June 1

My girlfriend is upstairs doing her homework. In a little bit, I'll sit next to her and play Shadow of the Colossus HD as she finishes. E3 is soon and I want to play through The Last Guardian beforehand, but I figured I should play the first two games in the "Trico" trilogy first. I beat Ico HD yesterday, my first time playing through the game, and I originally beat Shadow of the Colossus back in 2005 on the PlayStation 2. It became one of my favorite games (and the soundtrack is one of the best of all time), so I look forward playing it at a higher resolution and stable framerate. A little while ago I loaded it up while my girlfriend was working next to me, just to do something, and I ended up killing the first three colossi. It's still a fantastic experience that I've yet to see matched.

It's June 1, and I wanted to write something. It's going to be a big month. There's E3, which I mentioned earlier, in which my girlfriend and I got tickets to go see Sony's conference at a theater, an event I've loved going to for the past three years. It'll be the first time I share it with somebody. My 29th birthday will be less than two weeks after that. I'll have one year until 30, something I'm not exactly looking forward to. I have what I call Bad Baby Brain, but what others call ADHD, depression, etc., and it causes me to not do a lot of the things I want to do. But I am getting better, slowly, and I am hoping to have this month be an example of what things look like when I actually, you know, do stuff. We'll see how that goes, though. The first of every month has always been a false start with me. "A new month, a new beginning!" which lasts a few days until I go back to the same old routine of poor social media use and napping.

Wait, I wanted this to be positive! E3 is soon! It's one of the best times of the year! In the words of Roland from Borderlands, "It's like Christmas!" I call it Second Christmas, actually. It makes me happy, gets me inspired, and it's just a great time, especially with all those fantastic gifs people end up making. I usually use it as an excuse to eat like crap, too, but I think I'll just stick to having some popcorn this year.

So in the interest of staying positive, I want to talk about what I have been working on and what I would like to start on this month. I beat and recorded my entire playthroughs of Nier and Nier: Automata, and want to make detailed videos about my experience with those. That's actually one of the reasons I am playing through the Trico trilogy, is because I definitely see similarities with those games. Once I have footage of Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian, I'll get to editing. I also want to officially announce my other YouTube channel, Pure Gameplay, after I spruce it some more and get more complete playthroughs uploaded. I'm also going to focus on selling some of my belongings that I no longer feel the need to keep around, which I'll use to take care of all my credit cards before all the 0% APR windows end. This will mostly consist of my comic book collection, as the vast majority of them I could probably get digitally, and they take up a lot of space and aren't easy to move around. I want to read through each one before I get rid of them, though, so I'll probably be talking about comics a lot on Twitter and such. I especially want to take pictures of some of my favorite ads that I come across, like those old "nerd gets sand kicked in his face by a buff dude at the beach and then gets buff himself and gets revenge" ones that used to appear a lot.

Other things I would like to do: redesign website, optimize YouTube channel, finish YouTube school, and more!

My girlfriend is about to be done with dinner. We just started Fargo (the TV show) since I finally saw the movie the other day (which is great), so maybe we will do that. And then it's time to take down some colossi.

Talk to you soon.

2014: Upcoming Projects

I made a video showcasing snippets of various projects I am working on, from big to small. The song used is "What This Could Be" by The Hamster Alliance. I have a lot on my plate!

Five Guys: Burgers and Hedgehogs

In May 2011 I spotted Mega Man on the drawings board at a Five Guys in Fayetteville, NC. Two years later I returned to the same restaurant and saw that Sonic the Hedgehog had taken his place. 

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Sonic says, "I'll chose 5 guys over any restrant." If only he was eating a chili dog.

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Here's a bonus Captain America that was on the same board.

The Culture War

Years ago, I saw a forum post that contained an excerpt of the following article. After searching, I found the article was written by Tom Standage over at Wired.com back in April of 2006. The article is archived on their site and the formatting is kind of wonky, so I've included it in full here. It's funny how people never seem to learn from the past.

"US senator Charles Schumer says some videogames aimed at kids "desensitize them to death and destruction." But dire pronouncements about new forms of entertainment are old hat. It goes like this: Young people embrace an activity. Adults condemn it. The kids grow up, no better or worse than their elders, and the moral panic subsides. Then the whole cycle starts over. Here's how the establishment has greeted past scourges.
 

Novels
"The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?"
- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790

The Waltz
"The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced ... at the English Court on Friday last ... It is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies ... to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is ... forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion." 
- The Times of London, 1816

Movies
"This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood ... Depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children with the inevitable result. The Society has prosecuted many for leading girls astray through these picture shows, but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the 'moving pictures.'" 
- The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1909

The Telephone
"Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does [it] break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?" 
- Survey conducted by the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee, San Francisco Bay Area, 1926

Comic Books
"Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child's life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children ... All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!" 
- Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954

Rock and Roll
"The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness; impair nervous stability and destroy the sanctity of marriage. It is an evil influence on the youth of our country." 
- Minister Albert Carter, 1956

Videogames
"The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it's making the difficult job of being a parent even harder ... I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control."
- US senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2005