Personal

A title chosen because I feel like I’m going stir crazy from the repetition of my daily life. Oh, and I’m also playing Pokémon Crystal. I’m not quite sure how I got there, but I’m nearly done with every task in the game shy of completely filling out the Pokédex. I’ve never actually finished Crystal and always wished I owned it as a kid, so I feel a sort of moral obligation to see it through — and thoroughly. But if you think that’s bad, wait until you hear my next plan: playing Pokémon Soul Silver. I’ve been so shamelessly addicted to Crystal that I feel like I may as well fill out another blind spot with the generation 2 remakes. The back-to-back may be exhausting, but it will at least highlight all of the changes to me. Plus, I have no qualms about using AR codes to make my experience smoother. You may have no idea how much having instant text display improves Pokémon. It’s insane.

What remaining time I’ve had has gone mostly to UFO 50. It’s still an awesome game, and by its nature reveals more reasons as to why over time. I’m only at about 6 cherry discs and 8 completions, and I’m working on 100%ing Mini and Max. I’m still trying to get my girlfriend to check it out sometime.

Speaking of the girlfriend, we’ve began playing through Ocarina of Time. She’s more familiar with this one, so I don’t get to show off quite as much as I did for Majora’s Mask, but any excuse to replay OoT is a worthwhile one. I already learned something new this playthrough: you can’t get Din’s Fire before meeting the Great Fairy of Power on Death Mountain. Total bullshit. Why not just have the first Great Fairy you meet give you the Magic Meter? The game even plays the success jingle when you play Zelda’s Lullaby. But nothing happens. Bastards.

Shining Force CD has been put on the backburner, albeit not deliberately. My entire Shining journey might be on hold with it, but I’ll try and keep it in mind as I wrap up this Pokémon illness. Scroll down to the Public section to see more information on reviews and the like.

Professional

Still in limbo. I don’t even want to talk about it. I will say though, I’ve been incentivized to push out some newer reviews to have more recent material to reference for work samples. I was recently turned down by TheGamer for a listicle writer. As always, no reason was given. I was probably overqualified.

Public

It’s done. It’s finally fucking done. After months, I have finished importing the entirety of my work from MyAnimeList. Check it out here. There is not a single word on my MAL that is not on this site now, sans my profile description.

What’s next? Well, there’s still a lot of polish to do. I refined my page template throughout the process, so everything will need to catch up to the final product. I also plan to reference my other digital footprints to verify original publication dates and for any material that wasn’t widely published. This shouldn’t take nearly as long to do, as the bulk of the workload was creating the pages and entering metadata. I look forward to applying the finishing touches.

As for original material, I’ve actually published a lot already. The final few imports were largely works I considered inconsequential. They were often only a paragraph long, too informal, or some other vague feeling of unprofessionalism I didn’t agree with. While bringing those over, I either edited or expanded them to better explain my perspectives while just generally making them more palatable. I wouldn’t say any of these revisions are “must reads”, but if you want to check them out, then a large quantity of them were either for Dragon Ball Z movies and specials, or Fullmetal Alchemist.

My drafted reviews are still just that — drafts. I went back to focusing on imports, as should be obvious. I started revising some recent commentary I wrote for Ecco the Dolphin into a full review, and Hajya is mostly in need of high quality screenshots. I’d like to review Pokémon Crystal as well. I only really want to discuss the changes from Gold and Silver, of which there aren’t many, rather than the game as a whole. In general, I’m entertaining the idea of writing shorter reviews just to have my thoughts out there on various things. Like, I might write a few paragraphs on why F-Zero GX is my favorite game, so at least people know and that information is out there. I’m reminded that this site isn’t just a portfolio, but also a record of everything that makes me me. Some reviews just won’t be as detailed as others, and that’s fine, damn it. I insist, anyway. Keep an eye on the front page for new articles.