dmxrated

Maris spent most of yesterday morning watching various shows Mom put on for her, and also went with Mom at one point to Giunta's Meat Farms, until Emily came to pick her up midday.

Mom and I watched the rest of Goblin's Crown shortly thereafter, and then spent a few hours out, starting with a walk on the beach. Along the way there, there were a few police cars around the scene of some car stuck in a ditch.

In case the police were still there when we finished that walk, we decided to take a detour to Bellport, and wound up having another walk down to the bay there.

The bay was covered in a thin sheet of ice. We also noticed the piers littered with chicken bones that Mom later inferred to have been used as bait for crabbing and then washed back up from a tide.

On the way home, in preparation for that blizzard that's supposed to begin midday today, we picked up some suet at Stop&Shop, and also paid a quick visit to Savers in the same shopping center. Also stopped at BJ's to return my shirts issued there from before Walmart in a motorcart, and then made one more stop for gas.

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Mom and I have just started watching Frankenstein this morning.

From what Mom told me the other day, Emily's brother-in-law Mike has broken his foot, and is unable to look over his two daughters without her sister Maggie. Brian is taking finals of some course he's taking in Harvard, so Emily had to come here on her own to accompany her parents, or something like that, while leaving Maris with us.

Whatever the details are, Emily's mother, Karen, dropped Maris with us yesterday afternoon. Mom put on Thomas the Tank Engine for her after the three of us had dinner, until she fell asleep on the couch.

Emily came to retrieve her after I had gone off to bed. I didn't hear her arrival, but I did overhear Mom speaking to Maris beforehand while they were watching the Winter Olympics.

Had an interview at Lowe's yesterday afternoon.

Mom was originally gonna make me a burger when she'd be home, but then noticed that a bag of rye bread previously containing four slices was gone, and asked if I had had two tuna sandwiches for lunch. We ended up just having a salad.

Getting ready for my interview, I then trimmed off a bit of hair that wouldn't lie flat from brushing. Mom told me not to do that from now on, pointing out that it looks slightly uneven.

She soon asked if I'd rather just have a main course and dessert at Costco. I brought up a protein shake to refridgerate, to have with a cookie.

Soon as we actually got into the car, I turned the heat off to let my shake chill. She suggested I put it in the trunk instead.

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Having decided between errands to get a slice of pizza this time that a cookie already once went poorly with, instead of a hot dog, and left that shake in the car.

Turns out Costco actually has some new items on its menu. Got myself a calzone and a double-chocolate mint sundae.

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Having kept tabs on my subscriber count, I discovered it this morning to read 0. Google AI states that to be something the site does when freezing my metrics to verify authenticity, so I have made everything public again, even ignoring one more bot that will hopefully be dealt with as well.

Mom and I finished watching season 2 of K-ON! two days ago, and with some time left before my Hidive subscription ends, I decided to put the movie on yesterday. Mom asked while I was setting it up, if I would like some tea (declined), and then some popcorn. Took her up on that, and after she started a pot up, she had me help her straighten a few small things up. We were in the middle of discussing a sock drawer in Marie's room with a lot more space than the one in my dresser, when I suddenly heard it popping out of the pot and ran in. Had to sweep some up, but I had put the lid on she forgot to, in time for there to still be enough to fill a bowl for each of us.

Directly following yesterday's viewbombing, I have managed to accumulate a total of 55 new subscribers, raising my sub count to 245, but only nine legitimate views throughout. Not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for my channel, and I reported this a few hours ago for possible bot activity after waking up in the night to use the bathroom.

Just bought a new copy each of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and its player's guide, for some footage for my next video.

For these past two days, following the failure of my brownie-hack creation video, I have been proofreading an ebook I commissioned a few years ago, hoping to make some side-profits once and for all while I continue seeking out work, and am going to finish up today.

From there, I have already been planning just to play something other than Earthbound, before I come back to that and implement my remaining changes to the main hack. Originally, I was going to default to Xenoblade Chronicles 2, my other Switch-exclusive game after having already played The World Ends With You, but then somehow decided to check the Falcom logo in Trails in the Sky on my laptop (Steam itself flickers on my house desktop), and that glitch from before did not appear. Pulling it up later on my apartment desktop (my parents stopped renting the apartment iself out back in 2018), the issue must have since resolved itself, negating any need for a Steam Deck just to bypass what I assumed would be hardware-related degredation issues with PC games in general.

With Steam back on the table, I went on to list the games I still have (not counting free-to-download ROMs; I wanted to play stuff I've had sitting around for years now), to choose from on a die roll, that are still each awaiting any real work on a walkthrough:

1) BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm
2) Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stone
3) Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: The 7th Stand User (Not a Steam game, but free to download and not a ROM either.)
4) The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
5) Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom
6) Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Landed 5, and while I was going to essentially have a break from YouTube itself, I also looked into promoting my main brunette-girl video through YouTube Studio. Researching that even upon waking up this morning, though, for just $144 (less than the default $200 the preparation window sets your budget at), even any subscribers I obtain towards 1,000 (the actual number required to host ads; 500 unlocks options I'm not interested in) might not actually watch any subsequent videos from there, which would end up hurting future growth.

I then remembered some planned parts of my next video, that are going to involve both TTYD and the Android version of Marenian Tavern Story. Playing those to an extent each essentially is going to provide me the change in pace I want from Earthbound, rendering any one of those other six games just a needless delay towards monetization following the time I already spent on a video that failed me there (a fraction in turn of how long that took to get around to).

Posted two new videos simultaneously yesterday, and have so far gained less than an hour's worth of traffic to show for it, despite one of them being 37 minutes long.

Said first one is about how I got the idea to create the brunette-hack, why it took so long to complete the actual test playthrough, how I decided to create a total of twelve shades of brown midway, and how I re-created the hack from scratch while putting my previous main video together.

https://youtu.be/R2Qiz5ZYua0

The other video is an update short on how to run Getter Love!! optimally. Just recently, I tried to patch that game mainly for a screenshot of the translated title screen, to host on a new site called ROMhacks.net, and the game failed to load when I tried to run it. Brought it up with ozidual, who then gave me a tool to patch it more easily, along with permission to actually host it when I ran it past him.

https://youtube.com/shorts/-Cr04AVjR9E?feature=share

Trying to host my Earthbound hack onto ROMhacks.net only blanked the entire form I had to fill out, and I went on to write that site off. However, I did load the whole Getter Love!! package, including an additional Japanese-version patch for an unused sound test (should've also included a translation-only patch, come to think of it), onto ROMhack.ing, attributing to Ozzy, to link back to my videos before setting those to Public.

https://romhack.ing/database/content/entry/TtNv5JQBNs8FWu0CvXpr/getter-love-panda-love-unit-english-translation

Yesterday's Far Side comic:



Mom asked me before getting out of bed for the morning, about The Three Little Pigs that that comic was obviously making fun of, and I told her that Sesame Street had also spoofed it when we put that on for Maris when Brian visited those few weeks ago, by having the big bad wolf blow everything away except the straw house over more than a minute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TemExNuY2Q

During her own search that I suggested, she first came across another spoof before that one, in which the pigs all gather outside for what turns out to be a game, and the wolf blows Kermit away, who is doing a newsflash in both segments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=118l2OD57NA

Yesterday morning, I found some coffee still sitting on the coffee maker, and naturally assumed Mom had left it for me for when I'd actually wake up, as she does normally with a bowl of yogurt and blueberries on the dining table. Had to re-heat it for 30 seconds.

Last night during dinner, Mom mentioned having forgotten to drink what was actually her own and realizing after she had already left the house. I confirmed when she asked, having drunk it myself; no point just to pour it out one way or another.

Had breakfast provided by San Anselmo Inn yesterday. Beside the waffle iron itself is a dispenser to pour the batter into a cup from. It turned out nice and soft, and I also had two slices of chocolate chip bread, and English muffin, and some orange juice and coffee.

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Marie picked us up from the hotel for a ferry ride to San Francisco. Drew had stayed at the house due to his foot.

The first place we passed was a prison called the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, and we also spotted the Golden Gate Bridge shrouded in fog along the way.

We went inside the ferry station building where we disembarked, and looked around at various restaruants and souvenir shops. I soon parted with Mom and Marie, and ate at this place called Lunette Cambodia, where I ordered this special called a prahok ktiss bowl, having also picked out a can of lychee water to go with it.

I then decided to get a bowl of ice cream, one scoop each of Vietnamese coffee, secret breakfast, and peanut butter fudge ripple, topped with hot fudge and sprinkles. Mom and Marie brought me outside to eat it on a bench.

During the return trip, we spotted some small egrets, loons, and a spray of water from a whale.

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Not much happened at the house. I slept for most of the afternoon while the others watched Below Deck, but I did show them episode 3 of K-ON! at one point. Also played a bit alongside Marie with Ruby.

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Marie eventually drove me and Mom to another hotel called Holiday Inn for the night.

Breakfast this morning was a slight hassle. The refridgerator in our room turned the remaining milk in that bottle into a cold slush by the time I got up to pour it on some remaining chocolate chip Special K from our first Safeway visit, and I had to heat it up for a whole minute in the microwave.

I also decided to make myself some coffee, which did involve some tinkering to get the machine to work, only to discover an apparent lack of creamer to pour into said coffee. I went down to the lobby in an attempt to grab some, but the only stuff available there was bottled, and given the hurry we were in to meet an Uber on time, I didn't bother figuring out how to work the machine there. Turns out, though, that the creamer in our room was actually powdered inside packets, which I only naturally mistook for sweetener (I did treat myself to that afterwards, just because it was available).

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As of this writing, we are now at the airport awaiting our flight. Checked YouTube Studio before typing this entry, and following two stragglers who brought my subscriber count to 149 a few days after I subscribed Marie and Drew after my video ended, I have now gained an additional 15, standing now at 164.

Also got five comments on my thumbnail video, including one I've just seen now while checking back.