I did something I swore I wouldn't do: let a year pass without writing some bullshit here for everyone's enjoyment. Needless to say, I've been busy. I've been clocking in some hours, which really takes a lot out of me, but with everything that's been happening in the world, being busy is good. I've never once complained about having too much work to do, and probably won't until things settle down. Who knows when the hell that will be.

At the moment, I have quite the World Cup fever, as I usually do every four years. I don't have any particular love of the sport as much as I like everyone supporting their various teams across the globe. In a city like this where you have quite a few friends from various places it gets interesting. The two teams I directly support as well, the US and Japan, have both made it to the quarter finals, which means I've got some late night games to watch.

Gamewise, I was playing MAME as usual up until about a month ago but I've since had to put it mostly aside. I picked up Super Mario Galaxy 2 which is good and very relaxing fun (unlike MAME) but I can only play a bit a night. I just don't have the concentration it takes to play any games competitively at the moment, so the gear is getting a much-deserved rest after years. Probably not a bad thing for both the consoles and myself.

Spring is in the air. Well, not really. It kind of came and went, and there was only a few sunny days. I guess it's retribution for having such a mild winter. I guess since June is usually pretty hot I should be thankful it was cloudy almost ever day. Rainy season will start here in a week or so, and that can really suck. I remember some years when it only rained twice a week, but of course the polar opposite holds true as well. I've gotten into the whole bicycle mode, and I'd hate to downgrade to the trains. It's quite good excercise (especially when I get off my ass and ride in the morning), cheap, and this is quite a fun city to go riding in.

I've not exactly been getting my game on. The 360 release of Death Smiles was better than expected, and I feel I gave a nice ass-ripping in arrange mode with an 8-billion score. I'll get it out again, but am on to less nerve-racking games at the moment. I pop into the arcades from time to time but there's nothing released in the recent months that has caught my attention. Death Smiles II is, as expected, awful on just about all fronts. The loli shit was forgiveable the first time around as the game was so well put together. This time, it's a lost cause. Hopefully Cave will pull their act together and realize that their fanbase doesn't want half-assed 3D based games which are easily ported. I would most likely not even buy a port of this turd.

For those of you dedicated viewers that are wondering what the hell is up with the site, there are updates coming. I throw some shit up in the omake area from time to time, which I hope isn't unnoticed. Those posters take ages to scan, and in a lot of cases doctor up. There is more stuff coming, but it's been a project going on for a very long time. It will be nice to see it finally out in the open. I'll have more on that in the coming weeks.

It's that time of year again where we get drunk, look at Sakura, and absolutely wreck Yoyogi park. Unlike last year, the sakura didn't hit ye old 'mankai' (full bloom) on the weekend, thus resulting in some rather lack luster scenery. That didn't stop half of the city from raiding the local combini for loads of booze and heading to the nearest park - in my case, Yoyogi. As someone who's trying to trick everyone to thinking he's a more respectable man, I can't go running around to techno parties acting like a jackass like I used to. The kid would get trampled anyway. The music, I guess, doesn't bother me. However, this year, it didn't even have the chance. The police for a change were actually enforcing a rule: the "don't play your fucking music w/ an amp out here" rule. There are signs all over the park that forbid amps from being used. However, there's no less than 20 groups each weekend playing their music (quite often poorly) at full blast. In some parts of the park, two different performers will be mere meters apart. Remember, this is a city that accepts such weird things, and even extremes like some dickhead screaming through a megaphone in your ear about saving 10 yen, but scouls at loudness on the train.

I've actually been really busy the last... uh... 6 months or so. I still get time to play games from time to time, but it's generally at the end of the day, and for a short while. While most of my hectic schedule stems from real work, I have spent quite a bit of effort in getting all my technologies to play nice. I think I'm finally there, I just need to clean up the wires now. I've got my gigantic A3 scanner running on my main Linux machine, Mame and my Arcade VGA running off my one and only cube PC (which can also output 1920x1200 if I want to play real games), and my Macbook Pro will be where all the Photoshop love occurs. Yes, it's a bit much, but the machines themselves are really small. This damn scanner is a damn joke though. In addition to my hardware woes, I am doing updates here... they're just very thin on the content side these days. I'm making some changes on my end that will make the post-scanning process much more streamlined, and a few changes server side as well. I'm hoping that in a month or so this can be in full swing, and more content will find it's way here.

It's been a pretty wild Fall over here. Work and real life both took over and I really didn't get to do much else. With the little free time I had, I was went out and drank most of the time, which meant during the day I just wanted to relax and watch the tube. I picked up Little Big Planet, and other than that, didn't really play much of anything. I guess it's a natural transgression for guys my age.

I did decide that I had far too much crap that got basically zero attention, so out it had to go. This included pretty much 90% of my books, flyers, and posters. They've been scanned and added to the site, so they've pretty much served their purpose as I don't decorate my room with any of that. It has also given me a little more space, which is always nice.

After getting rid of a lot of stuff, the next thing was to get everything clean and organized. I was mucking about with my arcade monitor the other day, when it did a face plant into the floor, taking with it the Dreamcast, PS2, XRGB, and landed on a controller. Miraculously, everything was fine. So glad the thing didn't shatter. They sure don't make them like that any more. Any LCD would've been rendered useless. My son was no where around, thankfully,

As I'm really busy, I'll just end it here. I would like to bullshit more on this page in 2009 than I was able to this last part of the year, but who knows. Writing everything in two languages definitely slows it down some, but is good excercise. Keep you fingers crossed.

I've had about the longest ends of summer I can possibly imagine. August is generally supposed to be about getting in those last summer parties, but it was quite a bit of work for me. I had a 2 week trip to Honolulu, and within that a 2-day, company trip to Las Vegas. Vegas was a blast of course. Shockingly enough, I didn't play a single hand of poker, and only an hour or so of Black Jack. The rest of the time was spent boozing it up by the pool all day, then dinner, then out clubbing at night. For the most part, I did pretty good at making a jack ass out of myself. Having to work Sunday afternoon (Honolulu time) we took the 10:30AM flight out of Vegas, which runs about five and a half hours. Of course, I was quite hungover, so I had been pounding water all morning. About an hour into the flight I start throwing it all up. Seems that dehydration caught up with me. Not sleeping a wink, and simply staring into space for the remaining four hours, I eventually went to the hospital for a drip which took about 2 hours from check-in until they finally administered it. I went back to the hotel, crashed, flew home the next day and got on with life. I've learned later though that someone else in our party got food poisoning, so perhaps that was it.

I've really been too busy with work and real life to enjoy any of the heaps of expensive gaming shit I have in my house. In all honesty, I've played nothing for any type of duration since the first of the summer. I did buy Eden from the Japanese PSN which is pretty fun. As luck would have it, it's about all I can commit to these days. I'll bust out MAME or a PCB every now and again, but honestly, I spend like 30 minutes each day having fun. The rest is all the boring shit.