gen's daily life - no promises, no bets

so uh, kind of remembered something from last year, and... well, remember when i posted some new-year's-resolution-type things last December?

well, uh, looking back at it, seems i only got a tiny bit of those supposed goals done. did review another steam game a while back (said game being Undertale, of course), did get one chapter of the Disgaea manga readthrough up this year even though i haven't mustered up the motivation to snap shots of the other pages after chapter 2, did do a musing writeup on Hearthstone which i guess would classify as Warcraft-based things...

but yeah, outside of those three and probably some others i forgot, i haven't gotten too much done in terms of living up to any of those resolutions. i guess this is what happens when i expect too much out of myself despite the fact that it's hard for me to really get into writing about things.

well, i did a few other miscellaneous writeups like the BKPC review and my Anime Boston experience over the first half of the year, and then things just... kinda slowed down exponentially. i know i should stop excusing myself for leaving drafts unfinished and generally slacking on here, and the whole "i've been busy" excuse gets really old after a certain point, but that genuinely has been the case for the latter half of the year.

around summertime i got a PSP as an early birthday gift, so i spent most of my time customizing it and tinkering with homebrew things on it. pretty much got well over 2500 games slapped onto it as well, even if most of them are emulated retro titles. mostly spent autumn wrapping up things with the PSP and (admittedly) struggling to keep the site updated with actual content. eeeeeven if the only substantial things during that time were the Undertale review and a little writeup on my thoughts on the upcoming Disgaea PC.

also was considering doing a liveblog playthrough of Soul Nomad on here, though i haven't started it up yet. or touched any of my consoles in a while, for that matter.

with the holidays just around the corner, life's just gotten more busy for me. got a scanner/printer so i'm now able to get back to traditional pencil drawings, and i've been spending most of my time talking with my friends and getting gifts ready for them. i've also been frequenting another WoW private server and doing things on there, to the point where the admin asked me if i'd like to be part of the staff. so now i've been answering player tickets and shaping up my SQL knowledge so i can help with database stuff.

it's been a busy year in general, to the point where i've p much realized how much i haven't been living up to the goals i set for myself last year. this site is mostly a personal sort of endeavor, so compared to things like... idk, i guess completing video games, working on drawings, and finishing roleplays with my friends, it hasn't really been a major priority for me. i dunno if it's because of the lack of too many visitors on here or my own lack of motivation, but i'd have to say it's the latter, honestly; i haven't been doing too much vidya/drawing/rping this year either.

at the very least, one thing i'm p happy about getting done this year is expanding my video game collection and talking with my friends more. got the famous 6th-gen trio that is the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube (Wii, but it can run GC games, so), and i've even made a few new friends and started hanging out more with some older pals. plus with learning about SQL, i might get into learning some other programming languages as well in the coming year.

so while i haven't been able to do a lot of stuff i've been hoping to do and keep the site updated like i promised, i don't think this year's been a complete waste. especially with how well this month has went so far. c:

as far as new year resolutions go, i'm just going to focus on getting last year's actually done over the span of the next year. as well as generally just improving my skills in what i know. hopefully i can get at least half of the unfinished drafts done at some point.

not that i can 100% guarantee it, but it's a step up in keeping this place active, at least.

anyhow, have a wonderful holiday this week, and thank you for sticking around for so long despite the lack of activity here on KKGS. <3

card games by a mage's candlelight - gen returns to hearthstone

honestly was considering penning this under the "gen's thoughts" title, but this falls under more freeform musing than rambling about my opinions and thoughts on things. i don't know why i need to stick nearly everything under specific categories; it's not like this site even follows a specific trend or theme to the things i write about. :y

at the start of the month, i've gotten myself back into playing Hearthstone, a digital collectible card game spinoff of the Warcraft series. which is also free for windows/mac and iphones and tablets if you wanna try it out. the microtransaction/free-to-play stuff is pretty fair, too. buy packs and adventure parts with either money or earned ingame gold which is fairly easy to get.

i initially got into Hearthstone around April or March of 2014 when the game was released to the public. played it for a while, got a few card packs out of it, and got a nifty pandaren-themed card back from ranked play. while i did enjoy it, i soon retired from HS for greener pastures, which naturally meant i missed out on a lot of cool card backs from the following months up to now. ah well. such is how life goes, i guess.

wasn't to say i wasn't interested in coming back to the game at some point in the future. my younger brother still plays Hearthstone as of this writing, and of course i had a ton of fun just watching him blow opponents to dust with cheeky tactics. just didn't have the proper incentive to actually play the game again myself. which, knowing me, that incentive most likely involved either more variety to cards, more cosmetic stuff, more content, or tauren. preferably tauren.

'course, we got new card set expansions and adventures and new modes, and i even followed the official Hearthstone twitter, but i wasn't coaxed into coming back until my brother let me know about the latest shaman-themed card back for the current ranked season.

as someone who played shaman in both Hearthstone and World of Warcraft, that was what got me back into the game. got myself to rank 20 now so i'm guaranteed to get the card back after this month, but now i've found myself enjoying the game even more; not solely because of the new cards and content (tavern brawl is fun as hell, i should mention!), but for more poignant reasons. not really the sappy kind of poignant, just stuff that just kinda draws me into the game in a different aspect.