I made a promise to myself that I would update this website monthly so I will, even if it is literally on the last day of the month. I had a pretty eventful summer, which led directly into a packed semester, so there is lots to talk about. The first notable thing was that my birthday was in July! On the week of my birthday I went to a gourmet hot dog place and a bar arcade. I played my first game of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike on an original cabinet there, and also my first opponent in person who wasn't one of my friends and it was mind blowing (I have played ranked on Fightcade but I’m not really counting that). I had never seen someone execute Yun combos live in a match against me so it was really exciting. I ended up taking only one round off him but I enjoyed the matches.
For my birthday I also amassed a bunch of funds from my family and from my girlfriend in order to get my BVM-D14H5U monitor repaired. Around a year ago, when I was playing Dark Souls, the monitor lost picture while I was playing and it took me till last month to finally bring it in for repair. While it was out of commission my family made me get rid of my Sony KV 27FV17 as it was too big for our space. Being without any CRTs basically put me on a hiatus from playing any retro games, so it is good to have a monitor back. It was serviced by Savon Pat, a former Sony technician and great boon to the CRT community. He explained that my model was essentially a standard definition model that was retrofitted to have HD capability at the beginning of the high definition era. The BVM-D14H5U was like the transitional model and because of that there were faults with it that typically caused the M board to fail. He had a replacement that has an additional board that was manufactured by Sony added to it that corrects the issue. The monitor works wonderfully now, my only worry is that the new board he installed has many more hours on it than my original had. He also went ahead and calibrated the thing which was also nice of him.
The first thing I did with the monitor when I got it back was finish Dark Souls. It was my first time finishing it and my run was a strength/int build using the Dark Knight Sword and Moonlight Greatsword and wearing Havel’s Armor, which invalidated a lot of bosses. I think the funniest part of the run was the fact that I never found or bought any spells other than Fall Control and Great Heavy Soul Arrow, and just relied on mostly my Dark Knight Sword.
After finishing Dark Souls I started playing Baroque, and oh my goodness is it amazing. It is a roguelike dungeon crawler with a beautiful post apocalyptic grungy setting. It feels like a first person Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game that is set in the world of BLAME! It was recently translated by Plissken https://x.com/Plissken___/. I played the PS1 version, and the translation patch can be found at https://cdromance.org/psx-iso/baroque-jpn/. Also, be sure to check out https://nervetower.neocities.org/, as this was the source for the translation’s text. The person running the site also has obsessively translated several interviews and content surrounding the game and has made a walkthrough which I have been using for my playthrough. I have yet to complete the game but I highly suggest it, as it really surprised me, it being a quirky PS1 tank control game.
The biggest event of my summer was definitely my 9 day trip to visit my girlfriend in Toronto, and to go to Fan Expo. I can never fall asleep on planes so the first day I got there was spent relaxing with her and giving her birthday presents <3. She had me bring a KnuckleBonz Ghost Ghoul figure she shipped to me over so that she could skirt around the shipping prices, but I also bought her a second Ghost figure and when I surprised her with it she almost cried. Some of the things we did include making a pizza with dough that wouldn’t stretch, eating fresh oysters for the first time at a fancy restaurant, watching the Hobbit as we fell asleep, and buying a fountain pen. One thing I want to highlight was a trip to Newmarket. We went to Upper Canada Mall just to do a little bit of shopping, where I bought a shirt and we ate a couple Jamaican patty. We then went around the area going to a card shop, where I picked up a couple Unstable mountains, to a thrift store, where I got a ps2 memory card and a physical copy of Dark Souls 2, and then went to Shoppers to load up my Presto card.
The best part of the day was definitely dinner and dessert. We made our way to a small sushi restaurant called Kozy Sushi. I ordered a tuna roll and it was so generously portioned that I was floored. It was the thickest roll I have had. My girlfriend got a dragon roll and she couldn’t even finish it it was so massive. If we had known it was so big we probably wouldn’t have ordered the chicken karaage. For dessert we walked down to Goblets & Goblins, a gaming cafe. It was super cute, with a ton of nerdy themed food and board games. We decided to play Wyrmspan, which maybe wasn’t the best choice to just pick up and play, and we ordered the lembas bread and a milkshake to share. The lembas was a really dense bread with honey and cinnamon. It was okay, but it really lived up to tasting like travel food, I wouldn’t have it again. Wyrmspan proved to be pretty complex, and led to us cutting it pretty close, finishing our game only a couple minutes to closing. I won, as I had done that week in Magic: The Gathering, Myrmes, Mario Party, and Cards Against Humanity. She was tired of me winning at that point… heh.
The last big event was Fan Expo, which turned out to be mostly a bust for me. The best part was definitely seeing all the cosplayers and art, but besides that it didn’t feel all that special. What was nice was that my girlfriend managed to pick up a bunch of Ghost merch, if you couldn’t tell she’s a big fan of the band. I went in expecting to see a ton of Beastars merch but I guess that manga/anime was old news by now. What was in was apparently Dungeon Meshi, as I saw about 20 Marcille cosplayers. Below you can see some of the booths had interesting polls happening.
To wrap things up, I would say that this summer has been my least stressful in a long time. While having to go from spending time in person with my girlfriend to being thrust straight into a hectic semester of school and work is difficult, I feel completely ready to tackle this semester. It is rare that I feel this resolved and organized, so I am going to roll with it and hope I can keep it up for as long as possible. Wish me luck with the new semester, and thank you for reading!