PixlBit

Good Evening everyone,

I thought I’d start off the official Octoberween 2020 blogging season with an “Away From Keys” posting since I’ve literally haven’t blogged since last year around the same time. A lot has happened since I’ve last posted, be it life related or gaming, so I thought I’d share a bit of what I’ve been up to since the last time I wrote an AFK style blog.

New Job/Old Job

Near the end of the old year of 2019 I had received an amazing job opportunity that was aligned with my prior work history as a “work merc”. I can’t go into exact details but the best I can say is that it was a government contract job that I’ve had prior experience with. Normally I wouldn’t take such contract jobs but the job itself was technical contracted out to a third party and I was told they would have full control of how the job was to be handled, instead of the government types finding ways to make the job more of a hassle than it needed to be. So when 2020 started it looked like I’d have the perfect job that would best fit my technical skills and make me set for life financially. Sadly what I feared would happened eventually did: government overseers started to exert more control/influence on the project and the third party that was contracted with them ended up bending the knee more times that I cared for in how we were to do the job. After three months when it looked like this job was going to become yet another government run quagmire I put in my two weeks. The third party didn’t want me to leave given I was considered one of their best leads and had hoped to fast track me to a command position given my experience but the government overseers put an end to that decision. Yet despite this they wanted to sue me for “breach of contract” saying that I became a “government contractor” and was bound by such contracts. It was all BS in the end and I was able to get out and go back to my old job from back in 2019, though I doubt my government security clearance is any good now. Win some, lose some.

Family, family, family

I had a lot of family happenings during the last year. Aside from having my mom and dad live with me I also let my sister and her family stay with is for a brief time while they sold their house and bought/built a new one. For a time I hardly had any time for myself, let alone with “Teh Waifu” and the “Little One”. I was spending more and more time entertaining and playing with my sister’s nephews. For some reason they have glomped onto me and did all they could to play all the games I owned in my GameRoom. Given the boys were 3 and 2 respectably made it a bit difficult to find games age suitable for them (I am a VR Sociopath after all) but thankfully I had a decent selection of current games to keep them happy. Now they are obsessed over anything Minecraft and Marvel Superhero related to the point their parents are not too happy with my gaming influence over them. “Teh Nephews” are now asking for their own video game systems, being no longer satisfied with their ipad and iphone game offerings. Even now the 3 year old is eyeballing my softmodded Wii U since he learned I now have a gamepad to use it on. When they moved on I spent more time with my “Little One” given she was soon to graduate high school and planned on attending college. It was the best summer I could share with her, we even went running for a time so we could be in shape for the coming fall. Sadly as of this writing she is now at college and I do miss her dearly. Hard to believe my “Little One” is all grown up and attending university. She makes me so proud.

COVID Quarantine

Like the rest of the nation my family to had to adapt to the effects of the pandemic. We had to deal with the month long shut down and deal with the “new normal” that is society. Though we weathered it better than most I have to admit it really didn’t bother me too much given I usually don’t go out as much and I usually spend my free time to indoor endeavors. Thankfully as of this writing none of my family have fallen victim to COVID but we are still taking things carefully given that not everyone is taking this pandemic as seriously as they could. But during that time I did stay busy.

Softmod/hardware Projects

Since I had all this free time during lockdown I took the liberty to learn some new tricks when it comes to videogame software/hardware. I learned how to unlock more features to my Nintendo Wii and tinkered with the $5 Wii U console I bought long ago. Though I wasn’t able to fix the system’s disc drive fully, I was able to repair what I could to make the system a secondary Wii U in my GameRoom. Though I had to find a second hand gamepad to use the Wii U’s game features, it still works out well as a secondary back up Wii system in the event my original Wii decides to give up the ghost. I also had to do some emergency maintenance on my Super Slim PS3 with a failing internal HDD along with failing disc drives on my original Xbox and PS2 slim. I fear some of my older gaming consoles are slowly showing their age and will need more repairs/replacements soon. I even went as far as to refurbish some of the laptops I had lying around. I currently have three laptops with maxed out RAM that I plan to use for other gaming projects based on their OS’s available from Windows XP, Vista and 7.

Game Collecting continues

Though I haven’t collected as many games as I’ve wanted to this year, I’ve tried to focus more on quality than quantity. I’ve hit my area thrift stores as often as I could during the 2020 pandemic but most of my purchase were done online. As a result I ended up spending a bit more than I’d liked to when it comes to retro gaming goodness. Sadly it seems I’ll have to pay about $20 for one PS3/Xbox 360 games I’ve been trying to hunt down and much more for PS2/Xbox titles since the ones I want are ones that warrant that kind of price. I hope to post a future “MyBuys” blog later on to fully share what all I’ve been trying to collect, game related and tech related specifically. One one major buys I’ve been happy to get ahold of have been more of those retro mini consoles that have come out as of late. I now am a proud owner of a PlayStation Classic, Sega Genesis Mini and a Neo Geo Mini. Sadly I missed out on the Turbographx Mini for they had sold out by the time I had enough funds to snag me a unit. And no I WON’T pay for those outrageous scalper prices. I didn’t buy my NES/SNES minis that way and I won’t for the Turbo.

House building

I mentioned earlier that my sister’s family eventually moved out of my place and into a place of their own. But the house in question needed A LOT of work done so during Quarantine I helped, along with the rest of the family, in rebuilding their new home. I have to admit I’m not cut out for house building. We did get it done but afterwards my body needed time to rest given the strain I put on it. I know for sure in my lifetime I won’t help in building anything anytime soon.

Gaming

And of course I continued my gaming hobby over the past year. Still enjoying the fruits of Xbox Game Pass. I even went as far as convert my Gold status into Game Pass Ultimate. I have to admit it’s a pretty sweet deal to have though the downside of it being that all the new games I’ve played I don’t really own. If anything they help me to test out certain new games released to determine if they are worth the $60 asking price. Most of the time it isn’t for me and I’m much happier to get it later on when it’s on sale or better yet, used and unwanted. One of the highlights of my gaming this year is when “The Waifu” was lucky enough to get me a Nintendo Switch for my bday, just before the pandemic truly hit and systems became hard to come by.

That about covers the TL:DR version that is my current life at the moment for an AFK post. I’m sure I skipped a lot in-between but for the most part that’s what I’ve been up to for the most part. I’ll possibly share specifics in future blogs depending how Octoberween is like coming along this month. Till then I hope you found this informative or if anything just to quell your curiosity as to where I’ve been from the blogsphere. Till my next posting!

Sleep well tonight

 

Ta-ta

“N”