Homepage on Nick64

I bought a DSi

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 19:55:10 -0800

This happened a while ago, but I still wanted to write about it.

I think this was around the beginning of January, I was going thrift-shopping at Value Village, and I was looking at the small electronics section when I found a white DSi IN THE BOX (not sealed but still awesome), including some accessories and games, for $60 dollars. On top of that, I had 20% off, so I got it for like around 50 dollars.

The reason I bought it was because I finally wanted to start getting back into DS stuff, since I had a DS and 3DS as a kid, and I wanted to relive that nostalgia while also experiencing new titles, mainly Pokemon. Not to mention, I’ve become so much of a Sony fanboy with the PSP and Vita, that I kinda started hating on the 3DS and DS for very shallow reasons. Realjame has been shilling the DSi a lot, and combined with my nostalgia, yeah I finally convinced myself to buy into it and give it a second chance.

After I bought it, I modded it and installed some homebrew on it, and got a nice pink theme on it with a custom image.

Fast forward to now, I haven’t really used it in a while, mainly because I’ve been interrupted by Persona 3 Reload and work, but before I was using it to play Pokemon Fire Red, which is actually a really fun game if you don’t have a bitch in your ear telling you Gen 1 sucks. I think I got like half-way through the gyms, so I’ll beat the rest of it someday. Maybe I’ll even complete the Pokedex on it. Not sure.

Anyways yeah, just a small very low-effort post today because I want to get back into writing without getting burnt out so fast. Thanks for reading :)

What I've been doing since the last post

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 12:01:52 -0800

I’m back! …For a second. I’m not sure if I’m going to be returning to the site long-term or what, but for the time being, here I am.

It sure has been a bit, two months, since my last post. I’m not really gonna drag this out longer than this needs to be, so I’ll just say it now, the reason I haven’t written here in a while is that I’ve just been busy and a bit burnt out on the website. I have a job that takes a lot of my time now, I have a webcomic I want to work on, and only so much time for anything else. And I don’t really see this site as a top priority, so I decided that instead of forcing myself to write and do stuff that I didn’t feel like doing, I would just wait for the right time, and I think now I feel like doing more stuff with this site maybe. Not a guarantee, but we’ll see.

I won’t go out of my way to decorate this post and put a bunch of stuff on it, but I do want to talk about what I’ve been up to the past two months, since it’s actually a little bit.

I bought a Pixel 8 (mint color too!)

So before, I had a Galaxy A51, and I wasn’t in a huge rush to buy a new phone, but I was looking into getting one sometime around my birthday in March, ideally a Pixel phone since people had been suggesting it to me a lot. Around the time I was doing research, Google announced a new Pixel 8 and 8 Pro model in MINT COLOR, and I LOVE MINT, so I was pretty excited. That alone didn’t make me get it though, what DID make me buy it was the 20% off they were offering on it to some customers through an email coupon. Luckily, one of my friends had this coupon and gave it to me, so I purchased a Pixel 8 Mint for around 600 dollars.

It came with a case for free, but I sold it because I didn't care for it.

I’ve been using the phone for about half a month now, and I gotta say, it’s quite a great phone. I love the size of the Pixel 8, since it’s just small enough that I can comfortably use it one-handed, which is why I went with it and not the 8 Pro. It’s a little less wide than my old phone and like a centimeter shorter, so it’s a nice size downgrade, since I wanted a smaller phone.

As for the speed, it’s a lot more snappier than my old phone, having double the RAM at 8GB, along with a 120Hz display which feels REALLY smooth. Discord doesn’t completely shit itself when I use it now, and apps generally have less lag. I’m not really like a gamer or anything, so I can’t say much on that, but Fortnite did run better on it than it did on my old phone, so I’ll give it that LOL.

The only thing I don’t really like on this phone is that the battery is kinda not great on it, but it hasn’t been a huge problem for me since I don’t really use my phone most of the day, and I always make sure to charge it as often as possible. So it’s not a big deal, but do keep that in mind if you want to buy one.

Snow

Back in December, it snowed in my area. I know that’s not that crazy, but it was the first time I really saw snow since I first moved to Arizona, so it was honestly a really special moment for me, and made me appreciate moving back a lot more. It didn’t snow like a lot, but it snowed enough to see a layer form. It was really cool honestly.

Conclusion

Yeah, so I have a lot more that happened than that, but I don’t wanna bloat this post, I kinda wanna talk about them over time (if I’m in the writing mood). So I hope you enjoyed my post :)

First post of 2024: A fresh start?

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 22:39:54 -0800

I’m back!

…For now.

Also I know this post is technically created on the 31st of December, but it’s gonna be finished by the time 2024 starts, so it’s a New Years post.

Where have I been?

Well, I’m not gonna rewrite it again and complicate things. If you didn’t read the older posts, tl;dr: I’m busy with my job, along with working on Blip, plus I also have some burnout with the site, so I haven’t had the motivation or time to write anything here.

Will I be writing more soon?

I don’t know, maybe? I want to write more, but writing takes time, which I kinda don’t have a lot of. Plus with the webcomic taking my time (which I will talk about in a bit), I’m already dedicating time in my day for one project, so another project is a little overwhelming for me. But I will not abandon this site, don’t worry all… 2 readers. I will just not post as often.

Working on Blip

I think the first thing I want to talk about in this mega-post is the new webcomic project I've been putting all my time into. It turns out that, man, making one is kinda hard! ESPECIALLY if you're already sort of lazy.

The first three chapters took me A YEAR to make (mainly because I started on it, gave up, and picked the project up again), but that should go to show how well I do with big scale projects like these. This project is deceptively big. Apparently, even if you're not a good artist and you don't try to be a perfectionist, it STILL takes a long time to draw out the drafts and panels and stuff, who would've thought?

Regardless, I've learned a lot from this project already, but I feel like I still have a long ways to go, which is perfectly fine. This project was created for the goal of self-improvement, so I expect this to not end up great from the start. But I believe in the idea of it, so it doesn't mean I intend to make garbage. I have an idea of where I want to take it and what I want to explore with this project story-wise, so I hope to keep at it!

Some images of the currently work-in-progress Chapter 6

If anyone actually read Blip and have been caught up on it, you may have noticed that I published the new chapter in three weeks instead of two. I think I'm starting to realize that this schedule may not work for me too, which I feel decently guilty about because I see other webcomic artists produce much better results in their weekly schedules, and I can't even keep up a two week schedule with such a lackluster art style and page count. But I don't want to push myself too hard, because I NEED to make sure I don't get burnt out no matter what.

So even if I hate it, yeah I can't really promise a schedule, I'm just gonna upload new chapters at my own pace at this point. BUT I PROMISE I will work as much and as fast as possible on new chapters.

I would like to write more about Blip and making it, but I want to keep this post concise, so perhaps in a future post, I'll talk about it more. But let's move on.

Going to Seattle

A few weeks back, a couple of my friends visited from Arizona to see me (and the state of Washington, of course), and one of the main things we got to do while visiting was go into Seattle and explore.

One of the first things we did after getting off the bus was ride the Ferris Wheel, since it was the closest thing to us at the time. I even got some pictures while on it, courtesy of my PlayStation Vita B)

In glorious 480p (not even probably)

After that, we walked around to other places like Pike Place Market, the first Starbucks, Pink Gorilla Games (I bought Persona 4 Golden and Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness for 40 bucks!), and then, finally... the Space Needle.

Beautiful view of Seattle

It was getting kinda late, so we went to Dick's Drive-In to top it off, and then took the bus back to the hotel, where I spent the rest of my time watching End of Evangelion with them before saying goodbye.

It was a busy and expensive day, but I'm glad I got to spend time with my friends from Arizona. I thought when I moved that I would associate with them less because of the inconvenience of being farther away, but in the end, we're making it work out surprisingly, so I hope to keep things going with them.

A Reflection

The past year has been interesting, to say the least. I wasn't expecting to be back in Washington at all by the end of 2023, but here I am. That is probably the most significant aspect of this year, but there were other things too, such as me ramping up work on the website, starting my webcomic, graduating high school, etc. It's been a year with a lot of stuff going on, especially outside of my bubble too. Writers/actors strike, the attacks on Palestine, HENRY KISSINGER DEAD LETS GOOOOOOOOO, and more that I can't list off the top of my head. But I think through all this, I've slowly begun to learn more about the world and improve myself as a person through it, learning how to deal with more political and sensitive topics, educating myself on important social subjects, and also more personal things, like utilizing new methods to increase my productivity.

I don't like making promises to myself like with New Years Resolutions and all that because I won't keep them, but if there's one goal I have in mind this year, it's to become a more productive person through my personal projects like my webcomic or my site, and to maintain a balance of that and my life. I think if I can figure that out, than I would be pretty satisfied with myself this year.

...I say this a lot, but I'm starting to ramble now. It's 1am in 2024, I think it's time for me to hit the hay.

Good night, reader. And Happy New Year. :)

Fortnite, work, and Blip

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 12:56:58 -0800

Well, today’s Sunday (editor note: as of writing), and I was going to type out a post, but I’ve decided to do another text to speech post again, so hopefully the text (and my thoughts) doesn’t get messed up by the time I finish this.

My life’s been… okay. Not really great, but not really terrible. The only thing I’ve really got going on right now is primarily just my job, and I’ve finally started playing Fortnite after abstaining from it for such a long time now.

Update on my job

So far, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve gotten my job, and I’ve had to deal with understaffing and stress. This is the first time I’ve ever done food service before, so that also adds to the stress of this job. And as time goes on with this job, people are leaving over time, which is a little bit demotivating. I don’t have a lot of free time either, since my only days off are Sundays and Mondays, and Sundays aren’t really free since I’m dragged to church half the day.

This job only lasts until January so I might just stick with my current schedule for now and just put up with it, but if things get worse, I might have to adjust my schedule or leave or something, I don’t know.

But for the time being I’m coping well enough with the job, and it pays, which is what matters most, so for now, I’ll stick with it.

Fortnite

To lighten up the mood of this post a little bit, this week I started playing Fortnite for the first time, after staying away from the game for many years, thinking that it was “cringe” to play the game. But at this point, I don’t really care anymore, and a lot of my friends are playing it, so after seeing the hype with the new season, I decided to start playing the game.

I started a couple days before the new event started so I got to see a little bit of the OG map, which was cool. Eventually, I got to see the event with my friends, and soon enough, the actual modes came out and I’ve now tried all three of them.

The three new modes in this season are Fortnite Festival, which is a new rhythm game mode created by Harmonix, the devs of Rock Band and Fuser, LEGO Fortnite, which is basically just Fortnite’s version of LEGO Worlds, and Rocket Racing which is supposed to be a racing mode that takes from Rocket League.

My least favorite one is the LEGO Fortnite mode, because of the fact that I don’t really like Minecraft-esque open world sandbox games. I’m already so exhausted with Minecraft that anything similar just makes me feel even more exhausted. This game mode also feels kind of bare-bones, which is understandable since it’s all in Fortnite, but regardless it’s still not really that fun to play in my opinion, and when I do play it, I can’t really tell what I should be doing, since there’s not enough to do or build to make it fun to play as a proper sandbox game.

However, the other two modes on the other hand are actually pretty fun, especially Rocket Racing. I thought my favorite mode would be Fortnite Festival since my favorite kind of games nowadays are rhythm games, but because of the lack of songs that I actually care about (plus the lack of support for Guitar Hero style controllers at the moment) it’s currently my second favorite mode of the event.

I’m genuinely surprised by how much I actually liked Rocket Racing. It is kind of bare bones, just like all of the other events, but again, this is all being made inside Fortnite, so I can understand that. However, I actually had a lot more fun than I thought I would. It’s really fun to race with your friends, and playing on a controller feels really good, it just feels nice to control.

So overall, this event has some bad parts of it but for the most part it’s actually pretty good.

And now to get to the actual gameplay of Fortnite, the Battle Royale. I never really played many Battle Royale games prior to this, so this was kind of a new experience for me, but once I got the hang of it I’ve actually started to kind of like it a lot.

I also noticed that I’ve started spending money on this game once I saw some of the skins that were available, such as Raven Team Leader, but I hope I don’t make this a habit. I will probably have to create some sort of limit for myself haha.

Anyways overall I’m having a lot more fun with Fortnite than I thought I would, so it might end up becoming a game that I play long-term.

Website and Blip

I feel bad for not updating this site very much nowadays since I’ve been so busy with work and, not to mention my webcomic, which is taking more priority over my website due to me wanting to fulfill my bi-weekly schedule that I’ve now created for myself. As of now, Chapter 4 should be out on GlobalComix, so please go read that, along with the other previous chapters if you haven’t already. But now that I’ve gotten Chapter 4 uploaded, I’ve already started working on Chapter 5. I actually finished Chapter 4 on Friday night and I started working on Chapter 5 right after Chapter 4. I’m hoping to create a buffer in the future so that I may have time to work on other projects such as posting new art on Twitter, or just having free time to myself.

It’s a little bit scary seeing a project like this that I’m working on now up on the Internet and free for people to read for the first time. It’s intimidating, but I want to do this because this project will help strengthen my creative abilities and get myself to not be afraid to show people the work that I create, because in the end, the whole point of this webcomic isn’t to create an astoundingly good story with great art or anything like that, but rather to use it as a creative scratch pad to explore ideas that I think have potential and see what sticks and what doesn’t, which is why the art looks meh.

I’m not aiming for perfection with this webcomic, I just want to make something that makes me happy and lets me do whatever I want without my perfectionism getting in the way. This certainly doesn’t mean that I’m not open to criticism, if anything, I’ll use this to become less afraid of criticism, but I don’t want this project to devolve into me getting burnt out because I’m putting too much effort into it.

Gonna just end the post here since I’m rambling at this point. Thanks for reading :)

First post of December: Festivities and Blip

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 09:50:59 -0800

It’s been a few days since I wrote here, so why not catch up?

Working a job

I’ve been working at my job for the past few weeks now and it’s been okay. I don’t love it but I don’t hate it. It’s a food service job, which makes me surprised that I’m dealing with it fine since I’ve never done food service before and I’ve always stayed away from those sorts of jobs, but it’s not that bad. This is a seasonal job, so I’ll be let go by January, but it should be fine since I’ll see if I can get rehired in the store, since it’s not just food service. I’m glad I took this job since I definitely felt like I’ve been a little toughened up, which was my idea for taking this job.

Blip

My new webcomic, Blip, released about a week ago now, and I’m currently working on Chapter 4 right now, which that, alongside my job, is the main reason I’ve neglected this site for a bit now. I think the new chapter should come out by the end of this week/beginning of next week with the pace I’m working at it on. I think I need to put more time on it during the day, since I only put an hour or two on it. Regardless, I don’t wanna push myself too much, so I’ll try to push more time into it while not overwhelming myself.

Root beer

I’ve been in the mood to drink root beer for some reason. So today I went to Fred Meyer and got a bottle of root beer and vanilla ice cream so I can make a root beer float. Gonna try it later today, so I hope I enjoy it.

Thanks for reading, sorry for the lackluster post, I just don’t have a lot to say at the moment. :)

Blip: my new webcomic!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 22:11:42 -0800

I’ve been talking about this (and trying to work on it) for a very long time now, but it’s finally here.

My new webcomic is titled Blip, and the first three chapters are out now to read on GlobalComix!

I’ve been working on these first few chapters throughout the year, and despite the quality of the comic itself so far, I’ve learned a lot about the process of it all, and I have a clearer vision of the story for this project of mine. Although the focus of this project is to push past my perfectionism and create a project that may not be perfect (or even good, for that matter), I still want to do my best to make this as good as I can make it, so I would appreciate your support by continuing to read the comic after this, once new chapters come out.

I will probably update my site to have a section for the comic. That way, I can provide content on the site, plus updates for new chapters, and all that.

With all that being said, at the moment, I’m working on the draft for chapter 4, so look out for that in the future, and thanks for reading :)

One year of nick64.me

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 11:19:36 -0800

I almost forgot, but today my website (at least, as it currently is) is one year old! My first post was written on November 25th, 2022. It’s interesting to think it’s been a year now, it honestly doesn’t really feel like it. But when I look back… yeah, ok maybe I feel it now.

Surprisingly, I have few screenshots of designs of the site over time, but I imagine some of them are on the Wayback Machine or something. Perhaps I should remaster some of them and try to use them again lol. But here’s a look back at nick64 through 2022-now.

An early home page for nick64.me when I was figuring out what to even put here.

nick64.me during Christmas of 2022

The previous design of nick64.me prior to the current one.

nick64.me at present day, present time

For whoever reads these posts on this site, or even looks at my social media posts, thank you. I’m glad that I made this site and I’m glad that at least somebody out there may be reading. I hope to continue writing on this site for more years to come.

Happy Thanksgiving 2023!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 10:37:44 -0800

I’m not gonna write much, but I just wanted to say happy Thanksgiving! I’m gonna be relaxing today and not doing a lot, just working on my stuff.

Speaking of my stuff, the first three chapters of my comic are basically done now! I plan on uploading them soon, so I’ll make some update regarding that in the near future hopefully, the next hurdle is just converting all my Krita files to whatever I need for the website I plan to use.

Other than that, yeah I’m not doing much, just working and stuff, getting moolah. December is coming up, so that’s nice.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving, guys.

Avalon (2001) and consuming obscure content

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 08:59:44 -0800

A while back, I found a song from YouTube, which was from the soundtrack of a movie known as Avalon. It seemed cool, so I decided to watch it eventually, and now I did.

Avalon

Initially, this movie was a lot harder to find than I thought. It’s not on any streaming services, and finding a physical copy seemed to be impossible. So the only way to watch the movie was to… utilize my skills to locate a copy. And eventually I did. While I was looking though, I found some interesting information about the movie.

Here’s the original Japanese trailer for the movie:

First of all, it was released in 2001 as a collaboration between several Japanese studios and Polish producer Deiz Production, with several members from the 1995 Ghost in the Shell participating in the production, such as director Mamoru Oshii, writer Kazunori Itō, and composer Kenji Kawai, who by the way, does a killer job with this film’s tracks, primarily its theme song, which is SOOOOOO GOOOODDDDDDDD OMGGGG.

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Now playing: Avalon Theme (Extended) from Avalon

At this point though, I’m just sort of reciting the Wikipedia article, but it is interesting to see a production with a collaborative effort like this, I’ve never really seen that before. While a chunk of the team is based in Japan, the cast is all Polish and filming was mostly done in Poland. The Polish Armed Forces even allowed the crew to borrow their equipment for filming.

But anyways, on with the review. (I won’t write a synopsis so just read it online or watch the movie.)

The movie

Overall, it’s… okay.

I think that while the film is kinda cool overall, it generally feels somewhat unfocused sometimes and the plot is really hard to keep track of. Not only that, but while the world shown does have a unique look to it that can be cool at times, the dull color palette present in the movie becomes somewhat of an eyesore, which I do get makes the change to the colorful world at the end a very drastic and surprising change, but it’s still annoying for me. And considering only like half of the movie is in Avalon, there’s somewhat of a lack of worldbuilding, which leaves me wondering why are people playing this game, how is this game incorporated into society, and, if this game is illegal, why are there posters for it literally everywhere like it’s just sort of confusing to me.

Ash herself is kind of a blank slate of a character, and doesn’t really have any crazy depth, other than that she was in a team called Wizard and that she left after a mission went wrong, but it all feels disconnected.

Her character kinda reminds me a little of Major Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell… In fact, this whole movie does. It feels like they tried to do another futuristic cyberpunk movie about computers and stuff and just changed it up a little. Hell, the intro credits sequence feels ripped right from Ghost in the Shell, just with a color palette change.

I think what this movie does GOOD is, first of all, the soundtrack is pretty neat, good job to them on that regard. I think the ending part where it changes the palette to a full color spectrum is really neat too, but I’m half and half on it, as I mentioned earlier. I also think that the movie being in Polish instead of Japanese sets it apart a bit more from other movies, since a lot of cyberpunk worlds we see depicted in media are usually in countries like Japan or the US or whatever, so having something else is a bit more refreshing and also gives actors and actresses in that region more opportunites to shine. I think the acting was pretty alright, especially from the main character.

So while this movie has a lot of downsides to it, it’s also good too in some parts. It’s in the middle for me basically. Do I recommend it? Ehh, I mean if this sort of story is your thing, and you can bear some of the issues I mentioned, sure I guess, but I’m not going out of my way to say this is some masterpiece or something, it’s really not.

Watching and talking about obscure content

I think that doing this sort of thing is really good for you honestly because when you consume more mainstream content, you already have a preconceived bias of whether something is good or not, usually from word of mouth, or from watching reviews or something. So I think that watching more obscure content like this really lets you create your own opinions and for me, being into wanting to write and draw and all that, I might also get some ideas and inspiration from content that’s not mainstream.

Halfway through November: Comic update and jobs

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 13:01:17 -0800

I haven’t wrote here for a tiny bit, just been busy with life, but I have some time to write, so I want to just give an update now.

First of all, I finally got a job! It took a while (and many rejections too…), but it finally happened. However, I’m working in food service, which is a weird contrast from my old job doing retail work. I just started yesterday and I’ll be going in later today to start a full shift, so I’ll get an idea of how the job will be. I only work evenings, so I’m happy about that since I can avoid lunch rushes, but I still have to deal with dinner… I don’t think it’s that bad, though. I only tried the job a little yesterday, but it seemed alright, just need to be on your toes.

Secondly, I am inching closer to finishing the first three chapters of my comic, and it should happen pretty soon at this point. I’ve been talking about it on and off, but I have been (for the most part) working on it pretty consistently, just really slowly, only doing about 2-3 panels a day. There’s a few reasons for that.

Motivation

For the most part, I like to think that I have been relatively motivated to work on the project, however at times, there are moments where I don’t feel like working on the comic, and as to not push myself too hard and burn out, I have been taking these motivation dips seriously and I didn’t touch the project during those times. It wasn’t anything major, typically a couple of days, but that definitely slowed things down. Not to mention, I also had motivation dips stem from doubts about whether I should be writing this or not, if it was good, etc. However, I’ve been generally good at flipping things around when those times come, and now I’m close to the point I wanted to be at before uploading it online.

Artistic choices

I won’t say what happens in the comic, to avoid spoilers I guess, I don’t know, but to sum up, in the beginning I thought it would be neat to change the method of illustration from digital to pencil and paper scraps temporarily, as a way to convey the difference in the worlds my main character is dealing with. However, while this only lasts about two chapters, the work has proven itself to be rather tedious. For every panel, I would have to:

Draw the characters/objects on paper
Tear them out
Lay them out on another paper
Scan them
Plot the scans digitally on the comic pages

It doesn’t sound that bad, however, this grew very annoying really quickly. As a result, I feel like the quality of this section is rather lacking, which has also contributed to my occasional lack of motivation. In retrospect, I think this was not a good approach to take, and if I ever chose to come back to it, I would scrap that idea. However, my ideology for this project is not to make a good project, but instead to make a project. Whenever it comes to these sorts of projects, like writing or drawing, I never got far in the past because of perfectionism, so this project is my way to try to stray away from the idea that my creations need to be good because the idea is that at least I would’ve made something, regardless of quality, and that’s more than I would’ve ever done before had I kept the same mentality.

This is not to say that quality in general is not a focus or priority of my comic at all, I do try to take that into account. I have especially been recently putting a lot of thought in the writing side of things. However, I’m not afraid to make mistakes with this project, and once something is done in it, there’s no going back to it for me.

Anyways, that’s enough excuses for that. I only have a few pages left of the current chapter to complete, and I’ve already finished all the paper sections and have begun transitioning back to digital, so hopefully I will finish it soon. With the new job I have, we’ll see.

Thank you for reading :)

brawlers world merch

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 19:18:57 -0800

Got my keychain from brawlers world yesterday, pretty happy about it.

Don’t have much more to say other than that, I just really like brawlers world and I’m glad I got to get some merch.

Rainy morning + the FNAF movie review

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 10:58:51 -0700

This morning, I woke up to a really nice rainy sky. The weather is really nice right now, so I’m kind of in a good mood.

With this new mood in mind, I’m setting myself to be more productive. And what better way to be productive than to write a review on the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie?

It was alright

I have an important thing to say before I go into this. I’m NOT a FNAF fan. I’ve barely played the games, I only know a bit of the lore, and that’s it, so this review is less a fan’s perspective and more an outsider’s perspective. Nonetheless, I thought it was alright. Not great, but not terrible either.

I think it’s interesting that they changed some of the lore aspects to fit with the movie and make more of a story. For example, giving a reason for Mike to do all he does by introducing his brother into the movie. I feel like it’s stupid that Afton killed his brother because maybe OG lore-wise, it makes sense, but in the movie, it feels so forced, so IDK.

Overall, an alright film, good for the fans, good fanservice, but IDK I don’t care for it much. But that’s just a theory.

First post of November: What's new?

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 15:32:42 -0700

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Now playing: Tama River from Umihara Kawase Shun

Feel free to pause if you want a silent read!

Well, for starters, my PSVSD FINALLY ARRIVED TODAY, but I wrote a post about it already, so check it out here!

Besides that though, I guess it’s good to reflect on the previous month.

Positivity

I made a promise a couple of posts ago that I would try to have a more positive outlook on things instead of writing about negative posts all the time, and I think that progress is starting to show, since I finally made a post that’s not talking about my life for the first time in a bit. And right now, I just feel happy in general, since I’m occupying myself with new projects and stuff to do.

Working on projects

Despite my changing mood over the month, I have been making more of an effort to work on my personal projects, and so far, it’s been working surprisingly well. Rather than force myself to work every single day, I work as much as I can and feel like every day, and occasionally take a break. I hope that this makes it less likely for me to experience burn out and keeps me more motivated than before, since the motivation is self-driven rather than forced, if that makes sense.

Gaming

I’ve gotten a lot more into gaming and collecting in the past month, probably because I don’t have anything to do right now, but it’s given me more motivation to clear games in my backlog that I didn’t finish before. For example, I finally 100% completed all the achievements for Persona 5 Royal on Steam, and also beat Spider-Man Remastered, and now I plan to play either NieR: Automata or Resident Evil 2. Along with that, I’ve been getting more into trying other consoles and console modding, like the Vita, and my next project, an Xbox 360 Slim I had lying around, so I will make a post on me doing an RGH mod for it once I finish that.

Overall…

It’s been a pretty alright month. It started kinda bad, but things are looking good for the future as of now, so I can’t wait to see what awaits.

Once again, thank you for reading. Have a great day :)

BAIIIII!!!!!!! :3

The PSVSD finally arrives

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 15:03:09 -0700

It finally happened. After 48 days, the PSVSD finally arrived today.

It came when I didn’t really expect it to. I was working on some other random thing when my mom called me and said I had a package, and that she had to give a signature for it. I was a little confused why she called me up at first since she didn’t tell me why, but she showed me the package and I just was kinda shocked. I kinda thought it just wasn’t gonna arrive. And I know the shipping is supposed to take a long time, but 48 days is A LOT OF TIME.

Regardless, it was finally in my hands.

It was so nice seeing this in my hands now. But now that I had it, I needed to start modding the Vita. So I prepared by taking out my SD2Vita, which only lasted me 4 days… It did well while it lasted.

Out with the old, in with the new.

After I took my SD2Vita out, I flipped the console over and unscrewed all the screw on the body, and popped the back off of it.

Naked photos of the Vita.

After that, it was a pretty straightforward installation. It was just a matter of removing all the old antenna cables, popping off the plastic piece covering the 3G module, unscrewing it, and it came out with no problem.

The slot with no module in it. Kinda nifty.

Now I just pop my SD card out of my SD2vita, and into the PSVSD module, slide that in, and…

Pretty neat!

And that’s the whole mod! …Well, at least, the hardware side of it. I still had to do the software modifications as well. Before getting to the software, I had a bit of a panic because the system wouldn’t turn on, but after some troubleshooting, I figured out that I needed to plug the charger in to boot it up, so once I figured that out, it was alive!

I had to reset the time because I unplugged the battery, but that’s alright.

From there, I had to mess around with installing stuff, and I actually did need to use my SD2Vita again to transfer some files and install them, since the Vita wasn’t at the point of setting up the PSVSD yet, so I guess it was a good thing I got it. But in the end, I got it all set up!

Ready to game!

Overall, the set up was decently straightfoward, and I’m really happy to finally have what I would call the definitive PS Vita. And now, I’m installing some games on it to play, so I can’t wait to start using it.

Have a silly, spooky Halloween!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 08:58:17 -0700

Heeeeehheeeehahahahahahaaaahoohohooooooo…. it is Halloween!!!!!!

…I don’t really celebrate it, but I wanted to write a post about it for the sake of the holiday.

Skeleton guy is schmovin'

It’s not a holiday I celebrate because of le Christian parents, but I do enjoy the vibe of the holiday, so that’s why I wanted to make a post about it. I will probably spend my Halloween watching a movie in call with friends or something.

I don’t have a lot to say beyond that, but I am excited to get that clearance candy after Halloween ends :)

Happy Halloween, reader.

Turning that frown up-side down

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 12:49:40 -0700

It’s been a second since I’ve wrote here, and I’ve been thinking a bit about my mood a bit, and how a lot of what I’ve written is more negative than positive. I kinda uh… don’t want to be like that much.

I’m not gonna be like crazy positive or whatever, but I really hate that the site has turned from a shitposting fun place for me into a broody diary for me to complain about all my problems, and that’s not what I want it to be!!! I wanna be happy, and an example for myself in the future and for whoever reads this, so I’ve decided to try to work towards being more positive and writing more about things I had fun doing. I will probably try to write something for Halloween, even though I’m not doing anything then, but I do wanna make an event post, so I’ll think of something, I’ve got a few days, so I’ll brainstorm something cool.

But yeah, anyways I hope whoever reads this keeps reading my blog more and hasn’t been annoyed by all the negativity going on.

P.S. I just got an SD2Vita in the mail for my Vita, so keep an eye out for a post about that maybe????

Home server and shipping frustration, but other fun stuff too

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 20:50:41 -0700

I’m probably gonna post this the next day instead of tonight, so as of writing, it’s currently October 20th.

The bad

Today was kind of an annoying day, and my head is kind of killing me right now, but some good things happened first, mainly me getting the motherboard for my server.

Here's the board installed in my server :)

It’s a nice little board, higher quality than I expected it to be, considering it’s from AliExpress. I’m not really sure what to expect from items on there in terms of quality because I always hear bad stuff about it, but hey, maybe they do have some good things on there.

So once I got it, I used an old case I had lying around to assemble the whole thing, and eventually I got it turned on and it worked just fine. I had to reinstall Debian on my SSD because it wouldn’t boot from the old partition for some reason, but after that, it was booted and I could get my server set up.

…Small problem, though.

This motherboard doesn’t have Wi-Fi, which is a big problem for me because my house doesn’t have Ethernet jacks around, so the only way for me to get internet on my devices for the time being is through Wi-Fi. “No problem, I’ll just use ICS on Windows to route my PC’s Wi-Fi to the server!”, I thought. I tried and TRIED to get it to work and it just wouldn’t.

So after thinking about it for a bit, I got the idea to try to do the same thing, but with my Raspberry Pi, since I figured maybe it would work differently somehow. And maybe it would IF I GOT IT TO WORK. Apparently it’s not a very easy task to just set up a Wi-Fi bridge on a Raspberry Pi, and I still haven’t really figured it out.

On top of that, I also decided to message the seller for the PSVSD, since at this point it has been over 36 days since it shipped out and it’s nowhere to be seen. I know that the shipping does take a while for it, but I saw reviews talking about how it got to Italy or some other country in Europe in around 30 days, so I don’t see why it’s taking longer to arrive at my house, which is on THE SAME CONTINENT. So at this point, I kind of gave up on it and now I’m trying to see if the seller can ship me a new one or refund me. I think it would be more worthwhile if I just manufacture one myself with PCBWay or something at this point, because I genuinely do not want to wait another 30 days for this. Once I get my server configured, I’m probably just gonna order an SD2Vita as a temporary substitude so I can actually use my Vita.

So right now, I’m a little frustrated now and I’m ending the day off with a headache and kind of a bad note.

I did do some cool stuff earlier in my week though.

The good

I went to a sushi place called Kura Sushi in Bellevue with a friend and got this Gojo… thing. They have these capsule machines that dispense a capsule when you insert 15 sushi plates into a slot, so that’s really cool.

Daddy's home

It was surprisingly advanced when it came to what was in the restaurant. They had these yellow robots that went around, mainly for drinks, but also for carrying small trays as well.

The robots did a… mostly good job? I remember it carrying plastic cups with drinks in them fine, but when it came to it carrying tea in yunomi (they were these Japanese tea cups that were like a few inches tall), I kinda laughed at the fact that every time it moved, it would spill a bunch of tea everywhere and leave a mess on the floor. And it wasn’t a one time thing, it just always had a hard time dealing with those cups.

But besides that, the conveyor part was really cool too, and when you didn’t want to just get what was on the sushi belt, you could order something on the menu and it would zoom to your table on a belt above. So overall, it was really fun, but I forgot how much food we got and ended up spending a bunch… oops.

Umihara Kawase

I also started getting into a game after finding a video on Mastodon:

And I thought, “Damn! This music is really good! I hope I can find it somewhere online…”

So I dug around and found it from the OST of a game called “Umihara Kawase Shun”. It’s a low-budget PS1 platformer that has a really interesting style and its gameplay mechanic is that you have a fishing line you use to swing around platforms and make your way through levels. It’s really fun, but I want to write a seperate post about it in the future, as to not keep making one post for a million different things, since I’ve formed a bad habit of doing that.

Anyways yeah, as of writing this right now, it is currently the morning of October 21st, and my headache is gone, so I now feel a bit more motivated to work on stuff. I made a Post-it note list of everything I need to do and I’m gonna do my best to stay off YouTube.

Thank you for reading.

Life in limbo

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 12:06:22 -0700

Hello, reader. :)

I hope you are doing alright. I’m sort of not, and I wanted to talk about it. It’s nothing serious, but it’s just a few things that have been bothering me in my life lately, so I wanted to write about them to externalize my feelings about it. I don’t like always writing these negative posts about how I feel and whatever because I feel bad for being such a downer so often, but I feel like I need to get this out.

The stagnation of my life

I think one part of things that are contributing to my mood is that NOTHING is happening in my life right now. I still don’t have a job due to the fact that I can’t find a lot of jobs I want to work, (and no one really wants to hire me).

In transit

Then, there’s the whole fiasco with the PSVSD, which I’ve been looking forward to a lot, and as of writing, has approached day 29 in shipping. There’s that and my AliExpress parts for my NAS, which will also take a while, so I just have to sit and twiddle my thumbs everyday until the eventual day comes, which feels like FOREVER.

Third, and I feel like the most important part, is my social life. I haven’t really been talking to too many of my friends in-person, and only really dealing with people online. It’s not like I haven’t been at all, but not a lot either. Everyone is so busy and occupied with their own jobs or college, and some people live in different locations now. One of my best friends lives up an hour from here, and I went to visit them earlier this week, and going there sort of just made me feel more depressed as I realized that me seeing them, along with my other friends, is no longer going to be easy to do anymore.

And with me taking a gap year, I feel sort of… left behind? I have some friends that are taking gap years, but most of my friends aren’t, and I heard that this could happen, but I didn’t really think about it much until it hit me in the face now.

Conclusion

Yeah, that’s kinda it for the bad stuff. I think I just need to talk to more people, and go outside, get support from my friends and hang out with them more to make myself feel better. It’s not like this whole week was bad for me. When I went out with my friend earlier, we encountered an arcade where I got to play Pop’n Music for the first time.

…But yeah, that’s kinda the only great thing that happened to me this week. Thanks for reading though, writing this helped a bit.

Walking around in Seattle and Pink Gorilla Games

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 16:04:31 -0700

Today, I went into Seattle to walk around and explore a bit.

It was kinda nice, I walked around University Village and I walked out to get to Pink Gorilla Games. It took about like 20-25 minutes to walk there though, but the route there was actually very nice and pretty.

At Pink Gorilla

When I got to Pink Gorilla, I sorta took my time inside, looking through all the PS2, PSP, and Vita games. In the end, while there were games I was interested in, they weren’t top priority for me, and I didn’t wanna spend too much money, but one game did make me interested. It was sealed and 30 bucks, which for a Vita game, doesn’t sound bad at all, so I bought it.

That game was…

Lumines: Electronic Symphony

I’ve never played this game before, but I am in LOVE with Lumines on the PSP, so I imagine this game must be pretty similar. And also, I wanted to try to go into something blind, so this felt like a good choice to try. I don’t think I’ll open it, since I can just load the file for it on my Vita using my PSVSD. Speaking of which, my PSVSD IS STILL NOT HERE!!!!!

Give it up for DAY 20!!!!!

Oh, well. Patience is a virtue, I guess, so I’ll try to not think about it too much. I just wish I could use my Vita…

That’s all for today. I’ll probably spend the rest of the day on YouTube or working on my small comic. I’ll see.

First day of October: Spooky time!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 16:48:21 -0700

It’s currently the first day of October (as of writing this). I’m trying something new with this post and using text to speech instead of just conventional typing so I hope I don’t make any major grammatical errors or anything, I’ll try to proofread this when I get the chance (hi past me :D).

Compared to the past several days here, where it’s been gloomy and rainy (even though I do like the rain), today was really sunny, as it hopefully shows in the photo.

My mood

In terms of how I’ve been feeling overall, I haven’t been really doing super excellent for the past couple weeks, mainly because I just been low on motivation, busy with tasks, getting my life together, getting a good job, thinking about school, etc.

But today is the start of a new month, so hopefully I can get my motivation up and make today the starting point of something better.

It’s kind of weird talking and doing text to speech like this it feels so weird and unconventional because I’ve never done this before, but hopefully doing things this way will get my inflections and what I’m trying to say more accurately.

Motivation

I feel like one part of my problem with my motivation is that a lot of the tasks that I’m currently working on right now are very long-term and they don’t produce results in a short time, so it’s very hard for me to keep doing what I’m doing and yielding no immediate results. But hopefully, if I just keep telling myself that things will change, then perhaps I will begin to see results in the future.

I think one part that’s causing my current slump right now is that a lot of my friends have started college now and meanwhile, I sort of feel left behind. I do have friends that are taking gap years, I just still feel left behind anyways, but whatever I guess.

Updates on random things

Just wanna give some smaller updates on some things going on:

PSVSD adapter shipping

I guess the first small update that I have is that the PSVSD is still not here yet, but it is making progress in shipping. I’ve been checking it every day, and tracking currently says that it’s cleared customs and it’s getting shipped over the border to here, so that’s really exciting. I hope it gets here soon, instead of having to wait more for it to slug its way through the post office.

Home server

The second small update that I have is that I sold the parts (or at least some of the parts) from my now old home server and hopefully, once I get a job soon, I’ll be able to afford to get the new parts I want. But in the meantime, I’ve plugged all of my hard drives into an external hard drive bay and plugged all that into a Raspberry Pi 3 that I had lying around, and so far, it’s actually… pretty terrible. It’s not that great, but you know, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, since it’s running through USB 2, but it is what it is and it functions about as well as I need it to for now.

Rate my setup B)

Conclusion

Yeah, that’s kinda the end for now, I don’t have much else to say, but I’ll try to do more stuff with my life so that I can make more posts about it lol. Have a spooky October :)

Snickerdoo-disaster

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 14:54:59 -0700

Yeah, so I tried to make snickerdoodles yesterday.

I’ve been wanting to do more baking and cooking and stuff for the past while, so I’ve been ocassionally trying to make different foods, and after a cookie-related discussion with some friends, I got in the mood to make snickerdoodles. So I got the ingredients and tried to make it. I had no clue about the process of it all, so I went in blind and…

Yeah, at first they were kinda bad, but I left them in the fridge for a while and they got better. I think I undercooked them lmao. But hey, I’m trying new things and doing stuff with my day, so that’s all that matters to me.

Going out at Everett Mall + minor site updates

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 13:44:08 -0700

A couple of days ago, I went out with a couple of friends from my high school to Everett Mall to hang out. It was actually kind of fun.

Walking and shopping

We spent a decent amount of time walking around and shopping around at some stores. Some of my friends ordered boba several times, while I only got food at the end, where we ate at Jack-in-the-Box. They had an arcade there, which had some cool games, like Mario Kart, Minecraft Dungeons, but the one that stood out to me was Guitar Hero.

Woahhh.

I tried to play the game a little, being familiar with some of the songs on there, but I put on a poor show in front of my friends because I hadn’t warmed up and the little notch on the yellow button was worn, so it was hard for me to get a mental image of where my hand was on the guitar lmao.

We all played some Minecraft Dungeons Arcade afterwards. It’s a 4-player game, which was perfect since we were a group of 4, so we played it for a few minutes and then walked out of the mall.

They had a HobbyTown there, so we walked in and checked out their selection of model kits. I was mainly interested in the Gundams though, and while I didn’t get any that day, I did get myself some Mr. Mark Setter for water decals that I never applied previously on my Gundams, so I’ll get to that eventually.

From there, we walked to Half-Price Books, which was fun to look through (despite their overpriced items), and I did spot an Evangelion DVD, which I wanted to get for my collection of EVA merch since it was one I didn’t own yet and it was SEALED, but…

60 bucks? Yeah, no thanks.

After that, we went to Walmart to get some drinks and to Jack-in-the-Box to eat, where we sat and talked for a bit before we all split off and left.

It was a really fun time hanging out with some of my friends, especially since I hadn’t seen some of them since before COVID hit. I’m glad that I had the chance to hang out with them again, and I hope to do more in the future.

P.S. minor site updates

I added my button again in the Info page, but it’s not updated to look like the rest of the site so I’ll figure that out in the future. Also added a new Bed page and fixed some stuff with the Neocities redirect. Pretty much it.

The grindset mindset

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 21:48:40 -0700

MUSIC I LIKE PART: ???

Good song, please listen to it :) Onto the post…

Well, I was going to write about the PS Vita and the PSVSD adapter for the Vita 1100 models, but it’s kinda taking a REALLY DAMN LONG TIME.

I am going to cry

My Amazon Prime brainrot has made me unable to bear shipping longer than 3 days, so I’m kinda seething right now, but it’s okay. I didn’t want to leave this site for too long, so I wanted to write about my life again, just catch up on what I’m doing at the moment.

Adjusting to my new life in Washington

At this point, it’s about to be one month since I’ve moved, and it’s been kinda weird, and rough at times, but at this point I think I feel pretty used to being here again now.

I’ve seen several of my old friends, still seeing some old ones and rekindling friendships that I’ve sort of abandoned, and it’s been kind of nice. Part of me still feels conflicted about leaving my friends in Arizona behind since I formed genuine bonds with them, but thanks to my family members needing to fly over there for business, I will be able to hop on with them occasionally and visit. And now that I can drive and do my own thing and be an adult and all that, it will be a lot easier to do so, so I don’t feel too bad about it. And in the end, I moved here because I knew I would enjoy it more, so I consciouisly made that choice, and I think (at least, right now), I made the right choice.

Getting a job

I’ve been looking into trying to get some jobs in the IT field, mainly for more pay, but also to make my resume look good and to get into the field I want to be in and all that. But as it turns out, when you’re fresh out of high school and have no certifications and no college behind your back at all, maybe employers DON’T want you. So instead, I’m just gonna suck it up and work somewhere smaller for the time being to get my work experience up, and in the meantime, try to improve my skills and work towards getting some sort of certification, such as the CompTIA A+, so that I can get a good IT job in the future.

Working on grit and me as a person

Now that I’m out of school and don’t have a job, I’m kind of just rotting in my bedroom doing nothing with my life. So instead of doing nothing, I’m now doing slightly more things, but mostly doing nothing.

I started using Google Tasks to give myself reminders and sort of make a loose schedule throughout my day of tasks I need to do. For example, now that I’m out of school and no longer taking Japanese classes, I need to do my own self study, and so I’ve implemented flash cards into my learning, but I always forget to do them. So now, I have a reminder on my phone to tell me to do them every night, and as long as I stick to that regimen and DON’T BREAK OUT OF IT, this Tasks thing might work pretty well for everything else. Using that, alongside the Post-It-note method of getting myself to do tasks has been decently effective in making me do stuff with my day.

I’ve also been using it to work on my projects as well, such as my comic (YES I’M STILL WORKING ON IT, I JUST WORK EXTREMELY SLOW, IT’S A TRAINING PROCESS I SWEAR IM FINISHING IT) and… ironically enough, NOT my website, though I should do that, I want to make it a goal to write here at least once a week.

Tasks aside, I’ve also been trying to work out a bit more. Nothing crazy or anything, just doing small exercises throughout my day, like stretching, or doing like push-ups and sit-ups and stuff. Just to get a little more activity in my day, although I DO want to increase it and make it a bigger part of my day and be more active, since I will be the least active I’ve ever been.

Regarding the website

So now that I’m mostly done with the redesign… now what?

Well, I’ll probably continue to work on adding stuff to this site. Now that I’ve made a new design for it that I’m really proud of and feels much more rounded (literally) and complete, I feel more compelled to expand on it, so I might work on things, like completing the pages I didn’t finish (hey, maybe I should add that to my Tasks list!) or adding more visual touch ups. I had some fun ideas, like making a TV sprite to add to posts every time I want to put a video in them, or making stylized elements to spice up the aesthetic of the posts a bit. But I guess we’ll see if I’m motivated to actually go along with that.

The end

Well, that’s kinda it from me. Guess I’ll leave it at that and sign off here. Good night.

I finally got a PlayStation Vita!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 19:48:29 -0700

After shilling it for so long, I finally got one!!!

I think I overpaid a bit for it, but I’ll explain:

I was hanging out with one of my friends the other day, and we stopped at Another Castle Video Games, a game store that I’d been to before, but hadn’t gone to in a while, and since we were in the area, I figured I’d stop by in my hunt for a Vita, since my visits to game stores in Arizona proved fruitless.

So we stopped in the store and I remembered “Oh, right! I wanted a Vita…”, so I went to check out the consoles, and they had not 1, not 2, but three Vitas, all of them 1000 models. I was looking for an 1100 model with the 3G module though (for modding reasons), and luckily, one of them was an 1100 model, and it was the same price as the others.

So, even though it was above market price, I had that hanging-out-with-friends hype and just… well, bought it.

Cleaning it

When I got home with the Vita, it was actually dirtier than I thought. I will say Another Castle Video Games kinda sucks with consoles and stuff because it doesn’t seem like they really clean them.

You can see the smudges and grime on it.

So I took it upon myself to take it apart and do a somewhat deep clean of the input areas on the controller, and wiped down the exteriors as well, and it certainly made a lot of difference.

Look how clean it is now!

The back still has some deep scratches and scuffs, and the front is the same but much less worse, but overall, the system is in pretty decent condition.

Using it (kinda)

It was really surreal powering it on and seeing the UI again and hearing the super nostalgic music that reeks of the early 2010s. It’s so awesome!!!!!!!

Though after setup, that was sort of it because without a memory card (didn’t feel like paying 30-something dollars for the 8GB memory cards they had there), there’s not much you can do on these original models, since they come with absolutely NO internal storage to download games on. Because of that, earlier today, I bought a PSVSD (which was the reason I got an 1100 model) and it should be coming in a bit, since it’s shipping from Mexico.

In the meantime though, I tried some things, like going on Welcome Park to try out the many features of the Vita, or going on nick64.me on the Vita browser!

It... sorta works?

Conclusion

But yeah, overall, I’m really happy I got a Vita now, and hopefully I can get my hands on the PSVSD adapter soon so that I can finally play games on the Vita. But for now, it’s gonna sit on my desk, and every once in a while, I’ll turn it on, play 2 minutes of Welcome Park, and turn it back off lol. I’ll write a new post once the adapter arrives.

Ah screw it, I'll upload the revamp now.

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 11:51:44 -0700

Ok, so remember how last post, I said hopefully the new revamp would be coming in the future sometime?

Well, I thought about it for a bit, and it just pains me to keep working on the revamp, which is mostly done, and just be constantly working on small touch ups and other random stuff like images that I might not use and don’t have the creative juices to make at the moment. So instead of delaying it more, I decided to wrap things up for the time being and just upload what I have now to show what I’ve been up to for the past while.

If you’re reading this right now, chances are you can probably already tell the difference, and if not… then I don’t know, but I’ll go through some differences anyways because I need to fill this post with content.

Homepage

As you can see, some new things are here and some old things are gone, like how the YouTube section is now gone from the new page, but it also introduces that giant image in the center there.

The Bedroom

The Bedroom is pretty much the place I put the most effort in. It’s not fully complete, but the desk and bookshelf sections are, so feel free to explore around and see some cool stuff about me.

Netlogs/Art

The netlogs are different in some ways too. The biggest change is that netlogs no longer stretch the page down to the length of the post, but are rather put in a container with a scrollbar. I thought it would be cooler to do that, so that’s why I did it, and I really like it.

Overall…

Yeah, the fundamentals of the site are kind of unchanged, but a lot of visual things are, and new things have been added that I hope whoever comes across this site will enjoy. I don’t really have much else to say besides that, so yeah, thanks for reading :)

My posts are infrequent, but here I am + site updates and overhaul news

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 09:36:40 -0700

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Almost two weeks, I believe. What’s been going on with me?

Website overhaul

I kept bringing up in the past several posts that I was working on an overhauled version of the site, and that still applies. I am working on it, I actually have it mostly done, like 90-95% done, I’m just putting a bunch of work into smaller parts of the site because I’m silly like that :)

But seriously though, it’s almost done, I just really want to get some things down well before I upload it. That is mostly why I haven’t posted much in a while.

Migrating from GitHub Pages

Another reason I haven’t updated this in a while is because I also finally made the move to a proper VPS to host my website rather than using GitHub Pages to host my site. It was sort of annoying, but thanks to my pal, realjame, he helped me set up the VPS, so now it’s working all fine and dandy. I even got new domains for the site as well, so you can visit it using nick64.com as well!

However, because of the move, my workflow needs to be adjusted, so that’s another reason why it’s taking a while for me to do anything with this site. Hopefully once I get it down, things will go faster.

Catching up on life

Life is okay, so far. I am now two weeks into moving into Washington again, and I’m getting more used to things now. At first, I was having some trouble adjusting, and my mood was just kind of down for a while, and I still sort of feel like that, but I’ve been getting more things set up in my house, and my room is nice, though I will be moving it from the basement up a floor to another room due to my family trying to adjust things to be better. My dad is doing some remodeling work in the basement and adding another room, so that’s gonna be nice.

As for Washington itself though, I do like the environment, but I’m having trouble adjusting to the weather, it is COLD. Gone are the days of T-shirts and shorts. In Arizona, I could even get away with that fit in the winter, and now it’s turning to autumn in Washington, and I already need to wear sweatpants, and I need more pairs of sweatpants too since I only have like two pairs.

Conclusion

So yeah, things are alright, but with the site, I just need even more time before I can call it good and upload it. But I hope to make more posts more often in the coming future.

Moved in my new house and adjusting to the (new) environment of Washington

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 07:17:39 -0700

This might not be published on the day I write this due to me not having internet quite yet, but as of writing this right now, it’s 7:20am on August 25th, 2023.

It’s a nice chilly morning, and I feel like I’m finally able to calm down a bit after all the stuff I had to do this week, starting with moving out.

Moving out

Moving out was pretty stressful because I live in a large family, and I myself already have a lot, so it took a few days to pack the moving truck, and when we did, it was pretty much filled to the brim, and I MEAN that, it was practically overflowing. And we rented the biggest truck from Penske too. This was probably the most stressful part of it, but it wasn’t necessarily the most taxing part.

Driving

As I stated before, I live in a large family, so when it came to actually getting to Washington, it was honestly not that great at all either. Actually, you know what? If anything, it was kind of awful.

The first day of it was okay, since some people were in our car and some were split to the moving truck, so it was quieter, but we brought everyone together later on so we could find a hotel and sleep, and those last few hours with them were terrible since they always fight and bicker, and it was tight in the car too. By the time we got to the hotel, I was kinda done with everyone. We got our rooms and I had to share with my brothers, which was awful since I had to share a bed with them and… yeah, it sucked. Not to mention, by the end of that night, I had developed a sore throat, which even right now, I’m still recovering from.

The next day, we drove all together, except for my dad who drove the truck and wasn’t even with us at the hotel, and we finished our trip at around 4pm.

The house

I wasn’t expecting a lot from the house itself, since I already saw pics of it, but when I saw it in person, it was a little different than I expected it to be, both in good and bad ways.

First of all, I was expecting the land to be flatter, but it was actually pretty hilly, which I guess makes sense, I just expected it to be flatter because of how Google Maps showed it.

The house inside looked worse than I thought it would, not that it was like awful and terrible, but you could tell the people posting the photos definitely had someone edit them to look nicer. In the end though, I wasn’t expecting much from the house since it was already pretty crappy anyways (it was built in 1938), but my parents have plans to build a new house on the property, so I guess we’ll see how that goes.

My office on the first day.

Unpacking

As of now, we’re still unpacking, but the process of unpacking itself was actually (at least, so far), a lot easier than packing everything in. I’ve got pretty much all my stuff unpacked, and the house has its stuff unpacked as well, it’s just a matter of getting a bunch of other random stuff like tools off the truck and moved somewhere. I’ve even unpacked my computer and got my office mostly set up, since I’m writing this now. I’m (for now), not going to be sleeping in here, since it’s a room in the basement, and Washington basements (especially in the winter) get CHILLY. But we’ll see how it all goes, I’ve heard it’s healthier to sleep seperately from your computer and office, so I want to see if that has any effect on me.

A scary spider that I found in my office this morning.

Conclusion

As of now, it’s the third day of me being in this house, and it’s weird to adjust being here in Washington again, but it’s too soon to say anything conclusively. I really thought I would have more to say about my feelings moving here and all that, but right now, I feel sort of… indifferent? I think I just need more time to settle here and figure things out. But I am excited to soon see all my old friends, make some new ones, and see what the future has for me here in Washington.

Sorry for my infrequent posting

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 14:44:57 -0700

The people reading my blogs (1, maybe 2) may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much recently. I would if I had more time, but sadly, with preparing to move next week, plus also occupying my time with the website overhaul and Minecraft, I won’t really be posting much for the next while. Once I find myself in a more stable environment to write, I will start doing that again.

Hopefully I can finish the website overhaul soon as well. The visuals of the site are overall done, but I’m doing a lot of work on the About Me, plus giving it final touch ups, so I might just upload it as it is sometime this week, but I’ll think on it.

First post in August: What's new?

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 15:30:38 -0700

It’s been a second since I posted. What happened?

Massive site revamp in the works

I would have posted more, but I’ve been busy with a lot of things, and the bigger one (for this site) is that I’m working on a complete visual revamp, along with adding a bunch of new things. I won’t show anything from it yet, and I have no estimated release period for it, but it will be up when it’s ready. I’m hoping to add more content to explore on the site, along with making it more visually pleasant and interactive.

Moving

Boxes...

I have already begun to start packing for my move, which is gonna happen in a few weeks. Actually, as of writing, I have approximately 2 weeks, more or less, until I move. So yeah, my room’s looking a lot emptier right now.

My shelf looks a lot emptier now...

Maybe it was too early to start packing, since I have so much time ahead, but I wanted to be prepared in case I needed to do stuff in the meantime, like hanging out with friends. Or getting my license….

Getting my driver’s license

My test is this Wednesday. I have been extremely nervous about it since I feel the need to get it done before I move, and I haven’t driven in a while, nor have I mastered all the aspects of it, so I’ve just been speedrunning a bunch of things and learning before my test so I can have the highest chance of passing. Right now, my driving is… okay. What I’m worried about the most is being nervous on the test and messing up. I feel like that’s just a huge snowball of nervousness waiting to crack with that sort of mentality, but I guess we’ll see what happens when I take the test. I have one more day to practice, so I’ll use that the best I can and pray that I pass… and get a good test administrator… and I’m not too nervous…

Writing and drawing

I have been working on comic projects very slowly. It may not be a lot, but it’s still progress, so I’m happy about that. Hopefully by the end of this month, I can get something uploaded to get it done with instead of sitting on them forever…

(UPDATE from one day after I started writing this initially: I finished the first small comic project I was working on, so hopefully it’s uploaded today or soon, so yay :D)

Playing Minecraft again (Better Than Adventure)

Recently, the friend group I talk to has been talking about starting another Minecraft server after the last one died after a couple of weeks, and so Mr. Jame of realjame started up a Beta 1.7.3 server, but with a twist… it would be running Better Than Adventure.

Initially, I was a bit skeptical, since I wasn’t that big on Minecraft in general, let alone Beta versions of Minecraft, since I burnt myself out of Minecraft permanently years ago. But I saw the trailer for the latest version that came out a couple of days before our server, and it looked cool. So I tried it and I’ve actually been having a lot of fun with it so far.

Knowing me, I will probably get burnt out after a week or two, but I guess we’ll see what happens.

The end

Yeah, so things are happening, I’m going through some big things now, and it’s a little bit nervewracking, but even this is the calm before the storm that’s gonna be moving everything. But after that, it should be smooth sailing. I will move there, probably look for a new job, and then just put my life on cruise control from there until college comes around.

I spent $200 and need to punish myself for it and I'm stressed and stuff

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 21:46:14 -0700

Look at all this shit

Today, I have disappointed myself immensely by spending way too much money. But let me start at the beginning.

First, I went to hang out at a food place with some school friends I hadn’t seen in a while, and it was really fun. I got to eat some good food, reunite with my friends, catch up, all that. I enjoyed it, and I spent like 25 dollars on food. From there, I went with another group of friends who wanted to hang out in the same day, and one the friends from the food place was in this group too, so we went together there. We drove down to a mall and stayed in Barnes and Noble to wait for everyone else, where I proceeded to buy the Tamagotchi, the Erased manga, and a CD of Ten by Pearl Jam. It was about 70ish dollars, I believe, and decided that was the end of my spending, maybe one more thing, but that’s it. Everyone else got there, and I got tempted to buy the Evangelion artbook, but decided to wait on it.

We then walked to Best Buy, where we stayed for a while and I got Spider-Verse on 4k since I wanted it for a while. THAT WAS THE END. NO MORE.

Then we walked to Target. One of my friends, who didn’t have cash, begged me to get him a Lego set for 35 dollars, saying he’d pay me back. He did the same thing at Barnes and Noble, where I said no, but eventually caved in at Target. I never really liked this person much, to be honest. It feels like he’s trying to mooch off my friends sometimes, with him constantly assuming people will just give him rides, asking to buy stuff everytime we go out, etc. I even remember in Barnes and Noble, I don’t know if this was directed towards me or my other friend, but he said something about “Oh, you’re not gonna let me get anything even though I’ll pay you back, but you conveniently have money when you want stuff.” But yeah, I bought him the set because well, whatever, I’ll see him again and he’ll give me the money, and if not, I’m moving anyways, so I’ll cut ties or whatever.

Then, in Target, my friends wanted to plan out a Barbenheimer thing, where we’d watch Barbie and Oppenheimer in theaters on the same day. In order to properly coordinate it, I decided to be the one to pay for everyone’s tickets, which I’m okay with doing for some of my friends, since they have jobs and I know for a fact will pay me back, but some, like Mr. Lego Man… I don’t know. But whatever, I accepted.

Then, we went back to Barnes and Noble, and I caved into my spending habit and bought the art book and the omnibus. My friend who drove me here decided he was very tired and wanted to get going, since it was 8pm (I was as well), so we left. On the way back, I sort of just went on a rant about how I felt immensely guilty about spending my money, how I hated being pressured into doing stuff, being socially drained, that sort of thing. And then I got dropped off home. And now, I’m gonna rant about that same thing here.

Socially drained

I’m not much of a socially outgoing person. I try to pretend I am towards others, whether at work, or in public, just to give myself a good image. But the truth is I’m terrible at being social. And part of that is because my energy to socialize with others is very low, and today, I exhausted that a lot. I hung out with two friend groups for an entire afternoon and I already felt tired by Barnes and Noble. I have nothing against (most) of my friends, but I just can’t really handle the energy of having to keep track and talking to like five different people at the same time. It’s very taxing for me, so today as an extremely stressful day in that regard, and it especially doesn’t help that now I’m responsible to plan an event where I’m forced to be with my friends for at least 6 hours just watching movies.

Being pressured

I hate being pressured by others to do things. I wouldn’t say the Oppenheimer thing was a peer pressure thing, since I did have intentions to watch Barbie with friends and rewatch Oppenheimer, I’m just concerned about the grueling time it will take. However, the thing with the Lego set ticked me off a bit. He had asked me and my other friends several times that day to let him get the set and that he would pay us back, but I just didn’t want to do it, because he didn’t have the cash. To be fair, he did say he would get his next paycheck on Monday, the day before Barbenheimer, so I would get the cash by then. However, if he really wanted the set, he could’ve just waited until Monday to get the cash and go buy it himself. I don’t know why he felt the need to pressure not only me, but my other friends as well to buy it for him, and even said what he said. All in all, to me, he’s generally an unreliable guy, and I don’t really trust him for much, so the fact that he pressured me to get the set, and now I have to buy HIS TICKETS since I’m getting everyone else’s as well, ticks me off. I need to learn to be more resistant to pressure and to make sure to make myself clear.

Spending 200 dollars today and punishing myself

The worst offender of all, I spent over 200 dollars today. The pressure of buying stuff, plus this, and also needing to spend a ton of money on theater tickets for my friends sort of set me off on a little bit of… I guess the best word is a “panic attack” when I got home. I just felt immensely guilty, and vented to my mother about it, who told me that I was in control of my money and that I should use this as a learning experience for myself, but not to feel guilty. But when I got to my room, I just slumped in my chair and silently broke down a bit over this. I needed to save my money for my future endeavors, like college, getting a car, that sort of stuff, and I decided to drop hundreds in a single day, and need to drop even more the next few days now as well. Obviously, everything else contributed to my attack as well, but I just had to sit in my chair and breathe for like 10 minutes. And because of the guilt of spending all that money, I decided I had to punish myself for this somehow to learn a lesson.

So in order to repent for my actions, I decided to ban myself from buying any “wants” until I move and to commit myself to more productivity tasks every day. I feel that this was a suitable thing to do in order to make up for today’s major loss and to rebuild my mental state of mind and motivation. I hope that this will serve as a suitable punishment for myself and that I commit myself to it.

Overall, I just feel horrible from today. I had fun, but the stress and guilt outweighs that for me. I need time to relax until Barbenheimer and I needed to get this off my chest as a way to vent and make myself feel better. So for those who read this all… thank you. And have a good day. A better day than I did.

Leaving my job, moving, and monsoon season

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 22:47:56 -0700

A song for you to enjoy:

This will probably the last post of this month, so to make the best of it, I want to make a “catching up” sort of post, just talking about my life so far. Got some big things going on recently, so I’ll start with the important stuff, like employment

Leaving my job

As of writing this post, I am no longer employed (unless you count eBay as a job). July 27th was my last day. Since I’m moving next month (which I’ll talk about later), I left my job to give myself time to prepare for the move and, of course, to move, since well, I can’t really fly to Arizona every time I need to go to work.

I don’t really know if it’s like… safe for me to say where I worked online? So I’ll just keep that detail out. But I’ve been working here for like a year and a half now, and I gotta say, it really wasn’t that bad. I almost went to work for Target, but they turned me down, and in retrospect, I’m glad. This job was my first, and I learned a lot of valuable lessons from it, met a lot of people, it was kind of sad for me to leave, which it shouldn’t be since it’s my job, but well I kinda liked working there. It wasn’t perfect, sure, but it could’ve been way worse.

Also, one of my managers gave me his DS Lite right before he left. Not actually as like a last-day gift, but just because we were talking about it yesterday. He told me he found it in a drawer and it was in there for almost a decade, and I was gonna lend him a charger, but he just said that I could keep it since he thought I’d get more use out of it.

While covered in fingerprints, I don't see any scratches...

Screen's kinda dirty, but that's it.

So minty fresh, the back is still a matte texture and not glossy from use. Woah!

I also got to say goodbye to my other manager friend (the guy who went with me to all those stores in this post), though it might not be the last time I see anyone, honestly. I will visit that store a couple of times since it’s RIGHT NEXT DOOR to the Goodwill I frequent, so I’ll pop in a few times before I move.

But yeah, for now, eBay is my job before I move and get another job.

Moving

I will be moving back to Washington in about a month or so from now. And honestly, I feel kinda… weird about it?

It’s not like I’m not excited to move back, but I have this kind of paranoia in the back of my head about it, such as “Well, what if this isn’t worth it?” and all that. If I’m gonna be completely honest, a big part of me going back is also seeing my old friends again. But I already made new friends here, so I feel bad about leaving those behind. It’s a terrible idea to move with that sort of thing being a major motivation, but I do feel like I will be happier that way. However, I have this fear that maybe things won’t go well and I won’t be able to talk to my friends much anyways, because of life, school, moving on, whatver. It’s kinda scary honestly, and it’s making me antsy about the whole move.

And in general… I don’t really like the “moving” part of it. Dealing with the stress of adjusting to a new place, moving all the stuff in, it sucks. I have the advantage of knowing everything about the state and whatever, so that helps a lot, but honestly, I’ve associated moving with just a negative experience, so now I just hate it. But I am excited to live in Washington again for other reasons too.

The environment and weather is a big part as well. I LOVE the Washington environment. The beautiful greenery and hilly terrain that I grew up with contrasts the plain tan color of the flat desert I’ve been living in for a few years now. It just feels like there’s much more to do there, much more going on, then in Arizona. And that, I’m excited for.

I’m also excited for the new potential house as well. My family wants to lock in on a 4-acre property and build a new house there. The old house, however, is small, old, and humble. I really, really like it. Especially the basement. After living for years in one-story houses, I can finally have multiple floors in a house!!!! The basement will be awesome to use as a hangout and chill center, which is what me and my parents have been proposing to use it as. But we’ll see what happens when we move.

Monsoon season

The monsoons haven’t really kicked in the past while, but a couple nights ago, a huge but brief one came about. This is honestly my favorite part of Arizona: when the storms hit, THEY HIT.

I’ve always liked storms. I think what it is is that when I’m inside in a storm, I get to watch the chaos unfold in peace and observe nature do its thing. It’s very nice and… calming, actually. Though there were some minor inconveniences.

Yeah, the power went out, and also we had a nice giant lil’ puddle form by our door. Oopsies.

In the morning, all the clocks needed to be set again, so that was annoying, and something in our Google Home mesh network fucked up, so now Wi-Fi doesn’t work properly, which isn’t a huge problem for me, since I use primarily wired devices, but for the rest of my family, it’s the end of the world, so I had to sort of fix that. Besides that though, very fun storm. Glad to see one more of these brief monsoons before I left Arizona.

Conclusion

I’m finishing writing this up at 12am of the 28th. I’m really tired right now, so all I’ll say is that yeah, I’m doing okay. A lot is going on though. I’m still working on those comics as well, I’m almost done with Chapter 2, so now I need to work on drafting Chapter 3, and the second that’s done, it’s going up. May be experimenting with some other stuff too here and there. Won’t say anything until I have something concrete.

Well… that’s it.

Oppenheimer: the movie where le bomb.... le killed people (in 70mm IMAX)

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 21:33:24 -0700

Yesterday, I watched Oppenheimer in theaters. And not just in any old theater. I watched it at Harkins in Arizona Mills, one of about 30 theaters in the entire world to have the equipment to project 70mm IMAX, which Oppenheimer was presented in. And I gotta say, it was quite an experience.

My little memento from the theater :)

First, I went to the mall.

Arizona Mills is kind of a neat mall, it’s great for walking around in and certainly has some interesting stores. I was particularly interested in the stores with figures and stuff, but I also saw some other neat places and things, and even ate the GOAT of mall food, Auntie Anne’s. Here’s some pictures:

A neat sign I saw at Ross

The famous Rainforest Cafe from Eddy Burback and Ted Nivison's videos

The best mall food ever

After walking around the mall for an hour and a half, I made my way to the theater.

The movie itself

The movie was quite interesting. To be honest, I haven’t really watched much of director Christopher Nolan’s films. I’ve only seen the Dark Knight Trilogy and Interstellar, so I’m not terribly familiar with his films. However, from what I’ve gathered from my friends, some of his films can be confusing and hard to follow, and I felt that in this movie.

I’m not sure if it’s the exact same issue in his other films, but in Oppenheimer, the story is split into three timelines: one with the story of Oppenheimer and the build up to the atomic bomb (and its eventual dropping on Japan), another from 1954 where he is in a hearing relating to his security clearance, and another in 1959 relating to another character in the movie, Lewis Strauss, and his confirmation as Secretary of Commerce. I had to look that up on Wikipedia to get the details, but yeah. The issue with this is that there’s so much to take into account, and the movie doesn’t make it entirely obvious at times when it takes place.

The movie’s pacing is also pretty FAST, which is impressive, considering its whopping 3 HOUR RUNTIME. Dialogue goes fast, and for me, most of it went from one ear and out the other. It was really hard for me to comprehend what was going on, especially in the second half of the movie. Speaking of the second half…

The second half

I’ve heard that some people don’t like this movie due to how much of the movie isn’t actually focused on the bomb, which is still a lot of the focus, but a decent chunk isn’t, and that’s because this movie isn’t about the bomb or it being dropped (they don’t even show it being dropped in Japan), this is a movie about Oppenheimer. His life. His troubles. All that is the focus, not the bomb. It plays a huge part, but isn’t the main focus, and that might turn some people off.

The bomb is dropped about half way through, I believe, and the rest of the movie is the aftermath of the bomb and not only Oppenheimer’s image being destroyed, but also the drama of other characters, mainly Lewis Strauss, who engineered Oppenheimer’s downfall as revenge for Oppenheimer humiliating him and supposedly turning people against him. The drama is interesting, but again, it kinda went from one ear out the other. It was hard for me to comprehend what was going on a lot, and I think that’s mainly what this film’s primary issue is for me, so I won’t go repeating myself. I think honestly that’s really the only major issue for me, if at all. So I want to talk about the good things about this movie, which is a lot.

The part where I gush about how great this movie is

The biggest part of this movie for me was the cinematography and the experience of watching it in 70mm IMAX, but I’ll save that for last since I have a lot to talk about there, so I’ll start off with another great point: the acting.

Cillian Murphy does an AMAZING job playing Oppenheimer. It’s crazy how similar he looks to the real Oppenheimer and also how great his acting is in general. I can’t really pinpoint one single high point of it, it’s just all around great for me, and I hope he gets awards for it and all that because this was an award-winning performance for me. And while Cillian Murphy did an amazing job, I was also so surprised to see a bunch of other actors in this movie that I didn’t expect. I went into this movie blind, so I didn’t know what to expect, so when I saw Lewis Strauss, I asked myself “…Wait, is that Robert Downey Jr.?”, to which I got an answer to in the credits when I saw his name. WHAT!!! It’s weird seeing him in a role that’s not Iron Man, and he kills it. Even Devon Bostick, RODRICK FROM DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, is in this movie, which caught me really off guard, even if he is just a minor character. They brought a lot of great people in here, and everyone does an exceptional job, and it really ties the whole movie together.

Another part is the visuals of the movie itself. Supposedly, this movie uses NO COMPUTER GENERATED EFFECTS. Even for the bomb explosions, which is crazy to me. It really grounds this movie in reality and pulls you into the world of Oppenheimer in a way that CG wouldn’t be able to do.

The way the movie dramatizes things and makes you feel is crazy. When they were prepping to detonate the bomb for Trinity, I was literally gripping my seat in suspense, my heart was beating, because I KNEW WHAT WAS COMING, I just didn’t know how. This movie has a lot of scenes that really feel intense, like the scene where Kitty is in the interrogation room and answering the questions, and the scene where Oppenheimer is in the auditorium with the people cheering at him, and him imagining the skin melting off the people and the charred corpses, the blinding light, the deafening noise of the bomb, it’s seriously crazy awesome.

The soundtrack in this movie is surreal. It’s crazy how amazing the soundtrack is, it makes you feel like your soul is leaving your body. When these tracks play on top of scenes, they really add into the illusion of just sucking you into the movie.

Here’s a couple of tracks that I really liked:

And now, I want to talk about what excited me the most about this movie.

My first time watching a movie on film

This movie was made entirely on film, primarily on standard 65mm film, but many scenes are also filmed on 65mm IMAX film reels. And it REALLY shows. This movie looks CRISP on 70mm. When the IMAX shots pop up on screen, they REALLY POP. They look super sharp and vivid. This was the first time I’ve ever seen a movie on film, so I’m happy it was with this movie because I feel like the way the movie was made, with its cinematography, its new breakthroughs in IMAX technology (the first movie to use black-and-white IMAX film, which was made specifically for this movie), and the person behind the movie caring so much about the film format, allowed the movie to really show the best aspects of not only IMAX, but film as a whole.

Film as a format is dying. Not many theaters have the technology to show movies on film anymore, and not many movies are on film, with most of them being made digitally. 35mm is more common as it’s been the standard for movies on film, but 70mm is an even more obscure breed, and only around 30 theaters in the world have the projectors to show 70mm IMAX films. It’s thanks to Christopher Nolan and his love for film that we have movies like Oppenheimer keeping film alive and even now, pushing the boundaries of the format. I hope that Nolan’s efforts to keep film alive pays off and that, somehow, film becomes a format that, while no longer being the standard for film anymore, can still be a format that is accessible to people years from now.

Overall…

Watching Oppenheimer itself was quite an interesting experience, let alone watching it on film. The movie itself, while somewhat jarring at times, does an excellent job peeking into the mind of Oppenheimer and his history with the atomic bomb and providing a surreal viewing experience for movie-goers. This movie also does an excellent job as a showcase for IMAX and film as a format through its boundary-pushing technological feats and fantastic cinematography, and takes full advantage of the film format. I highly recommend watching this film, but I recommend watching it on 70mm EVEN MORE.

Adding a 'Miscellaneous' tab for miscellaneous things

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 19:40:23 -0700

Currently working on adding a “Misc” tab so I can have some sort of gateway to make more obscure and niche pages for this site. The tab is there, but the page is under construction, so yeah.

Soon, I will also be reworking the entire “About Me” section, but my plan is a bit ambitious and requires artwork, so it’s gonna be a while before I finish that.

Someday, I need to redo the “Info” page as well…. Oh, well.

For those that browse my site and actively use it… thank you! From the bottom of my heart. Genuinely. If you really enjoy it, feel free to send me an e-mail telling me how much you absolutely super duper love it x100000000000. Or send me criticism. That too.

Thrift finds + Barnes and Noble pickups

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 19:34:37 -0700

Today, I went to Barnes and Noble and Savers, and picked up a few things. I first went to Barnes and Noble and got a One Punch Man volume to add to my collection, along with a Promised Neverland volume to replace my old one since it had some really bad misprints. I saw that they had Criterion Collection movies for 50% off, but I needed to conserve my spending and decided against getting anything else.

After that, I stopped at Savers to try to look for an iPod or a Zune, but found none… Disappointed, I went, to electronics and found this PlayStation 2 DVD remote there for 3 dollars. Decided “Eh, why not?” and bought it.

And uhh, yeah. That was pretty much it for today.

Fixing an old SONY Dream Machine

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 18:58:36 -0700

A couple of days ago, I went to Goodwill and found this SONY Dream Machine for 5 dollars, and decided to buy it simply because… well, it looks really neat. And hey, if it doesn’t work, it’ll serve as a simple repair project, so I bought it for 5 dollars.

First of all, I tested it to see if it works, and it… sorta does? I couldn’t change the time on the clock for some reason, and the radio only worked half of the time. So it was time to do some repairing. But before that, it needed a clean, because man, was it nasty! I don’t have any pictures showing the grime up close, but it was baaadddd. So I gave the surface a quick wipe down and then got a screwdriver to unscrew the really deep screw holes (like 2-3 inches deep!). After I got in, I was a bit intimidated at first, since the internals look kinda like this:

This picture is from the end of the repairs, but you get the idea...

A lot of it was in one giant core that was made of a bunch of different parts, and the wiring was super short and tight, since they needed to really compact everything. One thing I noticed was that the ferrite bar used for the radio was loose inside. It seems that it came off of the black plastic clip that it was originally mounted in, so I glued back whatever pieces of the mount I could find and then used hot glue to finish the job, and it sat in there pretty well.

Next, I had to clean the rest of the system inside, which was REALLY dusty, so I just took a canned air and blew all the dust away outside. From there, after a while of digging around and figuring out how it all worked, I found the problem.

So there’s this dial on the top of the system that allows you to set the mode of the clock (ex. set time, radio on/off, alarm, etc.), and it works by having that metal piece on the bottom right rotate around the circle with pads circled on the left. As it rotates and shorts different pads, it tells the clock to set the modes differently based on rotation. And the plastic piece that was supposed to hold the metal clip and rotate it… shattered.

Luckily, I was able to get the pieces together and use plastic cement to glue it back together. I don’t know how strong it is, but I tried it and it was strong enough to withstand turning the dial gently. I don’t plan on using this as anything other than a clock, so this was perfectly fine.

Here's what the piece looks like after being glued back together.

From there, I had to fiddle around with getting that metal piece in the dial aligned properly since the plastic that would’ve done that was kind of broken off. After a while, I found the correct rotation and sort of mounted it… I tried to glue it but it’s not super strong. It should stay just fine though. And with that…

The clock is fixed!

Looks so nice...

Now, it sits on top of my night stand and replaces my old clock. I (mostly) had fun doing this, and I actually learned a bit from it as well. Maybe I should buy more random electronics from Goodwill to fix them and use them for no reason…

Zenith's awesome website + PSP USB-C update

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 15:06:49 -0700

My good chum realjame showed me a new website this morning from this person named Zenith.

The homepage of zencorner.xyz

I just love the aesthetic of it, it looks really cool. The colors, the dithering effects, the way things are LAID OUT is really REALLY cool to me. I’ve been thinking of redoing my About Me page, and after checking out Zenith’s about me, I know exactly how to do it now, so I’m gonna steal their About Me (not really, but it’s awesome and I’m gonna try a similar layout). And the icons!!!

A section of the About Me page of zencorner.xyz

God, the icons are so neat! I don’t know, they’re just… cool! I think they get them from somewhere else from what I remember, but it’s really neat! I might look and see what those icons are about…

They also talk about the PSP! They happen to own a PSP 3000 (mystic silver) model, and they apparently use it for like music and stuff, which actually got me to redo my USB-C mod (which I’ll get into later). Their wife (known as Ashie) also has a pink PSP 3000, so that’s really awesome and cute!

The homepage of ashiecorner.xyz

But yeah, check out their site here and Ashie’s site here! Check Zenith out on wetdry.world as well!

An update on the USB-C mod for my PSP

When I saw this person’s post about the PSP, I felt the need to work on my PSP’s USB-C mod again. Even the second time around, it didn’t satisfy me since

The fit of everything inside was too tight
The data lines on the USB port didn’t work

So I decided to redo the mod AGAIN this morning and finally got a result I wanted.

Trying out the music player after seeing Zenith's site

Overall, I’m impressed with the results. I did change a couple of things:

First of all, I forgot to wire the 5V from the USB port so I guess that’s why data didn’t work. So I wired both the 5V lanes from the USB and the power connector in order to get the full charging capability and also getting data to work on the port.

Next, to make everything fit better, instead of gluing the port to the board, I glued it inside the crevices where the old miniUSB port used to sit. That way, the glue didn’t interfere with the board and take up more space than needed. As a result, the case can now fully be screwed back on without any force.

So I’m very satisfied with how it all turned out. And uhh, yeah that’s it.

New Shoes and Backpack

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 14:19:13 -0700

In the past two weeks, I’ve bought some new shoes and a backpack. I’ve been trying to make my fashion match what I like and overall just look better and more presentable instead of being super casual and lazy about my clothes.

A week ago, I got a Jansport Superbreak Plus backpack for 40 dollars. I saw this recommened a lot online, and it was small, but big enough to fit what I wanted to, so I bought it, and yeah, it’s pretty great! I put all my silly pins on it too, and hopefully this will be their permanant place, since I was having a hard time finding a good place to put them.

And just today, my new Chuck Taylors arrived in the mail. I ordered full black instead of the classic colors because I thought black would be cooler. Here’s a picture of them with me wearing some cargo pants. I feel like the look is slightly off from what I want, but it’s getting there, so I’m happy about that.

The Linsoul 7Hz Salnotes Zero earphones

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 13:57:23 -0700

For Prime Day, I bought the Linsoul 7Hz Salnotes Zero earphones. That’s sort of a mouthful, but yeah.

Before this, I had a pair of Moondrop Chus, which I liked a lot, but broke after a year of me abusing them at school by shoving them in my pockets, waving them around, etc. They were really good for their price though, right now they’re 22 dollars on Amazon. But after they broke, I wanted to try something new just because. So I bought these earbuds. They’re about the same price as the Chus, at 20-25ish dollars depending on if you get one with or without a mic, or with USB-C.

Unboxing.

The box is kinda basic, not as neat as the Moondrop Chu box, but it does the job. When we open it, we get to see the buds themselves, which look pretty cool in my opinion. I like the design of this slightly more than the Chus. The ear tips, however…

They look bad. I don’t like the colorful tips, to be honest, they just look tacky compared to the design of the buds. It’s nice for differentiating the tip sizes, but I wish we just got plain black tips too.

The build.

The metal look on the buds looks nice and sorta stylish, so I’ll take that over the Chus. They also feel a bit more comfortable to use. Actually, when I first got these buds, I plugged the buds into the wire backwards and was wondering why they felt so uncomfortable. I realized two days later that I plugged the buds in the wrong way. So yeah.

You may have also noticed the wire detached from the buds. One nice feature about these buds is that the wire isn’t actually built in, but rather, it uses two pins to connect to each bud. This is nice because I don’t have to worry as much about breaking the buds anymore, since if the wire breaks, you can just buy a new one and use your buds again, unlike the Chu’s attached wire, which was why I stopped using them.

The sound.

I like my music to be high quality, and I can sorta tell, but not enough to give an in-depth review of the buds. I can’t really compare them to the Chus either since it’s been a while since I’ve had those. But overall, the sound is pretty great. I think if I had to say what’s different, I think the mids are better on these buds, but I’m not too sure. All around, it sounds more even than the Chus, which isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, just more your preference. I sort of liked the Chus a bit more because they were more fun to listen to, but I still really like these and I recommend them over the Chus simply because of the cable.

Overall.

They’re pretty good in terms of the build, though I like the sound of the Chus more. For 20 dollars, the quality is great and I do recommend these if you want some good cool buds. If you prefer quality of sound over build, I’d get the Chus. If we had Chus with detachable cables, those would be my go-to… I wish.

July and the heat death of Arizona

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:27:03 -0700

It’s been a little bit since I’ve done one of these “how im doing overall” sort of posts, so I just wanna write something to catch up on how I’ve been so far.

IT’S HOT.

Really, really hot. Scorching hot. I’ve been making more of an effort to get out of the house by walking to Goodwill everyday now, but it’s been getting harder to do that because it’s so damn hot outside, everyday it’s like 110 degrees and when I actually go outside, I can’t sit out for more than 5 minutes unless I want to melt like an ice cream. It sucks, so when I move to Washington next month, I’m going to have much more of an appreciation for that weather. Speaking of Washington…

MOVING.

Sometime next month, I will be moving to Washington with my family. My plan is to take a gap year so that I can be considered “in-state” for college and then go to UW Bothell (maybe Seattle if I really try IDK). I’m pretty excited, but also scared too, because I feel like while I am moving for several valid reasons, I’m also moving for nostalgia and old friends.

I already made friends here, despite me not really wanting to. It’s not like my friends are bad, not at all, but I feel like now I’m torn between two places because of it. And now that I’m moving with that in mind, it makes me feel a little conflicted… I’ll see what happens when I move though. It’s unpredictable.

As for what I plan to do in the gap year, I will probably find a job (one that’s hopefully better than the one I have right now), meet with friends, and work on personal projects like the comic more often.

THE COMIC AND ART STUFF IN GENERAL.

I have actually been working on the comic mroe often. Almost every day now actually. It’s hard though because I’m doing this neat bit in the 2nd chapter where I make the entire thing in paper scraps. It’s a neat idea, and it’s been sort of fun making it, but also extremely time consuming. However, I am making progress. As of writing right now, I have 5 pages of Chapter 2 complete, and once I finish up to Chapter 3, I will upload those chapters online. I feel that doing this will give more context to the story and hook the readers more than just uploading a single chapter (especially since Chapter 1 is only 9 pages!… I think.)

The art for the comic isn’t very great… the story so far isn’t either… but the point of this comic isn’t necessarily to be good, it’s to be a learning experience for me, to make me better at art mostly, but writing too, both of which are skills I want to be really good at, which is why I’m making this comic, so I hope it turns out okay at least.

I’ve been working on it since last year, most of that time being spent doing nothing. I actually made half of Chapter 1 and shelved it for many months before coming back to it and working on it periodically since then. It’s been kind of a rocky journey of ups and downs and whatever, but it’s been fun. So… yeah.

I have also wanted to start making more art in general as well, and if that goes well, making a seperate brand for myself.

Not as in like a brand for merch or anything weird like that, I just mean like a separate alias from “Nick64”. That alias is more personal to me and I want to keep it that way. I don’t really want things like the comic being associated with my personal accounts, so I’ve been thinking. Perhaps when I release the comic, I will launch my new alias online. I will see.

BRANCHING OUT FROM TWITTER.

Twitter has not been great recently. Actually, that’s a lie, it hasn’t been great for a while. All the changes being made to the platform in terms of the algorithm, restrictions, new systems, it sucks. And worst of all, apparently, I just learned this a week or two ago, adding links to your posts actually lowers your viewership immensely. So how do I advertise new posts for my blog if no one will see my posts? I will still be using Twitter because of how many other people use it, and also the demographic of it, but I want to try to branch out more to other platforms.

Mastodon might be good for that. I actually had a small, small Mastodon presence at one point, by using the Twitter –> Mastodon bridge to link my posts, but that has been down for a long while now, and since then, I stopped using Mastodon. However, I’ve been recently thinking about going back on there, and I actually made a post this morning discussing that a tiny bit (my Mastodon stuff is in my “Info” page :D).

Threads just released from the Zuck Machine, and apparently people are enjoying it. Data collection and Zuckyness aside, I don’t really know that much about the demographic on there, so maybe I should check it out and see what’s going on there. Since the platform is new, it might also provide me with an opportunity to make more of a presence somewhere.

Instagram was also on my radar too, but the demographic of people there don’t seem to care for my kind of content, not really sure.

Tumblr… I don’t know anything about it, but I’ll look into it maybe.

Social media seems kind of meh in general right now. I hope somehow, something changes. God, you know, I wish that someday, we’d all go back to making our own personal websites, or MySpace pages, or whatever, instead of the short-form 3-second-attention-span-grabbing garbage we have today. I think it would be really cool to see more websites and pages like that.

AMAZON’S PRIME DAY

Prime Day is today. I ordered a few things:

I ordered the backpack as part of an effort to look cooler and to have more style, while at the same time having the things I need on me at all times. The USB 3.0 to SATA adapter is for my Blu-Ray drives and ripping Blu-Rays, since I want to separate that task from my server for when I make my new one in the coming future. The IEMs are for me, since my old ones broke. These are different from my old ones (a pair of Moondrop Chus) because I wanted to try something new. And the SATA to IDE adapter is for my Pentium III PC, because I believe the drive is dying.

I don’t really have anything else to say about that. It’s all coming tomorrow, so that will be fun to unpack.

CONCLUSION

This post has been getting really long, and I feel that I’ve used it less to talk about me and my wellbeing so far and more about random things I’m doing.

If I had to describe how I feel right now, it’s… fluctuating. Some days I feel really happy and motivated, and others I want to do nothing and cease to exist. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it’s some undiagnosed bipolar thing since I’ve been like this since… forever. I don’t know anything specific about mental issues or anything like that, and this isn’t a self-diagnosis by any means, but if I did get officially diagnosed. I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve grown to live with it though, so it’s okay… for now.

And as of right now, I feel okay. Not great. Not bad. Just okay. I have work in a few hours, I need to prepare to look into my driving test to get my license. Life is life. A bunch of obstacles and things I need to do. But at least I have things to look forward to, things to motivate me, all that.

So I have something to live for.

To ECC or not to ECC?

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 12:13:48 -0700

Recently, I’ve been pouring in a lot of time looking into what parts to buy for a new home server that I want to build soon, since the one I’m using right now is sort of power hungry and large. However, in my research, a debate I’ve noticed coming up a lot is whether or not to include ECC RAM in a home server.

In layman’s terms, ECC RAM includes extra hardware that helps fix errors and corruption in memory. These errors are very rare, but can happen, and so ECC helps to fix those issues when they do happen so that the data doesnt leave from memory corrupted. I’m not the most knowledgable on this, so I hope that explanation is good. You could also say I shouldn’t be writing this if I don’t know what I’m talking about, but whatever.

I think that ECC RAM isn’t really necessary in a home server setup. I see a lot of people shill ECC RAM like their life depends on it, some people say it doesn’t matter, so here’s my take.

MAKE BACKUPS!!!

I think the main reason ECC is not needed in a home server is because while it does help prevent corruption from RAM errors, the most important thing to do to keep your data safe is to make several backups. ECC is a protective measure to keep your files safe, but the RAM errors that ECC protects against happen so little that, to me, it’s more worthwhile to invest in proper methods of keeping your files safe, like using multiple different storage methods (like Blu-Ray discs or cloud storage). This doesn’t even really apply to just ECC either, this applies to everything. Backups are the most important thing you can do to keep your data safe.

The cost.

Looking into ECC has been sorta confusing to me. People say its not that much more expensive than regular RAM, but that’s not really true. Sure, the sticks themselves are a tad higher, but you also have to take into account getting a motherboard that supports ECC RAM, as well as a processor. IIRC, all Ryzen CPUS support ECC unofficially, and I think some Intel CPUs support ECC, but not all. So if you don’t have a system already configured for ECC, then no, it’s not only “a bit more expensive”.

How much does ECC actually impact everyday users?

Consumer hardware does NOT use ECC RAM. Your PC doesn’t use ECC RAM, your phone doesn’t, game consoles don’t, etc. And most importantly, most people running home servers don’t use ECC memory. ECC is NOT necessary. It, just like things like RAID, provide an extra layer of protection to your setup. However, how often do you hear people talk about how they have failures because they don’t have ECC memory? It’s not that it doesn’t happen at all, but the chances of it are so small, that it really isn’t a big deal worrying about it for an average consumer. So when should you worry about having ECC?

When to get ECC

Many people have said online that ECC is most important for things like enterprise use and storing mission-critical data. ECC works at its best when data is contantly being streamed through memory, so for, say, a server where data is constantly being accessed by users, new data is writting, or some sort of database, ECC is important to have because those systems run 24/7, there’s a lot more hardware and data to take into account than with a home server, etc. So, in the end…

Should I get ECC?

I hate leaving it with ambiguous answers, so I’ll say this. If you feel like the data you have is extremely important to you and you have cash to spare, or if your homelab is being constantly used and has data constantly streaming in it, then yes, invest in ECC. However, if you’re a user like me who just wants to use your homelab to watch movies, store some pictures and backup data on, and you have other methods of storing your data, then I would say… not really. In the end, it really is up to you, but I hope that answer gives a baseline on what to think about.

My Sentai summer sale pickups

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 21:23:52 -0700

Today, I got my stuff I ordered from Sentai’s summer sale. I bought these three because they were extremely cheap. The only one I bought with the intention of watching from the start was Flip Flappers, these other two were both 5 dollars each, so I bought them as a blind buy, and I’ll be watching them soon sometime. My total spent was about 20 dollars, so I got out of the sale pretty good!

Going to game stores and not buying games (anime instead)

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 22:37:28 -0700

On July 5th, I went out with a coworker to check out a bunch of stores in the Phoenix/Tempe area. I was initially really nervous because I’ve never really went out with people outside of school or my family or stuff, this is just kind of… a guy. But it turns out I didn’t get murdered and actually had lots of fun.

Goodwill

First, I went to Goodwill, where I found this monitor and video box thing for SONY VAIO PCs.

The LCD is really charming, but not great quality. The resolution is 1024x768, and the size is good, so muh pixels look really nice.

The video box thing I got with it because it looked like it went with it, but apparently not. I also thought the port in the back matched the port on my pc, but I was wrong. I don’t know if I’ll return it or if I’ll keep it, maybe it’s worth something or will be useful, not sure.

Bookmans

Bookmans was right next to Goodwill, so we went straight there, and man do I wish I had pictures of this place. It was really awesome! SO SO much better than Half-Price Books. They had a much bigger and cooler games selection. I tried to see if they had a PS Vita, but no luck. The closest thing they had to a Vita was Persona 4 Dancing All Night in some box set (which I almost bought but decided not to spend 70 on it). They had a bunch of games though. They even carried PC components, so that was really interesting, never seen that before.

They even had the Evangelion Ultimate Edition box set for 350 dollars… I was semi-tempted, but then checked eBay prices. They go for less than I thought they did. It’s not really a great set anyways…

Zia Records

After that, we went to Zia Records, where they had an interesting little collection of games and consoles. Again, no pictures, but it wasn’t anything exciting. It’s a cool store though, they had a ton of vinyls and CDs as well, hence the name. No PS Vita again, sadly… This was a cool store, but not as cool as Bookmans. My friend ended up picking up Mario Sunshine disc only for 30 bucks, which IDK if that’s a very good deal, but oh well.

Fallout Games

This store was really cool. They had several game kiosks, including N64, Wii U, Saturn, Dreamcast, and I think that’s it. Here’s whatever pictures of the kiosks I took (I know realjame will love that Dreamcast kiosk):

Here’s some pictures of random stuff I found as well:

That Gudetama Tamagotchi was sort of interesting, but 60 dollars is waaaay too much for me for a Tamagotchi. And again, this store had no Vitas. I asked them if they get them in often, and they said that they do, but they go out very quickly, which doesn’t surprise me. This was definitely up there with Bookmans, but I think Bookmans was a bit better cuz of the selection of other stuff since it wasn’t a specialty store. And even then, the selection they had rivaled game stores. Very impressive. Nonetheless, this store was still very awesome.

The End

That was the last store we went to. We grabbed lunch and then I went home after that. Honestly, I was kind of worried at first since this was the first time I’ve ever really hung out with someone outside of school or outside my social ring, this was just a coworker of mine. I was thinking maybe he’d lure me in and murder me or something hahaha, but it was really fun. I don’t think I’ll be able to do this again before I move, but maybe in the future if I come back for a visit, I’ll definitely try to arrange something again and definitely check these stores out again.

Making an Old Website Layout for Old Browsers

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 14:55:54 -0700

I’ve been working on an older layout for my website for old browsers. I wanna see if I can get my site fully working on a really, really old browser. It would be cool. Anyways, I’m trying to work on some parts of the site, like the About Me, so who knows how long it will take before I finish, we’ll see. Hopefully soon.

Three Years in Arizona

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 12:37:19 -0700

Today marks three years since I moved from Washington to Arizona. It’s weird to think that it’s been that long now, and I want to reflect on that time, since I will be moving back in a month.

9th Grade and COVID

The first time I heard that I was moving was in February 2020, and it wasn’t even from my parents, it was from a friend of theirs, who apparently knew about us moving before I did. I was quite shocked because it was such a weird move at the time, considering we lived in Washington our entire lives up to that point and I didn’t really feel like we really needed to move.

March came around and COVID shut everything down. I wasn’t going to school anymore. I spent my months not doing a lot before the move, but I did want to meet with some friends. Right before I moved, I wanted to have a hang out event so that I could see my friends one more time before I moved. Only two people came. I did get to see more of those friends over the years, but there are still some I’ve never seen in-person since February 2020.

Fast forward to the end of June and we began moving out. We drove to Arizona and arrived at our new house on July 1st, 2020.

It was pretty interesting at first, seeing the new environment, the new house, new location, etc. We had visited back in December 2019, so it wasn’t completely new, but it was really interesting to see all these new things. For the first month in Arizona, not a lot changed in terms of my lifestyle when COVID started in March.

10th Grade

Then I started 10th grade in August. It was starting out online, since COVID was still a big thing at the time, and it was somewhat confusing for me, having to go into Google Classroom meetings, meeting my new teachers, since before, my school in Washington didn’t do video calls, we were sent videos or assignment instructions online and expected to just do them. I actually remember being late to a few classes because our ISP was having major issues keeping the internet stable with everyone joining video calls… or something like that.

The more I got used to my new lifestyle, the more lonely it got for me. I had Discord and was talking to my friends from Washington, but in Arizona, I had no friends, and it didn’t help that being all online made it way harder for me to make friends. I was pretty much alone for most of that year. There was one girl that I talked to in Washington that I became really good friends with at the time, and we began to talk a lot, to the point that I was messaging them almost all the time everyday, but even then, I still didn’t have anyone to talk to in Arizona, and the whole situation started to get to me. I never really was happy after that for the whole year, and my mental health deteriorated.

There’s one moment I remember very well, I don’t remember when exactly this was, but it was within the first couple months of me moving. My parents had bought a house that they wanted to renovate for a nursing home business, and me and my siblings were brought there a lot to “help” and “get out of the house”. One day, we went there, and I went into a random room in the house where no one would come in. I laid down on the old bed, my face planted in a pillow, and I just… cried, and cried for about 10 minutes or so, before someone called my name, and I wiped my face and left. Whenever I think about when I first moved here a lot, I think about that moment a lot, and even now it’s still hard to think about that moment, because from that moment until now, even if my reactions and overall mood about moving has changed, the one thing that hasn’t changed from then until now is the reason I was sobbing in that pillow in the first place:

“I don’t want to be here. I want to get out.”

That Girl I Mentioned Before

We’ll call her Mar. I liked her a lot. Even before I moved, I had a huge crush on her, and I think that was the reason I resorted to talking to her so much when I first moved to Arizona. She made me happy. I was pretty awkward at the time, and resorted to sending a bunch of images to her of memes and other stupid garbage, but I also got to talk to her about myself more and hear more about her as well.

It was really refreshing to have a person like Mar I could talk to and be happy interacting with, because around that time, I felt a drift between me and my old school friends. Our interests were beginning to diverge, I was on calls less and less, and I ended up resorting to just talking to that girl all the time. However, I ended up relying on her too much. In retrospect, I never did realize at the time how much of a burden I was to her, because I spent a bunch of time trauma-dumping and talking about how much I hated living in Arizona. She was really nice and supportive and helped me through some tough times, but this enabled me to trauma-dump more and more, and I began to feel super close to her, and… well, I wanted more. And she didn’t. And it made me really angry and jealous at the time.

I remember constantly checking what Mar was up to on Discord, and getting jealous when she talked to other people. I didn’t say anything about it for a while, but eventually, I did, and we began to fight about it. In the end, I know I was in the wrong now, and what I did was horrible. But that fighting went on for a long time. I’d even say it still goes on now, but I’ll stop here for now.

You may be wondering why I spent my time talking about some girl instead of my time living in Arizona, and that’s mainly because nothing really happened in 10th grade, except for really my bickering and terrible behaviour towards my friend.

10th Grade (cont.)

My friendship with Mar was the bulk of my life in 10th grade, but some other things did happen.

School went back to in-person around October, which was kind of nice. The school itself wasn’t really great though. The building itself made me feel claustrophobic, the teachers were pretty boring (except for my World History teacher, you were cool :D), I had no interest in the classes (except World History kinda), and the people at the school weren’t too great.

I remember that at the school, there was a girl from my Physics class I think that wanted to talk to me for some reason. She would come up to me in the hall and try to talk to me, or make me sit with her at lunch, but I never really wanted to talk to her. If anything, I think I hated her.

She was just extremely extroverted, and I didn’t want to talk to her because I wanted to be left alone, so I tried to keep our conversations and interactions to a minimum, resorting to playing on my Switch at lunch as an excuse to not talk to her, and I’d also intentionally avoid her in the hallway. I actually remember getting into a Discord call with her and trying to leave ASAP without being mean because I just really did not like her at all. But she kind of made me realize something about myself:

I think at the time, I didn’t want to make friends at that school because I was scared of losing more friends. I had begun to stop talking to my friends from Washington, and I didn’t want to go through that again. I think if I met her again now, I would be fine talking to her, but I was so scared of meeting new people and losing them at the time.

Back to talking about school in general though, we went back online for 1 month in December and went back in-person in January. By the end of the school year, I did actually make a couple of friends. One was a girl I had a small crush on and wanted to talk to her because uhhhh I don’t really know, but she was kinda shy like me, so nothing really happened. There was another guy I talked to from my math class, he was pretty tall, cool dude, and I kinda didn’t wanna talk to him either, but I didn’t hate him. I even played Jackbox with him and his friends sometimes for a brief bit there. He was cool, and I actually talked to him once in the past couple of months, and caught up with him really quick.

By the end of the school year, I began to get more accustomed to school and Arizona, so I decided to try to make more friends, so I talked to one person in my English class by complimenting their Demon Slayer shirt. We exchanged Discord IDs and talked a bit, and then school ended and we never talked since then.

Overall, my 10th grade year felt kind of like a blip in my life. It sounds like a lot happened, but in reality, it was such a nothing year, and I was too busy wallowing in sadness to care about anything at the time.

1st Trip to Washington

In June 2021, after school ended, my family and I visited Washington for a few weeks. I ended up meeting with some friends outside of school, and even with Mar, but not my school friends. I think I remember actually not wanting to tell them I visited at all, because I didn’t want to talk to them much. I had a lot of fun on that trip, especially with Mar, which I think made how I felt and treated her even worse later on. But it was fun, I don’t remember much more than that.

And when we all went back home, my parents told me we had to move to another house.

11th Grade

A little more context is needed. We had to move out of our rental because of some lease thing and the owners or something like that, so I had to change schools before moving. Initially, I wanted to be homeschooled because I was devastated by the idea of having to get used to yet another school, but I tried it for a day and it was terrible. So I decided to change schools and go to the school closest to where we would be moving. I had about a week of a late start due to that, but the start was somewhat fine. I had to get used to the new school environment again, new school rules, new things, etc. so it was stressful at first, but it was more enjoyable because I had more classes to look forward too, like Japanese. And overall, the teachers and vibe of the school was way better than the other school I went to.

However, I was still alone for a long while. I did talk to a girl in my English class, but we didn’t really do much and we stopped talking after a while. I want to pause to talk about Mar for a second.

My Mental Health and Mar

By this point, I was starting to decline again in my mental health, and I began taking it out on Mar, who I constantly berated for “not being there for me” and other random garbage like that. It got to a really bad point, I had breakdowns in text during class, took breaks from Discord for attention, I constantly made her try to pay attention to me, and it finally got to the point that she ended up taking a break from me for one month in February. This was pretty devastating because I always relied on her as someone to talk to and someone I could trust, and I ruined that with my horrible selfishness and behaviour. I believed that I had some… sort of right to have her attention all the time or something, I was just horrible, and relied on her so much that it ruined our friendship.

However, that break we took served as a sort of wake-up call for me, and I decided that I needed to make things straight.

11th Grade (cont.)

During that break, I began to hang out more with a small group of friends I met in my English class, sat with them at lunch, and even went to watch Sonic 2 with some of them in theaters when it first came out. I slowly made more friends in other classes too, such as my History class, where I met a small group, and in Japanese, where I met a freshman who just moved in the same year as me, and we both liked similar anime, so we talked often in that class. I didn’t just meet these people, but I grew closer to them at this time. I started to feel better about myself and living in Arizona now that I had more friends.

Sometime around this time, I don’t know if it was now or earlier or before, but SOMETIME, I began talking to some friends online in a Discord server (where I also met realjame (hi J)), so I now had in-person friends and online friends. Also…

I got a job in March as well. Fun fact, my official hire date is my birthday (March 14th!), so that’s funny haha. But I was starting to get my life together now, finally becoming used to my new life in Arizona.

Speaking of my birthday, Mar contacted me on that day to wish me a happy birthday, and we began talking again. We still fought a little, but I began to work harder to fix my behaviour and attitude, and having the support of my new friends and life in Arizona really began to help with that.

And before I knew it, the school year ended.

2nd Trip to Washington

I went on another trip shortly after, this time for not as long, and visited my friends, including my school friends this time. It was kind of weird though, because I wanted to see them, but I just felt horrible during our meetup, it felt like they didn’t really care that I was there. It made me feel bad, and from then I kinda just stopped talking to them. I sometimes talk now, but not much. Besides that though, the trip was fun. And shortly after I got back, I started 12th grade.

12th Grade

This year was probably the best year in high school for me, because I had a much more established friend group, I had people to talk to, my mental health was getting better, and I was fully used to living in Arizona. There still were ups and downs here and there, but very minor, and overall, it was a great year. And before I knew it, graduation came and went, and here I am now.

Present Day, Present Time

I know I kind of rushed to the end there, I’m just tired of typing.

It’s been interesting remembering everything that went down these past few years, and seeing how things have changed for myself. I can’t say that I’m a perfect person now, but I am getting better. Moving here has made me learn a lot of valuable lessons and toughened me a bit, made me get out of my shell more. However, I’m still deciding to move back to Washington. It sucks having to move away from more friends, but I feel that I’m gonna be even more happier there. But I guess we’ll see what happens when I move.

Cooking pasta (tasty pasta)

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 18:20:47 -0700

Today, I cooked some pasta. It was very good. I should learn to cook more, I don’t want to rely on frozen food too much…

Thrift finds (6-22-23)

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 16:37:02 -0700

Forgot to make this post. Whoops.

Got a bunch of stuff a few days ago, added up to a total of about 124 dollars :((((

Mainly just bought to resell some stuff so I can afford a PS Vita, but I also bought the Dreamcast for realjame, I actually just shipped it out earlier, so J, if you’re reading this, you’re welcome and you better make a post about this on your site haha.

But yeah, I wanted to buy a PS Vita, so I’ve been buying stuff to resell, which has been my little side thing to get more money for ages. There’s a whole bunch of stigma around resellers, specifically video game resellers, who I do not sympathize with. However, I don’t really mind other resellers, since some of them can actually be really chill, but there are some who ruin it for everyone.

Anyways yeah, have a good day, and fuck video game scalpers and overpriced resellers :D

How to become less insecure?

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 16:23:02 -0700

I really wanna become less insecure, but, like my last post I made today, I’m not really sure how to do it. When I went to Goodwill today, I literally sat on my phone and Googled “how to be less insecure” and “how to not let others influence you” and that kind of stuff. I feel that I am too influenced by other people in the sense that I just let others do what they want with me rather than what I want, because I hate confrontation and conflict. I’m just so scared of it that I let others influence me to a terrible point. For example, when I’m at work and I see someone doing something, like kids pulling off fire extinguishers, or a thief stealing something, I don’t say anything. I tell my manager about it and he’ll do something, but I feel so pathetic not being able to stand up for myself and just say something. And it’s probably why I feel like I’m too nice to people as well. I remember I got some texts from someone in the Marines (probably got my number from the school) and wanted to recruit me or some bullshit like that, and I went along with it for a bit because I felt bad about just blocking his number (I eventually did, but it still took me a bit).

The thing is I just don’t know how to fix that. Do I just… go out and yell at people? How do I boost my confidence in myself? Like… what am I supposed to do? It’s such an irritating issue because I’m not sure how to fix it. I hope someday to figure out the secret to it.

Frustrated about my fence-sitting and contradictory stances

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 13:03:13 -0700

I feel like I’ve talked about this before, but regardless it still frustrates me a lot.

An issue that I seem to be having is that I can’t really formulate my own opinions of a lot of important topics, and I tend to just go with what everyone says without really thinking for myself, or I tend to fence-sit on a matter as to not create conflict or anything like that, since I’ve always hated creating conflict and that sort of thing. But it feels frustrating to me because I feel like when I talk to people nowadays about a matter, I just initially think one way about something and then flip it immediately with a switch when someone points out some fault with that argument and pretend that I never thought that way. I don’t have a strong sense of opinion on everything, I just absorb at face value and use the opinions of others to create this facade of an opinion, when in reality, I have no clue what I’m talking about.

The worst part? I don’t know how to fix it! I really, really don’t. You could say just try harder and sit down and think, but I just can’t do that in the moment, I don’t know. I’m just kind of ranting at this point, I really don’t know if this is cohesive at all or not, since trying to explain exactly how I feel is so difficult. I’m just frustrated about being so in-the-middle or sometimes, just plain contradictory. And I know that everyone contradicts themselves, no one has perfectly set logic, but it really really frustrates me when I talk to someone and try to say something one day, and then completely change it the next day just to be “in the right” or whatever, because nowadays, I feel that, whether you like it or not, a lot of times, there is no such thing as an opinion, and there is always a right answer. And if you aren’t in the right… yeah. I’m not really talking about major major issues and subjects, just minor things, but still.

Bumblebee

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 21:57:32 -0700

SWEET LITTLE BUMBLEBEE I KNOW WHAT YOU WANT FROM ME DOODODOODODODAADAAA DOODODOODODODAADAAA

Great song.

Unboxing Evangelion Stuff from ZenMarket

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 10:18:03 -0700

Trying something new, making videos instead of typing netlogs… I wonder if I’ll stick with this format. We’ll see…

I enjoyed making the video, but it took like several hours lmao, I don’t know if I wanna put that much effort for every post, but I’ll try to do it once in a while and see if it sticks. Hope u enjoy :)

Took out the Writing tab and added new tags

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 20:12:42 -0700

Decided to take out the Writing tab since I felt like it was going nowhere, and I don’t really like writing. Right now, my focus is the comic, so I’m gonna take this section down since it has no real value. It technically still exists tho, if you just add “/writing” to the website link, but nothing is there, so :/

I also added new tags: Music, Site Updates, Life, and Movies/TV. Just to make it more better organized than it was before. And I went through my old posts and quickly updated the tags on all of them.

Thrift finds and vinyl

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 14:28:03 -0700

Yesterday, I went to Goodwill and I found some pretty cool stuff!

I got some small stuff, like another PS2 DDR game for my collection, but most of what I got is music. I did get one CD, Travelling without Moving by Jamiroquai, so I’m really happy about that, but the biggest part of my find yesterday was finding a few D&B vinyls.

Initially, I didn’t look at the vinyls because 99% of the time, I never find anything. But when I came back to the DVD section where the vinyls were to check other stuff, I notice a guy looking through a bin and digging out some vinyls with the Good Looking Records logo on it, and my heart immedaitely sunk. In the end, the guy (who might I add was a reseller (I could tell by the fact he was looking up prices on his phone (yes i kinda stalked him (grahhhh sorry ill continue)))) took some of the ones I really eyed out, leaving me with the scraps. Out of said scraps, I picked up these albums.

I’ve heard of some of the names and labels like Makoto and Metalheadz, so those were nice to find, but I also got some vinyls with cool covers on them. I’ve never heard of them before, but they were 3 bucks and looked sick, so I got them. However, it turns out the turntable in my garage no longer works the day I needed to use it, so I can’t actually listen to the vinyls. For now, they will be in my collection collecting dust. Now here’s the kicker…

I don’t like vinyl.

Yeah, I don’t really care for vinyl. It’s mainly the price of the medium compared to CDs, like DAMN vinyls are so expensive compared to CDs. And IMO, they don’t even sound better. The difference to me is so insignificant that paying like 20-30 dollars for a vinyl vs 10-15 over a CD is not worth it. Not to mention, CDs are smaller, so they’re easier to store. Take that, vinyl losersssssss B)

I don’t hate vinyl that much, but yeah. However, if I found stuff I really love on vinyl, I’d still get it. However, preferably, I’d want it on CD.

Tummyache

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 13:18:11 -0700

In the past week, my family has been having stomach flu, and now it is finally my turn to hear the burden as well. I feel terrible, like my stomach is gonna blow up, aaggghhhhh…. As I’m typing, I’m in bed on my phone in fetal position, clenching my stomach in pain, but when I upload this, I’ll be on my computer chair in fetal position clenching my stomach in pain.

With nothing to do but to try to relax and get through it, I may as well talk about my week.

Buying new stuff

I got myself some new stuff, like these Yotsuba books that are in Japanese from Goodwill for 3 dollars each and The Batman 4K Blu-Ray.

I bought the Yotsuba manga because when I was still in school, I was studying Japanese and, funilly enough, my teacher had me read the first chapter of Yotsuba in Japanese one day, and I actually liked it, so when I saw this on the bookshelf, I thought it would be fun to read it all in Japanese since the text is at about my level and it gives myself a proper excuse to study over the summer.

As for The Batman Blu-Ray, it was 10 dollars on Amazon, which was good enough of a deal for me to cop it. I do like this movie a decent bit, so I’m happy to have it in my growing collection of 4K Blu-Rays. It makes my shelf look more like a proper collection than a mess of random garbage haha.

Update on my ZenMarket haul

Right now, they are STILL packing my order, it’s been almost a week now. The issue is that I initially set my shipping method as FedEx, but apparently for disc media, they require a “video declaration form” in order for it to get through customs, and I didn’t want to deal with that hassle, so I switched it to DHL, and I think that’s why it’s talking so long, but who knows. Man, I just want my cool stuff already…

Well, that’s about it for now. I’m still in bed, suffering and wriggling around in pain. I hope this passes soon.

Discussing the leaked Persona 3 Reload trailer

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 13:48:46 -0700

Yesterday, shortly after the first conference of the Summer Game Fest ended, where I didn’t care, nor was expecting much to happen, the trailers for Persona 3 Reload and Persona 5 Tactica leaked online through ATLUS’ Instagram. I couldn’t really care less for P5 Tactica, but I was hyped for Persona 3 Reload. And after watching the trailer, I have some thoughts on what’s been shown so far.

The 2D Graphics

In terms of 2D graphics and UI, I mostly like the improvements and new things they did with it. They refreshed the portrait art for all characters to line up with the modern Persona style, which is pretty neat and looks great.

persona 3 remake portrait comparison pic.twitter.com/RHYeNkgiPC
— akechi goro time (レオ) (@akechigoroboy) June 9, 2023

The UI is alright. The pause menu in particular looks awesome with the Persona 5-esque layout and styling, along with the water theme of it all, although how much it fits into Persona 3 overall is debatable. Then again, I am not one to say that, since I only have about 20 hours on Persona 3. I think it looks good overall, and I think it fits alright enough.

The battle menu on the other hand, I don’t know… I think that it leans too much into Persona 5’s style. And why did they get rid of the revolver menu? The menu overall looks more boring than it should’ve been. I hope that this gets changed before release, but knowing ATLUS, I sort of doubt it.

The dialogue menu is something I am kind of indifferent about. I don’t think it’s an upgrade or downgrade from the original, it’s distinct in its own way, but still preserves the vibe of the original, if that makes sense. It’s fine.

Another thing with the UI that I’m not sure I like, this may sound weird… it’s too blue? They seem like they’re trying to do what Persona 5 did where they had the elements contrast with the game’s central color by having these drop shadows on stuff like the portaits, or in the Battle UI, and I don’t really like it. I wish that they kept the redesign more in-line with Persona 3’s original design. I’m fine with modernizing the game’s look, but I think they’re trying too hard to make it like Persona 5.

But hey, at least the shop menu looks fine. It’s pretty in-line to the original game, and I think this is a good example of how the UI should’ve been designed: given modern touch-ups and edits, but still maintaining the core aspects of the original design.

The 3D Graphics

I don’t know if I really like them too much, honestly. It might grow on me, but I think it looks weird.

About 22 seconds in the trailer, the gameplay has this motion blur look, and everytime I see it, it reminds me of those videos that are like “I RECREATED MARIO IN UNREAL ENGINE!!!”.

Things like motion blur don’t fit in this sort of game. But it’s not even that, it’s the fact that the game is MADE IN UNREAL ENGINE. I don’t mind that, you can make some really cool looking stuff in UE, but the game just has that Unreal look to it, and I don’t like that much. And using Unreal is kind of weird to me… They have the engine they developed in-house for Persona 5… why not just use that?

With all the Persona 5 games, the new ones have grown stale graphically, and it’s because the games don’t use the in-house engine from the original game, they’re all made in Unreal, or something else, which gives the style of those games a somewhat… boring look? It doesn’t look as unique as Persona 5, and this game seems to have that same issue. I think using Unreal is fine, but I think the 3D graphics need some more work to set them apart from that Unreal look. Some clips look pretty alright though, like I don’t think the game looks horrible, but… yeah.

In the end…

As much as I have complaints about this game, I am overall really excited for this, and these complaints are more minor than anything, although I think these are things ATLUS should consider, since I’m not the only one with these complaints. But worse case scenario, modders will probably fix things up. Looking forward to this coming out in early 2024.

Across the Spider-Verse: A great sequel to a great movie

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 12:14:55 -0700

Yesterday, I watched Across the Spider-Verse. And my god, it was pretty great.

Honestly, I don’t like giving movies sequels too much. They can be good, but nowadays, most sequels are made as cash grabs, and don’t meet the expectations the previous films set. But not only does Across the Spider-Verse meet those expectations, it goes beyond them in some ways.

I’m not really good at reviews and criticism or anything like that, so I’m going to be speaking my mind more than writing a concise review.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Gwen (Spider-Woman)

To start from the beginning of the movie, I love the extra context and backstory given to Gwen’s character. I actually missed the first few minutes of this since I was a bit late, but I saw enough of it to understand what happened. I think adding this conflict makes Gwen a more fleshed out character and really adds more depth to the cast of characters we’ve come to like from the previous film, and considering the important role Gwen plays in this movie and probably will play in the next movie, it’s good that they added these elements to her character. The conflict with her dad, a police captain hunting for Spider-Woman after the death of Peter Parker, is great, and I’m also happy that they went back to it near the end of the film, making the whole thing complete. It really is one of my favorite things in the movie.

The Spot

Next notable aspect I want to talk about is the Spot. I really REALLY like the Spot. He’s just a fun villain, but it’s really a shame he pretty much disappeared in the last half of the film. I get why they had to cut him out, since they needed to make room for the events with Miguel and Miles, but he plays a very important role in this conflict, so it’s weird that he just disappears and the cast seems to forget about him briefly with seemingly no consequences. I hope the next film gives him the spotlight more.

Miguel O’Hara (Spider-Man 2099)

And since I mentioned Miguel, I’ll talk about him a bit. He’s also a great villain, but he plays a more cynical and aggressive role than the Spot does, being motivated by the loss of his family as a result of being in a universe that he doesn’t belong in (I believe that’s what happened? Sorry if I’m off), and this backstory provides a solid foundation for his contempt and motivation to stop Miles from disrupting the canon event of his father dying.

The Canon Event

The canon events, a concept set up in this movie, is really interesting. Essentially, a canon event is an event that must occur in a Spider-Man’s universe, such as Uncle Ben or Captain Stacy dying (I don’t really watch or read Spider-Man, so sorry if I get this wrong). It’s really interesting how this concept is set up and how Miles tries to subvert it as it serves as a commentary of what Spider-Man really is and what makes Spider-Man… well, Spider-Man.

Bloat

I think the film has a little bit of bloat, as I mentioned with the Spot’s lack of appearance in the second half, but also around the end. I don’t think the runtime was too long, but I was feeling like the movie should’ve ended 20-30ish minutes prior to when it did. They set up a lot of stuff near the end that, while serving as a great cliffhanger that’s sure to draw people to the next film, makes the film feel bloated and drawn out. And with the nature of it being split in two parts, it feels incomplete, but I feel like maybe this could’ve been prevented by keeping some parts from the last section of the film in the next part of the movie.

My Overall Thoughts

It’s a great movie that definitely stands around as tall as its predecessor, maybe taller. I definitely recommend this movie, and can’t wait for the next movie to come out next year (hopefully there’s no delays!!!). I will probably try to fulfil my Spider-Verse craving by rewatching the first movie, since it’s been a long while since I’ve seen it.

First post of June: What am I doing?

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 10:26:40 -0700

It’s been a little bit since I wrote, I sadly missed the first day of June… What have I been up to?

Across the Spider-Verse

Yesterday, I watched Across the Spider-verse, and it was really good! Really, really good! I won’t be talking about it in this post, I want to write a separate post to compile my thoughts in, so I’ll link it right here for you to check out (watch out for spoilers) :)

Imports from Japan and ZenMarket

Recently, I’ve decided to put some money into ZenMarket to buy some stuff as a treat for myself for graduating in a way, about ¥30000. I used that money to buy an Asuka figure and the final Evangelion Rebuild Blu-Ray to build up my collection.

Originally, I wanted to buy the Japanese Evangelion Blu-Ray set with the clear blue plastic case, but I decided not to in the end. I plan on buying it eventually, since I already own a good basic Blu-Ray set, but I just want it so I have a nice set to show off in my collection that’s not the American Blu-Ray set, since I don’t really like the design of it much at all. But I’ll see what I feel like doing in the future. For now, I will wait on it.

I hope to receive my ZenMarket items soon… So far, their service has been pretty good, I’ve just been waiting for the items I ordered to arrive at their warehouse.

Thrifting

My thrift finds in the past few days have been really, REALLY good. I found these in 2 days and paid probably around 40-50 dollars more or less in total for all this.

Some of the discs, like the Totoro Laserdisc and Mario Party 4, are heavily scratched, but I bought them anyways because they were like 3 dollars each, so it’s fine.

I’ve been thrifting way often now, since the Goodwill I go to is walking distance from my house, so I’ve been making efforts to walk there everyday to try to just get out of the house and find stuff. It’s been working really well, since I… well, found all this. So I’m happy about that.

Dragon Ball

Last time I talked about Dragon Ball, I said it was kind of mid, but I’m about to finish the Tenkaichi Budokai saga as I’m writing this, and well… it’s a lot better now! Much better than the Pilaf Saga. I actually am excited to watch Dragon Ball now. I don’t have much to say besides that, but apparently Red Ribbon Army saga is really good, so I’m excited for that.

Overall…

Yeah, I’ve been doing fine. Not much is going on at the moment for me.

An update on the USB-C PSP

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 31 May 2023 12:41:02 -0700

I got bored this morning and decided to redo the mod quickly. My main issue with it was that the big bulky wires I used were not that great, and I recently bought some thin 32AWG wire from Adafruit, so I thought it would be nice to redo it.

I basically followed the same steps from the original mod, though this time I did wire the data lines (but it ended up not working :/ oh well).

I would have gotten pictures, had my dumbass not forgot to PUT AN SD CARD IN THE CAMERA WHEN I TOOK THE PICTURES. Oh well, it’s not drastically different. One thing I still don’t like is the tight fit of everything inside. I’m not sure if it’s the breakout board or the hot glue, but the fit inside is SUPER tight and the board actually has a very tiny bend to it, which irks me a lot. It still works, and it goes back together, but I’m not sure if the bend is good, I want to see if I can fix it, but if it works, then I won’t waste my time even more on this. It charges and works, so yeah.

Got to play some Lumines today, great game, please buy it!!! :D

My life so far in summer break

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 31 May 2023 12:08:59 -0700

It’s been a week since school ended for me. I think. It feels like way more. But I’ve been trying to make that time count in my days.

Working Out

I’ve started doing more exercises and being more conscious about my health recently. I wouldn’t say I’m overweight at all, but I feel like my habits on the computer and my eating habits are not too healthy, so with the start of the summer break, now that I have a lot more time to spare, I’ve started doing some work outs from time to time in my day.

It’s not much, just mainly working on my arms and my core. For instance, I try to make a consious effort to be doing something with my arms when watching a movie or a show, such as using a hand grip strengthener, or lifting some small weights. And whenever I feel like it, I’ll try to spend 10 minutes or so doing some small exercises with a thin fold out mattress on the floor, since I don’t actually own an exercise mat (maybe I should buy one).

I’m not really looking to become extremely fit and build up a 27-pack, but I want to make myself more conscious about my health, and I want to be a little bit more fit, and not stay a fragile twig.

The Comic

I always talk about it, but I’ve never said anything about it, and I still won’t. I’ve been having a hard time getting myself to work on it during the day, or just in general recently. I think it’s that I’ve been struggling to keep myself away from distractions. Even though it is break, I need to make myself more productive, so I’m thinking of setting a more strict schedule in the day, or maybe setting a stop watch during my comic work time so that I don’t let myself get distracted. However, I also need to work on actually getting started on work, so I think that’s where I will start.

I lied, here's a panel.

Watching Movies and Anime

Recently, with my time, I’ve also been using it to watch more shows and some movies too. This sounds like a bad thing, but I don’t want to force myself off movies and shows, since I find them important for me finding inspiration for my writing and art. And it’s not like I am addicted to them, not at all. If there was an addiction issue to fix, it would be YouTube, so I’m not concerned about movies and shows at all.

Recently, I finished rewatching NEON GENESIS EVANGELION after not watching it for 4-5 years, I think. Man. I watched it dubbed (ADV dub) this time, and… IDK, it’s fine. Both the show and the dub. I don’t care for the dub much at all, but damn, Tristan MacAvery did a really good job as Gendo, in my opinion. Everyone else is okay to mid, I just don’t care for the dub, and don’t understand why it’s so loved, besides maybe nostalgia. As for the show itself, I think I’ve overpraised it the past few years. It’s a good show, but certainly not peak. I’ve never really liked the show as much as its finale movie, End of Evangelion, though, and I still hold that movie to a very high regard, even after watching the show. I will be watching Death and Rebirth, along with EoE, dubbed soon, so I hope that will be a good experience.

I’ve also started watching Dragon Ball. It’s fine too, it’s a lot different from the Dragon Ball I hear people talk about nowadays, and honestly, I don’t care too much for it so far, I’m about 12 episodes in as of writing. I wish I could just start with DBZ and get along with things, rather than needing to watch 150+ episodes to get context. I hope DB gets better.

Bored

I’m bored. So so so so bored. I’ve been trying to fill my time up by doing productive things more, but I still have this feeling of monotony in my day, I’m just going with the schedule, staying at home, doing nothing… I do go on walks to go to Goodwill, but it’s still not very fulfilling. I hope this feeling goes away, or I find more things to do for myself.

Overall…

It’s going okay. I still kinda have remnant feelings of that last post I made, and I listed my boredom issues and stuff… But I don’t feel entirely terrible. I’m just doing… okay.

Thinking on a Saturday

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 27 May 2023 18:02:42 -0700

I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve written something about my life and my thoughts. Like real talk, not just talking about my day or a project I’m working on.

Death

Recently, I’ve had this on my mind a lot. Well, not recently, for a few months now. I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m out of school, starting my proper adult life. But I’ve just been thinking about death, and what happens after you die. This isn’t some revolutionary thing, I don’t want to present it as that, more just my thoughts and feelings, since I feel like I need to get them out.

Death scares me a lot. I’m pretty sure it scares many other people in the world too. When I go to bed, and I close my eyes to sleep, I can’t help but have the thought in my mind that maybe death is like sleeping. Or death is like nothing. And it makes me wonder what nothing is. What is nothing?

Nothing scares me. Trying to comprehend what nothing is in a material world is scary. Trying to comprehend a lack of awareness and consciousness and self I guess scares me. Imagining my conscience disappearing and my corpse rotting into nothingness terrifies me so much. And all this makes me wonder: how do people cope with this thought?

I know there are things like religion for example. They typically set up what happens in the afterlife, and act as a reassurance and a guideline for how to live your life. However, I don’t believe in any religion, or really, even any god or higher being of any kind. And even if I tried to, it wouldn’t work because I know I’d be lying to myself just to alleviate the pain of acknowledging the inevitable.

I feel like anything I do is just a distraction from death. I know that’s a terrible mindset to have, but I feel like that’s the truth. Like all we do in our lives is just keeping ourselves from thinking about the fact that we will all die.

It doesn’t help that the world that we live in always seems to be clouded in negativity.

The World

I’m judging the world based on what I see, which is mostly on the internet and some people at school, or at work, or on Discord, so this is completely dependant on the people you surround yourself in (in my opinion, I’ll get to that later), but it always seems like people are just drowning in negativity.

In person, for example, when I go to church, all the messages are no longer about teaching the values of God, but rather about discussing how TERRIBLE the world is and how AWFUL America and the values of the everyday day people are and how gay people are GOING TO HELL and UBHFUYDSVUIYASDVFUYSDBIFUDYSVF IM TIRED OF IT, REALLY. I’m dragged to church by my parents every Sunday and I’m so drained by the preaching because it just feels like a negativity and doomer circlejerk than anything else, and I’m sick of it.

School is fine, I don’t think the people I associate myself with are negative. If anything, they probably know how to cope with the world better than I do.

Online, people are constantly starving for clout and attention, victimizing themselves, always trying to call others out, and in general, just being so negative. People can be so aggressive towards others online, and generally just have no patience. I know there are plenty of people online that are genuinely just horrible and don’t necessarily deserve patience, but I believe patience, even online, is an important virtue to have, not only for your own mental health, but for the health of others too. The amount of people online, especially on Twitter, that are so critical of others for hardly any good reason annoys me.

The Mindset

In the end, I think what makes the world good to live in is the mindset one adopts. If you constantly let what others think affect your day, or make yourself have doomer thoughts like “death is inevitable”, you will always feel horrible. What determines your view on life is your mindset. By thinking for yourself instead of letting the world determine what you think, you can be happier. And even for things beyond your control, like death, it’s okay to ignore them and live your life the way you want to, while it lasts. I suppose maybe there’s no shame in ignoring the inevitable. Well…. Actually, I don’t know about that. I don’t think it’s good to ignore it, but rather to confront it and to try to cope with it. I want to figure that out for myself. In that sense, it means I have to find my purpose for existing, which I feel like I have a grasp of, but I don’t know what makes me want to keep living and going. I’m not saying I’m suicidal at all, more just I don’t really know why I’m still doing what I’m doing, figuring out how to live my life, that kind of stuff.

Ending

I don’t know if this is cohesive at all. I don’t really mind whether it is or not. I just wanted to try to externalize my thoughts, and I wanted to try to put into words my current emotions and thoughts. Right now, I feel good emotionally, but I feel confused. I’m just figuring out things right now.

Oh yeah, and I just finished rewatching Evangelion, so maybe that’s why I’m like this lol.

Graduation

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 24 May 2023 11:33:30 -0700

Today, I graduate from high school. It’s pretty weird to think about. It feels like life went by really quick, but when I really think about it, man have I been through a lot.

I’m not really sure what else to say. I guess it’s nice that I have more time to myself now instead of at school, since I’m not gonna go to college for a year. I hope to put that time into my own personal projects, like working on my small comic project that I’ve brought up before. I’ve been working on it from time to time, but I struggle to find time in my day to work on it and I also have a hard time working during the day, so I hope to fix my bad habits and use my time wisely.

My Post-It note scheduling has also been going really well, I enjoy my days because I have a goal to work towards now, so I’ve been doing it every day. It really does help to have a plan everyday, although I don’t like the whole planning things out by the minute thing some people do. I want to give myself goals, but not be too strict about them.

The ceremony for the graduation is awfully late, its at like 7pm or something like that, man… Sorry if I sound really jumpy and disjointed in my writing, by the way, I’m rewatching Evangelion with the ADV dub, and my attention is on that more. Rewatching this is my way of celebrating, kind of, since the last time I watched it was either… late 8th grade, or early 9th grade. Man, it’s been ages.

I don’t have much more to say, maybe I will tonight. We’ll see.

Building a USB-C Guitar Hero controller

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 20 May 2023 11:15:21 -0700

I love USB-C. I love rhythm games. I also love building random things that I don’t particularly need. This build fulfils all three of those things for me. And it’s finally done.

This won’t really be a guide, more just me talking about my little journey of building my own Guitar Hero controller, though I hope it does prove to be helpful or cool to at least one person.

CONTEXT

Almost a month ago now, I went thrifting and I found a Guitar Hero guitar, specifically a PS2 Wireless Kramer controller, for about 7 dollars. (check my post talking about this :D)

It looks much more different than it does now!

I’ve always had an interest in playing Guitar Hero and Clone Hero, but I didn’t want to deal with all the ordeal with buying a specific controller and using adapters and whatever. Many guitars are discouraged from being used for Clone Hero or for use on PC due to many incompatibilies, issues with the actual controller design, etc. So instead of dealing with that, I thought it would be fun to repurpose this now useless and very much NOT sought after Guitar Hero controller and bring new life to it by giving it a complete makeover, both cosmetically and internally.

CLEANING THE GUITAR

I sadly don’t have many pictures of this process, so I’ll try to describe it the best I can.

It sucked.

Some stubborn and gross sticker residue

There were a ton of stickers on the guitar, probably over a decade old by now, so removing them was a pain, each sticker had to be scrapped off and drowned in Goo-Gone. The big stickers were especially horrible. After a while of going and coming back to give my hands a break, I got all the stickers off the guitar.

From there, I just gave it a quick wipe-down and also gave some parts a little Magic Eraser and sanding in order to prepare it for painting. Speaking of which…

PAINTING THE GUITAR

I already made a post about this, so I won’t go to much into it, but to give a quick run-down, I painted the main part of the guitar red, which I already discussed in this post. After that post though, I got some white spray paint and also painted the center glossy part. From there, I painted both parts with several coats of extremely glossy clear coat.

I think it honestly turned out pretty alright, considering I’ve barely ever used spray paint prior to this, and I’m really glad that the gloss turned out pretty neat looking.

MODDING THE INTERNALS

(NOTE: I did a terrible job taking pictures and journaling this, so I apologize for the lack of pictures for a while.)

Before talking about the process of modding, here’s my list of tools and parts I used for reference:

TOOLS

Soldering iron
Torx 10 and Philips head screwdriver
Tweezers
Desoldering pump/braid
Craft knife

MATERIALS

Raspberry Pi Pico
Jumper wires
Hot glue (lots of it)
Panel mount Micro USB to USB-C adapter
Solder and flux

ORDERING THE PARTS

After I finished painting, I went on Adafruit and ordered several parts, here’s my little list :)

(the ones highlighted in red are the ones used for this project, the other parts are for something else)

I hope you know what Adafruit is, but if you don’t, they’re an amazing website for buying electronics parts. If you ever need parts for a project, this site is what I recommend.

Overall, without the other stuff on that list, the parts for this project cost about 30 dollars. The brain of the controller will be the Raspberry Pi Pico, which we will use to program as a controller for use on PC with a tool I’ll talk about a little later. The Micro-B to USB-C is used to adapt the Pico’s Micro USB port to a much more… not terrible port, while also giving more cable length for me to fit things nicely inside the case. The wires are for… well, wiring. And I ordered two tilt-ball switches for using Star Power on the controller, which is activated by tilting the neck up. I ordered 2 switches because according to some people online, it should help provide a more accurate input without misreads… or something like that.

After a few days, I got the parts in the mail and it was now time to mod the parts.

REMOVING THE OLD PARTS

I already had the guitar open since it was painted and I reinstalled the old parts inside, but I took out the power switch and LED, along with the battery compartment, since we wouldn’t need those anymore. It was a matter of just unscrewing them and pulling them out, so very straightforward.

I also went out of my way to remove the old wireless antenna, some of the big capacitors on the board, and other random small parts that weren’t needed anymore, mainly just capacitors and wireless stuff. I did cut my thumb on a capacitor leg though, so that wasn’t fun.

Be safe when working with electronics!

THE NECK CONNECTOR

After that, I had to desolder this little daughterboard, which had the pins that connect to the neck of the guitar, from the mainboard, and I wired several jumper wires that corresponded to the colored buttons and the pinout, which was conveniently labeled on the mainboard.

I wasn’t able to clear the holes for the orange pin and ground, so I had to surface-mount them, and because of that, the wires interfered when closing the case. Because of that, I had to cut this hole in the case in order for the wires to fit and the case to properly close.

I may have cut the hole a little too big. Oops!

I wasn’t really happy to have to do this, but now the case closes properly and, to be fair, the neck will be plugged into the guitar anyways, so you won’t even see this hole. I may cover it up with tape or something in the future, but it doesn’t bother me too much anymore.

WIRING THE STRUM BAR

Wiring the strum bar was fine, it’s basically just two buttons, so I wired two wires on each button.

I also cut the traces around it with a craft knife since apparently, not doing this can cause phantom inputs (basically just random inputs you didn’t make) because of the circuitry around the buttons being active when using them.

WIRING THE WHAMMY BAR

The whammy bar uses three pins, and I had the exact colors of wire they used, so doing that was really straightforward, I just desoldered the old wires and replaced them with jumper wires.

WIRING START AND SELECT

Start and Select are on a seperate board which uses three wires, so I simply desoldered the old wires and resoldered new ones. For some reason, I was having issues getting the wires in and being too thin since they wouldn’t properly fit through the holes, but I got it figured out.

WIRING THE TILT INPUT

The board inside the guitar actually already has a tilt sensor on it, but I ordered other tilt sensors because I don’t know, why not? In retrospect, I probably could’ve just stuck with using the board’s tilt sensor, but it’s fine, I didn’t think about that when ordering my parts.

I wired both tilt sensors in series so that the tilt can only activate when both sensors are active, if only one is active, the signal won’t pass through.

I just wired them, used some heat shrink to cover the pins, and then wrapped the sensors in Kapton tape to keep them together.

Looks pretty good, huh?

MOUNTING THE PI PICO

After I finished soldering new wires to everything, I needed to mount the new parts, starting with the Pi Pico. I decided to mount it directly below the mainboard, since it looked tidy and was the best place where all the wires could reach it without too much strain. To mount it in the case, I used a lot of hot glue, which I know isn’t the best, but it should work perfectly fine, since this won’t have much strain put on it.

I also got a little head-start with plugging things into the Pico haha

MOUNTING THE USB-C PORT

On the bottom of the guitar, there’s this little black piece that holds the power switch and LED. This proved to be a perfect place to put the USB-C port at, since the hole was big enough to fit a port and the cable going in it, and the plastic around the USB-C port was big enough to cover the hole.

To mount it, I took out the screws it came with and cut one of the screw holes out to make it fit on the plastic cover.

From there, I aligned the port and then used a ton of hot glue to mount it on the plastic piece. I hope the hot glue lasts a while… I also had to cut out some plastic from one of the mounting posts on the whammy, since it was interfering with the wire. Even with it cut though, it barely fits, but fits enough that it should be fine.

I think the port turned out looking really good though, almost like it’s official. Very proud of that. And plugging cables in and out feels good too, it’s not too hard to, so I’m not terribly worried about applying too much force on it.

PLUGGING EVERYTHING INTO THE PICO

I now needed to wire everything to the Pico. This was pretty straightforward, since I just needed to wire all the buttons to any ground and digital pins, which the Pico has plenty of, and then the whammy needed to be wired to some analog ports, and I needed to plug the USB-C cable to the Micro USB port. I also had to mount the tilt, which was the same as wiring the other buttons, but I also needed to hot glue it to the case, which wasn’t hard at all. And that was all for wiring.

PROGRAMMING THE PICO

To program the Pico, I used the Ardwiino Guitar Configurator, a very useful program that programs your Pico for you and provides a very convenient way to map your buttons. While the name suggests it’s meant to be used for Wii guitars, it can actually be used to configure any guitar that you can get the Pico inside of. I’m not gonna go into depth with it, since doing this was pretty much just a matter of plugging it in and pressing buttons and stuff, so I’ll close this section off by saying thank you very much to sanjay900 for creating the Guitar Configurator, the link to the Github page and guide is here!

PLAYING THE GAME

I suck at it, but it’s fun.

CONCLUSION

This project was really fun honestly, I learned a lot, and now I can finally play my favorite guitar game…

HHAHAHA I LIED TO YOU ALL IM NOT PLAYING GUITAR HERO IM PLAYING GUITAR FREAKS BITCHHHHH HAHAHAHHAHAHHAHHA

The weekend, Fullmetal Alchemist, old Roblox, and... more?

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 14 May 2023 21:21:22 -0700

Sorry for lying about posting yesterday, I was too tired lol.

My weekend

This weekend was pretty good, I made progress on a few things, like exercising, comic stuff, etc. I also had some fun doing some random things. I set up Tears of the Kingdom on my Steam Deck, so I’m looking forward to enjoying that after I beat Persona 5 Royal eventually. I also finished painting my Guitar Hero guitar, and I also finally bought the parts needed to make the controller work on Clone Hero. Originally, I was going to make this post about the painting, but I decided to hold it off for when I fully complete the guitar.

Bloxxin’ out

Today, I decided to join in a little game of Roblox with my friend, realjame (check out his website at realja.me). We didn’t play for long, but we had fun. Here’s some pictures of us.

TIP: Click on the images to expand them if they’re too small!

Here's a picture of me testing realjame's work in progress farming game :)

After that, I did my own thing on Novetus, and explored a lot, but I only took 1 screenshot haha.

Welcome to Kentuci fried chicken

Going back and looking at all those old maps I used to play on Roblox really sent me back, it was really cool.

Fullmetal Alchemist

Today, I also finally finished watching the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime. I’ve watched Brotherhood prior several times, so my reaction to this show overall is that I really like it! It’s good and really subverted my expectations. I personally like Brotherhood more since it felt more grand and epic. Not to mention, the end was cool in OG FMA, but Brotherhood’s ending was more cohesive and cool to me, although to be fair, I still have yet to watch the movies. I will get to that soon. I like how some of the characters that were pushed as single-use characters in Brotherhood were used more here, or some characters were used less, and even completely new characters. It was nice, and I really like how they used them.

I also like the logic changes, I don’t think one show is better than the other in this regard, I think they are equally good, but FMA’s treatment of topics like how the Homunculi are created, how equivalent exchange works, etc. are unique and made interesting to me again instead of repeating what Brotherhood did, so I appreciate that.

Overall, a great show. I think Brotherhood is better, but this definitely shouldn’t be shoved off, and stands its own ground very well.

Yes I used a Brotherhood GIF for this lol sorry

Working out

I’ve also begun to try to work out more. Not necessarily like a very strict thing for myself, but rather trying to make myself more conscious of when I’m doing nothing. When I’m watching a show or YouTube, I try to lift weights now, and when I’m bored, I get off my PC and work my core out. I hope I can maintain that habit… It would be nice to be a little more fit. I’m not obese by any means, but I’m not strong at all. I’ve got the strength of a twig.

Overall…

I could go on and on about small things, but this post is already getting bloated, so I’ll leave it at that. I hope I can keep my mood lifted and my spirits up. And I hope whoever reads this does the same too. Have a good night :)

Adding a mobile layout to my website

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 13 May 2023 14:31:30 -0700

Yes, I finally did it! I added a mobile layout to my website! It’s not fully complete, but it’s mostly done for the important aspects, like netlogs and the front page! Just uhh… don’t go on the About Me page lol.

Initially, I was sort of against doing this because:

I was lazy
I thought it would not be able to capture the look and feel of my site properly
I was lazy

But after a while (and thanks to the encouragement of my friends who actually use this site thank you so much oh my god seriously), I convinced myself to do it, so after a couple of nights of work, I (mostly) finshed working on it. I will be fixing the rest of the site later on, but for now, I will be publishing it as is, since I finished the primary aspects.

I will be posting another post later tonight, this is not my main post of the day, I just wanted to post this here to like make it official or something haha.

Painted my Guitar Hero controller (still work in progress)

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 08 May 2023 18:00:13 -0700

I painted my Guitar Hero controller that I bought a while back (check out “Thrift Finds (04-25-23)”). It’s not perfect, nor is the guitar itself close to being done, but I’m really proud of how it’s coming along so far. Next, I’m painting the center part and I’m gonna install a Pi Pico so that I can use it on my PC (since this is a PS2 Wireless Kramer Guitar). Gonna post this and enjoy some mac n’ cheese. Later, gater :P

Building a schedule, thrifting, and also my Windows ME desktop

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 06 May 2023 19:15:21 -0700

Today, instead of doing random things, I decided to build a schedule for myself (and half-follow it).

I got the idea while talking to J and decided to implement it today. I started by waking up in the morning at around 7pm and having a good breakfast. Then, I finally painted my Guitar Hero controller shell and intermittenly checked on it throughout the day. From there, I went and practiced for my Japanese speaking final, watched some Regular Show, downloaded some psychoanalysis books on my Kindle and read a little, slept for an hour (which was not part of my schedule but good nonetheless) and walked to Goodwill and Target. I didn’t get much from Target, but Goodwill was cool because I bought some graphic novels.

I heard of Maus, so I’m excited to read that, but Laika is a blind buy for me, it looked interesting, so I’m also looking forward to that. After that, I kinda derailed and resorted to just sitting on Discord and talking for hours before sitting here and typing this out now. And I forgot to mention, but I also banned myself from YouTube for today, so that went well, and maybe I should do this more often.

My mood in the past few days has been improving a lot and today really helped as well, so perhaps I should schedule my days more. Only thing is that I didn’t get to drive today, which is a bummer, but it’s okay.

I also messed with my Windows ME desktop more today, and made my setup look like this:

I think it’s pretty cool and I might keep it this way, but I want to change the wallpaper maybe, since I just grabbed it temporarily, but I don’t care too much for Rei. Man, I should try to install the Evangelion games of this era, and try to play them, now that I can sort of read Japanese. Worst case scenario, I can just download fan translations or smth.

Overall, today was a good day though. I am satisfied. Have a good night :)

First Post of May, Status Update!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 01 May 2023 22:47:15 -0700

THE START OF MAY.

Today was a pretty alright start for May. Today, I set up Cave Story on my VAIO PC, and it ran perfectly (as expected), so I’m stoked. I also did some more driving, so that went well also. School is finishing in three weeks, so I’m kind of stressed about that, especially English due to the fact that our teacher has put a bunch of different assignments, including our final, into a small timeframe of due dates, so me and many others are not happy about that.

This month, hopefully, also marks a new era of my spending. I’m doing the impossible, the unthinkable… no… it’s….

BUDGETING.

Yes, I’m starting to budget. College and adulting costs a lot of money, so I’m going to be budgeting more in order to make sure my savings dont stay at a stagnant amount (and definitely not moving lower). I set my budget to 150 dollars this month, which sounds pretty reasonable, but who knows, it’s been a day, and I already spent 8 dollars on a bag of Dot’s Pretzels. I guess I’ll see over the month how this all goes.

PERSONAL PROJECTS.

I also want to start working on my personal projects more… It’s out of the blue, but I really want to work on some of my older ideas, or at the very least, start doing more art practice again. I’ve been putting that stuff off due to my busy schedule, but perhaps I can somehow make time for it. I had a comic idea (this is getting old, I know) in my backlog, and I abandoned drawing it at page 3… it looks really meh, but I remembered why it was like that. I didn’t care or mind, it was supposed to be a project I made to figure things out for myself and do things for fun, not for others. And I like the idea of it and really want to expand on it, especially after watching Infinity Train, a show with a somewhat similar premise to what I had in mind, so I’m really excited to work on it again, and hopefully, I can get something finished out of it. That’s what matters most… finishing something…

Well, it’s 11pm exactly as of me typing this, so perhaps I should head to bed. Good night :)

My New Pentium III Late 90's PC: the Sony PCV-LX800! ...And the Journey of Installing Windows ME.

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 14:47:24 -0700

Yesterday, I was walking to a thrift store near me and I walked into it, not really expecting to find much, until I walked into the electronics section. I didn’t see a lot at first, they had some crappy mid 2000’s prebuilts, random Blu-Ray players, and cables. But as I double checked, I noticed something that piqued my interest: a Pentium III sticker. I looked more and saw right above a Windows sticker with the 9x era logo. I darted my eyes around and saw the beige grey case, the dull blue lining down the center, the very unique and of the era 90s design, and on the side: the VAIO logo. On it was taped a piece of paper that read: “PC - NOT TESTED” and below that: “$5”. I picked it up immediately. I had to walk a bit before I got a ride, but I got back home and placed it on the floor of my room, admiring it. I mean… look at it!

OK, enough with the fancy prose. It’s a really cool looking PC though. It is missing the front cover, as you can see, and it has some scuffs and slight yellowing, but it’s still awesome as hell. That being said though, I needed to power it on. I had to use the power cable from my home server since I didn’t have any spare ones, but thank goodness I still had a VGA cable lying around and that my 2nd monitor supports VGA. I hooked everything up and turned it on and…

It booted and worked fine…ish. I’ll get to that later. More importantly, it had Debian preinstalled on it??? It looked like the guy who had this before tried to revitalize the system by installing Linux, and (I think) he even replaced the RAM from the original 128MB configuration to the max 512MB! Not complaining there. However, that wasn’t enough to make the system keep up with… whatever he tried to install and set up on there. I turned the computer off and decided to open it up. I noticed that the power button felt really stiff, so I wanted to check that out, plus dust out the system if it was dusty. And… it wasn’t.

Well, it was sort of, but not as much as I thought, just surface dust. I don’t have pictures here, but the power button on the front is one of those metal dimple switches (if that’s what they’re called???) and it looks like somehow it wore out because it wouldn’t press down at all, but it still works if I touch it. It’s really sensitive though, so I just pulled it up a little with an Xacto knife and it works for now, but I don’t know if it will stay that way. After addressing that, I wanted to replace the thermal paste, so I took off the cooler…

It already had paste on it. Oops. Well, I have better paste I think, so I put it on there anyways.

From there, I wanted to install Windows 98 initially, so I spent the day trying to figure it out. I had to run to Target to buy CDs to burn and use, since it doesn’t support booting from USB flash drives, and from there I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to actually install Windows. In the end, I gave up though because I couldn’t figure out how to boot the installer without a boot floppy and nothing I tried would work. I also figured it would be hard to get the drivers set up since they didn’t really seem like they were readily available online. So instead, I decided to install Windows ME via the recovery discs for this system, which I found here:

https://archive.org/details/SRCDV28B7_0_ENU1_2

Thank goodness for Internet Archive.

Anyways, I got the two discs burned, and after a while of waiting for it to reinstall the OS…

IT BOOTED!!! And yeah, this was at like 10pm lol, so that’s why it’s so dark. I went through the setup process and then was greeted to the desktop soon after.

What a sight to see. Shortly after that, I even got networking working and soon enough, I was online.

From there, I did a few more things and just went to sleep, since it was pretty late.

I don’t really have a plan on what to do with this PC, but I want to use it for just doing random things, so it was definitely worth the 5 dollars and the trouble to get it working, I love this thing so much. Shame I don’t have a CRT monitor to go with it, but this works fine too. I will probably write more updates in the future regarding this PC once I figure out what to do with it, but for now, that’s all :)

How to Stop Going Down and Keep Going Up?

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 22:13:54 -0700

It won’t be a big rant, but I do just want to express my frustration regarding my constant mood swings. It’s frustrating to deal with. I’ve been stressed about driving, school, work, etc. I already said this, but recently I’ve felt more down than usual. I think all the bad things are catching up with me… like, all the stress and reality is kinda setting in and now, I can’t keep my mind off of it and my mood is stuck in a gloomy mode. I will probably get better soon… I also feel like I’ve been more bitchy recently, because I started having this idea that I need to act more for myself over others since it feels like they’re all doing the same, so why shouldn’t I, right? And also, I want to stop being such a pushover and act for myself. But I don’t know if what I’m doing is good, I feel like I’m just being more irritating now, since all I do is just act more sassy to others. I don’t like it. Might change it. Anyways, don’t have much more to say, I’ll sleep on it… good night ZZZZZZZ

Thrift Finds (04-25-23)

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 22:11:09 -0700

My thrift finds on Monday. I found a few things, went to a Savers and two Goodwills, and overall, spent about 90 dollars, more or less (the Savers stuff, like the i7, was all half off). Pretty awesome finds, I think I will probably do some stuff with the guitar since I want to get into Clone Hero but I also want to mod it for the awesomeness of it, and it will be fun :)

If I do that, def will make a blog post on it.

haircuts for men CD is here!!!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 21:55:04 -0700

My new haircuts for men CD is here!!! Love their music, so I’m finally glad to own a CD of peak :D

The Stress of Adulting Is Growing

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 20:23:05 -0700

I feel drained. Like, I don’t know, I’m being dragged in all directions. School, college, work, driving lessons… it’s a little much, I don’t know. I feel a bit better after just being left alone for a bit, but I do wish I had more people to talk about it to. Back to writing after a while, not finishing this. GN

LEGO Sonic the Hedgehog (21331) Build

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 11:59:06 -0700

OK, my second post on the LEGO Ideas Sonic the Hedgehog set. Here’s a pic of the box again. Let’s open it up.

Looks pretty cool, inside we have 7 different bags, manual, stickers, the usual stuff.

The manual is cool, I really like how the front of it is the title screen for the game.

The inside is cool too, it has some pictures of the original Ideas concept pictures, some Sonic art, and (not pictured here but) a history timeline of Sonic games.

And now… I build.

PART 1:

PART 2:

PART 3:

PART 4:

PART 5:

PART 6:

COMPLETE!!!

In person, the set is bigger than I thought it would be, it just barely fit inside my glass case. It looks awesome though, and I love how everything turned out. I’m still crying interally over the money I spent on this, but it was worth it. Definitely would recommend buying it. It has some really cool features, like how the spring actually works (it uses a little lever behind the set).

Nick Makes Poor Financial Decisions: Featuring LEGO Sonic the Hedgehog!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 15:13:20 -0700

Why do I keep doing this lol

I’m supposed to be saving money, but I just dropped 70 bucks on this after seeing the new Sonic sets, mainly out of fear that it was gonna go out of print soon. So, yeah. It was just 70 bucks, but I still feel horrible for buying it. Hopefully when I finish building it, that guilt will leave me…. I will make an update once I finish this set, but it might take a while because I have a busy weekend :(

Suzume: Oh Cool, Another Shinkai Film

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 22:35:56 -0700

A few days ago, I watched Suzume in theaters. I think it was pretty good. However, I do have some things I’d like to talk about.

THE BAD

First of all, the main character romance couple thing is getting kind of old. The only Makoto Shinkai movies I have seen so far are Your Name, Weathering with You, and now, Suzume, his three most recent movies, and all of them involve a boy and girl duo who fall in love at the end after doing their whole supernatural thing. It is getting kind of old and I wish he would make something different. Not to mention, in this movie, the romance feels… off? I’m not going to go into the whole dynamic of a 17 year old wanting to get together with a university student, but it didn’t really feel like they were together in a romantic sense, and yet the film sort of forcefully tries to get them together by making Suzume fall in love with him, which… I don’t know. Anyways, yeah, this romance thing is getting old, to be honest.

Next, Daijin is interesting, I like them but their motivations are kinda weird at times, like Daijin is messing with them I think, but likes Suzume, and then apparently he was just trying to lead them to the open gates the whole time??? I don’t know if I’m missing something here, but it just feels weird.

I guess the conflict with Suzume and her aunt could be a little better too, it was solved too easily IMO.

That’s all with the bad for me. Onto…

THE GOOD

This movie is visually stunning. It really is a sight to see on a giant theater screen. The sound too, it was so amazing in a theater. It makes me wish I had a home theater so I could listen to the audio and experience it again… It feels epic. The whole movie feels epic. And I like how in every next Shinkai film, the setting becomes more and more grand, with this movie’s setting now stretching across Japan and the main characters exploring the places they visit and meeting new people. I also like how the film ties itself to the March 11th earthquakes, I think it gives the film more of an impact and helps audiences relate to Suzume a little more, as her mother was lost in the earthquakes.

I wish I had more to say about the movie, and it’s not like it’s bad, but there’s not a lot of exceptional things to say about it for me. It’s certainly enjoyable, but it feels like a Shinkai film, so anything else I say also applies to his past few movies as well, which mainly chocks up to just: It’s very epic. Shinkai has that sort of effect on his films, so even his less impressive films still feel grand, like this one.

CONCLUSION

I am writing this at 10pm, so I hope my review does justice to the film. While this is not one of my favorite Shinkai films, it definitely still is a good watch and I do recommend it. However, it feels a bit formulaic at times, and it could’ve helped to expand on some characters a tad more.

The Past Week Has Been a Drain

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 22:46:55 -0700

I have not updated this website in a week.

Oopsies :P

I’ve been kind of bogged down this week, mainly by school, but I’ve also been busy setting up Proxmox and pfSense on my server instead of just using Docker. It took a bit of learning and hours of struggling, but I figured it out in the end, and now my computer uses my home server as a network and has access to a full 2.5Gb connection to it.

I’ve also been working some more on trying to improve my personal habits, mainly cutting down YouTube time and putting it towards doing personal projects. I’ve been using LeechBlock to make sure I fall out of the habit of opening YouTube all the time, so I’m really happy about how that’s been working out. I hope to work on drawing and writing more often, and also spreading my wings out a bit more to learn new things.

Emotionally, I’ve been alright. Not really super great, but hanging in there. Just surfing the wave of life. I watched Suzume today, so I may write a review tonight and post it either tonight or tomorrow, depending on how I feel, I’m sort of tired…

Website Improvements

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 08 Apr 2023 20:22:12 -0700

Working on my website more, I am overhauling the “Writing” and “About Me” sections, and soon, I will be improving the Info page and, hopefully, the RSS feed stuff. Another big change is I changed the base font on the site, so hopefully it fits the style I’m going for more.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 22:25:08 -0700

Went to see the Mario Movie today. It was good, not perfect at all, but it’s still an enjoyable watch.

THE BAD

The movie’s first half was okay, but think the pacing was a little too fast, but I’m not sure if it was because of the fact that the first half consists of pretty much all the clips they showed in the trailers or if it was just fast, I think it was both. Another criticism I have is that I think Mario is set up to be a more complex character than he really turned out to be. I don’t expect Illumination to make the next Travis Bickle or anything, but their setup for Mario is inconsistent. I think they try to set him up as being a bit of a coward, but he doesn’t show that in the movie at all until the very end, and even then it’s just he’s scared for 20 seconds and then comes out. His friendship with Donkey Kong is also very basic, like DK doesn’t like him because he wins and then they talk about their parents a bit, nothing comes out of it except more fighting, and then they get out of the Maw-Ray and somehow they’re friends now???? It’s somewhat jarring, but oh well. I think that’s honestly my biggest criticism of the movie, they set up stuff or there’s scenes that have potential to be awesome, but they end up being very basic and by the book. Mario as a character had more potential, they could’ve given him at least a little bit of an arc, it seems like they were going to but just sort of forgot about it. I also wish Peach got more background or an arc, it seemed like they set up some stuff and did nothing with it, just like Mario… Seeing a pattern here.

The several 80s songs they played felt out of place, but IDK I guess they were okay, but I wouldn’t have put them in if I was them. The humor was okay though, but it still had some mid, like the whole “OOHOHOWOWOH WE’RE SO ADORABLE” Toads and stuff, shit reaks of Minions.

THE GOOD

The movie looks awesome, the visual style, despite having that Illumination look, still looks stellar in my opinion.

Bowser in this movie was awesome, easily the best part of the movie. I thought Jack Black did a super good job, and the little jokes with Bowser were funny. I really liked him.

The references are good, but I guess for a movie like this, it’s a given. Lots of references and callbacks to old games.

All the voice actors are good, even Chris Pratt. I’m pretty happy with the casting, I always thought Chris Pratt was a weird choice, but I didn’t entirely hate it, and after watching the movie, I gotta say, he did a good job.

I don’t really think there’s anything else stellar about the movie, but it’s definitely not bad.

CONCLUSION

If I had to summarize my main criticism with this movie, it would be “missed potential”. The movie isn’t horrible, but it definitely could’ve been better. However, I think it’s still a decently enjoyable watch, and definitely a little treat for fans of Mario.

IDK My Head Hurts and I'm Kinda Feeling Meh

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 22:06:55 -0700

Kind of just vibing with a nice ol’ headache after being in a car for a few hours earlier today, and I also mentally feel bleh too. Not really sure why, but I just sometimes feel like I feel really out of place with my friends, and that I’m constantly saying something wrong and… I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I get that feeling every once in a while, like I’m like some douche, or an outlier in a group. Sometimes, I do or say things that just make me seem like a douche, and I don’t try to be that way, it’s just my way of being an attention-seeker, in the end. Going 2 bed now, gn.

Goodwill Hunting (Not the Movie)

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 19:14:58 -0700

Today is April Fools!

…and I have nothing prepared. Oh well.

Today, I went walking. I try to do this a couple of times a week, which sounds bad, but then again, I do go to school, so I’m not like a shut-in or anything haha. But yeah, today I walked. Went to Goodwill first. I really like the Goodwill near my area, because there’s a lot of good stuff a lot of time. Today, I found 4 volumes of The Promised Neverland that I’ve been meaning to get, but never did, so this was a really nice thing to find. I got these for the price of a new volume, so I’m happy to add these to my collection of the first 3 volumes.

I’ve been collecting some used manga, comics, literature, etc. overtime, but I haven’t read a lot of it. For instance, recently I just finished collecting a graphic novel series I read as a kid, Amulet. Hope to read it soon, I’m thinking of making it a habit by setting an alarm during the day maybe, I need to get off my computer more…

I also went to Target and bought lime-flavored Tostitos. They taste pretty good.

I also wrote more stuff today, I’ve been working on just coming up with some interesting and more broad prompts and trying to write with them. I feel like I plot my stories out too much, so instead I want to try “letting the story write itself”, since people say that works very well. Hopefully it does for me.

I also watched Forrest Gump for the first time today, I really liked the movie, although afterwords, I found it odd how split people were about the movie, apparently there’s controversy with its message? I want to look into it more since it makes me curious.

And yeah, that’s pretty much my day today.

The Struggle of Good Writing

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 15:07:23 -0700

Right now, I would not call myself a good writer. Not in the slightest. Recently, I’ve been working on a writing project with an odd premise, being a person who gets access to a large hub of camera feeds from around the world and his descent into that world of parasocialism. I think the concept itself is good, however, I’ve been struggling a lot with it. I think most of it might come down to the fact that I am writing at 11pm most of the time (which is something I’ve talked about before I think, I really need to fix that :/). However, there’s a few other things I’ve sort of come to see about my work on it:

I don’t feel like I’m having fun with it. The whole point of me writing is to get better at it because I enjoy it. However, with this project, I don’t feel like I am, I feel like I’m doing it just to fill a quota for myself to get it done. And I know that getting better at narrative writing isn’t going to be a smooth way up at all, but this doesn’t feel fun. It might be because of the fact that I feel like I’m constantly pressured to make my writing good, so I actively think about “hm, how should I do this better?”, which is good until it becomes an obsession/paranoia. I cannot think about my writing without thinking about how it can be better, and most importantly, how bad I think it is. I need to learn that it’s okay that my writing is bad, and that I should be writing it for myself, not for others, and I think that’s an important lesson for beginners to learn. Do not let the pressure of other people or you putting pressure on yourself to make others happy ruin things for you. This doesn’t just apply to writing, but to anything.
I feel like I’m not taking it seriously. It’s a weird thing to talk about, since writing does not need to be serious at all, but I mean that I’m not taking the learning part seriously. Instead, I’m just writing for the sake of, like I said earlier, meeting a quota. So instead of thinking about how a scene should play out, or how to cleverly write something, I just ended up writing as I thought. That itself is not a bad thing to do, it actually helps a lot for rough drafts and just getting something down to work with and fix, but for finalizing, it’s not good. Unless it ends up good miraculously, I don’t know haha.
”DEEP” OR CLEVER WRITING DOES NOT MEAN GOOD WRITING. I feel like I have this very distorted idea of what good writing actually is, and I’ve started to come to terms with it. I thought that good writing was incorporating everything as descriptively as possible and trying to make symbolic and deep meanings out of every element of my stories. Symbolism, complex writing, adding deeper meaning to writing through subtle hints and that sort of stuff does not make good writing. It merely should serve as a bonus, a treat to readers. I always thought I needed to make it complex to make it good, but the truth is good writing is something that is surface level. When it comes down to it, the heart of good writing is the concept of “show, don’t tell”, which I never thought much of, despite how much my English teachers hammered it into my head over the years, but it’s true. “Show, don’t tell” is what makes writing good, and I feel like things like symbolism fall under that umbrella, but should be treated as an extension of it, it should not be relied on, but rather used as a tool to further writing that already has a good foundation. Relying on those extensions is bad, and to use them, one must first learn the fundamentals of good writing, and I think that’s my biggest problem when it comes to my learning how to write, but I think it’s a valuable thing to remember for everyone.

I’ve debated to myself whether or not I should just can the story or continue, but honestly, I think writing a story like this requires more skill and planning than what I have now. I really need to think this through more, so I think for the time being, I will be holding off on it, and trying to think on whether I should work on something new and simpler or to rework the idea. In the meantime, I will still work on writing other things, like these netlogs, and perhaps other skills as well, such as drawing or programming.

A Tribe Called Quest

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 21:01:31 -0700

Been listening to their stuff for the first time recently. So far, this is my favorite song of theirs:

Hope to broaden my horizons to more music and different genres of music after only sticking to stuff like breakcore and drum and bass and stuff… man, I like them, but it makes me feel like I’m one of those quirky zoomers that like obscure things for the sake of it. I want to be an all-rounder. In other words… maybe a little more mainstream?

Vanilla Custard Ice Cream, Life, and Death

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 20:35:04 -0700

VANILLA CUSTARD ICE CREAM

Today, I made vanilla custard ice cream. I made it a while ago, and felt in the mood to make it again, and so I did. And it actually ended up turning out pretty good! I like it a lot, but I did make a lot… and also, this picture doesn’t look too good, it’s melting a bit, but it’s okay, it was still awesome. Would do again. I want to have the motivation to cook more extravagant things, ice cream is easy but I want to cook meat and stuff. Someday I will learn… eventually.

LIFE

Recently, I’ve been doing alright, not a lot has been going on in my life at the moment. I’ve just been working on staying on top of things at school and making sure my grades don’t fall. Also been trying to motivate myself to work on more personal goals, such as writing. Yes, I am still writing, I know it’s been a while since I updated the page, but I am still working on it. The issue is that I only really work at night, so I write in small chunks, but I will upload more, eventually. I don’t want to rush anything, and I don’t want to push myself to work when I can’t. I do, however, want to train myself to try to work during the day on stuff like that more, since I always get caught up doing other things and procrastinating.

Speaking of which, I’m finding that the Post-It notes do really help with completing things. I have them right under my monitor and in my line of vision constantly, and I try to be actively thinking about it, so I think it’s having a good effect on me. It also makes me look like I do way more productive things than I actually do in my day to day activities, haha.

DEATH

Last night, I was sitting in my bed trying to go to sleep, and I thought about trying to feel myself going to sleep, and my mind drifted to thinking if that same feeling would apply to death. I mean, we don’t really know how it feels to go to sleep, and we ourselves can’t pinpoint that exact moment, and I imagine it’s the same thing when we die too. We won’t feel ourselves passing, it will be like going to sleep. It made me extremely terrified and unsettled in that brief moment. I have thoughts like that a lot, wondering about death and what it will be like. But I try to remember a few things:

I am 18 years old, so dying by natural causes is out of the question. It doesn’t mean I can’t die anytime soon, but hey, if I get shot in the head or something, I imagine it would be a lot more instantaneous, and the chances of that happening are… well, I don’t know, no one does, but not enough to worry me. Car crashes though… I’m always paranoid about that. Dying painfully… nnn……
I have my whole life ahead of me. I think about death, but if things go well, in reality, I will die several decades from now, and right now, only about 2 decades have passed. And when I look back, it feels short, but in reality, it will be a lot slower than I think it is.
Everyone will meet the same fate. We will all die. All the people I know and love will die inevitably. And whether I do or do not believe in an afterlife or a higher being is something I honestly debate to myself all the time, but the best way to think about it is that I will not be alone when I die.

Overall, yeah, depressing stuff, but I really am doing alright. I just try to push those kind of thoughts out of my mind because I know all they will do is cripple me and prevent me from living the life I want to live. In a way, ignorance truly is bliss.

Dr. Pepper Cream Soda

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 21:14:40 -0700

Today, I bought Dr. Pepper Cream Soda from Walmart, and I gotta say, it’s kind of a nothingburger. I wouldn’t say I necessarily hate it, it does taste a lot like Dr. Pepper, but the extra added flavor is something I don’t really like a lot, I’d rather just get regular Dr. Pepper…

Switching My Home Server to Debian

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 13:33:38 -0700

One day, my networking stopped working on my server. For context, I was running Ubuntu Server. I am not a big tech expert, so I could not figure out what was wrong, so I tried reinstalling Ubuntu Server, but even that didn’t work. So Jame (realja.me) suggested I install Debian, so I did, and not much has changed so far, but it does help to have a desktop environment for troubleshooting. Apparently, my system will be more stable, so I hope so. I don’t want to have to reinstall my OS again…

One Week With Steam Deck

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 13:07:06 -0700

It has been a little over a week now since I got my Steam Deck, so this is how it’s been so far. It’s been…

…really good! Really, really good! I love the Steam Deck so far, I’ve been using it to mostly play Persona 5, but I also have tried other titles, such as Hi-Fi Rush, Resident Evil 2, and dabbled in emulation with Persona 3 FES (with HD textures and mods), and Breath of the Wild, and everything runs really well. Even more intense games, like Resident Evil 2, can run at 40FPS, which to me is perfectly acceptable. It’s been making me want to play games more now, so I can finally use this to get through my backlog of games hopefully.

Would I recommend this?

YES. ABSOLUTELY YES. Screw Nintendo Switch, buy this!!!

Writing (Both Narrative and Personal)

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 23:58:14 -0700

I want to write more. I remember having this sort of bias towards writing and reading over other forms of media because I was into the visual arts, so I wanted to make games or comics or movies or stuff like that. And I kept trying over and over again to make projects, and while I learned a lot, I also failed and never finished anything. I feel like writing sets the bar lower for me but lets me express myself a lot still.

When I think about it, I don’t really understand why I hated writing. I think I did prefer visual arts, but it wasn’t a reason to hate. I don’t really know… I’m glad I’m writing more though, both narrative and personal writing, with the blog, short stories, etc. I’m actually getting things done for once. It makes me feel happy.

Well, anyways that’s the end of my 12am rant. Good night.

Post-It Notes

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 12:31:14 -0700

Started trying to organize my daily tasks with sticky notes, mainly because I find myself getting constantly distracted during the day and sometimes, I feel like I have nothing to do, so this should solve both problems by telling me what I need to be doing. I started today, so I hope this lasts because so far it seems good.

The New Writing Tab On My Website!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 22:26:31 -0700

I added a new “Writing” tab to my website to post all my stories and writing! Whether it will be good or not, though? Eh, up to you. I’m posting these here as a way to get myself to loosen my overthinking mindset and to GET MY STUFF OUT THERE ALREADY! I have something already posted there, so I hope you check it out and enjoy it! It’s not finished, but I will be working on it in the coming time.

I will also be working on new blog posts soon enough, I’m going back to school tomorrow and will be hard at work with that, plus I have work, so who knows what time I have to do that?

Have a good day (or night)!

Building a HG Gundam Aerial

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 15:56:19 -0700

A while back, I bought this kit from Target to build. It looked really cool and I wanted to build it, even though I haven’t seen the show.

The box itself looks really nice, it’s got a somewhat simple but sleek look. Time to open it.

Ooooohhh, colors.

Stickers, too.

Here’s the manual…

And my tools! Not a lot (and I didn’t even use the cement, it was just in case).

Several days later…

Here it is! My posing is not the best, but I really like how this looks. It also helps that I added lots of outlining with my outlining pens and stuff. Not a lot to say here, I just wanted to show this off.

I Got My Steam Deck!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 11:39:57 -0700

Hello, YouTube, this is Nick64 Tech Reviews, and today, I will be reviewing the Steam Deck! As you can see, I have it right here on my desk, so I will be doing an unboxing of it.

Let’s take the tape off of it… And inside, we see a sleeve with some pictures…

Taking the sleeve off, we see the Deck itself in a case and a box on the left, assumably carrying the charging cable. Let’s see the box.

Here’s the box… And…

Yep, charging cable.

Oh, cable and a manual too.

Let’s see the Deck… It’s wrapped in plastic.

Let’s take the sleeve and plastic off.

And here’s the Deck in the flesh!

And here it is on! It’s installing Steam OS right now, so I’m gonna give it some time.

And there we go! We’re in!

…OK, that whole YouTube bit aside though, this is AWESOME. I’m so excited to use this. I started installing Persona 5 on it, but it took up all my storage :( Luckily, I ordered an SD card from Amazon, and a bigger SSD is coming in next week, so that will be exciting to have. I may write more about this, but for now, yeah… that’s kind of it. I will be busy for a little bit, so I might not post or work on projects for a bit, it’s been like that for a few days, but I will hopefully post some more meaningful stuff here later down the line. Thanks for reading! :)

It's Raining Rain Again

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 20:39:40 -0700

Today the rain is hitting hard, which I love. Earlier I was working and my window was open, letting in the sounds of the rain trickling and hitting the ground, and the occasional boom of thunder. It’s sets a really nice mood for working, in my opinion, and I generally love rainy weather as a whole. But I live in Arizona, so that’s a shame haha.

Today has been alright, I actually made progress on some personal projects, mainly writing wise. I’ve been working on something that I hope to publish soon on my website. I don’t know how good it will be recieved, but it’s an idea that’s been in my head for a bit and I wanted to write it down as a story. So no promises, but I do hope to finish a chunk of it so I can actually publish it here.

The second project is another story, but I’m also incorporating pictures so I can practice art. That one already has the writing done, I might want to make some small edits, but the main hurdle is the drawing of the pictures. I felt it would do very well to practice drawing more pictures of stuff like that, so that’s why I’m working on that. And again, no promises.

In the end, I don’t really care whether or not I actually finish and publish these or not… well, maybe a little, but the point is that each time I fail, it’s a learning experience. And if I don’t fail, then that’s good too! I think my issue is that I can’t commit to these projects though. I read about planning fallacy online and I think that’s exactly what I’m going through. In the end, all these sorts of projects take time and lots of work to make good, but I tend to underestimate that work because I think of it in my head and it seems really good, but I don’t properly take into account what it takes to get that done. Maybe I need more discipline to avoid distracting myself or my thoughts drifting away somehow, since that’s a huge issue of mine…

Well, anyways, not much going on today. Have a good day.

18

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 22:03:01 -0700

Happy birthday to me!!!

I am now 18. Things do not feel too much different than yesteday. The weight of responsibility I now have has not set on me yet.

I didn’t do too much today, I just went to a water park, ate some cheesecake at home, rewatched The Muppets (2011), and… yeah. That’s kinda it, it wasn’t super eventful, but I’m happy that way, I don’t want to be overwhelmed or tired or anything, I just want to enjoy myself. I wish I had more to say about it, but that’s all. I am an adult now, so that’s neat…

Offtopic, but some news regarding the site…

I added a Ko-fi!

Now visitors can donate as little as 1 dollar to widdle ol’ me. Isn’t that neat? I don’t really know if I will get anything, but it’s nice to have it there as something of a fundraiser for myself. So if you actually like the stuff I do here, a tip would be cool. Or not, I don’t really mind honestly. I will probably work on making more content like art and writing for this site so that I can justify getting donations, but for the time being, yes, they’re there and you can donate if you want.

Secondly, more of news for me, my Steam Deck is coming on Friday!

…Well, that’s what UPS says. It could be earlier, or later. Or maybe the driver will steal it. I don’t know. We shall see.

I mentioned writing earlier though, yes I really want to get into writing! I really want to write stories, and coming up with them is fun, but the actual writing part is my big issue, so I feel like making something and publishing it here (as bad as it may be) will help me learn to be a better writer and storyteller. So hopefully, eventually, I will write stuff to put here. I have some ideas for some short stories to write.

Anyways, thanks for reading, and have a blessed day!!! :D

In Other News...

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 11:18:13 -0700

It’s my birthday in less than 24 hours!!! So that’s awesome…

This is more just an update on myself than a news thing, honestly. I’ve been good, not much has been going on. I did the USB-C mod, and also, oh…!

I ordered a Steam Deck! I’m selling my Switch off in order to buy it, but it should be here within this week if Valve doesn’t take forever, so I’m really excited for that. I hope to do more gaming on the go with it and to get through my backlog with it. That, and I want to use my PSP more now that I have the USB-C mod. However, I could also just play all my PSP games on my Deck… oh well, it’s fine.

It’s finally spring break for me, so I’m glad to finally have a break from school and all that, but I’m not thrilled for the next quarter. I imagine it will be more stressful than before, with finals and all that. But it’s just one more stretch.

Well, that’s all from me, not much. To whoever is reading, have a wonderful day. :)

ARK-4 Custom Firmware for the PSP

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 10:36:51 -0700

It was only last night that I actually learned about this CFW existing. It’s apparently supposed to be a “new, updated, improved, and modern CFW for PSP and Vita’s ePSP”, so that’s cool. It looks like it has some pretty nice improvements like plugins, Popcorn, which is for PS1 games, etc, but I didn’t think much of it. At least, not until I scrolled down on their GitHub, where they mention:

“Region Free playback of UMD Video on all PSP models. Change the region of your UMD drive on-the-fly.”

FINALLY OH MY GOD FINALLY YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS YIPEEEEEE HURRAYYYYYYY!!!!

I can finally watch my region-locked UMDs on my Japanese PSP!!!

I will be properly installing it sometime soon, but I don’t think there will be much improvement for me personally, besides region-free UMD Video of course, so that’s awesome. Thank you, ARK-4 devs! :)

Music (?)

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 23:02:09 -0700

So much fun music… but where to put it?

A (Messy) Guide on USB-C for the PSP

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 20:26:46 -0700

As something of an update on the parts I got, I finished adding USB-C to my PSP 2000, and I wanted to make a small guide on how to do it, for anyone else that would want to do this.

⚠️DISCLAIMER⚠️

I am NOT a modding expert, and this guide will show that very clearly, so follow as closely as you want to at your discretion.

Tools I Used

I’m not really someone who has a ton of tools and things that might’ve made this easier for myself on hand, so it’s up to you what you need.

Soldering iron
Tweezers
Desoldering wick/pump
Flush cutters
Hot glue gun
Xacto knife
Small Philips and Torx screwdrivers

Materials I Used

Solder
Solder flux
Hot glue
Wire (I didn’t use very thin wire, but you should, get about 30AWG or more thick)
Kapton tape
A USB-C port (duh)

As for the USB-C port, make sure it’s small, the PSP is very cramped inside. Adafruit has good USB-C boards for these kinda projects, so I bought a few for the future in case I want to do more of these mods.

Getting Started

The first step is uh, taking it apart. Not hard to do, and I won’t go into detail, since there are many guides that tell you how to take the PSP apart. Just disassemble and take out stuff until you’re able to remove the board from the case. From here, choose where to put the port.

Where To Put The Port

This is something that I took a second to decide. Originally, I only intended the port to be charging only and found a place inside to put it…

…but it ended up being too small, since that was where the connection to the battery was sitting. You could probably find another place to put the port if there’s space, but for me, the main two options were to replace the barrel jack on the bottom of the console, or replace the Mini USB port on the top of the console. I was going to decide to replace the barrel jack, but ended up going with replacing the Mini USB because I would be able to use the USB-C port for data transfer (…yeah that didn’t go as planned, but I’ll get to that later though) and also I found out that you could use the data lanes on the USB and use the power lanes from the charging port, which gives the best of both worlds.

For those that don’t know, the USB port on the PSP only lets you charge on models after the 1000 model, but is VERY, VERY slow. Not to mention, you can’t charge with USB without the console on, so that’s pretty lame. So by doing it the way I mentioned before, it gives the best of each. However, you can just replace the barrel jack if you wanted to, it would be easier too since the jack is not surface mounted to the board, however it would leave a larger gap when putting the USB-C port in. In the end, the choice is yours, and this guide will cover replacing the Mini USB.

Cutting The Case

In order to fit the USB-C port properly in the case, some cuts will need to be made where the Mini USB port would sit. I just used my Xacto knife to cut out a square chunk from the housing and part of a plastic piece from the UMD mechanism, but this won’t break the piece or mechanism. This may differ between different models though, I don’t know.

You will also need to cut the little tabs on the edges of where the Mini USB port would sit in the housing in order to fit the extra width of the USB-C port, I just used my Xacto knife for this as well. It should end up looking like this. The same routine needs to be done on the housing rim that goes on top of this as well

Removing the Mini USB Port

This was kinda tricky because I wanted to do this without damaging the port, but I didn’t really have the equipment to do that. I had a soldering iron, but I was worried about removing other important surface mount components, and I had a heat gun, but it was too big and I didn’t want to ruin anything by overheating the board (or my fingers). So in the end, I used my flush cutters to snip the plastic and metal casing on the port off (Note that if you do this, BE CAREFUL TO NOT SNIP CLOSE TO THE SOLDER PADS, YOU WILL DAMAGE THEM), adding kapton tape to the surrounding components to protect them, and then removed the pins with my soldering iron and some desoldering wick.

And when you do that, you should be left with this. This is a bad picture, but there are 5 pins on the board, 3 of which we will need.

Installing the USB-C Port

We will be getting the +5V from the left pin of the charging port connector inside (sorry for the pic with the wire).

From this point, you can solder all the wires from the pads on the main board to the pads on the USB-C board, which are labeled appropriately. Make the wires very short since the insides are extremely cramped.

As for the data lanes I mentioned earlier, yes I was going to wire them, but I ended up not doing so because I didn’t have wire thin enough to put all those wires on the board. And I could always just plug in the SD card from my PSP to my PC, so I ended up not wiring them. However, if you want to, it’s just two extra wires, the D- and D+, which should be self-explanatory.

Mounting the USB-C Port

I don’t have any pictures for this section, but I hope my explanations will do the job.

Before mounting anywhere, WE NEED TO PUT KAPTON TAPE AROUND THE AREA AND PORT. This will ensure nothing shorts inside since the wires and USB-C board will be touching the main board. Once you do that though, it should be protected.

As for how to mount it, I know it’s not the most long-term or secure, but hot glue did the job pretty well. I just put it under the port and on the sides, which made it hold on pretty well, and I think it will be fine as long as you don’t abuse the port and take care of your electronics like you always should be doing. :)

Finishing Up

From there, just put the board back in and begin reassembling the system like normal. Just be careful with the wires and make sure the fit inside isn’t too tight. But from there…

That’s it!

And when you plug your PSP in, it should charge.

Closing Thoughts

While I’m somewhat disappointed about not getting the data pins working, overall I’m really happy with how this mod turned out, it really helps to be able to charge with USB-C on the go and, hopefully, will make me want to use this more again, now that it’s slightly more convenient to use. Besides that though, this was really fun and interesting to do, and I hope my struggles can help someone else who wants to do this as well.

My Stuff Came!!!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 14:41:01 -0700

YIPEEEEEEEE IT FINALLY CAME, earlier than expected too. It said it was coming on Tuesday, so this is a very nice surprise. I will write something later today hopefully if I remember.

Waiting Is Hard

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 15:39:30 -0700

Waiting is hard when there’s nothing else to do or look forward to in your week.

Buttons Are Fun

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 19:26:07 -0700

Adding more buttons to my website, finding new websites on the internet is really fun, and I really liked some of these sites, so if anyone actually checks this site out, please check out the others on the giant button section on the home page plz plz plz :)))))

Here’s a couple of cool buttons I found that don’t lead to anywhere, I just think they look neat. (courtesy of deadnet.se)

Selling My Quest 2

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 18:36:58 -0700

I listed my Quest 2 on eBay. I already discussed why I don’t like VR (although how good that take was is debatable). But anyways, I’m done with VR, it’s just not my thing. It was fun sometimes, but not enough for me to go into it more.

One Week Until 18

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 17:00:54 -0700

First post in a while, and exactly one week from now is my birthday, so that’s neat I guess. I would like to be a bit more excited about it, but honestly, I don’t really know right now. School has been a big thing that’s been bogging me down, with math and English taking up a lot of my mental energy. I’ve also been trying to work on personal projects too, but don’t want to stress myself out too much, so I’ve stopped, which has been frustrating me a lot recently, but it’s for the better, I think. I hope that soon, things will get better for me, because I’ve been so up and down, like a roller coaster of emotions.

As for what specifically I’ve been up to recently, well I updated this website a decent amount. A lot of that time was spent on working on a “reviews” page. And if you’re reading this, you might be wondering, “Well, where is it?” Yeah… I scrapped it because I realized that I will never be that dedicated to writing reviews, so they will stay in the Netlogs section. I did add an “About Me” page with my favorite movies and games and shows and stuff, so that’s pretty neat. I’m beginning to get burnt out on working on adding extra stuff to the site, I feel like as of now, this is comfy for the time being, so I’m just gonna dedicate whatever time I use to work on this site to making content for it.

I’ve also been planning to add USB-C to my PSP, as of yesterday. I ordered some USB-C breakout boards from Adafruit, and they should be coming soon hopefully. I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia trip with handhelds, and I’m now mighty tempted to purchase a DSi and a PS Vita because I love the Vita so much and the DSi would be neat for Pokemon and stuff. Someday, maybe…

Back on the topic of Adafruit, I also ordered an RGB character LCD with USB serial, so I’m hyped to mess around with it. I didn’t buy it for a super particular reason, I just really wanted to mess with one and put my own stuff on it, so now I’ll be able to.

And that’s pretty much all that’s been going on with me, not much beyond that as of recent. I hope to make more posts about art stuff and also make a new post about my modding journey with my PSP. Have a good day :)

(Almost) One Month Later

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 15:30:15 -0700

Well, it sure has been a while, has it?

Oops.

I hope all my (1, maybe 2???) followers and readers have been alright the past almost 28 days since my last post here. Sorry that I haven’t been posting much (apologizing to myself). I haven’t given up on the website, it’s been on my mind the whole time I haven’t been writing on it. I think the reason I haven’t had the motivation to do anything with it much comes down to my lack of knowledge in all the stuff like HTML, JavaScript, etc. to actually put interesting things in this website. Maybe I’ll try to get back to it sometime.

Real picture of my oblivious ass not knowing how to make a good website

School has also been taking up a lot of my time as well. It’s weird, I don’t really feel like I have more work than before when I really look at things, but it feels a lot like I do. College English has kinda been meh (although 1984 was a great book), Trig is the bane of my existance, yada yada yada… College too, I’ve been worried about that, but that’s less of a time consumer, and more of a mood sucker more than anything else. Lots of school on my mind.

I also just haven’t had the motivation to write though. I kind of find myself to be somewhat… uninteresting? This website’s intention is to be my not-so-private diary commentating on my life and things I like, but I can’t get myself to write about myself much.

Speaking of writing though, I have been working on that too. I want to get my story ideas out there and on paper, so instead of twiddling my thumbs around, trying to draw something, and quitting, I’m thinking of trying to publish a small-form, chapter-by-chapter thing, right here, on my rinky dinky lil’ website! I actually did some good work on it, and it helps me get a product out by worrying about it in small chunks rather than only seeing things in the bigger picture. So… hopefully, and I can’t stress this enough…

Real picture of my dumbass procrastinating and getting distracted instead of doing productive work

HOPEFULLY…

I can get something done. This is not a guarantee or a promise. And no, I’m not saying anything about it yet.

That’s a surprise for later :P

I really hope I can get something published from it though… I’ve gone through so many ideas and projects as fruitless efforts at this point that I’ve set the bar so low for myself. If I can’t something out of this… then it’s probably over for me, and the intrusive thoughts will have won.

But anyways, that’s what I have to say about myself after almost a month. Sorry for neglecting you, nick64.me. I mean it. I will update you, add some things sometime too. I promise. Eventually. I will try to make myself write here more.

Before I go, have a good song for some good times:

See you later :)

Obscure Media Formats

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 22:09:31 -0700

I love obscure media formats.

Maybe I just like obscure things in general. But something about obscure media formats are so… I don’t know, alluring to me? There’s just something really fascinating about them and their history, I suppose.

For example, the LaserDisc. I don’t collect LaserDisc (but there are a couple I would love to own), but something about the format is so cool to me. Maybe it’s the fact that its literally just a huge ass silver platter with data on it, like a DVD (but not quite since LaserDisc is an analog format, unlike DVD). I don’t collect it, but I love looking into it and seeing the oddities of it and its history and whatnot.

Two Laserdisc players having sex :)

MiniDisc is really cool too. I think it’s because I’ve always been a sucker for small things, so seeing something like MiniDisc is just really cool. It’s always interested me how much people here in the States never cared about it too much, but in other countries like Japan, it did pretty well. Facts like those make me really interested in the format, but like I said, the form factor itself is also a really big part of it too. Small things and discs are awesome.

Which leads me to my most favorite obscure media format….

UMD.

Okay, calling it obscure is maybe a bit of an overstatement. The PSP did sell pretty well, so it’s not like UMD was doing horrible. I like UMD for the same reasons I like MiniDisc, being it’s small, it’s a disc, and it’s… somewhat obscure, I guess. But most of all, I like it for what they tried to do with it. UMD wasn’t just a platform for games. Enter UMD Video (and Music, and whatever other things they tried to do as well that I don’t remember right now, but I’m mainly talking about UMD Video).

I’m not quite sure why I like UMD Video. Maybe it’s because it’s so… odd, I guess. It’s odd seeing any movie or show on UMD that I like. For example, shows like Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Spongebob, Family Guy, etc all made it onto UMD Video. A decent amount of movies did too.

However, my favorite release on UMD Video, and why I love the format so much, is a release I bet many people don’t really know exist:

The NEON GENESIS EVANGELION Decade Memorial Box Set

Released in 2006 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of EVANGELION, Bandai released this box set. It contains the game NEON GENESIS EVANGELION 2, but also contained an exclusive release of Death (True)2 and, my favorite, End of Evangelion.

These UMD movies were apparently supposed to release as a standalone product in the future, but to my knowledge never did (probably due to the fall of UMD Video), so it’s just kind of an odd product to me, and probably my favorite piece of EVANGELION media that I own.

So yeah, that was my little write-up about obscure media to brag about owning the Evangelion movies on UMD Video lmao. I do enjoy the rest of the format though, and hope to find some interesting movies on it. One I wanted to get my hands on was American Psycho, but I’m not really sure if it actually ever released. It apparently released on March 14th (my b-day haha), 2006, but I never found any listings or photos of it online :(

Hope you enjoyed my random little thing on this topic.

Catching Up (Also Puss in Boots)

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 19:05:02 -0700

I haven’t written here in a week. I don’t really think it’s a good or bad thing, I don’t want to bloat my site, but at the same time, I also want to write more so I don’t know. Anyways.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

I was sick for like half the week, still am a tiny, tiny bit, so that wasn’t fun. But today was fun, I got to see the new Puss in Boots movie in theaters. I won’t make a big long review, so I’ll just make a quick summary of my thoughts here really fast:

It was pretty good, it was a good start for 2023 (even if it came out in 2022, but shh) animated films. Besides the obviously Spiderverse-inspired visuals (which were awesome, good job Dreamworks keep your streak going), the story was pretty good, but nothing super stand out. I really like Death, like many people online seem to do, and I think the conflicts Puss goes through are pretty good, the wedding stuff felt a tad shoved-in, but led to a good conflict between him and Kitty, so oh well. I like Jack and the little conscience, I thought they were funny, and the Goldibears were alright, they felt like a plot device at first, but turned into a group I actually cared about by the end.

Perrito :\

Yeah it was good.

Wow he such a baddie fr fr mmmmfgmgm

I also bought a figure of Simon from Gurren Lagann today, and it’s pretty cool but the store I got it from didn’t have Kamina :( They had Yoko tho, but I don’t want her so idk.

I’ve also been looking into trying to fix my overthinking habits and trying to change my way of thinking about things. When working on my projects, I have this nauseating expectation for myself to do the best I possibly can, but I don’t really ever feel happy about my work, I just go along with it, and it just makes me feel bad. So I want to try doing some new things to improve that, perhaps read some self-help books, watch some videos, reflect for myself, I don’t know. Just something I want to bring awareness to myself about more.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

Great Wolf Lodge

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 21:10:03 -0700

Today, I went to Great Wolf Lodge.

I have one really close to my house, and my family decided to go as a somewhat late Christmas gift. I thought it was okay but… I don’t know. I went to another park in Washington and I felt like it had more, it was a bigger building, had more intense rides, all that. This park felt very small and tame in comparison. And I know I’m literally critiquing a kids water park, but I don’t care haha, I wanna write about this. The slides were mostly the same, but they toned them down more and they’re kinda lame in comparison to the older slides. The building is more modern, so I’ll give it that.

Yeah, not much else to say, I guess. Except “haha furry hotel”.

GN CHAT

One Week In

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 19:56:06 -0700

Well, it’s been a week, what happened in 2023 so far for me?

Not much, I did get some new stuff like more camera equipment and stuff. Oh yeah, I watched Parasite blind, very good movie, I liked it a lot. I’m not really sure what else to write here honestly. I know this is supposed to be more like a diary than some official blog thing, but I still don’t have a lot to write here. I wish I did, but at the same time, I don’t have a lot of motivation to write here without having content to write about. But oh well… I’ll see what happens.

Hope everything is alright with anyone reading right now. Have a good day :)

Reflecting on the Year

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 15:49:49 -0700

Well… it’s been a year, hasn’t it? I think it’s time I reflected on myself and what I’ve done the whole year.

I think this year’s been okay, not great, not bad, but okay. I’ve met some new people this year that I’m really grateful to have in my life. I’ve also done a lot of things I regret. A lot of people have, it’s not just me, but I feel like this year I feel like I’ve been deceiving myself in believing I’ve changed as a person, but in reality, I was just sort of ignoring my faults and pretending that I had fixed things, when in reality I didn’t change at all. Last year, I had wanted to make an effort this year to change, but I don’t think I have, and it’s caused some things to happen in my personal life that I only realize now was my own fault. To those people involved, who probably aren’t reading this, I’m really sorry. I now I realize the error of my ways, and I want to put a proper effort in 2023 to become a better person, not just for the people I’ve wronged, but for myself as well.

Anyways, sob story out of the way (although I really did mean all that I said), this year had some high and lows. I finally feel somewhat better about moving away and living where I do now. I think my overall mood has gotten better compared to 2021 and 2020, so I am happy about that. I also consumed a lot more varied content this year, so I feel like I broadened my horizons a lot, mainly music, but also movies and stuff too, it makes me feel less disconnected from everyone and like I’m not just stuck with the same taste and all.

This year, I also made the website in November, obviously. I think the website honestly hasn’t been anything big in my life like I was kind of expecting it to be, but it’s helped me do something I wanted to do more, which is to write in order to externalize my thoughts more and practice writing. I also used it to expose myself to more artsy and stylistic stuff by making more themes and researching cool stuff to base them off of. Speaking of artsy stuff though, I think the lack of art on the site is disappointing for me, since that was a big aspect I wanted to focus on with this site, but I don’t feel like making art just for the sake of having content. I’ve been working on comic stuff on my own that I don’t feel like talking about right now, because chances are that I could not finish them because of my commitment issues. And I guess that’s another thing I wanted to talk about.

I have huge commitment issues. I can’t finish personal projects, or keep my motivation or focus on one thing. I’ve been struggling with it a lot this year, and I think I’m starting to get past it just a little. I hope next year, I can somehow overcome this big issue of mine.

I want to make next year about personal growth, even if that’s something that happens all the time, but I really want to make a commitment next year to further pursue this. I don’t really do New Years Resolutions, but if I had one, I guess that’s what it would be.

I don’t really know how many people are reading my posts on this site, but to those who are, thank you. It really means a lot to have people reading these posts. I hope to improve the site more and to bring more people here.

And again to those reading…

Have a Happy New Year!

GIF PARTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gurren Lagann

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 09:45:01 -0700

Wow, okay, it’s about time I finished watching this show.

Last night, I finally finished Gurren Lagann. I thought it was really good! I liked it a lot, and I’m glad I bought the Blu-ray set. I’m not gonna write an in-depth review or anything, just some quick thoughts I have about the show.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

First of all, I really like the style of the show and the atmosphere it sets up. I think the music is really good and the style of the art (except Episode 4) is really good, which I guess is expected, since this is the show that led to the creation of TRIGGER, one of my favorite anime studios known for their stylish and sharp artwork.

I also really liked the characters too, Simon is a really good character, and reminds me a lot of Shinji in terms of how he’s initially set up as being a wimp. Unlike Shinji though, he eventually grows out of his shell to become a hero, and I think that the show actually shares a lot of similarities to Evangelion in this regard. I usually wouldn’t try to shoehorn Evangelion into random topics, but considering both shows are made by the same studio, it’s interesting to see some of the parallels. I think while I enjoy the pessimistic but eventually somewhat hopeful tone of Evangelion, it’s hard to deny that the punchy and very optimistic attitude Gurren Lagann goes for is very exhilarating and really does a good job hyping you up.

Since I got off-topic with characters, I’ll just finish that by saying that I really like how it felt like every character got something in the show, even the more minor characters. Rossiu is one of my favorite characters in the show because of his development throughout the show.

I guess that’s gonna be it for positives, since that sums up everything and I don’t want to make this too long. As for what I don’t like…

Not much, really. I guess Episode 4 is stinky in terms of animation, but that’s understandable, considering the state of Gainax during the production of Gurren Lagann. I think the final battle was a wee bit drawn out and there was no point in having Boota turn into a human. I also don’t really get the whole scene with the extradimensional trap for Team Gurren, having them trapped in their dreams and all. It’s like “Oh yeah, they can never escape!”, and then they do somehow. I don’t know, it’s sorta strange, but whatever, I’m fine with putting it aside for the sake of the sheer awesomeness of the show.

Overall, really good, like a solid 9.5/10 from me. Bravo, Vince.

Stinky, Stinky VR

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 09:39:04 -0700

Ok, so I was going to write some big thing about why VR as a platform is bad, but the more I think about it, I think it’s just a matter of preference than anything. So instead of writing the worst criticisms possible about VR, I’ll just explain why I personally don’t like it.

The biggest one is more of a problem on my end than anything else, motion sickness. Some people have issues with this in VR, some don’t. I do, so actually using VR is kind of a pain in the ass for me.

Second of all, I’m not a huge fan of the game library. To me, it just seems like most of the library is just shooter games, which makes sense considering they are probably the sort of games that could take advantage of the platform the most, but I’ve never been a fan of FPS games too much, so for me, it’s kind of meh. I’m not saying VR doesn’t have other games, it has many other games that aren’t FPS games, but I feel like most of the library is just shooters.

I guess another reason is how underwhelming it turned out to be. I was led to believe by others that VR would be this super awesome experience and it’s amazing and all, and in reality, that magic only lasted for like 2 minutes. A big reason for me wanting to invest in VR was because of movies; I wanted to watch movies in a home theater setting because I couldn’t get a setup like that in my place. It turned out to be very underwhelming when I tried it. It could be that the headset was too low-res for my liking, but it just wasn’t it for me.

Oh yeah, and I guess metaverse stuff sucks too, but I feel like everyone agrees with that, considering corporations are trying to make VR something it really shouldn’t be. At least, not right now.

You know, I thought I was going to have more to write about this topic, but I guess I do not. Oh well. Hope you enjoyed my silly rambling or got something out of it, I just need something to write about on here. Maybe I’ll finally write about the PSP sometime.

Wow OK I Made This Site Much Nicer Overnight

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 00:19:17 -0700

Website overhaul again!?!?!? Yeah, I saw the cover art for a song and thought “Woah, OK my site needs to look like this”, and here we are. I like it. I put a lot of work into it. I hope you like it too, reader :)

It’s all yellow now, I added fancy CSS stuff, and I also added a newest posts section on the front page, so yipee!

Ok, good night.

Saint Nick64 Says Merry Christmas!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 20:20:25 -0700

Well, this is sort of late, but I just wanted to say Merry Christmas to all reading!

I hope you did something fun today, perhaps hang out with your family, or something. I spent some time with my family walking and eating lunch at the table today, which are two things my family as a whole don’t do often. I love my family, but I do feel bad about how we sometimes feel really disconnected from each other. I’ve been trying harder to get closer and do more with them.

I feel like the feeling I get from Christmas only happens in the first hour or so of the day, when me and my family open their presents. After that, it just feels like a normal day. I think it’s because of the fact that we don’t do a lot on Christmas since I don’t have any family where I live, so no places to visit, or even friends here to visit, since everyone is out of state. Oh well…

Just wanted to write a little. I’ll probably write more soon since I have some ideas of things to write about. Also site updates too, with visuals and all. Well, Merry Christmas, fellow reader!

Trying Out Fighting Games

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 16:05:43 -0700

When Smash Bros Ultimate preorders went live, I preordered immediately. I wasn’t even into Smash Bros, I just really wanted to get into it, so I bought it in the hopes of finally fitting in with my friends who all played Smash Bros. And how did that go?

I haven’t touched the game in years.

Fast forward to now, I’ve been wanting to get into it for the longest time. They seem really fun, and the kinda stuff I’d be into, but I was really intimidated by all the technical terms players were throwing around and their skills. It put me off of getting into them for a while, but today I checked Steam and said, “Hey, why not?”, so I bought a couple of fighting games, but the one I’m mainly kinda hooked on right now is Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late. It’s fun, but I really suck at the game, which is to be expected since I never played anything much prior. I think I’m finally beginning to understand a little and I’ve gotten slightly better at it. I’m just playing Hyde and I kinda learned the basics of the gameplay and moves and stuff. I finally got my first CPU win after like 30-40 minutes of playing around with it. It’s fun, but I hope I can manage to make myself stick to playing them.

It’s not like I hate them, like I said, I’m just bad at them and somewhat intimidated. But that’s what practice is for, right?

Well, it was fun to play that. I guess I also did get Spider-Man Remastered, but that’s not a fighting game, I just wanted to add that since I bought these games because I was buying that and it was the Steam Winter Sale. I’ll get to playing that soon as well, I played like the first 20 minutes of it so far….

Anyways, I’m gonna head to work, have a good day!

Should You Make a Website?

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 14:49:48 -0700

It depends. That’s a really unconclusive answer, sorry.

I think it’s a matter of how much effort you want to put into it and what you want to use it for.

For me, I did it because I wanted a place to post whatever I wanted to, like stupid rants or art or whatnot. It also gives me an outlet to be more creative about my profile, instead of a place like Twitter where it’s simply just the profile picture, background, and profile text, and that’s it. It’s not bad if you don’t mind it, I just really wanted to have somewhere more open and customizable to let my thoughts out on.

To be clear, I didn’t leave Twitter behind and make this site because of the whole Elon killing Twitter thing people were freaking out about it, just wanted to have a website. But while I’m at that topic, censorship is another thing too. I never really dealt with the censorship, so I can’t comment on the policies on other sites, but if that’s something you’re worried about, this is good then. I may not have things that need to be censored on here (I think) but it’s nice to know that nobody can take me down. Except the government, I guess.

I think the freedom of having your own platform is nice, but it was also really fun to customize the site and a great learning experience as well. I was not good with HTML or CSS prior to this, and I’m still not, but I did learn new stuff and, most importantly, I had a lot of fun changing things up every once in a while and writing posts.

I think another nice thing is that despite pretty much nobody at the time of writing checking the site as far as I know, I feel like it’s more comfy to have an audience that actually cares about checking into your sites and looking at your posts (or RSS) rather than people on Twitter who just scroll and like posts mindlessly. When you have a website dedicated to your content and not surrounded by other people’s content and also exposed to people who don’t care about your type of content, I feel like the connection to the audience feels more genuine.

Overall, making a website isn’t something that’s for everyone, but if you want to ensure freedom of speech, want to have more customization, but most importantly, have a lot of fun, this is a cool thing to do. There might be other reasons too, but those are the reasons I thought about myself and I feel like the biggest reasons for other people too. But hey, I’m just a random guy on the internet, so it’s up to you what you want to listen to.

Thanks for reading, and have a good day!

MAKE A HOMELAB NOW!!!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 11:35:59 -0700

YOU WILL MAKE A HOMELAB NOW!!!!!

YOU WILL BUY SEVERAL TERABYTES OF STORAGE FOR BACKUPS AND STORING TORRENTED MEDIA OR RIPS!!!!!!

YOU WILL SET UP PROGRAMS LIKE SEARX AND JELLYFIN TO DEBOTNET YOUR LIFE!!!!!!

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY….

YOU WILL HAVE FUN DOING IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Website Overhaul!!!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:29:14 -0700

As you can see now, the website has quite a different look to it. I’m not really sure if I’ll keep it as the final one, but I’m really digging the look of it. It also took me like a week to make because I’m bad at HTML + CSS :(

Anyways, I hope whoever sees this enjoys it!

In other news, I have been playing other stuff like Persona 3 now, and also working on my short comic. I feel like I’ve been doing more stuff to distract myself, but in the end, I still feel not very great… Perhaps I should write about that. Maybe next time I get the motivation to write again.

It is really late as of publishing, so have a good night.

Playstation Stuff and Website Stuff Too, I Guess

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 11:27:56 -0700

Sorry I haven’t been posting in a bit, I’ve been dealing with drama and also just not feeling in the writing mood for a second there (maybe I should write about those things).

It’s funny how after the PlayStation 2 post, I played a little bit more on the PS2, but not by much. Also, my GBS-Control died because of how shit of a job I did with the making of it, I plugged it in and it had a lil’ puff of smoke come out of it. Oops. I want to play on the PS2 more though, so I brought out a CRT to play on it. It’s not an excellent CRT, but it does the job. I’m gonna play Persona 3 on it and also probably try to get better at Parappa 2, but I want to play more games on it as well. We’ll see.

Also wanted to make a post on the PSP, but I can’t actually find my charger for it for some reason and it’s completely dead. USB charging doesn’t seem to work either, I think I disabled it or something. I will probably work on that soon enough.

I’ve also been working on a small comic. I have a really bad track record of not commiting to my projects, so I won’t say anything about it until I release it here on my website. I would say look forward to it, but you might disappoint yourself if you do that.

I’ve also been working on the website too as well, I was experiementing around with new looks for it, but I’m not very good at writing CSS or HTML, so honestly it might be while before I come up with something that I want to put in while looking stylish and nice. But I do have plans for renovation, and I still want to implement those new ideas I was talking about.

Anyways, thanks for reading, and hope to write here again soon!

Walking and Catching Up

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 11:48:03 -0700

Sorry for not writing in a while, I’ve been busy with work and finals and also doing anything but working on the website. I will write more and work on the website during my winter break, I promise. Today I walked an hour from school to home instead of just getting driven back home. It was really nice, honestly. Got to stay outside in the cold Arizona winter air and walk around, see some parts of the area I had never really seen before. I should do that more often, I think it would be nice to do.

Recently, I’ve also been super nervous and stressed out because I had to block one of my friends. I basically was just tired of them not talking to me and all that, despite them being actively online. I mean, how does one not have 5 minutes of time to talk to someone in the span of weeks, right? This was going on for months and months, and they didn’t do anything to fix it, so I’m not gonna do anything to keep things going either. There’s much more to it than that, but that’s not really in the scope of this catch-up post. I just wanted to share it because it’s something that’s been nagging at me for a few days now.

I hope to write less bloaty content for the website, and I also want to add more things to it. I don’t want to bloat (I say “bloat” a lot, huh?) the website with random garbage, but I want stuff that I think would be fun to include, so I’m just brainstorming stuff right now. If anyone is actually reading this, you can also e-mail me ideas or DM me on Discord or something. But yeah, hopefully new things will come in the future.

Anyways, thanks for reading, and I hope you have a good day :)

True Selves

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 22:15:57 -0700

I was thinking about things tonight like I always do and something interesting that I thought about is the fact that there are so many layers and factors to take into account when looking at people. A lot of people define others based on factors like looks, external actions, etc. And no, I’m not about to go Kanye mode and say Hitler was good or something. I just mean that when we look at people, we can’t really know their true character.

Sure, you can get a basic idea because the traits that are the most prominent of theirs are probably on display, if that makes sense. But I suppse someone could just cover up said traits with a facade. How would I know someone is a huge golf fan without them telling me if they don’t make it obvious through their dialogue or clothing or whatnot?

I feel like it is possible for someone to expose their full self and their true feelings if they really wanted to. But the issue is to make sense of something like that, you’d have to consider their ENTIRE life and background in order for every single piece to fall into place, unless you resort to making assumptions, which isn’t true to their own true self. There are things people hide about themselves that could probably never be revealed, for better or worse. And the traits that people do hide are always probably bad ones, whether they know for a fact those things are not acceptable by societal standards, or their own standards.

Is there ever really a way to truly know a person? I feel like the reason I bring this up is because while I never mentioned it or tried to think of it that way, subconsciously, that’s what I made this website to do. This website acts as a somewhat personal diary, revealing aspects of myself that are true to me. I reveal my likes, dislikes, day to day activities, my fears and anxieties, and more. But even then, even if I am absolutely truthful about myself, I will never be able to fully reveal my true self to anyone, both because of things I and others would not accept, and because to include all factors of what make me myself and what factors have to be taken into account as for how I feel when I make a specific post would be pretty hard, or impossible.

I’m not really sure what I want to say at this point anymore. I had a concept and a thought in mind, but it’s hard to put it into words. And this thought is not something I just thought of, I’m pretty sure everyone has. I just wanted to talk about it because I thought it was really interesting and I want to try to put my deeper more abstract thoughts into words.

That was really nice to type out. Have a good night, and sorry for my delusional rant.

Why the PlayStation 2 Is Awesome

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 19:21:28 -0700

The irony of me changing my profile picture to an Xbox character right before making a post shilling the PS2 is uncanny. Was just thinking about the PS2 because of how much I prefer it over the Xbox.

When I was a kid (2013-ish or smth), my parents didn’t really buy new game consoles like the PS4 or the Xbox One, so when my dad got an old Xbox from someone he was working for, me and my older brother ended up using it a lot because that was all we had. I remember him playing Blinx the Time Sweeper on the Xbox and never being able to beat the final boss, and also messing around with Xbox Music Mixer… those were the only 2 games my parents had for that thing. The guy gave like 50 other games in the box but my parents donated them all because they were all rated M ;(.

Anyways, off-topic. Fast-forward to now, I honestly don’t care much for the Xbox at all, besides my attachment to Blinx (the little scrunkly). Not even the GameCube either, really. I ended up growing to become a PlayStation shill, not just PS2, but all PlayStation stuff. I even owned a PS Vita at one point. But now, all I have is a PS2 and a PSP (I’ll write a post on that later maybe).

I think for me, the first thing that stands out about the PS2 is the design of it. I like the designs of all the consoles of the 6th gen, but the PS2 is probably my favorite one. Something about the skyscraper-esque standing design of it is really cool to me, the ridges on the system, the boxy sharp design, the cool font on the PS2 logo… it all just screams “awesome” and “2000s” to me.

My PlayStation 2!

Another thing is the games too. I used to care about collecting old game systems a lot more than I do now, and bought the systems and random games for them for the sake of having them, but the only console that really lasted after that phase was the PS2. Why? Its selection of games is really good. I’m personally in it for Persona 3 and I’m willing to try out some other games I have in my colleciton, like Jak and Daxter, Metal Gear Solid, etc. I find that a lot more niche games are on the PS2 than on other systems like Xbox, or even GameCube and Dreamcast, probably because of how big the console was. My favorite games on the system are more obscure and odd games, like Parappa the Rapper 2 and Katamari Damacy… I don’t really know if they’re super obscure, but yeah, I still love them nonetheless. There’s also a lot of other bigger games that came out on PS2 that people may be more familiar with, like GTA, God of War, and other big franchises.

And honestly… yeah, that’s about it. I’m mainly in it for the games. But that’s all a game console should be for, right? I’m not out buying a game console for the fancy features or anything, I’m there for the games, and the PS2 delivers on that. Even if it’s a less powerful system.

That’s my post for the day. Glad I’m writing longer form posts now, since it doesn’t feel like I’m filling the site with bloat. Good night!

My Widdle Pwecious Home Server

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 21:46:43 -0700

Today I undervolted the CPU on my home server, so now I can save a little bit more moneyz on power!

That’s neat, I guess.

Also plan on upgrading the drives in the future so that I have more space for awesome doodads (pirated movies and TV shows heheheha), and for backup storage too. Not only that, I also want to try to use the server for more things, like setting up Searx or a home VPN for places that I can’t use ExpressVPN at (like school or smth idk). Even if it won’t be that useful, it’ll be a fun and enlightening experience for me, and I think that’s what matters most.

Good night, guys! :)

Kindle: Rekindling My Desire to Read

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 18:18:06 -0700

I’m pretty sure somebody already used that pun but still.

About a couple of days before posting for the first time on this blog, during Black Friday Week, I finally gave into Kindle shilling after wanting to do something about not reading and bought a Kindle Paperwhite 2021 model off of Amazon for 100 dollarinos.

For a bit, I didn’t use it at all.

Yeah, I guess it wasn’t a good idea to get a Kindle unless I had the intention to read in the first place. One issue I had when getting it was how difficult it is to read just regular chapters of manga on the Kindle. Instead, reading volumes of manga is more convenient since they’re all compiled and stuff. After a while though, I finally got other books, mainly Akira and Infinite Jest on there, although I do plan on getting other books on there as well. I haven’t touched Infinite Jest too much since its like 1000 pages and it’s sort of intimidating (although I’ll get to it eventually I promise), but I did start Akira, and the experience is very good. I’ve been reading before I go to bed, so the blue light feature really helps a lot.

Overall, don’t buy shit you don’t know if you’ll need for sure, but I think this ended up going well for me and I’m glad I bought the Kindle, because at least now I have more motivation to read unlike before.

Buy a Kindle.

You must please Jeff Bezos.

Goodnight :)

Unexpected Visitors

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:53:39 -0700

Well, I was hoping this kinda wouldn’t happen. You know how you can’t use personality #27 in front of friend group #5? Well, this website being on my Discord exposed it. Was kinda hoping this wouldn’t happen, but not much I can do now. If you’re reading this (you know who you are), uh…. Hi. Hope your day’s been good.

In other words, here’s a cool song that I wanted to share.

I like it a lot. Maybe I should share more music I like every once in a while.

Feeling Awesome

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 20:55:44 -0700

There are people I would not like to be associated with that are actively making me feel worse and I do not want to be involved with them. Why do I feel this way

Fuck

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 15:57:18 -0700

Realized that I didn’t post yesterday. Honestly, I don’t mind too much because I think I want to try to actually make good content rather than fulfil a deadline and make shitposts. Anyways, today was a wild day, I saw a hit and run with a guy on a motorcycle and other stuff too, it was kinda chaotic and I think I need to rest.

But back to posting, I might start not posting as often so that I have time to craft better posts. Maybe I will still shitpost since it’s fun but I don’t know. Next post might be a review of something. Not sure.

Hugo or Jekyll?

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 20:07:00 -0700

I’m debating whether I should go through the effort of learning Jekyll and porting my site to that, or sticking with Hugo. I heard from my good friend realjame that Jekyll (the gen he uses for his blog) is better to him after he tried using Hugo because of the convenience of the tools, but it could just be that he’s used to it. I’ll think on this a little more. In the meantime, I should worry about more important things like school, since finals are starting now for me…

Not Really Feeling It Today

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 20:33:31 -0700

Wanted to write a lot earlier, but honestly I don’t really feel like it right now, I’m just kind of burnt out from working on my art stuff and just doing nothing. Good night.

More Rain

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 21:13:02 -0700

Today was a really nice day. It actually rained a lot more than I thought, I thought it’d only rain for the morning, but it rained the whole day, which was really refreshing and set a good mood for me. I also worked on the website and fixed some RSS stuff, worked on my new project (which I won’t say much about right now hehe), and also got more letters from colleges. One college sent me a “handwritten” letter that was just printed for the whole message except for my name on the top. The address was written too, but they spelt my name wrong. How special. It was good though.

Oh, and I also watched Blair Witch Project. I’ve been trying to open my horizons when it comes to movies since I never watched a lot as a kid, but I liked it a lot. I’ve been watching a lot of movies and getting into new stuff recently in order to give myself a broader sense of my own self and the world. Hopefully it helps with coming up with inspritation for projects I want to make, but A) I have major commitment issues when it comes to those, and B) I’m getting off-topic here. Blair Witch Project was really good, the style of it was unique and helped set a good atmosphere, and it doesn’t help that YouTube horror series and other stuff has conditioned me to fear old 4:3 analog video, so it made it that much more scary hahaha….

Anyways, it was a great day. I hope you reading this right now had one too. And if not, things will get better! Hopefully. Kidding, haha. Anyways, good night. :)

Rain

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 12:34:30 -0700

It’s a beautiful rainy day where I’m at right now. No sunlight, all clouds, rain pouring down. This is a nice day for me. I personally don’t like the sun too much. Especially here in Arizona, where it gets so hot and all. When it rains, it’s really refreshing, especially growing up in Washington, where there’s a lot more rain than here. I think a reason I like the rain more is just the atmosphere of it. Rain is honestly really beautiful to me, something about the tippity tappity of the rain on the earth and grayness of the clouds and the amplified coziness of my home now that I’m sheltered from the rain feels really nice. Sunlight is fine too, but I don’t find it all that interesting. Maybe it’s just because I’m saying this as someone who goes outside a lot, but only really for school and work and other stuff, I don’t go out for the sake of going out a lot, so I don’t enjoy things like that. But oh well. Anyways, just wanted to write about that because I really enjoy this day of rain. I hope all of you reading this enjoy your days too.

Hallo!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 17:51:52 -0700

HALLO GAIS!!!!!! MY NAME IS KONATA IZUMI DESUUUU
I AM WATCHING LUCKY STARRR wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

It’s ok.

RING POP PROGRAMMING!!!!!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 15:29:01 -0700

RING POP GAMING!!!!

For real though, no more weird posts for a sec. Sorry for not saying a lot recently, I’ve been busy with school and work and… life, in general. I want to work on the website, and I will still be posting daily here, but fixes and adding new stuff will be kind of slow for a while. I hope to get to it as soon as possible, but at the same time, I also need to work on other projects as well. I wanted to use this website to host said projects, so I should probably get to them now that I have a site to put them on lol. I should also post more art here from my old Twitter sometime. But yeah, have a wonderful day guys, and to those reading, thank you.

December

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 23:34:31 -0700

It is now Decemberrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is so awesome guys!!!!!!

Ok good nite

My Time Watching Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon a Time in IMAX.

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 22:42:43 -0700

It was mid.

Let me clarify. I… like this movie. Not a lot, but I like it. I think watching it in theaters has made me appreciate some aspects of the movie a lot, some of the scenes were really cool to see in theaters (especially the scene of Asuka trying to penetrate Unit 13) and the music was really cool and epic to hear, but the IMAX presentation felt somewhat… lacking, I guess? It didn’t feel as punchy as I had hoped. And all these things also don’t help with the story of the movie itself and how things go, which I have quite a few issues with some parts, mainly the end.

Was it a waste of 2 hours and 45 minutes of my life? No, not at all. Would I willingly watch it again? No. At most, I’ll buy the Blu-ray once it comes out so I can complete my Evangelion Blu-ray collection.

It is sad to see that this is the end of Evangelion though… supposedly. Knowing how much of a cash cow Evangelion is, it inevitably will return somehow.

But for now…

Also this is the last post of the month :(

New Twitter... and Email!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 17:22:31 -0700

Got a new Twitter, so woohoo… and hey, I also made a new email! Both are in the “Contacts” tab if you want to contact me. Just wanted to make that post real quick. I’ll write some more later today, I’m about to go watch Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 in IMAX, so yay… End of Evangelion is still better. I’ll talk more on that later.

The Sega Genesis is so sexy...

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 23:05:29 -0700

Oh man, oh man, I bought a Sega Genesis for 16 dollars today at Goodwill. Opened it up to get a look-see inside and oh my… old hardware and huge chips are so hot… I really dig the look of the internals. Something about the humongous 68000 CPU and the SEGA chips and the Zilog CPU, MAN! It is so AWESOME AND HOTTTTTTTTTTT. Old hardware is my fetish.

Twitter

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 15:54:23 -0700

So my old Twitter handle got banned because I was under 13 when I made the account. I set my real birthday on it because I was revamping my profile and uhh yeah. Fuck you, Elon Musk, give me back my account :(

In reality, I’ll just make a new account, with a new handle and everything. Maybe I’ll expand to other sites like Instagram or something so I can spread my site around somehow, I don’t know…. I’ll update with a new post when I get my Twitter stuff figured out, but honestly I don’t really care enough to panic about it right now and fix everything, I have better things to do.

I got the Gurren Lagann Blu-Ray box set.

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 21:16:18 -0700

Finally got the Gurren Lagann box set in my mail today after ordering it on the RightStufAnime Black Friday sale and waiting a week for it to arrive. Being my first Aniplex box set, DAMN was it expensive. But it was worth it, it’s really nice. I haven’t finished the series yet but I wanted it because it was fire. Will waste more moneyz on future box sets in the future.

Enjoy the intro video here :)

Have a Melancholy Christmas...

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 21:18:30 -0700

Despite what marketing wants me to think, after Thanksgiving will always be the start of Christmas and the winter season. Except the “hype” for me is… strange. I do feel genuinely excited for Christmas because the mood of the holiday is really nice and cozy for me. But at the same time, it also feels somewhat depressing too. Something about Christmas and the winter season, while I like, makes me feel melancholic as well. Winter is my favorite season, period. But somehow it makes me feel alone as well. When I think about Christmas, I think about being with your family and friends, and I have family, but friends… not really. At least, not in person. I’ve been living in Arizona for about 2 and a half years now as a former Washington resident. Since then, while it was really hard for me to get adjusted most of the time being here, in recent times, I have begun to make friends, but I don’t feel any sort of deep personal connection for any of them (no offense to you guys if you’re somehow reading this). The only people I really feel connected to are all online, either being my old school/church friends or friends I met through Discord. And I don’t want to exclude them or discount them by any means since they mean a lot to me, but I do feel the need for in-person relationships more than online. Something about the feeling of having the people you love in-person with you feels really good to me. It’s nice. It’s comforting. But I don’t have that now. And for a lot of people, the things that define what Christmas is to them may not be that, but for me, that’s a defining aspect of it. Anyways, sorry for going on a tangent about this. It was an attempt to contextualize and externalize how I feel about Christmas. This probably won’t be the last time I discuss my social situation though. To whoever reads this, I hope you have a wonderful winter and a wonderful rest of your day :)

No Yawning!

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 17:03:09 -0700

I’m about to go to work, but this was a thought I had for a bit every once in a while. My boss will sometimes say not to do something, and somehow, I don’t know how he does it, he sounds serious, but also sounds like he’s joking at the same time. The past few times he’s done this to me, I was yawning because I work later in the day, and he said “No yawning!” in that same way I mentioned before. I genuinely can’t tell if he seriously means it or not. It sounds like such a silly thing to not allow, but at the same time that feels like something that would be frowned on by the higher ups of where I work at (a retail store, for context). I’m about to go into work in half an hour, but I just wanted to write about it because it was sort of confusing and I’m not really sure what to think of it, haha… It’s just a funny thing to me.

Genesis

nick@nick64.me (Nick64) — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 14:48:48 -0700

In the beginning, I created this shitty website. Thus the homepage and the template were completed in their subpar looks. By the twenty-seventh day I had finished the work I had been doing; so on the twenty-seventh day I rested forever and ever from all this work. Then I blessed the twenty-seventh day and made it awesome, because on it I rested from all the work of creating I had done by watching anime and YouTube the whole day.

Anyways, yeah this is the first post on my blog. I wish it was more monumental, but honestly, I’m not even writing this for anyone more than I am writing it for myself. This post is just kickstarting the blog, more or less. I plan on writing here daily, or at least, as daily as I can handle, but we’ll see how well that commitment goes. But right now, the site isn’t even live at the time of posting, so who knows when it’ll go online so that others can see posts like this.

Anyways, for anyone who may or may not be reading this, enjoy the website. It’s still under construction, but I’m gonna do my best to make it really good and fun to browse. I’ll be adding more over time and also begin posting other stuff like art and other projects here (hopefully).

See you next post :)

Homepage on Nick64

I bought a DSi

What I've been doing since the last post

I bought a Pixel 8 (mint color too!)

Snow

Conclusion

First post of 2024: A fresh start?

I’m back!

Where have I been?

Will I be writing more soon?

Working on Blip

Going to Seattle

A Reflection

Fortnite, work, and Blip

Update on my job

Fortnite

Website and Blip

First post of December: Festivities and Blip

Working a job

Blip

Root beer

Blip: my new webcomic!

One year of nick64.me

Happy Thanksgiving 2023!

Avalon (2001) and consuming obscure content

Avalon

The movie

Watching and talking about obscure content

Halfway through November: Comic update and jobs

Motivation

Artistic choices

brawlers world merch

Rainy morning + the FNAF movie review

It was alright

First post of November: What's new?

Positivity

Working on projects

Gaming

Overall…

The PSVSD finally arrives

Have a silly, spooky Halloween!

Turning that frown up-side down

Home server and shipping frustration, but other fun stuff too

The bad

The good

Umihara Kawase

Life in limbo

The stagnation of my life

In transit

Social life

Conclusion

Walking around in Seattle and Pink Gorilla Games

At Pink Gorilla

Lumines: Electronic Symphony

First day of October: Spooky time!

My mood

Motivation

Updates on random things

PSVSD adapter shipping

Home server

Conclusion

Snickerdoo-disaster

Going out at Everett Mall + minor site updates

Walking and shopping

P.S. minor site updates

The grindset mindset

MUSIC I LIKE PART: ???

Adjusting to my new life in Washington

Getting a job

Working on grit and me as a person

Regarding the website

The end

I finally got a PlayStation Vita!

Cleaning it

Using it (kinda)

Conclusion

Ah screw it, I'll upload the revamp now.

Homepage

The Bedroom

Netlogs/Art