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First off let me start today’s post by saying how much I appreciate the outpouring of support that I have had over the last couple of days.  I’m sorry that I have not responded to each of you individually…  but I just haven’t been in a great place to be able to do that.  My focus was trying to get through the last couple of days which also had the added bonus of being super stressful on the work front as well.  Each time I saw a message come through it helped, and I wish I had been able to really be sociable and such.  I had mostly been staying off social media the last few days apart from making a few random comments here or there to take my mind off things.  What makes the whole experience weird is we have had a ferret playpen in our living room for at least the last ten years…  so now that we have cleaned everything and removed it…  there is a visible void that will take some getting used to.

To add to the pile of woes that are happening…  I spend a lot of time on the sofa with my laptop remoted in to the machine upstairs.  We were eating dinner and I had to get up to check on the printer upstairs that was reporting to be out of paper.  I had pre-emptively filled it and apparently did not get it jostled just right for the sensors to notice.  As soon as I had gotten settled in and was about to kick out the leg rest…  the handle that does this broke completely.  Now the handle itself had broken some time back as it was plastic and not exactly the best idea for a part that would get a lot of constant use with a certain amount of force applied to it.  This time the pulley or spring or whatever ties the mechanism to the armature under the chair came loose and now the remainder of the broken lever flops freely.  This is part of a sectional…  and the manufacturer apparently no longer carries the design anymore…  which lead me to research a replacement part.  Apparently these handles are pretty standard and I managed to track down what appears to be a replacement and a new cable to boot just in case that actually snapped as well.  So there is a project on the stack for the weekend.

As far as gaming goes…  I am still playing quite a bit of Marvel Future Fight via Memu Android Emulator each evening.  I largely just burn down the daily objectives similar to how I usually play Dragalia Lost.  I apparently did not notice this last night or this morning when I took the screenshot…  but I appear to have 3 heroes that I can unlock now because I had gathered enough biometrics while doing other things to get over the initial 10 threshold.  I’ve since swapped out Agent 13 to Luna Snow another one of the Netmarble created champions because the team bonus between her and Sharon Rogers is pretty nice.  More or less Sharon Rogers is the primary champion and Captain America and Luna Snow are just walking buffs.  At some point I want to spend some more time playing Iron Hammer which is an interesting Amalgam character of Ironman and Thor first seen in Infinity War #3.  Whatever the case playing a blend of Ironman and Thor is pretty sweet.

I am also still spending a lot of time playing Dragalia Lost because the Fire Emblem event is still going on, and should have the next story block released today.  Both the summon changes and this event went in at the same time…  and it definitely feels like I am getting to summon way more often and without the worry of getting shitty wyrmprints the whole experience feels better.  I am still getting a lot of crap summons, but have managed to gather up several really nice ones over the course of the event so far.  Marth is my jam and the character I play the most in Smash Bros…  so I was super happy to get it here as well.  It reminds me that I really should return to playing some of the Fire Emblem mobile game at some point.  It is still weird to me how much mobile gaming I am doing these days… but the whole playing from bed thing is a way bigger pull than it used to be.

As far as non-mobile gaming…  I played an awful lot of Lumines yesterday because zoning in on a puzzle game was an excellent way to forget about the world for awhile.  As a PSP owner I loved this game on that platform, and was super happy to see when it got remastered and re-released on the Nintendo Switch.  This is one of those games like Tetris that you can just blank out while playing and move into pure muscle memory territory, or at least that is generally how I play puzzle games.  The more I think about things the more I fuck them up… so if I can just reach a point where I am reacting automatically I am not psyching myself out.  The only real question is…  how do you pronounce this game?  I heard someone in a video the other day call it what sounded like “Lou Mines” whereas I have always called it “Lumin Es” sorta like Luminous chopped off with an Es at the end.  The fact that the game has always had a sort of shiny flair element above the I made me think this, but hell I could be wrong.  Lou Mines just does not sound right however.

Last night was a rough night, and one where we didn’t get an awful lot to sleep.  First off I am super thankful that we have an amazing vet that is open extremely late, and was wiling to stay there as long as it took us to finally reach the decision.  When you reach the point where you are capable of taking action…  there is still an awful lot of second guessing yourself but from the moment I got home there was not really a time when she was not regularly having seizures.  Before I left yesterday I had tried my best to stabilize her and she was resting relatively comfortably in one of her beds.  When I arrived at home that was very much not the case.

So this morning we are going to remember Shiloh in happier times, napping in her toy box or bouncing on the bed.  It is weird how we quickly reach a point where we think things have always been this way.  The photo above was taken in July of last year and she was still her happy and bouncy self, seemingly unaffected by the fetters of age.  So what seemed like something that had been going on for years was in truth a fairly rapid decline over the past year.  The nurse last night remarked that she was one of the oldest ferrets she had ever seen come in to the vet…  that also specializes in exotics.  So I guess we stole a lot of good years that we might not have gotten otherwise.

While Bella that we lost in 2017 was “my” baby…  I still very much loved Shiloh so this has been hard to go through.  The experience also seemingly traumatized the cats…  one of which only came out of hiding after we got back from the vet.  It isn’t really over yet however… because at some point I have to go pick her back up…  so that I can bury her beside her cage mate Bella.  I don’t have much of a post in me this morning but I wanted to at least give an update since so many people offered support yesterday.

I’ve been going through a little bit of a fighting game renaissance lately, especially playing them on the PC with the release of Mortal Kombat 11 and diving into some Street Fighter V on the PS4.  I cut my teeth on the 90s arcade scene playing a lot of Street Fighter, Samurai Showdown, Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct.  However as time went on I faded away from that and dug more and more into PC gaming…  eventually joining the cult of gamers tied to our MMORPGs.  In that time fighting games have evolved and changed, and while I no longer have the reflexes that I once did I have wanted to regain a little bit of my youth.  One thing that I noticed while playing these fighting games on my Xbox One controller that I use with my PC…  is that my hand would get really tired really fast after trying to do the combos.  This lead me down the path of looking into getting a proper fight stick.

For the uninitiated… fight sticks vary wildly in price and quality and it is entirely possible to drop $500 on a custom made stick with the best arcade components.  After a bit of research I started to notice that many of the custom builds I was seeing centered around using a Mayflash fight stick as a base and then adding additional components to it.  Mayflash is a chinese made budget fight stick that accepts universal arcade components and ships with its own Sanwa-knock-off buttons and joystick that I figured would serve fine for my purposes…  but give me the ability to upgrade later if I saw fit to do so.  Ultimately there are two models available… the F300 which seems to be more compact and probably ideal for smaller hands…  and then the F500 which I ended up getting which has a more spread out design ideal for my stupidly large hands.

The best part about these is the fact that they are wired to support pretty much every console I would ever want to play on.  Officially it supports… PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, Android, Switch and the NeoGeo Mini.  There are probably some others that it actually works fine on as well.  The support for PS4 is a little janky because it requires you to connect an official PS4 controller to the fight stick that then uses it for pass through authentication with the machine.  All told however it has been amazingly simple to get it up and running with the platforms I have tried it on.  The F300 tends to go for around $60 on Amazon and the F500 for around $80…  however I managed to find an Ebay Buy It Now F500 listing with free shipping for only $55 so your mileage may vary.  The weird thing about that… is it shipped from Amazon so I am guessing it came from Mayflash directly that was running some sort of an Ebay Special that I legitimately got the last listed copy of.

One of the nice things about this particular stick is the fact that it came with both a Square Gate and an Octagonal Gate.  I’ve swiped the above image of two Sanwa gates from the Shoryuken forums to use as a reference… because I am not sure it will make sense entirely without seeing them.  Essentially joysticks that came from the west and those that came from Japan evolved differently during the arcade boom.  While our 8 way joysticks got a distinct 8 point restrictor plate with a tactile divot for the shaft of the stick to bump into denoting which direction it was currently facing…  the Japanese sticks simply took what was previously a 4 way diamond shaped restrictor and rotated it to create what would eventually serve as their 8 way square restrictor.  Almost all of the mass produced Fight Sticks on the market come with a square gate, as the hotbed of fight stick production is still Japan.  However these feel really awkward for those of us who grew up with the octagonal gate design and the very first thing I did to my stick was pop open the back and change these out.

After having done that…  and seeing how easy it was to swap parts out…  it has made me daydreaming on Focus Attack about other modifications I could make to tweak it…  and then being sad at how much additional cash it would ultimately wind up adding to the price of the stick.  This is how you take a $55 stick and turn it into something closer to $200 if you are not careful.  There is however one mod that I do plan on making soon.  One of the features that Focus Attack has is the ability to download a template for any of the common fight sticks and have them print a high quality laser cut artwork overlay to place under the clear Plexiglas cover that most of these sticks have.  So I took all of the awesome Ammo artwork that I have in the masthead of this blog and arranged them around the template.  Now the question is… do I order this or do I go ahead and swap the buttons and joystick while I am having to crack open and pull it apart anyway.  I feel like I have traveled down a very slippery path.