お楽しみはこれからだ！

02.12.23

So I'm doing fairly well, all things considered, but February is definitely one of those months where I feel a lot busier than usual. I'm hoping it'll calm down after this week, since I've got an event to go to where I'm coaching someone for a competition. I'm also needing to piece together this magazine I'm leading, but I think it'll all come together before March. And ontop of that, I'm needing to get my head in the game with the job hunting and shit now that I've talked to my supervisor about the fact that I'm moving. Man, the next few months are gonna be insane leading up to summer. I've been lucky enough to not have to move for about 3 years, but the change is needed, and I'm excited about moving across the country to an area that hopefully won't be passing laws that are pro-erasing the existence of LGBT people. I really lucked out that I was already saving up and thinking of moving before this.

In less political and more self-indulgent news, I finally won an auction for a used GBA that wasn't wildly overpriced, so I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on it to mess with. I ordered a fancy, new IPS laminated screen for it that has pretty nice features to control the brightness and colors. I'm also getting a new case for it and some nice new buttons so it'll be essentially brand new aside from the motherboard. I'm hoping the speaker for it works already, cause that would be a pain in the ass to mod, but I think I could do it. I'll need to solder a couple parts of it, but it's just three wires, so I don't think it'll be that bad. I need to desolder (and resolder) to change out old batteries from some of my partner's GBC cartridges too. I haven't soldered anything since high school, but I don't think it'll be too hard.

I know you can get really fancy flashcarts that are like SD compatible and shit, but I really like using the older hardware, especially with the old Pokemon games so they're compatible with Pokemon Stadium. I realized recently that I never really played the game the way it was intended by loading your team from your game to use for the gym battles and cup battles, so that's something I've been interested in coming back to cause I still have my N64 and Stadium 1 and 2 are like my all time favorite games ever (though I remember mostly playing all of the mini games most). I remember the cup battles being ridiculously difficult to beat, and I think that's mostly due to the rental Pokemon having shitty movesets. I've been playing a lot of Soul Silver recently, and it's made me want to come back to the original Gen. 2 games so I can use them for Stadium. So anyway, this is a longwinded roundabout back to the point that I need to fix these games so I can play them as Lugia intended with the N64. (Also I really should save to get a nice Flashcart from Insidegadgets that will let me flash some Pokemon rom hacks to it so I can play them on original hardware...yes I know, this is a little ridiculous, but I already have a GB card reader/flasher for my computer, so why not make the most of it). I feel like there's a lot of nostalgia I have for this tech, and I've been enjoying messing around with it a lot. It's just nice to have different little hobbies I'm able to get into to keep myself sane. I was joking with miscellanium earlier about how I'm like the modern stereotype of the weird, non-social introvert husband that builds model trains instead of hanging out with friends and shit lol. Except my version of trains is like building keyboards and modding little retro game systems and shit like that.

I've also been trying to write more and get my fics done for the YGO mini bang. I finally got one of them to the 1600 word mark, so it's almost finished. Now I just need to write 1k words of Johan/Ryo smut that I think I'll manage easy enough. I've fallen out of practice with a lot of my other creative hobbies, I think because of how busy I am. I'm hoping once I get a new job and move I'll have more time for this. I think after being "On" for like...8-10 hours a day, it's hard for me to feel like I have any steam left for creative interests, so it's much easier for me to think about logical projects that always have right answers like tech modding. It's similar with coding, though there is a degree of styling that comes with that. Well...now that I think of it, there are quite a bit of aesthetic decisions I have to make with the modding (sound, look, feel, etc.), but I feel like imagining a story or depicting an image from my brain takes a lot of similar brainpower that I need to function at work vs the kinds of logic based aesthetic decisions that I make with tech related hobbies.

Anyway, this is a very rambling entry, but I wanted to get record this as a way to look back on my progress. I never really thought I'd be able to get into tech modding, and looking back like 2 years ago when I first got interested in it, I'm proud of where I'm at now. If there's ever an insane, fascist takeover and I need to live on a commune with a group, my skills will be tech repair and cooking I guess lol.