While chatting with Rome yesterday, he mentioned something about our blogs having not updated in a while. Not much has been going on in my life, other than the usual tedium of waking up, going to school, and going home, and perhaps hanging out with friends (sometimes referred to by my friend Tsubasa as “sociable nothing”) on the weekend. There are a handful of things that I can think of – none of which I can expand quite nicely upon.

This will be a post not unlike that of the Raymond Mar bullet-point variety: a collection of small (yet somewhat notable) things in my recent life.

• At Sunnyvale Golfland, beatmaniaIIDX 16 EMPRESS and GuitarFreaks&DrumMania V5 Rock to Infinity have been fully unlocked. On the IIDX front, Himiko (injoke aside) is, uh, a 12 on Hyper. Yes, I know that the song’s rated 11, but that’s called Konami Lying To Us. Also, Rock to Infinity (the song) is giving me a run for my money on Basic (88). And while I’m playing copious amounts of both, my time with pop’n music has suffered.
• Speaking of pop’n music, pop’n music 17 THE MOVIE officially released on March 4 after a small delay. The staff mention that the number of unlockables is to make up for the number of songs that were cut. Can I finally say hello to Water Stand songs on AC? Please?
• I recently got into Puerto Rico. It’s a pretty fun game. In fact, I’m considering whether or not I like it more than Die Siedler von Catan*.
• I started actually searching for and browsing stuff on pixiv, which is sorta like the Japanese equivalent of deviantART – the difference being that since I enjoy music game fanart and character fandom (it’s half the charm of pop’n music!), I get a lot more out of pixiv than I do out of deviantART. As an aside, I enjoy having 40 pages (registration required) of smooooch・∀・ parodies to look at, and I don’t know what kind of person that makes me.
• I’m still waiting for the full US release of DJ Max Technika. This week’s unveiling of the update at the Amusement Showcase International exposition in Las Vegas both kills me (I want to plaaaaaay~) and gives me hope for a prompt release of both the game and its online features (the update is scheduled to hit East Coast arcade hotspot 8 on the Break shortly after the show). In the meantime, I’ve found out that I can’t play a DJ Max Portable game anymore without thinking of Technika and how much more fun it would be tapping a screen as opposed to, essentially, DualShocking beatmania.
• I’ve started two JRPGs: one because one of its sequels is the hot thing of the moment, and one because I’ve been hearing hype about it and I’ve been meaning to try it out. Both are pretty fun.
• I watched one episode of White Album, which was interesting. I then rewatched half of Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight! (I need to grab the other half from the aforementioned Tsubasa) and watched its OVA about three times. And, finally, an obligatory Clannad After Story update: I didn’t expect that, why’d they have to go there again?

* I like saying Die Siedler von Catan, as opposed to The Settlers of Catan…if only for my opinion that it sounds cooler.

I’ve wanted to learn how to cook for some time. When I went down to Southern California over winter break, my friend Mark took me to a chain of grocery stores by the name of WinCo Foods, from which I picked up a handful of spices in bulk on the super-cheap (four fistfuls of basil? At WinCo, it’s, like, fifteen cents). Some of you might reply, “you’re going nuts over a frickin’ grocery store?” until I tell you that, for us here in Northern California (or at least, the San Francisco Bay Area), such a thing does not exist.

Anyway, I was looking up recipes to help me put those spices to good use (as in, not making instant ramen and tossing in some peppersteak seasoning) and picked up a couple from the Internet to try…and all of them happen to have bacon in them, which I enjoy quite a bit (I guess I won’t be losing weight any time soon, hahahaha). Listed in order of preconcieved difficulty from easiest to hardest:

Easy: Bacon Cinnamon Buns (pictured above): Admittedly, BaconToday is a surreal site. Following a link to it from the Bacon Explosion recipe (see the Hard recipe below), I found this sucker, and I’m curious. It seems like it’s a pretty simple deal, too.

Medium: The (Double) Bacon Hamburger Fatty Melt: I was thinking of whether or not I should attempt to do the original Fatty Melt, and then I found a link to the updated version. I’m down.

Hard: The Bacon Explosion: So my friend Jay linked me to this and I was all like “damn, I want to try that, it looks ridiculously heartstopping”. It blew my mind so much that it led to the creation of this post.

Blog posts will be coming for each (and some experimentation a la that Burrito Helper) as I go. Assuming I survive, of course. If I don’t, though, I might also end up taking some people with me.

We’ll end up having an eternal bacon barbeque using the fires of hell.

If and when I can find the time, there’s going to be one helluva update waxing poetic on my trip down to Southern California these past few days – four days, in which three were spent at Arcade Infinity. Also, cosplay pictures from Anime Los Angeles!

Oh, also: many revelations about DJ Max Technika, how developers for the game further propagate the stereotype that everyone in Korea plays StarCraft, and how Michael Yum is a man among men.

But only if and when I can find the time. Which should be relatively soon – I’m not going to go on super-extended hiatus just yet.

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You know something amazing’s going down when you and two of your friends, having been burnt out by a game of Settlers of Catan, decide to play Scrabble diagonally.

You also know something amazing’s going down when the first round consists of the words “vhat” (46 points), “Ngage” (15 points), and “vhatdat” (64 points).

And for the record, the person who played TaQ was not me.

I just finished my last essay of the semester.

Winter break, here I come.

Today, I ended up cooking for the hell of it. The ingredients?

1 generic Hamburger Helper package, lasagna flavor
4 tortillas, microwaved

So, basically, it’s the Safeway brand of Generic Hamburger Helper-Esque Product without the hamburger, stuffed into supposedly “soft taco size” tortillas. I felt like eating Hamburger Helper today (there’s not a great variety of quick-heat food options ’round the house, and it’s been a while since I’ve actually prepared something, pre-mixed or not), so I passed by Safeway, and they just happened to be having a sale on it. Then, I passed by the tortillas, which were also on sale. I decided to experiment.

I’d like to declare this experiment a pretty tasty success. I’ll be right back as I recover from the ensuing foodcoma.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Also, as an administrative aside, the blog’s been upgraded to WordPress 2.6.5. Nice to know that I didn’t screw that up. I might up to something like 2.7b3 sometime just for kicks.

One of the things I like to do nowadays in my spare time is go through each pop’n music release and play the crap out of it to unlock it, because up to this point in time I still have yet to do so. Just two days prior to my drafting this post up, I unlocked pop’n music 12 Iroha, and was happy. Then I had the pleasure of playing eighteen stages in Marathon Mode to die at the hands of Bubble Bath Girl [EX] – not a pretty failure.

I decided a part of the way through my playthrough of pop’n music 11 that I would revisit a good old friend, and so I swapped the 11 disc for pop’n music 14 FEVER!, the last great pop’n game to ever release on a home console.

There’s something about Fever that I’d like to hold dear to my heart. At Sunnyvale Golfland, all we had for the past year and then some was Fever. Fever was what I devoted at least a twenty to each month. After several attempts at emulation (pop’n 5 for the original PlayStation on keyboard!) and DualShocking, Fever was the game that finally got me addicted to pop’n (blame its inclusion of the Super Mario Bros. Medley). Fever, over the span of that year, saw me progress from the low level-10s to the level-40 wall (out of a difficulty ranking spanning 43 levels), before the innards of the machine were gutted and its marquee replaced with that of pop’n music 16 Party♪, the likes of which I had experienced two months prior, during a trip to Asia. Not only did the arcade release see the progression of my skill, but the home version of Fever was the first home pop’n game I had unlocked fully, on DualShock skill, while waiting for my Desktop Arcade arcade-style controller to arrive.

And now I had returned, after a month and a half worth of Party.

During my play, the home version of Fever felt incredibly weird to me. It was familiar, yes. The home-version exclusive songs were quite fun to play, yes (woooo Innocent 3!). But after a four song set, I decided that it just didn’t feel right anymore.

I wonder why. Perhaps it’s because Fever was all I did have, to the point where I became sick of it, like every other player at Golfland. Perhaps it’s because Fever was really the bad mix that others made it out to be.

I’ve decided that it probably was a mix of both. I think I’ll be ready for another round of Fever in probably a year from now.

I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an election this crazy. For the past eighteen and a half years of my life, every election has failed to get me hyped up – until now, where it had not only me, but everyone else mumbling to and fro about it.

Perhaps it was because I was young, and did not know anything; maybe it wasn’t me, and the media just brushed away each and every election with a “oh, okay, game over, he won, go back to your daily lives”.

But looking at the way people – not just in the United States, but around the world – reacted to this particular election’s results (least of all McCain, who basically told his booing supporters to shut up and deal with it in his concession speech), I can’t help but join in this supposed swelling of American pride after watching Obama’s victory speech last night.

I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before. Congratulations, Barack Obama, on making me, and a whole bunch of other people, actually care for once.

Here’s a eulogy crossposted from my original deviantART entry to start things off…

Today was a rather ordinary day. I attended my Sociology class, then, deciding that I was in the mood for sweets, headed over to Nijiya Market for some milk tea and maple bread. I headed over to my next class – the ever-dreaded Algebra II – and, while taking in a lecture on cube roots and how to be eternally rid of them, I munched and sipped happily on the pair.

After the class (in which half of it was admittedly playing the excellent Mother 3/EarthBound 2 translation), I decided that more milk tea was in order, and visited Strawberry Park, which is this strip mall oriented toward the Japanese community in the Saratoga/Santa Clara area. I did indeed obtain my milk tea from the Mitsuwa Marketplace there, but I also made another purchase: a Japanese keyboard, from a little shop to the right of Mitsuwa, called User’s Side (formerly Grow Up Japan).

User’s Side billed themselves as a “PC pro shop” from Akihabara, but didn’t limit themselves to just PC equipment – they stocked all kinds of import goods, the most notable being video games and video game accessories. Among these were some neat stuff, such as one-handed “RPG controllers”, Hori arcade sticks (of which a number have been purchased by my group of friends), official PS2 Multitaps (are these even sold in America anymore?) and game posters (A poster I have from User’s Side – a poster for the console release of beatmaniaIIDX 13: DistorteD – hovers above me tacked to the wall). My friends and I visited User’s Side every time we passed by Strawberry Park for Kinokuniya runs, and someone out of our group always found something that would come in handy. Even if I passed by alone, User’s Side never failed to charm me with their stock. And, most importantly, the prices on their goods were always reasonable and certainly better than what the online stores had to offer.

And now, User’s Side had closed, indefinitely, after having given the public two weeks’ notice and sale.

I stopped in front of User’s Side to stare at it, for I would never be able to see it as it was again. At that time, an employee came out and announced that they were closed. I replied that I was just passing by one last time because they were going away.

After a moment of silence, the employee asked, “Did you want to take a look inside? We still have things that we haven’t gotten rid of.”

“Sure,” I said, and he called to the attendant inside and told him that I would be browsing for a bit.

The lighting in the store was dim. Not much was left inside the shop. A handful of import video games sat on the side, their prices having been reduced to $14 as a last-ditch sales effort. Computer wires and software sat against the wall, a sign in Japanese proclaiming that they had been slashed by 60% to 80% – as an example, their copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection had been cut from $1,100 to something around $200.

And then I spotted the keyboards. A stack of various keyboards had their prices slashed by 80%. I decided that I should at least pay them a final tribute before I would never see the store as it was again, and grabbed a Logitech (or, rather, Logicool – apparently someone beat them to the name “Logitech” in Japan) slimline keyboard. The register rang up the keyboard for eight-plus-tax.

As the attendant gave me the receipt, I inquired, “I’m curious: why are you guys closing down?”

The answer was a nonchalant “I don’t even know, to be honest.”

And so, I left the store carrying my supposed $40 keyboard and went home. The moment I came home, I plugged the keyboard into my laptop, played Mother 3 for a bit, and started typing this entry in full.

For sure, I will miss User’s Side. There is a store in the same strip mall that does still sell import games, but are more focused on offering Japanese mobile phone services to the public, rather than selling all kinds of neat doodads that might catch my eye. They’re also pushing their online store in lieu of a brick-and-mortar shoppe, but, for me, there’s just something inexplainable about the tangible experience that makes all the difference.

I’d rather pay for this keyboard in full than see the store go away, but what’s done has been done, and another part of my childhood has faded into mere memory.

For now, saraba, User’s Side; you’ve had a great run. See you online.