Well, it’s 2013 and stuff
A belated happy new year to everyone 🙂
This post has been inspired by a couple of other blog posts I read earlier this month, specifically this post from Old School Game Blog, and this post from Insert Disk 2. So, I’ll start off with a year in review, gaming style!
2012 was notable for being a year where I caught up on some modding, took advantage of the high Australian dollar to start filling in some of the premium gaps in games I wanted to pick up and went to Japan. Over the years I’ve gone through and culled the volume of games on the shelves a number of times, and last year I went through and trimmed the last of the fat. Almost all of the games and hardware sitting in the nerd room are titles I actually want to play, if not today then some day, rather than owning them for the sake of owning them. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but physical storage space dictates pragmatism, and as James points out on his post on Insert Disk 2, games are meant to be played, and so the cull has been made with this key thought I’ve held for a while now (but hadn’t necessarily acted on). I’ll still hold onto some interesting curios, like my C128D complete with keyboard and matching C= RGB monitor, but most of the duplicate hardware has been jettisoned.
However, it was also a year where I spent more time reading and writing about games rather than actually playing them.
Last weekend I did something I hadn’t done in ages – whiled away a Saturday afternoon playing through a random selection of titles I picked up in Japan on my Twin Famicom (thanks to Frank and Hollo for getting me on the Twin Fami bandwagon!), then went on to some Saturn games before the afternoon gave way to evening and the time came to switch off the nerd and get started on being domestic (or in other words, get cracking on cooking dinner).
This habit of thought and not action is not just centered on gaming – the house and the garden are both in serious need of attention, and as always in life it’s all about striking that balance so there’s also plenty of time to spend with Wifey.
So, 2013 is about change. Wanky I know, but stick with me for a moment.
First up, there will be less consumption of gaming info and more time actually playing games. I’ve taken a handful of sites off my RSS feeds (though I’ve kept most of the independent gaming blogs, like those linked to above) and am trying to spend less time getting distracted online, and therefore should spend more down time playing games rather than looking up esoteric information that feeds the addiction for more information (such as the fruitless hunt for info around, say, Virtua Fighter 3 on the Saturn).
As an extension of this, I’ll also catch up on a couple of modding projects so that gaming downtime is the best it can be. This includes chipping my PSone with a stealth chip so that I can play US and Japanese games without any hassles, fixing my DC following its recent interest in resetting all the time and replacing its dead battery, finally adding an AV mod to my A2600 (thanks to fellow modder Mamejay for the info from a while back) and getting a new RGB cable for my 32X that eliminates the jailbar effect that is killing the quality of its video output.
Beyond this, I’ve had two projects in the wings for the last few years I’d like to get a start on at some stage – a late-70s Japanese Space Invaders cocktail cab common in Australia back in the early 80s that has been gutted but needs to be actually rebuilt, as well as putting together a massive switchbox for all the hardware in the nerd room.
Outside of gaming, the house needs work with renovations and painting, and the neglected gardens need a stack of work to being them back to normal again so we can get the veggie patches happening for next spring, with hopefully some winter crops in there if we make it!
So, with this in mind and the important tenet of balance at the fore, I’ll be winding back my sporadic blogging output to something a bit more realistic, such as a monthly update, rather than the current intermittent schedule. Before that kicks in I’ll aim at finishing up posting the daily travel diary I kept when we were in Japan throughout February though, so don’t worry – that’ll still be sorted!
So, what kind of content can you expect this year then? I’d like to continue to playing around with our DSLR and get some more wallpapers up (Hollo’s also got me onto some fun lenses to try out to play with some depth of field effects), and there are a couple of projects I have in mind around writing about how we consumed and partook in gaming in Australia in the 90s as a point of difference to where we are today.
I also have a lot of photos and details around a stack of repair work and console mods over the last couple of years that could do with a write-up too, but realistically they take a bit of time and effort to document so I’m not sure how likely it is they’ll get done, especially when there are such a variety of excellent resources probably already out there on the topics I’d document on the blog.
I’ll also document the process used for restoring the old cocktail cab and the switchbox too, as I really enjoyed doing that for my Astro City overhaul a couple of years back. Time will decide which (if either) gets finished this year, as the switchbox is looking to be pretty complicated, and the cocktail cab will be a bit fiddly to restore.
… so I think that’s it. Long-winded as usual, but it’s a start to the new year, and hopefully a new outlook that will make it a great year 🙂
I’ve been thinking about trimming the fat in the game room myself. What a daunting task though… There are a few areas in which I will still go for complete though – the PCE HuCards, and NeoGeoCDs – but the rest will have to be trimmed down I reckon.
On the lens stuff… Glad to hear you’re going to try out a few! Really is a fun hobby – albeit damn expensive!