funeral was two weeks ago. it was great seeing so many old friends. i couldn't count how many times i heard some variant of "i wish we were meeting under better circumstances". it's funny how we are so often able to find a light in darkness. i like that.

Today's post is not nearly as depressing as the last. The title isn't actually meant to mean anything, just like the blog post doesn't really have any sort of theme, or rhyme, or reason; it's lifted from a... song? short film? of the same name, which I probably saw the year it was released (2016). It's a satire of our current world, a hellish, gray dystopia, where everyone is glued to their phones, not giving any thought to tradegy, nor suffering, or even their own well-being. Except, of course, our main character, who is simply different, and smarter, and cooler, and actually cares about others. I don't really know what happens beyond that, and I don't particularly care enough to watch it again, despite it coming in at just over three minutes long. It's boring, trite, egotistical, and if I dug into the animator enough, probably hypocritical in some way. Occasionally, I'll either stumble across or think about this image and I'll get a crazy kick out of it:

A Letterboxd review for the short film. It reads: My teacher showed us this in class once and got so mad when a kid called it gay he had to go outside and calm down.

There's something about what I consider to be an incredibly pretentious piece of art getting called 'gay' by probably a middle or high schooler that just brings a smile to my face. Is that immature of me? Perhaps.

On another note, some cool news. Last year, my then-best friends and I went to CEO, one of the largest fighting game events of the year. I'm not a huge fighting game guy, but I have a lot of respect for the genre. I was there to play Pump it Up - I did a lot better than I thought, and beat out a few people from my pool, but wasn't able to get very far. Still, I had a great time, and I played some of the best PIU that I had ever played in my life up until that moment. Part of the reason for that is that modern PIU pads are "bracketless" - in the original design for PIU pads, each of the 5 panels had four triangular metal brackets in its corners to hold the acrylic in place. While incredibly durable, it creates deadzones where stepping on the corner of a panel means you actually end up stepping on this stiff, metal bracket, and your step isn't registered. They rectified this problem about a decade ago. Here's a comparison, with bracketed panels on the left, and bracketless on the right:

The pads at CEO, along with a large majority of public cabinets, were bracketless, whereas mine at home were the old bracketed style. I told myself I'd order parts to upgrade my own pads if I was able to pass a D21, and then ended up doing that like a week later with a much too easy chart, leaving my victory feeling hollow and undeserved. So I just pushed the idea back, back, back, until a year later. I ended up ordering them sometime in June, and they just arrived a few weeks ago. A coworker helped me install them over the course of a few hours and they are fantastic to play on. It literally feels like I'm cheating sometimes. My interest in the game has been revitalized and I'm doing things I never thought possible. So that's quite nice!

I've started attempting to learn Chinese. I don't know how long that's going to last - it's been about two weeks so far, and my vocab is so shit I on average recognize 0.5 words a sentence in whatever I read. But it's been pretty fun. I think the Chinese have a great sense of humor, interesting culture, and I've always loved the 'floweriness' of the language, so I think I'm going to stick with it. Who knows. One of my best friends is also trying to learn, as his girlfriend is half-Chinese, and you might be thinking, 'oh, that's so cool, you guys can learn together, and help each other out-' no. I am going to BEAT him. I am going to withhold and gatekeep strategies and be BETTER than him at Chinese. Let's get it.

I've got a lot of miscellaneous projects going on. I need to re-wire my Ms. Pac-Man cabinet. The wiring is not good. Will I order the things I need, which I famously do not do ever for months? We'll find out. I also need to track down a TGM2 board, I also need to find a Astro City cabinet to put the board in. Surely both of those things will be easy to find, and cheap. Maybe I just make my own cabinet, I find some shell, I get a supergun, JAMMA harness - you know what, that sounds like a better idea to me. Also, I need to get an external hard drive adapter for my Pump it Up so that I can properly put the cabinet against the wall and have to stop digging behind it to switch out the drives every so often. I'll get on that and hopefully keep y'all posted.

Also, I want to try using social media more often. I don't very much, and it's a good thing, but I also want to start 'micro-journaling', and just write little things here and there. I think I'll do that over the coming weeks. Thanks for reading!