Category: IRL

This is what I’ve learned

Apparently WordPress automatically turns text emoticons into smilies? I had no idea. Maybe it’s just the theme? I don’t think I’ve ever actually used one in a blog post before yesterday.

Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I went to work yesterday as usual, even though I was feeling a little snippy (not that anyone noticed). And I spent the evening with my family, so it’s not like I was stewing in my misery all alone. I’ve been fairly good in general, it was just the one big day that brought me down.

It’s new, alright

Hey so it’s been weeks now but check it out, I bought myself a New Nintendo 3DS. Note that it’s New and not just new. I mean, yes, it’s both, but it’s the New that matters. The New is what makes it different than simply being new.

This thing has a terrible name.

mh3ds

Anyway, I’d like to recount the story of how I came into possession of this little gadget first, if that’s alright. I mean, we all know that I’m very likely going to buy new Nintendo hardware. It’s part of what makes me the person that I am; mindless consumerism.

When the New 3DS was first announced for Japan, I didn’t give a spit. Oh okay, sure there’s more stable 3D visuals and a weird little C-nub and it’s got a few more horses under the hood. But really, it didn’t seem like it was important for anything but playing a portable version of Xenoblade Chronicles. Which is a decent reason to own the thing, mind you, but it still didn’t “Wow!” me.

And yet despite this, I started putting a little money away here and there because I knew that I was going to end up buying one anyway.

Months later, it’s officially announced to be releasing in North America, and there was a sweet, sweet Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate-themed version, exclusive to EB Games/GameStop. I figured that special edition 3DSes have always been pretty plentiful, and almost nobody in North America gives a toot about Monster Hunter, so I’ll skip the pre-ordering and just pick one up on release day. WHOOPS. Pre-orders were sold out by the end of the same day, and local EB Games staff were fairly certain that they weren’t going to get any extra units for walk-in customers.

So I booked release day off and got to the mall with the littlest bro before the EB opened. We sat down near the store, not anticipating a crowd. But then a couple other young people stared sitting at adjacent tables and a young woman planted right in front of the door. Another fellow got up and stood behind her, and we quickly followed suit. Not a minute later, a rather large line had queued up behind us.

A single employee opened the store, and we shuffled in to be helped one-by-one. The lady got her stuff, and the guy in front of me (let’s call him Paul) went up to bat. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what was happening, but Paul had a bunch of stuff pre-ordered, though he decided against actually purchasing all of it.

I got up and asked if the store had gotten any extra Monster Hunter 3DSes. The guy said they didn’t get any, but that he had one since one of the items that Paul had left behind was a Monster Hunter 3DS, and that it was mine if I wanted it. I heard a cry of sorrow from behind me. The guy behind me had come looking for the exact same thing, and I had been lucky enough to scoop up the one stray unit.

Think about it: If I had gotten in line mere seconds earlier or later, I would have gone home a disappointed little boy. But the entire friggin’ cosmos aligned that day, and the universe did me a solid. It’s not often that I catch a lucky break like that. A new toy isn’t exactly the solution to the crap I’ve been going through lately, but it certainly takes the edge off.

And look at that. I’ve put down too many words about simply obtaining this thing. Maybe I’ll talk about the actual machine another day. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe I’ll forget or just not bother. Who knows? Think of it as a fun surprise from me to you.

And so our story ends

It’s been a month now since my wife moved out.

Everyone who knows me already knows that I put my heart and soul into my marriage. To the exclusion of a lot of other things, even. Having it crumble to pieces broke me pretty hard, and for a while I’d lost the will to do anything at all.

This is why I hadn’t drawn and posted a comic in January, despite having the intent to draw at least one a month for 2015. But that’s besides the point.

I wrote a very long essay about what went down and how it has affected me, but it’s rather personal and I’d prefer to keep it to myself, if that’s alright. Here are the main beats of the story: 1. She left. 2. I was depressed and spent two weeks on my parents’ couch feeling bad for myself. 3. I’m not doing that any more.

To suggest that I’m “over it” would be a bald-faced lie, but I’m sick of feeling like crap because I couldn’t save a relationship that was, though I denied it until the very end, doomed from the start. I’m putting it behind me and getting on with my life. Yes, I am still emotionally tender, and I’m not excited about getting all the legal stuff hammered out, but I’m moving forward.

I’m not entirely sure how to sum up how I’m feeling about this whole situation, but even though this has been the most difficult thing I’ve ever gone through, I’m beginning to see how much of a good thing it’s going to be for me. I still love my wife, but I’ve also accepted that she was so, so bad for me, and that I need her out of my life. It still makes me feel horrible to say that, but I’m free of that darkness now.

It’s only been a month, and that’s not really long enough to gauge my mental and emotional recovery, but there are more good days than bad right now, so I’m taking that for what it’s worth. I don’t have a very clear picture of what the future has in store for me, but I’m hoping that I’ve got some good karma flowing my way.

In the air tonight

Sense memories. We all have them. Or at least I’m assuming we all have them. Little moments when something innocuous -a smell or a feeling, perhaps- brings back a very specific memory. Being such a nostalgic person, I tend to get them all the time. But never quite in the same frequency as I do in December.

It’s not often big or particularly affecting memories that are triggered, either. It’s usually just little things. When I’m sitting around and I feel a rush of cold air from somebody coming into the house, for example, I’m brought back immediately to my early teenage years. I can picture myself in the basement of my parents’ house, playing video games on the little TV designated for video games, while the main TV played on the background, filling the room with the sounds of sitcom Christmas episodes.

Then my parents come in. If they were doing normal shopping, they just bring in their purchases (probably groceries) as usual. If they were doing Christmas shopping, my mother will come in first and announce that everybody had better stay where they are and away from the door (usually followed by me running straight towards the door, for the sake of being a nuisance). A few moments later, the cold air from the outside will make its way down to me. I never thought that little chill would leave such a defined mark on me, but it did. It’s funny how humans work.

While the SNES was hooked up to that little video games TV for many years, it’s always the N64 in my memory, and usually I’ve got a rented game in there. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko and Winback are the ones that figure most prominently into this memory (placing it in 1999), but Super Mario 64 shares a similar mindspace. In fact, this very memory recalls when I beat it for the very first time. Perhaps that’s just another reason why it remains my favourite video game of all time.

If you hadn’t connected the dots yet, it is this very memory that led to the Year of Nintendo 64. In a fit of irony, I didn’t play any of the games mentioned above this year. Okay, I did play the DS port of Super Mario 64, but it’s got a whole different feel to it. Not nearly as nostalgic as the original. Gex didn’t make the cut because I bought the Playstation version of Enter the Gecko on my PSP a couple years ago and found out that it didn’t age terribly well. Winback… I do really want to play Winback again, but it’s so ingrained in that one part of my memory that I don’t think I could appreciate it in any other setting.

Anyway, that’s more or less all that I wanted to share today. Hooray for posts about weird things going on in my head! I often write these posts and then wonder if even a single other person in the world would have a damn clue what I’m talking about. I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Oh yeah, and that was about the most Christmassy thing that going to be happening on TE this year. So have yourselves a merry little Christmas, or a happy little whatever else you might be celebrating. Have a good time, is what I’m saying.

No-blogging-vember

Absolutely nothing interesting has happened in my life over the last few weeks. It’s been the absolute steadiest stream of “the usual” that I’ve ever experienced. The first couple weeks of November are also apparently the new Birthday Season, but there isn’t a lot to be said about low-key family parties and nights spent at Pizza Hut with the in-laws.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like it this way. The less excitement there is, and the more time I have to just lay around and devote myself to my hobbies, the better. A boring life suits me perfectly, but it doesn’t make for good blogging.

Oh, but I did make this papercraft Shovel Knight! That’s pretty cool!

pc_shovel

Note to the curious: papercraft is not a hobby intended for the chubby-fingered. Or the impatient. I won’t lie, Paper Knight took a little over two hours to make. Probably would have been easier if I’d used small craft-sized scissors. Oh well! He ain’t perfect, but I still love him. He brightens up my desk more than all of my other childish baubles combined.

The end of freedom (for 2014)

Well, that’s it. My last week of vacation for this year is over. It’s really depressing, knowing that I’ve got at least three and a half months left before I get any more time off. And even then, I won’t be taking any vacation time until March at the very earliest, so it’s more like six months. On the brighter side, since next month marks my five-year anniversary with my current employer, I will be awarded with a fourth week of paid vacation next year. Hooray! Life is wonderful!

So you’re probably thinking that I must have done something really special for my final week of vacation, what with it also having been my birthday and all. And you’d be so horribly wrong. Don’t you know me at all? I spent most of the time off playing video games and watching Netflix. It’s just what I do, as an introvert with no ambition or motivation whatsoever.

On sleep and moving pictures

Back at work today after another week of vacation. This one was an especially grueling return, as I unintentionally developed a habit of staying up until 3 AM and sleeping until around 11 during my time off. This is not good, as someone who normally sleeps from 11 PM to 6 AM. Needless to say, I had a rather difficult time staying awake at work today. By noon I’d downed three cappuccinos, which is one more than I usually drink during the span of an entire workday.

Why was I staying up so late, you ask. Mostly because of computer games. See, I don’t have a clock in my basement, and if my phone is too close to my PC, it causes a weird disruption in the speakers, which then emit some really annoying staticy beeping noises. So all I have to tell time is the computer clock. Which is covered up while playing games in fulllscreen. When I don’t have any plans, I tend to not worry about time as much, and so I’d often end up playing a game until I started feeling tired, and when I close the game and check the clock: oh my goodness! It’s three in the morning! I didn’t realize I’d been playing for so long.

And that’s why it’s better to play console games.

Or something like that. The point is, that I wasted another week of vacation. But that’s pretty much all I intend to do with them anyway. It’s not like I have any money to go away with, so I just enjoy loafing around at home for a week. Makes me happy, at least.

I did watch the first two Gamera movies, though. I own the 11-movie set (which is only missing the 2006 reboot), and so far so good. They’re pretty short too, running an average time of about 80 minutes. That’s actually a good thing, as you really don’t want a lot of padding in your kaiju films. Basically you just need a set-up, the villain monster doing its thing, and then the good monster showing up for a beat-down. It’s a good time to be had by all, as long as you can see the beauty of two guys swiping at each other while wearing goofy rubber suits.

gamera

It’s pretty reasonably priced on Amazon, so if you’ve got a thing for classic kaiju flicks, it’s quite a bargain. And really, how can you not love Gamera? Godzilla is the king of the monsters, sure, but Gamera is so innately lovable. Maybe it’s just because I’ve got a thing for turtles.

I also watched a lot more TV than usual, finishing off the episodes of Portlandia offered by Netflix, and the first two seasons of Seinfeld. The latter is well-known, and still one of my all-time favourite TV shows. Portlandia you may not have heard of. It’s a sketch comedy show that pokes fun mostly at hipsters, but also other wackos like overzealous feminists and hippies. It’s usually pretty funny, and occasionally even hilarious. Definitely a good watch.

I guess that’s about it. I could go into greater detail about my video game adventures, but that’s what the Monthend Wrap-Up is for.Now I’m just going to struggle through the next month of work while I eagerly anticipate my next and final week of vacation time.

Vacation time and a new baby

Last week was my first week-long vacation since September, and man, when you wait that long between vacations, it feels good to be off for so long. Especially when you don’t do anything with that week besides catching up on your video games and Netflix backlogs. Many years ago, a vacation week would have been put to good use with comic drawing and writing for this blog, but I didn’t even think about touching my PC until Saturday night. To say that I accomplished nothing of value would be an understatement.

Actually, I did mow my lawn and tidied up my basement a little, so I suppose that technically I did get a few things done. Though I likely would have done those on a not-vacation week anyway. And I spent a few mornings sitting out in the sun with a book, so there’s an activity that I guess isn’t a complete waste of time. Why reading is considered a more legitimate hobby than any other type of media consumption is a mystery to me.

Oh, also I began recording a new set of Pop-Tarts Reviews, so you can look forward to those at some undetermined point in the future.

The big news of the week is that my entertainment unit is now home to a Playstation 3. Heresy, I know! But it came at the low, low price of $9, as my brother had recently moved up to an Xbox One, and all I had to do to adopt his PS3 was to buy a new power cable for it. The poor thing had been living between the bed of his truck and my parents’ shed for the last few months, so I’m happy to be able to give it a loving home.

Alas, now that I’ve got the thing, it seems like there are far fewer exclusive titles for it that interest me than I had thought. Currently the only games that I have on it are Tokyo Jungle, which I love with all of my heart, and a handful of PSOne Classics that I’d previously purchased on my PSP. Literally the only other games for it that I really want are Valkyria Chronicles and Drakengard 3. It’s pretty likely that I’ll be buying the HD Kingdom Hearts collections at some point, and probably Tales of Symphonia Chronicles, but I wouldn’t place those as sure bets.

I’m trying to resist the HD port of Shadow of the Colossus, but I think we all know that it is my destiny to buy it and play it over and over forever. It’s funny how a game that I didn’t like very much at first has become one of my all-time favourite video games. Favourite PS2 game, at the very least.

When a stone’s not a stone

WARNING: The following post concerns icky body stuff. Maybe skip it if you can’t handle that kind of stuff.

Sometimes weird stuff happens in our bodies. Actually, weird stuff happens in our bodies all the time, but plenty of it goes completely unnoticed. One of the weird things that is totally noticeable is the mysterious tonsillolith.

Colloquially known as tonsil stones, tonsilloliths are gooey little bits that pop into your mouth from time to time (in fact, I referred to them as “bits” before I actually looked them up). I never thought much about them until recently, when I watched an episode of Game Grumps where Arin hacked one up and Danny freaked right out at it, having never seen one before.

Maybe you’ve never seen one before either. If you haven’t, you’re either really lucky, or you’ve had your tonsils removed. See, a tonsil stone is a buildup of calcium and bacteria and other bits of stuff that collects in your tonsil cavities. They’re white/yellow chunks, and are generally pretty tiny. Despite being called stones, tonsilloliths are actually very soft and sticky. On occasion, they’ll fall out, possibly because of a cough or other throat-rattling activity. They’re fairly common, although since many people have tonsillectomies, they’re not quite common knowledge.

I used to have tiny little ones show up in my mouth all the time. Despite being known for having an awful smell, I never smelled or tasted anything when they showed up. Mostly I’d just spit ’em out and think nothing of it. And then they stopped. I didn’t even notice that I wasn’t getting them anymore until one day when I just randomly thought about it. don’t know what spurred the thought in my mind, but I shrugged, realized that I hadn’t seen one in what felt like years, and moved on with my life. I hadn’t made any major changes in my diet or lifestyle, so I have no idea why they went away.

Over the last few months, I’ve been getting them again. Just like when they stopped, I haven’t made any changes in my life, so I have no idea what brought them back. But now, they’re back with a vengeance, being bigger than ever before, clinging just on the edge of my tonsil cavities for hours before falling out, and carrying a noticeable (though faint) odor. Someone suggested that my mouth is dirty and gross, but my oral hygeine regiment is more thorough than ever, so I know that’s not the case. Unless my Listerine is actually causing them, as they started showing up again around the time I started using mouthwash daily.

Like I said, they’re really lingering just inside my tonsils now, and they’re quite annoying to feel sticking around back there. I’ve taken to poking stuff in there to scoop them out, and I’m actually starting to get really good at it, so much so that I’m able to pry open the tonsil cavity and fish out the deeper ones. All this poking around in the back of my throat has also dulled my gag reflex, which is kinda neat, but ultimately useless because I only like girls.

So what’s the point of this story? Nothing, really. Partly to educate (a lot of people don’t know tonsil stones exist), and partly just to keep a short log of my battles against tonsilloliths. I have an upcoming physical, so I’m going to ask my doctor if there’s a way to prevent the little buggers, but the internet hasn’t offered much on that front, so I’m fully prepared for the possibility of having to live with them forever. It’s a very minor inconvenience, but one I’d like to nip in the bud if I can.