I haven’t updated here in forever, have I? I guess now is as good as a time as any.
I entered in the local BlazBlue tournament in January. There weren’t that many entrants, but I am happy I came in third place. I’m sure I could have performed a whole lot better if I really focused on working on new combos. The combos I have seem to be holding me through pretty well, but I feel like I’m genuinely limiting my ability if I don’t learn anything new. Those combos that are in muscle memory are pretty well rooted in muscle memory. I think I just need to do something more than what I already have.
Another thing I really need is matchup experience. I have a lot of experience playing against Tyler’s Kokonoe. I have a bit of experience playing against Estevan’s Valkenhayn. I understand how a lot of the other characters work. I have about as much matchup experience as I do from playing online in previous iterations of BlazBlue. When I rolled in to the tournament, I’ve only seen Azrael in play from videos and Score Attack. Not a whole lot of experience otherwise. I locked up pretty good playing against Chavelo’s Azrael. I feel like I would’ve done better if I had more matchup experience, but hindsight is always 20/20.
The Atomic Mesa household hasn’t been streaming a whole lot lately. We did try something different in the past few months, though: we streamed a Vanguard card game tournament. It was a lot of fun, even though we were lacking in streaming gear at the time. The players thought it was an amazing idea, and they all really wanted to play for the stream. We had advertising on the Cardfight! Vanguard Facebook, and we actually had people in the chat discussing what was going on in the game. It was pretty successful! It was a unique experience for us, and I think we’ll be better prepared for stuff like that in the future.
Tyler has been really busy building and modding fight sticks lately. He recently built a custom Melty Blood stick for himself that came out quite amazing. He designed the art himself, put the stick together, and he even put LEDs into the stick. He went through the effort of programming the LEDs, and it paid off. The stick is quite amazing.
Besides the stick he built, he is also building me my waifu (Kuroneko) stick! He has put in so much effort making it perfect, and I am blown away with what he’s done so far. He’s put the entire thing together save for the wiring (we’re still waiting on the wiring harness to come in). I’ll have to post pictures of it once it’s finished–the work he’s done has exceeded my expectations and then some.
I think I would be doing more with things, but having two jobs has been taking up a lot of my time. I work eight hours a day for my main job, then I go home and get things done around the house, then I go and squeeze in however many hours of work for my second job (depending on how much stuff they have for me at the time). I barely have enough time to squish in gaming, much less a social life. Oh, and add going to the gym on a regular basis in there, and… free time? What’s that? I don’t understand what free time is anymore. I like being busy, sure, but maybe this is a bit much.
On the bright side, I have really been using my handwritten journals lately. I haven’t missed a day since I started seriously writing in the daily ones in January. I’ve almost filled my general journal, too. I’m trying to write more, even if it is about stupid stuff. I feel rusty (since all I really work on is formatting and editing these days), but I think I will eventually get a handle on things again.
Welp. I think that was a good start. Now to actually see if I can keep up on this thing…