codenameTOSTR

Wednesday, November 6th, 2024 05:35-
He won at 05:31 this morning. Wisconsin secured it. Might win the popular vote too. The presenters on CBS News look absolutely exhausted. As am I. I've been up all night watching it on TV and monitoring it on my laptop. Oldest president, and the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms. He got both the electoral college AND the popular vote.

Monday, October 28th, 2024-
I've been playing a lot of Minecraft recently. One of my friends from UMW has a server, and I've rediscovered the fun in playing online with friends. The other night out of curiosity, I searched up the name of this server I used to play on back in like 2015 and 2016 when I went by the name Tantive_Oracle. It's called Towncraft and it's still running! I hopped online and found that it's changed quite a bit since then, as I was expecting. What I wasn't expecting was that the old worlds I used to play on were archived! I was able to join them again, and I was amazed. Everything was just how I left it all those years ago. My old houses were all still standing as well as the towns I used to live in called Enderville and Falkreath. I spent the next hour or so just walking around and admiring my house-building skills that I'd say look pretty good almost a decade later! I also found my old Minecraft Forum profile which was a fun quick read. This has been a serious nostalgic trip.

Thursday, September 5th, 2024 -
I have returned back to this website. I've been adding onto it in pieces this year, but I still have a long way to go. There's a lot of new pages to add, pictures to take, and old things to update. But I should have it all done by the time 2025 rolls around at the latest. I will not be adding any new content to my college blog as I have graduated, so this blog section will hopefully be a lot more active. As far as things to write about right now, lot of concerts this summer. That's been fun. I have a new XP Machine that I plan to photograph and talk about on the "My Setup" page, so look out for that. I also bought an antenna and a digital converter box for my $10 Goodwill TV that's been working well. I've been watching a lot of Family Feud, Bar Rescue, and local news. I'm also trying to get an EP out the door by December 1st. Progress has been slow, but I'm not giving up. It's good to be back updating this website. I'll see you all in a few months when I remember to make another one of these posts.

Monday, January 29th, 2024 -
Yesterday, I went to Goodwill with a few friends. I wasn't really looking for anything in particular, but I found some cool stuff. I bought a copy of a Pokémon movie, and a copy of Grand Theft Auto III where the disc was loose inside a Simple Plan album jewel case.

Monday, January 15th, 2024 -
Today is the first day of my last semester of college, and it feels pretty surreal. I moved back to school this past weekend. I have off from classes today because it's MLK day. I'm pretty nervous for this semester. Not really about classes, but more so the fact that I'm about to graduate in a few months and I don't know what I'm going to do after that yet.

Sunday, December 24th, 2023 02:56 -
I DID IT! FINALLY, after months of trial and error for something that's really not that complicated, I installed my games on my PlayStation 2's hard drive, and I can play them! This is a big deal. I have a super old PlayStation 2 from 2000, and it's running on its last legs. The disk laser is pretty damaged, and doesn't really read disks properly. I can't seem to get movies and CDs playable on it, which kinda sucks, but I can finally play my games properly! I got back from a family Christmas party around midnight, and I picked up my Amazon package that contained the cable I needed to plug the hard drive into the laptop. After spending about an hour getting everything together, I was finally able to transfer my games to the PS2 and everything worked out. I'm so happy right now oh my God. I couldn't really test the sound because it's really early in the morning and my family is asleep, but I can't wait to try it out tomorrow. This has seriously been a Christmas miracle! I am so happy right now I can't wait to start playing through my library. I was even able to put all my beatmania IIDX games on the hard drive! Now I can really sit down and focus on getting gud at 7key. I'm going to listen to Pimped Out Getaway and then realize how bad I've let my sleep schedule become. But I don't care. Why? Because it's almost Christmas and I'm SUPER HAPPY.

Friday, December 22nd, 2023 01:35 -
It's amazing how much I hate keyboards that don't light up. I get it, you should know where the keys are. They didn't put those little bumps on the "F" and "J" keys for nothing. But stll. It drives me crazy when I'm sending a late-night message to my friends, or working on this website, or doing anything that requires the keyboard, and I completely screw up whatever it is I'm trying to type. Like right now. I've messed up at least five times just on this post alone. And I'm not a terrible typer. I thank Mavis Beacon for giving me the ability to type as well as I do. Anyway, it's three days before Christmas and I'm pretty excited. Christmas is my favorite holiday, even if it's one of the busiest and most stressful times of the year. The last few weeks at school were pretty nightmarish, but just being home again has been amazing.

Thursday night, my family and I went to the Old Bethpage Village Restoration for the candlelight evenings they do around Christmas. I look forward to it every year. They have bonfires going, people are walking around in their 18th century attire, and there's a brass band playing and caroling in the church. I tried to take some pictures and videos there, but what a surprise that lighting wasn't exactly the best for photographing at night back then. I'm going to try to get some rest soon. I'm not really doing a whole lot over break, mostly just editing videos for school and practicing for Motif1 gigs next semester. Also my LAST semester of college. Seriously what the FUCK. How am I there already.

In other news, I started working on my PlayStation 2 again. I've been trying to get a hard drive working on it since the summer, but I was unsuccesful. I kept running into issues and almost wiped my laptop's hard drive on accident trying to format the PlayStation 2 one. It was a whole mess. I've spent quite a bit on this stupid project, which I think is supposed to be pretty damn easy, I just mess up a lot. My console's disk laser is on its last legs, so I'm hoping this hard drive solution will be a good alternative. I have a cable I need to connect the new hard drive to my laptop coming tomorrow, so we'll see what happens. Until then, I'll work with the super long load times in San Andreas.

Saturday, November 25th, 2023 00:10 -
We reached 1,000 views on my blog yay.

Thursday, September 21st, 2023 10:08 -
New blink-182 music HYPE!

Wednesday, August 30th, 2023 11:22 -
Last night, my roomates and I discovered a pool of water forming from the wall under my bed. We found that our shower backs up to the wall next to my bed, and there's a small gap there. So whenever someone takes a shower in that bathroom, water leaks under the wall and gets everywhere on my side of the room. We called a plumber and he came over today. I'm not going to be able to go home until late tonight, but it sounds like the problem has been resolved. This looks like a good sign of things to come.

Friday, August 25th, 2023 03:03 -
I'm half awake typing this. I'm getting ready to leave in about four hours to drive down to Virginia with my dad. College starts back up tomorrow, and it's my senior year. I can't believe it either. I'm living in an apartment off campus this year with a few of my friends, and it looks nice. Currently, my room is unusually empty with a few duffel bags lying around that I still need to bring downstairs. I already brought down my instruments, TV, and a big box of random stuff. We're planning to leave at around 07:00 which is going to be tons of fun. It's about a five hour drive from where we are if we leave early. Just another sleepless night packing my stuff up as I think about how I don't have many more of these left. Which actually freaks me out a little.

Sunday, August 20th, 2023 23:15 -
I went to NYC today. It was one of my last trips to the city before school starts back up again. After walking part of The High Line, I went to (what was once) CBGBs. It's now a high-end clothing store. So pretty much the exact opposite of what it used to be. The inside was still cool. The stage was still there with instruments, and lots of posters on the walls. Vinyls were being sold near the enterance. On the way back, I went to Midtown Comics and got two volumes of Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! Great NYC day.

Saturday, August 19th, 2023 22:24 -
Today I went to my local Round1 with a few of my friends. Upgrade kits for DanceDanceRevolution A3 came out today, and I was interested to see what the situation was with R1's cabs. Turns out, both white cabs were down and there was a large crowd around the only other gold cab running A3. I didn't get to play any DDR while I was there, but I did play quite a few rounds of DANCERUSH STARDOM. I'm starting to like that game a lot more. My favorite songs I played were Crazy Shuffle, Din Don Dan, and Midnight Amaretto. I also got in quite of few rounds of beatmania IIDX. There's two IIDX cabs there: One is a standard cab that's running CastHour, and the other one is a LIGHTNING MODEL cab running RESIDENT. I played on the LIGHTNING MODEL cab as I've never played on one before. I really like the touch screen panel. I'm not very good at IIDX and the highest difficulty I can clear is a 6. I played LOVE♥SHINE as well as a few 1st style songs. I also played Talk Dirty to Me on Guitar Hero Arcade. Overall, solid Round1 rhythm game experience.

Thursday, July 27th, 2023 02:00 -
I went to the CD store again yesterday. When I was there last week I saw a few Green Day bootlegs that looked interesting, and today I got them. I found Radio Daze, a recording from the the 1992 WFMU broadcast. Allies of the Idiot Nation, which is from MTV Supersonic in Milan, Italy in 2005. Lastly, Surprise Gig At CBGB Studio is from a surprise gig at CBGBs from 2001. I also got a copy of Dookie on CD. I also got the first season of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on DVD. I watched that show a lot in high school and decided to add it to my collection. I also got a copy of Wedding Crashers on UMD Video. I've wanted to watch that and finding it for the PSP was cool.

Tuesday, July 18th, 2023 18:24 -
Hi. I know it's been a real hot minute since I've worked on this website, so I decided to completely revamp it yet again last night. Welcome to Version 3.0. I think this is going to be the one to stay. Anyway, I worked on it some more today, and hopefully I will add all the pages that I've wanted to add in the near future. Summer's already almost over, and I go back to school the last week of August. This summer's been pretty fun. I worked during May and June and then went camping for two weeks. I've been playing a lot of music recently. I bought my first electric guitar a few weeks ago and I'm finally learning how to play. I've also been playing bass a lot to get ready for this next semester with my band. Also, I went to this CD store near my house today and picked up some stuff. I got the Ramones compilation Hey! Ho! Let's Go: The Anthology, the Family Guy: The Freakin' Sweet Collection and the first two seasons of Archer on DVD, Social Distortion's self-titled album, and Marky Ramone's autobiography Punk Rock Blitzkrieg: My Life as a Ramone.

Wednesday, August 10th, 2022 22:51 -
I went to a Jimmy Buffett concert at the Jones Beach Theater last night and it was so fun! He played a lot of songs off his Life on the Flip Side album from 2020. We had to park two fields over from the theater as the closest parking lots were full of RVs and tailgate parties, which were fun to navigate through. It was awesome and the weather was perfect!

Saturday, August 6th, 2022 17:38 -
I bought a PlayStation 2 today. I went back to Tri-County to play some DDR and StepManiaX for one last round (and I actually got a new highscore on "Sunshine" on StepManiaX which made me really happy) and I just couldn't ignore the retro games store. So I went upstairs and bought a pretty heavily-used PS2. It reeks of age, but the thing still powers on AND reads discs. I think the laser is on its last legs though, so that's a sign for me to invest in a beefy hard drive and mod it so I can play backups. Also, one little cool detail I noticed is that my PS2 is a model SCPH-30001 which I believe is the first ever model sold in the US, making it 22 years old. So that's pretty cool. I tested it out tonight playing beatmania on my $10 Goodwill TV.

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022 18:12 -
So I was on Twitter this morning, and I saw that "IIDX" was trending. I click on the link, and it turns out the next beatmania IIDX game is on the way. I still feel like CastHour came out last month but here we are. The location tests are going to be at the SILK HAT Kawasaki DICE arcade from August 5th to 7th, 2022. Anyway it's called beatmania IIDX 30 RESIDENT and just by looking at the logo it appears to have some kind of dark, polygonal, futuristic artstyle and theme. The logo style reminds me of Metal Gear Rising and the name "RESIDENT" makes me think of Resident Evil.

Sunday, July 31st, 2022 20:31 -
I saw Joan Jett and the Blackhearts perform yesterday and it was awesome! I brought my camera and took a few pictures there. They were playing at this small venue in a park near my house and I've never seen that place so packed before.

Thursday, July 21st, 2022 12:41 -
So another package from Japan arrived today, and I got a lot of cool stuff in it. It was a bunch of BEMANI related things I found on Mercari and Yahoo! Auctions Japan. I got stuff like some beatmania IIDX and DDR books, a HEROIC VERSE poster, a Hello Kitty DDR pocket, and a DanceDanceRevolution...music box? I've never seen this thing before anywhere on the Internet. It's interesting because the box shows DDR X gameplay, but the music box plays one of three licensed songs from DanceDanceRevolution (2010) on the Wii. The songs include "Hey, Soul Sister," "Bad Romance," or "Celebration." I have no idea which song mine plays yet because I haven't unboxed it yet. I might make a video about it because I think I may be the first to document one of these on YouTube. I posted about it on ZIv to see if anyone can help me figure out what this thing's backstory is.

Saturday, June 25rd, 2022 23:58 -
So I've been looking around online for a drum controller for Guitar Hero, Rock Band, drummania, or even Rock Revolution that was at a reasonable price. I talked a bit about this in my last note, but I'm going to explain more of the story here. Last week, I finally found a listing for a used Band Hero drum controller for the Wii. I won the auction and got the controller for a pretty good price. It arrived a few days ago and after putting it together I immediately tested it out on Guitar Hero 5 on my Wii. All the pads seemed to work fine, except for the red pad. It was registering a hit around 30% of the time, and that got really frustrating after a while. So today I opened the whole controller up to take a look inside and see wassup. I disconnected the wires for the red pad, cleaned off some of the excess glue holding them in place, and then reconnected them. I put the controller back together and to my surprise, it actually worked! The controller didn't come with a foot pedal though, so I've been playing with the Auto Kick cheat until I can find one on eBay that will work. I may be able to connect my drummania foot pedal to it somehow.

Thursday, June 23rd, 2022 20:32 -
I bought a Rock Band microphone for use on my PC today and it works fabtabulously. I also bought a Band Hero drum controller too. The cool thing is that the red pad doesn't really work so very good so now I'm going to have to look up how to fix that.

Monday, May 30th, 2022 20:39 -
After 3.14 years of smashing arrows and 3 billion points overall, I finally achieved Veteran status on FlashFlashRevolution. I'm amazing, I know. No but seriously, that took FOREVER. I'm just glad it's done and I now I can focus on other aspects of my life outside of rhythm gaming, like going outside and touching grass. Also, I know I kinda fell off with updating this website. I've been pretty busy recently with work and school (and FFR).

Monday, April 25th, 2022 12:37 -
My beatmania pocket 2 finally arrived today from Japan and I'm so excited to listen to its incredibly bit-crushed music. This thing is in beautiful condition and it came with its box which is really nice. It even has the instruction manual too. I plan on making a video about it along with my DanceDanceRevolution pocket as soon as finals are over with. Until then, My beatmania DaDaDa!! keyboard review video is coming out on the 30th which talks about another obscure BEMANI game.

Sunday, April 24th, 2022 14:46 -
I got COVID yesterday yeeha. I feel just so great right now and what a surprise I get it right at the start of finals week like isn't that #epic?

Thursday, April 14th, 2022 18:54 -
It's finally here!...after like two years. I bought this DJ Station Pro beatmania controller off Yahoo! Auctions Japan way back in 2020 and it finally arrived today. It's the best 5key beatmania controller a 5key beatmania player could ask for. Maybe. The turntable is great, much better than the UKOC imo. There's these volume faders on the left side which really add to the "DJ" feel that this game's supposed to give off. The keys are a little stiff, I much perfer the UKOC's keys but what totally makes up for that is the fact that the keys light up just like the arcade! There's a guy on YouTube who cleared "SWEET BREEZE" from ClubMIX with one of these things, so I'm sure it's just a matter of getting used to the keys. Also, the seller bundled in a copy of beatmania IIDX 3rd style for the PS2 with the controller which was super nice.

Saturday, April 9th, 2022 21:32 -
I successfully connected my PlayStation 2 EyeToy to my Windows XP machine to use it as a webcam. It works about as well as it sounds. You can almost taste the pixels and the audio is very delayed, but I think it really brings out that early-YouTube aesthetic. Finding working drivers for the EyeToy was just tons of fun. The only ones I could find only seemed to work on Windows 10, which obviously didn't work on XP. I eventually found this totally-not-a-virus "setup.exe" on download.com that did the trick.

Friday, March 26th, 2022 22:14 -
So I went to the Tri-County Flea Market again to play some StepManiaX. I did pretty well, almost FC'd Sunshine on HARD towards the end. I'm going to make another video there sometime after school ends in late June. I want to do a "summer" themed setlist where I play the songs Bumble Bee, Sunshine, and Summer (Speedy Mix) together. Also, I wanted to share this picture I took of Tri-County's decaying IIDX cab. It's been broken for like a year.

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2022 21:06 -
I was cleaning out my closet today and I found my old MacBook Air from 2015 buried under a pile of clothes. I dug it out and tried booting it up only to discover a broken Windows 10 BSOD. Long story short, I fixed the broken Windows Bootcamp partition, deleted it, and reinstalled a clean copy of OS X El Capitan. It seems to work pretty well after sitting in my closet for six years, but it has some screen problems and it's missing the "T" key for some reason. But it works and that's cool.

Thursday, March 17, 2022 21:36 -
So guess what got released today? DanceDanceRevolution A3! It only released on gold cabs, but my local Round1 has a gold cab so I'll take it. Hopefully I can make it over there soon because I really want to play the new songs. They aren't any new licenses, but hopefully the KONAMI originals are good.

Monday, March 14, 2022 06:27 -
So I guess I'm making this a blog thing now? I figured out how to make the navigation bar buttons light up when you hover over them with the mouse. Yippee. I'm staying up all night again revamping my homepage. Hopefully this will be closer to the final version. And hopefully I'll be able to wake up for my first class of the day in like four hours. EDIT: So THAT didn't happen lmao.