2022 sucked. Stand Tall friends, you survived it!
…
Oh wait, we should probably expand on that.
Like a lot of kids, I started college the semester after I graduated from high school. And, like many kids, I went to a community college instead of aspiring towards Ivy League life; I didn’t long for the “college life” of dorm rooms and living out of state, massive loans and being away from everything and everyone I’d ever known. I didn’t even know what I wanted to get out of more school… I mostly coasted through high school as it was, and didn’t know what I wanted to be when I “grew up”.
Now, I’m a 37-year-old man. And on my 37th birthday, after having dropped out a few times, I logged in one last time to my final online course. I finished my Associate of Arts degree in English (technically two degrees, also English for Transfer) almost exactly 18 years after I started it.
But why go back at all? Let’s talk about it.
Categories
Finished Business
The world’s got pretty weird over the last year and a half or so, hasn’t it?
I wanted to write something before now, but I honestly had no clue where to ever start, and the longer I waited, the more I felt like I had nothing to say. Much like the end of 45’s presidency, every week felt like something new… a new announcement from the CDC, new mask mandates (or lack thereof, goddammit Florida), new virus strains. Being perfectly honest, trying to keep up with reality as it is… it’s exhausting.
And that’s not even taking into account all the regular struggles of humanity since this pandemic began.
But even without a global pandemic that brought the world to its knees,, all the normal and abnormal of 2020 and 2021, this has been some of the most wonderful, painful, satisfying times of my life. And it’s time I shared a little bit.
Hello, internet. It’s been too long since we caught up.
So it’s a small thing, and it’s late in the day (and already 2021 by the time most people read this), but I thought a fun little thing I might do tonight is make something to (hopefully) put a smile on somebody’s face. It’s a Game Boy ROM I created using GB Studio, playable with a Game Boy emulator, and it has no sound (since I built, tested, and compiled it in about 90 minutes)… but I hope you might enjoy it despite its flaws. I even made all of the assets myself, basic as they are, aside from the font I used. Proud of that!
I’ll try to write more thorough blog posts again in 2021, I’m sorry I dropped the ball a little this year. The game doesn’t make up for it, but I promise I will over the next 365.25 days.
I hope you enjoy my little trinket, and a positive 2021 to everybody! Stand Tall, friends!
One of the best-selling consoles of all time, the Nintendo Game Boy is a unique beast in the gaming landscape. It wasn’t nearly as powerful as its competitors, the screen was about as awful as a screen could be (even in its heyday), and the games… there was a lot of garbage developed for it. Yet with nearly 119 million units sold in the Game Boy line, from the original gray brick in 1989 until the final Game Boy Color rolled off the assembly line in 2003, the 8-bit juggernaut was a console that couldn’t be ignored, even when it was being absolutely overlooked.