R.I.P. My Switch

Damn. Damn, damn, damn!

My Nintendo Switch has probably bit the dust. It’s been a few days now. I was playing Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship Tournament 2004 (meaning things were already bleak), and I was in the middle of a pack-opening strategy early in the game, so I was starting to get into things. I was aware my battery was dying, but I had already plugged my console in. I continued to play, and then I noticed my system wasn’t charging despite being plugged in. Nothing unusual; I’ve seen dozens upon dozens of issues regarding Switch charging. I would do the rigamarole of resets and things would be fine.

But they weren’t. It died in the middle of my game, and all of my subsequent attempts to establish a port connection failed. I could turn my Switch on, but it would only display the Nintendo logo, an empty battery symbol in the top left corner of a black screen, then power off after two or three seconds. I’ve left it on overnight. Left it docked and undocked. I’ve connected it to a wall socket. I’ve held every button combination humanly possible. No dice.

For a brief time shortly after the inciting incident, boot attempts gave me an error code. I haven’t seen it since, however, and Googling it gave me no further direction. Speaking of which, it’s really goddamn annoying how presumptuous a lot of troubleshooting advice is. Go to this menu, go to that menu, hold something for 20 seconds, etc. For fuck’s sake, I’m looking up how to solve a Switch that won’t turn on, obviously I can’t get the system booted long enough to hold the required buttons down, let alone get to the fucking menu. Just think for a second.

Sorry, I’m just frustrated. Another obstacle has been that my exact symptoms appear unique. First of all, my battery icon in the top left has never displayed a lightning bolt symbol since this issue started. You would assume, then, that the issue is with the port or the charger. But it’s not. Not only have I tried multiple chargers, but I’ve confirmed that the Switch is receiving some kind of charge. On two occasions, I manually drained my battery by turning the system on and off until it would no longer boot. Each time, I plugged my system back in and eventually found it booting again. No progress past the same black screen, but it had obviously gotten enough power to boot.

It’s almost as if something has “capped” my battery’s charge to where it’s insufficient to boot the OS, but I don’t think that would explain it not being able to power on when connected directly to a power source. To make matters even stranger, I’ve recently had periods where the system was able to boot and then later wasn’t able to boot, then eventually returned to being able to boot—all while never leaving a power source.

If I had money, I would just send the thing to Nintendo for repairs, but they request a $100 minimum charge. Lord knows I could use the excuse; I have six Joy Cons with drift they still owe me repairs on. But alas, I cannot afford things right now. At the moment, I’ve given up with finagling the hardware itself. It’s plugged into a wall outlet in the vain hope it will suddenly decide to live again. I’ve seen people on the internet quote absurd lengths of time before their black-screened Switch returned to the world of the living (up to a month), so I’ll just leave it there until I earn enough money and hope for the best. I check in on it a few times a day like I’m visiting a relative in a coma. I make sure to talk to it regularly. The doctor says it helps.

Gaming

Needless to say, I’m in a bit of a foul mood. My life was consumed by the Early Days Collection, so having that feedback loop cut off really sucks. I also mainly play Master Duel on my Switch, so I’ve been bleeding Gems there, too. I might download it for my PC or PS4 just to get some of that, but what a pain. I’ve had a bit more time with Duel Links as a result. I got to level 19 out of 20 in this month’s KC cup with Battlin’ Boxers, which makes me pretty cool since Battlin’ Boxers suck. I was mostly just getting my dailies, even.

A new Rush Duel super mini box just dropped, but it seems pretty insubstantial. Konami continues to sabotage this format in new ways. In the last box, I only really cared about Sea Serpents, and they turned out to be abysmal. We went from a Voidvelg infestation straight to an even more oppressive Gaia format. Meta Rush Duel skills are disgustingly overtuned, but I don’t want to get further into it right now.

To sate my addiction, I’ve returned to World Championship 2006, a.k.a. the game that was too good to be included in the EDC. It still rocks, unsurprisingly. I just finished collecting all cards today, and I’m generally just free dueling with new decks I’ve made. There are a surprising amount of cards legal in this format that weren’t fully appreciated until later, so returning with that knowledge is rather interesting.

For example, I had never built anything utilizing Summoner Monk until this recent visit, and there’s a lot of potential nonsense one can pull off with him and Cannon Soldier, Last Will, cards like Soul of Purity and Light, and Return from the Different Dimension and Dimension Fusion. Card of Safe Return, Premature Burial, and Giant Trunade are also all legal! It feels like everything is just waiting to be busted open, but staying within the 40 card limit with so many powerful generics being legal is a genuine challenge.

As for the decks I’ve been playing, there’s too many to list, but of them are Horus, Dark World, Fire Princess, The Creator, VWXYZ, and Gravekeeper’s. I’ll probably make even more tonight. I’ve been meaning to put the patched version of the game on my 3DS to fix the The Huge Revolution Is Over glitch, but I haven’t bothered yet because it’s such a colossal pain in the ass to put files on a New 3DS XL. I have just that and the last three Duel Puzzles left to complete before I’ve hit a true 100%. But I’m having so much fun playing the game that I’m in no rush to hit that mark. I think I might even upload some of my deck lists to Neuron. Go check my socials page to see how you can find me on there.

While I play YGO, I’ve been watching Game Grumps play through the Danganronpa series. It’s been cool to return to them. Seeing DR1 was especially interesting, as I had only played the original PSP Japanese version with a fan translation. Going directly into DR2, it really is immediately apparent how much of a step up it is in regards to writing quality. I’m a bit more conflicted with how Nagito is depicted as a character this time, but I still really like him. I wonder if V3 will still be my favorite when I finish this revisit. Two things I will say right now: these games use the phrase “in the end” to an absurd degree, and DR2 has an absurd amount of typos.

Professional

I mentioned in my last blog post that I was potentially going to be published in print for the very first time. I’m happy to reaffirm that the process is progressing smoothly. I look forward to sharing the article when it goes public! There’s a lot I want to say about the experience, but I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth until everything is a done deal. It’s all positive, though!

I’m also expecting an interview for a major job position sometime around the end of the month. Again, I don’t want to divulge too much personal info, but it would be an enormous leap in income for me. I’ve been disappointed before with job prospects, but by the same coin, it’s hard not to be excited for each one.

Site

No major changes, but I have gotten back into the habit of importing things every day. I recovered some old reviews for Soul Nomad, Phantasy Star II, and Star Ocean: The First Departure. I can’t promise they’re great, but they exist. With these, I might have hit the bottom of the well when it comes to importing my old video game reviews. It’s possible (and almost certainly so) that I wrote more than what I have published here, but I don’t know how to obtain any more than what I’ve already found.

My best shot is hoping I have document drafts on the hard drives of my old computers. I kept all of those drives for eventual data scrubbing, but I haven’t bothered to look through all of them yet, because there really isn’t anything on them I desperately need or anything. I’ll just randomly be hit by the motivation to do it one of these days, I’m sure.

Most of my recent imports have been music reviews, so check that category if you’re interested. There’s too many additions for me to bother listing here.

In my last blog post, I mentioned how Google was failing to index my review of the Early Days Collection. As a hail Mary, I spammed internal links to that review in hopes Google would arbitrarily deem it to be an “important” page to index. To my shock and indignation, it actually fucking worked. My review was indexed within the subsequent 24 hours. Unfuckingbelievable. Thousands of words, dozens of hours spent writing, and Google’s algorithms that are designed to weed out “low quality” content were fooled simply by me link spamming on my own goddamn website—something none of my other, lower-quality articles required. The solution to anti-spam was spam. No technical support from Google the entire time, either. I can’t think of any word to describe this other than “pathetic.”

We have exited the phase of society that values quality. That’s going to read as a dramatic assertion to some, but it’s not like this website snafu the only symptom I’m using for my diagnosis. It’s more that recognizing the decline hits harder when you’re being let down by one of the most powerful forces in its respective sector. Like, the people and organizations we’ve bestowed the title of “expert” are now fucking up with the regularity you expect from your local pizza deliveryman, but they’re the ones making six-thousand times their salary from a combination of institutional inertia and the slashing of costs to put off the inevitable reckoning that perpetual growth is physically impossible. It’s a reminder that prestige is just the waxing to incompetence’s wane.

Oh, shit. I just remembered I had another article Google was failing to index for no reason. Let me just correct that.