paragraph

journal/12-24-2020-animal-crossing-stability.gmi

@@ -22,7 +22,22 @@ This game released at the end of March, 2020. COVID-19 had just started to sprea
 
 The week that New Horizons came out, my friend group became alive with activity. Screenshot upon screenshot was posted. We formed a fruit cartel to distribute items and foreign fruits to eachother. This group lasted for months. We worked together and built up our islands to make them shine.
 
-Ironically, as COVID-19 separated us, we were brought closer together through Animal Crossing. This same pattern showed up and was repeated all over the internet, and the Nintendo Switch became and still is the most popular console because of this.
+Ironically, as COVID-19 separated us, we were brought closer together through
+Animal Crossing. This same pattern showed up and was repeated all over the
+internet, and the Nintendo Switch became and still is the most popular console
+because of this.
+
+## The Significance to Me
+
+When I was a kid, the first Animal Crossing game came out for the Gamecube. It was a very minimal game in comparison. You could collect furniture, harvest fruit, catch bugs and fish, make new friends, and that's about it. However it was a blank canvas to create things upon. A lot of the game's details (such as where villager houses would go) were managed by an RNG. This left you as a sort of guest in the village. However, the game offered a lot regardless. There's still an active speedrunning community for Animal Crossing!
+
+However my experimentation into self-expression via Animal Crossing was limited then, and not just by the in-game tools. This was a home console game, and my family shared the Gamecube between multiple people. Animal Crossing also took up 59 blocks of storage on a memory card, which was the entire storage capacity for the base, most cheap memory card.
+
+Then the Nintendo DS came out, and after a year or two Animal Crossing: Wild World came out for it. The Nintendo DS was revolutionary because it was a fully portable console. Having Animal Crossing on it means that I could do whatever I wanted in private without people easily discovering it and judging.
+
+Around this time, I was also starting to explore my gender. I started out playing the game with a male character, but after I got an action replay I was experimenting with codes and found one to change your character's gender from male to female. I ended up liking it that way, but I couldn't place why. Years later I realized this was the first time that I was actually figuring out that I didn't identify with the gender I was born into. Without Animal Crossing I would have probably gone down a far different life path filled with denial and self-loathing.
+
+New Horizons is the first game in the series since Wild World that really stuck to me. I've tried to go back and play Wild World again, but it's not really stuck to me like it did when I was a kid. It just doesn't feel the same.
 
 ## My Island
 

journal/atom.xml

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
   <id>gemini://cetacean.club/journal/</id>
   <title>Flight Journal</title>
-  <updated>2020-12-24T17:44:11.859429+00:00</updated>
+  <updated>2020-12-24T19:21:41.668909+00:00</updated>
   <author>
     <name>Cadey Alicia Ratio</name>
     <email>cadey@firemail.cc</email>
@@ -67,7 +67,7 @@
   <entry>
     <id>gemini://cetacean.club/journal/12-24-2020-animal-crossing-stability.gmi</id>
     <title>Animal Crossing New Horizons: An Island of Stability in an Unstable World</title>
-    <updated>2020-12-24T17:44:11.859429+00:00</updated>
+    <updated>2020-12-24T19:21:41.668909+00:00</updated>
     <link href="gemini://cetacean.club/journal/12-24-2020-animal-crossing-stability.gmi" rel="alternate"/>
   </entry>
 </feed>

journal/index.gmi

@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ These logs will contain thoughts, feelings, major events in my life and other su
 => plurality-xenoblade-cyberpunk.gmi 12-18-2020 - Plurality as Portrayed in Cyberpunk 2077 and Xenoblade Chronicles 2
 => 12-19-2020-yahoo.gmi 12-19-2020 - Yahoo
 => 12-20-2020-7e.gmi 12-20-2020 - The 7th Edition
-=> 12-14-2020-animal-crossing-stability.gmi 12-24-2020 - Animal Crossing New Horizons: An Island of Stability in an Unstable World
+=> 12-24-2020-animal-crossing-stability.gmi 12-24-2020 - Animal Crossing New Horizons: An Island of Stability in an Unstable World
 
 ## Stories
 Occasionally I write little stories that are not really connected to anything. I have not really had a good place to publish these in the past. This place seems as good as any.