I just feel like acknowledging that many good things happened this week.

First, as I mentioned at some length at the start of the week, the American election is finally over. Florida was an unexpected bonus, I was happily wrong about the popular vote, it's behind us and let's never mention anything about this ever again (unless you're Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, who I'm especially looking forward to this week).

I also discovered a new album by another (perhaps the other) electro-power metal artist on Bandcamp, a pre-release version of Ancient Kingdom of Omnimaga by DJ Omnimaga. I'd known about his music for a while because he's given me some great support on his site for my music and Crystal Towers 2, but I've been unable to stop playing the title track on a loop for the last two days now. (Sections of it appear very much based on the chorus of Unreality with the Amstrad-like synth that I tried to copy from Heavenly in places like The Machinist, but I've honestly never been happier to have been an influence!)

This morning I received an email from Belic, one of the organizers of Furfright, thanking me for an outstanding performance and wishing me luck for next year. After the convention I had emailed him to thank him for the opportunity to perform and for bringing me and my friends together, and I thought that in the aftermath it would be read but unreplied to among hundreds of emails, so getting a response was a nice enough surprise - and it's wonderful to think about what this... unlikely, mad interest can do to unite people.

And tonight I also realized that I had received a birthday gift from kjorteo - it had been unopened for a couple of days because it had been confused with a different package for someone else that my mother had said would be arriving at our house at about this time. I opened it to find Elite Beat Agents for the DS, along with the following note:

Happy birthday! Sorry for all the assaults on your mental health I've committed over the years. Here's another one.

And I'm really looking forward to it - it's just as well I'm planning to upgrade to the 3DS the minute Etrian Odyssey 4 comes out, because my touchscreen is going to be absolutely ruined after this. Though it has currently been confiscated to be put into the birthday pile in six days' time.

My life is fantastic. I hope that I can keep acknowledging this, and to tell it to other people as much as I can... even though some people say I come across as unhappy, I hope that especially in real life it's apparent that a lot of it is just my sense of humour (or because of being mentally assaulted by talking pigeons and other wildlife). And, still displaced from my old world, I do have moments of actual depression - but if you're one of the people who reads and responds to these things, then you are one of the people whose love helps me through it all. Thank you so much.

And I got another Youtube comment saying that Shuu started off as Snape but by the end of the game he'd become Saruman.