Elsie Quarterly - Q1

Oh my gosh, we’re already into May!? Since I am far too lazy to do monthly writeups, I figure I would do one for each quarter of the year to sum up everything that happened.

I started the year off unemployed. Unemployed by choice, mind you, but I had decided at the end of last year that I wanted to find another job in the new year. I had a few interviews lined up after sending my portfolio to places I actually wanted to work at. That was until one of my best friends did something for me I will never forget. He is the VP of Product and Design at VShojo, and he went to bat for me to get me a headcount. I am so happy to say I am now gainfully employed at a company where I get to do not only product design work, but many other forms of visual design (logo, brand, fashion, etc.) as well as the occasional illustration. It is really a dream job.

The day I officially started, I was thrown to the wolves to a VRChat party with staff and some of the talents, and we had a blast!

If you’re unaware, Mocopi is Sony’s version of full-body tracking that has been eyed upon by the VTubing community. I managed to get my hands on a set to play around with and I was quite shocked how easy it was to integrate in to Unity. I may have to experiment more with this!

Kicking off February, Nintendo had one of its best Nintendo Directs in a while! They showed PIKMIN 4, Deca Police, Etrian Odyssey Collection, Baten Kaitos Remake, GB/GBC/GBA Switch Online, a new Fantasy Life, Ghost Trick, and a New Professor Layton. Nintendo DS era gamers are eating quite well.

This year, I entered the Digimon Illustration Competition and the results were announced. My Veemon artwork had made the first cut off of Top 32 artworks (Top 4 in the Veemon category). I was freaking out when they announced the results live on the DigimonCon stream. I never considered myself a strong artist and thought it would be fun just to participate, and lo and behold one of my entries did well!

About a month later, they announced the final results and... while my work didn’t make it on to be printed on a card, my work received a Judges Special Prize!! I was over the moon that my work had made an impact on the judges enough to be recognized in this way! These results only further steeled my resolve to continue pursuing art and doign what makes me happy.

I wrote about this on my blog already but long story short, I finished a 6-week workshop builing a miniature model diorama from scratch! Full details in the article, but what an eye-opening experience. Here is another hobby I’d love to continue pursuing!

We had a free weekend and decided to take a trip to Niagara Falls as we were close by and hadn’t been in many years. We had a lot of fun wandering around the Falls grounds and lost a lot of time in the casinos (but did not lose money!) See more here.

The World Baseball Classic was going on while we were in Niagara, but we made sure to keep up with the tournament and watch a game or two. Watching the USA, Mexico, and Japan battle it out for the top spots was wild. Also watching Shohei Ohtani pitch to his Angels teammate Mike Trout for the final at-bat was like something out of a storybook ending.

We watched John Wick 4 and it was probably one of my favourite out of the 4 films in the series largely due to the part that Donnie Yen plays. Fantastic action film that sometimes gets away from itself with the crazy kevlar suits but nonetheless a lot of fun. The video below describes my absolute favourite sequence in the movie.

Wrote more about this on my blog, but we visited Seoul, South Korea after trying to find somewhere in Asia that we wanted to visit that wasn’t Japan again. It was certainly a great place to visit, and getting around on the subway was pretty easy so we made liberal use of it.

This collection was announced some time last year and it finally came out! I have been having a blast with it reliving memories of playing the old GBA games. Some of the games definitely do not age well, however they included a super buster option that lets you do massive damage with the basic buster attack and honestly, it makes the random encounters less annoying. Supposedly they also included some of the Boktai content in Battle Network 5 that was cut from the US release of the original games, so I’m looking forward to playing that one.

What can I say. It has been disappointment after disappointment every season for the Toronto Maple Leafs that I was fully expecting them to flame out in Round 1 yet again. But by some stroke of luck, they scored a much needed overtime goal to launch them into the second round for the first time in 19 years! They will likely get eliminated in the second round, but it feels nice.