Another Thursday has come and gone and I'm feeling great. Thursday is Pump It Up day at my apartment, where some friends of mine gather after work and hang out for a few hours, all while playing on the Pump It Up cabinet I have taking up most of my living room. If you're unfamiliar with Pump It Up, or PIU, it's a Korean knockoff of Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) that uses five panels, one for each diagonal and one in the center of the pad. PIU started off as nothing more than a cheap imitation but has grown to be, in my opinion, a much better game than DDR, with more natural movement, a better UI, and a more interesting ceiling to climb towards. Whereas DDR and its cousin In The Groove (ITG) laser-focus on timing, with songs being relatively easy to "pass" but difficult to beat with a solid score, PIU takes the opposite approach, forcing you to hit more arrows and punishing misses more harshly but having a much higher tolerance for average timing. This better highlights the core gameplay loop (hitting arrows to music), makes the game more accessable, gives charters more freedom to add notes, and more. The five arrows instead of four also starts out a bit intimidating, but allows for much more natural movement, hugely improved doubles gameplay (when one player plays on both pads, using 10 panels in total), and allows charters to ask much more of the player in the upper echelons of play. But where were we?

I was lucky enough to score a Pump It Up in the fall of 2023, when a local Georgia player was moving countries and needed his cabinet gone. I paid $1500 for the thing, a GX model cabinet with countersunk screws on the pads, the original functioning CRT, and all internals working fine, minus the computer itself. After grabbing a parts list and scouring Chinese online shop listings, I was able to build a computer second-hand for somewhere under $200 and get it working with a copy of XX that I ordered from another PIU player who wasn't using it anymore. To be honest, it was a steal, and I can't thank local pillar of the community Vincent enough for hooking me up. The pads needed a little bit of TLC, which I was happy to give them, but honestly were in pretty damn good condition. I got a new TV specifically to play the game, and while I still need to mount it on my cabinet, it doesn't look too bad chilling next to the cabinet at eye level.

Everyone usually clears out by around 8-9, but one of the fellas is particularly addicted, and stays well into the night (he's actually still here, if you can believe it lol). It's a great time and almost always the highlight to my week. It's been a blast showing everyone the ropes and watching them learn at their own pace, and they all seem to enjoy it a lot. I recently got a new futon and some chairs to host some friends that visited from Atlanta last month and they've been putting in a lot of work with the increased load of people in the apartment each week. I don't offer much in the way of refreshments, to be honest, which would be nice to change but a lot of work haha. And expensive! So, until then, they get tap water -- after all, I've heard no complaints so far, which everyone knows means everything is perfect and nothing needs changing :)

Outside of PIU, life has been treating me pretty well. I just finished playing through DELTARUNE, which I'm going to be writing about at some point next month. As someone that grew up playing SNES RPGs, and a huge fan of Earthbound, of course I was going to love it, but I was still blown away by the game at certain points and I think the most recent chapter to have been released was one of my favorite parts of any video game I've ever played. I'd seriously recommend checking it out. I stopped piano lessons, unfortunately, having lost most of the drive I had eighteen months ago. I feel like I don't know anything about music theory, I suck at reading the staff, my playing is a bit awkward and soulless, and at a certain point it felt like I was just forcing myself to go through the motions, so I figured I'd stop for now and see where life takes me. I've been a bit annoyed and frustrated at myself and a specific individual in my life due to some recent events, but at the same time I've got so many loving and close friends that it's hard to dwell on any one thing for too long. It's been great getting in touch with local community members and starting to be a part of different groups of people. Just gotta keep myself distracted and move forward.

It's reaching well into tomorrow morning at this point so I better be off to bed. Waking up tomorrow's gonna be fun :) Night night.