Chill Relax Reflect

Audio Blog

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Audio Blog ♪

It’s time for the most laid back blog I’ve ever done on my site. This relaxed attitude also includes you as well, so make sure to check out the many resources I’m going to be throwing your way on every topic I cover this month. Since so many of you are visitors from around the world, I encourage you all to look into VPNs just in case any of my links are blocked or unavailable in your country. Let the chilling out begin!

It is estimated the world over that 10 to 30 percent of the population suffers from some time of insomnia or sleep disorder. That means 1 to 3 out of every 10 people (on the planet) have a hard time getting a good night’s sleep. I’m unfortunately in that statistic, as all my life I’ve had a hard time getting more than 6 hours of sleep on any given night. Napping therefore has become my crutch for the last decade of my life, and I’ve done my best to make sure what little sleep I get is quality. Although ASMR has been a relatively “newer” concept to help people relax and feel better overall, it also has been influenced to the point of making it a stimulant rather than a depressant. In other words, it’s hard to relax if you’re also horny, the byproduct of overzealous social media fad chasers and content creators. Thankfully before the influx of such content, white noise was a long established recommendation for helping to calm you down and help you relax or go to sleep. Therefore I’m recommending you a few YouTube channels (pictured above) to help bring that peaceful ambient sound into your bedroom, living room, and life so that you can perhaps find some more relaxing things to listen to while you wind down for the day. Although I don’t personally use social media myself, I know how it can keep people up for hours on end going down rabbit holes they never intended to go down. I humbly suggest my alternatives of watching a still scene with some beautiful rain sounds, or a person wandering aimless in the quiet outdoors as your new night time phone habits. You’re probably going to want to get a good pair of wireless earbuds to help facilitate this, which leads me to my next topic.

You ever heard of that prolific company that shall not be named on a random YouTube channel talking about how great their new wireless earbuds sound? If so, you also probably know those particular buds are awful for the price you pay for them. There are much better alternatives, and luckily for you there is a hard working individual out there that reviews these things as they are. He goes by the handle Scarbir and he has a website dedicated to TWS (Truly Wireless Stereo) reviews, specifically earbuds that have become commonplace all over the world now. What’s nice about Scarbir is that he keeps his site up to date and talks about products that cover a variety of use cases and not just overall sound. More to the point, he isn’t endorsed or sponsored by any one particular brand, so his reviews can be a little bit more open on flaws or points of criticism. It also helps that his product reviews are on buds that are on sale mostly on Amazon, so those who are interested in them can potentially have them delivered in a few days should the need arise. I’ve been using him as a source for TWS reviews for quite some time now, and for the purposes of white noise or ASMR, I highly suggest you take a look at his “most recommended for sleep” buds since they’re fit for that very purpose.

Some people like to relax by watching… other people. Strange as it sounds, sometimes loneliness can be a stressor to some individuals, and I understand that the feeling can be especially tough for extroverts out there. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that some people who are forced to be indoors for the vast majority of the day can get a little bit stir crazy, leading to all types of strange behavior that manifests itself in an unconstructive manner down the road. Thankfully as the world opens up a bit more and travel loosens up a bit, you can take solace that people half way across the globe are living their lives normally. The two live webcams I’ve linked you above are in real time, meaning what you see is actually what is happening at that very moment at their respective locations (if the video glitches out, just watch it on the YouTube channel instead for the latest feed). Why I linked you to these specific web cams is that they’re the only ones I found to be of high quality as well as intimate enough to see the expressions of people’s faces doing their day to day. I also found it occasionally humorous as you can sometimes find the random tourist, drunkard, prostitute, or wild animal in the shot. Humor in the absurd can sometimes being equally relaxing after all!

Bastet Statue (Venrose Design)

Artist is Kardie

Artist is Oughta

Last thing I want to mention about relaxing is creating a space in your house to unwind in. You can start off with a little corner of your bedroom, or you can do the entire room if you please. Personally I would recommend making a small “shrine” area to put things of interest you have as a focal point. You can always go back to this place whenever you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed or lacking focus to re-center yourself a bit. This probably sounds crazy to some of you I know (and I don’t blame you!) but you can totally make this a fun thing to do without going overboard into the superstitious realm. As a matter of fact, a lot of nerds for a long time now have “waifu” shrines in which they display their figurines as a sort of “trophy case” of their collections. I try to ground myself just a little bit to mainstream history stuff, so I recently updated my shrine area with a figure of Bastet. The point of all of this is to give yourself a visual (and tangible) new hobby unbound from the digital world that you can see and feel in the real one. I say this chiefly since I hear stories of folks dropping serious money into things they can’t even touch with their fingertips, and to me that might be a sign to take a step back and look elsewhere for “healthier” habits.

That’s a wrap for the “chill out” update! I’ll be back next month with some minor gaming stuff and hopefully more weird and interesting stuff around the web for you all. Take care and relax!

Sometimes Video Games And Japan Stuff

I’m not going to mix words with this month’s update; it’s going to be 95% primarily focused on video games and not much else. The reason being is because as a whole, March was filled with a lot of world news (recently in fact) that most people can’t stop talking about. And because I try my best to insulate this site from all of that, it’s near impossible to find the “good” stuff that I usually can share around the internet without running into a wall of commentary on subjects I have zero interest in. So what little I can talk about this month, I’ll do my best to make it as thorough and entertaining as possible. I promise next month’s update will be more diverse; hopefully as long as the world can just calm down for 2 seconds.

While doing my best to come up with stuff to talk about this month, I came across a YouTube channel called TokyoLens which has a lot of fascinating videos on various Japanese topics. Without diving into only pop culture related things, it was refreshing to see content that revolved around oddities and weird stuff that had to do with day to day life. Leave it Japan to make mundane things seem rather uplifting. So I’m going to be recommending a few videos from the channel your way with what I found interesting.

I’ve spoken upon the death of traditional arcades for quite some time now, and I’m not a “doomer” by any sense of the imagination. I’ve long accepted that time marches onward, the world keeps turning, and things change for better and worse. Still I am a sentimental fool for the days long gone, and the slow decline of arcades is a topic I revisit once in a while to see the progress of it all as it unfolds. Japan has always been the last bastion of traditional arcades, and even then the country has been slowly closing down its iconic game centers on a yearly basis. The following video will highlight some of the most dramatic closures of recent times, and even though the video itself is not even a year old - I’ve heard on the grapevine that even more places have closed since the start of this year (2022). Either way if you’re too young to know what an arcade is or too old to care anymore and have moved on with your life, I invite you to take a look at a “thing” that was once at the center of gaming culture.

I recently got into (and finished) my participation in the Nikke Closed Beta test I mentioned in my last mini post. The audio portion of the blog has the significant details of my adventures in it, but for brevity let’s just say I’m now even more hyped for this game after having my hands on it for a week. For everyone who just wants my impressions on it, the vided posted below by YouTuber SeanB mimics my sentiments about the game exactly. So in other words, he’s already done the work for me so I don’t have to. For the few folks that asked questions in my AMA post about the game, I’ll be answering them in detail on the audio portion of the blog. I have A LOT to say about this game, but not much to write about it since it would take an incredible amount of effort to get into writing all the little nuances of thought. So in other words, take a listen to the audio portion if you really care about Nikke at all.

Although Nikke is going to probably eat up all my time once it releases, there are still other games on the horizon that seem to hold promise. One of those games recently went into closed beta called Alice Fiction and there is a webiste you can visit for more information here. Video from some folks playing the CBT are below as well.

That’s it for this very (admittingly) strange update for April! Since it’s Easter month, I need to make sure to include some type of bunny or rabbit. So here’s Carrot from One Piece!

Artist is Tsampikos

Mellow Out March (NSFW)

Another year older and another year in the books. March is my birthday month and things up until now have been pretty sleepy outside of unfortunate world events. So during this downtime, perhaps it’s a good moment to take a look at some more slow burning topics before spring hits us full force. As always the audio portion of the blog is going to be much more detailed with nuance, while the written portion is brief with links to all the stuff I’m talking about.

I think we could all use some lighter news to start off March, considering the heavier things that have been going on. So I’m going to try and stick to lighter end topics and video games to smooth things over. Let’s start off with some pretty hardcore nerd stuff - right from the nerd capital itself in Japan! The following video is just a nice walk around tour of a store in Osaka called Den Den Town. I can’t imagine visiting a place like this without emptying out my bank account.

Going back in time a bit, one of my first videos on my YouTube channel was talking about a game called Planet Master. The developer at the time was simply called MIST, but now goes by MIST MSG. I’ve been in contact with MIST MSG over the years very briefly, but have always kept tabs on what has been happening with them since I really enjoy the games they make in terms of originality. Although nothing (of major note) has been released by them lately, I still wanted to shout them out for being great artists on the side! So for my monthly dose of lewd anime stuff, here’s some nice eye candy artwork courtesy of MIST MSG.

Artist MIST MSG

Although I retired long ago from the MMO scene, I still enjoy a relaxing slow paced jRPG from time to time. It’s really hard to find folks who are passionate about this genre without being overly invested into the franchises they’re sometimes based on. So I was glad to come across a YouTube channel that does a pretty good job talking about jRPGs in a pretty concise and informative way. In any case I hope you take a look at their backlog of videos if you’re also a fan of these type of games and perhaps you might find something up your alley.

Let’s get something out of the way that’s been in the news for a while. I don’t like talking about drama stuff in general (especially politics), nor do I like engaging in it for entertainment purposes. But there comes a time when something has to be addressed, especially since it has impacted so much news surrounding anything regarding pop culture and video games. It’s NFTs, and it’s slowly being considered by most the new taboo “N” word to say or mention. I’m not going to give you my take on NFTs, but what I am going to do is to give you a video to watch and to make your own conclusions once you’ve finished. It’s a LONG video, but as I said - it’s a slow burning month outside of world news. Learn yourself something and hopefully take away something useful from it. I know I did and everyone else that watched it.

Last stuff on the agenda is rather useless on the grand scale of things, but it has to do with my YouTube community tab. Some of you who visit that place often may have noticed that recently as of late, a lot of my posts will show up momentarily for a few hours before disappearing. I want to set the record straight that I absolutely do not delete anything posted there unless I say so in the post. To this date, I only ever have deleted one post that I forewarned would be gone after a while. Other than that, nothing has been voluntarily deleted by me. To this end, I’m constantly learning what I can and can not get away with on YouTube on a daily basis. And it seems to me that the things that I type in the post weigh heavily on what gets deleted RATHER THAN what image is posted. So in other words, if a post survives 24 hours, there’s a good chance it’s there to stay. In a nutshell, the number one thing I have noticed getting posts deleted is the fact that I mention something in recent news (a trending topic) or I link a site that YouTube deems to be “adult” orientated. This also includes social media sites where the author has tagged their profile as “adult” or “18+”, that would lead to the post being deleted. So from this point forward, I’m going to name the artists I post and give credit where its due, but unfortunately, I may have to start stopping linking to them. It’s a shame, but it’s the only way I can proceed forward without my stuff being thrown away. In any case, if you see a Goblin Shortstack girl in my community posts - that’s code for “my previous post got deleted, here’s a cute goblin girl”!