTPT) of the residents (!!!!!). Quite an opportunity, really, I hope I can capture it!

Of course alongside those I have my guitar and driving exams. Guitar seems to be going okay. I’m not practicing right now as I’m in Kolkata lol. But I’ll have like a month after I get back, and I’ve memorised most of the scales. Mr Lim said my songs are pretty okay too. I hope I do well! There’s still aural to consider, though, which is a bitch. As for driving, BTT done, FTT almost done, secured PTIs but they’re not supposed to be that good. Honestly I tried so hard to find a PTI, but like every single one of them has some major issue. Like most reviews just said ‘DON’T LEARN UNDER HIM/HER’ for like ALL PTIs. Wtf why aren’t there any good, straightforward people teaching driving? No wonder Singaporeans sometimes get a bad rep as drivers. Anyway, I think I found some good PTIs, let’s see how it goes with them. I was hoping to do 2 lessons a week and fast game it so I could get my license by end March. That’s still the aim, but I don’t know if my instructor will let me go at my own pace like that. I will try my best to convince them though – I really want to get my license quickly.

And last but not least, sports! I’ve started playing tennis again, which is fun, and I want to get a lot better! I’ve figured out a bit of what’s my problem (match game not as developed as my rally game due to confidence, I believe), so I’m just going to try my best to focus on improving my game and not winning games. Losing isn’t okay but it’s acceptable if it’s a short-term result of trying to play harder and better. I’m also going to do Sailing starting March! I’m going to go for a course which will give me a license, then just sail for leisure. Quite looking forward to that. And MMA. I’m supposed to go twice a week. Now I haven’t paid yet so I’m not wasting money but I am wasting time. I’ve developed an inertia to going.

Every time I’m supposed to go, it ends up with ‘Myeaaaaaaahhhh….I’ve got some stuff do to, maybe when I’m back from Kolkata’

Okay, to be fair this has only happened twice, and I did have things to do in preparation for the trip, but it’s no excuse. I’m going to start going when I’m back. Seriously.

MMA is a good way for me to get fit and learn self-defence. The training is rigorous and will definitely make me much stronger, so I should go for it. It’s not too expensive either, considering I’m planning on going twice a week. Definitely worth it.

And of course, there’s the Europe trip! Well, planning seems on track. We’ve got a finalised itinerary, I’ve booked the plane tickets, Nic’s found out about transport between and within cities and Ben’s got some ideas on accommodation. We’ll meet up soon to thresh everything out properly, but it seems like the trip will be a success! It’ll definitely be fun though.

Right, so these are like the ‘hard objectives’ for the year – Scholarships and Funding, Employment, Guitar and Driving, Sports and the Europe Trip. Now for some ‘soft developmental goals’

The name sounds a bit dumb but basically the idea is that I want to improve myself as a person over the course of the year. At least till the time I’m in university. Now the tough things about these goals is that there is almost no tangible way to measure them, which makes achieving them and even tracking progress highly difficult. But I will endeavour to set and achieve them just the same.

So, first off, we know I’m a very disciplined person who can follow a schedule well. Too well sometimes – I can be quite inflexible and unwilling to deviate from a schedule. Hell, I get downright upset and cranky when people throw activities my way last minute. Like seriously, I had a good plan, and I could have easily worked in what you wanted me to do if you had told me earlier, but no. You had to tell me on the day itself when I’d already made a plan for a week. You’re going to throw my whole week out of wack.

See, that’s exactly the thought process I want to stifle. Life isn’t structured and scheduled like I want it to be. Sure, it is good (extremely good) to have a plan and a schedule, but, like Dad always says, the plan is there to help me. I shouldn’t become a slave to the plan, which is what happens nowadays. To some extent. Okay, to a large extent.

So basically, I want to be more flexible – retain my ability to plan and execute my plans, but also be able to handle the curveballs and exigencies others throw my way. I want to be able to change my plan to accommodate others while still being able to accomplish all I need and want to, without getting upset about it.

So, first SDG – be more flexible in terms of time. I’m not sure how I can measure this, but I think I’m making progress. After the stress of university applications was lifted, I find that I’m more…relaxed? And able to accommodate. I still get flashes of annoyance when people tell me to do things last minute, and do experience some resistance inside, but I definitely feel I’m getting better. I guess every time somebody throws something my way, I should try to soothe myself, not flare up, and instead look at the purpose behind the activity and how best to achieve it.

Next SDG – learn to respond, not react. Mum and Dad always tell me that there is a difference between a reaction and a response. A reaction is what I feel immediately after getting input. It’s unrefined, thoughtless and often downright visceral. It is usually a strong emotion which, if let out inappropriately, can hurt others and damage relations. A response is achieved after careful consideration of all factors, both external and internal, and the subsequent output. It’s always better to respond. A response can be emotional like a reaction, if the situation calls for it. The difference between the two is, that, in a response, you’re in control. In a reaction, you’re not. So, when younger and more impulsive, my main method of dealing with input was a reaction. I’m trying to change that to a response – a careful, measured output after considering all input. I’m not there fully, but I have, once again, made progress. I still react sometimes but often I do respond. I just need to increase the percentage of responses to 100%.

The thing is, I still often have a pseudo-reaction in the run-up to a response. Like, if I get some input, I will start processing it and considering all circumstances before arriving at a final plan of action – a response. But in the midst of processing, I will often vocalise, or make facial expressions which come off as a reaction and honestly do have the ability to hurt and damage. Hell, I’ve seen this with my parents – they tell me something, and then we get into an argument because of these micro-expressions and phrases. At the end, when I explain my full response, they are perfectly okay with it and agree completely, but were put off initially by what I said and expressed in the process of coming up with a response. So I need to control these micro-expressions, and ensure that I don’t allow these to surface, lest the world views me as somebody who reacts and doesn’t respond.

2nd SDG – learn to respond, not react, and exert control over what leaves my being in the process of generating a response.

I find that this applies to interviews as well. After I messed up Jardine, I told myself to listen, think and answer. Listen to the input, go through my mental library of things I’ve done and formulate an answer, then put it forth in a deliberate, measured manner. I think it helped for Imperial and UCL (although UCL aren’t getting back to me). It’s basically the same thing – respond to the question asked in an interview. In the Jardine interview, I think what went right was my preparation – I didn’t feel over- or under-prepared. What could have been improved as my execution – listen, think, answer. This little mantra only developed after my Jardine interview, in which I felt I didn’t answer all their questions as well as I should have. So, in future interviews, I will focus on intently listening to the question, thinking of how I can use my skills and experiences to support my answer for the question (and sell myself to an appropriate level simultaneously) and then answer in a measured, deliberate, controlled and confident manner. I may have messed up Jardine (and thereby lost the chance to reduce my university bill my half *cries*), but at least I now have something important which, I feel, will help me greatly in future interviews.

3rd SDG – learn to sell myself, but not over-sell. Dad always says my problem is I think what I’m doing is average. My academic results, ability in sports, music and community service are supposedly very impressive, but for me, they’re…normal. I’ve always been like this lol, so I don’t find anything spectacular about what I do. So the point is now to make people aware of what all I can do, but not too much – over-selling gives you the reputation of being a bad salesman at best, and a cheap prostitute at worst. Moderation is key! But I need to learn to let people know who I am and what I can do. I’m starting by leaking bits and pieces of my achievements and accomplishments into my conversations with people I just met, or people I want to impress. Not to my friends of course, I don’t need to sell myself to them haha. But I hope to be able to master this skill!

4th SDG – improve my memory. My parents always say that my memory is something extraordinary. I can remember things – even the smallest details of long gone events. It is true that my memory is quite a bit better than average – no doubt this helped me perform in school. But in the run-up to exams, I changed the way I approached knowledge – I focused on keeping a database and remembering how to access it. Dad’s point is that everybody can do that, and that’s not where my competitive advantage is. He understood why I did it – to perform well in exams and get into Cambridge. But now that that’s achieved, he thinks I can go back to how I was before; remembering for the sake of remembering, and relying on my strong memory. I’m definitely going to try to do this. To achieve it, I’ve stopped writing down what I learn. I’m trying to absorb and remember as much as I can from simply reading. For now I don’t remember as much as if I write it down, but I’m sure I’ll get better and be able to remember more and strengthen my memory even further.

So, quite a few goals for this 20-21 year old to accomplish this year. Get funding for Cambridge, pass my guitar and driving exams, get a good retail job, volunteer, take part and improve in a variety of sports (particularly tennis) and carry out a fantastic Europe trip. For my SDGs, I’m focusing on learning to be more flexible, controlling my responses and reactions to stimuli, learning how to sell myself appropriately and improving my memory. I hope I can achieve all these throughout this year – they will definitely help me grow as a person. But of course, over and above all these goals and objectives is to spend time with the fambam. I’m embarking on a new phase in life soon, and I will be the furthest away from my family for the longest time yet. It’s scary, but also exciting and I look forward to it. But before I go, I need to spend as much time as I can with my family – Mum, Dad and Scooby. I’m really going to miss them when I go…but c’est la vie. The young eagle must leave the nest to find his own hunting grounds.