Video Game Thoughts - 3DS Love

In February 2014, I remember buying my first 3DS because I needed a handheld console. Not wanted; needed. Even though I already had a PS2, a PS3, and an average laptop that could play 2D games at best (because my knowledge of PC purchasing consists of the answer "I'd like a black computer that goes fast please!"), I still needed a handheld console to play some games that aren't on the consoles like Pokemon or Animal Crossing.

The PSP I had that was jailbroken which allowed me to play illegally downloaded--I MEAN--purchased games was starting to fall apart. The battery case got lost, the plastic case it was in was collapsing like bread in a bowl of milk, and the analog button was as defiant. I wanted to go right; it refused and wanted the character to stay put. I wanted to move straight forward, then it decided it wanted to go right. It was like a whiny girlfriend who didn't want you to do anything when she's around.

The DS Lite I had is still wonderfully working though. Have I told you about my DS Lite? It's a pink DS Lite that has a glittery plastic case on it. I bought it last 2013 before I left for Canada and to be honest, it's my 2nd DS Lite. My siblings broke my first DS Lite which had a manlier color of blue and black. Surprisingly, the pink DS Lite is the best DS I had since it's reliable and doesn't have battery problems so far. Plus, it's pink! I love the color pink! The bad thing about the DS Lite now is the lack of new games for it. I could get nearly any game I want for it because I own an R4 cartridge which lets you play DS roms on your DS. The problem with that is more interesting games are on the 3DS nowadays.

When I got my 3DS, it was a spur of the moment purchase that I don't regret up to this day. I bought it at a pawn shop for 90 bucks. The 3DS came with a box and a charger. It felt brand new but there were pictures of the previous owner in it. I thought "Wow, this must have been loved by the previous owner... TIME TO DELETE ALL THIS SHIT!" I didn't know the girl nor do I care enough to send her the pictures she left behind. If she didn't care enough to save those pictures before selling her 3DS to a pawn shop, why should I care to save her pictures, right?

Anyway, the first game I bought for the 3DS was Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Basically, a cute debt simulator. It was fun for the 3 months I've played it but when I accrued half a million worth of debt in the city's real estate agent. Before he could break my legs as collateral, I stopped playing the game. Gotta run away before the bats come in play.

The next game I bought was Pokemon Y. The good thing about this was that I bought it for one third of the price at a thrift store. Thankfully, no one likes video games there so I bought it at a reasonable price. 10 dollars for a game that's been out for 3 months is a great deal, right? Booting up the game led me to the old owner's save file and his batch of Pokemon. I thought "Wow, this must have been loved by the previous owner... TIME TO DELETE ALL THIS SHIT!" His Pokemon were alright but I barely remember them at this point. I tried to enjoy Pokemon Y as I usually do but the occasional flickering of the bottom screen whenever I use the roller skates and the new camera angles in certain areas turned me off the game. Fuck you, Lumiose City, I hope a Call of Duty villain sends a nuclear bomb on your face.

The Streetpass feature of the 3DS was interesting for me at first. Every morning, I ride the train to school and usually I get at least 2 Streetpass hits from people, 10 at most. It's fun as it made collecting them and seeing what kind of caricatures of themselves other people were making. It became a chore eventually, seeing that green light on the corner of my 3DS and some chucklehead making a "randum" mii to send.

As much as I get tired of the 3DS and its games, I still love it. It's not its fault I'm an old man who hates making games feel like a chore to play. To make my 3DS stop gathering dust, I recently bought Puzzle and Dragons Z and it's somehow addicting because it's a matching game mixed with attacking the living hell out of monsters. It's Pokemon mixed with Candy Crush, basically. Perhaps this is why I got tired of my games now. I got used to mobile games that are just simple and ready for a quick play while I'm waiting for the bus that games like Pokemon and Animal Crossing don't interest me that much as they require constant investment in time. Perhaps this is just a side effect of getting older.

Maybe at 90, I'll still play with my 3DS and finally finish Pokemon Y.

How I Never Met Your Mother [Part 38] – Planning The Comeback

What's that? A year after the updated version of the Pink Puppy arc of my old How I Never Met Your Mother series?

Kids, you know I’m a nice guy. Now my friends won’t tell you that unless they have a gun pointed to their head though. I show my friendship through my meanness and for some reason, people like me for it. My friends know for a fact that when I do something nice for someone, I really mean it. When I apologized to Jill in person, it really didn’t go well.

Ralph: Jill, I’m sorry.

Jill: Whatever. Whatever.

Ralph: I didn’t know what I said—

Jill: Whatever. Whatever. 

Okay, “didn’t go well” is sort of an understatement. My apology was crashed and burned like a race car out of control.

Ralph: What do I do with Jill?

Classmate: You apologized and she didn’t want it.

Friend: Obviously, she doesn’t like you.

Ralph: I'm not giving up on her.

[I should've given up on her.]

Ralph: This girl could be special.

[She was the devil.]

Ralph: I’m gonna apologize and things are gonna work out with Jill.

[No they're not, dumbass!] 

Then I remembered something. Mediartrix, a musical theatre organization in UST, had a serenade service during Valentine’s Day. With 150 pesos, you can get a guitarist and a singer to give a rose to someone along with a serenade. That's like 3 to 5 dollars Canadian.

Ralph: That’s it. The harana services of Mediartrix.

Friend: Oh god no.

Classmate: Yeah, she hates you now and with a harana, she can hate you more in a more festive way.

Ralph: Come on, Jill’s probably nice enough to accept that. I mean, she liked the pink puppy.

Friend: Right after you stalked her.

Ralph: I did not! I didn't do anything like that!

Friend: You made me pretend that I was going to shift to tourism!

Ralph: At least we got the schedule, right? It was a tactic!

Anyway, I asked your Uncle Martin who was a member of the organization at the time how to reserve a slot. He told me to just call the project manager of the serenade services and pay on the day itself. Also, I gave him several specifications on the serenade.

Ralph: Martin, I need you and May to sing. And I want the song “Addicted” by Simple Plan.

I chose that song because of the lyrics. “I'm trying to forget that I'm addicted to you. But I want it and I need it, I'm addicted to you. Now it's over, can't forget what you said. And I never want to do this again. Heartbreaker.” Okay, that song may be a little exaggerated but if I wanted to pick a song that would be sung to a girl that started to hate me then I should have at least a little fun. Right?

I know I’m a horrible person but at least I’m trying to be nice and save face. As far as I know, some tourism girls became aware of me at the time and I tried to keep a low profile. I tried keeping a low profile but a serenade in public wasn’t the best way to keep it. Genius, Ralph. Genius.  What could go wrong?

Oh, right. School Days.

So yeah, that’s how I planned my apology to Jill. Was it good? I’ll get to that later.

Sprott Shaw College

If you had told me three years ago that I would be graduating college in Canada, I would’ve laughed at you and said you were genuinely insane. Three years ago, I thought I’d graduate with a degree in literature. I thought I’d be writing the next series of novels that will be turned into big movies. “Take that, The Hunger Games,” I would’ve said mockingly.

Now, I’ve never actually planned on enrolling in Sprott Shaw College but I did see the ads on transit. Every time I saw those ads, I had two thoughts running in my mind:

1) “I’m never going there because I don’t know where their campuses are.”

 2) “Why the heck do they have ads everywhere? I keep seeing purple and blue on buses now.”

That didn’t stop me from enrolling anyway.

On August 27, 2013, I was browsing online through several colleges that offered hospitality management courses, curious as to what my options were. Among those choices was Sprott Shaw College or “SPROUT Shaw College” as I called it before actually reading the name clearly. I asked a question on their website, expecting to receive a generic machine-generated response in my spam folder. The next day, I got a phone call from Sprott Shaw College telling me that they booked me for an appointment.

“Hi Ralph, this is from Sprott Shaw College. We booked you for an informational interview at the Vancouver campus this Friday.”

My initial reaction was “WHAT?!” followed by “I was planning on eating pizza and Chinese food that day but I guess that’s out of the window now, eh?” I didn’t want to be rude so I just agreed to it. I had to go to a campus where I have never seen before in Vancouver, a city that I could easily get lost in. However, instead of not showing up for an informational interview, I thought it could be nice to at least be aware of what I could be missing out on. It wasn’t like I was going to actually enroll there. Haha. Ha. Ha....

Now, I wasn’t really sure at first on whether or not it was a good idea to enroll in a college that I had little to no knowledge about so I wanted to see what it was like. It was a different atmosphere from what I was used to. I was used to big, open universities with hundreds of classrooms in a dozen buildings. Sprott Shaw College Vancouver had a dozen rooms in an office building. I felt claustrophobic at first because I missed seeing shades of greenery out the window instead of disheartening gray buildings. I wanted to back out as soon as I entered the building.

However, I was told what possible jobs I could get hired for if I took a course with Sprott Shaw. I wanted to do something in my life and a literature degree was not the door to open for that path. I wanted the path to hospitality management and Sprott Shaw College was going to show me the door.

My patience is tested every day. I was promised that everyone spoke English but on my first day, the first thing I hear was everyone else in the classroom not speaking English at all. At first, I was absolutely annoyed that no one wanted to speak English. It had come to a point where the entire room was speaking in languages other than English despite the school having an English-only policy. “If none of you want to speak English,” I thought, “I’m going play loud videos of someone speaking English really fast.” And I did. I played Zero Punctuation, a series of videos from the internet where the critic speaks in a disturbingly fast voice just to annoy people who didn’t want to speak English in class.

I’ve also had rough encounters with poorly chosen group mates for presentations.

One particular group mate drove me off the wall for a presentation due for Technologies class. The project was due in ten days but the first five days were spent faffing about and going in circles. The particular classmate wanted something specifically done in what she wants but what she wants was unreasonable, insane, and utterly pointless in the end.

So what I did was basically go behind this faux leader’s back and make a presentation of my own for everyone else to present, just so it can be done and we can move on. I had to spend 5 hours editing and recording videos followed by 2 hours editing the presentation while doing laundry at night. When I showed it to everyone, the particular classmate basically said that it was wrong according to her vision and it was at that point where I had to scream in the hallways just to get the hate out of my system. Eventually, I was so fed up that the people at the front desk and the director saw me screaming in the hallways.

Despite this extremely negative experience, it never occurred again. I never had that particular useless classmate ever again and she never got honors for her bossiness. I did my best to be the best and it worked well for me without screaming.

I never wanted to give up. I didn’t want to cut my study of hospitality management just because I lost faith in it. I didn’t want to quit two courses in one lifetime. I’m not that big of a quitter. As the months went by, I was finally going to attend my college graduation. All my hard work had led to a graduation ceremony that I thought I was going to miss because the poster said May 22 and I misread it as March 22. I thought “Oh, I missed it. Oh well. Maybe next year.” However, after noticing that no one was removing the posters, it had come to my attention that it was actually May 22 and I thought “OH MY GOD! GRADUATION!” It was a graduation that I thought I would never have since I never finished my college degree in the Philippines. I thought I would never experience a college graduation in my entire life.

The one problem I came across was that the blue graduation gown couldn’t fit me. I looked like a potato wrapped in adhesive tape. Somehow, I’ve built up enough goodwill from the staff that they ordered a new graduation gown for me free of charge. I told them that they must’ve stolen bed sheets from a children’s hospital just to make the graduation gown fit me.

Sprott Shaw College has given me opportunities that I never would’ve gotten in my old university. I could never say that I had the opportunity to be a contender to be the valedictorian for batch 2014 yet Sprott Shaw College proved me otherwise. Sure, I wasn’t able to get it for some reason but to be able to say I was very close to being valedictorian is still a great achievement. The first paragraph of this was actually part of my graduation speech that was rejected.

I would never have had that opportunity in my old university, in my old life. Never could I have said the words “My graduation speech” in a sentence without the phrase “Does not exist” if I were still in my old university. I consider my experience at Sprott Shaw College to be the right path that will lead me to something even greater in life. For that, I’m thankful for every second that I have spent there. I never regretted a single moment in that college and I would always be grateful.

WankPad

I was at a bookstore in the Philippines the other night and I came across the funniest pile of bad literature ever. It could be classified as piles and piles and piles of the Twilight and Fifty Shades series. It was the first time I ever laughed so hard in a bookstore and I wasn’t even reading anything.

Judging from the titles alone, you don’t even have to read any of these books to know what they’re about.

Lemme give you the recurring themes of what these Wattpad stories are about:

- Guy is from a private school; girl is from a public school; can they solve their differences and bone each other by the end of the story?

- Guy is authority figure like a teacher or a boss; girl is being ordered around by guy; can they solve their differences and bone each other by the end of the story?

- Guy is a gangster/playboy/miscreant; girl is goody two-shoes; can they solve their differences and bone each other by the end of the story?

- Guy or girl got friendzoned; nothing is forever (apparently); everyone’s bitter

Not that I don’t find clichés offensive – I do fancy some cheap thrills like Filipino action movies and pop music – but I’d like to ask though: who are these for? Teens who’ve never seen the films 500 Days of Summer and Definitely, Maybe? Teens who’ve never experienced a good romantic relationship? Teens who don’t have access to good dramatic media?

I can understand catering to teens but that’s what the young adult section in your local bookstore is for. Don’t you fucking tell me that a book like The Fault in Our Stars is on the same level as a WattPad story like She’s Dating The Gangster. That’s like saying a PlayStation 3 is just as good as a McDonald’s happy meal toy. Sure, they’re both fun but who are you fucking kidding? I would rather play Grand Theft Auto V than a cheap Shrek figure. Yes, Wattpad fans, I compared your romantic bullshit stories to a cheap Happy Meal except the Happy Meal is actually better because I get momentary satisfaction from the food.

It feels like the equivalent of cheap romance novels sold in places where you least expect them to be sold. When was the last time you heard any one of your friends say “Hey, I’m going to buy some romance novels at the drug store”? No, really, when was the last time anyone bought those cheap romance novels?

Cheap drug store romance novels and cheap WattPad romance novels are similar yet they’re so different. Cheap romance novels tend to remind you of soap operas whether they’re The Bold and The Beautiful, Passions, or The Young and The Restless. The cheap Wattpad novels remind you of Korean romance TV shows. Hell, one of those books even had “The first Korean anime novel in the Philippines”, whatever the fuck that overly narrow superlative means. That’s like when your friend Billy says “I’m Dad’s favorite son” when, really, you’re Dad’s only son. Fuck you, Billy! Your dad hates you and wishes you would run away.

Anyway, the point is: it’s possible that the authors of said novels watched a few Korean dramas like Meteor Garden or Memories of Bali (all dubbed in Filipino, of course) and thought “Hey, I wish I could experience that! I should write something like that!”

At what point could all these Wattpad stories be considered as wank material?

Think about it: it’s all romance and it’s basically wish fulfillment. It’s what Vince McMahon calls mental masturbation. You’re thinking about something you have no control over; you’re just mentally jacking yourself off. You’re writing the same shallow tripe with little to no substance whatsoever and you’re not a better person out of it. You just want to be the person of interest. You just want to have that bad boy authority figure fall for you. You just want to be picked special by a playboy because he sees you as something different from the dozen girls he likes.

Instead of letting these Wattpad authors continue what they do and spread the cynicism that “nothing is forever”, I’d like to introduce them and their fans (who don’t know any better) to the concept of video games.

*ahem*

Hi, Wattpad dramatics! Have you heard of “video games”? 

“Video games, Ralphy? What are those?”

Let me tell you about them, reader. They are absolute fun! They are more fun than putting salt in your melodramatic emotional wounds and spraying that blood around like a girl who went swimming while having her period.

“That sounds interesting, Ralphy.”

No, that period blood would most likely make the pool disgusting to swim in, chlorine or not.

“No, I meant the video games part!”

Oh, good. That’s good of you to know, reader. Now let me tell how you video games can help you so you can stop winging and moaning about your love life at 16.

Are you heartbroken? Play some Dynasty Warriors 7 and Dynasty Warriors 8 for the PS3! What could be more fun than mowing down at least a thousand enemies in one stage? Certainly not writing about how you’re lonely like the miserable fucks that you are, and you know you’re miserable because you’re writing in Wattpad. Jesus Christ, FanFiction.net writers have more dignity than you weirdos--Sorry, that got lost on me. Where was I again? Right, video games!

Do you have the need to date cute girls? How about some Persona 3 and Persona 4! If you want to play as a female and date some hunky boys, grab a copy of Persona 3 Portable for the PSP. It’s much better than crying about being lonely and how “nothing is forever”. Thank you for the insight on nothing being forever, Wattpad Nietzsche!

See? Was that so hard? Look at all the alternatives to writing bullshit for Wattpad.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to continue writing my story about a hunky gangster being fawned over by high school girls who think they’ve been friendzoned by him and other guys. But this is different since this’ll take place in space~!

I’m Ralph Corleone and that’s my opinion.

Rest In Peace, You Famous Person

It’s no secret that people die. It’s natural. It’s what makes everyone human and that no matter how much time we spend in the world, we’re all going to be worm chow sooner or later. When we eventually die, we’re remembered and forgotten by the people we love. This is the same for celebrities. They get remembered fondly for their public work but we will never fully know about their lives behind the camera.

The thing I would like to talk about here is how people react to celebrity deaths.

Celebrities die because, you know, they’re people. They’re people like you, me, the old man across the street, the tattooed drug addict who never pays bus fare, and the one girl you like in college but never really get a chance to talk to because they were busy with friends (I still like you, Michelle McTavish from 2nd year algebra class! Please notice me!).

Anyway, repressed college crushes aside; we know that people are affected when a person dies. We may not exactly have known the person who died but they have affected someone in some way. Whether they’re a friend, a classmate or a family member, someone who dies will affect someone else greatly in one way or another. (Michelle McTavish, I’m so sorry about your sister but I didn’t see her cross the street, okay? She still owes me a new bumper which her shins somehow dented!)

This goes beyond a new level when it’s someone who’s known by hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

Okay, let’s go for an example. I don’t want to use a real celebrity because I don’t wanna get sued or threatened by fans for fake killing their idol so let’s make up a celebrity here. Excuse me for a sec, I gotta think of a name.

And by “think”, I meant “generate randomly”. Alright, there we go. Now generate!

Okay, Hippocrates Gernot is our celebrity for now. Hopefully, I don’t insult any real people named Hippocrates Gernot out there. If I do, I’m sorry, blame BehindTheName.com, and hey, you got a cool name! Also, please don’t die because this will really be harsher in hindsight.

Anyway, we have Mr. Hippocrates Gernot who’s a big time Hollywood celebrity. He starred in movies such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 2: Even More Spotlessalongside Jim Carrey. He was in Broadway musicals like Ben Franklin in Paris, Bombay Dreams, and Cats, because as we all know, Cats will never, ever die. Mr. Gernot even released songs that featured singers like Michael Bublé, Tegan and Sara, and Paul McCartney. He has also made TV appearances in shows like WWE Monday Night Raw,Hannibal, and Sherlock. What’s even better about him is that he refused to appear in Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory.

Tragically, Hippocrates Gernot died after he was hit with a blimp. It kills over oneAmericans every year (Thanks for the statistics, Chandler Bing!). What’s even more tragic is that Hippocrates Gernot is bloody fictional because I was really starting to like him. When the news broke out that Hippocrates Gernot had died tragically, social media has been buzzing with sadness.

The hashtags “#ThankYouGernot” and “#WeLoveYouMrGernot” have been trending worldwide on Twitter for three days. People have been posting pictures of Hippocrates Gernot on Facebook with “Rest In Peace” written on them (along with the usual “1 Like = 1 Respect”). People have been putting flowers at the disaster site and blimp sales have gone downhill faster than your teacher making a couple of jokes in class.

You would think I’m exaggerating with the reaction for a fake celebrity death but if you’ve been on the internet long enough, you’d know that this is the exact same reaction you’ll see whenever a celebrity dies. You’ve seen it with Paul Walker. You’ve seen it with Michael Jackson. Cory Monteith, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Robin Williams, Harold Ramis, and Philip Seymour Hoffman - When they passed on, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of tributes for them on social media and you can’t blame their fans for feeling sadness about losing people who they have considered dearly for entertaining them throughout the years. As you’ve seen earlier, the tributes for Hippocrates Gernot’s death were massive.

However, it’s absolute bullshit to say “I don’t care about Hippocrates Gernot. I care more about the 25,000 people who die every day” in public. Oh really now, Mr. Empathetic? Do you even know all those 25,000 people? What have you done lately for those 25,000 people that just died yesterday? What about the next 25,000 that will die tomorrow then? Have you given them some sort of sympathetic gesture lately? Do they have some sort of emotional impact on you as each day passes by? No, of course not! Where’s your tribute for each of them if you do care? And this happens every time there’s an outpour of tributes for a recent celebrity death.

Mostly, people who say they care about the 25,000 people dead people every day are just ticked off that their newsfeeds are filled with people saying “RIP (Insert Famous Person Here)” because they don’t care. As horrible as it sounds, it’s alright to not care! Indifference isn’t evil! It’s not genuinely good but it certainly isn’t evil. If you say “I don’t care about the 25,000 people who die every day but I care about this celebrity”, it’s a horrible sentence to say out loud. You’ll most likely get harsh responses that range from “Wow, you’re an asshole” to “HOW DARE YOU!!! I HOPE YOU GET KILLED BY MUTANT GENITAL HERPES!!!” However, if you just shut up, move on, and just talk about TV Tropes or something, you’re fine.

So what I’m saying here is that everyone has a right to express their sympathies and condolences in social media. However, there’s nothing wrong with silently being apathetic.

Do it the easy way: If people are mourning the death of a celebrity on social media, you shut the fuck up and ignore them because it doesn’t affect you. If a celebrity dies, who’s affected? The fans! Are you a fan? No? Then you shut the fuck up! If you want to care about the 25,000 people who die every day, then you post something about them every day instead of just saying that you care more about those people that you don’t know. Or better yet, just do something nice for 25,000 people every day and don’t brag about it on social media.

I’m Ralph Corleone and that’s my opinion.