May 2024 Monthly Wrapup

It's the first monthly wrapup! Here's what I did in May.

RELEASES

• I'm done being a YouTuber. released May 1st in video form. Made as an effort to change the way I make things and allow myself to do more background and non-video work. Seems to have done the trick so far, which is nice!
• I just quit being a YouTuber. What's next? released May 5th in article form. Made as an extension of the video about the same topic to clarify some of my actual plans moving forward.
• Base 10 Zerosum Mode in 20:28 released May 9th in video form. Complete impulse run, did it due to a friend who sent me the speedrun.com leaderboard. The only run on the board seemed bad, so I did something that seemed a bit (aka 7 minutes) better.
• Base 10 Zerosum Mode in 17:19 released May 26th in video form. Said friend who sent me the speedrun.com page beat my time, so I decided to get them back. They beat my time again not an hour later.
• Base 10 Zerosum Mode in 14:58 released May 27th in video form. Try beating me NOW, Mark!
• Every Bit Generations and Art Style game reviewed and tier listed released May 28th in article form. I wanted to discuss these games, so I did. I'm very happy the reception on this was good - series fans enjoyed it, people finding out about it for the first time enjoyed it, and that throwaway joke about getting Light Trax times in my DMs actually did end up happening.

OTHER PROJECT EFFORTS

• Did some work on Plant Review S3. I got plant footage for 5 plants, bringing the total to 6. I do wish I did more, but finding plants I have anything to say on has been a bit of a struggle lately. I should be good to start writing scripts now.
• I redid my Ko-fi and did some reorganization to both my website and my discord server.

NON-PROJECT EFFORTS

• I went to Chicago for Anime Central! I had a great time playing ONGEKI and Cleopatra Fortune for the first time, and Mel enjoyed seeing all the cosplay. We hung out at the con Friday and Sunday, and went to the WNDR Museum and Color Factory on Saturday, as well as a USPS and a UPS store. We only ever used public transportation, which makes my suburban ass very jealous of big cities. It was a fantastic time and I'd love to go back during a non-convention time so I can see a bunch of the rest of Chicago and have an excuse to use the metro system more.
• The 3DS homebrew app NetPass released late last month, which allows you to use StreetPass over the internet. I've been enjoying this and as such have put a lot of time into StreetPass Mii Plaza this month, and I also have gotten to meaningfully use SwapNote and Mario Maker 3DS for the first time. It's been magic in a way!
• The above note has caused me to play more Nintendo handheld games in general, which led me to play every game in the Bit Generations and Art Style series of games. It's an obscure series of experimental arcade-y puzzle/action games with varying levels of quality, it's been very fun to go through. I wrote an article on my thoughts of this series, go read that.
• I've also kept the dance game grind going, putting some more time each week into StepManiaX. I've not gotten anything super new, but I've kept the 24s all cleared and pushed myself on scoring and understanding higher level charts.
• As of last month I picked back up on working out and I've been continuing it this month, which has felt very good. I've been trying to go from twice a week to three times a week, but that hasn't been very successful and I've decided it'll end up being too much of a time sink anyhow.
• And of course, the everlasting 9-5 required to live.

AM I SATISFIED?

I'd say so! Obviously I'm dissatisfied with the Plant Review progress, but that's had a few impeding factors and a streak of bad luck. Otherwise, it's just been nice to sit back and not feel pressured to make a video every so often, and when I do want to put out a video I don't need to adhere to any format or whatever. That being said, I do find it funny that most of my releases were videos, even if three of them were speedruns of the same game. You can take the man out of the YouTube, but you can't take the YouTube out of the man, I guess.

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