07
Dec
2019

Somebody loves Tales of Phantasia.

categories: RPGs; word count: 316 words

I remember when Tales of Destiny came out for the PlayStation. By that time, Tales of Phantasia had already been out for the Super Nintendo, and it seemed incredibly unlikely that it would be translated. It wasn’t until DeJap finished a fan translation of the SNES port that fans of the franchise, especially that one game, went wild that they could actually play and enjoy Tales of Phantasia in their own language. I was one of them. I was only a child when it happened, but I was a fan of the franchise, I desperately wanted to play the game, and it was huge that I — as well as many others — could finally enjoy the game in the English language. Sure, it took getting used to playing the game on the computer, but the learning curve was quick for me, and I enjoyed finally being able to play the game and listen to the soundtrack as I did so. And although the official Gameboy Advance port of the game was additional sweetener, it didn’t quite compare to the time and the effort that DeJap put into giving us English-speaking (and reading) fans of the game the most authentic experience possible. Still, though, a game is a game, and I enjoyably played it with my youngest son, Bub, while he was still a baby. It may have taken us a little while, but we did it… we defeated Dhaos.

The blow was only softened when we found out that we defeated someone who only came to our world — albeit in an extremely hostile manner — desperate to save his own world from destruction. I mean, he had his motive, even if it would have come at the cost of our characters’ home world. You have to recognize that.

Personally, I have always been a fan of Mint Adenade. I almost always have a soft spot for the healers.

06
Dec
2019

Playing video games with my child.

categories: RPGs; word count: 490 words

Out of all of the friends that I grew up with, it honestly seems like I was the only one to stick to the “promise” that I made to play video games with my children, and to introduce them to the games that I grew up with and enjoyed. Of my children, one of them in particular enjoys playing video games with me. I started introducing them to him when he was a baby, because that calmed him down when he was breastfeeding and needed something to focus on — I positioned him so that he could see the Nintendo DS while laying on the Boppy and played a bit of Tales of Phantasia (since backwards compatibility by means of the Gameboy Advance port was absolutely wonderful at the time), and that was how Bub played a lot of Tales of Phantasia with me. And since he liked it so much, when he wasn’t breastfeeding, I would sit him up once he became a little bit stronger so that his back was up against my stomach and hold the game so that it was in front of him and we would play it that way. Being able to watch the characters on the screen enamored him.

Bub actually helped me recruit Suzu — one of the optional characters, and one of the most powerful characters if you look at it — into the party, and kill Dhaos. There’s also that. I mean, I give him credit where credit is due. He didn’t appear to have a clear favorite character in the game other than seeing enemies fly across the screen and eventually die, which is, as I call, “peak Bub”. He likes that in a lot of games though.

Seriously though, it’s games like these that make me appreciate when console manufacturers take the time to include at least some degree of backwards compatibility in their consoles. Some of us like to take a trip down memory lane and enjoy old games, and some of us like to play older games to begin with, you know?

This was also the first time that Tales of Phantasia actually came to Europe and the United States and, although perfect, it was the first chance that we actually got to play the game short of DeJap’s fan translation of the SNES port that fans were tremendously excited over when he finished it. I remember being one of those fans. I remember being a fan of the “Tales of…” franchise when it was still so niche that very few people had actually heard of it, before Tales of the Abyss actually put it on the map, before a whole lot of people began to like it. I’m not complaining about that, though. It’s a great line of games, and it’s good to be able to talk to fans who like it just as much as I do now rather than only sporadically be able to find them….

05
Dec
2019

Now that I’ve gotten all of that done…

categories: personal; word count: 417 words

Most of what has been needed to set this blog up has been accomplished!

Here’s hoping, at any rate.

I did the pulmonary function testing that my lung doctor needed to have on file for me this morning. When I started needing to have these done, I sucked so hard at these that they took awhile to do, pun definitely intended. But now that I’ve needed to do them with more frequency, I’ve gotten used to them, and I haven’t had to repeat any part of them… that’s always good. And when I was done with that, I got to do another six-minute walk around the area in front of my lung doctor’s office with one of the new nurses working there, which is always good for causing brief desaturations in my oxygen levels, but I mean, what isn’t these days? Luckily for me, my saturations always come back up. I don’t have some of the diagnoses that my friends have, which is always good. I count my blessings that I have asthma, and some of my friends — probably a few more of them than I realize — count their blessings that they do not have, as I’ve sometimes put it, “my level of asthma”. Ever named nebulizers? Held funerals for them as you dump them into the trash canister out front when they “die”? That’s what we’re talking about here, folks. Daria Morgendorffer humor is my thing, at least as often as I can muster it up. And that’s actually fairly frequently, because it does help out.

When you’re a “frequent flier” in the spoonie department — and a fairly young person for being a member of that department — you find that being civil and polite helps you get through the day, even though you also find that coming home and venting to your similarly minded (and bodied) friends also helps you get through your day when you have to deal with all of the bureaucratic nonsense that comes with being a card-carrying member. It does seem to surprise the people that you interface with, though. Oh, she’s actually thanking me for handing her page after page of forms to fill out? She’s actually polite about this? Yeah, I know that you’re just doing your job. I’m not going to make your life more difficult because you handed me the forms that you had to hand me. I know that you had to hand me the forms. I know that I have to fill these out. Carrying on…

04
Dec
2019

I’m back again, with a change of hosts!

categories: blog maintenance; word count: 361 words

Previously, I had been hosted on AwardSpace, and they met the majority of my site’s needs… except for the fact that they only offered, at their base tier, 50MB worth of space per MySQL database. For someone that wrote a decently sized blog post once a day and didn’t use any plugins other than ones that cleaned up their database, this wouldn’t have been hard to hit at all. As a matter of fact, I managed to use 1% of that in a month just writing one post per day in here, try as I might to use as little space as possible. And that was when I knew that I needed to find another host, because it would have been cost-prohibitive to continue to stay with them when so many other site hosts out there offered better deals for more affordable prices. For a site that offered unlimited bandwidth and space at that base tier, but refused to offer even a remotely decent MySQL database size, I couldn’t help but wonder what must have been going through their heads when they made each of their hosting packages… other than maybe trying to make as much money off of people wanting to blog as they possibly could. And their cPanel wasn’t even shy about it at all. “If you hit your MySQL database size, either start deleting things in it to free up some space or upgrade your hosting”.

After giving it some thought, I decided that our new website host would be Hostinger. They offer a lot of space, their allotted bandwidth is great, and although their MySQL database size isn’t unlimited, it’s still pretty large. Three gigabytes compared to 50MB is like night and day. I can run the plugins that I need to run, look for any more that might be helpful to have, write as much as I would like to write per blog entry without having to worry about whether or not I’m going to go up another percentage point, and not have to worry about if or even when I’m going to max out on the database size. That’s one less thing to worry about here.

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