IRL – Page 3

Nintendo 3DS by the Hours

Following yesterday’s remembrances of the Nintendo 3DS, I decided to open up the records app and take a good, long look at all of the games I played on the system throughout its lifetime. I definitely could transcribe the entire list of 254 games, but I settled on just listing any game or app that I used for over ten hours. That’s still 74 different pieces of software!

Sunset of the Dual Screen

For each year that passes, I become more and baffled that this website still exists. Like, I have immense difficulty focusing on anything for more than about 10 minutes at a time, and a list of unfinished projects that could wrap around the Earth. How am I still doing this???

I don’t have an answer to that question. But Nintendo recently asked themselves a similar question, in relation to keeping the ol’ 3DS family of systems relevant. Their response was “We’re not.” and earlier this week, it was announced that the 3DS eShop will be shutting down in March of next year. To be more specific, you’ll no longer be able to make purchases at that point. Presumably, the shop will still exist so that people can still download all the games they’ve paid for. Presumably.

24 Days of Desire (20): Sleep

You know what’s something that I would really like? The ability to sleep consistently.

My sleep is way all over the place. Sometimes it’s my fault for ignoring my phone when it tells me it’s bedtime. But most of the time it’s not my fault! Not in any obvious way, anyhow…

24 Days of Desire (16): An Arcade

This one’s quick and easy: I want an arcade.

Well, that is to say, a very specific arcade. An arcade that has the “holy trinity” of 90’s brawlers: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Captain America and the Avengers, and The Simpsons. Though honestly, I’d gladly accept even one of the three.

Growing up, our Chuck E Cheese restaurant had those three cabinets, all nicely aligned back-to-back-to-back, and they were where I spent the vast majority of my tokens. Those and Cruis’n USA, but I’m less nostalgic about that one. While we do have a few modern establishments that include arcade games as part of their schtick, none of them have any of the three I listed. It’s all skee-balls and coin pushers ’round these parts.

So that’s really it. My list of demands is short. Not cheap, mind you, but short. I feel like I’m putting out a reasonable ask, but I think the fact is that those arcade cabinets have left the city and are never coming back. I did see (and play!) TMNT once, but it was at a bar that has long since been replaced by a spa or something that I care equally little about.

24 Days of Desire (15): Headphones

This is a simple one: I’d like a nice pair of headphones.

The thing that makes this tricky is that there are so many different kinds for such a wide range of prices, and I have no idea what I actually want in a headphone. Just something that does a good job of relaying sounds from a computer or video game console to my head, while also blocking as much outside noise as possible.

24 Days of Desire (13): A space-filler

Got another quick one today. There’s this space above my bed, and I’ve been meaning to fill it with something for years now. I just don’t know what it is that should go there. I was hoping that at some point, I’d have a flash of inspiration, or see the perfect thing whilst shopping for something else.

Alas! Four and a half years later and I have still not been wowed enough by anything to have hung it above my bed. The wall remains empty and cold.

24 Days of Desire (10): Abs

No, you didn’t read that wrong. Today’s topic is abs. As in “visibly tight abdominal muscles that women want to rub their faces up against.” Nobody ever said that this list was going to be exclusively for material objects what must be purchased.

Okay, to be fair, I don’t really want abs so much as I want for the abs-sence of my gut. It’s not even really that much of a gut, but it has re-inflated a little bit over the last year. I’ve been trying in vain to get it back down to 2020 levels, but I’ve developed some fairly bad eating habits this year that have been proving difficult to undo.

24 Days of Desire (7): LEGO Millennium Falcon

While it’s not something I do very often, I find very few activities as satisfying as building something. Be it a piece of furniture, a jigsaww puzzle, or a complex spreadsheet, I just really like putting things together. There’s nothing like the feeling of taking a step back from a completed project and thinking “I made that.” That said, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I really liked LEGO as a kid.

24 Days of Desire (5): The Always Pan

I’m not much of a cook. I try sometimes, but for the most part I’m just too lazy to be making anything that requires more effort than turning the oven/microwave/air fryer on. That said, my frying pan is more or less my best friend in the kitchen, and I use it all the damn time.

I’m a sentimental fool, so the idea of parting with my frying pan after nearly a decade together seems unthinkable. But the old girl is getting on in age; she’s developed a pretty severe tilt which ensures that oil and eggs always pool over to one side, and more than a few permanent battle scars. It’s time to move onward and upward, and the solution to my problems came to me in an unexpectedly helpful YouTube ads.

I say that because YouTube ads are typically for trash products that I would never even consider buying into. (Especially YouTube Premium.)

24 Days of Desire (2): A better GPU

Last December I got a lot of extra money from sources I will not mention, and since I was planning to start creating more video content for my YouTube channel, I decided to spend a bunch of said money on a new computer. In this sense, it was a complete success! The new machine was more than capable of taking on the heavy video processing load that was making my old PC wheeze worse than me after 20 seconds of light jogging.

However! When I selected my new computer, I did not put any consideration into VR capabilities. Any why would I? I bought an Oculus Quest 2 specifically for the fact that it doesn’t need to be tethered to a PC. Fast forward to summer 2021 when I bought an (off-brand) Oculus link cable for reasons I can’t remember, and through some sequence of events ended up trying to play some PC VR games. It did not go well.