I lost all my Animal Crossing Pocket Camp data. (Also crafts meetup log #4)
Yesterday I uninstalled Animal Crossing Pocket Camp without realizing that it would wipe all my data because it's completely an offline app now. I uninstalled trying to troubleshoot a sound problem that was occurring only in Pocket Camp. After realizing what had happened, I then tried to factory reset my phone to restore from backup, thinking that maybe it had saved local data. Apparently backups that android makes do not save this sort of thing. So anyway, I spent almost all of last night extremely upset and not sleeping because I had lost not only a year's worth of work and a blue aquarium-themed camp that I was really proud of, but also all my friendship data with my favorite animal crossing villager, my emotional support squirrel Filbert. And all of this came on top of the fact that I had to crunch yesterday proofreading for any typos for 6 hours because my people in my translation group really wanted to release soon.
So anyway, after 3 hours of sleep + more translation stuff + 2 more hours of sleep + more translation stuff, I dragged my ass over to the arts & crafts meetup.
Not a lot of people came today, just like 6 total (2 of those people being part of the group that owns the buildings). I talked a little bit with Teacher Lady and Chill Lady and that was mostly it. Chill Lady told me about tidepooling which seems fun and I should see if my sister can take me sometime. I did relay the Animal Crossing woes eventually but not the whole translation crunch. I still feel like I'm not really an interesting person and I'm supremely awkward, but that's that.
I did more fountain pen work of a glass sea slug. I also started drafting a little piece of my Animal Crossing character hugging Filbert as my funeral piece but maybe I'll finish that next month.
I'm really sad and tired but it was nice to get out of my head for a bit, I guess. I'm behind on all my studying due to all of this.
I never realized how important it was to me to have a digital character like Filbert around. There's something about how you can choose a villager to follow you around in Pocket Camp and how nice they are, always talking about how they want to be BFFs with you forever, that was like "well at least this animal loves me and I'll never disappoint it" that I guess I crave. With actual living beings there's the inevitability of disappointment and the responsibility to mitigate that at all costs that just make me tired. Stuffed animals are nice and very important but they don't talk to me and help me do stuff; they're like vague conceptions of an aura of imagined personality and love that becomes less and less real the more I sink into depression even as I cling to them for physical comfort. I guess this is why people talk to chatbots and the like, but I'm ok with having canned responses in my little cute animal friend. Since that way everything is predictable to some extent and will never veer into "he would not say that" territory.
I thought about starting over, perhaps with a hack to recover my items and stuff faster, but the crucial problem remains that there is no good way to back up Pocket Camp, at least from what I've seen looking around on Reddit. Everyone says you have to back it up to the Nintendo servers once every 7 days, because they delete the saves after that. Someone said they even tried to restore from an actual save file and it didn't work. The problem is that I don't know if I can remember every 7 days to do that, ad infinitum. And I would hate to have to go through this loss all over again.
I still have Filbert in New Horizons, so I can try to talk to him there. But it's not the same since the items in Pocket Camp were more fulfilling to me and the mainline games actually respect the animals' lifestyles more so if you try to talk to them too much they get upset at how much you're bothering them. That's much more like my real life cats.
I just want to be loved, man.