That time of year again

Hope everyone enjoyed their Mother’s Day!

We Rochlin children celebrated by getting my Mom breakfast donuts (as requested), went out for lunch and then had fancy home-cooked pasta for dinner. A very food-focused affair.

Spending the morning and afternoon with her (as well as the night with my friends losing hours to Minecraft) left me with no time to write a blog post. Though it was all a nice stress relief…

Because as you can see from my baggy-eyed Featured Image, finals and graduation anxiety are undoubtedly taking their toll.

When I wasn’t with Mom yesterday, I was working on my last few college assignments. Ever.

For instance, the Final cheatsheet for Comm Law:

It’s technically not a requirement, but the cheatsheet for my midterm was extremely helpful. So making this one seemed sensible.

… Especially considering I get extra credit for the selfie.

Eating the pain away.

Taken at lunch, with a cameo by Mom’s arm. Because taking a break in the middle of eating to do homework is the perfect encapsulation of my life.

Comm Law is arguably the biggest stressor, as it turns out that is going to be a cumulative exam. Even though it’s online and we have cheatsheets, it will undoubtedly be a nightmare.

More than Cognitive Psychology, anyway. I should theoretically be studying for that now, but the first two exams were so easy that I don’t feel compelled to kill myself here.

If anything, the more stressful parts of tomorrow are around that exam. Like the Kappa Tau Alpha Communications Honors Society induction ceremony around noon.

Which I’ll have to leave early to take my Psych exam.

That event will get me the last pieces of hardware for my graduation attire, which means I’ll have to finally have to figure out who should do my professional Grad photos.

Because that’s a thing everyone does.

However, I’m currently more concerned about parking for graduation. As I found out, the tickets I secured for my family  do not cover their parking at the event. I needed to get a separate parking pass for that — and that deadline was at the end of April.

Had to make some calls while I was waiting to hand off that sweet Gladeo computer so it could go to a better home. Editing videos, as it was meant to be.

Throw in my semester textbook return, getting a legal document notarized (like a real adult) and going to the gym, and you’ve got my scatterbrained mentality for the day.

At least once Psych and Comm Law are out of the way, life should slow down.

As far as my assignments go, I’ll still need to put together my Honors Project — which I’m working as I write:

Then I need to finish my Gaming in American Culture paper. An endeavor made slightly more difficult by surrounding circumstances, but I’ll get to it eventually.

Oh, and let’s not forget that my Dad’s birthday is coming up.

So that’s the whirlwind I’m currently cycling through. I keep trying to remind myself that once I’m through this week I won’t have to worry about college ever again…

But frankly that seems to freak me out more.

Instead I’ve been trying to drown out the incessant thoughts with more Games Done Quick speedruns.

Because seeing someone beat a game like Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door in under four hours is enough to really melt the stress away.

Tales from a digital voice

With the end of the semester coming up, we had our last big Society of Professional Journalists event today.

It was another guest speaker: Sonya Quick from the nonprofit Voice of OC.

Plus donuts. But the donuts unfortunately did not get into this Tweet I did:

.@FullertonSpj is hosting the @VoiceofOC’s digital editor @sonyanews to chat with chapter president @hmfaigen and students about her history with journalism, search engine optimization and making engaging content online. pic.twitter.com/uPKvUijcEg

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) April 17, 2019

This talk was slightly less hands-on than our last guest’s discussion of useful apps, but the focus toward online content engagement was certainly just as noteworthy.

Voice of OC has a strong recent history with CSUF and the Daily Titan. My old mentor Spencer Custodio is one of five full-time reporters for their newsroom, and my old News Desk Assistant Brandon Pho is a reporting intern there.

I was the middle generation that missed out on that family tradition I suppose. Gladeo got to me first, or I just might have considered it.

Getting to hear Sonya share some things she’s picked up during her time at Voice of OC, as well as other papers like the OC Register, was great.

One of her first comments was about the importance of being straight-forward:

“I’m an emotion on your sleeves kind of gal. If I have a complaint about something, I won’t hold back.”

— Sonya Quick, Voice of OC

She reportedly has not held back in the past, being responsible for manifestos that encouraged organizations to focus more on digital, and later mobile, reporting as those came into vogue (especially pertinent now, as she says that reporters should think with their phones first).

Yet, she also fielded a question from our Chapter President Harrison Faigen about how to not take editorial criticism too personally.

She said that taking things personally is not a problem unless it impedes your work, because the emotions show you care.

However, even more of an important point — and one that strangely echos sentiments I’ve gotten from my parents — was that the time to get concerned is when an editor does not read or critique your work.

The more effort they put into tearing apart your story, the more they care and believe you can be even better than you are.

“Our goal is not to impact decisions, but to get people involved.”

A number of other topics were on the docket for our hour-long meeting:

• She recommended hiring staff “by passion, not by skill,” as she herself did not know much about the digital world before jumping into it.
• Her two major rules for creating good search engine optimization in stories were:
  • Don’t scam people. Ever.
  • Write content people care about, especially “guide-like content” that can be built-up over time. Much more engaging than daily event stories.
• When making videos, she recommended editing them down to one minute each and focusing on pre-planning with storyboards to avoid overshooting.
• While for-profit organizations often only look at whether a reporter’s work garners clicks, she said Voice of OC looks at overall impact through shares, comments and other social engagements.

Then, as any good editor would, she plugged a great piece published that morning with a juicy DUI scandal going on.

There were a few other tidbits that made me laugh throughout her talk.

For instance, when I asked her about dealing with vitriol in those previously noted engagements she said she has had to wade through the “Seventh Circle of Hell” looking at the OC Register comment section.

But the really important takeaway would have to be what she said of being a reporter, in reference to many college students with Communications degrees leaving the industry early, or not going into the industry at all:

“You work long hours, you get little money and you get shit on almost constantly. But it’s awesome! And you have an impact!”

— Sonya Quick, Voice of OC

If that isn’t true love for one’s occupation, I don’t know what is.

Putting the “Pro” in “gamer”

With Finals and graduation and all of that terrible real life stuff on the horizon, I’m staving off imminent insanity in the only way I know how:

Video games.

Specifically, finally trying out that brand new Nintendo Switch Pro Controller I got for my birthday. Two months ago.

To be fair, I mostly haven’t used it up until now for two reasons.

First being the obvious fact that I just haven’t had a whole lot of time to play as the semester has progressed. But also I’m just a stubborn baby that tried to convince himself his janky left Joy Con was still usable, despite a significant drift.

In retrospect I don’t know why I was such a stubborn baby. The Pro Controller is actually a solid accessory!

Not only does it fit comfortably in my hands, but I appreciate the grips not being made of the same material as the semi-transparent body, meaning they don’t get covered in fingerprints.

However, I did immediately come across some trouble with the concept of using a more traditional controller for the Switch…

It doesn’t work with every game.

I notably found this out while trying to play some Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee with Aly.

She was complaining about the drifting Joy Con, so we tried to use the Pro Controller.

Turns out you can’t use it to do things like throw Pokéballs without the same gyroscopic technology, so they just didn’t add any functionality for the external apparatus.

Cool.

On the bright side, I’ve been able to properly try out the device with a pair of Indie titles I picked up again:

Both Wizard of Legend and Enter the Gungeon received recent updates, and I’ve been playing them to avoid slamming my head against a wall from all this work.

They both add a bunch of new content.

Wizard has a new locale called the Sky Palace (similar aesthetically to The Minish Cap‘s Palace of Winds, much to my nostalgic pleasure), new enemy types and a bunch of additional spells.

Meanwhile Gungeon got… Basically tons more of everything.

It’s amazing to me that such an already stuffed game has been filled with an almost imperceptibly large amount of extra content again. That’s good service if I’ve ever seen it.

The funniest thing about playing both of these titles in quick succession is how different the control schemes are, which makes it difficult to swap between the two.

For instance: In Gungeon, item pick-ups and general interactions are done with the “B” button, while shooting and dodge rolling are done with the triggers. But in Wizard, “B” cancels out all interactions and every action/magic command is done with the A/B/X/Y buttons.

But this difficulty context switching is only going to get worse tomorrow. Because we just found out that Nintendo is dropping the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate 3.0 Update:

Joker is finally here with all of his funky Persona 5 music (and a ton of really well-done fan service by the looks of things).

Sakurai is appeasing his hordes of complaining fans by adding the Stage Builder we all thought was gone. Now with moving platforms!

Clips can be edited together and posted online via the Nintendo Switch.

Move over Adobe Premiere Pro, turns out I could have been learning how to edit video in Smash Bros. all along! That’s the future of journalism.

Frankly the only “bad” part of this whole update video is the fact that no teaser was dropped for the next DLC character. Nintendo could have kept us strung along for years if they doled out teasers for new fighters one at a time.

Yet that’s not even a reasonable “bad.” The fact that all this content is coming deep into the game’s life-cycle shows it has a god damn ton of longevity.

It’ll be rough switching between all those control schemes, but it’ll be worth it.

Especially on account of all these memes:

joker's neutral special is literally "gun" pic.twitter.com/NAof0OWpgB

— Ültra (@Ultrashroomz) April 17, 2019

You’d be mistaken if you thought I wasn’t going to whittle my study time away building stages in Ultimate.

Even though the mode is based on drawing and I’ll probably be terrible at it.

At the very least I’ll try bringing back some Brawl classics for my friends and I to enjoy.

Who knows, maybe I’ll even introduce you all to the pit of death in the near future. We’ll just have to wait and see!

The hero Gotham deserves

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him… There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us — for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”

— Abraham Miyamoto, 193 B.C.

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Feh — Legendary Owl

• Feh’s Talons (Might = 999+, Range = 9+)
  • Grants Health, Attack, Speed, Defense and Resistance +99. “I can’t let them counterattack! No, I’ll be the one counterattacking… If foe initiates combat, regardless of foe’s range!”
• Feh’s Mimicry (Range = 9+)
  • “I’ll do my best impression of any hero. Well, if they don’t mind.”
• Eavesdropping Owl (Cooldown = 100)
  • “How I gather all of the juiciest information on Fire Emblem Heroes.”
• Feh’s Mighty Flat (A Skill)
  • Use wings to send target paper flying off the notification board.
• ??? (B Skill)
  • Target can’t help but watch what happens!

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It’S tImE tO dUeL

Int. Syst. decided to bring us to the Beanbean Kingdom’s Joke’s End by introducing the ultimate end-all-be-all unit for Fiber Inglewood Heroes today.

Feh. Slayer of Gods. Destroyer of Worlds.

Truly whomever bequeathed such a auspicious avian ally upon us mere mortals hath decided that we no longer need to play this dumb mobile game anymore.

Once everyone summons this non-simian, sort-of slithering sociopath with the beyond generous chance of 0% (as the Associated Press now allows percent in symbolic form), there will no longer be any need to play.

All quests will be immediately completioneted.

Hero Catalogs will be more full than me when I am full of fine meals such as:

1. A hearty boigor.
2. Ninety-nine individual green beans mushed into one super bean.
3. That gunk underneath the sink except if that gunk was actually a chicken masala.
4. Bees?

We will be free.

Finally free.

…

Free to pick out which fashion style we want our Bratz-tastic bird to bolster when bombarding enemy bases!

Hit it, Madam Couture:

Available costumes for Feh:

• Scorge of Dreamland
• Mitre Cap
• ORB™
• Freddy’s Big Birthday Bonanza
• Tiara
• Golden Mini Feh
• Rubber Duckie, you’re the One
• Markiplier’s Crown
• Bunny Hood
• Summer Lovin’, had me a Blast
• Hagrid’s Loud Noise Warning

The end is nigh.

Kiss your wife and kids goodbye, it is time to ascend into the aether of purgatory.

God is dead. We have killed him.

Long live the King.

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Editor’s Note:

April Fools?

This is how April Fools jokes work, right? Piggybacking off of a company’s April Fools joke to make a different joke?

I’m assuming the pre-conceived notion that I enjoy writing about Fire Emblem Heroes might make people double take at this weirdly set-up post and have a nice chuckle.

However, at the bottom of this jokey joke I wanted to seriously address my recent absence from blogging.

Chalk that up to a combination of a party in Fullerton I went to Saturday that lasted until 4:00 a.m. Sunday, followed by most of that Sunday spent shopping with my parents while playing Shantae: Half-Genie Hero.

I’ve already blown through three campaigns in the span of a day or two, and if I were you I’d expect a review of sorts within the next couple days.

Hopefully I’ll be better with my writing in general this Spring Break. I have a bunch of extra time that I’ll mostly be using for homework, but I want to keep y’all in mind too.

All I have to do is figure out things to write.

So, if you have any ideas, let me know about them somewhere on the Internet!

In the meantime, I’m off to catch some Z’s. Because I didn’t expect to be up so late making this joke post.

Merry Aprilmas, my friends!

My Magnum Opus

Ever since I booted up my old desktop Mac a few weeks back, I’ve written a few posts about some of the goodies I pulled out of it.

My personal favorite so far regarded the Super Smash Bros. wallpapers, which I tried to coincide with the release of Smash Ultimate.

Then I wrote about Armagetron Advanced, a game I really loved playing back in the day.

But I found a whole host of other things from the oughts and early twenty-tens, including elementary/middle school assignments, the first chapter draft of some fantasy novel I tried to write as well as memes or projects that provide a very distinct look at the kind of trash I loved growing up.

Oh, and when I say memes, I mean trashy memes all saved up on my desktop.

True.

Comedy.

Gotta love those old Memebase pulls.

Sifting through the garbage brought me to something that I ultimately came to refer to as my magnum opus. A project with so much love and passion put into a creative route I’ve since abandoned that it was actually astounding.

In my “fun stuff” folder, I found these three files partitioned off:

My immediate reaction was a hell of a cringe. Flashbacks to a true period of weeaboo sensibilities that left me doing things like watching all of Dragonball, Dragonball Z and Dragonball GT over the course of a few months in middle school.

True story.

Not only was there a “fan animation” based on Naruto, it was made in the primitive programming language animator Scratch.

Back in the day I used the program religiously, and even made some animations that went into official school broadcasts at Adams Middle School.

Also a true story, but for another day.

I couldn’t imagine anything good coming out of this animation from 2012 Jason… Yet I was blown away by just how great of a product I pulled together. So much so that I went through a lot of trouble to get the final (though unfinished) animation into a format where you all can see it today.

For your viewing pleasure, here it is:

First off, the fact that I didn’t remember spending a single second working on this until I found it again is such a travesty.

This was from that same era when I went to sprite animation camp like I talked about in the Smash Bros. wallpaper post, with all the sprites pulled from The Spriters Resource.

They were taken from a game called “Naruto: Ninja Council 3,” which to this day has some of my favorite sprite work in an old-school DS game.

I can say I confidently knew that because Ninja Council 3 is still a treasured part of my games collection:

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Now for those of you who don’t know, the video is based off the fifth anime opening to the original Naruto series. Crunchyroll has it uploaded here for you to see, and I’d recommend doing so to understand how much I tried to replicate.

It’s incredible to me how I actually grasped the concept of timing scenes to the music so well (mostly). I even went so far as to put the little floating heads in the sky to represent Sasuke thinking about his past!

I adore every second of it.

The journey to get this to you here today was far more complicated than it may appear, however.

It all began that night when I opened up the old Mac and watched this animation in Scratch for the first time.

As it turns out, the only way to pull projects off of Scratch was to go to the program’s website. Unfortunately…

That wasn’t much of a possibility for a computer that hasn’t been updated since 2012.

Thus the true quest to save my magnum opus began. At first I attempted to record it externally with my iPhone:

Needless to say I was not able to get the kind of quality I wanted out of this.

After a few more attempts, the best solution wound up being a QuickTime screen recording. That got the video in its purest quality!

However it wasn’t possible to do screen and audio recording at once through the older tech.

So… it’s a good thing I had the song file in that original folder!

Don’t ask me where I got it because I don’t know and it was probably illegal.

When I pulled everything onto my laptop, it became a 2 a.m. adventure to Frankenstein the video together with its original audio timing:

In iMovie, naturally.

Mind you, it happened at 2 a.m. during Finals week. Big tests coming up and here I was laughing like a maniacal idiot, cutting together an old Scratch animation from 2012.

Me rescuing six-year-old files from extinction: pic.twitter.com/r1oriGJosr

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) December 6, 2018

Should be asleep because I have class in a few hours, but instead I’m doing Frankenstein surgery in iMovie to try and revive an old animation I did using Scratch back in 2012.

The more I watch this over the more I’m convinced it is my magnum opus.

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) December 6, 2018

I’m glad I took a few weeks to get to this blog post because now that I’ve marinated on it, the whole situation is hilariously ridiculous.

But all worth it to finally get that finished project up on YouTube so I can show it off!

Except the process of getting it uploaded actually made the whole story even more ridiculous. Just thirty seconds after the video went up, I got this:

Sony Music actually blocked my video in Japan and demonetized it.

Which is such a shame, I was really looking forward to the ad revenue out of that video… On my one subscriber storage channel.

It was interesting to be on this end of the YouTube algorithm for once. Gives me a bit more of an understanding of how terrible this must be for creators who have their livelihoods contingent on the site.

For me, it just means any of my readers in Japan won’t see my magnum opus. Sorry!

All this being said, I’m really proud of 2012 me. He’s the kind of man I wish I was now.

I’ll never not smile looking back at this, because no matter how many awards and scholarships I get for my writing as a journalist, none of it will truly be as personal as the actual fan animation I made surprisingly well back when I was 15.

Now if only I had finished the damn thing.

 

Musings on what’s ahead

Again, life seems to have thrown me a bone with this whole pre-Thanksgiving Break school stuff.

My 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. class tonight was easier than usual, much like yesterday’s class was. Not because of the content of the class this time around, but because we miraculously got out in just an hour rather than three.

Okay well it wasn’t miraculous, I suppose.

The professor for my Visual Communications class is apparently a part of an administrative group set to appoint new professors in his department this semester. Part of that obligation means occasional meetings with the rest of that group.

Including meetings he was not previously aware of. Such as the one that he wound up having today during out class period.

Thus: Surprise! Only an hour’s worth of class before we were let out and allowed to roam free.

It always feels good to get home early on a day where I expected to be sticking around late. Especially when that gives me extra time to do the stuff I need to do, like edit a piece for Gladeo. Or edit a research paper proposal for my Evolution and Creation class. Or help edit an oral history project for my friend Tiana.

Apparently it’s just an edit-heavy kind of night.

After doing all that work I wound up sitting here close to 10:00 p.m. realizing I didn’t have any ideas for a blog post. Yet I didn’t want to just leave well enough alone, so I figured I would hike up my jeans and write… Something.

Anything.

Yet I mulled it over a bit and couldn’t come up with anything substantial. At least nothing I was willing to try to scrounge together in the next two hours.

Figured it would work to do one of my patented ‘deflecting my responsibility to write now by writing about the things I’m going to write about in the future’-type posts and call it a night. Get some Monster Hunter in or something before having to go to bed for my hematologist appointment in the morning.

Speaking of, that’s probably what I’m going to be writing about tomorrow. Not really because of the hematologist stuff in particular, since it’s just my (at this point) quarterly check-up.

Instead I think I’m going to write about a somewhat tangential point: My weight loss progress.

I haven’t checked my weight since my physical a few months back, so it’ll be good to see whether or not exercising regularly has helped out. Or it’ll be bad to see that exercising regularly has not helped, which will potentially completely demoralize all the progress I’ve been trying to make.

So that’ll be fun.

The day after that I’ll probably have a post about a tour at the Long Beach Post that I’m going on with the Fullerton SPJ chapter.

That should ACTUALLY be fun, hopefully. Not like the sarcastic fun I just joked about.

Once the weekend hits, I’ll see about finally hitting Toby Fox’s Deltarune. Maybe write something about that. The momentum of the weekend could also help me finally hit on a Monster Hunter-related post, regarding my current obsession with armor planning perhaps.

Next Tuesday I have a mandatory internship orientation. There might be something good to glean out of that for a blog post?

I don’t know, I’m kind of grasping at straws by this point aren’t I?

I’d rather not keep you all here for some random bs I’m cobbling together. So I’ll let you go free with a hopeful “come again soon!” like some kind of 7/11 exit sign.

…

Yeah okay I’m just rambling now. Good night, everybody.

English Papers from the Flip Side

Between going off to meetings in Fullerton and building somewhat mindlessly in Minecraft tonight, I kind of lost track of time and almost forgot to write a thing.

So I’m just going to take the easy way out and riff on something real fast and dirty that I’m finally seeing from a new perspective tonight: High school English essays.

English was probably my favorite subject in high school, which all things being equal makes sense considering the industry I was headed toward by working at the school’s paper for four years.

Don’t listen to young, naive Jason who’s ready to tell you math was my favorite subject in school. Because he’s wrong. Algebra was okay. But the geometry and the trigonometry and the calculus certainly were not.

One out of three classes does not a favorite make, you idiot. Stop lying to yourself.

But hey that’s enough self-reflection and self-flagellation for one night. Obviously that’s not what I’m here to do.

What I’m here to do is talk about English classes, all of which required just a ton of essays every year. Especially AP Language and AP Literature, both boasting the extra requirements of essays specific to the AP tests that were just… A lot of work. Like so much work. Like write three different kinds of essays in the span of an hour after answering 100 multiple choice questions kind of work.

Yet surprisingly enough, I’m not here to relive that nightmare either.

I’m here to talk about the basic weeks-long essays that happened throughout the year in every English class. You know the ones, those essays where one quarter would be focused on persuasive writing, followed by the next quarter focusing on argumentative writing.

I bring up all of this writing because tonight my sister was working on completing final edits for her research paper on how music can effect a person’s perception of restaurants/the meals they eat. Because let’s face it, she’s as one-track-minded about music as I am about video games.

Also just incorporated video games into my post about Aly again. #GotHer

Back in my high school English days, there were many a long night of staying up late with my parents to finish papers. Actual writing, editing for copy, creating work cited pages, and so on.

While I certainly did appreciate their help keeping me from going crazy at the time, I never quite realized how impactful it was to have a couple of good editors around to prevent me from going crazy staring at my own text for too long. My mom has always been the copy editor — now reflected in her career as a book editor (hint hint plug plug) — while my dad has always been the content editor, always good at framing things the right way.

Tonight I got the opportunity to really appreciate the impact of that work when I became both copy and content editor for my sister as my parents were out of the house.

Now you may think my seven years of experience working on newspapers, many of which have been in editorial positions, would have made this a quick-and-easy time.

If so, you too seem to not realize the vast divide that exists between writing short, informational print for newspapers versus writing elegant prose for English essays. Because they are entirely different beasts and switching back to the older style (older in my personal chronology anyway) is kind of a pain.

There were some noticeable benefits to switching back to English prose however, in my opinion.

I got to be more wordy and expand upon thoughts more verbosely, for instance. It has always been a criticism of my work that my papers tend to be too long or wordy, but after many years of focusing on becoming more concise to fit a newspaper format it was a lot easier to take the middle-of-the-road approach.

Not too long, but enough extra space to be able to elaborate on thoughts more readily.

I suppose there really is no good way to end off this short, kind of silly post because Aly has to turn in the essay tomorrow so I can’t resolve the cliffhanger of how well she did on it.

So instead I’ll just say… Thank you mom and dad, for dealing with me when I got so exhausted staring at a paper that you had to do 90 percent of the job by pushing me toward the correct ideas.

Because that’s basically what I had to do tonight, and it was… Interesting seeing things from the other side.

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Bonus content:

Enjoy Aly laughing herself into a coma as she seriously loses it trying to edit photos of chef Mario Batali into the powerpoint presentation she needs to accompany her essay.