Starting with video games, Chris' interests have led him to write game reviews, study Japanese and move to Japan to continue his studies. Of course, he has other interests, like cooking and baking, travel, and occasionally updating his blog.
This year, or maybe it was the end of last year, I became friends (hope he doesn’t mind me saying so) with a speedrunner of the SNES game Super Metroid, one of my favorite games on the console. And he’s good. Really good. Within the top 15 in the world for any% good.
Speedrunning is a way of playing a game with the intent of completing it as fast as possible, with various categories or ways of finishing the game.
The first time I met him in person, some friends and I gathered at my apartment for a day of video games, and he showed us a few key moments of the game and explained why he does what he does. Needless to say, it was impressive to see in person.
I meant to write this a few days ago, but got distracted. Here is the year’s, uh, yearly update before has now become the September 1 deadline.
In October 2023 I got my PADI Advanced Open Water license. I’m now certified to go down to 30 meters, or 100 feet. Found a place a few hours away that offers training in English, so I did that over three days. The area is Atami, which is about 45 minutes away from Tokyo Station by bullet train. I by now means consider myself advanced! It’s purely in title.
During the Japanese New Year break (お正月/年末年始) I took a trip to Oahu with my mom. During the summer between kindergarten and first grade, my mom, dad and I took a trip to Hawaii. I believe we visited the islands of Maui, Oahu and Kauai. I barely have any memory of the trip, and while I have been to Hawaii several times since then, it’s always been to the island of Maui.
Last year in December 2022 I made my first trip stateside since February 2020. That was when I went to Texas for about 36 hours for a friend’s wedding, then I jetted off to Maui to spend about five nights with my dad and stepmom in Lahaina, the town that was just burned to the ground a few weeks ago.
Crazy timing I had, huh?
During my holiday visit, which was about two and a half weeks, I first went to the Houston area to see some friends and family, took a trip to Nacogdoches to visit my alma mater, a trip back to Houston to see more family, then I was off to Florida to see my parents.
Well, until I was at Hobby Airport in Houston waiting for my flight and misplaced my backpack and didn’t realize it until I was on the f’ing plane! I immediately told the crew, rushed off the plane, and frantically looked for it in the wing of the airport where I thought I may have set it down. But I didn’t find it.
Suppose I should keep up with the now yearly update. It’s already Oct. 1 as I write this in Japan, but still Sept. 30 back in my home of Texas, so I count this as making the cutoff.
Earlier this year I took a trip to Okinawa and received a PADI Open Water scuba certification. Means I’ve been trained to safely dive down to a depth of 18 meters, or 60 feet, as long as nothing is above me. That is, no going into caves or wreckage where there is no way to swim straight up to the surface.
I first did a scuba dive in Maui, Hawaii, in February 2022 just as the covid-19 pandemic was beginning to spread. The experience was wonderful and decided to get the certification. But the aforementioned pandemic took off and I put the plans on hold.
So in March of this year I made the trip to the island prefecture of Okinawa and spent three days getting a certification.
There was quite a bit to remember, and it was physically exhausting, but a good time.
Just a few minutes from Odawara by local train. This is where I did my diving. Well, in the nearby ocean, not at the station.
Yesterday, Friday, Sept. 30, I did my first dives since then down in Kanagawa in the area of 小田原 (Odawara). Woke up at 6 a.m., got on the train at 7:15, arrived around 8:50. Got home around 4:30 p.m. It was a long day.
The dives themselves were all right. The water was a bit choppy, so visibility was pretty low (2 – 4 meters) most of the time, but it was nice to be able to just enjoy the dive and not have to do various exercises and practice maneuvers needed for a certification.
I didn’t take any pictures of the water, but I promise it’s there behind the buildings.
Note: This game has more typos and misspellings than it should, and I have included quite a few in this post. Some include characters you meet throughout the game, so those could be spoiler-ish. Also, the game allows you to customize the look of characters, hence why some have bunny ears, strange outfits, etc. They don’t normally look like that.
It’s been years since I’ve had as much fun with a role-playing game as I did with Tales of Arise. The game is not perfect, but it’s almost there.
This was my first experience with the Tales series, other than the anime adaptation of Tales of the Abyss. A friend of mine has recommended the series off and on over the years, but the desire to play it was never there.
The beginning hours of the story feels rather generic. Guy with amnesia meets angry girl who wants to topple some powerful rulers of the land who come from a different planet, Rena, and enslave the people of Dhana. But it does pick up, and it just keeps better and better and leads to things unexpected. When you get to the end and look back at the beginning, it feels almost like a completely different game.
Why matrix switchers are awesome… after the trouble of setting them up
In this post we’ll take a look at the two Extron matrix switches I purchase this year, the Crosspoint 450 Plus Series and Extron SMX Series Switcher, and why you may or may not want to add one to your setup.
Let’s say you’re like me and you have quite a few game systems you’d like to have all connected to your TV (or some other display device). The simplest option, but perhaps bothersome depending on your setup, is to swap out the A/V cables as needed.
Your NES is plugged in but you want to play SNES? Disconnect the NES and plug in the SNES. Want to now play your PlayStation 1? Same thing—disconnect the SNES and plug in the PS1.
If you only have a small selection of consoles, this might not be so much of a hassle. But if you have your display wall-mounted or in some other location where you can’t easily get to the inputs, you may find this challenging.
If you’re only working with composite video with RCA plugs (typically with yellow, white and red plugs), a basic RCA selector could work. Plug everything into that, and then that plugs into your display. Almost all of these are going to require you to get up and physically push a button the switch, but that’s not terrible.
My setup is a bit overkill. Click the picture for the full-size version.
But let’s say you have a lot of consoles. Five? Eight? Ten? Twelve? More??? You’re going to need to connect several switchers to each other, and that can get a little confusing.
What if you’re using a higher quality video signal, such as S-video, component or RGB? HDMI? How about a mix of any of those cables? Are you splitting the video to two or more displays at once? You’ll be hard-pressed to find a consumer option that fits your needs.
