[Late] Quarter 3 2015 Notes

Q3 Items

Nothing much new to say here. I spent a majority of time this period continuing to work at my current job. It’s been a challenge to continue to muster up interest, motivation, and energy to take care of whatever’s happening there. The company never seems to slow down at all this year, with the office continuing to win a mixture of short-term projects along with larger projects that can potentially last for a couple of years depending on the services conducted on the contracts we won from our clients. Due to the family car situation, I’ve turned from working over the weekends the past few years into working longer hours during the weekdays, but the immense exhaustion still feels the same no matter what days you work longer than usual. It’s been another one long working year again, and the year isn’t over yet.

Unlike many of my previous quarterly blog roundups, I actually did something fun and out of the ordinary. My brother and I visited Chicago on 25-27 September as the City of Philadelphia basically scared away many folks who reside and work in Center City/Downtown with the over-the-top security measures for Pope Francis’s visit to the city. You can read our exploits of our Chicago trip at my Wordpress blog. My impressions of Round 1 Arcade Illinois and Galloping Ghost Arcade can be read here, which was featured on the 10 October Giant Bomb Community Spotlight. Thanks to ZombiePie for including it on the spotlight and folks that read and commented on it.

I also attending two music concerts in Philly during this period: Archers of Loaf on 11 July and Built to Spill on 2 October. Both concerts were held at the Union Transfer and were decent shows.

Q3 Gaming

After completing a number of shorter-length video games in the second quarter this year, I went into the third quarter to scratch off a significant [JRPG] video game from my enormous backlog. Spurred on the notion that the fifth game of this franchise was hinted of possibly being released toward the end of this year finally got me to get Persona 4 done for good. It was tough squeezing in time in between work and other hobbies and fighting off many episodes of exhaustion to get it done. I got it done somehow, first getting the normal ending, then the true ending thanks to a convenient previous save file to work toward the true ending from. My Persona 4 Golden journey lasted from 22 June to 15 August.

After Persona 4 Golden, I went back to focus on relatively short games. Another recent big game that I finally got around to was Hotline Miami, and I enjoyed the game. I went straight into the sequel and didn’t quite like it as much. Soon thereafter came completions of Picross e6, Persona 4: Dancing All Night, and Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai DX. Outside of the games I completed, I continued to play a little of Splatoon whereas I worked my way up to an A rank in ranked mode, and dabbled around briefly in Super Mario Maker.

Q3 Items

Reviews

• Persona 4 Golden

Music Albums I Thought Were Awesome

• Beach House - Depression Cherry
• High on Fire - Luminiferous
• Max Richter - Sleep
• MF DOOM - Mm..Food
• Rosetta - Quintessential Ephemera
• Unwound - Challenge for a Civilized Society
• Unwound - Leaves Turn Inside You
• Various - Shenmue OST (vinyl OST by DataDiscs)
• Yuzo Koshiro - Street of Rage OST (vinyl OST by DataDiscs)

Manga I Thought Were Awesome

• The Ancient Magus Bride #2
• Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer #7-#8

Q4 Notes and Goals

Getting Through the Year-End Work Crunch

Work again has kicked my ass for another year and it doesn’t get any easier with the year-end crunch for the final months of the year. It’s already been a stressful stress of work coming out from my Chicago trip so far this month and unfortunately I’ve been at a state where I’ve been having a ton of depressed thoughts lately. I’m frustrated on the pace of how frantically fast they company’s been working this year (I’ve heard some murmurs this year being a record year of revenues recognized, breaking last year’s numbers) and the lack of opportunities to days off along with the consequences of taking a normal business day off combines into a long year. I expect work to still be fast and furious up until [United States] Thanksgiving, where things will finally slow up by then.

More Console Gaming Time, If Possible

Majority of my gaming time in Q3 have come from handhelds, which I am grateful for as they provide the necessary cooldown and availability to play outside of my room. Since I expect to be inside a bit more with time of daylight being shorter and cooler temperatures outside, I am going to make a stronger effort to put in more gaming time on the consoles. I don’t expect to tackle a game from my backlog until December, but want to go back into putting in a bit more time in fighting games on the PS3 (UNIEL, Xrd) and see if I can improve my rank in Splatoon (currently A 40 at this time).

Finishing EO2U Before Year End

I just started up Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold last weekend and been playing it a bit throughout the week. I hope to complete this lengthy JRPG dungeon crawler before year-end, hopefully before Christmas in time for year-end game deliberations.

Miscellaneous Items

I really want to attend one NEC fighting game tournament in person here, though it seems unlikely for now unless a lot of things move favorability to get me to attend there. It’s the biggest Philly major FG tournament out of the three Big E runs yearly.

I’m still not convinced enough to make the jump up to the current generation consoles yet, even though I am glad that the push to move on from the PS3/X360 generation has finally gone through. If there’s a decent enough Black Friday deals for one or both consoles, I’ll bite.

Lastly, just get through the remainder of this year with no significant issues. Work’s been a major pain in the ass and I haven’t been at my best mentally at all this year.

That’s all for this quarterly roundup. Thanks for reading.