Kurisu has been blogging for a year now!

I should probably post something here, huh?

So yeah... you may have noticed that there hasn't been a blog entry in a while. And that was not due to me forgetting about this site. I've actually been quite active on the media log, writing about all the art I... I hate the word "consumed", we need a true English aquivalent of 鑑賞する. But whatever, go check that out if you want!

So the reason I haven't been talking on here is because this blog is where I am supposed to reflect on my life. Now what do I do if something happens that's so horrible that I could never talk about it here? Just ignore it? But all the other stuff that was happening was actually rather nice, so it would've seemed like I've been fine, and that wouldn't have been true to my experience. So I can't write about it, but I also can't just write about something else. I came up with two other options: Explaining that I'm doing bad but also that I can't talk about it (what I'm doing now), or just not write anything (which I did until now). I still think this was the best thing I could do. Since now, even if the bad thing still isn't over, I've had some time to get used to it. This is my life now, and I'll live it. I think I'm at the point where I can tell you whatever else happened and then go on more or less normally from here.

So Week of Charity went great. We made much more money than ever before and other than the dreaded thing happening in the midst of it it was a gay old time. I really hope there will be many more weeks of charity like it, because it always feels like such an adventure, even if it's a shitload of work. Another thing that happened around that time was me finally getting my housing support greenlit. So I got a huge payout for the half year my application was in limbo and now I'm getting a good bit of support that enables me to make a living and even put a tiny bit of money on the side. I might even go to Japan next year! I'll have to do some calculations though, because I also need a surgery, nothing major, that's why health insurance won't pay it, but having it dealt with will make my life a lot easier and more enjoyable. It's just that it's 4300€, which I don't have.
Oh, and I'm gonna be real with you: This situation had me spending a lot of money on coping. I got an FPGBC, an FPGA Gameboy Color clone that is extremely accurate at a cheap price of 80€. Which you're also playing for an original GBC, except it wouldn't stop there, you'd also have to mod it. This thing comes preshipped with parts that are on-par with all the mods you'd wanna do. So it's a real great way to continue my Pokémon Crystal playthrough! I also ordered a Taki MiSTer, another FPGA system, but more powerful and meant to play basically everything up to N64, PSX and SEGA Saturn, which is much cheaper than getting an everdrive for everything. Then also some cable to hook it up to the CRT, some Wii lightgun accesories to play lightgun games with a wiimote because actual lightguns are really expensive... and a lot of small stuff. Sweets and whatnot, I've just been allowing myself a lot more now that I have money and a hole yearning to be filled with comsumerism.
But it's not just that, I've also been working a ton and spending a healthy amount of time with friends and hobbies. Saturday I'll go to the Pokémon Regionals in Stuttgart to play the TCG! It's gonna be my first time and I'm actually kinda hyped. So maybe even carefully expect more frequent updates on that now!

Oh, and if you know me and read this and don't know what happened, feel free to reach out. I don't mind telling you as long as it's in private. It's just something I do not want on here, especially since it concerns more people than just myself.

I had a dream

Tonight I had a dream. I was having dinner in the garden of the house I grew up in, and all my friends were there. Then suddenly, Man Ray (the Spongebob villian) showed up in a hot air balloon to spoil the fun.
Everyone suddenly started pinching themselves, and we quickly came to the conclusion that it was my dream. I said no problem, I would wake up before Man Ray would cause any trouble, and then I did.

Now, why am I telling you this? Do I suspect a deeper meaning within this dream?
Nah, quite the contrary actually. That was one of the most senseless dreams I ever bothered to remember throughout the day. It's just precicely that. I have recently been checking out a bunch of new webblogs to read, and I noticed again how many people prefer to publish texts that refer to a certain topic, sometimes heavily researched even. It's pretty cool, and I think it probably has a broader appeal than reading some random internet womans diary. So I kinda thought about doing something like that myself, but I don't think that's for me. It's a lot of work, and if I ever could get myself to write a script about a topic I find interesting like that, I'd probably rather turn it into a youtube video if I can.

On the other hand these diary blog posts are fun for me. They are fun to write, they are relatively low commitment, they are fun to browse much later as a diary, and the best thing: I still feel like I'm improving my skills as a writer. Which is a thing that apparently I can call myself now, considering these 30,000 words of me yapping about my daily life.

September is a kind off fucked up month if you think about it

For me at least, the various things I do to have fun and feel like my existence benifits society in a meaningful way cumulate here. I have to write another one of my dear essays, since the semester ended in August, I have to work both to feel something and to purchase my right to exist, it's the end of the festival season which means the local Open Air I traditionally crew on takes place. This means I gotta take a trip to my hometown for at least a week, any less wouldn't justify the two days of travel. And also: Week of Charity comes up again. Which, contrary to how the name suggests, does not simple take a week of my life for charity, but a lot more. We've been doing a lot of planning and organizing, and I am really looking forward to the event, but honestly, I wouldn't mind if the prep work would just get done by itself.

Also I might have spent a lot of time on a certain goblin bunker game club, where we are mainly playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Rebirth 1, but also watching a lot of very quality anime together. The One Piece watch is also still going well, I'm around episode 70 now, in midst of Little Garden. We're closing in on being done with the first 10%!!!

How long does it take a Kurisu to put an episode of One Piece on?

Hello readers. I have just "finished" my 30 hour quest of getting an episode of One Piece from my hard drive to run on my crt. Who would've thought that it was gonna be this complicated?

It just makes sense, right? You have a tube at home, you're watching a 4:3 anime, only makes sense to bring them together! Your files are in mkv, so what is your best bet? Probably the PS3, it was literally advertised as a media hub in its prime, it supports media playback from usb and is pretty much the newest thing you own that has an AV-out. (Except for the WiiU but you haven't hacked that yet so that seems like a lot of work.)
So you hook up your PS3 to the TV, don't get an image, hook up the PS3 to your monitor with HDMI, get an image, set the video out to AV, loose the image, hook it back up to the tube but there is no image because you haven't pressed X in the first 30 seconds, so you do all of that again and now there's an image so you regoice but then you realize there is no file recognized on the thumb drive you shoved the episodes to so you google "PS3 supported files" and find a manual which says the PS3 doesn't support mkvs so you google "convert mkv to mp4" but all the articles are AI generated so you google "convert mkv to mp4 reddit" and you find a bunch of ten year old threads of people saying that converting is stupid because mkv is actually a container and you just gotta change the container so you try that and it doesn't work so you google "convert mkv for ps3 reddit" and you find a bunch of 10 year old threads of people saying that wanting to convert the file is stupid because you can just make a media server that transcodes the files on the fly so you don't have to do nothing to have access to your entire library via your home network so you google "set up ps3 media server" and you find a tool called "ps3 media server" and you install it and it works and you rejoice but then you realize that it has horrible audio desync that you don't know how to fix so you google "ps3 media server audio desync" and you find nothing of value at all so you go back to converting files to mp4 but for some reason that doesn't work but then you find out that actually ps3 media server is antiquated software that has long been replaced by a software called "Universal Media Server" so you try that and it has the same issue so you try converting again and it doesn't work but this time for some reason you press triangle on your crusty old Dualshock 3 that your little sister greased up with funny-frisch ungarisch-fingers while playing Minecraft in 2013 and that you never properly cleaned because you don't like the Dualshock 3 all that much and your super slim can't be hacked so there's no reason to play it a lot and as you press that triangle button you find an option that says "show all files" so you hit that and there it is.

The labor of your work. One Piece all synced up. In beautiful 1080p downscaled to 480i. Without subtitles. And your girlfriend doesn't speak Japanese. So you go back to the PC. At this point you mobilized every Discord server with at least one person interested in crt-gaming. You made your own reddit thread that isn't 10 years old. Everyone gives their input, you throw stuff at a wall like back when you still had a super ball to play with instead of a yoyo, but you got rid of the super ball because your friends got mad that you would always run after it onto the street if you failed to grasp it, which was a lot because throwing the super ball hard much too hard is really fun. You learn way to much about converting to mp4 and transcoding settings and different codecs and all that shit that you never cared about in your life, but now, now that you want to watch One Piece on your CRT with your PS3 you're obsessed with it, you suck it all up and come back a stronger person, even if it made your girlfriend really annoyed for a night there. You now posses the knowledge to create perfectly playable mp4s with hardcoded subs burned in, and you know how to downscale videos on a media server before sending them to the ps3 and how to enable this one frame skip feature that keeps the audio on track. You feel tired. Your girlfriend is gone because she had to work. "But next time it will be plug-and-play." You say to yourself. Was it worth it? Who is to decide? You hope someone will play Kirby Airride with you for your birthday.

pizza time

Today I had a friend over and we made pizza. It was the last of a series of meet-ups where we would cook something together, mostly Japanese food which can't be found here authentically or at reasonable prices, but also western food that she wanted to try making herself. Next week she'll go back to Japan, so I wanted to go out with a bang, and I think I did. The pizza turned out pretty great, to the point of me eating too much too fast and ending up with a real bad tummy ache. But it was worth it, both for my friend, as well as for the pizza.

I know I often make it seem like I wanna go to Japan for all the food, the karaoke, the arcades and the reasonably priced used games, and while that isn't incorrect, it would be wrong to assume that's even just half the reason I'm so obsessed with going there again. I have so many friends all across the country (mostly Kansai though), whom I have to meet up with again. Most of them used to be exchange students here in Germany, I always had a much harder time making Japanese friends in Japan, I assume it's because the comparatively small amount of Japanese people deciding to go as far as to spend a year overseas are much more open to the idea of befriending foreigners. The singular downside is that there aren't a lot of friends I have in Japan that belong to the same peer-group, except for the slim chance they went to Germany during the same time, but apart from that I think I can be quite proud of my squad of LINE contacts that barely get used until the day one of us goes to the others homecountry again, and then it's like we never were apart. Exept most of the time my friends German skills get worse over time because they don't get a chance to use them a lot after graduating university.

...Graduating university... nah, let's continue to push this topic under the rug, my therapist is on vacation in Portugal. The point is: I already miss her. We'll meet one more time on Tuesday and then she'll leave while I'm at work. But next year I'll go to Japan and visit her. I'll visit them all. I'll get the money somehow. Just gotta stay on the grind.

The worst Birthday present

Get ready because I'm doing something unheard of: Leaking my age on here. Well kinda. I'm not telling you outright, but you might know, or be able to google it.

Now, what would you consider the worst birthday present? Socks? Nothing? A punch to the face?
Well, here in Germany, people who are still in university when they reach a certain age that I will reach this very month, get 350€ removed from their monthly income. Fun, right? Because students are known to have so much of that. The way this works is that two things change at the same time: You stop being eligable for child relief, which is a payment of 250€ (Right now at least, it got adjusted for inflation a few times and is somehow less of a help than it used to be) that every kid gets until they either enter the working life or turn this amount of years old. And because that by itself is so fun, it gets accompanied by not being eligable for family insurance also. Which is a thing where you are insured by proxy as long as your parents are. So I gotta get my own insurance now. Which is another 100€. (Minimally, it might be more because I need a good insurance or I'll never get the surgery I need that I need to do an infinite amount of paperwork for.)
So yeah, that's money that I gotta pull out of thin air now. Because I at this point lost a lot of hope when it comes to the rent relief aid I'm applying for. I think I'm too poor for that, and they really want me to go to that other agency that will only aid me if I give up on university. Isn't this fun? It's almost like they don't actually want poor and/or disabled people to graduate from university. They should do poor people jobs.
Which, funnily enough, I already do, which is why I'm kinda in a real bad spot right now. I just remembered I still gotta pay off my car getting repaired.

So yeah, I've been pretty much doing nothing but paper work to sort all of that out today. I might actually go cut the grass today because that actually seems like an appealing way to dissociate, which usually means I'm in a really bad spot. But hey, my roommates might like it.

I like cards

I'm a tiny bit sad writing this blog post, for a rather small reason, but very eternal one. Last July was the first month since starting this blog, where I only made a single blog post. Which isn't like a huge thing, but it's something I can't like... undo. I can't say "I've written at least two blog entries every month since March 2023", which I always thought was a nice thing to have that I could be proud of. Having written one per month is still cool and all, but it's just a tad different.

But I guess I just didn't have a lot to talk about. Not that nothing happened, just nothing that I haven't written about here before. I worked a bunch, did my weekly DnD sessions which are still the highlight of my week rather frequently, played Triforce Heroes weekly with two friends of mine, Splatoon 3, ect.

What I haven't done in a good while was go to a Pokémon TCG event, and today I went and it was really nice! I got second place. It's really fun. A lot of people will tell me that it's such an impossibly expensive hobby, and they aren't completely wrong, but I kinda see it like having a gym membership or something like that. Those things also pile up to cost a lot of money if you do them long term, so I don't mind paying 10€ to get two boosters and an afternoon of socializing. Of course it still sucks when those new powercrept cards come out and you gotta adjust your deck with some stupid 20€ card to be able to play, but if you're part of the community it's probably not that hard. I think every card in my current deck combined cost me like 40€, which is about the price of a 3DS game, which may or may not give me the same amount of fun!
If you happen to be curious, I'm playing a Charizard deck. Not by choice! It's just that it's cheap to get your hands on right now. I played Miraidon before, but that's really hard to make work right now, and even more so if you can't just shit out three-digit-numbers for Iron Hands ex cards, which I just refuse to do. So I went with the option that's both cheap and reliable, and I'm starting to see results, which is pretty cool.

Now it's getting pretty late. I however, cannot go to bed just yet. I gotta clean my damn room, my mom is visiting tomorrow. I gotta at least attempt to make it look like I'm not just gaming all day, so I'll just shove all my controllers and handhelds into a drawer. Might also wanna get my shelves a bit orderly, they look like an ADHD-having persons shelves. So that's what I'm gonna do now. I hope my next blog entry will be this month. Maybe even not entirely at the end, so that there is potential for even more entries!

I need a laptop

I'm back now. Like for the second time. I did come back from Italy 2 weeks ago and then I didn't manage to write my blog post because I had a lot of stuff to do, and then I departed again for my hometown.

It was nice, for the most part. I visited a lot of friends, started watching One Piece, realized that the problem with my GBA is probably that the USB-C socket is faulty (which kinda sucks but if I ever find it in me to write an email with proof for a 12.50€ part I might get a replacement). What I didn't do was write a blog entry at home because that's still horribly annoying to do on my tablet. I really need a laptop, but sadly my monetary situation isn't even close to where I hoped it would be by now, which is partially my own fault because I just had to kick my car up some curbs into the bushes. All things considered I might have come off pretty lucky but will need a new wishbone or I won't even get it out of the neighbourhood I crashed it in.

On the other side, I'm still not getting that rent relief I applied for in March because of a lot of stuff that isn't my fault. And let me tell you, I could really, really, really use that money right now. Or literally every minute ever since I applied and even before that. But hey, not like I'll run out of people to scrounge off of anytime soon.

On a more positive note: I've been playing a lot of PokéRouge lately and it's really fun! Being browser-based is also a nice plus, since I can just play it anywhere, all the time. I'm home? Let me just boot up PokéRouge on my PC. On the go? I'll play it on my phone! At my girlfriends place? She has a Steamdeck. This will probably cause me to fall back on making progress on everything else in my life, both video game related and not, but that's okay, as long as I'm having fun, right?

It's rather wet in Italy

My vacation started on Friday, and after class ended that day, I went straight to meet with my girlfriend and depart on our camping trip to Italy.
The weather was rather bad, which was fine because we were visiting a friend in Swiss, who let us crash in his flat for the night. On the second night we made it to the shore, but still a far way from the small town in the Toscana my girlfriend wanted to go to. The weather was still bad, and we got completely drenched while trying to unbuild to tent for departure, it was quite the adventure. For the way back we decided to bite the bullet of paying the highway tolls, which we avoided for the way here. But is that really worth it if it means we need a place to stay for an extra night? Nah, I think this is perfect. Now we had the adventure of small mountain paths on the way here and the convenience of the highway on the way back.

So anyway, yesterday was our first full day at our destination, and it was really nice. We had pizza, went to ikea for all the stuff we forgot to pack, and we even had some nice weather for a bit of beach time! Another thing that is really nice about Italy is how cheap the coffee is. I barely drink tea right now because at every corner there is quality Latte Macciato for as cheap or even cheaper than the stuff they sell us at the food court. Until now Italy feels more like a culinary travel experience than Japan does, and I thought you couldn't be more overly confident in your own food than Japan is.

Todays plan was to go to Florence originally, but we kind of scrapped that on the fly, since it started raining again real bad, with thunderstorms and everything. It kinda sucks because it meddles with our planning, but it's not so bad at this point. We have a big tent set up that is dry and comfortable to sit in and catch up on my Pokemon Crystal playthrough. I finally beat Whitney (or Akane-chan on my 500 Yen Book-Off copy) and got a shiny Smoochum from my Odd Egg first try (Which has a 50% chance of happening in the Japanese version, although you gotta go online with the GB-Phone adapter thingy. Which is possible thanks to great people at Re-On who are reviving GB-Mobile by slowly reverse-engineering long lost code, so shoutout to them!)

But alas, the rain has stopped and my girlfriend wants to take a walk with me, so I gotta wrap this up. Until then!

My work here is done

I did it! After weeks of way too many workdays I am now officially at the start of my vacation. I can finally rest, take some time for myself, and for all the things I didn't take the time for recently. I really wanna pick up streaming again for example. I finally got a new mic and I haven't gotten around to using it on twitch because I was always either working, tired, or otherwisely occupied. But without work to keep me down, anything is possible. I may even finally finish Pikmin 4!

Oh right, also my developed pics came back and I'm really happy! A bunch of them fluked, but I might upload the nice ones when I get the chance. That chance is not now though, because even though I'm done with work for the forseeable future, I got class tomorrow at 9am. A really dystopian time to learn if you ask me, but whatever. It's just once a week. I only hope that it actually happens tomorrow, because what actually bothers me is when I get up super early to go there and only find out then that class is canceled. That happened twice now! Apparently there's like a notification thing on the online lesson plan thingy, but seriously, how hard is it to just send an email? I don't go on moodle and check a word document in the morning if I have to be at the bus station at 8:30am! But hey, surely that won't happen again. So I can just go to bed now and chill and have a good time.

"aren't you pushing yourself too hard?"

This week was tough. I was working every day, sometimes two times a day at different jobs, built up a pretty heavy sleep deficit and especially yesterday a lot of bad stuff happened at work because I wasn't fully there. Now, I don't wanna get too much into it because I don't feel like ranting about that right now, but I will say it caused me considerable overtime and probably multiple people to hold a grudge against me.

Today at my third job, I told a colleague about some of it and she said to me "Aren't you pushing yourself too hard?"
And that felt really good. It stuck with me. Like, I knew that I am pushing myself too hard, but it feels really good to have someone acknowledge that who isn't my therapist. That's something I don't think I've ever really had. I have ADHD, and my life is structured accordingly, so usually people will just talk about how I'm too slow, or too unreliable with deadlines, or too clumsy, or... well, you can probably imagine it. But to just have someone at work who is noticing much work all that failing is? It's reassuring.

Now excuse me, I have to sleep because I finally have one (1) evening where I don't have to be somewhere and I will use it to catch up on some sleep.

cooling down coding

I had another rather busy week of work, and so I allowed myself to just stay at home alone for the weekend to recharge my social battery. I really needed that, basically every moment I wasn't spending at work I was meeting someone for social life shenanigans. Which is really nice and great and I enjoy it however sometimes you just really need a break. And this was that for me.

It also helped that the Paper Mario 2 remake came out, which I just had to spend a considerable amount of my time with. It looks really pretty, and it's great a great opportunity for me to play the game in Japanese. I'm not gaming, I'm doing my homework!

But most importantly, I finally found another opening to actually work on this damn website. I redid the media log, and it now actually looks like something. Originally I only threw it together so I had a place I could log stuff for myself. Now it's actually presented in a way that might be fun to dig through! And I have reserved space for a few words regarding everything I put there, which will hopefully encourage me to do that more often! Since that kinda was kinda the original vision, I just ended up not doing that because it was a hassle with the honestly pretty shitty layout I had. I might even go back to some of the stuff already on there and add a few thoughts, so maybe keep an eye out for that if you're interested. For now I should go to bed though, I already missed my Pokémon Sleep bedtime and won't get any rewards today, better see that I will tomorrow!

tuna can weekend special

It was a goverment mandated long weekend, and I used the occasion to invite a few friends! Well, originally the plan was to invite one friend, because she lost a bet and owed me a sushi platter. However, one does not simply invite only one person from a Splatoon comp team, so I invited all four members that aren't me. Luckily, only three of them came. Nothing personal of course, but having four people in my 12²m room already requires the most meticulous layout. It wasn't unlike living in my car for that roadtrip last year. Every morning we put away the sleeping mats to fit the tiny couch table to eat from, and every evening we would put the table away to make room for the mats.

But enough of logistics. We had a ton of fun! We played a lot of games, like Nintendo Land, Mario Party 8, and the Splatoon 3 Splatfest of course. I showed them the city, we went bowling, had sushi of course. We also had a poker night, which is something I wish I got the chance to do more.
On Monday, two of my friends had to leave for work, but since one had a bridge day she only took off today. That gave us the chance to do some two-player things: We played chess, Pikmin 4's Dandori-Battle, played a bunch of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity in coop, and the Splatoon 1 battle-dojo multiplayer (the thing where one plays on the gamepad and the other tapes a Wii-mote to a WiiU Pro Controller). That was lots of fun too!

I'd have to lie to say though that I am not glad to have my tiny cave back for myself though. Stuff like this is great but recharging the social battery afterwards is nice too. Still gonna hit the city though after I finish this entry, I got therapy today, and after that I plan on dining at the food court. Cooking for four people from Friday until Tuesday was enough for a while, I deserve a break. And if I'm already outside, why not make the most of it?

Oh, as a final afterthought: I finally managed to fill my first roll of film! If I don't forget I'll go to the drug store to send it in for development today, and I might upload some of those photos here, so keep your eyes peeled!

I'm the superstar!

We did it! This week we met up for an epic Mario Pizza Party 8. We really went all out, I brought my pizza stone, my friends brought the game on original hardware, everyone had their own wiimote, we had lots of toppings and the most delicious tomato sauce that might actually have been more garlic than tomato. So then we stood there in the kitchen to feast, and after that we played 50 rounds of Koopa's Tycoon Town. When it comes to minigames I do have to pick up some slack, but I managed to win the game by making smart board game decisions and having a little bit of luck.

Well, the day after was a holiday, and I mostly spent it just getting home and resting, because I spent the entire rest of the week working. And honestly, my new true wireless earbuds are great for listening to music or podcasts in whatever workplace environment without being found out, as long as I don't tie up my hair, so I mostly don't mind it. Just kinda sucks that I have to drop a course I really wanted to take for work. I could have been learning Ainu-itak, but no, I gotta bring lunch to kindergarten kids so neither of us will starve. Kinda cringe.

The future is now! (How to end up in gig economy)

It's the dumbest thing. I just got called: "Hey Kurisu our cleaning lady is sick can you come in tomorrow?" You think I can say no to that? Hell, I couldn't say no to it if I wouldn't need the money! I'm so easily exploitable!

For real though, I don't mind helping out in the store I worked at last year, the people there were all really cool. But working three jobs, and not getting in consistant hours at any of them? That kinda sucks. I wouldn't even mind three jobs if I had a clear schedule, quite the contrary! I like not having to do the same thing every. But tracking my finances with different income every month, shoving around everything in my planner, last minute adjusting my sleep schedule to spontaniously clean a pharmacy tomorrow before uni starts... all that kinda blows. There's a reason I don't think I'm fit for being self-employed and it's literally all of that. But I can really use every penny I can squeeze through. Gotta go Japan next year after all! And also a bunch of other stuff. A new matress would be really awesome.

First roadtrip of the year!

This weekend I took took a two day train trip with my girlfriend. So, you might have heared about Germanys fairly new 49€-ticket. An almost affordable monthly commuter pass for short distance travel, that mostly shines in its simplicity, since it literally just allows you to take every short-distance bus or train with no additional costs. My new girlfriend had a business to take care of in Austria, so we planned a camping trip with a night in Munich, where we would visit a friend of mine for breakfast. We camped in a really nice spot in a small city just outside of Munich, the weather was nice too. It was the perfect night for stargazing. There were just two small problems: Our inflatable matress fucking sucked. We basically slept on the ground and still had to inflate it two more times over the course of the night. The other problem was temperature. Despite it being 20°C during the day, in the night it would cool down to 1°C. We literally froze, no amount of clothing and/or cuddling could help there. That's why we cut the trip short and came back on Saturday, which meant we spent 80% of the trip on the train. But it was worth it to be able to spend Saturday night in a real bed. And the trip was still fun! I'll totally do something like this again once the nights get warmer.

Oh, right. I started a new project: Growing cannabis plants! Which is now entirely legal in Germany, up to three plants per person. Right now one of them has sprout, and the other two will hopefully join in over the course of next week. I might make a project page for them once all of them are see the light of day, but I might also skip out on it because taking digital photos is kinda annoying for me right now, since the iPhone X I use for most phone shenanigans has a broken camera. But I'll figure something out!

Surprisingly nice birthday party in my flat

Today my roommate celebrated her birthday, and I'm gonna be real, I was a little bit scared because she invited a lot of people, and I was worried it might be a little much for me, and because we live in the same small flat, it's not really like I would be able to isolate myself very well. However, only a few people ended up showing, and honestly I really enjoyed it. It wasn't really all that much of a party, more like a game night. So thats what we ended up doing, we had some snacks and played some games, it was rather chill and I'd totally do it again!

Tomorrow I'm gonna go to a Pokémon TCG league cup that's a 1,5h car ride away from here. And it starts at 10am, so I really gotta get up early to pick up my friends, which is probably going to be hard for me. But I really wanna go, I haven't been to any TCG events since the rotation killed my Miraidon deck. Tomorrow I plan on playing Charizard. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not gonna pay hundereds of Euro for iron hands just so I can keep playing an electric type deck that doesn't even perform significantly better than much cheaper alternatives. And since I've warmed up to Charizard on TCG Live, it's probably gonna be my best shot to score some points tomorrow!

My therapist says he hasn't seen me in such a bad shape for a long time

Yeah... I really would like to start writing more entries again, but I am always afraid of doing nothing but whining about the same problems just because the problems are big and won't go away for much longer than I always hope for. A thing that I might do is just focus on smaller things again. I've kinda navigated this blog into a retrospective on every day on my life. I try to write about everything that has happened since the last time I wrote a blog entry. But it doesn't have to be that. I can just leave out shit if I don't like it, and make shorter blog entries about just small things that happened that I enjoyed.

For example, yesterday I played Mario Party 7 with some friends and it was really fun. Personally I actually prefer Mario Party 8, since I find the stupid motion control mini games really fun, and both Koopa's Tycoon Town and Shy Guys Perplex Express are some of my favorite Mario Party boards to ever exist. Windmillville is also great though, and since for some reason not everyone has a Wii sensor bar set up literally all the time like I do, we resorted to playing a gamecube game instead. I lost by 9 coins due to bonus stars, but I still had a great time. And we all know that I had the best strategic play, I'll be content with that for now.

Kurisu is the only girl I know that can have fun with a dungeon master for 12 HOURS!

Man, yesterday I had my longest DnD session yet and it was really fun! I'm still pretty much caught up in the hype of it, but as it is with pen and paper game sessions, at least those that aren't recorded and made public, there aren't a lot of people to fangirl about it with. Now, I neither feel like explaining the entire history of this campaign that has been going for like half a year at this point, nor do I want to bore you with contextless info regarding the latest session, however I want to tell you that the beauty of it lies within the fact that we already met up earlier than usually to have more time, and when the time came to pack up and leave for the last bus we were still in the middle of a battle. So we decided that we might as well finish it off and walk home afterwards, it's just round about 7km after all. But if we already walk anyways, we can just do that whenever, right? So why not tie it up in a bow with a little roleplaying. So we went to the tavern, where the DMs self-insert was waiting for us, and we ended up roleplaying as our drunk characters while simultaniously drinking together irl, and suddenly it was 5am and the first bus came around. That's when I went home.

Spending time with friends is really nice. Which is why I am really happy that I am also slowly getting back to my reguarly scheduled tandem-meetups. Tomorrow I'm meeting with a friend, the exchange student I helped out last month. Since he now finally has a home internet-connection, we can go to mostly just meeting for fun, which is really nice.

I just uh... gotta start preparing some shit for the next semester, because that is kinda starting soon and I don't really have any idea where all of my time went. Also there's still money things to sort out, but I'll work on that. I won't go to bed before having written at least three emails.

back from the dead

Hey friends, this is Kurisu with an irreguarly scheduled blog post to let you all know that I am in fact alive! I just had to be dead a little bit to save humanity from original sin, but now I'm back and everything is fine, actually.

For real though I'm doing alright. I had a few days this month where I had almost written a blog entry, but either because of time, or out of a dumb feeling of guilt I ended up not doing that. I translated an interview for a friend this month and it kinda felt bad to take the time to write for this website, but not to work on the translation, even though it's two totally different things and they surely wouldn't have minded anyways, even if they had read this blog.
Apart from that I also worked for another job (the one as the driver), which sadly doesn't pay as well as I need it to because I don't get enough hours, but it did help stabilize my situation a little bit. I should apply for another job though. And I also totally should look into university shit for the next semester... honestly there is still a lot of work to do. Like, until I'm back in some kind of spot where I can simply do things and have a daily life that isn't just one gigantic transitional period. I'll get there though. I have to, right?

Oh, I also started dating someone which has been nice. She might even read this, I haven't given her the url to my blog yet but I did show her the website. Maybe she'll check it out, if not then probably later, so hi!
What I haven't told her, is that this is basically the first time I'm doing this. All my relationships up until now were long distance, which meant we mostly got to know each other online and only met once we were already fairly close. I also never really met with people I got to know on dating apps. (Exept for mirdo who I met while having my profile open to men out of pure boredom and he kinda got me into the local Pokémon TCG scene, which was cool, so shoutout to him) This time we basically got to know each other on the first date and are still going. It's very different from what I'm used to, but we both have a good time and that makes me very happy.

So yeah, I'm still ganbaring. Happy Easter to those who celebrate! (I don't, I lack the money to visit my family right now)

you're never gonna keep me down

I'm making progress. Not only am I still spending most of my time with friends, meaning I actually go outside and do stuff and don't spend all my time depressed at home, I got a bunch of cool stuff done!

I went to see my psychiatrist so I can continue my therapy and get new ADHD meds, started looking over a kid, meaning I get some weekly pocket money which is certainly appreciated. I also had a new Japanese exchange student put in my care whom I helped to get settled here, and we quickly became friends which is nice.
Today I had a trial shift at that catering service I wanna deliver for. I can really see myself work there for at least two days a week, if not three. And if I do, I can actually earn more money than I spend. I haven't had that in years, so I'm a little exited.
Oh, I also went on a small hike, a little over 5km according to my phone. The weather was really nice so I wanted to take a few pictures of sunset with the analog camera I got last month. If I like them I might build a project gallery for them next to the funtography gallery. But we'll see about that. First I gotta get done with this role of film, and I should do it soon. The cherry blossoms started blooming and--

Wait. I'm leaving this in. Writing about cherry blossoms made me remember something really important: I missed my first anniversary!!!!
I started this blog last March when I had COVID for the first time after going to a Zebrahead concert! Man that's wild to think about. When I started this project I honestly wasn't sure if I would be able to maintain it, but it really did become a regular thing. I'm sometimes still self-concious about wherever people actually read all of this. I know I have people who check-in (semi-)reguarly, but most of them admit to me they aren't reading every post, so sometimes there might just be one that no one reads. But I just have to keep in mind that I am mostly doing this for myself. This is my diary. Where I write about my life to remind myself of the cool stuff that recently happened so I can fully appreciate it. I think my therapist is also in favor of this. So yeah, to another year!

PS: I just want to finish the tangent about the cherry blossoms. So they started blooming really early this year and I want to take photos, but not with the monochrome film I'm using right now. So I kinda just wanna get done with this roll now but I don't want to waste it either, so I'll just have to have my camera with me a lot and try really hard to find enough subjects before I do 花見 (hanami) with my friends.

paying rent with my overdraft this month

I feel a little bad for not writing more over the past few days. I did a lot of fun stuff with friends that's worth writing about. DnD, cooking with friends, yesterday I helped a friend moving because I'm the one with the car. The car, right. My car also got towed away, because I forgot I parked it at the river. When flood came they had to save it from drowning, which is nice that they did that, but for one my rear mirror was broken when I came to pick it up, and for two I don't really have any money to be paying a towing service this month, which is a huge problem. I have no money in general right now. Like none at all. I took too long to find another job, which is mostly because I thought I was gonna be working at a hotel this month but we know how that went.
So yeah, this month I'm living completely on overdraft, while I hopefully pick up work as a driver again. Then I can get my monetary issues sorted and then surely the constant existential dread will be less severe and I will be able to work on uni again.

Until then I will just continue to spend all my time with friends and not think about reality too much. Maybe that's why I didn't write blog posts... it makes me reflect on my life, which I've been avoiding. But soon life will be incredible again, surely. I just gotta believe!

Karaoke heals the soul

Today I finally got closure on that job that I was promised. "We haven't heard from you, so we gave it to someone else."

I literally called five times and went there in person again to try and find out what was up. Everytime I got told they would reach out to me. If they hadn't I would've called way more. Either way, they never did. I have no idea if this is just the pinnacle of incompetence regarding communication, or maybe they just were too chicken to tell me they didn't want me for the job for whatever reason. Either way I'm kinda pissed, but also relieved because I can finally divert resources to a job someone actually wants me to do.

I also went to karaoke again. For the last time at that specific place probably, since my friend has to go back to Japan and this was his farewell party. I really hope I can see him again sooner than later, but that requires me to fly to Japan... which requires me to buy plane tickets. So I need a job. I'll try to send out some emails tomorrow, maybe I can work something out. Karaoke would also be easier to do in Japan.

Spending time with friends is kinda nice

So, last week started out kinda shitty. I didn't write the exam and because of that my university life is kinda fucked. I have to give up on my student loan, get a job and find a new minor so I can actually progress towards graduation. All these problems are still very much present, but my mood is a lot better than it was last week.

Since the semester ended, we had two DnD sessions this week, which already was pretty fun by itself, but on top of that I had a Skyblock-LAN session with my friend quaka on Tuesday, and Juna (another friend of mine) came over for the weekend, and we had a really good time too. We played Pikmin 3 bingo battle, a lot of 3DS, went to play some pinball and watched Blackberry and the Scott Pilgrim anime. Actual couch coop is just so much fun, and I think the internet kinda tries to have us forget that. I hope I'll always have friends willing to come over and play the games I like with me in person, my mom would call it pathetic, but I think it is hard to have more fun socializing than sitting in a room together and playing something on the big screen. (Sadly though I don't have a big screen, I have a PC monitor that my consoles are also connected to).

Today Juna and I also went to meet with a bunch of my friends from Japan, and together we had a gyōza party. It's become a tradition at this point, when a Japanese exchange student I'm friends with goes home, we all meet up and make gyōza together. It's tasty, easy, and just something that works perfect if you have a bunch of people working together. I would never make fresh gyōza by myself, that would be so much busy work, but this way it's really fun and easy.

Now I feel tired (Watching anime till 3am while having to be at a cooking party at 11am took its toll), but also pretty damn refreshed. And I really hope that next week I can channel this feeling into sorting some things out.

feeling kinda overwhelmed right about now hmmm

So when I have too much on my plate and start to hear the impending breakdown coming, what I often end up doing is disregard everything that would be sensible to do and distract myself instead. Think of it as trying to learn for your exam, but you're procrastinating and clean your flat instead, except I procrastinate my entire life and read all 10 volumes of 先輩はおとこのこ (Senpai wa otoko no ko) instead. On one hand I feel good about it, because a good romance will just allow you to feel a huge array of emotions that will just let you feel alive again, but on the other hand... yeah my problems won't be getting smaller like this... I should listen to my therapist and try the plan thing again. Even if I just get some problems sorted out, it would already help and make me hopefully feel slightly less existential dread which will paralyze me less and I might feel less aimless. Which is a weird thing, because I am for example, aware that I have an exam tomorrow, I know what I need to do and I know how I need to prioritize my problems, and yet I just won't take the first step. That plan will be my first step now, and I'm gonna do it right away.

much work little money

Remember when I was going on about the cool new job I got as a nightguard? Yeah, I'm increasingly sure I don't actually have it after all. Like, they didn't tell me I don't have the job, they just told me they would reach out to me and then didn't. So I called them again. And they told me they would get back to me. And they didn't. And then two more times. I am not a fan of this system. If you don't wanna hire me then tell me so I can go on and look for something else. And if you do want to hire me... then what the fuck are you doing? Please just let me work!

But hey, just because I'm jobless that doesn't mean I don't have tons of work. After the semester is coming to a close, and I gotta punch all that book knowledge that I am chronically bad at remembering into my brain for like two days only to then forget everything all over again. Yeah, I have to do that... which obviously doesn't mean I actually manage to do that.

A friend of mine and I were playing Splatoon 1 the other day, just for nostalgias sake, and we started a bet on who will have the higher rank once the Nintendo Network goes down. This means I've been trying to play some ranked matches. Focus on that trying. It's really hard to get full lobbies, especially without cheaters. It's a little better during weekends apparently, but not by much, but it can be fun when it works out, and also it is just sooooo good to see my Splatoon 1 inkling in her Ika Musume gear again. I'm really gonna miss this game, so I wanna try to get as much as I can out of it before it comes to that. I even incorporated my WiiU into my setup again! Keeping the Gamepad charged! Things I haven't done since 2018.

I also learned about flexboxes. Yeah. This entire site was coded without them until today. Which is why I really hated css and never wanted to have to do anything that requires me working on layout shenanigens. But today I did it! I added a box for buttons right on my home page! It always felt a little empty compared to what I've seen on other sites I quite like, so I thought it would be a good idea to put it there in order to make things a little more lively. Now what's left is to completely rework the media log, finish my shrines, archive last years blog posts... and then rework the entire website to run on slightly less shitty code. But don't expect that anytime soon, I still want to at least try to get some shit for uni done.

The end of the semester is near. Sleep is no more.

So today I started working on a presentation that is Tuesday. I've known about it the whole semester. And if I say today, I mean today. I didn't plan for anything else this Sunday to focus on exactly this presentation, but I didn't actually do anything until midnight. And now it's 4am and I read like one encyclopedia entry and wrote less than this blog entry. And now I am dead tired and have to stop, which really sucks. But well, I'll just skip out on my other class tomorrow and do it then. And then do the same as today except I might not go to bed tomorrow ever because I have no choice if I want to get this done.

But hey, there's fun news also. I went on my first actual Pokémon TCG tournament! I got two wins and that didn't get me anything but I am still proud because it was my first time and while my deck isn't the worst, there are a lot of popular cards and deck gimmicks that I didn't know yet (and there probably still are more), and sometimes it's really helpful to know which cards not to play. So I actually have hopes that I will be able to improve if I just keep it up! Now to bed though.

We are so back!!

I've got a job! At least I'm pretty sure. I still gotta go there for a trial shift but I think I will be able to handle that. And I think the job might be nice! I'm gonna be night guard at a hotel, which naturally means shifts from 9pm-5am, but I think I will be able to handle that. More importantly: I am allowed to read, watch stuff, work on uni-stuff or literally whatever I want as long as I stay awake and make a decent impression on the guests. Now, I haven't found out what this means for video games, but honestly I don't see why not. And thinking about all the PSX games I wanted to check out, I promptly decided to hack my vita. Which I will do some time later, when my SD2Vita arrived.

Which reminds me of the other modding stuff I got! There is so much, first I got myself a GBxCart RW, a gameboy cart flasher that will not only allow me to back up ROMs and save files from original hardware, but it will finally give me an easy way to access my Gameboy Camera photos. Sadly this also means that my future photos will look a bit different which will probably annoy me, and they will certainly have a different resolution. I still gotta figure out what this means for my gallery.
Other than that I got a fancy ribbon cable that will make my picoboot mod a lot fancier, and the stuff I've wanted for my GBA SP for literal ages, namely a new battery, an IPS screen and a USB-C charging jack. Just gotta find some time to go to the makerspace and install all of it.

I'm also thinking about buying a new laptop. Possibly a Macbook even! I think that would be really helpful at work, for uni-work as well as for working on this website on the go. (My new job for example) The tablet I'm currently using on the go was just a cheap way to have something compact for on campus zoom sessions at the time. I'm actually still surprised how well it holds up for a 100€ tablet, it's just that it's just inconvient enough for me to be like "Nah I won't work here, I'll do it at home at my desktop" and then I never work at my desktop. But this surely is gonna help, right? ...Right?

I forgot how busy my life is right now

Okay, so I've been back at uni for a week now. And I thought I was gonna have infinite time because I don't have to work anymore. But actually with my social life being somewhat intact right now... even without work, I have plenty of stuff to do that cause me to not really be able to spend as much time to work on the website as I would have liked. But hey, I have a good time and that is also nice. I watched The Boy and The Heron, I had my weekly DnD session and my Splatoon scrim, I had a friend over for Smash today, and tomorrow I'm gonna go to a Pokémon TCG meetup. Oh right, Sunday I wanna try out my new pizza stone. I got a stone that you just put on your kettle grill and then it is basically supposed to function as a stone oven. Which I hope it will, because I am sick of not so nice pizza from my kitchen oven that can only do puny 250°C!

Oh, another great thing that happened today: I finally got the chance to go to a Japanese tea party as part of a university workshop. I couldn't do that back when I was in Japan because people there didn't ignore COVID yet. But it was really great. I might reach out to the instructer to do it again, even though that won't be as cheap as the workshop. I would love to enjoy tea with other people more often generally. Like, not just having people over and drinking tea while gaming or watching a movie, but really letting the tea be the main event, it really helps me focus. I wish I had space for two or three tatami mats somewhere.

Congrats on that it got bright!

No, I'm not above this stupid joke only because most people won't get it. It's kind of an established thing with my Senpai that I hold dear to me. But seriously: Happy New Years!

I hope you had a good time while the new year came along. Personally, I was with a bunch of friends, great food, and a foosball table. At one point I could even take the aux chord and only a few people complained sometimes!

Also: Even though I usually don't have new years resolutions, this year there is something just because it happened to come to me between the years. I've been reading experience boost, the webcomic that I still need to add to my media log but haven't because updating this site is still annoying right now, and it really made me wanna try and get back into an MMO again. I always kinda wanted to have one MMO that I can say I played at the end of my path to become a video game connaisseur. And I think if I start now, that should be Final Fantasy 14. So once I am back home and have some time, I'll try to get back into it. I also decided to play Tokimeki Memorial sometime next year. And also a gazillion other games of course. I wanna see just how far I can get. With movies and shows too. And manga. In fact I just read the 13 available chapters of the Bocchi the Rock spin-off manga centering around Hiroi Kikuri, and I am determined to do more. With books I'm gonna stick with what I started last year though, that is more than enough backlog.

Oh right, I had an idea to make the media log look nicer. You know how the pokedex looks in scarlet and violet? Maybe kinda like that. That can't be THAT hard to code, right? Right?