I've been in contact with a person who has been working on remastering the video game Dual Hearts. If you don't know anything about Dual Hearts, I recommend watching my YouTube reviews of the game. I still plan on finishing that series. I have a few more parts to add to it. Life got in the way of me completing it, but now that I've subtracted a lot of the things that took up unnecessary time, I plan on getting back into it in time for the game's 25th anniversary.

I ran into a forum post this person made last year. I actually get a Google Alert for whenever Dual Hearts gets mentioned on the internet. I don't think it's very accurate, since I've seen a lot of instances where I missed someone making a review, playing it on Youtube, or a forum post about it. The Google Alert showed a forum post about a remastered version of Dual Hearts being made.

After seeing they were missing some art of the characters, I decided to reach out to create an account on the website and DM them.

They thanked me, and have been messaging me if they needed anything else for the remaster. I have no experience tampering with game files, but I can confidently say there is no one else alive who knows more about this game than me. If they need some help, I might be able to point them in the right direction. It's a goal of mine to deeply analyze this game, and break it down into small pieces. I compare it to how speedrunners have systematically broken down games like Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time. I also plan on speedrunning this game in the future as well. My any % record as of now is just under 3 hours on the normal difficulty.

Here's a scan I made of a Japanese promotional poster of the game I found online years ago. I don't believe I've found an image of this anywhere on the internet. My scanner wasn't big enough for the entire thing, so it's in 4 parts.

I plan on creating a website for the game as well. It'll have all the details I've amassed from the game over the years. I have a bunch of other things no one has seen about the game, and I'm really excited to share it with the world!

So it looks like my job search has failed. I had hoped to get a job early this year so I could save money up for traveling to events. After several rejection emails and never hearing back from several others, I decided it's time to throw in the towel.

I'll still be trying to look for a job, but that'll have to wait. My business partner told me he needs me to travel with him for about a month to work the booth at 6 tournaments. That's a tournament every week. We'll be going all across the US, and one time in Canada. Since I hadn't found a job yet, I decided to do it. After all, Rectangle Corner is one of my only sources of income. Even though I'm not making money yet, I believe the potential for the business is very high.

There is actually one tournament I'll be going to before that. I'm going to be setting up a booth there, but it's my first time doing it alone. My business partner will be getting ready for another tournament during that time. I'm really looking forward to it. We've been working on expanding our convention presence to other non-mainstream areas. We usually only go to gaming conventions like EVO or Genesis, but I've been applying to several Anime and comic conventions.

I'm definitely not gonna be spending any money on a hotel when I do this. My car is more than enough to handle a few day trip. I've been getting ready for about a week now. I used to drink Huel on these trips to save money and time, but now, I asked AI to help me create a more palatable and cheaper diet. I'll be using dry foods that won't need to be refrigerated. The photo below is almost everything I'll need.

Even though I couldn't find a job, it's not over for this year. I still have enough money to go to a few track meets and tournaments here and there. Maybe I can go to some around the area of the conventions I'll be going to. I'll need to do some research to see what's best. If things don't look affordable on paper, I'll just have to wait until next year to compete. I still need to save money, so I'm definitely going to be looking for jobs for Fall and Winter.

I went to the dentist yesterday. After examining my teeth (X-rays and poking around with that small sickle and mirror), they said they found 3 cavities. 2 that needed to be re-filled (re-filled?! I thought it was a 1 time thing!), and 1 that was new. The total for this procedure came out to be about $700. I just came in for a cleaning, but they wouldn't do it without the other things bundled in. They recommended I do a payment plan. Mind you, I'm paying for a dental plan (This is different from insurance, I'm not sure how though) to handle most of the costs, so the total is after the discount.

The evaluation they gave me was $87. I can't take this no more. How the heck am I supposed to afford anything? I never thought being an adult would be this hard. It seemed like my parents had everything under control growing up. They never really showed us how insanely expensive literally everything is in comparison to how much money they had. Well, for the most part.

I grew up in the suburbs for most of my life. When my parents divorced, my dad moved into some apartments. He later moved into a house, and my mom is currently living in an apartment (Where I'm living right now. I alternate between my dad's house and my mom's apartment). I often wonder why my mom decided to move out of the house she lived in initially. I feel like it's because of a lack of money management. There would be times when the cable would go out for a few weeks, or the times when she would go to a payday loan place on our way home from school. Just yesterday, I asked her about a letter on our door threatening to evict her if she didn't pay the rent in 3 days. She says it was because of a change in payment methods that they were unaware of. I don't believe it.

No matter how much I look at it, there's just no way I can keep living with these constant bills looming over me. It just doesn't seem feasible for me to achieve my goals without subtracting a huge portion of the things I'd like to have. My dad told me he had to stop collecting comic books when me and my siblings were born. This is one of the main reasons I don't plan on having a relationship or children. With the insane amount of bills that are thrown my way on the daily, there's just no way I can hope to accomplish anything without getting rid of unnecessary things.

Here's an example: The image below is an unpaid debt of mine:

When I lost that Wells Fargo job, I no longer had a way to pay off my credit card bills. This, along with another credit card adds up to about $15,000 in debt. If you add my student loans to the picture, that's about $45,000 of debt. Luckily, I'm not paying any student loans right now because I was able to get them deferred for a year. I might have to pay them later on this year if I'm unable to do that again. Before that happens, I gotta find me a job.

Mark my words, I'm not gonna make this money mistake again. As soon as these debts are paid off, I'm gonna start saving up. This is gonna be much easier to do now that I'm living with my parents again. But don't get it twisted, I will still be traveling to track meets and tournaments to compete. That's what I've prepared my car for.

My tax return came in, so I've got about $900 to spare at the moment. I've just been eating whatever my parents have in the kitchen, and restricting my driving to only going to my dad's house or sister's temporary apartment. Once I get a job, I'll start planning other travel ventures.

Yesterday I took my sister to her counseling session to help with her addiction. This is the same sister I talked about in this blog post. She's been communicating much better than before, but she still seems very out of it at times. I have trouble understanding what she's saying, and I feel bad having to ask her to repeat herself at times. However, I've always had that issue with the way some people talk, so it could just be a problem with myself.

I'm so glad she's willing to start making a change in her life. A few weeks ago, she voluntarily went to a rehab center, and stayed there for a few weeks. Unfortunately, they couldn't let her stay longer than that, so she was going to be let back onto the streets. Thankfully, my dad decided to rent a small room out for her to stay for a few months. We've been taking her to these counseling sessions, and I think it's been helping. She told me she wants to get a cosmetology license and start working on hair and makeup. This is the first time in years that she's told me any goals of hers.

She told me she wanted to play Resident Evil 5 with me (The greatest Co-Op game of all time in my opinion). We used to play that game all the time growing up. Because I'm broke, I decided to grab my PS3 and work on jailbreaking it to play downloaded games. While figuring out how to do that, I found old music that my sister put on the system. This music was copied to the PS3 back in 2012-2013. It really brought back memories of my sister playing Britney Spears songs for hours in the room we shared back in the day. I used to tolerate it when she played it, but it grew on me over the years. I'm now a big fan of pop music because of her.

There's also photos of her avatar in Play Station Home. I remember watching her run around the malls and clubs, and conversing with people with a plugged in keyboard. Man, those were the days!

I've been searching for a job since after my trip to San Jose, California in February. I left my job at Home Depot in October of last year when I came back to Houston, but I decided to not get a job immediately. I had to work on my bald buttons, which are sanded down Gamecube Controller buttons that people use when playing Smash Bros.

I would like a seasonal job, but since I haven't had any success with finding one, I've been expanding my search for full and part time jobs. Last week, I had an interview with Lowe's. It was for a stocker position, which was the same position I had at Home Depot. I was pretty confident I would get the job because of my experience. Unfortunately, the manager was not happy with my work history and college degree. He wanted someone who would stay with the company for years and strive to become a manager. I made it clear to the manager I was not the person they were looking for.

Looking back at that interview, maybe I should have lied and said I was willing to stay at the job for a prolonged period of time. I think I'll take my degree off of my resume. I've heard that helps people who are over-qualified find jobs. I don't like the idea of lying, but what else am I to do? I guess I could try to find a job in my field, but I've never had success with that. Applying to software engineer jobs feels like throwing my resume into the void. I either got no response or a decline 4 months later. I'd rather keep trying to find a job where I'll at least get a response once in a while.

Today I went to a hiring event for a school district in Houston. I wish I remembered to take some photos. I need to remember to take pictures when I go somewhere new without my camera. The event had all of the district's elementary, middle, and high schools (Well, idk if it was all of them. It seemed like a lot of them though. At least 30 different schools were there). My main goal was to try to get a substitute teaching role. My mom (She's a teacher) told me anyone with a degree can get a job as a substitute teacher. It seems like a good way to make some money without having to work most days of the week.

I think I mentioned it before, but I need most of my days free to train and travel to tournaments and track meets. I'm going to be saving a large quantity of my money by sleeping in my car to avoid hotels. My hope is that my other businesses (rectanglecorner.com, reflexpoint.com, and selling bald buttons) will take off in the future. But for now, I'll have to rely on the jobs I can find out here in this fast-paced maze of a world.

After graduating college with a Computer Science degree in 2020, I spent a lot of time looking for jobs. After a full year of no job prospects, I was getting frustrated, and was willing to take any job that I could get in the tech field. My old roommate from college would talk to me about ideas to get a business started ourselves. We would play Apex Legends together almost everyday (That game is fun as heck!), and sometimes we'd talk about this topic in between matches. Our first go at something was to create a motion detection program using the programming language Python. It has a image reading library called Open-CV. We each bought a cheap camera lens and Raspberry Pie to create the camera and test it out. Not only was it capable of detecting motion, but it would also save the specific recording in which motion was detected, and delete the rest in order to save on storage. We were planning on selling this motion detecting camera to businesses. However, this all fell through for reasons I honestly can't remember. I believe it was because of the constant issues we had with the program, and we got frustrated trying to find fixes to errors. We just silently moved on to the next idea, which was website development.

We had the idea to create a web dev company. We called it Chyme. I'm not sure how we came up with the name, but I'm pretty sure it was my old roommate's idea. It was always his idea. He was always the brains of the operation leading me along. I was never the smartest programmer. Heck, I'm using AI as a crutch for all of the project I'm working on. The word crutch is saying it lightly. It's more like a wheelchair for me at this point. I was pretty confident in this endeavor. My dad used to create websites about 15-20 years ago, so I know I could always ask him for help if I needed it. He even gave me a list of things to ask our potential clients about what type of website they want. I felt like everything would work out this time. Unfortunately, we couldn't find any clients. We would reach out to small businesses, and post ads on Facebook, but it led nowhere. It pushed me further down into the depths of hopelessness. I felt like there just wasn't any opportunities out there.

During my time in Albuquerque, I decided to give web design another try. I took my dad's old web design business, and made it my own. I once again tried reaching out to small businesses in Albuquerque, even going in personally and handing out business cards. Thankfully, I got one business owner to believe in me. It was a business that specializes in car audio. The business was right across the street from the U-Haul I was working at. I looked across the street one day during my shift, and decided to give it one last try. After my shift was over, I walk into the store with my U-Haul shirt still on. I usually wear something business casual, but I didn't care how I looked anymore. I was just so sick of preparing; all I need to do is go in there and tell them what I can do for their business. I was shocked to see that they agreed to my offer. I immediately went home and began working on website mock-ups. In the end, I made about $800 working on their website.

Today, that website is still up and running, but it's a mess. It hasn't been updated since 2023. Now that I'm unemployed and back living with my parents, I've decided to give it one more try. The third time's the charm. I plan on revamping that website I worked on in the past, as well as work on my own personal projects. You're looking at one of my projects right now. I'll talk about the other websites I'm making in the future once I've at least gotten the first page up.

Making websites is a great way for me to express myself. I can design them any way I want (my personal ones at least), and I can put whatever I want on them. It really is refreshing to create something that isn't bound by rules. When I say 'bound by rules', I'm referring to social media, which is full of restrictions on what you can post and how you can post it. This is a good opportunity for me to show people there is more to the internet than 5 websites.

I've been playing a lot of Pokemon Showdown recently. I try to post all of my matches on YouTube. They've been the bulk of my videos for the past few months, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. They are very easy to make. All I have to do is to cut the video every 2-3 battles, export it, find a good screenshot in the clip for the thumbnail, then upload it to YouTube. I've gotten a surprisingly good response from my viewers. I still have no idea how YouTube's algorithm works, but people who play Gen 3 OU (The category I play the game in) have flocked to my channel.

I really enjoy playing Pokemon Showdown. I feel like it's a good way to train my brain for Melee. I have to make decisions fast because the game is on a timer. I prefer playing Pokemon Showdown over playing Chess or Go, which I've tried playing both online and in-person at community events when I stayed in Albuquerque. I'm not sure if I'm getting the same benefits from it because I don't feel as drained as I do after a match of Chess, Go, or Melee. The decision making in those games really takes a toll on my energy levels. Especially Melee with its added pressure of execution. Maybe I like it more because I win a lot more in Pokemon Showdown than I do in any other competitive game I play. Losing a lot really leaves me in a depressed state. I'm not giving up on Melee though. I still feel like I can be the best in the world at that game.

After playing Pokemon Showdown so much, the music gets really repetitive. There's only 3-4 songs that play when you enter a match. On the search for a solution to this, I found an old post on the Smogon forums about a script that can be used to change the music in Pokemon Showdown. My first attempt at running it caused the game to not play music at all. I saw that as a good opportunity to play random music from a folder using VLC Media Player while playing Showdown. For a few weeks, I had no clue the script was causing the issue. I didn't even know it was still running until I saw on my Google Chrome extensions that it was still enabled. When I found out the script was halfway working, I decided to dig deeper and figure out why it wasn't playing any music. I've been using VS Code CoPilot to help me debug the script. So far, I've gotten my music to play during battles half the time. Other times, no music plays at all. I'll keep trying to debug the script, and once it's completely functional, post to the Smogon forums about the fix. I don't know if there are other solutions out there, but based on my web searching, there doesn't seem to be anyone who uses music outside of Showdown. Hopefully people will find it useful.

Last week, I took a trip to Colorado with my dad. He bought some land there, and is planning on retiring there. He needed my help to put down fence posts surrounding the perimeter of the land.

During the trip, we talked about my plans to do the same thing, but I don't think I want to do it in such a cold climate. Even though it was Spring time, the temperature was about 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit. This wouldn't be much of a problem if the wind hadn't been so strong the whole time. I just can't take the cold. Even when I was in Iowa for college I just tolerated it. It never felt like I got used to it; even after 4 years of college.

My plans for the future is to buy some land down south. I'm not sure where yet, but it definitely will be off-grid. That trip to Taos gave me a lot of confidence for off-grid living. After living in my car for those few months, I don't think I'll have any problems living with the bare minimum. But we'll see how that goes when the time comes.

Now that I'm back from the trip, I gotta work on finding a job to save some money to even buy some land. My goal is to save $10,000 a year for 4-5 years, but I don't know how feasible that is. I've been struggling to find a seasonal job, so I've decided to just find some full or part time work for the time being.

I haven't been making many blog posts lately. My posts are too spread out from each other. I'll try my best to write one every 10 days. It honestly shouldn't be that difficult since writing these only take about 10-20 minutes, and I feel like I always have something to say.

This year I'm gonna keep it simple.

No flashy gimmicks or out-of-this-world ideas. I need to focus on a few things. Here they are:

1. Sprinting
2. Melee

Nothing too crazy, just my top 2 goals in life. I won't be ignoring my other 2 goals (Dual Hearts and Trombone), I just feel like it's important to remain focused on a few things to avoid being overwhelmed.

For sprinting, I want to be able to run under 50 seconds in the 400m dash. I won't be focusing on any other race because I feel I perform better over longer distances. My ability to hold form and maintain speed is better than my ability to accelerate.

For Melee, I want to win a tournament. I'm planning on going to many tournaments around the country this year, and not just majors. I want to travel to the locals of different states, and get a lot of practice in with the people there.

When I feel I have a bit more time, I'll finish my Dual Hearts review series and show the world what I've discovered about Dual Hearts. I'll also practice my Trombone, specifically working on Flight of The Bumblebee. I won't stress too much on these 2 goals this year.

I'm a competitor at heart, so the first 2 goals are a must. Especially sprinting. I'm turning 28 this year, and I may only have about 6-7 years left in my physical prime. I really want to see how fast I can get.

The more I look back on my August 14th post, the more it feels like I need to elaborate more on what I'm saying. Especially that last paragraph, which seemed pretty jarring. This blog is a place where I get personal and hold no punches, so expect to see more of that as time goes on.

A few days ago my cousin was ran over by multiple cars and killed. It was a shock to me and many others, including my dad. He talked to me about how sad it was that he did not reach his full potential. He used my cousin's death as an example of what I would become if I didn't start taking action and get a stable income.

My late cousin was out on the streets. As far as I know, he was just walking around as a homeless man. He had a history of drug use. My dad believes he might have been on drugs during the time of the accident. I didn't know much about his personal life because I hadn't seen him in about 3-4 years.

My dad gives me lectures about how I need to stop surviving and start thriving. I, however, don't see the way I'm living as surviving or thriving. I would call it adapting. I've talked about my situation in prior posts, but I'll go in a bit more detail.

In mid October of this year, I made the trip back home to Houston. I shipped my car back, and am in the process to get it fixed so I can get back to traveling. Including that, my other main goals are balding Gamecube controller buttons to sell at the next Genesis, resting to get back to sprint training, and training my Melee Pikachu.

These are things my dad is fine with. What he's not fine with is that I do not have a stable income. I left my jobs at Wendy's and Home Depot when I left Albuquerque. That's right, I'm unemployed. And when people are unemployed in this country they are seen as lazy and entitled. "Why can't they find a job and work like the rest of us?" is what I assume pops up in many employed people's heads when they see someone like me.

My dad tells me he doesn't want me to have the fate of the many male members of my family. I have a transgender older sister who is living a similar life as what my cousin was living through. Right now, she is living on the streets of downtown Houston. I saw her this week for the first time in a few years when me and my dad drove around downtown looking for her. "When you see him walking, you'll know it's him because no one walks like him". When my dad saw her walking down the street with a fast, flamboyant gait, my dad knew immediately it was her.

We took her to the nearby Jack in the Box, a place she frequents. A worker there told me she comes by late at night, and he feeds her. My dad orders her some food and leaves to buy her some cigarettes. As we sit beside each other at a table, I try to talk to her a bit.

She's very jittery. Almost two times as jittery as when I saw her a few years ago. She responds to everything I say with a fast "yeah", "yup", or "mhm". She stands up and sits back down immediately from time to time. She moves her arms and hands in random patterns. She bangs her head against the back of the seat at times. It was all very unnerving.

The most haunting part of me trying to talk to her was when she looked me in the eyes. She did it before, but they were only fleeting glances. There was one time where she stared at me for a solid 5 seconds. During those 5 seconds I tried to find her old self within her eyes. I wanted to see a small glint of hope that she was still in there, that the drugs didn't take her completely. Unfortunately, all I saw was nothingness. It felt as if those wide, blood shot eyes had nothing beyond them.

My dad tells me he wishes that I don't become like my sister. He believes we are put on this earth to grow. Not just physically, but spiritually. He also tells me he doesn't want to live life worrying about my well-being. But why should I care what he thinks about me? I wasn't brought into this world by choice. Why should I have to live my life to quell his worries? I have the free will to do what I want, just like he has the free will to worry.

He brought my sister into this world, and she hasn't lived up to his expectations. So what? She didn't live up to my expectations either. Do you think I want my sister to be living the way she is? Although I don't like the way she's living, it was her choice. I won't be living my life in hopes that my dad will be proud of me. Whatever I do will be of my own volition, and I won't be looking to others for approval.