Page 19 – Burning the midnight oil at noon

24 Days of Desire (11): NIeR Orchestral Arrangement

You know that I adore Keiichi Okabe’s soundtracks for the NIeR series games more than anything. I’ve typed that fact so many times. So of course I want the big, expensive box set of orchestral arrangements.

In my experience, video game soundtracks are very commonly overpriced, so in that context, the $80 USD price tag is actually pretty fair for a three-disc set. And that third disc is exclusive to the set! I can buy the first two on iTunes for 15 domestic dollars apiece, but not the third one! Is it worth $50 plus foreign exchange and shipping? Probably not for people who aren’t me!

I haven’t purchased it yet because of the price point, but I have included it on my Xmas wish list for a couple years now. Ol’ Sandy Claws just keeps letting me down [sad emoji]. So I think that it’s something I’m just going to have to splurge on once 2022 rolls around.

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 (9): Son of Godzilla

Here’s a little-known fact about me: I have a collection of all of the (live action) Godzilla movies on either DVD or Blu-ray. Well, almost all of them. There happens to be one that I’m missing, and that’s because for some reason it’s very rare and thus unbelievably expensive. You’ve read the post title, but I guess I should reiterate that the one film in question is Son of Godzilla.

24 Days of Desire (8): FNAF Core Collection

Remember that big indie game fad from like six years ago? Five Nights at Freddy’s? Well, it’s still alive and kicking, and while the newest game in the series isn’t due to release for another two weeks, all of the previous titles have now made their way out of the PC market and onto consoles.

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 (6): Maverick Hunter’s Field Guide

I like a lot of things. I like Mega Man, reading, and video game lore, to name a few. And it just so happens that today’s entry is an items that checks all three of those boxes.

Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter’s Field Guide is, as I understand it, something of a character bible for the Mega Man X series. Contained within are complete bios for (probably) each and every character that has ever appeared in one of the games. And that’s a lot, because it includes all of the boss robots, of which there are at least eight new ones in each sequel.

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 (4): Rock Jocks

So there’s this board game café downtown that I went to a couple weekends ago, and they have so many board games. Like, walls and walls and walls just crammed with board games. I would suggest that they have all the board games, but I know that is not the truth of the matter.

There are at least two board games absent from their collection. One is It From the Pit, which I have written about at length before. The other is Rock Jocks. Behold!

24 Days of Desire (3): Star Wars sequels box set

I have a really nice box set of the first six Star Wars movies on Blu-ray.

Sorry, I have to stop here to make an aside about how I very much dislike the fact that Blu-ray is a proper name and requires capitalization.

*ahem* It would be nice if I could slide in another little box that housed the sequel trilogy right next to it. Alas, there is currently no such thing! And probably never will be! The proliferation of digital media has absolutely crushed the market for movies printed on physical media. And also Disney is absolutely not going to sell you three movies in a box when they can make you buy all three separately.

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.