Well ladies and gentlemen, this is it: the final blog of 2015 from me!  To end this on a good note, I’m going to blog about some of the best things that happened to me this year.  What are some of the best things that happened for me this year?  I’ll start one off with something I hadn’t done in probably 8 years…

I remember when I was a kid, more specifically in the 4th grade, I had to draw something that represented what I had read and I remember reading a Sonic the Hedgehog book.  I have no idea where that book is now (let alone what it was called) and I decided to draw the way Sonic was shown on the cover.  To the amazement of everybody, including myself, it looked spot-on.  Ever since then, I had been drawing like crazy.

It was at some point in high school when I got sick of drawing my characters and always imagining how they’d look in color, so I started coloring my characters.  It got to the point where I was only drawing like 10 or less characters per year and I never understood why that was the case.  How did I go from drawing hundreds of characters to like 10% of that?  I finally realized later why that was the case: I was wasting time coloring my characters, retracing them and recoloring them so that the image would look good enough for my Canon LiDE 60 scanner; I’ll have to replace that scanner in the future.

As you can see, Mortal Kombat was a HUGE influence here.

Looking at my pictures folder, I had stopped drawing sometime in 2007.  One of the reasons why I stopped drawing was because my neck was in pain every time I drew and I couldn’t take it anymore.  I didn’t know if getting older had something to do with it or the fact that I didn’t have a drawing board or a drawing desk, but there were clearly some neck issues.

I did get a drawing board, but I still hadn’t drawn anything.  I also had a sketch pad, but I didn’t do anything with it.  In the early part of January of this year, with my perforated eardrum and the fear of sound, I needed to do something to occupy my time and the decision I decided to go with was draw.

The first thing I decided to draw was the Green Ranger boots from Studio Boheme.  To my surprise, it looked like not only did I still have it, but I drew better than I did before.

After that, I decided to do another challenge: draw the Green Ranger helmet.  You would think that I’d draw the helmet in my possession, but that one isn’t really accurate; I used an image taken directly from Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger that showed the detail of the Green Ranger helmet.  It was pretty decent, though I had trouble with the lips.  To any artist who can pull off those helmets, kudos to you guys!

I also decided to draw an updated version to some outfits I had for my created characters and you can tell by the design that I'm still a Mortal Kombat fan.

I also started to do something that also got me to quit drawing in the first place: the female body.  I don’t know if it was because I’m a male, but the female body had been too complicated for me.  With some women having fake body parts, it was hard to determine what was real and what wasn’t.  You know what the hardest part of the female body was for me?  It was basically any male comic book artists’ weakness: the breasts.  I had been drawing them like I did other artists and it never looked right to me when I did it.  It turned out there’s a good reason why: they were being drawn wrong in the first place!  Here’s a picture that shows how to draw different breast types and as soon as I get back to drawing, I’ll be using that picture as a reference point.

I hadn’t practiced the breast area, but I had practiced the butt area and I drew that area a lot.  I used Jade from Women of Wrestling, a pic of Tammy Sytch when she was getting her ass spanked by Dawn Marie with Angelica (bka Lita) holding her in the gut wrench position, a split pic of Melina Perez and a still of Mickie James being pinned in an OVW match against Jillian Hall.  Unfortunately for you guys, I won’t be posting those drawings here, so sorry about that.

Once new TV shows or episodes got back on the air, I stopped drawing and hadn’t gone back to it for some time.  I’ll have to remedy that at some point, but there’s one thing I forgot to mention: I didn’t have any neckpains at all while I was drawing!  The drawing board might have had something to do with it, but it was neat to be pain-free from the neck.

I’ve dabbled on about this for too long, so let’s move on to another thing that happened to me that was great…

I’ve realized that I can never go a year without upgrading some part of my PC, but for this year, it was a continuation of last year where I was upgrading as many things as possible.  Last year, I upgraded my case, motherboard, memory, hard drive, case fan and power supply.  For this year, I wanted to complete the cycle and get a new CPU, GPU, memory card reader, monitor and CPU cooler.  I didn’t get everything, but I still got some upgrades.

The first thing I upgraded was my CPU.  I wanted to go through all of 2014 without switching CPUs and I had accomplished that.  When the first full week of 2015 came, I purchased the AMD FX-6300 and switched out the AMD Athlon II X3 455.  When I was going to use my old PC for Lent 2015, I had realized that there was an empty PCIe x1 slot and no memory card reader for it.  I could’ve used my external USB memory card reader, but I felt like an internal one was better, so I bought an external memory card reader that has SBXC support and moved the old one to my old PC.

I had interest in the ASUS PCE-AC56 wireless adapter and I was planning on getting it in September, but since my old PC lacked a wireless adapter and the PCIe x1 slot was free, I moved my PCIe wireless adapter (Rosewill RNX-N150PCe) from my new PC to my old one and I bought the ASUS PCE-AC56 wireless adapter during the middle of the fast; being on the 5GHz network never felt so better!

In early July, I made one final upgrade to my PC for the year: my GPU.  As I’ve stated in the past, I went from the PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 to the Sapphire Tri-X R9 290 and I started playing games with this new combination.  To see what kind of games I played this summer, check out this blog.

I didn’t get a new monitor and the AverMedia Live Gamer HD because I didn’t have the time nor money to get them and I didn’t get a new CPU cooler because essentially, I didn’t need one.  The AMD FX-6300 runs cooler than the Athlon II X3 455 that a 92mm fan is good enough to keep the PC cool and quiet.  A 120mm fan would make my PC more quieter than it already is, but for right now, it’s not necessary.

While we’re on the subject of upgrades…

I remember back in the mid-to-late 90s when my mother decided that my brother and I should get new beds.  At the time, we were sleeping on a bunk bed split in two.  I loved that bed and didn’t want to change it for anything and one day, we went to a furniture store and saw some futons.  I remember trying it out and thinking that it was neat.  Apparently, that was enough for my mother to decide hey, let’s get these kids a futon.

I didn’t like the change, but I stuck with it.  Over time, I started to hate the futon some more because it was uncomfortable to sleep on and every time I slept on a hotel bed, it felt like bliss.  Hell, when I went away for school, it would feel great sleeping on a bed instead of the futon mattress!  Eventually, I would have to come back and sleep on that god forsaken futon.

Last year, I decided to do the one thing to my futon what I hadn’t done since the 90s: fold it into a couch.  When I did that, it made watching TV more enjoyable and it gave me extra room to exercise.  Once October came, something horrible happened: the hinges for the futon were getting bent out of shape; it was at the point where I could no longer fold the futon into a couch every day.  Oh well!  That meant I had to either get a new futon frame or try to fix the problem!

My futon was a metal futon and hinges on metal futons are weak anyway.  With metal futons, you can only have them on one of two ways: couch or bed; you can’t choose both.  I found out that info after disaster struck and I was doing research on it.  To make matters worse, the cost of hinge replacements were the same as getting a new futon, so getting a new futon I went!

While doing research on what type of futon I should get, I saw that wooden futons are the best choice for couch-by-day-bed-by-night futons and I went with that.  On January 17, I picked one up from a local black business furniture store, but was disappointed with the mattress.  The old mattress was a 6” thick mattress while the one that came with my new one was probably 5”; it was definitely thinner than my previous one.

Before I had gotten my new futon, I did research on what kind of mattress I should get for my futon frame and I saw that memory foam mattresses were my best choice, so I wanted to get that.  Since I didn’t get it, I looked online for one.  In June, I settled on one from eBay for a little over $160 and I couldn’t have been happier.  The only problem with this new mattress is that I bought an 8” mattress and it is HEAVY!!  It’s so heavy, I needed assistance to carry it.  It’s also so heavy, I need two hands to fold the futon into the couch position.  I’ll have to tighten the screws on the futon occasionally, but other than that, I’m happy with the much-needed upgrade.

Sticking with upgrades, this is the last upgrade section in a row I’ll talk about and then I’ll move on to other things…

With the surprise of my Sennheiser HD 415 headphones being pretty much dead, I wasted nearly $100 finding some replacement headphones.  I also spent another $20 or so on a new OTA antenna for DVR purposes, so I thought with that, I’d not be able to spend my saved money on some cosplay upgrades, but it turned out I was able to.

For this year, I had bought a replacement Green Ranger suit and some Blue Ranger boots from CosplayTree/Hunny_Lee and a replacement Blue Ranger suit from RavSeams/Raven Prior.  I thought I lucked out with 007Halu for my replacement belt since he went AWOL the last two months of 2014, but he came back in February of this year and he was making a limited belt run, so I jumped at the opportunity.

My Green Ranger suit and Blue Ranger boots arrived on January 28 and I was left with mixed feelings.  The Blue Ranger boots were the exact same size as my Green Ranger boots and they had the vertical stripe on it like I wanted, but the Green Ranger suit was a little too light on the green color and there was too much room for my grapefruits.  The suit’s an excellent secondary suit, but I knew I’d have to try out Halu in the future (which I’ve since did).

With my Blue Ranger suit, RavSeams/Raven Prior didn’t work on my suit until the week after Anime Central (I bought the suit in December, so I’m done buying cosplay stuff from that month) and I received it on May 28.  It was a little bit stiff to put on (since it is a 2-way stretch suit), but once I got it on, I was loving it; it’s too bad I couldn’t wear it at C2E2!  That part will be remedied next year for sure!

This next one I put down as a bad moment for 2015, but there’s some good that came out of it…

Reading up on the info about perforated eardrums, I had seen that it would take at most 8 weeks for an ear to fully recover.  It took me probably twice as many weeks before I felt the full effect.  The beginning was horrible: any sound probably over 20 decibels were causing pain to my ear, even if I was watching TV at a low volume.  The best solution I could think of was to put a cotton ball in my ear and wait until it felt better.

Every week, I could feel progress.  It wasn’t a big change or anything, but I could still feel it happening.  It was sometime in March when it started to feel like I could go a whole day without having a cotton ball in my ear and it was around that month when my PCs' noises didn’t bother me anymore.  With my current PC, I never had it on for the month of March because I was using my old PC for Lent and I didn’t get back to my current PC until April 5.  My old PC sounded quieter than ever, so that also became a determining factor into not getting a replacement fan.

In April, I believe my eardrum was fully recovered.  I was able to listen to music through my headphones again, but it had to be a slow process before I could listen to music again at a normal volume.  I was able to handle C2E2 2015 just fine and I didn’t get to listen to music the way I wanted to until June.  I’ll occasionally feel some sort of pain in my right ear when listening to music, but that’ll usually be my cue to stop listening to music.  Other than that, I’m fine!

Since I brought up C2E2 2015…

For this year, instead of going to two conventions, I went to three: C2E2, Anime Central and Wizard World Chicago.  With C2E2, this year’s event was by far the best one I’ve ever attended and to my surprise, Wizard World Chicago was on par with C2E2 and it was the best Wizard World Chicago I’ve ever attended.  Anime Central was different and I had a decent time there; I guess not being into anime other than Dragon Ball made things weird there.

I could explain more about my experiences there, but you can find my blogs of all three events and see what I had to say about them.  Moving on…

Ever since I had gotten my new PC, my old PC was just hanging around doing nothing.  I had thought about reinstalling Windows 7 and the drivers for all the devices in there and selling it, but I never got around to them.  Then on one night, I was DVRing Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and was surprised to find out that the recording ended a little too early.  Looking at the episode guide on TVGuide’s website, I saw that for the first time since the end of Season 1, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ended one minute later than usual.  That was a bad thing because Chicago Fire airs at 9PM Central and it’d mean a sacrifice would have to be made.

Not wanting to torrent an episode, it looked like I was going to have no choice since Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was going to end at 9:01PM for the rest of the season.  Sometime later, it dawned on me: I got an extra PC, an extra TV tuner (ATI TV Wonder HD 650), an extra monitor (my HDTV) and an extra antenna.  Since I was watching the NBA playoffs through cable, it meant that I could use one PC to DVR Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. while the other could record Chicago Fire.  That’s what I did and it couldn’t have come at a better time too since the season finale of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a 2-hour finale.

For this TV season, I’ve bought another antenna and my old PC now has a new purpose: DVR whatever TV show I’m not able to with my current PC.  It’s worked wonders so far; it’s tempting now to upgrade that old PC so that converting can be much faster.  And while we’re at it with TV…

I’m used to TV shows being cancelled and sometimes, they’re shows I really enjoy watching.  I enjoyed No Ordinary Family and I was also liking Ironside, but the fans and ABC and NBC didn’t give those shows a chance and they got cancelled mid-season.  With the 2014-2015 season, no TV show I ever watched got cancelled mid-season.

These were the shows I watched from beginning to end: Gotham, Castle, Fresh Off The Boat, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter, Chicago Fire, The Mysteries of Laura, Empire, Chicago P.D., How To Get Away With Murder, Backstrom, Last Man Standing, Cristela and Wake Up Call.  Out of all those shows, only two of them got cancelled at the end of their season: Backstrom and Cristela.

I was surprised that Backstrom lasted as long as it did.  Ever since the premiere episode, I thought the show was going to last only one more episode before it would inevitably be cancelled.  I hated the show too, but I kept on watching because it looked like on every episode, there was at least one hot ass there.  Slowly, I started to like the show and saw Backstrom back down a little from being a total asshole.  Like I said before, its cancellation wasn’t a surprise to me; Cristela’s on the other hand was.

I really enjoyed Cristela.  I hadn’t had a sitcom make me laugh hard every episode; not even Last Man Standing could do that and I love that show!  I guess it’s because of not enough Gabriel Iglesias why the show got cancelled, but it really sucked for it to be gone.  Oh well!  I guess it’s just Last Man Standing on Fridays again!  Actually, not just yet.

For this season, there are some new shows that caught my interest: Quantico, Supergirl, The Muppets, Chicago Med, Rosewood and Dr. Ken, the show that replaced Cristela.  I’ve been enjoying those shows so far and also so far, none of those shows have been cancelled.  As a matter of fact, here are the shows that have been cancelled for this season: Wicked City, Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris, The Player, Minority Report, Truth Be Told and Blood & Oil.  Out of all of those TV shows, I only saw the first episode of The Player, and the story was so confusing that it made no sense for me to continue watching just to try to make sense of it.  So far, fingers crossed for me and to the rest of the cancelled or soon-to-be-cancelled shows, nice knowing you!

Speaking of nice knowing you, the next one is a case of that…

Tom Thibodeau was our head coach from 2010 to this year.  He’s probably the second-winniest coach in Chicago Bulls history and the Bulls finished the 2014-2015 season at 50-32.  We made it to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2011 and haven’t made it back since, but we’ve always made the playoffs.  Despite all of that, his firing is on the good side of the blog instead of the bad side of the blog?  What did Tom Thibodeau do to make me glad he was fired?  Well, a lot of things, but one of them had nothing to do with how I felt.

First, his offense was a problem.  It was stagnant and it was pretty predictable.  With that slow-paced offense, the players couldn’t be explosive and I don’t recall any time an alley-oop play was done with his offense.  The biggest problem of his offense was turnovers.  Despite the fact that the Bulls were winning and had a great defense, we were in the bottom in turnovers per game.  I had seen so many turnovers from the Bulls, it was frustrating.

The second problem with Tom Thibodeau as our coach was minutes.  He would leave players out on the court for way too long, which would result in our players getting tired and letting teams come back to win.  If there was a blowout, he wouldn’t rest our starters or top bench players.  When Luol Deng played for our team, he led the league in minutes per game, but when he got traded, that was Jimmy Butler’s job.  Because he sucked at managing minutes, he had to go.

It’s probably because of the way Tom Thibodeau handled minutes why Derrick Rose has been injury prone.  So far this year, Derrick Rose hasn’t had any significant injuries, but under Tom Thibodeau, he couldn’t survive an entire season without having some big injuries.  Derrick Rose may never be the same player he once was, but at least he’s playing almost every game under Fred Hoiberg.

The last problem is probably what ultimately got him fired: his constant clashing with the front office.  Both sides couldn’t see eye-to-eye, but Tom Thibodeau would get away with it because the Bulls were at least winning.  When the Bulls lost their last game of the season against the Cavs, Tom Thibodeau was let go nearly a month later.

So far, I’ve been enjoying watching my Bulls play under Fred Hoiberg.  They pass better, they score better, they shoot more threes, they’re more explosive and they still play solid defense.  I’m disappointed with Tony Snell’s play so far (which makes me can’t wait for Mike Dunleavy to come back), but other than that, it’s been fun watching my Bulls play.

Ever since 2004, I’ve been using one pair of speakers for my TV: the Altec Lansing XA-3021.  I remember seeing those speakers being used at GameCrazy in 2002 and they sounded amazing.  11 years after owning those speakers, I couldn’t wait to replace them, simply because the noise coming out of them was annoying.

I actually meant to get those speakers replaced for years, but it looked like the only set of speakers I could use were 5.1 speakers and I didn’t want surround sound.  One day, out of curiosity, I looked up gaming speakers on Amazon and the first page had mostly 2.1 speakers.  I saw one set of speakers that I had in mind and I put it on my wish list.  On June 2, I finally bought my new pair of speakers: the Genius GX Gaming SW-G2.1 1250 2.1 speakers system.

The RCA cable that came with the speaker system was too short, so I used the cable that was used for my old speaker system, which was twice as long or maybe even longer.  The sound quality at first sounded better than my PC speakers, making me think that I should’ve used those speakers as my PC speakers.  Now, they sound just as good as my PC speakers and the noise isn’t noticeable; it’s almost non-existent! I had gotten these speakers just in time for the next set of good news…

I’m not that much of a hockey fan.  The only time I’ll watch hockey is if the Blackhawks make it to the Stanley Cup Finals; that’s what happened this year.  The team we were going against were the Tampa Bay Lightning and after 3 games, we were down two games to one.  I had hope that we would make a comeback and win and from then on, the Blackhawks won the last three games (with the last one at home) and we won the Stanley Cup; it was glorious!

I had noticed a pattern after the fourth game: every time the Blackhawks won, the Golden State Warriors won; every time the Cavaliers won, the Lightning won.  That coincidence went all the way as the Warriors won the Larry O'Brien after my Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup.  So far, I haven’t watched any Blackhawks game this season, but I’ve been watching my Bulls play and I like what I’m seeing with them.

This next one I was fortunate enough to have time watching…

When Daredevil came out on Netflix, I had interest in watching it, but I didn’t have a Netflix account.  I didn’t know if I was going to torrent it or get a Netflix account, watch Daredevil and then cancel my Netflix account.  One day, my brother gave me some good news: my father has a Netflix account!  All I needed was my father’s password and I could set up my username and watch Daredevil from there!  I didn’t watch Daredevil until August 10.

I had a plan for watching Daredevil: I was going to watch one episode per day.  It was kind of tough for me to do it, but I managed to watch one episode every day, with the exception of the final episode.  I would’ve watched the final episode on August 22, but I decided not to as I chose that day to watch SmackDown! and it was Day 3 of Wizard World Chicago.  Overall, I loved that season and it made me want to cosplay as that Daredevil.  Man I can’t wait for Season 2!

Next up was Jessica Jones.  I thought I was going to wait until next summer to watch the show, but it turned out that on the day it was to be available on Netflix (November 20), I was going to have nothing to watch.  Since I couldn’t think of anything to watch, I decided to go ahead and watch Jessica Jones.

I had the same plan for Jessica Jones like I did for Daredevil: watch one episode per day.  I can’t remember when, but at some point, I started watching more episodes in a single day than I thought.  I can’t remember when I reached the season finale, but on the last day, I saw episodes 11 and 12 during the day and watched the season finale at night.  The show, in my opinion, wasn’t better than Daredevil, but it was an awesome show to watch.

David Tennant killed the role of Kilgrave and I just loved how he screamed Jessica’s name.  It was a little disappointing that Henry Simmons played Mack on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. instead of Luke Cage here, but the guy who plays Luke Cage (Mike Colter) looks more like Luke Cage than Henry Simmons.  Kristen Ritter did a fantastic job playing Jessica Jones and it seems like every show Eka Darville’s been on (Power Rangers RPM shout out), he’s killed in the acting scene.  I can’t wait for Luke Cage’s show next year!

This next thing I hoped I would get by Wizard World Chicago, but I didn’t get it in time because of Wizard World Chicago spending…

The trimmer that I had been using for the past four years was a Wahl Peanut trimmer.  I didn’t notice one thing until it had started getting weak: it was always marketed as a clipper.  The trimmer would still cut, but it just wasn’t lining up my hair and facial hair like I wanted it to.  Because of that, I decided to do some research on getting a new trimmer.

The main thing I decided to do was finding out which trimmer works best for a black man.  After looking through some sites, it was determined that a T-style trimmer was what worked best, so I sought after one.  After doing some trimmer searching, I came across one that I liked: the Wahl Professional 8801 5-Star Series Detailer.  I bought the trimmer on September 30 and it is by far the best trimmer I’ve ever used.

Lining myself couldn’t have been any easier.  My facial hair was shaped up better and my hair lining was better than ever.  My worst hair lining with the trimmer still looked better than my best lining with the Wahl Peanut trimmer; also, it turns out I’m a Wahl guy.  Now I can’t wait until C2E2 2016 as my lining game will be on point…as long as I can replace my $20 Wahl clipper by then.

Sticking with upgrades, here’s one last upgrade I made…

I don’t remember how long it’s been since I’ve used my previous gloves.  Those gloves were so weak, it seemed like its only job was for me to not get my hands dirty.  My hands were freezing and cleaning snow from a vehicle resulted in me feeling the snow despite wearing gloves.  Since winter was coming, I decided to get those gloves replaced once and for all.

Since I’m an Under Armour guy, I decided to look at their website and see if they made winter gloves; it turned out they did.  I looked at the measuring chart to see what size fits me best and I saw that I was a large.  I went on Amazon and looked for some winter gloves and I found this pair of gloves.  I bought them on November 2 (sadly, the same day Tyshawn Lee was murdered) along with an Under Armour Cold Gear compression shirt and they’ve been magnificent.

Right when I put one glove on, I knew that my hands were going to be protected.  They felt comfortable and it felt like I could tackle the winter weather with no problem.  When it snowed one day, I put the gloves on and cleared the snow from the steps and the car.  The entire time I was cleaning the snow, my hands didn’t get cold at all; if they did, just very mildly.  In a weird way, I’ve rarely worn them this month as it’s been mostly fall weather here in Chicago: somewhere between the 40s and 60s, including this week!  Come next month or February, I’ll be ready for the winter weather again!

On December 15, Mozilla released Firefox 43 and one big feature they had was a 64-bit version of it.  I had been waiting for a 64-bit version of Firefox since 2011 and it’s finally here!  I wanted to add it to this blog, but I couldn’t because it hogs more than 400MBs of system memory when it’s being used, so I have to continue using Firemin for it.

Well, that’s it for this blog and that’s it for my blogging in 2015!  I had a good time blogging here and hopefully when next year comes, Livefyre will work much better than it has been currently.  Until next year comes, happy holidays and I’m out!

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to 2016!  I may be wrong with this fact, but I’ll say it anyway: IGN has made the blogging portion of their community available to the public for 10 years!  It doesn’t seem that long ago, but 10 years of errors and 2015 seeing a humongous drop in members getting involved with the community is outstanding.  Here’s another crazy thing: it’s how long I’ve been involved with the community, so you can expect my 10 year anniversary blog come April 5…if I don’t blog about C2E2 2016 by then.

Just like the start of 2014 and 2015, the first blog I will do will be things that I hope to accomplish for the year.  I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions as people change over time without there being one and I don’t plan to make my life miserable just to do one resolution.  With that being said, I’ve got seven things I hope to accomplish this year, with a couple of them being bold things.  I’ll start off with the usual…

I’m always doing some upgrades to my PC, so I don’t see how this year could be any different.  Last year, I wanted to get some stuff and I got all but two: a 1080p monitor and the AverMedia Live Gamer HD capture card.  For this year, those are the only two upgrades I want to make.

I have been a little bit conflicted with upgrading my backup PC, which is my old one.  Because I want my old PC to convert videos as fast or a little bit slower than my current PC, I’ve been contemplating getting a microATX AM3+ motherboard and replace my current memory with one that has a lower latency so that my current one could be used as the one for my backup PC.  There’s no telling if I’ll do that, but I’ll let it be known by the end of the year if I upgrade my old PC as well as my new PC.

This next one was on last year’s list too…

It’s thanks to Wizard World why I never picked up this cosplay.  The main concern I have with wrist passes, that’s not easy to remove without cutting it, is putting on the Spider-Man suit since there are no gloves.  I had seen one cosplay from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 that was around $200 and I was planning on getting that, but I’ve found some alternatives that cost less than that.

I’ve found two different suits that I would like to have: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and the Symbiote Spider-Man suit from Zentai-Zentai.  It would probably be a better idea to get the Symbiote Spider-Man suit since I’ve seen nobody wear that one in any cons, but I’m more in love with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 one.  Then again, I might not have seen anybody wear that suit before either, but I could be wrong.  I want to wear this suit for Day 3 of C2E2 2016 and this time, I’m determined to do so!  Hell, I might actually get both, so who knows!

This next accomplishment is something that requires me to get on Amazon, eBay or whatever site sells these things and buy them already…

I don’t know if I’ve said this before (I probably have), but I’ve never had any luck with N64 controllers.  Every N64 controller I’ve ever had had the following things happen to them: broken or missing, with broken being the most often one.  I’ve had my brother break one due to rage, I’ve had a couple broken because their outer shell was made of weak material and the last one had somehow gotten the daughterboard in it broken in half.  I’ve got no N64 controller right now and not playing my N64 really sucks, especially since this year’s the 20 year anniversary of the N64’s existence.

I’ve had some N64 controllers on my Amazon wishlist for years and I’ve never once put them in my shopping cart, let alone had the idea of putting one in my shopping cart.  Last year, I bought three N64 games that were either lost in my possession or stolen from a “friend” of mine.  I wanted to buy some N64 controllers while I was at Anime Central and Wizard World Chicago, but they were all third party controllers and I don’t trust third party controllers.  This year, I want to end that drought and buy at least two N64 controllers.  While I’m at it, I want to buy the Expansion Pak for it as well.

This next accomplishment will be the first of three bold moves for me…

This one is a really bold move for me for two reasons: Livefyre doesn’t make getting involved any easier, especially since it’s the #1 reason why many people who were here in 2014 were largely absent in 2015.  The other reason was because prior to Livefyre, I wasn’t that much involved as is.  As a matter of fact, I blogged less in 2015 than I did in years past, including the year that I quit Club IGN back in 2008.

I don’t know how exactly I’m going to get more involved, but one thing’s for sure: I can’t force myself into getting involved.  I tried it before and it didn’t pan out.  Hopefully over time, before the year ends, I want to take a look back and see that I’ve gotten myself more involved with MyIGN this year than I have in 2015.

One great way for me to increase my involvement is by publishing more blogs.  Last year, I had some blog ideas and I typed them out, but I just didn’t feel like they should’ve been posted; it’s because of that why the next thing is the next accomplish I want to make…

There are quite a lot of blogs that I typed on Microsoft Word that never got posted online.  I actually found out late last year that I’m not even the only one who does that (militaryveterangamer does too, but way more than I do)!  Last year, there were more blogs that went unpublished than before and I plan on posting them this year…..well, not all of them.

Some of the blogs I did, I don’t feel like they’re worth posting online, but you guys can try to prove me otherwise: if I can get five people who want to see a certain blog I don’t want to publish, then I’ll go ahead and publish them.  I’ll let you know what those blogs are right now, so let’s see what blogs I failed to publish last year:

STORYTELLING SERIES:  This one was my absolute favorite set of blogs that didn’t get published.  I’ve been meaning to get this blogging series published for a while, but I went lazy with it and never wanted to publish it until it was pretty much too late.  I’m not going to tell you what those blogs were because I’m making it a mission of mine to post this series this year; I’m not even going to label them Unpublished 2015 blogs as that’s how much I want to get this blog published!  At some point this year (maybe even this month), this blogging series will be told!

All I can tell you about this series is that there had been a pattern in storytelling in Hollywood, comic books and videogames that made me upset and this series tells you different things I think the entertainment industry is doing wrong and I offer solutions on how to make them better.  I think somebody on here had done that already years ago, but I’m putting my own spin on it.  Be on the lookout for this one!

3 Movies That Didn’t Deserve The Hate They Got:  This one is pretty much one of the blogs I don’t plan on publishing, simply because I might receive some backlash from it since one of those movies is Batman and Robin.  The other two movies I had up there were The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Super Mario Bros.  If you’re in anger right now, you’ve proven my point.

Let’s Talk About PC Overkilling:  This is a term that has been, in my opinion, overused within the PC community.  It makes me feel sorry for those being new to PC building and such, so I took some time and did this blog to go over the aspect of overkilling.  This blog I definitely want to post this year since I love the term PC Master Race.  And while we’re at it with PC Master Race…

Trying to Understand Unnecessary Overclocking:  For years, I’ve heard about overclocking and could never understand why people who didn’t need to overclock were overclocking.  This was a short blog and I don’t know if I’ll post this in the future.  If I do, I’ll let you guys know.

My Built-Up Anger Towards GameCrazy Explained:  I had discovered years ago that I forgive people faster than I forgive businesses.  It took me forever to forgive Jerry Krause for breaking up the Bulls dynasty (or rather, it took me years to not get angry thinking about it), but it took me a very long time to forgive GameCrazy.  I hated the store because it denied me the opportunity to buy a PS2 controller from there simply because I was under 18 and I bought Tekken 4 from that store two weeks prior with no problems.  Even though it’s gone, I still hadn’t forgiven GameCrazy for that stupid policy; this blog explained the process I went through and it was that blog that actually got me to forgive GameCrazy for that boneheaded decision.  Oh, and I do plan on releasing this blog sometime this year too.

What Does A Stereotypical Female Gamer Look Like?:  This one I’m really on the fence about posting.  I think we’ve all gotten an idea about what the typical male gamer looks like, but we’ve never thought about what the typical female gamer looks like; are we really at the mindset that female gamers exist at all?  This blog delved into what she could possibly look like.  If 5 people want this blog to be published, then I’ll go ahead and do that.

Why I’m Angry At AngryJoe:  Area51 by Alienware was bad enough for AngryJoe; he had to make matters worse for me by showing how much he didn’t know about PC parts.  Basically, he showed his true colors by not being the type of guy who builds his own PC.  I’ll talk about that more on the blog and I do plan on posting this one.  One last blog I didn’t publish is…

Why People Don’t Work Out When They Should:  This is one of those cases of unless you’ve been there, you have no idea.  Now that I think about it, since it’s the start of the new year and losing weight is one of the popular New Year’s Resolutions, this blog should be the first blog I post after this one as I do give an idea as to why weight loss or rather, the mindset of losing weight doesn’t get inside people’s heads even though they need to lose the weight.

I can see two blogs I don’t plan on posting (3 Movies That Don’t Deserve The Hate They Get & What Does A Stereotypical Female Gamer Look Like?), but the rest I do plan on posting this year.  Since I don’t have that many blogging ideas for this year already, this should be an easy goal to accomplish; let’s hope it is that way by the end of the year!

This next accomplishment is something that requires a question mark as I didn’t have this planned at all until the start of this year…

The reason why I put this in a question mark is because I installed Windows 10 on my old PC with the laptop hard drive that came with my PS3 and I actually like it; I like it enough that I’ve installed Windows 10 on my old PC’s main hard drive since I’ve discovered that all my hardware that don’t have Windows 10 drivers will still work on Windows 10 with Windows 7 drivers.  A couple things I don’t like about Windows 10 off the bat: updates, the lack of Control Panel as a menu at the start menu and fast boot.

With updates, there’s one big update that took my old PC TWO HOURS to install; that’s more than twice as long as the installation of Windows 10 itself!  The first edition of Windows 10 I didn’t like, but the update made it more bearable.  I miss an opening chime by default and a closing chime like the Windows before it, but it’s not that much of a big deal.

I know Settings is in the Start Menu, but I like Control Panel being there better as with my custom option, I like to set Control Panel as a menu so that I can easily access Device Manager, Power Options and Programs and Features.  Without that ability, I have to jump through hoops in order to access those features and I don’t want to miss that at all.  If Microsoft can bring that ability back to Windows 10, then maybe I’ll upgrade my main PC to Windows 10, but until then, I’m sticking with Windows 7.

With the last problem, I cannot stand fast boot.  Every time I shut the computer down, it takes my computer longer to shut down than on Windows 7 and I couldn’t understand why.  Then, when I turn the computer back on and I take a look at the wireless signal, it says that I’ve been online as long as I’ve first turned the computer on.  Why was that the case?  It turned out that fast boot is another form of hibernation, which I sometimes do with my PC, but never when I’m about to go to sleep.  With fast boot, the only way how PCs can properly shut down is if you restart it, which is ridiculous; that’s the one feature I wish Windows 10 didn’t bring with it from Windows 8.

There is a way to disable it though without the UEFI menu (since my old PC is not a UEFI motherboard): turn it off from the power option.  When you get to the power settings, click on “Choose what the power button does”, click on changing settings that are greyed out and uncheck fast boot.  PCs nowadays don’t need fast boot as their booting is fast enough as is, so I don’t need it on by default.  It’d also be nice if Windows 10 didn’t auto-update without our say too!

The last bold thing I want to do this year is…

I know I could’ve gotten a DSLR, but those things are pretty expensive; I’m not even the type of guy who wants to play with different types of lenses just to get a certain shot.  I really love my point-and-shoot Canon PowerShot ELPH HS 110 camera and I don’t plan on replacing it anytime soon, but I do want a camera that can shoot videos at a pretty good quality.  I had used my Canon PowerShot ELPH HS 110 camera for my Power Rangers cosplay review series and I’m planning on doing more costume reviews, but I want to do them with an actual camcorder.

I don’t have a particular camcorder in mind, but I definitely want one that can shoot at 1080p really well.  I did plan on getting a camcorder last year when I wasn’t doing that much blogging, but this year I really want to since I posted more videos last year than in years past.  If you want to see what videos I’ve posted on YouTube, you can go to this page and subscribe if you want to; just be warned that I’m not going to post that much on there since I like blogging more.

That wasn’t much, but from my own eyes, this should be the easiest set of accomplishments that I hope to make this year.  Did anybody notice I didn’t put Get A PS4 on that list?  That’s because I’ve given up wanting a PS4 since there’s nothing there that interests me.  If I change my mind on that area, I’ll be sure to let you guys know.  Until the next blog though, I’m out!

I've created this blog nearly 10 months ago and never found the time to post this blog.  Thanks to this being the new year and one of the New Years Resolution people always have is that they'll lose weight.  The problem with that resolution is that it doesn't take long before people give up on it.  Why is that the case?  Thanks to this blog, I'll tell you why that's the case.  Enjoy!

There’s one thing I hadn’t noticed about myself until a little while ago: I had always been an athletic kind of guy.  When I was a little kid, I did some gymnastics (flips into soft objects are fun) and I had the love of wearing my yellow Superman tank top (I still have a love of sleeveless shirts by the way).  I did get fat while growing up in elementary school, but one of my favorite classes was gym.  Gym was my favorite class because we got to have fun doing stuff.  I never did gym in my own house, but that was because there wasn’t any room around the house to do fun stuff with.

If we had Super Soakers or Nerf Guns, that would’ve been fine.  I do recall having Slip N Slides, but those things never worked as they were supposed to.  I remember my father taking my siblings and I to a racing track for track and fielders to ride our bikes around the place.  I also remember wanting to have a basketball rim with a basketball in our backyard because I wanted to be an NBA player when I grew up (Michael Jordan for ya!), but that never happened.  Actually, we did have a basketball, but never a rim.  There’s a park west from my house that has a couple of basketball rims, but I never frequented there and being a kid living in the South Side of Chicago, that was a risk I couldn’t take, let alone bother to try.

Once high school came around, I was no longer fat (actually, I was no longer fat sometime during 7th grade), but I still wanted to attend gym.  Even though I had the option to pick my classes, I never applied for gym for one reason and one reason only: it was half credit.  Other classes were full credits, but if I had taken gym, I could’ve ended up graduating a year later than expected and I couldn’t take that chance, so I didn’t attend gym at all.

When I went to college, I could’ve gone to other gyms to play some basketball, but since I didn’t have a basketball with me and my roommates didn’t bring one either, that ended all hopes of me practicing my shots.  In a way, I pretty much settled with not taking part in any physical activities.  I could’ve done some workouts, but I didn’t do so because in the past, it was painful and I hated it.

Before the summer of 2012, one of the things that fascinated me were some Under Armour commercials, mainly the Protect This House ones.  Here’s one for example…

I couldn’t believe how awesome those guys looked in their sleeveless Under Armour shirts.  I wanted to wear one of those shirts someday, but I never acted on getting their shirts because I wasn’t in the right shape for them.  I was in decent shape, but I wasn’t in great shape.  I knew what it would take to look right in an Under Armour shirt, but I never acted on it because I was just too damn comfortable being who I accepted myself to be, not knowing that I was putting my own health at risk.

Commercials like what you saw above had been playing every NFL season and each time, I wanted to wear an Under Armour shirt.  Once 2011 came, that was the start of things changing for me.  When I had visited the doctor for the first time in years, I had found out that I had Stage 1 hypertension.  I preferred the term hypertension over the other term high blood pressure as HBP sounded a lot scarier than hypertension.

I pretty much did everything I was supposed to do to get my high blood pressure down: I took less sodium than normal (around 1500 mg because that’s expected for blacks, but I’ve read reports that taking that much can actually kill you), I exercised everyday, I checked my blood pressure daily, and I tried to stay calm.  Unfortunately, every trip to the doctor’s office would result in me still at the same level of HBP as I was the last time, with an accelerated heart rate on top of that.

I was at 177lbs at the time and I was three pounds away from my target weight of 180lbs.  When I had received the health scare and did everything I was supposed to do, I went down to 169lbs and I stopped after that.  I not only stopped because I was losing weight, but I also stopped because my HBP wasn’t low enough to not get medication for it, which I ended up having to do.

The medicine that I took did lower my heart rate and it did lower my blood pressure at home, but at the doctor’s office, it was a whole different story.  The heart rate was acceptable, but the HBP levels were lower, but still the same.  It was a frustrating experience for me and it made me want to quit going to the doctor’s office.  I eventually did, but it was for a different reason which I won’t get into.

When 2012 came around, that’s when things started to change for both the good and the bad.  It started off with the bad: I was feeling my heart racing after every meal and when I would go to bed.  I didn’t know if it was because my body was used to the HBP medicine that it was showing withdrawals or whatever the case may have been, but I couldn’t solve the problem at all.

My pastor had came up with an idea for that year’s Lenten season with 6AM-6PM no food and I was originally going to take a pass at that idea.  Because of my heart problems, I decided to go ahead and give it a shot.  It did help me to stop feeling the heart rate after every meal, but it didn’t help me with the heart rate feeling every time I went to bed.  Every day that it was happening, I thought that I would never wake up one day and die of a heart attack or something, but as you can see, that hasn’t happened, at least not yet.

When the fast had gotten started, I was at 171lbs.  When the fast was over, I went all the way down to 160lbs.  I can’t remember if it helped with the HBP or not, but I was at my ideal weight (since I am 68 inches tall), so that might’ve helped a little.  It still didn’t solve the feeling-my-heartbeat problem and I never solved the problem until my very first comic convention C2E2 2012.

After two nights, I had decided to take the top pillow off and sleep with one pillow and that instantly solved my feeling-my-heart-rate problem; I should’ve slept with one pillow instead of two!  I had a great time at C2E2 2012 and the cosplays that I had seen made me want to take part of it.  I was of course horrified to see that the best cosplays are in the triple digits in terms of price, but it’s not like I’ve never done something like that before (PC parts and game systems).

Being uncomfortable with my body, I wanted to cosplay as somebody that didn’t show the out-of-shape parts of my body and the cosplay I wanted to do was an Engineer from Mass Effect 2.  I didn’t see the boots, but I could buy some black military boots and get ready for the next C2E2, but as of now, that has never happened.  It was going to be a “cheap” cosplay and I had one whole year to save the money for it.

After C2E2 2012 was over, my brother sent me a link to a Facebook page of Wizard World Chicago and I saw that it was going to take place all four days before my birthday.  I wanted to go and I had to figure out which cosplay I was going to do since I wanted to cosplay.  After much thinking, I finally had my answer: Super Mario!  I decided to cosplay as Super Mario because I already had two white gloves from two different funerals where I was a pallbearer and I already had some brown boots.  All I needed were some overalls (something I hadn’t worn since I was a kid), a red shirt and a Super Mario hat.  With the shirt, I decided to do something different: wear a sleeveless shirt!

Since I wanted to wear a sleeveless shirt, you already know which shirt I had in mind: Under Armour.  Before I had gotten the remaining items, I decided to imagine myself wearing the cosplay I wanted to wear and I realized that my arms were too out-of-shape to make the cosplay work.  So, what did I decide to do?  I decided to try to get myself as ripped as I possibly could in a short amount of time.  I knew that I could possibly not get ripped in time, but I was okay with it; I just wanted to get myself in shape in time for the con!

By using a tip from eHow, I exercised every day except for the weekends.  Within two months of exercising every day except for the weekends, even though I was still 160lbs, I felt a whole lot lighter than before.  I could breathe easier, I could move easier and my overall health felt better.  Also, I could physically see the change with myself; I was looking better than ever!

When Wizard World Chicago 2012 happened, I was nervous: I didn’t know how people were going to react to a black guy dressed up as Super Mario with no sleeves.  Overall, people loved it!  I didn’t know how in-shape I was at the con until I looked at photos of myself there and that’s just with a crappy camera phone!  Knowing myself, I was going to go back to the bad habits I had been going through for years and I didn’t want to go back to that.

I tried to come up with a reason to continue working out as staying healthy wasn’t a good enough reason.  I tried going to the doctor as being the reason, but that didn’t cut it.  Two weeks after Wizard World Chicago 2012 ended, I finally came up with a solution: be a Power Ranger at C2E2 2013!  That idea worked and I started to get good news at every doctor’s visit, especially when I learned that HBP medicine was no longer necessary!

When January 2013 rolled around, my thought process had changed: I was no longer working out on a continual basis for cosplaying reasons.  Instead, I was working out because it became a habit.  Cosplaying does help and I enjoy doing it very much, but it’s no longer a concern of mine when it comes to working out; now it’s if I even do it.

I still work out right now, with the changing of routines as expected, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.  It was after going through all of that when I experienced something I never thought I’d experience before: being on two different sides.  I’m sorry for the long testimony, but I felt like it was necessary to bring up a point: in order for somebody to lose weight and/or get in shape, they have to find a motivation to do it.

I’ll admit: being a fitness guy, I would get upset when I would see some out-of-shape people not working out or not even trying to work out, even when they know that their health is at risk.  I would wonder to myself why are these people not doing what they’re supposed to do?  Don’t they know that they’re putting their lives on the line with their way of living?  But each and every time, I would have to go back to my experience and it’s thinking too much about it that caused me to do this blog.

I know why people don’t work out or live a healthy lifestyle when they should: their way of living is too damn comfortable.  It’s so damn comfortable that we would do everything in our power to keep it that way, even when we have to spend so much money just to keep it that way.  Looking at before-and-afters and seeing some well-fit people aren’t going to do it for us: it has to be something that happened in our lives that causes us to want to change.

It doesn’t even have to be weight to be an eye-opener: it can be smoking, sex, drug addiction or anything else that’s considered sin.  We know what we’re doing is wrong, but we can’t stop it or we won’t stop it for one reason and one reason only: it feels so damn good.  In order for us to stop, there has to be a direct negative affect on us to get us to open our eyes and see how our sins are affecting not only ourselves, but other people as well.

Going back to weight, what got me to open my eyes was when they were ironically closed: the imagination of me in a cosplay caused me to change my daily habits.  For Monique, it was her husband telling her that he didn’t want to lose her because of her health.  With The Biggest Loser contestants (a show I no longer watch thanks to Rachel Fredrickson’s final weigh-in) and Chris Powell’s clients on Extreme Weight Loss, there are different breaking points that causes them to partake in those shows.

We can’t force people to lose weight and we can’t make them want to lose weight.  Bettering life for others doesn’t really do anything, but bettering life for self is the way to go.  It took me a long time to finally understand that and I will pass no judgments on people if they don’t want to change their life for the better; it’s their choice and they’re allowed to do so, even if they know the consequences of picking said choice.

I had always wanted to do a motivational blog and this was at the very top.  I’ve been nervous of doing it for a while because of what people might think about it.  But you know what?  I shouldn’t care what people think about how I’m delivering the message as the message itself is most important.

Did anybody get the message?  Did they get inspired to want to change for the better?  I wouldn’t know unless one of those people tells me in the comment section or anywhere I’m available to be reached.  If I have another blog in my system that has to deal with motivation, I’ll post that.  But until the next blog, I’m out!

I’ve said before that I’ve been playing videogames ever since I was 7.  There was something else I had done when I was that age and it has never grown out of me: watch wrestling.  I’ve seen the heydays of wrestling and I’ve seen the lowlights of wrestling, but there’s one thing that I have to accept: I’ll always be a wrestling fan.  I do wish the WWE would be like it was back in the Attitude Era (not fully mind you), and there’s one thing I wish the WWE would do from the Attitude era that worked so well: give their wrestlers the opportunity to succeed.

Lately, I have noticed one thing that has hurt their ratings: not build wrestlers that fans love or love to hate.  In this blog’s case, it’s somewhat the opposite: wrestlers whose momentum was killed by the WWE themselves.  Most of those wrestlers I have no idea why WWE would ruin their momentum and one of them had their momentum killed for a ridiculously dumb reason.  Without further ado, here are the six WWE wrestlers whose momentum was killed by the WWE, starting with…

This is not going to be in chronological order, but I really have to start with Muhammad Hassan because this was when I started to notice WWE killing the momentum of their “superstars” for whatever reason.  Granted, some controversy led to the momentum killing, but how it was handled was really dumb.

Muhammad Hassan was an Arabian wrestler who was being sick and tired of being labeled as a terrorist because of what happened at 9/11.  With his sidekick Khosrow Daivari at his side, he was on a quest to show the hypocrisy of the American people and how they treated people like him and Daivari.  Even though the person portraying Muhammad Hassan was actually Italian, he did a fantastic job at getting the crowd to boo him.  Wait, Muhammad Hassan was a heel instead of a face?  It may sound dumb now, but back then, it seemed to be the logical thing to do.

On one day during a SmackDown! show, Muhammad Hassan had a rivalry with The Undertaker and he had some henchmen with black hoods jumping him.  It was a move that you would see a “terrorist” do, but it was a heel move fans have seen time and time again.  That segment was unfortunately seen in poor taste as it happened at the worst time imaginable: the same day as the London terrorist bombing.  Since SmackDown! is taped on Tuesdays and SmackDown! was airing on the day of the incident, there was no way to edit the segment out in time, so the consequences had to be made.

Since SmackDown! was airing on then-UPN at the time, UPN wanted Muhammad Hassan off of TV and we had never seen Muhammad Hassan on TV ever again.  A talking segment was done the following week that was only aired on the internet where Muhammad Hassan addressed that situation, but after that, we never saw Muhammad Hassan ever again.

Since SmackDown! and Raw were separate shows at the time, it would’ve made sense for the WWE to move Muhammad Hassan back to Raw and keep his momentum going, but instead, they released him.  They kept Daivari and he went on to have a good run in WWE before being released and moving onto TNA, but Muhammad Hassan couldn’t wrestle ever again.  Actually, that’s not true: he could still wrestle if he wanted to, but he chose not to and retired right then and there.  Last I checked, he’s a high school vice principal now; the complete opposite of Matt Striker!

With Muhammad Hassan, the WWE probably released him to save face, but only to bring him back once the situation died down and he could rebuild his momentum.  If that was to happen, who knows what would’ve happened to Muhammad Hassan, but as I’ve said before, he retired from wrestling after that, so those plans were squashed.

The rest of the wrestlers on this list are still with the WWE today, but it’s still sad that these wrestlers’ momentum were killed by the WWE themselves.  I’ll start this part off with the wrestler with the biggest momentum ever, but got killed off by WWE…

Woo woo woo!  You know it!  The Long Island Iced Z had created a name for himself after the Z! True Long Island Story series on YouTube became popular, but for some apparent reason, WWE never wanted this guy to succeed.  It still baffles me to this day that WWE would kill every momentum Zack Ryder had.

When he first came to the WWE, he was partnered with Curt Hawkins and they were The Major Brothers.  I had a hard time telling those guys apart with their long, blonde hair, but the WWE decided to end The Major Brothers all because they weren’t real brothers.  Undertaker and Kane aren’t real brothers either, but WWE’s still going with that kayfabe; hypocritical much WWE?  Anyway, let’s move on.

After being one of the Edgeheads with Edge and having his own run that went nowhere, he was sitting at home doing absolutely nothing other than getting a paycheck.  Looking to kill some time and not caring if he was going to get fired or not, he started a YouTube show called Z! True Long Island Story and overtime, he blew up.  He was getting so famous that fans wanted to see more of him on regular WWE programming.  With the momentum that he built up for himself, the WWE had to oblige and give Zack Ryder his due.

Zack Ryder was a heel when he started Z! True Long Island Story.  Thanks to the show, he turned into a face and he eventually became the United States Champion.  He was never going to be main event material, but with the right push, he could’ve been a great sensation for the WWE universe.  Then, something terrible happened: WWE moved the Z! True Long Island Story series from his Long Island Iced Z channel to their channel.  Fans were pissed about that because they knew his show was going to tank from that move and that it was a move to kill Zack Ryder’s momentum and that’s exactly what happened.

Losing the United States title was to be expected.  His show lacking the quality it used to have was to be expected.  The show eventually being retired was to be expected.  What wasn’t expected was for the WWE to turn Zack Ryder into a jobber and rarely having any appearance on TV; basically, putting Zack Ryder right back where he started before Z! True Long Island Story.

Just thinking about Zack Ryder makes me angry at how WWE treated him.  I don’t know what it is they don’t like about him, but killing his momentum is one of the reasons why WWE’s ratings have been downhill lately, with their lowest ever being this past year.  Oh, that reminds me: there’s another wrestler who went through something similar to Zack Ryder and his momentum was killed last year, which helped contribute to WWE’s lowest ratings ever at that time…

This guy is actually in his second stint with the WWE right now.  On his first stint, he was Idol Stevens and I wasn’t watching wrestling (or not that much) during his entire run as Idol Stevens.  Then, when he came back, he was The Intellectual Savior of the Masses.  He had been that for a while and then, all of a sudden, the gimmick was dropped and he wasn’t doing anything.  Sure, he won the Money In The Bank contract one year and cashed it in on a return-from-tricep-injury champion John Cena, but he became the first official person to cash in his Money In The Bank contract and lose.  Despite the loss, Damien Sandow looked like he was going places; WWE just never knew where to go with him.

For a while after being irrelevant again, he was doing imitation work.  Every match he competed in, he was dressing up as different wrestlers or different characters outside of wrestling.  That was going somewhere, but it really didn’t resonate with the audience.  One day, when The Miz came back from a movie, they had him doing the Hollywood gimmick and he decided to come to every show with his stunt double, who ended up being…Damien Mizdow.

It was a good thing for Damien Sandow to do something other than nothing, but as time went on, Damien Mizdow became a fan favorite by doing one thing: imitating EVERYTHING The Miz was doing, no matter what.  When I say everything, I do mean everything.  It was so funny to watch that fans were applauding Mizdow’s performance while ignoring The Miz.  WWE knew that they would have to separate the two, but it was something fans didn’t want: if the split was to happen, Damien Mizdow’s momentum would be all gone since the fans already knew how much the WWE didn’t care about Damien Mizdow.  To make matters worse, they had The Miz tell Damien Mizdow exactly what we were thinking: without The Miz, he’s nothing.

It would’ve been great if the WWE had come up with something great for Mizdow once the inevitable split happened, but as we expected, they didn’t.  What was their next best idea?  Macho Mandow!  WWE’s next best imitation idea for Damien Sandow was to have him imitate the newly elected posthumous Hall of Famer The Macho Man Randy Savage.  Oh, and they teamed him up with Curtis Axel as he was imitating Hulk Hogan earlier as Axelmania.  Together, they were the Meta Powers!

They performed on Raw and SmackDown! a few times with that teamup, but have since been out of TV and on the WWE Network, until recently with Curtis Axel being a part of the Social Outcasts.  Fortunately for YouTubers, if they follow Xavier Woods’ YouTube channel UpUpDownDown, they can see Damien Sandow there busting some rhymes.  Will that help him get back to relevancy in the WWE’s eyes?  Probably not!

This next one is considered to be a little bit of a cheat, but given how popular this tag team were before getting into the WWE, I feel like they need to be included here…

I haven’t been watching NXT (and as long as I don’t have the WWE Network, I won’t be watching it), but I’ve heard that The Ascension were the most over tag team in that division.  They had won the NXT Tag Team Championship a few times and fans either loved them or loved to hate them.  Then, the WWE killed that kind of momentum by calling them up to the main roster.

Back in the day, it was great news to hear when a wrestler who was in developmental had been called up to the main roster.  It would mean that he made it and he had a chance to make a name for himself and become a champion.  Today, being called up to the main roster is a fan’s nightmare because the main show is watered down compared to NXT.  Not only that, but not many stars do big when coming up from NXT; The Ascension were no different.

As usual, when they made their debut, they were dominating.  They had won every tag team match they were in and most of their matches were squash matches.  Then, The Ascension did one thing they probably shouldn’t have done: they considered themselves better than the Legion of Doom.  I don’t know if that was a part of the script or not, but that was the beginning of the end for The Ascension.  A little after that promo was done, The Ascension had lost their first match and have pretty much been a jobber tag team ever since.  Sure, they’re teaming with Stardust, but that hasn’t helped their reputation at all.  The fact that they’ve been on the main roster for over a year and still haven’t had a shot at the tag team titles shows what a waste it was for them to be there.

Since we’re talking about champions, this next wrestler lost his momentum thanks to losing the WWE World Heavyweight championship…

Going back to Z! True Long Island Story, one of the best segments of that show was Ask The Heel.  The thing about Ask The Heel was that it always interrupted one of Zack Ryder’s sections and it would be Dolph Ziggler being super overconfident about himself.  The way he was cutting promos showed how much he ruled as a heel and it looked like there was no way WWE would turn him face.  He did win the World Heavyweight championship on one SmackDown!, only for him to lose it on the same night at the same show, but things could’ve gotten better for him and for a bit, it did.

In Money In The Bank 2012, Dolph Ziggler won the Money In The Bank ladder match at Money In The Bank.  He waited until the Raw after WrestleMania (WrestleMania XXIX) to cash in his Money In The Bank contract and defeated Alberto Del Rio to become the World Heavyweight champion.  He had the belt for like two weeks until he was out a month for a concussion thanks to injury-prone-delivering Jack Swagger punting him on the face.

After Dolph Ziggler made his return, he was going to defend his title against Alberto Del Rio in a rematch at Payback.  In that match, a rarity happened: a double turn.  A double turn is when a heel and a face switch sides at the same time and this was only the second time a double turn occurred in WWE: the first time happened at WrestleMania 13 with Bret Hart and Stone Cold Steve Austin.  Also, both double turns happened in the same building: Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois!

Alberto Del Rio won the World Heavyweight championship, Dolph Ziggler exercised his rematch clause, lost the rematch and never got in the heavyweight championship title picture again.  He’s won the Intercontinental title three times since then, but he’s never been in the main event again.  In a WWE world where wrestlers don’t know how to sell an ass whooping, Dolph Ziggler’s the only one who does, a little too much sometimes too.  With the massive injuries that’s been happening lately, and with Roman Reigns having to defend his WWE World Heavyweight championship against 29 other men at the Royal Rumble tomorrow, now would be a good time for Dolph Ziggler to get back into the main event picture, especially since we’re not going to see John Cena there.

The last wrestler whose momentum got killed by the WWE is the only one on this list who we know why his momentum was killed and I’ll get to that in a little bit…

All you gotta do…is BO-LIEVE!!  That’s what the WWE universe has heard coming out of Bo Dallas’ mouth when he made his inspirational debut in the WWE in 2014 and it was confusing at first.  When the video packages were done for his arrival, it looked like he was going to debut as a face, but on his first wrestling match (against botch-prone Sin Cara), it looked like he was a heel.  If anybody saw him on NXT, they would know he was a heel, but for those who weren’t (like me), they were confused.  It was later established that Bo Dallas was a heel and the fans reacted appropriately.

Bo Dallas was winning all of his matches and was doing victory laps around the ring, being the annoying little weasel that he was and fans were either annoyed by it or loved it.  Then one day, Bo Dallas lost his first match against R-Truth and ever since then, has been a jobber.  Being a part of the newly formed Social Outcasts isn’t helping his cause either as we’ve seen what happened to 3MB.

Seeing Bo Dallas losing has been frustrating for fans as they grew to love the character.  You could even hear the crowd chanting WE BO-LIEVE!! every time he wrestled.  But why has WWE gone down on Bo Dallas?  Well, it’s one particular person who’s been down on Bo Dallas and his name is Vincent Kennedy McMahon!  Why has VKM been down on Bo Dallas?  For a particularly dumb reason: he doesn’t understand the Bo Dallas character!  Wait, so because the boss doesn’t understand one of his wrestlers’ characters, he kills their momentum, despite how the fans feel about the character?  No wonder WWE’s ratings have been at an all time low!

Vince McMahon has been in this business long enough to have known that what he thinks shouldn’t matter; it’s what the fans think that should matter.  Take a look at The New Day!  When they were the always-smiling babyfaces, fans didn’t give them the time of day.  They were chanting “NEW…DAY SUCKS!!” just to show how much they disliked The New Day.  Ever since The New Day were turned heels and fed off of it, they’ve become the saving grace of the WWE; they’re like the only reason why fans would still tune in to WWE shows on TV.  If Vince was to let the crowd dictate Bo Dallas’ future, Bo Dallas would probably have been in a better position than his brother Bray Wyatt.

Why are our ratings so low?  It’s because of situations like this, that’s why!  It’s really amazing that the WWE doesn’t know how to solve their ratings problem when the answer is in their own locker room.  They’ve been ignoring fans’ suggestions on how to make the product better (please ignore bring the Attitude Era back), so because of that, they’re leaving.  If they would listen to their fans more and stop treating them like idiots or like they have no control over what gets the product over, then this wouldn’t be a problem for the present and future.

Hopefully, this blog can help WWE get better, but I believe they’re not going to read this, let alone find it.  I’m still watching WWE right now, but if it gets to the point where I want to quit watching them again, I’ve got YouTube and other video sites to keep me company.  Until the next blog guys, I’m out!

It’s that time again ladies and gentlemen: the annual Super Bowl self-debate!   For this year’s Super Bowl, we have the Denver Broncos squaring off against the Carolina Panthers.  The Broncos hadn’t been in the Super Bowl since two years ago when they looked like they had no business being in the Super Bowl after they got decimated by the Seahawks 43-8, while the Panthers hadn’t been to the Super Bowl since 2004 when they lost a game-winning field goal to the New England Patriots.  One thing both of these teams have in common: the head coach before their current coaches was John Fox, who’s currently the head coach of my Chicago Bears.

There has been a humongous change for this year’s self-debate.  Last year, the mediator of the debate was a woman named Carolina: that looked to be a huge problem for this year’s Super Bowl, so for the sake of fairness, she had to be let go.  Taking her place is a new woman who’s simply named Mary Jane.  It is a coincidence that her name’s Mary Jane and I’ll be cosplaying as Spider-Man this year, but she is no Mary Jane Watson, Mary Jane Watson-Parker nor Mary Jane Parker.

Just like Carolina and the mediators before her, Mary Jane will be in bold.  As far as the team colors go, one of me will represent navy blue for the Broncos since the Broncos don’t want to wear orange in the Super Bowl since they’ve never won wearing orange in the Super Bowl (the latest one is the beatdown I mentioned earlier) while the other me will represent sky blue since that’s the color the Panthers like wearing more than black; hopefully you guys can read it, but I’ll change it to black if it’s too hard for you guys to see.

Before the surprise reveal as to who’s representing who, I will be in green and Skip will be in red as those were the colors that each side had on the last blog which all but one of you did not comment on.  As usual, both sides will be one-sided and at the end of the debate, I’ll let you guys know who I’m really rooting for in this year’s Super Bowl.  Without further ado, here’s the debate.  Take it away Mary Jane!

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to a new installment of percy99’s Debates!  I am your new host Mary Jane, taking over for Carolina, and joining me in this debate are the usual two people Percy and Skip.  Like we do every year, we’re going to talk about the Super Bowl.  For this year’s matchup, it will be the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers.

Before we get into the debate about which team is going to win the Super Bowl, I’ll start this debate off with a question that may or may not have anything to do with the game and I’ll start with you Percy: how good does Roger Goodell feel about the New England Patriots not making it to the Super Bowl?

I don’t think Roger Goodell has any problems with the Patriots; he just has a problem with Tom Brady.  Just think about this for a minute: Roger Goodell wasn’t around in either the AFC Championship game nor the NFC Championship game.  If he was, the cameras didn’t show him.  And to answer your question about how Roger Goodell feels about Tom Brady missing the Super Bowl, he’s having a field day right now because now the pressure’s off his back.

Just imagine how bitter he would’ve been had the Patriots made the Super Bowl.  He’d have to be there since he’s presenting the Vince Lombardi trophy to whoever wins the Super Bowl and he’d probably have to give the MVP trophy to somebody on that team and if that team was the Patriots and Tom Brady had won the MVP, it would’ve made Roger Goodell look worse than he already does, not to mention that he and Tom Brady are due back in court next March of this year over the never-ending Deflategate debacle.

2-6: that’s the record Roger Goodell was counting on when the Patriots had to travel to Denver to face the Broncos.  In Tom Brady’s lifetime before the AFC Championship game, Tom Brady was 2-6 all time in Denver, no matter who was behind center for the Denver Broncos.  Yes, Tom Brady had owned Peyton Manning in their annual regular season matchup, but in the playoffs, Tom Brady’s only won that head-to-head matchup once.  The fact that the odds were against him showed that Roger Goodell didn’t have to worry about the AFC Championship game outcome, considering the fact that the Patriots had lost to the Broncos earlier in the regular season when Brock Osweiller was the starting quarterback at the time.

Well Skip, that game went into overtime and the game was over when CJ Anderson ran his way to the endzone, so that wouldn’t have meant anything.  That game could’ve gone either way and in the AFC Championship game, they were one two-point conversion away from tying the game and sending that game into overtime again.  Sure, there were reports that Stephen Gostkowski’s botched extra pointer could’ve turned the tides in New England’s favor, but the fact of the matter was that Stephen Gostkowski’s botched extra pointer had absolutely NOTHING to do with the Patriots losing that game; it was going to be a tough game for them to win anyway.

That’s where I disagree with you; Stephen Gostkowski’s missed extra pointer had EVERYTHING to do with the Patriots losing that game.  They started off bad in the beginning, but when the Patriots scored a touchdown, momentum was on their side and they were starting to become the Patriots of old.  Thanks to Stephen Gostkowski missing that extra pointer, it kept the Patriots from tying the game and it helped the Broncos never lose the lead for the rest of the game.  Stephen Gostkowski was right for taking the blame as the missed extra pointer was all his fault and his miss was the reason why the Patriots’ spirits were down, not to mention their Microsoft Surface tablet going out on them.

Well isn’t that something: the Patriots’ karma came back and bit them in the ass at the most inopportune moment.  Remember in their first game against the Steelers when the Steelers’ audio equipment wasn’t working for pretty much the whole game?  And the Patriots were accused of tampering with the equipment?  The Patriots have a history of cheating allegations and for once, they finally reaped what they sow.

Am I saying that Roger Goodell had something to do with it?  Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but the fact of the matter was that the Patriots had a chance to prove that they weren’t cheaters and with an obstacle against them, they almost tied the game up; they just couldn’t convert the two-pointer.

You know damn well that Roger Goodell had everything to do with the tampering of the Microsoft Surface Pro tablet; how else were the Patriots going to lose?  They couldn’t have the Patriots lose to the Kansas City Chiefs as the Chiefs are too weak to make that happen, not to mention Andy Reid’s weakness of clock management woes.  Plus, since Roger Goodell favors Peyton Manning anyway, it made perfect sense to have the Surface Pro tablets mess up in the AFC Championship game.

Alright, I’ll have to stop you guys right here as that debate’s going in a direction our audiences didn’t want us to go on.  Let’s move on to another subject and that is Cam Newton and his behavior.  He’s been receiving a lot of criticism lately for his behavior on the field and off the field and many people think that he isn’t a role model for young boys everywhere.  Starting with you Skip, how do you feel about those criticisms?

Really?  Are we really going through this right now?  Didn’t we see something like this two years ago when Richard Sherman was called a thug all because of his trash talking about Michael Crabtree when Michael Crabtree wouldn’t shake his hand after a loss?  The media has a thing against black athletes, don’t they?

Listen, that talk about how bad of a person Cam Newton is is totally ridiculous.  Just like he said, they can’t compare him to any other quarterback, past and present, and they’ve never seen anybody like him.  Are his celebrations annoying?  Of course they are!  Do they made you want to smack him in the mouth like Not Ray Lewis?  Of course they do!  Is there anything the opposing team can do to stop those celebrations?  Yes there is and it’s not as easy as it sounds: stop him from getting to the endzone!  At this point, and we’ve seen it in the past, the only person who can defeat Cam Newton is Cam Newton.

When Cam Newton came to the Panthers five years ago, he had not experienced losing as he was always winning at Auburn.  Once he started playing for the Panthers, they were losing.  He was getting all upset about it and he wore his emotions on his sleeves at every press conference after a loss.  He started by blaming his teammates and then he started blaming himself.  He had a lot of growing up to do and even though there’s still some immaturity left in him, he has grown up fast and look at how the Panthers are like right now; it’s like watching the ‘85 Bears and we were just babies when that happened.

I have to agree with you 100% on this one Skip.   I have never in my life seen any quarterback, no matter their race, get scrutinized as much as Cam Newton.  This is so crazy that not even Johnny Manziel’s getting as much scrutiny as Cam Newton is and Johnny Manziel has trouble staying out of trouble, with the latest trouble being this past week between he and his ex-girlfriend.  Oh, it’s alright for Johnny Manziel to be the guy he is, but we curse Cam Newton for being the guy that he is.

What’s the worst thing Can Newton’s done outside the football field?  I would have to say either criticizing his teammates early in his career, speaking his mind, or the financial situation while he was at Auburn; none of those things got him arrested nor should they.  I’ve seen players who have a much worse attitude than Cam Newton (like Gilbert Arenas for example) and the media don’t give those guys the time of day to scrutinize, but because Cam Newton’s the starting quarterback, it’s like let’s find out what we don’t like about that guy and blow it up beyond epic proportions.   It’s totally ridiculous!

Speaking of ridiculous, here’s something that was recently ridiculous: a Seahawks fan created a petition to keep Cam Newton from playing at (and I have to look this up since the building’s no longer Qwest Field) CenturyLink Field when or if the Panthers play against the Seahawks at Seattle next season.  Here’s the crazy thing: many fans signed the petition!  They claimed that he disrespected the 12th man flag by tearing it up when he really snatched it and threw it away.  Plus, they were in Carolina when the allegation happened!  Therefore, that 12th man flag shouldn’t have been there anyway; if it was going to be somewhere outside of Seattle, it should’ve been in Levi Stadium where the Super Bowl’s taking place, except oh, the Seahawks lost!

And on that note, let’s put a stop to that debate and let’s get to the nitty-gritty of this debate: Who Ya Got!  This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for and so far Percy, you’ve predicted incorrectly for two straight years.  Is this the year you’ll redeem yourself or will Skip outsmart you again?  With that being said Percy, who ya got?

You know what?  I’m sure that Skip hates it when I’m asked this kind of question first and I know he’s prepared to go the opposite direction of who I want to pick to win, so I’ll let him go first.

Oh really!  I have to say that I didn’t see that one coming.  I get to pick first?  That’s very astonishing!

In that case, then let’s start with Skip.  Who ya got for this year’s Super Bowl?

I think I see what Percy’s trying to do here: he’s seen a history of him choosing first and losing each time, so he’s using that against me in a desperate attempt at beating me.  Well Percy, it’s not going to work because we already know which team you’re going to pick and I have no idea why you can’t just agree with me on these picks for once.  There’s no way in hell your team’s going to win this year’s Super Bowl, so allow me to say that the team that’s going to win this year’s Super Bowl is going to be the CAROLINA PANTHERS BABY!!

Let’s get real here: Percy has always been and always will be a Broncos fan.  Hell, he’s got a Terrell Davis jersey from back in 1999 in his closet as we speak and he can’t wait to put that shirt on come Super Bowl Sunday!  Not only is he a Denver Broncos fan, he’s also a Peyton Manning fan; nothing will sooth his soul better than to watch Peyton Manning win one more Super Bowl before he retires.  Well, I hate to burst your bubble Percy, but that’s nothing but a fantasy.  A Final Fantasy.  A Final Fantasy The Spirits Within!

Don’t you dare bring that movie in my presence!  That movie had nothing to do with Final Fantasy at all and I hate that movie so much, I let my brother have the DVD!

Yes Percy, let the hate consume you.  That feeling you have about Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, that feeling you have about the Max Payne movie, that feeling you have about the rebooted Tomb Raider, and that feeling you have about Spider-Man 3 combined will be NOTHING compared to how you’re going to feel when the Carolina Panthers decimate your Denver Broncos.

Thanks to Mary Jane interrupting me, I couldn’t talk about how good of a quarterback Cam Newton is.  Have you ever seen a black quarterback, or any quarterback for that matter, throw for over 300 yards with two touchdowns in the air and two touchdowns by foot?  No, you haven’t!  Not even Michael Vick in his prime as a Falcon and an Eagle could produce numbers like that and he’s considered one of the most gifted quarterbacks the NFL has ever seen!

If you thought Aaron Rodgers was a nightmare to defend, defenses haven’t seen anybody like Cam Newton.  You would think that with a black quarterback like Cam Newton, he’s only hard to contain when he scrambles, but that’s not the case here.  His passing game is so great, he makes Ted Ginn, Jr. relevant and that guy had been irrelevant as a wide receiver his entire career!  But Ted Ginn, Jr. isn’t even Cam Newton’s best receiver: his best receiver is former Chicago Bears tight end Greg Olsen, whom Jerry Angelo was very happy to trade away for nothing because our offensive coordinator at the time, Mike Martz, didn’t know how to use tight ends other than as extra blockers.  Man I hate the Bears for doing that to this day!

I do too and you didn’t mention the other former Chicago Bears players who are on that team: Charles Tillman and Jared Allen.  Charles Tillman signed to that team during the offseason and we traded Jared Allen to the Panthers since he wasn’t a fit for our 3-4 defensive scheme.  Jared Allen may play on Super Bowl Sunday, but Charles Tillman will not for the same reason why we let him go: he’s injury prone.

As far as my pick for the Broncos’ concerned, yes, I do pick that team, but it’s because of something that you neglect to see: the Broncos have the best defense in the NFL.  Your Panthers may have the second best defense in the NFL (oops! I mean 6th best), but they could’ve been number one had they not gone lazy in the second half of games.  The Broncos defense never lets up and Cam Newton’s never faced any defense like them before, so he’s going to have some major trouble heading his way.

In the regular season, the Broncos gave up an average of 283 yards a game while the Panthers averaged 323 yards a game.  In the points department, the Broncos averaged 18 points given up while the Panthers averaged 19 points given up.  When looking at the playoffs, the Broncos gave up 17 points a game while the Panthers gave up 20 points.  The Broncos defense is a better defense than they look and they’ll make the Panthers wide receivers look like they don’t even exist.  Wait, does their offense exist?

Let’s take a look at the wide receiving core for the Carolina Panthers: you have Ted Ginn, Jr., Jerricho Cotchery, Brenton Bersin, Philly Brown, Devin Funchess and Kevin Norwood.  Besides Ted Ginn, Jr. and Jerricho Cotchery, I’ve never heard of those wide receiver names before and I’m pretty sure they do nothing.  Like I said, Greg Olsen’s their best receiver and that’s a bad sign for their wide receiving core.

On our end, we’ve got Demaryius Thomas, Andre Caldwell, Emmanuel Sanders, Jordan Norwood, Bennie Fowler and Cody Latimer.  With the tight ends, we’ve got Owen Daniels and Vernon Davis.  I know with that set of receivers and tight ends and Peyton Manning at quarterback, it’s going to be the toughest battle the Panthers will ever face and it will be a battle they will lose.

If you think that the Panthers have nobodies at wide receiver, what does that say about Cam Newton?  It shows that he can turn nobodies into somebodies.  Has Peyton Manning ever done that in his entire career?  I think not!  It’s actually funny that you mention defensive stats in the playoffs, but left out yards given up per game.  Looking at the stat sheet here, the Panthers gave up 690 yards in two games while your Broncos gave up an astonishing 732 yards in two games.  That’s insane!

Try to explain to me why the Broncos had a hard time stopping Ben Roethlisberger when he was playing with a bad throwing shoulder?  You can’t because that defense is overrated!  Do you want to know how good the Panthers defense is?  In both games against the Seattle Seahawks and the Arizona Cardinals, they made Russell Wilson and Carson Palmer look like they had no business being in the playoffs.  If Blair Walsh had not missed that easy field goal against the Seahawks in the wildcard round, the Packers would’ve come to Carolina and they would’ve made Aaron Rodgers look like he had no business being in the playoffs.

Russell Wilson and Carson Palmer are terrific quarterbacks.  The fact that the Seahawks were down 31-0 at halftime showed how great that Panthers defense was.  They made Carson Palmer look so bad, they had the announce people use the excuse of his dislocated right index finger as the reason why he was struggling.  Carson Palmer was playing just fine with that bad finger before going against the Panthers; he was just unfortunate to go against the Panthers like every team that came before them.  The Panthers should’ve been 16-0 in the regular season, but the Falcons got lucky in their second game against them.  You better not sleep on the Panthers like the Broncos did against the Seahawks two years ago.  That reminds me: I feel asleep on that game because of the massive beatdown the Broncos received in that game!

I want to go back to Aaron Rodgers for a minute.  You mentioned that if Blair Walsh hadn’t missed that field goal, Aaron Rodgers was going to look like a third string quarterback against your team.  It’s funny you mention that because earlier this season, Aaron Rodgers had a game against a team that gave him his worst performance of his career with only 77 passing yards total.  Which team did he go against?  My Denver Broncos!  To make matters worse, it was seen by everybody on Sunday Night Football!

You want to talk about the Panthers making quarterbacks look like they had no business being in the playoffs; well they did that to somebody who’s far more important than Ben Roethlisberger: Tom Brady.  Remember how he was a beast at the start of the season right until the Patriots had their first loss of the season?  Which team caused him to get his first loss of the season?  Again, my Denver Broncos!  Tom Brady looked bad when Brock Osweiller was the starting quarterback during the regular season and he looked worse when Peyton Manning was the starting quarterback in the playoffs.  If you think your Panthers defense will make Peyton Manning look bad, that will be nothing compared to what the Broncos will do to Cam Newton.

Just face it Skip: this game was over before it even began.  The Panthers were on an ‘85 Bears nostalgia train, especially since their head coach was a part of that ‘85 Bears team, but that nostalgia train ends at Levi Stadium when the Broncos will shock the world and beat your Panthers.  You can count on that!

You’re absolutely right that the nostalgia train will end at Levi Stadium, but it’s not going to end the way you want it to nor the way you think it will.  In that Super Bowl, the Bears put a major beatdown on the Patriots and went ahead and won that Super Bowl 46-10.  I expect the Panthers to do the same thing to Peyton Manning and the Broncos this weekend and even though I was going to go with 43-8, I don’t want to see that again, so I’ll have the final score be 46-10 Panthers.

You’ve got to be kidding me.  You’re really going for 46-10 as the final score?  Man, you need to get off that nostalgia train because you wasn’t even watching football in 1986!  How can you have nostalgia for something you’ve never seen in your life?  Hell, you didn’t even start watching football until 1999 and not regularly until 2002!  If you want to go nostalgia on something, how about this: my Broncos will beat your Carolina Panthers with the exact same score that the Seahawks beat my Broncos with two years ago: 43-8.  I can’t wait to see the sad look on your face the next time we meet!

And on that note, I’m afraid we’re out of time here.  I would like to thank Percy and Skip for debating for us and we’ll see you guys again next time.  Take care!

Here’s a little something that had happened which caused me to switch mediators: while I was watching clips of ESPN2’s First Take, I had noticed that there was somebody else being the mediator instead of Cari Champion.  I was wondering what had happened to Cari, so I googled her.  I found out that she was promoted as a regular sports anchor for ESPN, so they had Molly Qerim take her place.  Since Molly is another name of a drug, I thought that it’d be perfect to name the new mediator after another drug, thus Mary Jane was born.

When the Carolina Panthers put a major beatdown on the Arizona Cardinals, the idea of having Carolina fired because of a potential bias jumped out and I took that opportunity and ran with it.  With that being said, it’s time for me to make my pick on who I really think is going to win in this year’s Super Bowl.

Normally, I would have a hard time trying to figure out who I think is going to win the Super Bowl, but this one didn’t take long for me to figure out: I’m going with Skip’s pick the Carolina Panthers.  You would think I’m picking them because the Panthers have a black quarterback, but that’s not the case: I picked against the Seahawks two years ago!  No, the reason why I picked the Carolina Panthers is because that defense is too scary for me not to pick them.

I’m sure Peyton’s not going to look worse than he did two years ago, but that’s not saying much.  My fictional self made some excellent points in favor of the Broncos, but from what I’ve seen of both teams, the Panthers look more solid all around.  Hopefully, I’m right on this one.

Who do you guys have?  Let me know in the comments below and until the next blog, I’m out!

Windows 10 has been available since July of last year.  Looking at Microsoft’s Windows history, beginning with Windows 98, every time Microsoft releases a new and successful operating system, the next one turns into crap.  First, there was Windows 2000 (I think it was crap?).  After the success of Windows XP, there was the infamous Windows Vista.  After Windows 7 showed what Vista should’ve been, Microsoft released two versions of Windows 8, with neither of them being received well by Windows 7 users.  With the OS history, Windows 10 should be the OS that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 should’ve been.

I’ve tried out Windows 10 and I have it installed on my backup PC.  How do I feel about it?  I’ll let you know how I really feel about it later, but for now, Windows 10 is the topic of discussion.  Seeing as how the default wallpaper uses two different shades of blue and the taskbar is black by default, here’s how things are going to go: as usual, Mary Jane will be in bold, but the two versions of me will be in different colors.  The side that favors Windows 10 will be in navy blue while the side of me that’s against Windows 10 will be in black, which saves me time editing the color of the texts.

Without further ado, it’s time for another installment of percy99’s Debates.  Take it away Mary Jane!

Good morning everyone and welcome back to percy99’s Debates!  I’m your host Mary Jane and sitting to my left is Skip and the man sitting to my right is Percy.  For today’s topic, we’re going to talk about Windows 10.  There’s a question I want to ask about Windows 10, but before we get to that, I want to talk about the Super Bowl that happened a few weeks ago.

Percy, you did the impossible: with the odds being in total favor of the Carolina Panthers, you decided to have Skip argue first and you ended up winning the game.  How are you feeling about that?

I’m feeling great Mary Jane.  It’s just like I told Skip: the Panthers didn’t have any reliable receivers!  The moment Peyton Manning drove the offense to field goal range on the first offensive possession, it was over.  I also told Skip that the Broncos defense had the best defense in the NFL and they showed how that was possible with Cam Newton.

Just take a look a look at Cam Newton’s performance at the Super Bowl: 18/41 for 265 yards with no touchdowns and one interception.  When I say “no touchdowns”, I mean no touchdowns.  Usually, Cam Newton would get a touchdown through the air or with his feet, but on that game, he couldn’t get the job done anywhere, let alone getting hit so many times.

Did you see how he reacted when he lost?  All that talk we had about him maturing showed that not only is he a sore loser, but he also isn’t as mature as we thought.  With an attitude like that, he’s never going to win a Super Bowl, let alone get there with garbage receivers.

And you think Peyton Manning was any better?  Look at how many passing yards Peyton Manning’s had in that game: 141 yards!  If it wasn’t for the defense and the Broncos running backs, there would’ve been no chance for Peyton Manning to win with those numbers.  And while we’re on the subject of Peyton Manning, do you really think that he’s more mature than Cam Newton?  Please!  By comparison, Cam Newton’s more mature than Peyton Manning is!

Did you see the Super Bowl back in 2010 when the Indianapolis Colts lost to the New Orleans Saints?  I remember it because I saw it!  Peyton Manning had the longest wait time in Super Bowl history before he could get back on the field.  When the Colts lost to the Saints, he didn’t shake hands with anybody, he didn’t congratulate anybody and he walked straight to the locker room like a sore loser.  Seeing you and the media complain about Cam Newton not being a sport, at least he congratulated the Broncos on beating him and the Panthers; Peyton Manning didn’t do a damn thing when he lost in Super Bowl XLIV.  Oh, I’m not finished yet!

Like I said before, the worst thing Cam Newton’s done was either criticize his teammates, taunting his opponents or even the financial situation back at Auburn.  With Peyton Manning getting close to retirement, look at the skeletons that were dug up from his closet.  Back when he was at Tennessee, he had sexually assaulted a female trainer.  Why the hell would you moon or teabag your trainer while she’s examining your foot?  The fact that he didn’t and doesn’t own up to that fact, also taking to account him being friends with a guy who screws his employees out of their money and healthcare, shows that Peyton Manning has always been and will always be an asshole.

You’ve got to understand that the incident happened nearly 20 years ago.  Teenagers do stupid stuff all the time in the name of laughter and even if what Peyton Manning’s been accused of is true, the fact is he’s changed since then.  Are you the same person you were when you was in college?  Of course not because life changes us!  Plus, why wasn’t this brought up before the Super Bowl?  Why did somebody wait until Peyton Manning won to talk about that alleged situation?  More importantly, why isn’t Peyton Manning in prison?  I’ll tell you why: jealousy.

Nobody wanted the Broncos to win except Denver and I, and somebody needed to take their Super Bowl win away from people’s minds.  Just think about it: the Super Bowl ended, the Broncos won, and the only thing we’re talking about pertaining to the Super Bowl is Peyton Manning and something he was accused of 20 years ago.  How pathetic!

What is pathetic is how you’re standing up to Peyton Manning when he’s clearly an asshole.  You didn’t even take the time to address John Schnatter and how much of an asshole owner he is.  If you want to talk about the game itself, let’s talk about it.  How is it that Aqib Talib committed two personal foul penalties and was still able to play the game, with the latest one being an intentional faskmask penalty?  How did the weakest commissioner in sports history Roger Goodell handle it?  By fining him, no suspensions!  HOW?!  The level of incompetence of Roger Goodell shows how much he sucks as a commissioner!  Man I wish Paul Tagliabue came back!

Okay, I’ll have to stop this conversation before it gets ugly.  Then again, from looking at the history of you two, any topic could get ugly, so let’s make the next topic ugly which is Windows 10.  Windows 10 has been out since late July of last year and the number of people using Windows 10 is pretty good.  From reviews of other people, it is a much better improvement over both Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

You two have tried out Windows 10 and you guys have a difference of opinion there.  The question of this week’s debate is this: should people upgrade to Windows 10?  Percy, since you’re the winner of the Super Bowl bet, you get to choose who should argue first.  Who do you want to go first?

Since Skip got so bold into thinking that the Carolina Panthers were going to win and was proven wrong, I’m going to add salt to that wound of his and go first this time.  You’re right Mary Jane in that Skip and I have tried out Windows 10.  When 2016 first came around, we decided to use the 80GB HDD that came with our PS3 and installed that to our old PC to see how Windows 10 fared.  After tinkering with Windows 10 for a week, Skip and I had a difference of opinion concerning Windows 10.

How do I feel about Windows 10?  Well Mary Jane, that’s not the question you asked: you asked if people should upgrade to Windows 10 or not.  I can answer that question for you Mary Jane: yes, people should upgrade to Windows 10!

Before I get to the features of Windows 10 that showed how much of an upgrade it is compared to Windows 8 or even Windows 7, I’m going to give a testimony about the upgrade process all on its own.  The day after Christmas, my father gave me something I never asked for: a laptop.  You would think it would be great to have one as a portable PC, but the laptop he gave me was a Dell Inspiron 1501.  If you look at the specs of that laptop, you would see that it’s at least a 10 year old laptop; that laptop can’t handle Windows 10!

The laptop had Windows 7 Pro 32-bit in it and I couldn’t figure out why Windows Update was having problems.  I tried replacing the old thermal paste, I tried upgrading the memory.  Hell, I even tried replacing the AMD Turion 64 MK-36 with the AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-58, but the same Windows Update problem kept occurring.  What was the problem?  The problem was that Windows Update kept checking for updates!  If I had Microsoft Security Essentials installed, that program would take forever to search for and apply updates.  Do you want to know what the problem was essentially? The hard drive.  More specifically, the 5400rpm hard drive that I was using!

To confirm if the 5400rpm drive was the problem, I had the hard drive in my old PC and installed Windows 7 there.  Everything seemed alright until I used Windows Update to check for updates.  After 20 or so minutes, it was still checking for updates.  I don’t know what it is about 5400rpm drives and Windows 7, but both Vista and 7 hate 5400rpm drives.  What does Windows 10 have to do with that?  I’m glad you asked!

When I installed Windows 10 on that laptop, I was unfortunate to find out that the onboard GPU for it (ATI Xpress 1150) didn’t have Windows 10 drivers, so I was stuck with the 1024x768 screen resolution instead of 1280x800.  When I looked for Windows 10 updates, it found the updates and installed them.  Sure, it was slower than usual, but at least the updates were installed, let alone being found in the first place.  If you’re the type of person who’s sick of Windows Update taking forever or worst not showing up at all, then Windows 10 is the operating system for you and you should get it immediately.

Wow!  That’s it?  That’s all you can come up with to explain to these people why they should get Windows 10?  That was the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard!  If your argument about why people should get Windows 10 is because of Windows Updates, then I’m afraid to tell you that you’ve already lost this round!

Do you remember a couple years ago when Microsoft completely screwed up the marketing of the Xbox One by showing how draconian the system was going to be?  Yeah, they saved face by pulling a 180 on the Xbox One and decided to transfer those draconian practices elsewhere: Windows 10!  That Windows Update thing you’re talking about?  Yeah, you get Windows updates better with Windows 10, but it’s at the cost of two things: you download the updates from other PCs in addition to Windows servers, and, this is the most important part, YOU CAN’T TURN AUTO UPDATES OFF!!

Seriously, if you look at the options to turn off Windows Update, you won’t find it anywhere!  The only options you could find are download automatically and when you should restart the PC after the updates have been applied; I’m only talking about the Pro version of Windows 10 too!  If you have the Home version of Windows 10, the updates will download and install automatically and you have no say whatsoever when you can install Windows 10 updates.  With Windows 10, Microsoft’s taking control away from you and have snuck in an agreement in their TOS that says that there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.  What a POS of a company Microsoft’s become!  It makes me wish that Steve Ballmer was still with them; at least he’d make them look less evil than they already are!

Back to the using other people’s PC thing, yeah, you’re basically torrenting Windows 10 updates and you’re also sharing Windows 10 updates with other PCs, causing you to possibly exceed your data cap for your cable bill.  At least with torrents, you have the option to turn off the program once a download’s complete, but with Windows 10, it’s on by default and you have to jump through hoops just to turn it off.  Speaking of jumping through hoops, you’re going to do that a lot with Windows 10.

Oh really Skip?  Have you even tried Windows 8? Oh wait, you did!  And what did you think of it?  Oh, that’s right: you thought the same thing I did…it sucked!  It was a pain in the ass just to find the option to not create a Microsoft.net account just to log into Windows.  Also, what the hell were they thinking getting rid of the Start button?  Windows isn’t Windows without it!  They fixed that problem with Windows 8.1, but they never solved the Start screen problem.  Why oh why did they replace the Start menu with the Start screen?  I’ll tell you why: they weren’t thinking about desktop and laptop users when they created Windows 8!  Then they wondered why people hated Windows 8 so much.

Doing easy things that you were able to do on Windows 7 was not so easy on Windows 8.  Thankfully, the Start menu is brought back on Windows 10 and Windows 10 doesn’t force you nor try to coerce you into getting a Microsoft.net account just to use the operating system.  With the Windows+X feature, it’s so less time consuming to get to the Control Panel, the Power Options, the Add and Remove program, the System settings, Device Manager and most importantly, the Command Prompt, both with and without administrative privileges.  Instead of jumping through hoops with the search feature and Control Panel, I can just right click on the Windows button or press Windows+X and I can get to those things at any time.  Let’s also not forget that Windows 10 is significantly faster than Windows 7.

Oh yeah, it’s faster alright: at the expense of Fast Boot.  Yeah, let’s look at Fast Boot for a bit.  Fast Boot is supposed to be this feature that gets you to boot into Windows a lot faster than 7 and OSes before it.  But do you know what really happens with Fast Boot?  It’s basically another version of Hibernate.  When you hibernate your PC, it takes your PC a little while longer before it shuts down and that’s what Fast Boot does.  Once you turn the PC back on, it acts like it’s never been turned off before.  You may think it’s a good thing, but PCs need to shut down every once in a while like our brain does and eventually, Windows 10 will break down on you like that.

Fast Boot was a thing that existed in Windows 8 and it carried over to Windows 10.  Just like Windows 8, you have to jump through hoops just to turn it off.  Oh, and speaking of turning things off, you have to do that with a lot of features on Windows 10 if you don’t want Microsoft to see what you’re doing since Windows 10 spies on you more than Windows 8.  To make matters worse, even if you uncheck all the options of sending information to Microsoft, they’re still spying on you!  That should be illegal and it’s amazing that nobody’s calling Microsoft out on it!  If you want your privacy information kept secret, you should not upgrade to Windows 10, even if you’re on the pathetic Windows 8!

Why are you getting so concerned about what information is being sent to Microsoft?  If you’re that concerned about your privacy information, then why don’t you quit using Google Chrome and move over to an iPhone instead of using an Android phone?  Oh?  You didn’t notice that every time you use Google that you’re giving Google information about you using their product?  If you’re going to complain about something, at the very least be consistent with it!

Anyway, back to the reasons why you should upgrade to Windows 10.  Lately, I’ve been having problems with the AVerMedia Center when trying to use my PS3 as it kept on crashing every time a resolution change would happen.  I don’t know why it does it with my Radeon R9 290 as it never did that with the Radeon HD 6850.  When I tested a fresh install of Windows 7 with the 80GB HDD on my current PC, I ran into the same issue, but when I tried out Windows 10, I didn’t have the issue at all.  Plus, as a bonus, Windows 10 correctly states that my monitor’s using Digital instead of Analog like Windows 7 tells me, even though I’ve used nothing but DVI-D.

You know what’s the one thing my AverMedia C027 is missing?  Windows 10 drivers!  Even though the download page says that it has Windows 10 drivers, the latest drivers were released months before Windows 10 came out, so the latest OS drivers you could use with it is Windows 8.1.  And you know what?  It works with no problems!  As a matter of fact, anything that has Windows 7 drivers will still work on Windows 10!

With my old PC, I have a TV Tuner in there that’s the ATI TV Wonder HD 650 and the latest driver for that is a Windows 7 driver.  Windows 10 doesn’t recognize it on its own, but using the Windows 7 drivers, it was able to install and work with no problems.  I also have a scanner that’s the Canon LiDE 60 and its latest drivers are Windows 7 drivers.  Windows 10 doesn’t recognize it right away, but when I use the Windows 7 driver to install it, it installs with no problem.  Hell, my biggest concern was my reliable Adobe Audition 1.5 as that program’s ridiculously old, but it still works well on Windows 7, minus the disabling of Aero part.  You know what?  Adobe Audition 1.5 works with no problems on Windows 10!

If you’re worried about your products not working with Windows 10, don’t be as they’ll work with your system with no problem.  You will not be disappointed, so go and get Windows 10!

My god, will you shut up about those things!  Were you even listening when I said that the ATI Xpress 1150 in the Dell Inspiron 1501 doesn’t have any Windows 10 drivers?  Okay, sure, some devices that have Windows 7 drivers will work on Windows 10, but the ATI Xpress 1150 does not have any drivers.  Then again, AMD lied and said that the Radeon HD 3000 series cards have no Windows 10 drivers and they do!  All you have to do is allow that dreaded Windows Update to search for drivers and it’ll install drivers for it.

Let’s address that Google-Windows comparison you brought up.  The difference between Google and Windows is that with Google, you’re only being spied on if you use the service, but with Windows, unless you’re on a Mac or Linux, that’s all you’re on with your PC!  Yes, it would be annoying to turn off features on Google, but with Windows 10, you have to go through the settings and look for stuff that says that you’re giving Microsoft information about what you’re doing with your PC, but like I said before, even if you turn everything off, Microsoft’s still spying on you and there’s no way to turn that ish off!  That is beyond ridiculous!

You know what, I forgot to talk about Cortana for a bit.  Yeah, that’s another form of spyware in Windows 10 that’s on by default.  Also, why did they name the search program Cortana?  Can’t they be original with the name?  And they also named their new web browser Edge?  How ridiculous!  I’ll address Edge later, but right now, let’s go back to Cortana.

Like I said, Cortana’s another form of spyware and Cortana can be annoying, just like the character from the Halo series who’s only saving grace is that she has a voluptuous body and that’s it.  If you turn Cortana off, guess what?  SHE’S STILL RUNNING IN THE BACKGROUND!!  Again, you have to jump through hoops in order to turn default settings off and as a computer user since 1994, this is totally ridiculous!  What’s also ridiculous is how Microsoft just gave up on Windows Media Center!

On Windows 8, you had to spend $10 just to use Windows Media Center, which made no sense whatsoever.  Then, once they released Windows 10, they just got rid of it altogether.  Why?  According to them, it was because WMC wasn’t used much.  Well what about users who DVR stuff, like me for example?  Many people have claimed that out of all programs in existence, WMC was the best TV program that’s ever existed and Microsoft threw it away like the idiots that they are.  Since Windows 10 has no WMC, that means people will have to get DVD playback software just to watch their DVDs and Blu-Ray or download the highly popular K-Lite Codec Pack in order to watch MPEG-2 videos with Windows Media Player.  While we’re at it, let’s take a look at Microsoft Security Essentials.

If you have Windows 7 and you install either Windows 8 or Windows 10, MSS is uninstalled with Windows Defender taking its place.  Windows Defender is basically MSS, but there’s no option to set up the scanning schedule for it; once again, you have to jump through hoops just to do the basic stuff!  That was something Microsoft should’ve addressed with Windows 8.1, but as usual, they’re lazy scums who can’t do ANYTHING right!  And that leads me to their “new” browser Microsoft Edge.

Yeah, Edge is a better browser than Internet Explorer, but it’s missing one thing Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox has: add-ons!  Many browser users like to use add-ons or extensions with their web browsers and no add-on support for Microsoft Edge means that Edge will be more boring than Internet Explorer!  Microsoft’s got a long way to go before they make Edge competitive to Chrome and Firefox, but for now, I’m sticking with Firefox!

Wow Skip!  Tell us how you really feel!

Wah, wah, wah!  That’s all I’m hearing from you and you always have to find something to complain about.  Edge will have add-on support and Windows 10 is supposed to have a big update this upcoming summer which should make Windows 10 operate much better than it already is.

With all the times you’ve had with Windows 10, did you encounter any slowdowns at all?  No, you haven’t.  Also, with regard to Windows Media Center, you’re right that it was the best DVR program you could find, but what you neglected to mention was that sometimes, it would use your TV Tuner’s main tuner instead of the WMC one.  Once that happens, if you use another DVR program like Arcsoft TotalMedia 3.5, you would get an error message saying that your tuner’s being used by another device or isn’t available.  I’ve tried looking online for solutions to that problem and I came up empty; for that instance, thank God Microsoft got rid of WMC for Windows 10!

With your complaint about Windows Defender, at least you still have essentially Microsoft Security Essentials.  Have you tried Windows Defender from Windows 7?  That Windows Defender is so bad, even if you download and install virus definitions for the program, Windows 7 doesn’t recognize it being on and used.  That’s something you never got with any Windows prior to Windows 8 and like we’ve said before, Windows 8 sucks.

Well if you love Windows 10 so much, why haven’t you upgraded to Windows 10 on your main PC?  As a matter of fact, where’s the Get Windows 10 notification on your PC?  Oh, that’s right: you need Internet Explorer 11 installed in order to get that notification!  And speaking of that notification, why does Microsoft want you to upgrade to Windows 10 so bad?  I remember one time when I was checking for Windows Update and it was getting ready to download Windows 10 even though Windows 10 was optional; I had to hide that update so that it wouldn’t annoy me anymore!

I must be fortunate right now with the Get Windows 10 update not showing up because from what I’ve read, the Windows 10 update on Windows 7 and 8.1 are now mandatory updates.  What the hell Microsoft!  I know that come August, Windows 7 and 8.1 users can no longer get a free upgrade to Windows 10, but are you that desperate to get them to upgrade?  Having them upgrade without their consent and against their will?  Microsoft must be wanting to get sued for practices like this; I haven’t seen anything like that since they forced users overseas to use Internet Explorer and deny them using Netscape Navigator!  This is ridiculous!

Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re reading this, do yourself a favor and don’t install Windows 10.  It’s a spyware operating system and it will be extremely nosy on you!  If you install Windows 10, you’re telling Microsoft that they have every right to see what you’re doing on your PC and to sell that information to third parties.  Since DirectX 12 games aren’t around anyway, there’s no need to go from 7 or 8.1 to 10; stay where you are right now!

Don’t listen to Skip as he’s doing what he does best: over-exaggerate.  Yes, Windows 10 will use your information by default, but you can turn the options off anyway.  From a speed standpoint, Windows 10 is much better than Windows 7 and when it comes to navigation, Windows 10 is better than Windows 8.1.  If you just happen to have a 5400rpm hard drive, Windows 10 will download and install updates better than Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.  You will not be disappointed with Windows 10, so use your free upgrade or buy a fresh copy of Windows 10 right now.

I’m afraid that’s all the time we have here today and that was one heated debate.  I want to thank Percy and Skip for this week’s debate and we’ll see you some other time.  Who knows?  Maybe next time, it won’t be another Super Bowl topic.  Take care you guys!

Both Percys brought up some excellent points about Windows 10 and it does make me question whether I should upgrade to Windows 10 since I’m still using Windows 7 on my main computer.  I did try out Windows 10 on my old PC and after a week of using it, I felt like it was good enough for my old PC to upgrade to Windows 10, but I’ll save my main PC from upgrading until the summer.

What’s my real opinion about upgrading to Windows 10?  I think it depends on the individual if they want to upgrade to Windows 10 or not.  If you’re running Windows 7, there’s no real reason why you should upgrade, but upgrading’s optional, unless it’s a required update.  If it is, then you should hide the upgrade.  If you’re running Windows 8.1, besides the privacy policy of Windows 10, it’s a welcomed improvement for those that hate the Start screen.  Also, if you have a 5400rpm hard drive, Windows 10 handles updates on those type of hard drives much better, but at a slower speed obviously.

As far as the Checking for Updates thing, lately that issue happens no matter what kind of hard drive you’re using.  After doing much research, I found the solution: KB3102810!  You can download the 32-bit version here and the 64-bit version here and install them before you check for updates.  If that doesn’t work for you, then I don’t know what else to do.

What are you guys going to do?  Are you going to upgrade to Windows 10 or will you wait until the time is right?  Or are you not going to update at all?  Let me know in the comments and until the next blog, I’m out!

It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I kept wanting to go back to this blog, this blog and this blog and update them.  There’s been no doubt that my blogging has improved over the years and with the maturity I’ve acquired over my life, I felt like this was a topic I could’ve done better and would do better in.  But, like I said before, I tried to block it out, but the itch just kept on coming back.  I haven’t had that feeling since the first time I came back to blogging, but that will be a topic I’ll save for next month.

It’s been four years to this day since Mass Effect 3 came out and I’ve yet to play and still have no desire to play it.  This game is, by far, the most disappointing Mass Effect game that’s ever come out and we have no idea, as of now, what the story folds for Mass Effect Andromeda.  If there was one thing I did know four years ago, it was that there were signs that were shown to us that Mass Effect 3 was going to be disappointing; I just never noticed them until after the game came out.  I won’t talk about the controversial ending since that wasn’t discovered until after the game came out, but I will talk about the 17 signs that showed us that Mass Effect 3 was going to be disappointing.

When I did the blog four years ago, I split them up into three parts because I thought you guys would need the split since it was going to be a long blog.  I’ve since been proven that my blogs should be as long as I want them to be, so skip the splits.  I’ve also included two other signs that I somehow missed (or rather, never elaborated on with one of them) and I’ll talk about those missing signs in a little bit.  What I can tell you before I get to the list is that I will be less critical of Mass Effect 3 than I was four years ago, but some of those signs still burn.  I’ll also list the signs the same way as I did before, so let’s get to the first sign that Mass Effect 3 was going to be a disappointment before it came out!

Looking at my old blog and thinking about how I feel about it right now, this is one that I probably should’ve thrown out as a sign of a disappointment.  This could’ve gone out on a great note, but it looked like this game hit the 3 bug.  What’s the 3 bug you ask?  It’s a bug that causes the third story of a series to either suck or become a disappointment.  I would like to talk more about it, but I’ll save that one for another blog as well.

Being told that it was going to be the last story of Shepard was a little bit of a bitter pill to swallow, but if done right, then people would feel very happy about how they ended the Mass Effect trilogy with Shepard being modeled after the player instead of the default option.  Sadly, we know how that ended up and like I said before, I’m staying away from talking about the controversial ending.

What we know about Mass Effect Andromeda is that there will be no Shepard, the story will take place well after Mass Effect 3, so nobody’s making a return (I think) and you will still play as a human character.  We’ll probably learn more on this year’s E3 event, but what we know so far is that most of the writers from Mass Effect 3 will not make their return.  Oh, and speaking of writers…

It was quite surprising that I could find the full credits of people working on a game without looking at the credits video in the videogame just by going to, of all places, IMBD.  Just in case any of my readers don’t know, IMDB stands for Internet Movie Database.  With the name movie in the title, it should mean that the website only has data for movies, but it not only has data for movies, but also TV Shows and games.

So, looking at the list of writers for Mass Effect, I saw 6 writers for it.  The names that I saw were Drew Karpyshyn, Lukas Kristjanson, Chris L’Etoile, Mike Laidlaw, Mac Walters and Patrick Weekes.  When Mass Effect 2 came out, only one of them wasn’t credited (Mike Laidlaw), but there were some additional writers like Chris Hepler, Brian Kindregan, Cathleen Rootsaert (as dialogue editor), and Jay Turner.  With those types of numbers, you had a total of eight or nine writers on board with Mass Effect 2.  With Mass Effect 3’s writing team, that number dropped as only five writers came back (Mac Walters, Patrick Weekes, Chris Hepler, Jay Turner [the latter two names were missing from four years ago] and Cathleen Rootsaert moving from dialogue editor to being a writer), with only two of them from the first game.  What the hell happened?!

Because I was so angry about the way Mass Effect 3 was handled, I never did some research into why the number of writers dropped and why some of the Mass Effect 2 writers left.  I accidentally stumbled upon some articles about it one day with Drew Karpyshyn and in them, he explained the writing process with Mass Effect and why he eventually left.  I was in total shock when I found out that the writing team had no idea who the Reapers were as we didn’t and that they made up stories as they went along.  I’ll have to admit, that could make some continuity errors, but they did a splendid job with it…until Mass Effect 3 of course.

Drew Karpyshyn was the lead writer of both Mass Effect 1 & 2 and he had left before Mass Effect 2 had finished.  It looked like from this article that he had left because he was too busy doing other things and had no time for continuing with Mass Effect 3.  Since Mac Walters took over the lead writing role for Mass Effect 3, some fans wished for him to not be involved in future Mass Effect projects, but he’s unfortunately involved with Mass Effect Andromeda, so we’ll have to see how that goes.

But what about the remaining writers?  Lukas Kristjanson looks like he moved over to Dragon Age, Chris L’Etoile looks like he’s still working for EA, but his profile says nothing about any projects beyond Mass Effect 2, Mike Laidlaw had worked on something I’ll get to in a little bit and Brian Kindregan is pretty much in a bunch of places.  With some additional writers on board, there was definitely going to be some inconsistencies and I don’t know for sure if there were or not since again, I haven’t played nor have any desire to play Mass Effect 3.

Looking back and seeing some names that I either glossed over or were not on the list before, this one could have also been excluded from the list of disappointing signs.  But then again, how else are we going to transition to the next sign of a disappointment?  That next sign was a sign I didn’t include in my previous rendition of this blog…

Remember when I said that I’d get to Mike Laidlaw later?  This is that later!  Dragon Age Origins was a fantastic game for BioWare fans and they couldn’t wait to see how their decisions would be impacted on the new game Dragon Age II.  Unfortunately, Dragon Age II was basically a slap on the face to Dragon Age Origins fans!

The gameplay was changed up dramatically to cater to fans who hadn’t played Dragon Age Origins and weren’t RPG or RTS fans.  Then, to make matters worse, you might as well should have never have played Dragon Age Origins because most of your decisions didn’t matter.  Why didn’t they matter?  It was because for some reason, the writers decided to tell their story in Dragon Age II with little to no regard of your past decisions.  One decision that I heard of that didn’t matter was if a character in Dragon Age Origins had died.  If she was dead, Dragon Age II didn’t know that and didn’t care because the game acted like that character had still been alive the whole time.  To make matters even more worse, that plot hole never got filled nor did BioWare care to fill it.

There were a little bit of fears that Mass Effect 3 could head into the same direction and it pretty much did.  It did a better job at remembering your decisions than Dragon Age II, but from what I’ve heard, it looked like the same story was being told no matter what decision you made before and during Mass Effect 3.  A similar thing happened when Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City came out before Resident Evil 6 and the fate of that franchise is up in the air.

I mentioned before that there were two signs that were left out of my original blogs and the next one went completely over my head…

In a blog that will probably never be published, one of the reasons why I hate the Red Power Ranger is because like John Cena during his heyday, the Red Ranger was being shoved down our throats.  If you thought Power Rangers was bad, its Japanese counterpart (Super Sentai) shows way more favoritism towards the Red Ranger; so much so that I can’t even get myself to watch a new Super Sentai series.  That’s also despite the fact that I’m more of a Super Sentai fan than a Power Rangers fan.  What does that have to do with Mass Effect 3?  Advertising!

Before Mass Effect 3, both Mass Effect games suffered the same problem in terms of advertising: they never advertised the fact that you can play as a male and a female Shepard.  The only way you’d find out which gender you’d get to play as was if you played the game yourself.  Even though many fans preferred Jennifer Hale’s voice over Mark Meer’s voice, male Shepard was advertised a lot; so much so that fans wanted FemShep to get some recognition.  Well, BioWare heard those fans’ pleas and decided to advertise FemShep.  There was one little problem though: the default FemShep looked bland.  To give her a more proper look, they decided to run a contest about which FemShep the fans wanted as the default FemShep on Mass Effect 3.

The voting took place on the Mass Effect Facebook page and the number of likes determined which FemShep was going to be used as the default and here were the choices…

I personally liked FemShep 4 and that was the one I voted for.  Guess which Shepard out of all of those Shepards won?  Well, you don’t really have to guess if you’ve seen the Mass Effect 3 FemShep cover: it’s number 5!  Not only did number 5 win, but number 5 won by a landslide.  Immediately, this caused controversy.

There’s no telling how many fans of the Mass Effect page actually played Mass Effect or what other factors came into play, but many people were furious at the fact that the blonde Shepard won, by a landslide no less.  Once again, a stereotypical Barbie look won out!  I think some fans wanted to stray away with the modelling standard of a blonde woman, which would explain the controversy surrounding it.   To make amends, BioWare held another contest asking what hair color the fans preferred.  In the end, the red hair won, so fans ended up getting a better looking version of the Mass Effect 1&2 default FemShep.    With that result, a contest should’ve never had taken place in the first place!

So, maybe I had gotten a little bit carried away with The Last Shepard Story and Only Five “Writers” Returned, but this next one is definitely baffling…

In case some of you guys don’t know who Jack Wall is (or had forgotten who he is), Jack Wall was the lead composer of both Mass Effects 1 & 2.  His music was great and it set the mood of the games, with Mass Effect 2 being his best work in my opinion.  In a shocking twist to me, one day BioWare had announced that Clint Mansell (the composer of Requiem For A Dream) was the lead composer for Mass Effect 3.  Now, I did know that Christopher Lennertz did the score of Lair of the Shadow Broker and Overlord, but that wouldn’t have meant that Jack Wall was done with Mass Effect, would it?  As it turned out, that’s what happened.

Why did Jack Wall leave BioWare?  Was it because he got fired for whatever reason?  Did BioWare want Clint Mansell to score Mass Effect 3 and bounce Jack Wall out the door?  Were there any creative differences between he and BioWare?  Only Jack Wall and BioWare can answer that question for us as neither side will tell us what lead to the departure of Jack Wall!

There is one thing that BioWare can and have explained to us and that thing is another sign that I thought was shown to us that Mass Effect 3 was going to be a disappointment…

On the first Mass Effect game, your squadmates were Ashley, Kaiden, Garrus, Tali, Liara and Wrex.  On Mass Effect 2, you had Garrus, Tali, Samara/Morinth, Miranda, Jacob, Legion, Grunt, Jack, Thane and Mordin.  Ashley or Kaiden only had a cameo and that was only if you sacrificed one or the other in Mass Effect.  Liara’s a squadmate for one time if you pick up the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC and Wrex is only an interactive character if you kept him alive in Mass Effect; otherwise, he’s replaced by Wreave.  Oh, let’s not forget Zaeed and Kasumi as they’re DLC characters with their own backstory, whom you also can’t romance as either Shepard unfortunately.  Man, that’s a lot of characters for Mass Effect 2!

The goal of collecting as many squadmates as possible was to have a team ready to take down the Reapers once you got to play Mass Effect 3.  Well, it looked like there were too many characters for BioWare to develop for Mass Effect 3, so they decided to make the announcement that there were going to be less squadmates in Mass Effect 3 than there were for Mass Effect 2.  With that kind of news, it meant that not everybody from Mass Effect 2 was going to be your squadmate in Mass Effect 3.  Since I had no idea which characters were going to return as squadmates except for Garrus, Tali, Liara and Kaiden/Ashley, I had to look at the FAQ section of GameFAQs to see which Mass Effect 2 characters returned as squadmates and if you haven’t played Mass Effect 3 yet, I’m sorry to spoil this for you: none of them returned!

What was the reason for the Mass Effect 2 characters to never return as regular squadmates?  I have no idea why, but the less members of your squad reason was mentioned: to put a better focus on story.  Many Mass Effect fans felt like Mass Effect had a better story than Mass Effect 2 (I did too), but nobody ever said that the story in Mass Effect 2 was the weakest part of the game (the lack of RPG feeling from the first game was it).  It’s because of the Mass Effect>Mass Effect 2 opinions relating to story why BioWare decided to give you less squadmates than in Mass Effect 2.  But why ALL Mass Effect 2 characters?  That part didn’t make sense to me then and it doesn’t make any sense to me now.

With this kind of decision, it looked like Mass Effect fans were better off skipping Mass Effect 2 and going straight into Mass Effect 3…unless once again, they got slapped in the face with the ending of Mass Effect 3.  But hey, at least the new characters can be interesting, right?  Well, about that…

I didn’t know what it was, but I just didn’t like the look of James Vega at all.  And you know what?  Neither did the majority of Mass Effect fans!  There you had a weird looking guy who looked like he’s spent a lot of time in the weight room and probably not spending enough time being a soldier.  I had a problem with his salute (his thumb separating from the rest of his fingers), but practically nobody wanted to give James Vega the time of day.  Plus, the name sounds pretty lame.

BioWare kept on telling their fans that they’ll like James Vega and that they should give the character a chance, and that’s where BioWare messed up.  If there’s one thing the early PS3 fiasco has taught me (and should teach everybody involved in the gaming industry), it’s that you should let your project do the talking instead of you.  Trying to convince people to like someone or something is usually not going to work; they have to believe it for themselves.  Then, to make matters worse, the voice actor that they had for James Vega ended up being…..Freddy Prinze, Jr., another person fans typically don’t like.

So, there were two strikes with James Vega with his look and his voice actor.  Was there going to be a strike three?  Actually, there was: he was being shoved down our throats like John Cena.  I’ve heard that BioWare did that with Jack during Mass Effect 2’s development and I don’t remember that happening, but if it did, BioWare should’ve known better by then.  Also, whoever was in charge of the PR department deserved to be fired for making the same mistake twice.  Then, to top it off, James Vega didn’t give fans a good reason to like him anyway, so that was a waste of a new character.  Where’s Drew Karpyshyn when you need him?

Speaking of Drew Karpyshyn, I mentioned earlier that he had left before Mass Effect 2 was completed.  Well, there was another sign of Mass Effect 3 being a disappointment here and I think it’s something writers (whether it’s a job or a hobby) learn the hard way…

I’ll talk about myself first and how I learned this lesson the hard way.  I was working on a sequel to a story and the sequel to that story at the same time.  The first sequel was basically a rewrite and the other sequel was new material.  I can tell you, when I was doing that, my writing had suffered greatly; I couldn’t put as much focus and effort on two stories like I did with one.  To make matters worse, I had to redo both stories anyway.  When I decided to do one story at a time, I had seen that my writing was so much better than when I took on two projects at once.  By working on Mass Effect 3 while working on Mass Effect 2, not to mention making stuff up as they went along on top of that, BioWare was basically asking for a disaster to strike.

It’s basically a bold move to be working on a sequel while the current story’s being worked on.  It’s bold because you’re confident that the current story will do well enough to warrant a sequel and if you’re right, your fans wouldn’t have to wait long for the sequel to come out.  However, if you’re like 20th Century Fox and wanted to do the Fant4stic series, it could blow up in your face big time.  Fortunately for BioWare, Mass Effect 2 did exponentially well, so that meant that Mass Effect 3 was going to take a lot less time than before to come out, right?  Once again, about that…

Mass Effect 3’s story was going to be so epic, so unreal (in a way, it was), so unprecedented that there were going to be multiple endings that would determine what happened to Shepard and the rest of his/her crew (man, I need to stop references of the end, don’t I?).  In order for that to happen, to anybody with a writing history, it would mean that there would need to be more time for the game to develop so that the story would develop.  How was that going to happen if the game originally had (at most) 23 months since the release of Mass Effect 2?  Yeah, that wasn’t a good sign at all.

Mass Effect 2 came out on January 26, 2010.  Mass Effect 3 was originally scheduled for release on Holiday 2011.  I don’t know which day exactly Mass Effect 3 was supposed to come out, but neither did everybody else because BioWare never mentioned specifically which day it was supposed to come out.  As we all know, BioWare pushed the release date back to a cleverly date of March 6, 2012 (3-6-12 y’all!).

When I told my brother that Mass Effect 3 was going to be released on Holiday 2011, he thought that the game would be pushed back and right when he said that, I thought it would make sense for that to happen.  Like I said before, he was right: it did get pushed back.  For a story like Mass Effect 3 with its multiple characters that the writers didn’t want to spend extra time developing for some apparent reason, 26 months wasn’t enough time to get the finale the way it should’ve been done.

Were the release dates thanks to the pressures from EA since they were seen as a terrible company at the time (and still now)?  Did BioWare get a little bit self-centered into thinking that they could get away with the release date since fans “weren’t going to be disappointed with the game”, forgetting how they disappointed their fans with Dragon Age II?  We don’t know and we also don’t know what really lead to this next sign that Mass Effect 3 was going to be disappointing…

We knew multiplayer was going to be in Mass Effect 3 when news came out that BioWare was looking to hire some people to work on the multiplayer portion of a game.  It wasn’t specified which game it was, but people knew what it was: Mass Effect 3.  Many fans, including myself, didn’t want to believe that Mass Effect 3 was going to have multiplayer, but to our disappointment, it did.  To make matters worse, multiplayer was going to affect the single-player aspect of the game!

How was this going to be possible?  There would’ve been multiple Commander Shepards going around killing Commander Shepards, ruining the time paradox of many Mass Effect gameplays!  Fortunately, that was not the case: you got to play as any race who are not named Shepard.  How was this going to affect single player?  You racking up enough points or something and if you had enough, you would get the best ending possible.

Was the multiplayer fun?  From what I’ve heard, yes it was.  Did it need to be a part of the single player campaign of Mass Effect 3?  No, it didn’t.  Was it a requirement to get the best ending possible in Mass Effect 3?  According to BioWare, no it wasn’t, but according to people who did their damndest to get the best ending possible without multiplayer on Day 1, unless post-DLC had something to add to it, it was absolutely necessary to play multiplayer to get the best ending.  BioWare kept on reassuring that multiplayer wasn’t required, which was basically a slap on the face to gamers who felt like BioWare thought that they were idiots.  Then again, they probably were idiots since this page shows how to get the best ending of Mass Effect 3 without multiplayer, which looks confusing to people who have never played Mass Effect 3.

Why did BioWare want to use multiplayer in Mass Effect 3 in the first place?  According to Casey Hudson, BioWare wanted to have multiplayer in the Mass Effect series since the first one.  Why wasn’t it included in Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2?  Multiple searches for answers came up empty, so I have no idea.  With the way Mass Effects 1 & 2 played out, it looked like multiplayer would’ve hampered the gameplay, so it wouldn’t have worked anyway.  Then again, I’m not a multiplayer kind of guy, so I wouldn’t know.

Speaking of knowing, I would like to know what made EA think that this was going to be a good idea, given their reputation?

If you had the PC version of Mass Effect 3, you wasn’t going to be affected by this thing at all, but if you had the Xbox 360 or the PS3 version of Mass Effect 3, there was no way you could play the multiplayer version of Mass Effect 3 without a thing that was created by the publisher of Mass Effect 3 (Electronic Arts) called the Online Pass.  Thankfully, that thing no longer exists and you can play the multiplayer portion of Mass Effect 3 without that middle man.

What was the Online Pass?  In case you didn’t know, Online Pass was a thing created by EA that, as explained before, hindered gamers from playing the multiplayer portion of a game without a passcode.  It only came with new copies of a game and they could only be used once.  There was no way to deactivate the online pass and if the game was sold used, then the used gamer would have to pay either $5 or $10 (depending on publisher) to unlock the multiplayer aspect of the game.  The Online Pass thing was created for one reason and one reason only: to hinder used game sales.

Combating used games sales was a silly thing for publishers to do.  Some people may disagree with me, but from what I saw, it was a way for publishers to get greedy, which EA had been accused of before.  If Online Passes were going to be successful, not only would other game publishers use it for their games (it was probably one of the leading causes for THQ’s demise), but other companies outside of gaming would do it too, which could’ve caused another national financial collapse.  It only took three years after its invention, but EA ironically became the first company to stop using the Online Pass after they were the first company to use it.

There was no way how Mass Effect 3 could avoid it.  The best way for it to happen was if BioWare had ended its partnership with EA and joined another company (like Activision for example) that didn’t have the Online Pass policy.  That was too much of a risk for BioWare because EA was giving them the money that was necessary to create Mass Effect 3 and switching publishers would’ve delayed production of the game.  With the many bad moves they had done with the creation of Mass Effect 3, they couldn’t afford to add getting away from EA as one of them, although many people wished (and probably still wish) that had happened.

Remember how I said earlier that Dragon Age II pretty much got away with the gameplay element that made Dragon Age Origins so great?  That affected Mass Effect 3 as well!

There’s an old saying that is constantly being used and you’re probably sick and tired of hearing it.  The reason why it keeps getting used over and over again is because over and over again, people are making the same mistake: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  Despite the much-needed gameplay change Mass Effect 2 had from the first Mass Effect, BioWare felt like they didn’t do a good job at getting new gamers into the Mass Effect universe with Mass Effect 2, so they decided to change that with Mass Effect 3.

The core gameplay was left unchanged from Mass Effect 2, but the way you was going to play it was going to be different.  I believe difficulty levels were the same, but the style in which you was playing the game was changed.  BioWare had three different play styles for the game: Story, Role Playing and Action.

With Story, the game is pretty much easy and it’s very difficult to die as difficulty doesn’t matter, but the story does.  With Action, it does many gamers a favor by getting rid of cut scenes and letting gamers play, with the drawback of predetermining their morality choices.  With Role Playing, it’s the same style you’ve been accustomed to with the previous Mass Effect games.

From personal experience, BioWare did a tremendous job getting me into the Mass Effect universe with Mass Effect 2.  It was because of the demo of Mass Effect 2 why I went and played Mass Effect first, so that I could create my Shepard and have his decisions and looks carry over to Mass Effect 2.  Yes, the story suffered a little bit because you had to spend a lot of time knowing your new squadmates and learning something new from previous squadmates, but the story was still pretty damn good.

When I heard about the play styles thing and why BioWare decided to use it, I was furious.  I was like how DARE YOU say that you didn’t do a good job at getting me into Mass Effect with Mass Effect 2 when Mass Effect 2 got me into the Mass Effect trilogy!  What a slap in the face that was to me!  It felt like an insult to me, so I took that as a sign that Mass Effect 3 was going to be a disappointment, but I just never knew how much of a disappointment it was going to be.

With reports of Mass Effect 3 being pushed back to sometime in 2012 (which later turned out to be March 6, 2012), a new report came out that the demo for Mass Effect 2 was going to come out sometime in January, so gamers had like three months of testing out Mass Effect 3’s demo before the full game came out.  But on which day was the demo going to come out in January?  We may never know the answer to that because apparently, BioWare forgot that the demo was supposed to be released in January.

During the month of January, I was waiting for BioWare to make an announcement that the demo was readily available, but that news never came.  When an announcement for the Mass Effect 3 demo did come out in January, it was announced that Mass Effect 3’s demo was going to come out…on Valentine’s Day.   If you read the article from the latest link, you won’t see anything relating to the delay of the demo.  Like I said before, it looked like BioWare forgot that they mentioned that the demo was supposed to be released in January.

What caused the delay of the demo?  I have no idea and the questions from gamers who asked about the delay didn’t get any answers either.  The fact that BioWare never addressed why the demo was moved from January to Valentine’s Day showed that the game may have some shortcomings and in a way, it did.

This next part is a thing that I’ve complained about before and I’ve done a blog talking about this thing…

Last year, before the year ended, I released a blog talking about why DLC had gotten out of control.   It’s been four years since Mass Effect 3 came out and I still hate the bastardization of preorder DLC.  This was one of those times where the preorder DLC wasn’t necessary, but one DLC was probably worth it, but caused controversy as well, but that’ll be saved for the next entry.

Since trying to do research on what the preorder DLC was for the game was a difficult thing to do without looking at my old blog, I had to use my old blog as reference.  It looked like there were too many preorder bonuses for me to count at the time and my current research led me to a few weapons and an armor, plus getting certain DLCs by doing this or that.  WatchMojo had Batman Arkham City as one of the worst preorder bonuses ever and Mass Effect 3 looked like it didn’t learn from that lesson.

If there was anything that really pissed me off with Mass Effect 3 (and other fans as well), this next entry was a way of asking BioWare this one question: what the hell were you thinking!

It’s been four years since Mass Effect 3 came out and this part still hurts me to this day.  As much as I hate to say it and as much as I wish I could be swear free in this blog, there’s no way of hiding it: BioWare completely fucked up in this situation.  It’s so bad, messed up is an understatement; hell, it’s probably so bad, even fucked up is an understatement.  I’ll get to how this was a tragedy in a little bit, but first, let’s set up the story that preceded the fuck up.

When you’re playing the first Mass Effect, one of the things that you’re told is that there’s a group of beings called the Protheans who were rumored to have been wiped out by organics’ main enemy: the Reapers.  There were many casualties of the Protheans and those who survived were put in space pods, waiting for a VI named Vigil to wake them up when the Reaper massacre was over.  There was one problem with that: most of them never woke up thanks to Vigil cutting their power to save energy thanks to the Reapers taking too long to leave.

Once the Reapers had left, the remaining Protheans were woken up, traveled to a different part of the galaxy to create The Citadel, then went MIA.  Because there was no option to reproduce, it looked like the Prothean race was doomed to extinction.

Once you play Mass Effect 2, there was a new wave of enemies that you and your gang had to face: the Collectors.  There wasn’t much known about the Collectors, but on one mandatory mission, Shepard has EDI look through the DNA of one dead Collector that was found.  What EDI had discovered was that the DNA of that one Collector matched the DNA of a rare species that were thought to have vanished: the Protheans.  As it turned out, every Collector you was going against was an indoctrinated Prothean!  With the brown complexion of their skin, it would mean that those were dead Protheans being brought back to life in indoctrinated form.  Well, there goes the possibility of seeing a living, breathing, non-indoctrinated Prothean!  That’s where From Ashes comes into play!

One day, somebody had gone to their Xbox Live Marketplace and seen that From Ashes was up for sale and that it was going to cost 800 Microsoft/BioWare Points, or $10.  News reports came out about it and the post was quickly taken down.  From the description of From Ashes, it was seen as a DLC where you got to not only find a living, breathing, non-indoctrinated Prothean, but you also got to have that Prothean as your squadmate.  There was fear that this Prothean was going to cost you 800 Microsoft/BioWare points or $10 and that fear was squashed…if you bought the Collector’s Edition of the game; otherwise, it was going to cost you $10 or 800 Microsoft/BioWare Points.  That’s not the fucked up part: the fucked up part is that this very important, rare species character was OPTIONAL!!

Seriously, what the hell were they thinking?!  This was a very important character who was the last of his kind, who knew about the desecration of his people caused by the Reapers, who experienced the massacre first hand (I think), and he was optional?!  Him being optional meant that he really doesn’t matter being the only Prothean alive who isn’t indoctrinated and it would also mean that without him, the only Protheans around are the Collectors and you have to kill them to move on!  Him being optional also means that he’s not integral to the story at all!  Doing that to any other race wouldn’t have been a big deal, but to do it with a Prothean, that’s terrible storytelling!  Also, you had to PAY in order to get the last living Prothean on your squad, which adds insult to injury!  Thanks a lot BioWare!

It was very disappointing to see Dan Stapleton think that Javic wasn’t a big deal and his post on GameSpy showed how little he knew about the history of Mass Effect.  Javic should’ve been a free character and he should’ve been a character who was already in the game (and thanks to one fan, it showed he pretty much was), but why he wasn’t had to have been a decision created by EA.  If this was BioWare’s own doing, it showed that they were starting to become as bad as EA themselves.

This next one I hadn’t seen many people complain about, but it was a concern for me and anytime I saw this thing happen, it meant that this thing was going to disappoint, suck, or a combination of both…

There are two types of over-advertisements that you can see: the one that has a lot of them on webpages which will cause people to download and install AdBlock Plus (except on Microsoft Edge since, as of now, it doesn’t have add-on support) and there’s the type that shows up multiple times per day to the point in which it can get very annoying.  Mass Effect 3 was fortunate enough to avoid the former, but it wasn’t the case at all with the latter.

When Mass Effect 3 was coming out and weeks after it came out, I was seeing advertising for the game go through the roof; there was no avoiding it.  I hadn’t used AdBlock Plus at the time (I rarely use it now and that’s only for websites that can’t show video without Flash and has bad Flash advertising), but even if I did, AdBlock Plus couldn’t be used on TV.  Also, I couldn’t use AdBlock Plus to avoid the numerous posts on Facebook from the Mass Effect 2 fan page.

One of the main reasons why I stopped following Jason David Frank’s Facebook page is because he posts multiple times per day and it got annoying, not to mention the defamation he caused to Austin St. John a couple years ago.  I had to stop following Mass Effect 2’s page on Facebook for the same reason: they just wouldn’t shut up about Mass Effect 3.  It was getting so annoying and so frustrating, I couldn’t help but think that it was a sign that Mass Effect 3 was going to be a disappointment.

I’ve had a theory about advertising and it hasn’t failed me yet: when something gets over-advertised, it means that the product is going to suck, be a disappointment or a combination of both.  There was one TV show that was being over-advertised for ABC (I think it was called Work It) and it got cancelled after two episodes and there was one movie (Bucky Larson’s Born To Be A Star) that had not only poor box office numbers, but also one of the worst review scores in cinema history and it too was over-advertised.  Mass Effect 3 wasn’t a bad game, but it was a disappointment and over-advertisements revealed that to me.

This last one was a rage I probably shouldn’t have had, but I understand why I and every other fan had it at the time…

I said before that if you had the Xbox 360 or the PS3 version of Mass Effect 3, you had to deal with the infamous Online Pass fiasco.  For PC gamers, they avoided the Online Pass thing completely.  Unfortunately for PC gamers, because the game’s an EA-published game, it was a requirement for them to download and install Origin in order for them to play the demo and the full game.

Somebody had to compete with Valve and their Steam service and EA felt like they were the company that should take that challenge.  EA felt like Steam can be very restrictive to developers and publishers over content on the service, so to make things fair and be the challenge Steam needed to have, EA created Origin.  Well, they didn’t really create Origin as Origin was originally a game developing company that was known for making the Ultima games and EA bought them a while ago and closed the company in 2004.  Naming the Steam-competing service after a company that they bought and closed looked like a douche move on their end.

Just like Steam, EA’s Origin had some problems in the beginning.  Unlike Valve, the Origin program wasn’t the only problem: EA had a reputation problem as well.  Before Origin’s “rebirth”, EA had been very infamous for poor working conditions, SecuROM, the Online Pass and other things that harmed their reputation.  Then, once Origin did come out, they had a problem with spyware; more specifically, Origin itself was a spyware program!  On top of that, Origin was also said to have slowed some people’s PCs down as well!

I’ve never had any problems with Origin itself, but I hated the fact that I had to download Origin in order to install the Mass Effect 3 demo.  With the already bad reputation that EA had, it would’ve been a smart move to delay the release of either Origin or Mass Effect 3.  If Origin was delayed, it wouldn’t have been required to play Mass Effect 3 and PC gamers would’ve had less things to complain about.  If Mass Effect 3 was delayed again, then maybe Mass Effect 3’s story would’ve been expanded upon and have a much better ending than what we got, let alone a better unmasked Tali picture that wasn’t poorly photoshopped!  Neither one of those things happened, gamers got pissed and 2012 was a crowning achievement for EA as being the winner of The Consumerist’s Worst Company of America award!  They did it again the following year thanks to the botchiness of Sim City; closing Maxis was a cop out like they did with Origin Games!

Well, that’s the end of the 2nd edition of Signs that Mass Effect 3 was going to be a disappointment before it came out!  I neglected to mention that in 2013, I got annoyed at the fact that BioWare decided to make November 7 Mass Effect Day.  I made a brief mention about how much I hated the way Mass Effect 3 was handled on here and I lost a follower because of that.  I don’t even remember who that follower was, but I remember it was somebody I told should be a Blue Ranger cosplayer even if she’s a female.

Am I still upset with Mass Effect 3?  Of course I am!  Like I said before, I still have no desire to play the game and I don’t know what to expect from Mass Effect Andromeda.  Would I pick up Mass Effect Andromeda?  That I have no idea.  What I do know is that I’m not as upset with Mass Effect 3 as I was four years ago, but the ending still leaves a dagger in some fans’ hearts.

This was a really long blog and I’d be surprised if I get some comments on here, especially since MyIGN’s participation level’s at an all-time low right now.  If you’ve made it this far, then I salute you for reading this whole blog!  If Mass Effect 3 still disappoints you guys or you think it’s been blown out of proportion, let me know in the comments.  Until the next blog, I’m out!

Normally, at this time, it would’ve been a month left to go before C2E2 2016 happens, but for this year, it’s not happening next month: it’s happening in a few days.  This will be the first time in 5 years that C2E2 is being held in March instead of April.  Why the convention’s happening in March instead of April, I have no idea.  But hey: at least I got to wait 11 months instead of 12 this time!

As you can see from my profile pic, I will be debuting a new cosplay this year: Spider-Man.  The Spider-Man cosplay is from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and I bought it from Zentai-Zentai.  The total price was $231, but since I took advantage of the Lunar New Year discount, the total went down to $210.50.

If you look at this page, you will see that the base price is $65, so how did the total price get to be so high?  Well, I upgraded the suit to be jersey lycra ($20 and I still have no idea what that is compared to spandex lycra), I had the mask being detachable ($2), I added attached Eva Foam Eyes ($15), I had zippers on the forearms ($10), soles ($18), attached Eva Foam Spiders for front and back ($40 total), Arachnid Studios print to make the patterns on the suit ($30), upgraded the zippers to be invisible ($5) and paid for express shipping ($26).  If you do the math, that comes out to be $231, but thanks to a 10% discount (shipping prices not included), the number went down to $210.50.  That’s one hell of a deal!

I ordered the suit on January 22 and it arrived at my doorstep February 2, during the rain no less.  You probably can’t see what the suit looks like from my profile pic, so here’s a better pic for you.

Click the pics for a larger photo.

There was one mistake I made with the suit: I didn’t spend the extra $2 to get my mask to have open eyes.  Because of that, I would’ve gone blind as Spider-Man instead of near-sighted since I’m too chicken to try contact lenses.  I did cut the holes, so I’m all good to go.  If you want to see a review of the suit, you’ll have to wait until after C2E2’s over as I want to see how the suit holds up at the event first.  Plus, I’ll do a video review instead of a written review.

Here’s how the lineup’s going to go: I will be the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger on Friday, the regular Blue Ranger on Saturday and The Amazing Spider-Man on Sunday.  This will be the first time ever that I cosplay as different characters on different days!  With that in mind, here are the 10 things I want to do at C2E2 2016!

When it comes to Saturday and Sunday, I’m fine, but when it comes to Friday, I’m ALWAYS late.  After four straight C2E2 appearances, I’ve never made it to C2E2 on time for Day 1, with last year being the closest I’ve ever been.  Hopefully, for this year, I’ll be able to make it on time!

With C2E2 2012, my friend and I used that con as the first convention we’ve ever attended.  Since we were new and didn’t cosplay, we arrived each day at around 2:30PM.  With C2E2 2013, my friend didn’t go, but my brother took his place.  The thing about my brother is that unless he makes plans to go somewhere, it’s Black People Time with him, with Saturday being the worst.  With C2E2 2014, I forgot that the event started at 11AM instead of noon, so my friend and I were an hour late.  Then last year, we arrived with time to spare, but with the parking garage we normally go to being demolished and us not knowing about it until we got there, we had to find an alternative, which made us late.

My plan for this year is to go to Parking Lot C of McCormick Place (the same parking spot we were in last year) and hope that we make it in time there.  If my friend and I are late again, that would totally suck.  Then again, hours after I typed this blog out on Microsoft Word, I found out that my friend’s not going to be attending C2E2 this year since he has to pay his late father’s car note.  Because of that, this should be a lot easier for me to accomplish…I hope.

For the second straight year, Channel Awesome will be at C2E2.  Channel Awesome is originally from Chicago (or rather, one of the suburbs of Chicago) and they usually attend Anime Midwest.  I guess with the awesomeness that is C2E2, they decided to show up again.  I’ve met Doug Walker, his brother Rob Walker and Malcolm Ray last year at their table and they were pretty cool.  I saw Doug Walker again at Wizard World Chicago and got a better picture with him.

This year, the same guys are going to be there, but with one new addition: Tamara Chambers.  It’s not because of Tamara why I want to meet Channel Awesome again; I want to meet them so that I could thank them for starting the Where’s The Fair Use campaign.  In case some of you don’t know, YouTube has a broken copyright policy and it has allowed copyright owners to abuse their power.  The fact that a video can be taken down just by request is ridiculous.  To make matters worse, users who had their videos taken down for copyright reasons even when their videos fall under fair use have to either go through a rigorous process to get their videos back up or take the loss and possibly have their channel taken down.

The copyright strike thing took a major turn when Team Four Star’s YouTube channel was taken down.  It was actually through Channel Awesome that I found out about Team Four Star years ago and became a huge DragonBall Z Abridged fan.  When the channel takedown happened, even I got involved with the #WTFU hashtag.  To explain more about Where’s The Fair Use, here’s The Nostalgia Critic breaking it down for you.

Again, if I ever see those guys, I want to thank them for the video and the movement.

Last year, I made it my mission to do something at Artist Alley besides getting my picture taken by a bunch of people.  I succeeded on two counts: I got an autograph from Gail Simone there (she’s actually going to be there again this year, but I have no reason to meet her again) and I got a pre-done artwork of the Green Ranger by Tico Thousands.  I hadn’t illustrated anything in years and my coloring wouldn’t have been as good as the artists at Artist Alley.  Since I never got around to getting those guys to color my paper, I’ll try to make that happen at this year’s C2E2.

If I can get them to color my Green Ranger art, I don’t want the regular color: I want the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger color!  Hopefully, to make sure that they get what I want, I’ll be wanting them to do it on Day 1, which is the day I’m going to cosplay as the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger.  If that’s done, then I’ll come back the next day and request the Blue Ranger artwork.

While we’re on the subject of Power Rangers…

Last year, I was hoping to get a picture with CM Punk at his autograph table, but that was forbidden, so I had to purchase a Photo Op ticket for him.  Oh, speaking of CM Punk, he was announced a couple weeks ago to be making his return this year.  I have no desire to meet him again, unless his wife comes with him.  If his wife comes, I’ll have her autograph our picture from Wizard World Chicago 2013 since she’s the only one who hasn’t done so yet.  Anyway, there were some complications with my purchased ticket and I handled it with no problem; I’ll try to avoid that again this year.

The first guests who were announced for this year’s event were Karan Ashley and Austin St. John.  In case you don’t know who those people are, they are the second Yellow Power Ranger and the first Red Power Ranger.  Since I’m a Power Ranger cosplayer, I have no choice but to meet those two.  I already purchased my Photo Op photo for them to be held this Saturday and I’m planning on getting them to autograph the photo print.

I have no idea what I’ll be talking with them about once I get to the autograph table, but I am interested in seeing how short Karan Ashley is and how big Austin St. John is.  I’m also interested in seeing if this thing will happen…

Last year, there was supposed to be a Power Rangers photoshoot happening outside the building, but it was raining on that day.  Since nobody came up with alternative plans for the photoshoot, nothing really came out of it.  There were some gatherings near the entrance and there was a MASSIVE wave of people taking photos of us; it was the most amazing experience I’ve ever had at C2E2 in any year.  I want to do that again this year!

It would be even sweeter if we got to do a Power Rangers gathering around Karan Ashley and/or Austin St. John’s table.  If it’s possible though, I would want to try a Power Rangers outside photoshoot again this year, hopefully with no rain.  If I could do that in my RavSeams Blue Ranger suit, that would be amazing as I would like to see how the shine of the suit looks outdoors.

The previous two things I want to do on Saturday, but the next three I want to do on Sunday…

I didn’t get to participate in the Marvel Universe Photoshoot last year simply because I wasn’t a Marvel cosplayer.  The least I could’ve done was check the place out and take a photo, but that never came to mind.  Well, I don’t have to worry about that this year since I’ll be cosplaying as Spider-Man!

From what I gathered, the event will take place at the stairs either inside or outside the building, depending on the weather.  It doesn’t matter to me either way because I’ll get to hang out with some Marvel cosplayers and I get to be involved in something epic.  It’s too bad we can’t get something like that with Power Rangers cosplayers in the Midwest and this will be the least I can do.

The thing I really want to happen there is Spider-Verse.  What I mean by Spider-Verse is have a bunch of Spider-Man cosplayers gathered together in one shot.  There was a series called Spider-Verse that happened either last year or a couple years prior and I’d be very interested to see how many different variations of Spider-Man I’ll see there.  Just thinking about it gets me excited!

I wanted to be a little bit clever by wearing Under Armour Spider-Man compressions underneath my Spider-Man costume, but that was unfortunately not going to happen.  It’s not because of price either: it’s because there’s no sleeved Spider-Man shirt and the smallest they have for Spider-Man leggings is 2XL; I wear an L!  Because of those circumstances, I had to leave the Under Armour compressions behind.

I don’t know what Spider-Man thing I want to buy from C2E2.  I don’t know if I’m going to buy a shirt, cap, boxers, Pop! Vinyl figure, action figure, mask, robe, hoodie or whatever.  Whatever it is I feel like buying from there, I want to get something Spider-Man related and no, I don’t plan on taking pictures with my products as Spider-Man…..at least while I’m at C2E2.  I’m leaning more towards a cap since I do want to wear a cap that isn’t Chicago White Sox-related.

This next one is a bold move because I haven’t seen one of these cosplays much…

Bat In The Sun has ruined me taking pics with a Ryu cosplayer forever: as long as I’m the Green Ranger, I have to take a versus pic with a Ryu cosplayer.  Why?  It’s because Bat In The Sun had done a Green Ranger vs. Ryu video, that’s why!  Even though the Green Ranger came out on top (sorry for the spoiler, but it really doesn’t matter since they did an alternative ending anyway), I felt like Ryu should’ve been the clear winner.  They did it again with Spider-Man vs. Darth Maul, although we probably wouldn’t have done a friendly pose anyway.

The one thing I love about the video is that Spider-Man is wearing The Amazing Spider-Man 2 costume.  It’s one of my favorite Spider-Man suits and I’m ecstatic that I get to wear one, though not an official one.  To make matters sweet, the guy wearing the costume is Yoshi Sudarso, the guy who plays Koda in Power Rangers Dino Charge/Super Dino Charge!  Even though I felt like Darth Maul should’ve won (even though I’ve never seen Star Wars Episode 1:The Phantom Menace), I was glad that Spider-Man won.  If I see a Darth Maul cosplayer at C2E2 on Day 3, I will be one happy Spider-Man.  Now let’s get to the bold things!

Even though I’ve never done a blog like this last year because of time constraints, this was a bold move I wanted to do last year and I didn’t succeed.  Usually, I don’t see any Tekken cosplayers at Chicago conventions and I didn’t think there’d be one at last year’s event.  Well, there was some good news and some bad news.  The good news was that there was a Tekken crossplayer there (a female Devil Jin).  The bad news?  I TOTALLY MISSED HER!!  This is despite the fact that I didn’t attend any panels that day (Friday)!  I guess I needed to be outside the show floor more often, which I might actually do more of this year.

Will that Devil Jin crossplayer make a return this year?  Last I checked, yes she will!  Will there be a Tekken cosplayer or crossplayer at this year’s C2E2?  I don’t know, but it would be lovely if that was the case.  This is by far the biggest bold move I will make at the con and if this happens, I would more likely consider this to be the best C2E2 I’ve ever attended and last year’s was the best.  There’s actually one way how that could happen too…

I know I usually take a lot of pics when I’m at C2E2 or Wizard World Chicago, but I want to do more of that.  I’m not going to be trigger happy with the shoot button like my brother, but I want to do more than what I used to.  There’s only one way how I can make this thing happen: not attending any panels!

In years past, I would try my very best to make it to as many panels as I could.  Sometimes I made them and sometimes I didn’t.  If I didn’t, it’s usually because I’m in too much pain to make it, I ended up not feeling like going to the panel or (in Stan Lee’s case with Wizard World Chicago 2014) I forget about them.  On Day 4 of Wizard World Chicago 2015, I had a chance to go to the Gotham Season 2 panel, but I didn’t go.  The reason why I didn’t go is because my interests in panels had died.  Since I have no desire to go to any panels this year, I’m just not going to attend any panels.

Since I won’t be attending panels, that means I get to spend more time on the show floor and take pictures of and with cosplayers.  Of course, I’ll take breaks, but those breaks will not be at panels.  They’ll be at photoshoots, photo ops, autographs and lunch.  Now that I think about it, this might be the easiest list I’ll ever accomplish.  But will I?  Only March 18-20 will tell us!

This will be the most interesting C2E2 I’ll ever attend since I’ll be going solo.  I had wanted to do something like that for a while, but I never thought that it would happen.  When I went to Anime Central last year, I started to appreciate my friend being with me as he’s my personal cameraman.  Now that I don’t have a cameraperson, I’ll have to ask strangers to take pictures on my behalf when I’m with a cosplayer.

I hope I’ll have some fun this year, so wish me luck!  Until the next blog, I’m out!

Well, it was the final day of C2E2 and I didn’t want it to end, even though my body wanted it to end so that it could recover.  Last year, when the event was over, I was in the worst physical pain of my life and it took five days to recover, only to be hit with the cold virus that lasted me the whole month of May.  Thankfully, nothing like that happened this year and on this day, my friend picked me up instead of me picking him up.

He didn’t call me at all until he had arrived.  When I picked up the phone, I couldn’t hear anything, so I hung up, grabbed my stuff and went out.  While we were on our way to C2E2, my friend wanted to try something out: talk to each other by phone.  Calling wasn’t the problem, but the receiving part was: I could hear him through his phone just fine, but he couldn’t hear me at all with my phone.  I don’t know if government phones are like that, but it sure showed that he needs a new phone so that we could avoid situations like the previous day and the day prior again.

There’s one thing I forgot to mention: for this day, I was the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger again, but this time, with no shield.  It was something I wanted to do last year, but I was so disappointed with the costume that Tech_Styles made for me that I wore the shield again.  Since I liked Cosplay Tree’s costume, I thought that day was a good day to do it.  From there, I would like to fast-forward to the queue line section.

Once again, my friend wanted to sit out from being in the queue line and I was going to sit right next to him, that was until I noticed a female Commander Shepard cosplayer right in front of us.  I didn’t want to wait until the show started to get a pic with her, so I followed her to the line and got a picture with her once we were in line.  After that, I took a selfie and posted it on Facebook letting my friends and family know that I had arrived at C2E2 for one last time this year.  Oh, before I forget, I had my bag with my stuff in it this time, so no repeats of the previous day!  Once 10AM hit, we were let in.

The first order of business for me was to go to CM Punk’s autograph area as I had decided the night before that I was going to get CM Punk to autograph the Photo Op picture from Day 1.  To my surprise, the Commander Shepard cosplayer was heading straight to the Autograph area like I was, so I followed her.  She didn’t go to the CM Punk line, but I did go to the line, paid for the autograph and waited like everybody else.  Moments later, CM Punk had arrived and was ready to sign autographs.

When it came my turn, he had called me the Lime Green Ranger as yes, my costume is lime green, but I’ll save that part for the review of the costume, which will come some time after Raven Prior finishes my costume, let alone gets started on it.  When he got started to sign my picture, he was surprised to see that I was the Blue Ranger cosplayer from Day 1, but mistakenly thought that I was the Blue Ranger from Day 2.  I corrected him and he had asked who I was dressed as the day prior, which was the same as this day, plus the shield.  He autographed the picture, said that it was good to see my face, we thanked each other and I left, never to see him again.

I let the ink dry up a little bit and I walked to a table to take a picture of the autograph.  After I did that, I went to Rosanna Rocha’s table to see if she was there and unfortunately, her table was empty.  So, I used that time to put some stuff up and that’s when she came by.  We said hey to each other and then I walked away since she wasn’t in cosplay.  Maybe she’d change later, so I’d get a pic with her some other time.  I’ll get to that in a little bit.

Some time later, my friend and I got reacquainted when I was in a toy booth and I was looking at some Power Rangers figures.  Unlike years past, I did not take pictures with merchandise at the event as I felt like I didn’t need to.  We went back to Rosanna’s table and she was still not in cosplay.  My friend did want a pic with her, but her not being in cosplay threw him off, so we walked away, never for me to see her again.

While we were walking, I saw the Tyrone Biggums cosplayer again and we chatted for a little bit and I FINALLY got a picture with him.  I never got his name nor his girlfriend’s, but at least I know she’s KatieGamer on here, but I don’t know how often she frequents MyIGN.  Then we walked around some more.

There’s one thing I missed out on during this time: the CM Punk Q&A panel.  It started at 11AM and since I had met CM Punk and talked to him in person, I felt like I didn’t need to go to the panel, so I decided to skip it.  Well, that’s one panel I had to miss; all that’s left was the Stan Lee Q&A panel, which started at 2:45PM.  There’s a problem with that one as well: if you’ve read my previous blog, I mentioned that Dan Slott’s autographing started at 3PM, so that meant that I’d either have to leave Stan Lee’s panel early, or I’d have to skip it as well.  I chose before going to bed to skip Stan Lee’s panel; I’ll try again at Wizard World Chicago if I can make it.

During our walk, my friend and I had seen Nicolette Noir Cosplay again and I asked for a couple of pics and she was kind enough to grant them for me.  There’s one pic I would like to post on here, but I’ll save it for my pics blog.  Now I’ll fast forward to an incident that almost ruined my friend’s day.

I had saw a Fred Flintstone cosplayer and I wanted to have a picture with him.  After that, my friend wanted a pic as well and I sat on a comfy thing and was surprised by how low it was.  The booth we were in was the Yogibo booth and we were trying out their bean bag furniture and they felt great.  My friend and I tried them out, but the starting price was too much for either of us (around $100 and that’s without shipping), so we took their information and walked out.

I was still around the area when picture requests were taken.  As far as picture requests went, I was right: it wasn’t as much as the previous day, but there were more than Day 1 when I was the Blue Ranger.  I had like a dozen people ask me where my shield was and I answered truthfully if I was asked without my helmet on, but if I had my helmet on, I shrugged my shoulders like I didn’t know.  One guy asked if Jason stole it and another guy asked if the Black Ranger had my shield; on both questions, I nodded my head as they were better excuses than the truth.

After picture requests were done, my friend came to me looking very upset.  The reason why he was upset was because his camera fell out of his pocket at the Yogibo booth and it couldn’t be found.  We went back to the area and the rep at the booth said that he couldn’t find the camera anywhere, so all hope looked lost.  The Shield tablet could take some good pictures, but his camera had better still quality than the Shield, just like how I think my camera has better picture quality than the Moto X.

When we walked away from the booth, it looked like he was going to have to buy another camera and that whoever stole his camera got a good camera with all of his pictures.  Moments later, the rep came to us and told us that a lady found his camera and it was underneath one of the bean bag furnitures.  My friend was so relieved, he hugged both the rep and the woman who found his camera.  I believe it was at that moment when my friend finally saw what I saw all along: C2E2’s better than Wizard World Chicago.

Of course, my friend was being extra careful with his camera since he didn’t want to lose it again.  I could mention about some other cosplayers I had met to take pictures of and with, but those would be just filler.  Well, except for one moment that put a smile on my face: meeting a kid who was so into Power Rangers.

This kid was dressed up as the Megaforce Red Ranger (minus the mask of course) and he was so happy to see me.  I was pretty much the only Power Ranger cosplayer that day (at least a regular one) and he didn’t pay any attention to the fact that I didn’t have my shield on.  He loved that I had the Legacy Dragon Dagger and he was just overall ecstatic to see me.  His level of excitement is hard to describe, but it made me so happy to have cosplayed as a Power Ranger that I decided that after I had taken a picture for him that I should take a picture of him.  That was the biggest highlight of my day and I can never experience something like that at Wizard World Chicago…unless that kid’s going to be there too.  Considering the fact that ticket prices for Wizard World Chicago are a little too high, I doubt it.

From that moment until around 2:45, I was walking around looking at stuff, getting my picture taken and taking pics.  When 2:45 hit, I went to the Marvel booth where Dan Slott was going to be and I saw the line and it was ridiculously long.  It was so long, it took me a while to trace where the end was.  Of course, my friend was surprised to see that I was going to wait in line for Dan Slott, so he left me with my camera and my comic book and we separated.

The Dan Slott autograph session was supposed to last from 3 to 4PM, but an announcer had informed us that Dan Slott would sign autographs for every fan who wants one from him, so I didn’t have to worry about being in the cutoff section since where I was standing, there would’ve been no chance for me to get even close to him by 4PM.

You may have noticed that I didn’t mention my wallet.  Well, that’s because I didn’t bring it with me to the line: Dan Slott’s autograph and picture was going to be free, so no worries for me.  On second thought, there was a worry: my camera’s battery.  I had seen a Gwen Stacy dressed like Spider-Man cosplayer (no, it was not Spider-Gwen I promise you) and right when I took the pic, the camera’s battery went dead.  That’s no biggie; all I’d have to do was switch batteries and I’m good.  Well, there’s a problem with that: my friend had the bag with the backup batteries, so I was screwed.

Oh, and speaking of my friend, before my battery went dead, he came by to show me a pic: it was Rosanna Rocha in cosplay.  Son-of-a-bitch!  I have no idea when she got into cosplay, but it sucked to see that he had gotten a pic of her while I was in line for Dan Slott.  To make matters worse, I saw a post of hers on Facebook that showed that she was in cosplay a couple hours earlier before that.  All while I was in the Dan Slott line!  Since I’ll probably never see her again until C2E2 next year, that meant that I went the whole year not having a picture with her.  Dammit!

Since I couldn’t take a picture with my camera, my phone would have to do.  I’ve waited for an hour to get an autograph and a picture with Kevin Conroy at last year’s Wizard World Chicago, but Dan Slott had that beat: I waited nearly two hours to get an autograph and a picture with Dan Slott.  I didn’t say much to him because the line was long and I didn’t want to hold up the line.  I got my Amazing Spider-Man #700 signed (the purchase was no longer in vain!  Hooray!), I got a picture with him and I walked out not only from the booth, but from the show too.

I wanted to go back to Artist Alley to see Rosanna, but I figured that she went back to her casual clothes and had possibly left already.  I had no further use in being at the show, so I had left.  I walked all the way to the left of the exit to take a picture of the C2E2 sign to signal the end of the show, turned around and saw my friend walking towards me.

My friend thought I had forgotten where we had parked (the parking lot was on the opposite side), but I informed him that I was just taking the pic of the C2E2 sign.  We walked to the opposite side of the building, I had gotten my picture taken by various people, and once 5PM hit, we left.

We took a bus as a shortcut to the parking lot where my friend was parked and as I sat down, I heard a big old rip.  No, nobody farted and no, my costume didn’t tear; instead, it was my Legacy Dragon Dagger holster that ripped.  It was tearing a little bit anyway, but sitting down on that bus made matters worse.  It’s an easy fix, so I could fix that thing up by the time I go to another convention as the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger.

I live some miles south of what used to be Comiskey Park, but is now US Cellular Field.  The White Sox had played that afternoon, so my friend and I had to deal with some traffic before we could reach the Dan Ryan Expressway.  Once we were able to go there, my friend took me home with no problems and that concluded my time at C2E2.  I so can’t wait to do it again next year!

I had a great time at C2E2 and I don’t think my testimony can tell you how great it was to be there.  I had a list of things to do at the event and I fulfilled some obligations, but failed in others.

I wanted to get a photo with a Tekken cosplayer and even though there was a Devil Jin crossplayer there, I never saw her, so I failed in that bold thing to do.  I wanted a picture with CM Punk as the Blue Ranger wearing the Blue Ranger hoodie at the Autograph section and I did that, just not at the Autograph section.  Obviously I got photos with Power Ranger cosplayers (still no Yellow Ranger in sight) and I bought two missing games there.  The Wizard World joke I wanted to make to Rosanna Rocha I was finally able to do (what’s her excuse for missing this year’s Wizard World?) and I only attended one panel when I wanted to attend 3 panels.

Since I didn’t get to meet Christopher Sabat and Sean Schemmel, I couldn’t get Christopher Sabat to say “I AM THE HYPE!!” in his Vegeta voice (DBZ Abridged for the win!) and I forgot to thank Booker T for From Prison To Promise, but at least I got to talk to him and his wife.  I didn’t get an artist to draw me (at least I was able to buy something from Artist Alley) and I didn’t visit McDonald’s Express at all.  Despite those things, I had a hell of a time there and like I said before, I can’t wait to go there again!

I’ll end C2E2 week with the pics blog and I can’t wait to show you guys the pics.  It’s going to be something special and it might make you guys jealous.  Until that time comes, I’m out!

Well ladies and gentlemen, it's the moment you've all been waiting for, or at least what I've been waiting for: the pics blog!  Granted, I haven't taken as many pics as in years past, but I consider that a good thing as it shows how popular my cosplay was at the event, especially for Saturday!  As like last year, instead of posting the pics here, I'll just redirect you guys to the gallery that's on my Flickr page.

There's one big change for this year's C2E2 pics blog: after a year from being absent, booty pics are back!  This time though, all the booty pics you'll see were taken with 100% permission.  So, if anybody's got a problem with it, you need help and you'll easily be blocked if you complain about it.  Hopefully this disclaimer's read!

I'll only have 3 pics posted here and clicking on each pic will take you to the gallery of the event from that day.  Without further ado, enjoy!

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

There's one more pic I feel compelled to post on here and it's another backshot of Vera Baby, but with my friend.  If you click on the pic, you'll be redirected to the highest resolution of the pic, so you'll get a better view of the picture.  With that being said, until the next blog comes, I'm out!

On May 16, 2015, I did the one thing I thought I would never do: attend Anime Central, also known as ACen.  Anime Central is the biggest anime convention that’s held in the Midwest area of the United States (specifically Rosemont, Illinois) and it takes place at both the Donald Stephens Convention Center and the Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel right across from it.  I’ve always taken a pass at the convention because anime’s not my thing besides Dragon Ball (DBZ Abridged is my favorite now), but there’s one question you might be asking: what caused me to change my mind?

When I attended C2E2 back in 2012, comic books weren’t my thing either.  Of course, I was a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and the DC movies were up and down, but when it came to comics, I was left blank.  Ever since C2E2 2012, I have picked up some comic books and read them.  I’m not fully back into comic book reading and I don’t think I’ll ever get to that point, but with my experience with C2E2, could the same thing happen with Anime Central?  The answer to that is probably not.

Once again, the question remains: what caused me to change my mind?  You also might think that the reason why I changed my mind was because this was a once in a lifetime opportunity every year to meet foxrevolution, but he’s been going to ACen for years and I’ve never attended ACen until this year.  Also, no, he was not the reason why I went to ACen this year.  The reason why I went to ACen this year is because of this pic from last year…

Right there is a thing called the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot.  Every year, cosplayers of the Super Sentai and Kamen Rider series get together to do photoshoots for people in attendance.  When I saw the pic above, one thing came to mind: there are no Fighting Spirit Green Ranger cosplayers there!  I wanted to remedy that situation, so I made going to ACen one of my goals for this year; as you can see, I accomplished that goal!

I ran into some problems with ACen.  The first problem I ran into was that I could not buy a single day pass online; I had to do it at the con floor.  That would’ve been no big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that on Saturday (the day the Tokusatsu/Power Rangers photoshoot was taking place), the lines can take up to FIVE HOURS to go through.  I didn’t want to bother with that, so I had to bite the bullet and buy a 3-day pass from ACen online, even though I was planning on going for one day only, which I ultimately did.

The second problem I had with ACen was programming.  As big of a con as ACen is, programming has to be its biggest flaw as even Wizard World gets that part right and it’s the worst con I’ve ever attended!  Trying to look for the schedule of the event on its website is practically impossible because there’s no programming there.  In order to see the programming for the event, you’d have to download the Guidebook app on your smartphone or tablet and look for ACen there.

The Guidebook app for ACen’s a lot like the C2E2 app, which is pretty convenient.  There’s still one other problem though: the guests schedule.  foxrevolution had to ask me about where the scheduling was for guests and we both couldn’t find anything as the guest list only had the list of guests that were attending, but had no schedule for the guests.  He was looking for Christina Vee and it turned out that she was going to be there the day after I was to be there.  I didn’t check my Guidebook to see if ACen updated that portion of the app.

My last problem with ACen was its location: the same place where Wizard World Chicago takes place.  From where I live and where ACen takes place, it meant that I would have to deal with traffic.  The good news was that traffic wasn’t that bad; there was a little mishap, but it was more from the usual construction work that gets done in this city on a yearly basis than from whatever other reason there was.  So, thanks to going to ACen, I can safely say that Wizard World Chicago causes traffic stops come Wizard World time!

I didn’t let my friend know that I was going to ACen and it didn’t matter anyway as he never asked me when it was.  So, that meant that I was going to the convention all by myself and if I couldn’t find foxrevolution, I’d have to ask strangers to use my camera to take a picture of me and a cosplayer.  There was only one total blurry pic taken by a stranger and that was pretty much because he took my bag when I was going to pose with other Rangers beside me; I had my camera off too and most people don’t know how to turn my camera on.  Plus, he took the pic with my camera and his phone at the same time.  Other than that, pictures came out fine.

For a while when I was at ACen, I thought I was the only Power Ranger cosplayer there because I didn’t see any other Ranger.  I did get pic requests, but they weren’t as often as C2E2 (that will never be topped in my opinion) nor Wizard World Chicago if you exclude the photoshoot of course.  I eventually saw another Green Ranger cosplayer who looked a little too basic and then I later on saw another Green Ranger cosplayer who had not only a Dragon Dagger, but also the Sword of Darkness.  I never held the thing because despite the fact that my character only made one appearance total (unless you count the Power Rangers Super Megaforce intro which also breaks continuity, thus Power Rangers tradition), he never held the Sword of Darkness.  Maybe next year or next con I’ll hold one!

The environment was rather strange to me.  I’m used to Hall A being one of the halls being used for Wizard World Chicago, but for this event, Hall A was a little bit more colorful, although there were more blue than anything.  As you would expect, most of the environment was like anime heaven: anything you wanted from anime was right there.  It was a little odd to see Artist Alley in the front while the other aisles were behind it.  I’m used to the other way around with Wizard World Chicago, but other than walking around Artist Alley, I didn’t care much about it.

Wait a minute, I forgot something: the location of the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot gathering!  It was hard to forget where it was because it was quite simple where it was: to the very right of the entrance.  When I saw the spot, I knew there would be trouble.  Here’s what the stage looked like…

If there were going to be as much Super Sentai and Kamen Rider cosplayers as last year’s event on that stage, it could cause a catastrophe.  Would it be one?  I’d find out later, but for the meantime, it was time to find a black guy with some long dreads and possibly wearing a Punisher sleeveless shirt.  Why was I looking for that guy?  Because that’s what I assumed foxrevolution was going to look like that day, at least with the Punisher shirt thing.

I did see some black guys with dreads, but none of them were foxrevolution.  I didn’t approach them and asked them if they were foxrevolution because they didn’t have his face.  I looked around searching for him, but I could never find him.  We weren’t Facebook friends at the time and I didn’t want to install Facebook Messenger again because of its pain-in-the-ass setup after installing (plus I didn’t want to drain my battery on my phone by going on Firefox.  On top of that, I forgot to check to see if free Wi-Fi was available), plus trying to make my appearance a surprise meant that I was screwed.  Well, he did know that I was coming anyway, but it would’ve been a better experience if we had met before the Tokusatsu/Power Rangers photoshoot.

Being alone at ACen felt a little bit weird.  All this time, I wanted to go to a con by myself and see how it was like to not be responsible for anybody but myself and at the beginning, I was really starting to miss my friend being there.  He would’ve been unable to attend anyway, but still: it would’ve been nice if he had been there with me.  After getting used to being by myself there, I was able to roam around the place (or places in this matter) and not have to search for my friend.

There was one person whom I met there that I didn’t think I’d meet again: TheRealTDragon.  I hadn’t seen that guy since Wizard World Chicago 2014 and I had no idea he was going to be at ACen either (it turned out it was a last minute thing), so it was cool to chat with the guy and do a little bit of video.  We were outside too, so that made it even better.  Thankfully, unlike my Blue Ranger cosplay, you can see me at the following video on the 58 second mark...

On my way back to the Exhibit Hall, I saw another person I didn’t think I’d see there: Orlando Belisle, Jr.  We just gave each other a nod and went about our business, never to see each other again.  Wait, I forgot something: a room at the very bottom of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel!

I went all the way down and walked around the place just to see what’s up.  I was pretty much in the gaming section of the hotel and when I had reached the end, to my right was something I hadn’t seen since I was a kid: AN ARCADE ROOM!!  I fangirled on the inside, but I acted casual on the outside.  Once I went inside the dark room, I whipped out my phone, turned on the camera app and made this video…

There was one other type of memory it brought out: the memory of not having the money to play those games!  Well, I did have some ones in my wallet, but I didn’t bother to look for a currency converter, so next year, I’m going to bring nostalgia back full circle!

There’s one thing I didn’t mention about the photoshoot: it was originally scheduled to happen at 5PM, but it was changed to 3PM and the Google doc didn’t accommodate that change.  I didn’t notice anything while I was at the shoot, but there was some confusion as to what was supposed to happen on that stage.  That’s one thing ACen has to work on come next year!

When it was around 2:30PM, I decided to hang out at the main hall of the Donald Stephens Convention Center and I saw a Red Ranger cosplayer with a Dragon Dagger and a Green Ranger shield.  I was like how is this possible?  I have the shield and Dragon Dagger with me! Of course, I was acting like I was in character, so I approached the cosplayer and got a pic with him.  He was with a friend who was cosplaying as ShinkenRed and I had to get a pic of him.  After that, I noticed that the Red Ranger cosplayer’s belt looked familiar: it looked like the belt of the Red Ranger cosplayer from C2E2.  Since he didn’t take his helmet off, it was confirmed: that was the same guy.

All three of us had our pics taken together and the amount of pics that were taken was massive; we almost missed the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot because of that.  The pic requests weren’t only at the main hall; they were also near the main entrance as well.  While we were getting our pictures taken, a Rita cosplayer (whom I had met earlier, so sorry for leaving that part out) photobombed us.  There were no versus pics as that was being saved for the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot, but it was nice.  We were able to make it to the stage with a few minutes to spare, so luck was on our side…or so we thought.

Remember how I said earlier that the space for the stage would cause some problems?  Yeah, as predicted, it did, especially when the first set of photos was for everybody to be on the stage.  There wasn’t enough space to have everybody on the stage, so that made some people be out of other people’s shots, so that sucked.  Plus, the Rita cosplayer was nowhere to be found; the same with the other Green Ranger cosplayers.

It was while I was off the stage waiting for another opportunity when someone tapped me on the shoulder.  I turned to my right and that’s when I saw foxrevolution.  Finally, the two MyIGNers who had been on MyIGN since the ClubIGN days of 2006 have met in person!  We talked for a bit about the experiences of the event or whatnot (and also me having to be on stage again for another photo session) and he took a few pics of me, which reminds me that I’ll have to practice my dagger placement when I do the flute-playing pose because I totally lost it.  He took some photos of the gathering and you can see them here if you want, but after staying around for a bit, he left; we never saw each other again.

I can’t remember when this next thing happened, but I did notice a while ago that Funimations had their own booth.  Granted, they were there at C2E2, but I never visited their booth, even though I was interested then in getting Dragon Ball Z Battle of Gods.  Since I missed my opportunity to get DBZ Battle of Gods at C2E2, I went ahead and bought it at ACen.  I may do a review on the movie sometime later and if I do, I’ll get on a little rant about a plot hole in the movie that pretty much contradicts the DBZ universe.  You probably know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen the movie (don’t spoil it here please).

I decided to go to the Hyatt Regency O’Hare again to chill out and read my Facebook newsfeed since I was 15 hours behind.  On one of the posts, I had seen that a person I was following was at ACen too: Miss Sinister Cosplay.  Somebody made an Instagram video of her and she reposted it and I was like she’s here too?  I must’ve missed her.  Oh well!  I’ll try again if she comes back to the Chicagoland area.  Here’s where I made a mistake with that logic: I should’ve gone to her Facebook page to see what she had posted earlier.  I actually did do that though…..after I got home that is.

On an earlier post, she said that she was going to be at the Yaya Han table.  W! T! F!  You know what that means?  It means that I came across that table a total of three times and on all three times, like a senpai doing the opposite, I DID NOT NOTICE HER!!  I was too caught up with the fact that Yaya Han table? Eww! that I probably didn’t notice she was there.  Fortunately Yaya Han wasn’t there at all (and I hated the fact that I had to check her Facebook page to find out), but I didn’t know that, thus why I avoided her table.  Hopefully Wizard World Chicago will fix that and I turned on notifications for Miss Sinister’s fanpage since then.  Damn you Facebook for not providing me updates to everything!

When the PA announcer said that the Exhibit Hall was closing in 20 minutes, it was 5:35PM; it was scheduled to close at 6PM.  On that note, I decided to make like a tree and leave.  I did take some more pics on my way out, but once I went up the escalator, that was it with pictures and that was it with me being at Anime Central.  I paid my $13 parking fee and went home to watch SmackDown! since there were no NBA games to watch that day as there were none to be played.

I honestly didn’t see what made Anime Central the C2E2 of anime conventions, but it was definitely better than Wizard World Chicago.  I didn’t have to worry about wrist passes (I dread that part come August) and I didn’t deal with any stupid crap that I normally would expect from Wizard World Chicago.  Maybe I would’ve seen what the big fuss was about had I gone to ACen with my friend (or any friend for that matter) and if I had gone all three days instead of just one.

There’s one thing I didn’t mention about ACen: it’s not really a 3-day event, but rather a 72-hour event.  Why use 72 hours instead of 3-days?  They’re basically the same thing is what you’re probably saying right now, but hear me out.  I used 72-hours instead of 3 days for ACen because unlike other conventions I’ve attended, there’s stuff going on with ACen even when the Exhibit Hall closes.  There are things that are done that takes over the whole night and foxrevolution can give you better details about that since he attends those events and has been there way more than I have.

Am I going to go back to ACen next year?  To get a better experience of the event and to play some arcades like a little kid, you bet your ass I will!  Will I come with my friend this time?  Of course!  Will I go all three days this time?  Raul Julia as Vega (I refuse to use his American name), can you answer that one for me please?

Will I attend the festivities on all three days of the event?  In order for that to happen, my friend and I would have to rent a hotel room for the Hyatt Regency O’Hare and since we live like 45 minutes from the Donald Stephens Convention Center (without traffic), I don’t think we’d need to have a hotel room.  So, it’s more than likely it will not happen.  Plus, if there’s an NBA playoff game happening, I’m going to go home and watch that instead.

Here’s one more question that you might ask me: with Anime Midwest happening in the same building on Independence Day weekend, will I attend that convention?  I was considering going to that convention only if I couldn’t get a Wizard World Chicago 4-day pass.  Since I did obtain a Wizard World Chicago 4-day pass 2 days after ACen, the answer is no I will not attend Anime Midwest.

Since I only went for one day, it would make no sense for me to do a separate pics blog about the event, so I’ll have the link to the pics at the bottom of this blog.  I didn’t take many pics on Day 2 of C2E2 and this convention made up for it totally.  Not only will you see pics of the event there, but you’ll also see the video I posted above on there too.  I hope you enjoy the pics and also be sure to read foxrevolution’s blog to see how his experience was like at the event, which I’ll link to once he does do a blog about the event.  Until the next blog, I’m out!

Back on June 23, 2015, a well-anticipated game was released: Batman Arkham Knight.  It was to be the final chapter of the Batman Arkham series and the world was so great, it couldn’t be included on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii U.  After having to download a Day 1 patch (something I think is a major problem with today’s gaming, but that’ll be saved for another blog), PS4 and Xbox One gamers have been able to play the game with no problems, well probably except for how much time they’re wasting playing the game, which is a game’s job anyway.  For PC gamers however, it was the complete opposite: they were wasting time getting crashes, frame skips, freezes and the 30 frame-per-second limit that shouldn’t have existed on a PC game.  The game was so badly done that Warner Bros. Games pulled the game from Steam a day after the game’s release.

What seemed to be the problem here?  How could this problem have happened?  Well, it was a little case of Warner Bros. Games not learning their lesson from Batman Arkham Origins.  What lesson should they have learned?  It’s two lessons actually that they should’ve learned: don’t trust Iron Galaxy Studios for being the outsource for the PC version of a game and to NEVER POORLY PORT THE PC VERSION OF A GAME!!  ESPECIALLY WHEN IT’S COMING OUT THE SAME DAY AS THE CONSOLES!!

Before I get more into Batman Arkham Knight, I’ll have to start things off with the first game Batman: Arkham Asylum.  The Batman Arkham games have had a bad history with the PC version of them and even though Arkham Asylum had the least amount of problems, it was the start of problems.  With the PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum, if you so happen to have an AMD GPU and wanted to play it with anti-aliasing, well, you was screwed!  If you had an NVIDIA GPU, you could use anti-aliasing and the PhysX features with absolutely no problem.

Since PhysX is an NVIDIA-exclusive feature (AMD users can use it, but it requires quite a lot of power for stable framerates), I won’t knock Rocksteady there, but anti-aliasing has been in existence since practically the birth of GPUs.  Why would NVIDIA users have the capability for anti-aliasing, but AMD users didn’t?  Well, you’re probably not going to believe the real answer, but there is a reason: a miscommunication between AMD and Rocksteady!  Despite a one-month delay from the console version, AMD users did not get the opportunity to play their game with anti-aliasing, but NVIDIA users did.  Fortunately, that problem was averted with the next game, but it introduced a new problem, this time for everybody: DirectX 11.

Just like its predecessor, Batman: Arkham City was delayed a month after the console releases.  After the game was released, it became quite clear that the PC version was delayed just so that Warner Bros. Games would have as many B:AC console releases as possible and didn’t use the extra time to make sure the game was working for PC users.  On DirectX 9, the game ran beautifully with absolutely no problems.  When using DirectX 11 however, the game ran to a crawl, especially for PC users with beast machines.

I had tried Batman: Arkham City when it came out on my PC and I had slowdown issues as well, and that was without and with the first patch.  When I noticed it, I had one thought in mind: Unreal Engine 3 was never meant for APIs higher than DirectX 9 no matter what, also Unreal Engine 3 sucks on dual-core processors (at least AMD ones) on Windows 7.  I ran into issues with Gears of War on DirectX 10 before and I probably did play one more game that utilized DirectX 10 or 11 and Unreal Engine 3, but I had bad experiences every time I played a UE3 game that utilized either DirectX 10 or 11.

Warner Bros. Games and Rocksteady had released two patches and a Game of the Year Edition of B:AC and the DirectX 11 issues still persist (mostly outside), but it should run just fine for today’s PCs, although I haven’t played the game in a while.  With the next game (Batman: Arkham Origins), not only were Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill not going to reprise their roles as Batman and Joker respectively (although Mark Hamill was not going to matter since SPOILERS Joker died at the end of B:AC END SPOILERS), but Rocksteady weren’t going to reprise their roles as developers of a Batman game.  Instead, the developer of Batman: Arkham Origins was Warner Bros. Games Montreal.

Unlike the previous two Batman Arkham games, this game came out on the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U and PC at the same time.  Unfortunately, PC gamers weren’t the only people who suffered: everybody suffered gameplay issues to the point where it prevented players from progressing in the game.  With the PC version, they had one special bug which prevented them from completing one of the Riddler’s missions.  It was quite clear that Warner Bros. Games Montreal was not Rocksteady (especially since one company is in Montreal while the other’s in London), and it turned out that B:AO was a placeholder for Rocksteady’s new and final game Batman: Arkham Knight.  Before we get to the latest game, let’s stick with Arkham Origins for a bit.

After numerous patches, the game still had bugs in them.  It got so bad, Warner Bros. Games made themselves look even more ridiculous by announcing that they were no longer going to patch Arkham Origins to focus on making another DLC.  With worldwide issues, it masked the fact that Warner Bros. Games outsourced the PC version of B:AO to Iron Galaxy Studios, a studio that’s notorious for making bad ports of games.  So, with one more game, nothing could go wrong with using Iron Galaxy Studios again, right?  How else was this blog born!

I’ve already mentioned the issues that accompanied with the game and how it was taken off Steam shelves a day after being released to the public (Steam’s new refund policy came at a really bad time for Warner Bros. Games too) and it has shown that despite the advancement of technology, games are still being ported to PC and can still be ported nightmarishly!  You would think that the PS4 and Xbox One having a PC architecture would mean the total elimination of PC ports, but thanks to Dead or Alive 5 Final Round and Mortal Kombat X (why have a studio be responsible for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC version Warner Bros. Games?), that is sadly not the case.  Not only that, they’re either not being tested properly or are not being tested at all (more likely the former for B:AK thanks to reports like this).  To make matters worse, as long as people keep preordering games and buy into hype or until Sony, Microsoft and Steam start penalizing companies for pulling practices like this, it’s not going to stop anytime soon.

I could go on and explain about why we’re allowing these problems to happen, but that would be too long, so instead, I’ll break it down into a series where I tackle the problems individually.  The crazy thing is I did those blogs a while ago, but never found the time to post them.  Thanks to Warner Bros. Games and their total screwup with the release of Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, I now got an excuse to post those blogs.  You may agree with me or disagree with me on the subjects, but there’s one thing I think we can all agree with: in the words of Angry Joe (and I’m sorry for swearing for this one), Warner Bros. Games, YOU DONE FUCKED IT UP!!

As I’m typing this, I’m not expecting this blog to be as long as my previous convention blogs, but don’t be surprised if I end up making this a long split-series blog.  With that being said, I’ll have to say that this year’s Wizard World Chicago was the best Wizard World Chicago I’ve ever attended.  This con pissed me off a little bit (which was really a minor inconvenience which I’ll get to in a bit) and it felt just as good as this year’s C2E2, making it a little bit hard for me to decide which con was the better con.  As much as foxrevolution would hate for me to say this, Anime Central was the worst con I’ve attended this year, but that’s only because the environment was so different and anime’s not my thing; we’ll see if next year changes things.

What I’m going to do with this blog is try to be brief about each day as I can and at the end of each day’s testimony, I’ll have a picture from that day that’ll link you to the pics that were taken that day.  I didn’t run into any battery problems like with C2E2, so expect fewer pics from my phone there.  With that being said, let’s talk about Day 1 of the event.

Before I start off talking about this day, I’ll have to talk about a scenario that happened earlier that week, more specifically the Sunday before the event.  On Sunday evening while I was checking my Facebook newsfeed, my mother came to my room and told me that my Uncle Dayton had passed away.  That was a shock to me because 18 months prior, his mother (my grandmother) passed away and then six months after she passed, his brother passed.  With one of my other uncles dying from a heart attack back in 1994, that was a little bit of a cycle with my grandmother and her first three children (whom were sent to Mississippi to be raised by a Reed family) to have passed away.

When I had seen my Uncle Dayton last alive, it was a day after my other uncle’s funeral while we were in Mississippi.  He had his leg amputated (which I didn’t notice even though I already knew that had happened) and he was in some sort of hospital being unable to speak (but was able to express emotion by crying).  I had no idea his condition was that bad, but him passing 11 months after last seeing him was so surreal.  This also caused a little bit of a travelling conundrum.

His funeral was on the following Saturday and on that day, I was going to attend Day 3 of Wizard World Chicago, which meant that somebody was going to have to use a rental car for the weekend since his funeral was in Mississippi.  What ended up happening was that I kept the Kia Forte while my mother rented a vehicle to be used for the trip.  My mother and brother went to the funeral, but my sister (since she started teaching) and I (Wizard World Chicago) didn’t.  The travelling situation was the only thing that concerned me with Wizard World Chicago and since the travelling situation was taken care of, all I’d have to worry about was getting to Wizard World Chicago and try to have some fun there.

When Day 1 arrived, I was woken up to two surprises: the weather and a message from my friend on the Facebook Messenger app.  With the weather, after being in the 80s since probably late June, it decided that it was October weather instead of August weather.  What I mean by that is the weather dropped from the 80s in the previous day to either the low-to-mid 60s.  Couldn’t the weather have waited at least four more days before the major drop?  I guess that’s Chicago weather for you!

With my friend, he sent me a message saying that he needed to take care of things with his job, so he wouldn’t be able to go to Wizard World Chicago that day, so don’t go and pick him up.  Wow!  I really wanted Wizard World Chicago to be the con where I’d go by myself this year, but I ended up taking Anime Central instead.  I guess this was God’s way of making that up for me, but it totally caught me off-guard.  Since I had an extra hour to spare before I’d depart from my house to Wizard World Chicago, I decided to spend that extra time by watching Daredevil on Netflix (which is a really awesome show by the way) and when 1:30PM hit, I hit the road.

Before I could get on the expressway, I decided to go to my bank first to withdraw $300 from my checking account.  There was a little bit of a problem there: the whole block where my bank is had some major construction work, so I had to go around it to get to the parking lot of my bank.  The deposit went through with no problem, so after that, I was back on the road and went to the expressway.

There was a little bit of traffic going there (as expected), but it wasn’t so bad.  There were some construction signs up, but I didn’t see any reroutes or anything, so the travel was good.  Since I was driving the Forte, that meant no need for CDs, so I listened to my Saints Row The Third customized KRhyme 95.4 playlist.  It didn’t feel weird at all, but I was so happy to no longer be limited to 77 minutes worth of music anymore; I could listen to as much music as the memory on my phone would allow!

When I got to the Donald Stephens Convention Center, the setup was pretty much the same as last year’s, which made it easy for me, well, except for where to get the passes.  Last year, I had to get a VIP pass because the 4-day passes were sold out, but I was able to easily see where to get the VIP passes from.  This year, I had gotten a regular 4-day pass a day after ACen ended, so I had to go get my pass from somewhere else in the building.  After last year’s situation, I printed out my pass instead of having it scanned through my smartphone and I didn’t know which booth area I should put my pass in.  It turned out I was supposed to go to Will Call.

Why was it called Will Call?  Can somebody explain to me why it was called Will Call instead of Pre-Purchased or something?  That wasn’t what pissed me off, but it was baffling.  After getting my pass (not scanned surprisingly), I went to a line and killed some time by checking my Facebook newsfeed (sending status updates suck since the reception there sucks and you have to pay for Wi-Fi, which is something I REEEALLY didn’t and don't want to do) and listening to the Saints Row The Third theme through my phone and headphones.  As soon as I sent a status update that I had arrived, the lines were let in.

Oh snap, I forgot to mention something: who I cosplayed as that day!  I’ll have to look back at my previous blogs and see if I’ve mentioned this before, but I had my mind made up since Wizard World Chicago 2014 Day 1 who I was going to cosplay on Day 1 of Wizard World Chicago 2015: nobody!  I was going to attend Wizard World Chicago Day 1 for the first time out of cosplay and I finally did so!  I wanted to do that because the first day of Wizard World Chicago’s always a throwaway day as guests and panels are usually non-existent there.  Until Wizard World Chicago release 3-day passes, I’ll always attend Wizard World Chicago Day 1 out of cosplay.

How did it feel to not cosplay at Wizard World Chicago Day 1?  It felt normal to be honest.  It also felt like I should retire cosplaying as I felt free.  It also didn’t feel weird to be by myself at the event, but I knew it would be short-lived as the day was 5-hours long anyway.

Since I was out of cosplay and I was by myself, that meant that I could take as many pics as I wanted and I wouldn’t be getting picture requests.  If I did, I’d be surprised (spoiler alert: I was never asked for one!), but other than that, I took the most number of pics that day and you won’t see me in any of them!  I did meet a new cosplay friend to replace Rosanna Rocha at Wizard World Chicago probably (UndeadDu) and I saw plenty of vehicles on display at the autograph area of the show.

Speaking of that, do you guys remember last year when I did a rant on Wizard World Chicago for Dandera Entertainment denying me the right to take a picture of the Bat Tumbler without paying for it?  The good news was that Dandera Entertainment wasn’t at Wizard World Chicago this year.  The bad news: I still couldn’t take a pic of the Batmobile, even though it was the 1960s Batmobile, a vehicle I already took a pic of with my camera back in 2013.  Also, there were No Pictures signs surrounding it, so at least I was warned about it beforehand.  I forgot to tell the people working that area that I thank them for the sign as it was missing from Dandera Entertainment’s booth last year.  Unfortunately, I didn’t see the DeLorean at all even though it was advertised at being there.

Before I left, I saw another female cosplayer who looked fine from the front, but couldn’t tell from the back.  I took a pic of her and immediately after that, she sent me a business card.  Well, I can say that I’m no longer a fan of Ivy Doomkitty because this cosplayer got a better looking body and I’m now following her on Facebook.  The name’s Sofia Sivan; those who love booty will not be disappointed!

When 7:30PM hit, I decided to call it a day and left and went home.  Being by myself was great and everything, but Day 1 was a pretty boring day as usual.  Day 2 was when things would change for the better (which is also why I wish 3-day passes for the event would happen), so I was getting ready for that and for my new Blue Ranger cosplay.  Damn this day’s testimony is long as is!  Oh well!  Remove the article subheader and turn these blogs into individual blogs as usual!

A little known fact about my blogs: when I want to do a short one, I end up doing a long one.  When I want to do a long one, I have to force it to be long because the blog ends up being way shorter than I thought it’d be.  It’s funny how that works out!

As promised, a pic from the day will be posted on here and with that, you can check the pics out.  Since Livefyre’s still having its issues, I won’t be notified of when comments come to my page (this problem is slow even by IGN’s standards in the past), so I’ll have to check on the page frequently.  I’ll be back tomorrow for the Day 2 blog.  Until that time comes, I’m out!

There was a little bit of a worry for Wizard World Chicago 2015 Day 2, or rather two concerns I had: my new Blue Ranger suit and my Green Ranger shield.  First, let’s start off with the shield: on Day 3 of Wizard World Chicago last year, my shield came apart when I had to go to the bathroom.  Ever since then, I’ve been concerned with having to take my shield off outside of home because I brought nothing to help me fix the shield.  C2E2 had the Cospitality Lounge which specialized with fixing cosplay problems, but I never needed them; Wizard World Chicago had no such thing.  Since I was planning on wearing the shield for two days, I was hoping it’d hold up.

With the Blue Ranger suit, I finally retired the Color Suits suit from conventions and with my new suit, it is a two-way stretch suit.  The problem with two-way stretch suits is that they limit your movements and could possibly easily tear too.  I had gotten my suit from Raven Prior on Facebook and his suits by default are two-way.  Unlike 007Halu’s two-way stretch suits, Raven’s two-way stretch doesn’t limit movement, but it kind of feels like a chore doing it.  They also don’t feel like they’re going to rip and my fear was that it could.  I was going to see how the suit held up the entire time I was there, so off I went to pick up my friend and go to Wizard World Chicago!

I left my house at around 10AM and went to pick my friend up.  Unfortunately, I forgot to mention that when I went home the previous day, 76th street was closed up, so I had to take an alternate route home.  I had to take 71st street to my friends’ house and I got there around 10:40AM.  My friend came to the car and off we went!

There was another part of Day 1 I forgot to mention and it’s relevant for this day: while I was on my way home, my friend sent me a message about his camera that was worse than when he lost it at C2E2 2015 Day 3.  His mother was going to a party or what have you and she wanted to borrow his camera.  While she was at the party taking pictures and stuff, one of her coworkers wanted some of the pictures that were taken removed.  Rather than deleting the pictures from the camera, his mother gave her coworker the memory card that was in the camera, meaning that my friend would go to Wizard World Chicago pretty much cameraless!

Hearing that story, I was like that’s even worse than me going to ACen without telling him about it.  Fortunately for him, I had an 8GB microSD card that wasn’t being used at all, so I told him he could use that card for his camera.  It turned out that was the best thing I could do because when he had gotten his camera, the lady selling him the camera told him that he’d need a memory card for it as the camera will take pics without a memory card, but the camera would have to remain on for the pics to hold.  By default, Auto Power Down’s on and since the average person doesn’t change the settings on their camera, my friend would’ve been screwed ridiculously quick.  Enough with the backstory, let’s talk about the event at hand!

Not much happened at the con other than getting pics taken, taking pics and getting the Photo Ops passes scanned to avoid a repeat the following day.  Speaking of that, let’s talk about the Photo Ops situation right quick!

When it was 2:30PM, I went upstairs to get my Nathan Fillion Photo Op pass scanned and the guy behind the table asked if I had another Photo Op pass and I told him I had a Photo Op with Brett Dalton the next day.  I had both passes scanned (through my smartphone) and I received a ticket for the both of them.  When the guy told me to come back at least 30 minutes before the start of the Photo Ops, I told him that’s what I did for Nathan Fillion.  He looked at his sheet and told me that Nathan Fillion’s Photo Op was moved to 5PM, so I should come back then.  The crazy thing is the ticket on my TicketLeap app still said 3PM instead of 5PM, so I left my friend a little too early.

When I came back to my friend, we walked around for a bit and then I was stopped by a couple of people and they wanted to take a pic with me.  Of course I granted their pic request and they wanted me to take a pic in front of their background.  The group is called Chicago Reader and you can see two of my photos from them here and here.  Now let’s backtrack to something earlier that day.

While my friend and I were at a booth, we saw a Michael Jackson cosplayer dancing to Billie Jean.  His dancing was spot on and we both tried to take a pic of his dancing, but unfortunately, we ran into a thing called Motion Blur, so no shot was right.  We ended up recording the dancing sequence and you can see it on my Flickr page, which I’ll link to in a little bit.  Now back to after Chicago Reader!

My friend and I killed some time before it was 4:25PM and when that time came, my friend gave me permission to leave for the Nathan Fillion Photo Op.  I didn’t ask for permission, but he told me I could go, so I took the chance.  While I was waiting in line for the Nathan Fillion Photo Op, one of the Photo Op guys was selling photo covers for $5 and I picked up two, one for each Photo Op I was attending that year.  I gave him $20 since I didn’t have $10 on me and he wasn’t paying attention to what I gave him, so I asked him for the change.  Once he realized that I gave him $20 instead of $10, he gave me my $10 change and went about his business.

There’s one thing you gotta understand about Wizard World Chicago: even though they don’t have any black people working the con (as far as I’ve seen, which isn’t a problem to me), they apparently go by Black People Time.  When I did this blog three years ago, it baffled me that some people living in this country had never heard of the negative stereotype of black people always being late.  Trust me, it sucks.  When you’re black and you’re seeing your own kind living that stereotype, it embarrasses you and Wizard World Chicago’s the only time I see non-blacks be late.

Why did I bring up Black People Time?  Because the Nathan Fillion Photo Op didn’t get started until around 5:20PM!  It took a little bit before it was my turn and when it was time for me to get a photo with Nathan Fillion, he loved my outfit and wanted to do a karate pose or something.  Since I decided to go helmetless, I couldn’t do an actual Ranger pose, so I did the best I could, not realizing what Nathan Fillion was doing.  After the photo was taken, we shook hands and I left, never to see him again until Sunday.

There was something new that happened with the Photo Ops this year and it was the same way with C2E2: the photo prints are ready immediately!  I didn’t have to wait 45 minutes or so before I could get my pictures, so that saved me a lot of time!  When I looked at my photo, I couldn’t help but laugh because it turned out Nathan Fillion’s a bigger goofball than his Richard Castle character.  I did get a digital print of it of course and you’ll get to see it in a little bit.

There was one more additional thing that was done differently with the photos: how to download them.  In the past, if you purchased a digital print, you’d get a yellow card that’d give you the codes to put in to get the digital version of your photo.  This time, there was no yellow card; instead, there’s a code on the side of your print that you input to get the digital version of your picture.  That also saves time and was a very convenient thing for Celeb Photo Ops to do.  It makes me can’t wait for next year’s event!

After that was over, I reunited with my friend and we killed some time by going around taking pics and me getting my picture taken.  When it was around 6:20PM, my friend decided that he was done for the day, so we went about and left.  When we were about to exit, my friend noticed the gaming room (delivered by DeVry University) and he wanted to check it out.  We walked around the gaming room seeing people playing Super Smash Bros. Wii-U and some other arcades (the room wasn’t dark however, so no full-on nostalgia there) and after being there for a couple minutes, we left.

I took a glance at the other side of the room and saw some people as usual, but there was one person I wasn’t expecting to see nor was he advertised in being there: Doug Walker, also known as The Nostalgia Critic.  Without realizing that the previous photo was a little messed up from C2E2, I went up to him and asked him for a pic.  He granted me that pic and that was the last pic I took for the day.  Speaking of YouTube celebs, besides him, there was also Black Nerd Comedy (hosting for ConTV) and Chris Stuckmann.  I knew about Black Nerd Comedy, but I never saw him, but I had just started watching Chris Stuckmann and I had no idea he was at Wizard World Chicago until he did his reviews from last week.  I guess I’ll have to check every YouTube celeb’s Facebook and Twitter a day before Wizard World Chicago next year so that I wouldn’t be surprised by their unadvertised appearance.

As I was taking my friend home, we were talking about the Supergirl pilot that was going to be shown at Wizard World Chicago the next day.  He told me that he had seen the show and that it sucked to him.  He said it was like Gossip Girl (a show I’ve never seen), but with superheroes.  In case you guys didn’t know, a few months ago, the Supergirl pilot was leaked on the internet and a lot of people had seen it; I wasn’t one of them as I wanted to see the show the day it aired.  Well, you can forget about that because I saw the pilot the next day and I’ll talk about it once I go into Day 3 of the blog.  In case any of you didn’t see the pilot yet, I won’t spoil it for you.

I did think about watching the leaked pilot before, but I decided not to do that.  Oh, and in case you didn’t see my Day 1 pics, somebody at one of the booths was actually selling the pilot episode on DVD!  At the end of the day, I watched Daredevil on Netflix (the 12th episode), prepared my Day 3 cosplay and called it a night.

Usually when I go to cons, my legs would kill me.  My legs were killing me at Wizard World Chicago, but it was more of my thighs than my shins.  After Anime Central, I picked up some compression socks to see if that’d solve my leg pain problems and they did for my shins, but it brought the pain to my thighs.  It wasn’t that bad and I felt like I could go on for another day, but my arms started to really become a problem.

To try to solve the problem of the armbands sliding off of my arms, I installed another layer of 2mm foam sheets onto the armbands (two layers on my left arm and three layers on my right arm) and it worked, but at the expense of being too tight on my arms.  Raven Prior’s suit is a little bit thicker than I thought and it caused the armbands to squeeze my arms a little bit, so my arms were in pain the rest of the event.  Not severely, but it was at its worst when I was the Blue Ranger.  Well, I guess I can retire wearing the Green Ranger shield and armbands while wearing the Blue Ranger cosplay!

The pic with me and Nathan Fillion will be at the bottom of this blog and clicking on it will take you to a new tab and to the pics that were taken that day.  Until the Day 3 blog comes, I’m out!

With this day happening, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news: it’s the last time I’ll wear the Cosplay Tree Green Ranger suit as after this event.  I’ll upgrade to the 007Halu suit, if he doesn’t go AWOL on me again like he did last year, which forced me to go to Raven Prior for my Blue Ranger suit, which I don’t regret.  It was also going to be a busy day, so I was prepared for traffic to be heavy.  Also, I was expecting the number of Deadpool cosplayers to increase.

I wanted to leave my house at 7:50AM to go to my friends’ house to pick him up, but I predicted that I was going to leave at 7:55AM and I guessed correctly.  I was able to guess correctly because I usually end up leaving 5 minutes after when I was supposed to leave, no matter how much I try to circumvent that situation.  When I got to my friends’ house, it was 8:24AM, 6 minutes earlier than I was expected to arrive.  When I called my friend to let him know that I was outside, he told me that he needed me to wait an extra 10 minutes for him to get ready.  It took him like 7 minutes to be ready and out the door and away we went for Wizard World Chicago Day 3!

To prepare for the heavy traffic that was to ensue that day, days earlier, I had created a Saints Row The Third playlist that contained all the menu music from the game and that was a grand total of an hour and thirty-nine minutes; that was something I could never do with CDs.  To our surprise, we didn’t run into traffic issues at all and we got there with minutes to spare.

If you’ve read my previous blog, I mentioned that Wizard World Chicago goes by Black People Time and they didn’t disappoint here.  I wasn’t paying much attention to the time, but we didn’t get in until it was a little well past 10AM.  As expected, the event was packed with very little room to go from one part of the con to another part of the con.  As usual, I had my pics taken and my friend and I took pics of other cosplayers, sometimes with me being in them.  There was one set of cosplay that caught my attention, or rather, two.

Before I talk about this one cosplayer, I’ll have to backtrack to the previous day.  I had seen this one female cosplayer who was dressed as Bulma, but it was the type of Bulma I’ve never seen anybody cosplay as: the Bulma from the Frieza saga.  I took a pic with her and told her that I had never seen anybody cosplay as that Bulma.  Back to this day, I saw a female cosplayer dressed as a Ninja Blue Ranger (which made me wish I was the Blue Ranger that day) and I took a pic with her.  She asked me afterwards if I was the Blue Ranger the previous day (of course I was) and she told me that she was the Bulma cosplayer from the previous day.  Wow!  The crazy thing is she wasn’t even the only Blue Ninja Ranger at the event that day!

There was another Blue Ninja Ranger cosplayer and he was with his friend who was cosplaying as a White Ranger, but with something around his waist.  I didn’t make out what it was initially, but I left it alone and requested a pic with them.  As I was putting on my helmet, I noticed something odd about his shield: it was designed like Vegeta’s first Saiyan armor.  As soon as I saw that, I was laughing on the inside and I also figured out what was around his waist: a tail.  This White Ranger cosplayer was cosplaying as a White Ranger with a mix of DragonBall Z in it!

After I took the pic with those guys, I told the cosplayer that he was the Great White Saiyan Ranger and one of the people who was with him had told me that I was the first person who got what he was doing with that cosplay; everybody else were left baffled as they didn’t remember the White Ranger’s shield looking like that.

Another highlight for me was when I entered the Donald Stephens Convention Center, I saw a little girl dressed up as a DinoCharge Pink Ranger and I didn’t get a pic with her right away.  The next time I saw her, I asked her mother if I could get a pic with her and sure enough, I did.  Now let’s talk about the Supergirl pilot!

When I got to the area where the Supergirl premiere was happening, there was a long line.  I didn’t know if the line was for Supergirl or not, so I went in line.  It turned out that I was in the right line and when I got in Room 24, there were enough seats to sit in, so I sat on a chair in a corner of the middle section (remember, I’m wearing a shield).  While I was waiting for the show to start, I saw a Ryu cosplayer and a Cammy cosplayer walking by and I pointed at the Ryu cosplayer like YOU!!  Bat In The Sun has ruined my potential friendly photo with a Ryu cosplayer while being the Green Ranger forever!

When the show was about to start, one of the people who works for CBS had said that she was a little nervous about doing the show because Wizard World Chicago was the first con she’s ever attended and since getting on the stage, she’s excited to see everybody there.  She also said that everybody in the room were going to see the show before the rest of the nation would.  I said under my breath if you didn’t watch the leaked episode that is.  By the way, the word leaked or any mention of the leak weren’t addressed at all.  Without further ado, everybody was able to see Supergirl’s premiere episode!

If you’ve read my Wizard World Chicago 2014 Day 3 blog, you would know that I saw the premiere episode of Gotham there and the last 30 seconds ended up having some audio problems.  Supergirl didn’t have that problem, but it did have some audio balancing issues; issues that didn’t really hinder the quality of the show.  Like I said in the previous blog, I won’t spoil Supergirl’s pilot episode (please don’t spoil it if you saw the leaked episode), but I will tell you that it’s had some ups and downs as you would expect out of pilots.  My overall impression: it’s good enough to watch multiple episodes of for me.  Then again, therein lies a huge problem: its timeslot.

Supergirl’s set to air on October 26, 2015 at 7:30PM Central Time.  You know what’s on during that time?  Gotham!  So you have two DC TV shows airing at the same time, which could hurt one show’s ratings?  That’s like AMD having the FX-8370 and 8370e cost $200 or AMD having the Radeon R9 Fury X and Fury Nano costing $650.  In other words, IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!!  Then again, this is Warner Bros. we’re talking about, so this shouldn’t have been a surprise at all.

Before I get back on subject, I have to ask the inevitable question: which show will I DVR?  The answer to that is going to be whichever one is the easiest to record.  I can pick up CBS with both my digital antennas with no problem on my HDTV, but with my HDTV tuner, it’s a different story.  I guess it’s not that strong thanks to it being a USB 2.0 tuner instead of a USB 3.0 tuner, but I don’t know.  If CBS ends up being too hard to pick up, I’ll DVR Gotham and watch Supergirl instead.  But what if I want to watch Monday Night Football and I’d have to DVR both episodes?  Well, I solved that one at the end of this past TV season: have my two PCs DVR one of the shows.  If anything was to go wrong with Supergirl, Netflix and torrents are my answer.  Either way, me watching Monday Night Raw is going to be messed up.  Now, back onto the testimony of the event!

After the Supergirl premiere ended, I went to Hall A and went to the chairs and table section as that’s where my friend said he’d be at once the premiere was over.  To my non-surprise, he wasn’t there.  So, with less than an hour to go before I’d have to attend the Photo Op of Brett Dalton, I decided to go around the event and take pics and stuff.  When it was getting near 2:30PM, I went upstairs and got in line for the Brett Dalton Photo Op.

Do you know whose Photo Op was also happening at around 3PM?  Jason David Frank.  When I saw that his costume Photo Op was $95, I figured the reason why was because he was going to be in his Bat In The Sun costume and I was right.  Jason David Frank’s Photo Op was scheduled at 2:30PM, but since Wizard World Chicago goes by BPT, I don’t know when it actually started.

While I was waiting in line for Brett Dalton, one of the Celeb Photo Ops guys guessed that I was there for Jason David Frank because I was dressed as the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger; I told him that was not the case.  I guess my Legacy Dragon Dagger holster didn’t like that because minutes later, it came apart.  The sleeve being off because hot glue gun sucks sometimes was something I could live with, but one of the buttons coming off as well was something that was devastating.  Last year it was my shield; this year it’s my sheath.  If I encounter one more cosplay problem as the Green Ranger on next year’s Wizard World Chicago, that’ll mean my Green Ranger cosplay’s officially cursed at the event!

With the holster problem, I decided that it was not going to affect my Photo Op with Brett Dalton as I didn’t need it for the photo anyway.  I was going to need my Legacy Dragon Dagger though as I wanted to use it for my photo with Brett Dalton.  Like I said before, Wizard World Chicago goes by BPT, so the pictures didn’t start until around 3:15PM or 3:20PM.  Unlike the Nathan Fillion Photo Op, I wanted to take my photo with Brett Dalton with my helmet on.  Brett Dalton was a cool person and he didn’t do anything silly with my photo (even though he’s a silly guy as well) and after our photo was taken, I shook his hand and left, never to see him again for at least an hour.

I got stopped for a pic request before I could obtain my photo print and after getting that and my digital photo, I was heading back to the main hallway to kill some time before going to Room 4 for Brett Dalton’s Q&A.

When I got back to the hallway, I noticed Ranger Six hanging out with his buddies, so I went and had a little chat with them.  They were cool to chat with as always and I told Ranger Six that I had finally started watching Daredevil and that the show was amazing.  He told me that after a couple of episodes of Daredevil, he started going on Amazon to piece together that Daredevil cosplay and had it ready by the time C2E2 got started.  By the way, I did not watch the season finale of Daredevil on this day; it was reserved for the following day as I didn’t want to be behind on SmackDown! before SummerSlam.

I did let my Facebook Ranger friends see my messed up Legacy Dragon Dagger sheath problem and they said that it could be fixed without having to buy a replacement.  I’d like to save some money and I’d like to fix my Legacy Dragon Dagger holster, so if anybody can offer me tips on putting the button back on and keeping it there, that’d be nice.  When it was near time for the Brett Dalton Q&A, I went to the programming area where Room 4 was and went in there for the Brett Dalton Q&A.

Highlights from the Q&A: Brett Dalton thought he was going to be fired when he was about to learn that Grant Ward was going to be Hydra, four or five cosplayers were dressed as the original Hydra members (with the Green and Yellow), Brett Dalton would want his Hydra to be the good Hydra with a smiling face instead of a skull and have cookies, Ming-Na Wen being the complete opposite of Agent Melinda May and like us, can’t wait for Season 3 of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  I could’ve sworn that ConTV was there to record the Q&A section, but I can’t find it anywhere.  Oh well, I guess YouTube’s our friend here when it comes to that!

After that was over, I went back to Hall A (Hall F is where the Autograph section is) to go to where my friend was supposed to be hours ago, but before I could get there, I saw the same Ryu and Cammy cosplayers that I saw at the Supergirl premiere.  Of course, I had to have a Vs. pic with the Ryu cosplayer and since my friend wasn’t around to take the pic, the Cammy cosplayer had to take the pic.  She ended up taking two pics (one landscape and the other portrait) and my Green Ranger vs. Ryu pic streak continues!

When I went back to the area where my friend was supposed to be, of course, he wasn’t there.  I decided to check my Facebook newsfeed so that I wouldn’t be that behind once I got back home.  After I was done getting all caught up with my Facebook newsfeed, I texted my friend that I was in the spot where he was supposed to be.  He replied by saying that he was in the main hall.  I texted back OMW and proceeded to go his way.

Once I got to the main hall, I found my friend taking a photo of some cosplayer whom I can’t remember what she was.  We ended up spending the remainder of our time there in the main hall taking pictures of cosplayers and with me taking pics with cosplayers.  We hung around the area until it was around 6:20PM and when that time came, we left the con, preparing for the final day of the event.

On my way to dropping my friend off, he told me that he’s been having too much fun playing the Call of Duty Black Ops III beta and that he might not come to Wizard World Chicago on Day 4.  He also told me that he’d let me know by 11PM if he was going to go.  In my mind, I was hoping I would go by myself because it would make getting my autograph from Brett Dalton and Nathan Fillion easy.  I did have a strong feeling that he was going to tell me that he was not going to go, but things don’t usually go my way, so I expected him to tell me that he was going to go.

When 10PM came, he sent me a message on Facebook letting me know that he wasn’t going to go on Day 4, so I should have fun there for the both of us.  With that news, it meant that I could leave for Wizard World Chicago on the final day an hour later than expected.  Also, no shield and armbands this time!

As usual, a pic will be at the end of the blog and the pic will redirect you to my Flickr page where you’ll see all of this day’s photos taken.  With the next day being the final day, you can expect some stories there.  Until that time comes, I’m out!

I will preface this blog with the following: this year’s event was not the best C2E2 I’ve experienced.  At the same time, it was not the worst C2E2 I’ve experienced.  After last year’s event, it was going to be hard for this year’s event to top it and the weather going all winter on us didn’t do me any favors.  The guest list was pretty weak compared to last year’s, but C2E2 is more of a community con than a con that features big name guests.

Last year, because of laziness, I didn’t do a blog talking about things I wanted to do at the event, which meant that I couldn’t do a blog like this.  Since I’ve already done a blog like this, it’s time to do a follow up and see if I accomplished any of my goals.  Let’s list them in order from the previous blog, starting with…

With this one, I don’t know if it’s considered an accomplishment or not.  I left around 8:45AM and the con wasn’t supposed to start until 11AM for regular con-goers.  I didn’t realize that until I was on the expressway and with just my luck, there was traffic.  There’s usually no traffic going to McCormick Place from where I live, but maybe I had left a little too early.  Not only that, but there was also some construction going on heading northbound on I-94.  I could’ve exited early and take King Dr. all the way there, but I decided to stay on since I was early.

I can’t remember what time it was when I arrived at the Parking Lot A parking lot of McCormick Place, but I had killed some time until it was a little past 10AM.  Since there was construction there, I had to take an alternate route to the entrance of McCormick Place.  It was around 10:35AM when I made it to the South building entrance and to my surprise, everybody were being let in, with no queue line either.  In a way, I arrived on time and late.  I don’t know what to consider this as, but I’ll let you guys decide if this was an accomplishment or not.

This I did!  It surprised me that when I talked with Doug Walker, the term Where’s The Fair Use escaped my brain and I couldn’t find it until I got back home.  Fortunately, I remembered WTFU, so that was a save on my end.  I could go on more details about this, but I’ll save it for my Day 1 Recap blog sometime next month.

Sadly, that did not happen.  They did show up to the event and they did have a table, but they did not have any coloring utensils with them so that they could color the artwork.  Oh well!  I guess I’ll have to find another artist at Wizard World Chicago to color the thing for me!

So far, I’ve met the following in order: Jason David Frank, Steve Cardenas, Jason Narvy, Paul Schrier, and Michael Copon (the latter being unintentional).  I was not going to miss Karan Ashley and Austin St. John and dammit, I met them!

All I’m missing right now is Walter Jones, Johnny Yong Bosch, Amy Jo Johnson, Catherine Sutherland and David Yost.  Hopefully, one of them will show up at next year’s event.

There was indeed a Power Rangers gathering, but I was not a part of it unfortunately.  I saw a group of Ninja Rangers at Karan Ashley’s table and they had a Zordon cosplayer along with them.  I would’ve joined them, but the problem was my Fighting Spirit Green Ranger helmet broke beyond repair hours earlier.  I’ll talk more about that on the Day 1 Recap blog sometime next month.

If it wasn’t for one of my cosplaying friends, I would’ve totally missed it.  I knew the photoshoot was going to be at the front entrance of McCormick Place, but I didn’t know where exactly.  Since he and I were going to the same place at the same time, I followed him.  It was so epic and I can’t wait until I talk in detail about it on my Day 3 Recap blog sometime next month.

It wasn’t easy, but I did it.  I almost picked up a Spider-Man hoodie from StylinOnline, but the problem was that the hoodie was $60.  That wouldn’t have been a big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that I had spent some money earlier for food to eat.  I wanted a cap, but all they had were snapbacks and snapbacks are too small for my head.  I could’ve gotten a shirt, but I have enough shirts as-is, so I had to go with something else.  In the end, I found a Spider-Man Pop Vinyl figure and even though it wasn’t my Spider-Man, it was a Spider-Man nonetheless.

It wasn’t exactly Darth Maul, but it was close enough, so I’ll consider this a yes.

Hopefully I’ll get a real one come either Anime Central or Wizard World Chicago later on this year.

For the I don’t know how many years in a row, no I did not get a picture with a Tekken cosplayer.  I’m a member of C2e2 Pictures and C2E2 Photoshoots on Facebook and so far, I haven’t seen any pics of any Tekken cosplayers at the event;  I think Tekken went completely absent this year.  Maybe that will change next year once Tekken 7 releases on consoles…I hope.  Last question!

This one actually surprised me: I did take a lot of pics this year!  Saturday was the toughest day for me because there was a lot of standing around doing nothing on my end.  I spent probably a total of one hour talking with one of my friends without moving, I spent some time in the photo op line for Karan Ashley and Austin St. John and I spent some time on their autograph line, but I still managed to get over 100 pics that day; that more than makes up for last year’s C2E2 Day 2!

If you guys know my Flickr account, you can check the pics out right now on there.  If you don’t know my Flickr account, you’ll have to wait until the recap blogs before I post them up for you guys to see.  Until then, I’m out!

Can you guys believe it?  It’s been exactly 10 years since I made my very first blog here on IGN!  Even though the IGN blogging thing actually got started in 2005, it was in 2006 when IGN announced that they had their own blogging system for their readers to use.  I think I had seen the announcement on April 4, but waited until the next day to do my own blogging.

When I started blogging, I was mostly a sports blogger.  I blogged about anything sports related, mainly football and basketball.  I wasn’t much of a college sports fan (still that way now), so my sports-related blog had everything to do with the NFL and the NBA.  I did blog about games at times, but my passion was in sports and since sports was all I wanted to talk about the most, it was the type of blog I wanted to do the most.

I could talk about how the structure was like when I started blogging on IGN, but I’ve already done that and I don’t feel like doing it again.  If you want to see how IGN was like when I started blogging, you can check this blog out.  Go on, I’ll wait!  Then again, I should’ve warned you that it’s going to be a long blog post just like this one, so you’ll have to take your time before you get back here and continue reading.

When I was thinking about what to blog about, I had an idea that I was angry about: the way Amare Stoudemire was being handled during the 2005-2006 NBA season.  At the time, he was playing for the Phoenix Suns and the coach of that team was Mike D’Antoni.  With Mike D’Antoni’s offense, it was 7 seconds or less while running an 8-man rotation.  Amare Stoudemire had a leg injury and was sidelined for most of the season prior to his return.  I thought it would’ve been best for Amare to come off the bench just to soften things, but instead, he started.  After three games, he got reinjured and was out for the rest of the season.

With that season, I believe it was the beginning of the end of Amare Stoudemire’s greatness and that injury, to me, showed how ineffective the 8-man rotation, high-scoring offense was.  I posted the blog and as expected, no comments.  Well, I did receive some comments on it though…which was 7 years later, something that never would’ve happened with IGN’s old system.  After that blog got posted, I was on a blogging frenzy, making a new blog every single day.

Looking back at my list of blogs, it’s insane that I did a blog every single day.  It’s like I had a lot of things on my mind and I had to let them out one way or another.  At the time, I felt like I was a long blogger, but compared to today, I blogged back then how the average person blogs right now.  I guess I still have a lot of things on my mind, but just on one subject instead of multiple other things.  It wasn’t until my fourth blog I had finally received a comment.  That blog?  Learn from Gamecube’s Mistakes Nintendo!

Thanks to the switch to Livefyre (which I’ll talk about later), those comments are lost on the main blog, but they have been archived on the IGN boards, which you can find here.  When I did that blog, I was upset at Nintendo for playing a game that they’ve been secretly playing called Behind The Times and it looks like they’re still playing that game.   They were playing it with the N64 and they continued on with the Gamecube.  I thought at the time that I was a Nintendo loyalist, so I was posting everything I thought was wrong with the Nintendo Gamecube in hopes that the next console (codenamed Revolution, ended up being Wii) would do better and get with the times.  Since I had received some comments with the blog, I decided to do a series called Learn from Xbox’s Mistakes Microsoft and Learn from PS2’s Mistakes Sony, along with the opposite portions Learn from Gamecube’s Success Nintendo, Learn from Xbox’s Success Microsoft and Learn from PS2’s Success Sony!

I made some friends like uchiha5, Next-Gen-Gamer, AlloyNES, DOJNDO, 05STEVE05 and MrBeatdown, just to name a few.  uchiha5 and I were pretty good friends and it was through him how I discovered Naruto; I just haven’t watched any episode of the series unfortunately.  With some friends here, of course, I had some enemies as well.

One enemy I had was a user named nickloveschobot.  The guy was so anti-Nintendo that he not only did blogs expressing his hate towards Nintendo, but he expressed his hatred towards Nintendo to any and every Nintendo blog he could find.  That guy was my very first experience dealing with a troll and just like any newbie who deals with trolls, I fed him.  Since nobody had the power to block people with the old system, there was no avoiding him unless mods deactivated his account, which eventually happened.

Another enemy I had made ended up being my biggest adversary and I hate to use the name now, but I have to: GSI_jago.  That guy was the bane of my existence and that guy taught me a very valuable lesson that I’ve since taken to heart: if you can’t reason with people, stop trying.  Trying to reason with the guy fell on deaf ears (or turned a blind eye in this case) and to make matters worse, he was pretty much an asshole.

If the guy wanted to correct you on something, he had to say something smart along the way.  He was being very disrespectful and he was a different type of troll.  His attitude was so bad that on one website (formerly Joystiq, now Engadget), he not only was banned from the site, but also had a post dedicated to him, not to mention being doxed in the process.  Vladimir Cole was wrong for doxing him, but that alone showed how much GSI_jago could get under people’s skin.

There came a point where I eventually took inaction against trolls and ignored his posts.   I simply gave up trying to have a civil conversation with him and went about my business.  Well, there was one time when I was instant messaging a then-Ubisoft employee named ib0ssum and she told me that GSI_jago was one of the sweetest persons she’s ever met.  I was in total shock because that would mean that GSI_jago has a split personality; I had a thing against that type of person back then and I showed her proof that what he is in real life wasn’t how he portrayed himself online.  The next part, I don’t know what happened.

Hours after showing ib0ssum the link I just showed you, he made a blog calling me out.  Sticking with my morals of not giving the guy the time of day, I didn’t respond.  How he found out about my conversation with ib0ssum, I have no idea.  Either her IM or my IM was hacked or she told GSI_jago what I had told her and denied any involvement when I would ask her about it, those were my only reasons how it could’ve happened.  Either way, his blog proved that he didn’t get the whole story and the person who relayed the information to him didn’t do a good job of being a snitch.  Also, I wanted nothing to do with the guy period and it sucked that I, once again, couldn’t block him!

One more enemy I made was with a guy named Ottsel.  From what I heard, he was pretty much acting like Daxter from Jak & Daxter (he even used the creature as his profile image) and since I’ve never played a Jak & Daxter game, I didn’t see his attitude as funny.  We’ve butted heads a few times, but eventually, we left each other alone.  There were some good and bad moments with my time on Club IGN, but for the most part, things were good.  Then Kane & Lynch turned that smile upside down.

In late 2007, I was doing a thing called Man vs. Machine.  IGN was doing it at the time too, but I was doing it against my machine.  Since I didn’t have a PS3 at the time (and couldn’t afford one until the summer of 2008), I had to use my Gamecube to do simulations of every game.  Since EA Sports had the exclusive NFL license, that meant I was using Madden to do the simulations.  Also, every week, I would do a blogging series called Who Ya Got?! and with that series, me and some other IGNers would make picks to see which team would win on every game.  Every Saturday, the post would be made and I’d make one for Monday for Monday Night Football.  It was on December 1, 2007 when things started to go sour.

Before I get to that day, I have to talk a little bit about how reviews were handled back in the day.  When IGN had their scoring system, they usually had five categories: Presentation, Graphics, Sound, Gameplay and Lasting Appeal.  Each category was on a 100-point scale and almost every time, the final score never matched the scores of the five categories.  If a score was too high or too low, people would complain about it and that type of thing happened ALL…THE…TIME!!

On one side, you had people complaining about the review score and on the other side, you had people complaining to the complainers about the review score.  There was one game whose review score became controversial and since that game came after my IGN world got turned upside-down, I’ll get back to it later, but for now, let’s go back to how Kane & Lynch ruined IGN for me.

The blog I had done was Who We Got! (Week 13 Sunday) and a few days prior, Gamespot made a controversial move by firing Jeff Gerstmann after he posted his review of Kane & Lynch.  His written review remained on Gamespot, but his video review was removed, later to be brought back.  At the time, advertisements of Kane & Lynch were on Gamespot’s website and it looked like Eidos pressured Gamespot into firing Jeff Gerstmann.  It took all the way to 2012 for us to find out why Jeff Gerstmann was fired and the speculations were correct; we just didn’t know it at the time.

When I gave my quick opinion about it, I said that it looked like he deserved to be fired since his review looked unprofessional to me.  Thanks to those comments, I received 5 thumb down ratings on my next set of blogs.  Actually, the number got reduced to two later on and it was very frustrating, especially since the voters were anonymous.  I even tried to ignore the thumb ratings, but it was getting annoying and I wanted it to stop.  Then, on top of that, my friendship with Next-Gen-Gamer was starting to go downhill.

I was heartbroken to find out that Next-Gen-Gamer was being very close with GSI_jago and even made fun of me when I made an NDA type of blog about an Assassin’s Creed costume being in Metal Gear Solid 4.  I didn’t know about the news because IGN was my only source of gaming news and IGN didn’t post that news.  I would know because I frequented the site every weekday (still that way now) and I didn’t see the news anywhere; I had to find out from ib0ssum during one of our IM conversations.  Also, anytime I wanted to talk to Next-Gen-Gamer through IM, he never responded.  To make matters worse, he took me off his friends list from every site imaginable.

Do you want to know how much I was hurt by our friendship being over?  This blog I made 8 years ago today!  To me, losing a friend on the internet was like losing a friend in real life.  Now that I think about it, I’ve learned a lesson from there too: if you lose friends over some dumb stuff, then they were never your friends in the first place.  I’ve also learned (from Tyler Perry of all people) that some people are in your life for a season and some people are in your life for life.  If somebody wants to get out of your life, let them; stop trying to keep them from leaving.  It still hurts to lose friends both through the internet and real life, but I can handle it much better now than I did back then.  Now, let’s look at the ratings thing.

An anticipated game was getting ready to come out and IGNers couldn’t wait to see what the final score was going to be; that game was Grand Theft Auto IV.  When the review of the game came out, the final score shocked many people: a 10!  Not only was it the first game to get a 10 from IGN since Soul Calibur, but it was also the first game to get a 10 all across the board.  As you would expect, it caused some controversy.  Like I said before, you had one side arguing the review score and you had other people talking crap about the side arguing the review score.  I usually did a good job avoiding those type of scenarios, but this time, I got caught in the crossfire.

I wasn’t being immature about my thoughts about the review score, but I had talked about how I didn’t agree with the 10 score.  I’m the type of guy who thinks that a game can’t have a perfect score when there are problems with a game (I later found out that the PC version had a humongous problem that totally didn’t deserve a 10) and that’s what I would usually say when I’d argue against the 10.  I was trying to be civil, but apparently, people had their panties in a bunch and talked down to me.  It was at that point that I had realized that the whole problem was not people complaining about review scores; the problem was the people complaining about the complainers of the review scores.  It was a sad moment and it was one of the moments that got me to no longer take part in the community.  Looking back, we’ve made some serious progress about review scores and how we think about them, let alone how we think about games journalists!

Since it was 2008 and the DualShock 3 had come out and Metal Gear Solid 4 was on its way, I was planning on getting a PS3 with Metal Gear Solid 4.  Since the IGN blogging community felt like it was run by trolls and I wanted the thumb rating removed from blogs, I decided on two things: I was not going to add anybody from IGN onto my PS3 friends list and I was going to do a farewell blog letting the community know that my time there was done.  I followed through with the former, but I didn’t do the latter: I just ended up quitting Club IGN and never looked back.

Did it suck to leave Club IGN?  Of course it did!  Did I feel a sigh of relief when I finally gave up Club IGN?  Of course I did!  Was it difficult for me to not visit my blogging page on a daily basis like I used to?  Yes it was, but I eventually got used to it.  I couldn’t think of anywhere else to blog, so I didn’t blog at all.  As a matter of fact, I didn’t do any blogging in any capacity until 2010.

After I had quit blogging, I picked up the MGS4 PS3 bundle, but not the Gun Metal Gray version.  It looked at first like I made a mistake because an 80GB PS3 came out days after I had bought my PS3 and it was $400; I paid $500 for mine!  Since I use the PS3’s memory card reader to watch DVR’d shows and the PS3 makes playing PS2 games a lot more tolerable on my widescreen monitor and HDTV, I made the right decision.  I made some PC upgrades and continued being happy not getting involved with IGN.  What caused me to come back?  Continue reading to find out!

In 2010, I had some thoughts coming to my head and I wanted to get them out somewhere.  2010 was also the year that IGN changed their blogging system to what we now know as MyIGN.  It was a welcomed change of pace and it was a system that I felt catered to me, but since I was so happy being away from the IGN community, I chose to stay that way.  I did create some blogs, but they were exclusive to Microsoft Word.  I’m not going to post those blogs here since many of them are pretty much outdated right now, but it showed that I still have a passion for blogging.

When 2011 came, I still had the blogging thing happen with Microsoft Word.  I started to game on my PC as well and from October 2010 to April 2011, I spent like every day playing both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.  The games were that addictive to me and I couldn’t wait until Mass Effect 3 came out.  Hell, I even did some Mass Effect blogs which I eventually did post on here!  When the second half of 2011 arrived, I wanted to try some games that utilized DirectX 11 and I didn’t have a DX11 card, so I went and bought a Sapphire Radeon HD 6770.  I remember playing Crysis 2, Deus Ex Human Revolution, LA Noire, Batman Arkham City, Sonic Generations and Portal 2.

I had some good feelings with some of those games and I had some bad feelings with some of those games.  When I did a blog talking about the best games I’ve played in 2011, they were long and thought out.  After I was done with that blog, something strange happened: I wanted the blog to be made public.  I didn’t like that feeling as I had no desire to go back to the IGN blogging community, so I shut that idea down.  Unfortunately for me, the more I tried to fight back the feeling, the stronger it became.  Since the only way for me to get rid of that itch was to make the post, I decided to make my comeback on January 20, 2012 with Top 5 2011 Games I’ve Played (In 2011).  In the modified words of The Rock, FINALLY!!  After three-and-a-half years, percy99 HAS COME BACK TO MYIGN!!

The blog was supposed to be a one-time thing.  It was supposed to be the only time I’d come back to IGN and it was supposed to be a one-and-done for me.  After the first day, I received no comments.  Well, being somewhat new to the community and being absent for so long (also adding in getting new followers when I did absolutely nothing to get them), it looked like I was forgotten.  Oh well!  It was fun while it lasted!  But, when I visited IGN the next day, I received a notification.  When I checked it out, it told me that DOJNDO had commented on my blog.  WHAT!!  I couldn’t believe it!

At the time, IGN was using Disqus as their commenting system.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was a cool system to use.  You could see who liked your comment and it was an easy system to follow…until there were more than ten comments, which forced you to turn the page.  If a discussion was going on, good luck trying to follow it and it could get messy.  At least you could turn the page and not reload the site like IGN’s old system!

I had received two comments in total and I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t forgotten.  So with that, my blogging days at IGN had officially returned and this time, I haven’t left since.  I have been tempted to plenty of times, but I still love to blog, which is why I haven’t left.  Plus, I haven’t found an alternative site to go to where I can still blog, let alone look for one.

Unlike my first run with IGN blogging, I didn’t blog on a daily basis.  I didn’t have that in me and I’d rather spend my time typing out long blogs and proofreading them.  I’d blog every other day and I was getting anxious about the Wii U.  I didn’t pick up a Wii and I wanted to see if the Wii U was going to be the system that’d get me back into Nintendo’s graces (spoiler alert: it didn’t).

One day, in April, my friend had called me and asked me if I was going to be free the following weekend.  I told him I was.  Then he told me he wanted me to go to McCormick Place with him.  I didn’t know what was happening at McCormick Place at the time, so I was like “okaaay.”  Then he asked me if I had heard of a thing called C2E2.  My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree as I had always wanted to go to the event, but never found the time to.  I wanted to go because ItsJustSomeRandomGuy would frequent that event and I wanted to see one of his episodes before the public got to see them.  We went to the event, I enjoyed it and I’ve been going to that event since, with this year’s event blogs coming up real soon.

One of the biggest moments of my MyIGN time here was shortly after Wizard World Chicago 2012.  I had started exercising regularly and I was starting to cosplay.  At the time, Lost_in_Translation was doing a thing called The Community Nominations.  With that series, MyIGNers would vote for whomever they thought should receive some followers.  The catch though was that the person had to have less than 250 or 300 followers (I forgot the actual number) and my follower count was low.  Every week, I would hope that my name was used, but each time, I was left disappointed.  I never lobbied for a vote as I didn’t want to come across like a desperate person.  So, after going through Wizard World Chicago 2012 and doing my Wizard World Chicago 2012 blogs, I decided that winning Comm Nom didn’t matter to me, so I left it alone.

Has anybody had a moment when something they wanted to happen happened and it happened right when they gave up?  For me, this was that moment!  My follower count shot up to like 300 or more and I couldn’t have been more grateful.  To add cherry on top of that moment, my profile pic at the time was me standing next to Gabe Newell.  Talk about winning!

As you would expect, with every high, there are lows too.   Ever since I came back, I’ve rarely talked about sports.  The only time I’ll talk about sports is the Super Bowl with me self-debating about which team was going to win.  It was something I used to do with Club IGN and I enjoy doing it every single time.  Back then, I would trade insults with myself and I still do that now, but in a more civilized manner.  I used to do Roleplaying Interviews as well with game systems and fictional characters and since the Wii U was on its way out to the public, I decided to bring that series back and do a fake interview with the Wii U.

Knowing that my blogs were too long for people to read (and also being told that my blogs were too long for them to read, thus the title on my profile), I decided to split the well-renown series into different parts.  Well, there was one thing I was not counting on: being ignored.  When I posted the first part of the blog, I had one comment.  When I posted the second part, I received no comments.  I didn’t want to be an annoyance by posting my blog on people’s newsfeeds, so I would promote my blog numerous times and each time didn’t make any changes.  I was getting frustrated with it and to make matters worse, the linking portion of MyIGN wasn’t working.  Eventually, without any care in the world, I posted my first rant blog.  Knowing what could possibly happen, I didn’t check my MyIGN post for the rest of the day and the day after.

Before I did that blog, I tried to think of other ways to let out some steam, but nothing would work.  Since I felt like the only way for me to let out some steam was by letting MyIGN have it, that’s what I went with.  Fortunately for me, I didn’t get banned (and still haven’t been banned).  I did receive over 100 notifications and was surprised to see that most of the comments were positive.  I didn’t expect to see that happen and that let me know that I picked the right time to come back as the community was more mature than I thought.  To see the rest of the explanation about that incident, check this blog out.  Speaking of mature, let’s go right into the second time I ranted towards MyIGN.

I had gone through a tremendous time at C2E2 2013 and it was the first time I had cosplayed there.  I was the Blue Ranger and I’ve been cosplaying as a Power Ranger since.  Throughout the month of May, I had blogged about nothing except C2E2 2013 and I loved the responses I was getting.  Once June came, things started to go sour and to make matters worse, this was at the end of my C2E2 blogging series.

The first blog that caused controversy was C2E2 2013 Shameful Pics.  With that blog, I was showing the worst cosplays I had ever seen at C2E2 2013 and I was making light of the situation, but that didn’t sit well with some people.  Some people either created MyIGN accounts or created a Disqus account just to comment on my blog talking about how terrible of a human being I was for putting those cosplays on display.

Speaking of Disqus, let’s talk about the change it had made.  When I described Disqus earlier, I was talking about Disqus 1.0.  With Disqus 2.0, they were taking things in the wrong direction.  It was cool that you could scroll down to read conversations and not turn pages, but there were some things that brought the negatives out more than the positives.

First, they got rid of being able to see who liked who’s comment.  Then, they introduced the dislike button.  Seeing that, the thought of Club IGN and their thumb system came back.  Many people (including me) didn’t like the dislike button being there and Disqus didn’t think it was going to be a problem since each person can dislike a comment only once; they had no idea about the power of haters.  After seeing how much they’ve been proven wrong, they changed the dislike feature to only the red down being shown and no numbers attached to it, plus giving us back the Who Liked Me feature.  Anyway, back to the story!

On top of being ridiculed for not liking the cosplays I posted (or rather, making fun of them), I was also accused of being anti-gay (which I was, but not that much).  That became the first time I had to use the block feature on MyIGN and it sucked that I had to do it.  That was on a Monday; Friday was going to be the last blog which would end on a high note…or so I thought.

On Friday, I had a new blog that would end my C2E2 2013 blogging series: Pics of Dat Ass @ C2E2 2013.  As you can see, I don’t have the title linked.  Why?  It was because the pics were of the hottest female asses I had ever seen at the con…as much as I hate to say it, without their consent.  I had like 40 or more booty pics on there and the comments came flooding, not only from people I didn’t know, but from people I did know as well.  Many of those comments were about how much of a creeper I was and how much I suck as a human being.  My blog was getting popular for the wrong reason and as much as I hated to do it, I had to take the blog down.

Here’s the crazy thing: that wasn’t my first time I had done a blog like that!  I did it before with Wizard World Chicago and nobody batted an eye.  Also at the time, it was going by a different name.  What was it called?  Shameful Pics!  With the controversial blog, I picked the wrong time to change the name and moved it to something else.  Since I didn’t want to go down without a fight, I decided to do another blog, this time talking about the hypocrisy of the people complaining about me.  To make sure that they had no way of firing back at me, beforehand, I checked the box that says Only allow people you follow to write on your wall.  You would think that my blog wasn’t safe, but it really was: thank dtakes23 for that!

It took all the way to close to Wizard World Chicago before I unchecked that box; I haven’t re-checked it since.  I would do some blogs here and there and I thought that my reputation was shot forever.  At that point, little-to-no attention was better than a lot of attention; I had a taste of what it was like being a celebrity and I no longer wanted to be one.  As it turned out, the only person who remembered that situation was me and the rest of the MyIGN community just moved on.  Then, it turned out that some people in the MyIGN community moved on to somewhere else; the community ended up dying.

It looked like the very thing that was keeping MyIGN afloat when I came back was the anticipation of the Wii U, PS4 and Xbox One.  Right after the PS4 and Xbox One came out, the participation level of MyIGN went down.  You would think that people playing on their new system could’ve been the reason why, but that wasn’t it at all.  When I was on Club IGN, the Xbox 360 had already been out and people were anticipating the PS3 and Wii and participation levels were either the same or higher than before when those systems came out.  New systems couldn’t have been the reason for the lower participation levels, so I don’t know what caused it.  Last year didn’t do MyIGN any favors either.

Last year, IGN started to notice that Disqus was going to be troublesome; they saw that Disqus was going to use advertisements and it could cause issues with MyIGNers using Ad Block Plus.  To avoid that hassle, they decided to move to a new commenting system called Livefyre.  Livefyre was supposed to be a better alternative to Disqus and it was supposed to make the community more interactive than ever.  They tested it out on MyIGN first and that’s when the problems started.  I could list them, but I’d rather you go to this blog and search for Livefyre and read everything that I thought was wrong about it.

It took a while before Livefyre made its way from MyIGN to the articles and it seems to be stable there, but not on MyIGN.  Because of the Livefyre issues that are still prevalent today, it’s caused many MyIGNers to leave.  Many of the people I used to follow there are not there anymore and even if they are (like somegamergirl for example), they’re rarely there.  It’s actually gotten so bad that the most involved person on this site (KRATOSGODOFWARIII) had created another account to talk about how much the site has gotten downhill.  Wow!

I’ve made some blogs here or there and even though I’m still on this site, my participation levels are low.  As a matter of fact, last year was the lowest point during my time on MyIGN in terms of getting involved.  I said that I wanted to get more involved this year and so far, I’m failing there.  With many MyIGNers leaving the site, it’s hard to do so, leaving me no other choice but to continue blogging.  Despite all of that, here I stand at 10 years being on this site and I believe I’m the second-longest active member on this site and I’m only 30 years old!

I still find it hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since I first started blogging on here.  Granted, I did take 3 ½ years off during that time, but it’s still so surreal.  To make things more strange, I’ve actually had my IGN account for longer than that.  My profile says that I’ve been a member since October of 2005, but that’s not true: it’s actually older than that.  My account has to be no earlier than 2000 because I remember having to create an IGN account just to watch videos on their site; I also remembering them using Quicktime for their videos too.  If you want to see why my username’s percy99, you can check this blog out, which was my most popular blog during Club IGN.

If I’m not mistaken, this year is also the 10 year anniversary of DOJNDO and foxrevolution.  I was aware of foxrevolution during my Club IGN days, but I never interacted with him until sometime after I came back; he’s also the first MyIGN member I’ve met in person.  I hope to see him again at Anime Central and I also hope to continue seeing you guys, old and new, here for the next…I don’t know how many years.  Until the next blog comes, I’m out!

Something weird had been happening to me prior to C2E2 2016: I wasn’t nervous at all.  Usually, I’m extremely nervous when the days of C2E2 start rolling around and the situation concerning my circumstances should’ve gotten me into a nervous wreck, but it didn’t.  Here’s why I should’ve been extremely nervous: my friend’s father had died the day before Thanksgiving last year and since his father had bought a new car prior to his death, it caused my friend to be the one to continue payments on the car note.  Because of that, not only did my friend not attend C2E2, but he’s also not attending Anime Central either.  So, because of that, I had no personal cameraman with me, leaving me to have to get my pictures taken by strangers all three days.

The second reason why I should’ve been nervous was because I was going to cosplay as Spider-Man on Day 3 and since I don’t wear contacts, it could’ve hindered my ability to see excellent cosplays, especially since I’m near-sighted.  Also, because of that, my glasses could’ve gotten damaged while being in my bag.  Even though the Men In Black 3 glasses case I had received from C2E2 2013 could get the job done in protecting my glasses, I didn’t know what I’d do if it broke.

The third and final reason why I should’ve been nervous was because for the first time ever, I got to drive a rental car and it had to be picked up at 8AM that day.  The reason why I should’ve been nervous is because of remembering which car I drove and where I parked said car.  Despite those circumstances, I wasn’t that nervous and I thought something was wrong with me.  Oh well!  7AM, here we go!

I had woken up from Friday to Monday at 7AM.  Friday and Monday, I had to wake up at that time to get and bring the rental car back by 8AM and on the remaining days, I woke up at that time to be on time for the opening of the day.  On Friday, my alarm was the Zyosuken theme from Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger since I was cosplaying as the Green Ranger that day.  On Saturday, my alarm was Go Go Power Rangers since I was cosplaying as the Blue Ranger that day.  On Sunday, my alarm was this hip-hop remix of the 90s Spider-Man theme (thank meanmugg713 for playing that theme on some of his Spider-Man videos) since I was going to cosplay as Spider-Man that day.  For right now, let’s focus on Day 1.

Before I really begin the story, there’s one more thing I have to mention: the weather hated Chicago that weekend.  Days prior, the weather was somewhere around the high 40s to the high 50s.  It was like that all week, but once Day 1 began, temperatures dropped to like the high 30s and was no higher than 42.  Of course, that pissed me off and made me wonder why C2E2 was moved to March this year instead of staying in April.  I still have no idea, but let’s get the real story started!

I left the house to go to Enterprise to pick up my rental car.  After everything checked out, I picked up a red Nissan Versa.  I wish I could tell you what year it was, but I think Enterprise put the wrong instruction manual in the car.  The instruction manual was for a 2016 Nissan Versa, but I don’t think the car was a 2016 Nissan Versa at all; it had to have been a much earlier model.  The reason why I think it’s not a 2016 model is because there were instructions for Blutooth, but the car lacked it.  I didn’t bother looking at other instructions in the manual because I was floored at the fact that the car didn’t have Blutooth.

The car was half full, so I was good to use it for the day without having to drive to the gas station first.  Well, I did kind of go to the gas station; I went to my local bank, which happened to be near a gas station, to withdraw $300 from my checking account.  After that, I was going home, but a driver behind me was constantly honking at me.  I had no idea why he was doing that, so I pulled over to see why that was the case.  The answer was because of why I was having a hard time looking at my rear view window: my trunk was open.

How did I not realize that my trunk was open?  That’s a very good question.  I guess it’s because the trunk’s door was so small that it being open was hard to notice.  Thankfully, I had nothing in the trunk, so nothing fell out of it.  I went to a street where I was clear to get out and not mess up traffic and I closed the trunk.  The rear windshield looked tinted too and I had no idea why that was the case until the next day: the rear view mirror was way up high and I was seeing a reflection.  With that mishap, I’m lucky to have never been in a car accident in my rental car.

I came back home to see my street being blocked by orange cones.  It turned out that there were some guys getting ready to cut down some branches from a tree and they weren’t going to go away when it was time for me to leave.  I put on my Green Ranger outfit (minus the helmet of course), I got everything set and when it was 8:45AM, I left both my PCs on to record Last Man Standing and Dr. Ken and left the house to experience C2E2 2016!

Everything went fine until I got on the expressway.  I can’t remember exactly where I was on the expressway, but at some point, there was traffic.  I think I had experienced rush hour on the Dan Ryan for the first time because I didn’t recall going through traffic there at any point in my life.  I did see later that there was some construction and it was while I was waiting in traffic that I had realized that I had left early.   I was so concerned about getting to C2E2 at 10AM that on Fridays, they usually open at 11AM for the general public.  So, instead of getting off the nearest exit and taking King Dr. all the way down to 31st Street, I decided to kill some time by staying in traffic and taking the 31st Street exit when I got the chance.  To make that long part short, I made it to Parking Lot A, found a parking spot and waited until I felt like leaving to McCormick Place.

There was some construction going on with the Parking Lot A area, so I had to take a long walk towards McCormick Place.  I forgot when I made it to the parking lot, but I stayed there until it was like 10:05AM.  I killed some time by listening to my custom Saints Row the Third playlist.  Once I got out of the car, I took a walk towards the entrance and the sun was right in my face.  When I drove, I had some sunglasses and wore those the whole way.  Since I was without my sunglasses, I went with the next best thing: my helmet.  I had my helmet on and walked until I reached the underpass.  Once that happened, I took my helmet off and walked until I got to the entrance.

I had taken a risk with my helmet and decided to not use Dawn on my visor to prevent fogging and it looked like that was a mistake on my part.  My helmet was fogging up when I had the helmet on and I felt like my no-using-the-bathroom-streak was going to be over just so that I could use the building’s softsoap to defog my helmet.  Well, I’m happy to announce that it wasn’t necessary (since I forgot to go to the bathroom to do that) because once I got in the building, my helmet didn’t fog up again.  The fog had to have been due to the weather since it was in the high 30s at the time.

When I got up to the South building, it was around 10:35AM (yeah, it’s a long walk) and everybody were being let in.  When I saw that, I didn’t know what to make of my accomplishment: was I early or was I late?  I didn’t know, so just to be safe, next year, I’ll have to remind myself to arrive no later than 10AM.  I had my bag checked, my Legacy Dragon Dagger didn’t get tagged, and I was off to start C2E2 2016 by myself!

The first place I went to was Artist Alley and I wanted to see if Tico Thousands would color the Green Ranger drawing I had gotten from him at C2E2 last year.  Like I said two blogs ago, he didn’t have any coloring materials with him, so I couldn’t get it colored.  Well, that part of the plan failed!  Oh well!  Onto my next task: talking with the Channel Awesome guys!

I went to Channel Awesome’s table and I was able to talk with Doug Walker.  I hesitated a little bit because for some apparent reason, the words Where’s The Fair Use escaped me.  I was getting a little bit frustrated inside because my brain decided to hold off those words.  Fortunately, I remembered WTFU, so I was able to thank them for the Where’s The Fair Use video.  I also asked him what happened with them and blip.tv and MakerTV and they had no idea.  I bought two autographed posters from them (they were $10 each and I only had $20 bills) and I still regret that I didn’t get a pic with Tamara Chambers; she was such a cool person to talk to and she looked great that day.  Sadly, I didn’t see her the remaining time at C2E2.

With those two things out of the way, it was time to explore the area.  To my surprise, the setup was the same as last year’s, so I wasn’t going to be lost at all.  The Marvel booth obviously had the poster of Captain America: Civil War, but somewhere around that area was a Daredevil Season 2 poster.  I believe I had gotten my picture taken by different people after that point before I decided to go to another destination: Dial Up Games.

As a spoiler: I did not see the D’Arda Sisters at all at C2E2 this year.  While we’re at it, I also didn’t see Nicolette Noir Cosplay at C2E2 at all this year either.  That sucked, but at least I got Wizard World Chicago to make up for that!  Anyway, I went to their booth and looked around to see which kind of old school games I should get and one game that I saw I wanted to get was StarFox 64.  There was one problem though: it was $80.  Okay, it was a boxed version of the game, which is understandable for its price, but I don’t recall seeing a standalone cartridge version there.  I don’t even remember where and when I eventually bought StarFox 64 unboxed (it was $35), but I did buy that game; all I’m missing is a rumble pack and some controllers and I’ll be set there!

One of the biggest highlights of the day for me was at the Live Stage area of the con.  I saw somebody I seem to never be able to avoid since becoming the Green Ranger: a Ryu cosplayer.  Of course, we had to do a versus pic against each other and it will be the last time it’ll happen for quite some time.  I’ll explain in a little bit why, but for now, here’s one of the pics taken of me versus Ryu.

It was a little after that pic when I realized that I hadn’t posted on Facebook letting people know that I had arrived at C2E2.  So, I decided to take a break and sit at one of the tables and do just that.  It was also at that point that I had decided to get me something to eat.  I decided to get a slice of cheese pizza, a bag of Doritos, a large chocolate chip cookie and a bottle of Sprite.  The only thing I didn’t consume was the Doritos as I didn’t even open the bag; I saved it for later on that night.

After I was done eating and was getting ready to continue to look for cosplayers to take pictures with, I had picked up my helmet and that’s when I discovered a new cosplay mishap: the glue that was used to hold one end of the hinge onto a part of my helmet had gotten weak.  My helmet was starting to come apart and that’s when I had realized that I did forget something: my epoxy and hardener glues.  I was hoping that it’d hold on for the rest of the day, but given how weak the glue was getting, it was only a matter of time before I’d have to spend the rest of the day helmet-less.

I exited the con floor and went to the front to see if there were any cosplayers there that I could take a picture of or with, but there wasn’t any luck for me there.  I even had my helmet on to keep the glue from getting weaker, but at some point, I heard the hinge go completely out.  Right when it happened, I knew I had to make a long walk back to my car and put the helmet in there.  So, off I went!

There were a couple of people who wanted a pic with me, but I had to give them the bad news.  I wasn’t against taking pics, but because of my helmet situation, they decided not to take a pic of or with me.  The last people who asked me for a pic, right when I was telling them about my helmet situation, the back end of my helmet decided to fall off and hit the ground, breaking some things in the process.  Well, not only was I not going to be the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger for the rest of the con, but also with cons to go since I had lost a piece I didn’t notice went missing and I’d have to buy a replacement helmet.  Thanks MMPR Helmets USA for such a rushed job!

Since I was helmet-less, that meant that I couldn’t take pics with cosplayers.  Well, I could, but with no helmet, it ruins the picture.  So, what I ended up doing was taking pics of cosplayers like I was in civilian clothing.  I didn’t think I’d get some people to want to take a pic of me since I didn’t have my helmet, but to my surprise, I did get pic requests.  Obviously I didn’t get as many picture requests as I would with my helmet, but a few people got a pic of me with my outfit; I even had one guy tell me that my cosplay was spot on.  I honestly had no idea how to take it since I was without my helmet, but okay.

The biggest highlight of the day being without my helmet was a time when I wished I had my helmet: Mighty Morphin Ninja Rangers!  I was looking at the autograph area and I looked at Karan Ashley’s table (17) and Austin St. John’s table (18) and at Karan Ashley’s table were the Ninja Rangers.  It wasn’t just some Ninja Rangers: it was ALL of them.   All six colors (white, black, pink, blue, yellow and red) were at Karan Ashley’s table and it sucked to not be a part of that group.  They had noticed me at one point and waved at me; I waved back and continued to walk around the area just waiting to get a closer pic of them.

After they were done with Karan Ashley’s table, of course they went to Austin St. John’s table.  Austin St. John had a longer line than Karan Ashley and that was to be expected.  Because I couldn’t wait any longer, I went to the line and asked for a pic of them.  A little to my surprise, before I could ask for a pic, I had noticed another cosplayer was with them: a Zordon cosplayer.  Believe me, I’m not joking on that one.  Here, you can see it for yourself!

To make matters a little bit worse, three extra Power Rangers cosplayers showed up: a “Gold” Ranger (he’ll always be black to me), a White Ranger and a Blue Ranger.  I became friends with the Blue Ranger cosplayer on Facebook days before the con (here’s his cosplay page on Facebook) and it was nice to see his suit up close and his suit was made by the same person who made my suit.  We had a little talk and I went about my business afterwards.  It was at that point that I had stumbled upon one of my friends whom I became friends with on Facebook a couple years back (let’s call him Tony).  I forgot what we talked about, but we were talking for a while and we stuck together for the rest of the day.

When it was time to do some cosplay hunting, one of the pics we took was my Blue Ranger friend (let’s call him Flame Water Cosplay) and his friends.  You’d probably mistake him for me, but here’s one major way how you could tell us apart: my suit’s more tight on me than his is on him.  Here’s the pic that I took of them!

When Tony and I got to the Marvel booth, there was a guy there who asked me if I had a Legacy Dragon Dagger and I told him that I didn’t.  Then Tony and he were talking for I don’t know how long.  While they were talking, I had noticed a Cammy cosplayer getting her picture taken by a lot of people and she, in my opinion, had a body that was better than the actual Cammy.  She was with a Silkk cosplayer and I couldn’t wait until those two guys stopped talking so that I could get a picture of the Cammy cosplayer.

Since it looked like I was going to miss my opportunity to get a picture of the Cammy cosplayer, I took a picture of her and that caught Tony’s attention.  He and the other guy talked for a little bit longer and then it was time for us to get a picture of her.  When it was our turn, Tony wanted me to take a picture of he and the Cammy cosplayer with his phone and I did so.  When it was my turn, I had to have her take a back photo since that’s one of Cammy’s victory poses.  I don’t know if the pose she did was a pose that was on Street Fighter IV, V or any other Street Fighter after Super Street Fighter II, but I liked it; I’ll show you the pic at the end of the blog.

Since there was an hour left to go before the end of the con for the day, we went out of the showfloor and just waited around to see if there were any other cosplayers we could take a picture of.  One of Tony’s friends had come by and they were talking for I don’t know how long.  At one point, Tony wanted to take a pic of me and I obliged; I had no idea how good the suit looked on me and here’s a pic of me helmet-less.

When it was around 6:30, I called it a day and parted ways from Tony and that was the end of the con for me that day.  I made it back to my car, got out safely and was on my way back, only to find that there was some construction going on to the expressway, so I’d have to take an alternate route.  The alternate route I decided to go to was left on King Dr. and I made my way back home from there.  It took forty minutes to get back home, but when I did, my PCs were in the middle of recording Last Man Standing.

I let my PCs continue to record Last Man Standing and Dr. Ken and I waited until the DVRing was finished before I uploaded my pics onto Flickr.  To my surprise, I had over 100 pics taken and to an even bigger surprise, only one was a bad pic!  My legs were sore as usual and I had realized at some point during the con that I was wearing the wrong pair of socks; I was wearing the compression socks that were too big for my feet instead of the one I had bought recently that were the correct size.  I fixed that problem and couldn’t wait for Day 2 to arrive.  At the same time, I was hoping that my Blue Ranger helmet wouldn’t suffer the same fate as my Green Ranger helmet.

Did it happen?  That’s for Day 2’s blog to answer!  Until then, click on the following picture to see all the Day 1 pics I had taken on my Flickr page and I’m out!

Last year, I woke up to the same leg pain I fell asleep with.  Since my futon mattress at the time was a 5 inch thick mattress, I guess that showed how much I needed a new mattress.  This year, I have an 8 inch thick memory foam mattress and I woke up to less pain in my legs than I fell asleep with.  I also woke up with a message on Facebook Messenger from a friend of mine (let’s call him Gary) to let me know that he was in the building and was in line for the con.

Gary was going to be there for one day which was this day.  A couple weeks prior, I did him a favor by buying a pass to the Karan Ashley and Austin St. John Photo Op (which I was going to do anyway) along with a digital copy (which I was going to do anyway) and an extra print (which I wasn’t going to do at first).  Since the pass allowed up to four people at a time for one pic, I was going to hook him up with me, him and a couple of his friends.  This was going to be the first time ever that I was going to have a photo op photo taken with more than one person, so I was looking forward to not forgetting the photo op.

The message was sent at 6:42AM in the morning; I woke up at 7AM and the event didn’t start until 10AM.  Of course I let him know that I was going to be there soon and I got myself ready.  When it was 8:30AM, I left and made my way to McCormick Place.  Since the temperature was too cold for me to go out as the regular Blue Ranger, I wore my Blue Ranger hoodie to the car and kept the hoodie on until I got out of the car after parking it in Parking Lot A.

When I drove to McCormick Place, just to play it safe, I took King Dr. all the way to 31st street to McCormick Place’s Parking Lot A.  To my surprise, it took me a half hour to get there instead of 40 minutes like the day prior.  It probably had something to do with not dealing with any buses, but whatever.  Since I had some time to kill and I knew that the lines wouldn’t move until 10AM, I decided to kill some time by continuing to listen to my custom playlist, which was Power Rangers, not only with the original soundtrack, but the Ron Wasserman remix album too, minus the instrumentals.  After that was done, I put my hoodie in the trunk, grabbed my helmet and my bag, and walked my way to the building.

As you would expect, there were a lot more people there than there were the previous day.  I had to get my bag checked, my Blade Blaster wasn’t checked (I cut off the green zip tie the night prior, but kept the red one on) and I walked around to where we had to wait for the queue line to move.  To kill some time, I had to re-activate the Wi-Fi on my phone to their network, I made a Facebook status saying that I had arrived, and I took a couple of pics of how the lines looked.  Of course, once 10AM got started, the lines were moving and I was preparing to handle Day 2 of the con as the Blue Ranger.

Before I begin, I have to get this out of the way: my Blue Ranger helmet handled itself beautifully.  I had no problems with it and it never came apart, so that meant I got more pictures with cosplayers the whole day than I did the day prior.  Also, I had the correct socks on this time, so that might’ve helped.  With that out of the way, let’s get straight to the testimony!

The first thing I wanted to do was to go to Channel Awesome’s table and get a pic with Tamara Chambers.  Unfortunately for me, she wasn’t there.  Then I decided to go to Tico Thousands and get one of the Blue Ranger artworks from him, but before I could do that, I stumbled upon a Supergirl cosplayer.  Not only a Supergirl cosplayer, but a Melissa Benoist Supergirl cosplayer.  Speaking of Melissa Benoist, she and Chyler Leigh were at C2E2 and as much as I wanted to meet Melissa Benoist, my budget wouldn’t allow me to.  While we’re at it, Chloe Bennett was there too, but again, because of budget reasons, I couldn’t get a pic with her.  Back to the Supergirl cosplayer, I had to get a pic with her.

I headed up to Artist Alley and went to Tico Thousands’ table and got my Blue Ranger artwork from him.  After that was done, I hung around Artist Alley for a bit to see if there were any cosplays that caught my attention and I heard my phone ring.  The person calling me was a guy I had talked with the night prior on messenger: it was one of Gary’s friends.  This friend (I’ll call him Remy since that’s not his real name anyway) I had met at C2E2 2015 Day 1 and he was the biggest Spider-Man cosplayer I had seen.  He’s lost 19 pounds since that day and I think you’ll be able to tell from the upcoming pic.

When I picked up the phone, he had told me that he had arrived and wanted to know where I was.  I told him that I was in Artist Alley and he said that he was on his way.  Of course, I waited for him, but I decided to walk around Artist Alley to once again see if there were any cosplayers who caught my attention.

There was one cosplayer who had caught my attention and I have to admire this guy’s dedication to cosplaying.  It’s one thing to do a gender-bent cosplay, or in shorter terms, crossplay, but this guy went all out with it.  Not only did this one crossplayer crossplay as Quiet from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, but he went all out, bra included.

On second thought, right when I was about to post this pic, I had realized that this guy did a crossover cosplay as he's being both Quiet and Snake at the same time. Clever!

I was laughing on the inside because the guy didn’t need to wear a bra to pull it off, but again, that’s dedication for you!  After getting some pictures here or there, I finally stumbled upon Remy and his cousin.  Remy was wearing his Spider-Man mask, but wearing regular clothes.  This was going to be our first interaction in person and as I promised, the pic of me and him.

I did get curious about where Gary was at and since Remy had Gary’s number, he called Gary and followed instructions about where he was at.  We eventually found him and that’s when we hung out for a bit.  Remy and his cousin separated from us and Gary and I stayed with each other for a long while, especially since we wanted to be on time for the Karan Ashley and Austin St. John Photo Op, which was at 1PM.  I met Gary’s friends and their children and that ended up being the only time I saw them, but obviously not before I had gotten my picture taken with the kids.  Once Gary’s friends and their children left, it was just me and him.  That’s when we decided to go out and to the Family Lounge.

When we were about to go downstairs, I had seen a Green Ranger cosplayer.  That reminds me: when my helmet mishap happened the day prior, I was so glad I decided to cosplay as the Green Ranger on Friday instead of this day because it would’ve been extremely devastating had the mishap happened on this day.  Anyway, of course, I got a pic with the Green Ranger cosplayer.

The Family Lounge is to the left of the second escalator and after taking a couple photos of the Rey and Kylo Ren Lego figures, we went in.  To the right of the room was the children’s playground and to the left was a cosplay thing.  We went to that spot and sat on one of the comfort balls or whatever you call them and chilled for a bit.

There was one instance that was so tempting.  I had seen a Velma cosplayer and she was at a table far ahead of me of what ended up being the Cospitality Lounge.  Had I known that the Cospitality Lounge was coming back and that I was SO CLOSE to it the day prior when my helmet mishap happened, I would’ve gone there and avoided further problems.  Anyway, she had bent over to adjust her right sock.  I have no idea why I remember that detail because I saw some other detail: upskirt!  I couldn’t tell if she was wearing a thong or nothing at all, but all I could see was booty.  It was a good looking one too and I was VEEEEERY tempted to take a pic of it, but I had to use as much manpower in me as possible to NOT take the pic.  Fortunately (or unfortunately), I did not take the pic.

Another time while Gary and I were chilling, one guy wanted to take a pic of me, but realized that I was being the Blue Ranger instead of another character.  It turned out that thanks to me being a black guy dressed up as the Blue Ranger without my helmet on, he mistook me as a Frozone cosplayer from The Incredibles.  He was telling me and my friend that besides the design of the suit, my cosplay looks very similar to Frozone and to make matters worse, Frozone is a tough costume to look for period.  I’ve looked at pics later on (meaning before I got to this point of the blog) and I can see the similarities.  After looking at pics of Frozone, I think I’ll try to tackle that guy in the near future.

After some time had passed, Gary and I decided to go back to the show floor so that we could make it in time for the Karan Ashley and Austin St. John photo op.  We did find out later on that his friends couldn’t make it to the photo op due to time constraints, so it was going to be just me and him.  On our way back, we had seen a Linkle cosplayer and of course I had to get a pic with her!

After that we had stumbled upon a friend who does photography for a living (let’s call him HAP since his fan page on Facebook is Henshin Action Photography).  He was originally not going to show up at C2E2, but he decided to come on just this day and days before, wanted to know if anybody would want to do a photoshoot with him.  I said that I was down and that we should do it at around 1:30PM or later since the Karan Ashley and Austin St. John photoshoot was at 1PM.

When we talked, he said that he’d Facebook me about the location and time and he also told Gary that my Ryuuranger friend wasn’t going to show up due to him being sick.  That guy was the coolest Ranger cosplayer I’ve ever hung around with, so no him and my personal cameraman was a little bugger.  We parted ways and I’ll get back to my photographer friend later.

When Gary and I got back to the show floor, to our shock, we had to go through the queue line process again, which didn’t make sense to us.  Because of that, we never left the show floor for the rest of the con until it was almost time to go…well, at least I didn’t.  Just to be safe, we went to the photo op area since it was almost time for the con and we went there, stood in line and waited for the photo op to take place.  Of course, I had my picture taken by some people waiting in line to kill some time, but once it got started, it was on.

When it was Gary and I’s turn, he got to be next to Austin St. John and I got to be next to Karan Ashley.  I wanted to imitate on of the pictures Austin St. John did when he was dressed up as a Power Ranger (this photo), but there wasn’t enough space for that pose, so I did the best I could.  I’ll post the picture at the end of this blog.

If you looked at my blog from three blogs ago, you’ll see that I have more facial hair than I usually do.   That’s because for this year’s Lenten season, I decided to grow my beard out and only line it up.  I started Day 1 with a clean shaved look so that the beard would be more consistent and I’d let it grow.  Since Easter was the Sunday after C2E2 instead of the Sunday before it, that meant that I had to have that grizzled look for C2E2 and I didn’t know how it’d hold up; it held up just fine.

After Gary and I had our photo prints, we walked around for a bit, only to come back at around 2PM for him to get a Photo Op with Melissa Benoist.  That’s despite the fact that he hadn’t seen a single episode of Supergirl at the time.  Since he wanted a photo with Melissa Benoist by himself, I had to watch his stuff.  It took a little way too long because Melissa Benoist showed up late to the photo op, so to kill some time, I checked my Facebook newsfeed and took some pics of and with cosplayers.  After he was finally finished, I told him that I wanted to go to the autograph area to get my print autographed by Karan Ashley and Austin St. John.  That’s when we parted ways and I went to the autographing area.

I was getting a little nervous getting to talk with Karan Ashley.  The reason why was because I didn’t want to tell her that I never had a crush on her as a kid (not to mention having a classmate also named Aisha) and that I have a crush with a former Yellow Ranger, but not her (her replacement Nakia Burrise).  Oh, and one more thing: I didn’t want to mention that her character sucked since there was no character development for her.  Thankfully, it never got to those points and our time together was brief.

She liked how the picture came out and the cost of the autograph was $30.  She signed the photo and I was on my way to Austin St. John’s autograph line.  Being that Austin St. John’s line was longer than Karan Ashley’s (probably 2.5x longer), I had to wait for some time before I could get his autograph.  I had a photo taken while I was waiting in line (the photographer said that it was for Austin, but I had no idea where it’d end up) and when it came my turn, there was a little bit of a problem.  I told the guy that I wanted an autograph from Austin St. John (it was $40) and after I had paid the money, he didn’t take the photo out of its sleeve.

Believe it or not, I was not nervous talking with Austin St. John.  You would think I would because of how overrated I believe the Red Ranger is, but that’s not his fault; that’s Toei’s fault.  Anyway, he thought my suit looked good on me, which gave me the opportunity to compliment him on wearing all blue that day.  When he asked me if I had any questions for him, for a quick second, I didn’t, but then this blog came to memory and I had always wanted to ask him: who’s idea was it to have him be sleeveless on every episode of Power Rangers?

I asked him that question and he responded with one of the producers of the show, who was a female.  I forgot what name he gave me, so I had to look at the credits to see if the name comes back to memory.  Looking at the list of IMDB, the only names that show up are Ellen Levy-Sarnoff and Ann Knapp.  I don’t remember him saying either name, but it’s more likely to be Ann Knapp, but I could be wrong, so don’t take my word for it.

Whoever it was, he also mentioned that a couple of episodes had him being shirtless (I remember one, but not the other) and that if she had it her way, he could’ve been in his underwear.  Given that a man’s barenaked ass was acceptable for rated G movies back in the day, I could see that happen on a kid’s show; thankfully it never got to that point.

When Austin went to sign my photo, he asked if I just wanted the photo signed or if it should be addressed to anybody like me or someone else; I told him to sign it to me.   I told him my name and he was going to sign it, only to notice that he was signing on the cover instead of the photo.  The problem was situated and I got my autograph.  We did a cool handshake and I left, never to see Karan Ashley and Austin St. John again.

While I was waiting at ASJ’s line, I took a photo of my printed photo op picture being autographed by Karan Ashley before getting it autographed by ASJ.  When I was about to take the pic of Karan Ashley and ASJ’s autograph, my friends Gary and Remy showed up.  We did what we usually did until it was around 5PM when we went back to the autographing section so that Gary would get a photo op with Chloe Bennett since her photo op was at 5PM.

While I was waiting for Gary to go through his photo op with Chloe Bennett, Remy decided to head to the food area and I never saw him again for the rest of the con.  Then, my friend from the previous day Tony showed up.  We had talked for a bit and one of the subjects that was talked about was that incident where a school bus tumbled over in Indiana and nobody died.  I didn’t know about that, but it’s a miracle that nobody died nor was seriously injured.  Remember when I said a couple blogs earlier that I stood straight for what seemed like an hour?  This was that moment!

I had no idea how many pics I had taken that day, but it felt like I took around 40 pics or so.  After Gary got out of the photo op, all three of us talked for a bit, I told him where Remy went off to, and Gary decided to part ways since he wanted to go to the ASJ Meet and Greet, which was taking place at 7PM if I’m not mistaken and I chose not to go since I wanted to go home and watch the Golden State Warriors go against the San Antonio Spurs in their second meetup.  I didn’t know what to expect since the previous meetup was too embarrassing to watch.

Tony and I did our usual thing and one big highlight of us being together was going to Yaya Han’s table and seeing one Nightwing cosplayer with his big wings.  I don’t know if he’s exactly Nightwing, but I do recognize the Nightwing logo and he was sporting it.  The wings were so big that not even my photo could do it justice.

One thing Tony liked at the table area was the material that was used for Kylo Ren’s headgear.  The material looked very nice and because of the lines and position, I couldn’t get a good shot of it, but I did the best I could.  Oh, and for the record, I did NOT speak with Yaya Han.  I didn’t want to risk possibly getting my day ruined by her, plus I had nothing to say to her, so I left Yaya alone.

Tony and I stayed around the show floor until it was 6:50PM and when that time came, we left the con floor and hung around for another 10 minutes.  During that time, I had encountered HAP and I had approached him.  I did check my phone often to see if he had sent me a message and he never did.  It turned out…..he forgot about our arrangement.  I never got upset with him about it, but it was a good thing that I found him when I did.  He did wonder if I wanted to get the photos done anyway and of course I obliged.

During the middle of my photos being done, there were some people who wanted photos of me too.  After they were out of the way, Tony had brought up the fact that the zip tie on my Blade Blaster was in the way and he elected to cut it off for me.  After that, I decided to take my lanyard off my belt and have him put it in my bag since I didn’t need it anymore for the rest of the night.  A little after that, I got my photoshoot resumed and during the middle of that, Tony decided to bounce.

Once HAP was done with the photos, he had me review the photos and for the first time ever, the photos looked like it was somebody else getting their photos taken and not me.  It looked so beautiful, I can’t wait to see how the final images come out like.  It was my first professional photoshoot as a Power Ranger, but it was not going to be the final photoshoot of C2E2 for me.

When I decided to leave, I looked at my phone and saw that it was exactly 7PM.  I left McCormick Place and went straight to my car.  Of course, given the weather, I didn’t forget to take my hoodie out of the car and put it back on before I put everything else in the car.  I took King Dr. back home like the previous day and it took 30 minutes to go back home; I guess the bus was a problem the previous day.

When I got back home, I had realized that the car was a quarter full, so I needed to put some gas in it.  I decided to do that after the Warriors-Spurs game (which was a fun game I might add).  Obviously, I switched clothes and went to the gas station I normally go to.  Since I wasn’t going to be travelling much, I decided not to spend $20 for gas, but instead half.  If I remember correctly, gas was $2.05 a gallon at the time, so $10 got me from being a quarter full to three quarters full.  That I didn’t expect at all!

I did upload the pics on Flickr during the commercial break of the game and I was satisfied that my Blue Ranger helmet didn’t break.  The last day was the day I couldn’t wait for because of the Marvel Photoshoot.  It was going to be the first time ever that I debut a new cosplay on a Sunday and it was going to be the first cosplay at C2E2 that wasn’t Power Rangers/Super Sentai related.  It was also going to be the first time since 2012 that I wasn’t going to cosplay as a Power Ranger.

Was I going to get as many picture requests as Spider-Man as I did as a Power Ranger?  I didn’t think so, but only Day 3 would let me know.  I’ll let you know about my experience there as Spider-Man,  but until then, click on the pic on the bottom of this blog to see my Day 2 pics and I’m out!

For the second straight day, I woke up to a Facebook Messenger message.  This time, it was from Flame Water Cosplay and he had asked me whom I was going to cosplay as that day.  The crazy thing about that message was that when I woke up, I had completely forgotten that there was One More Day of C2E2 to go before it was done.  When I saw that message, I was like oh that’s right: C2E2 is today and I gotta go as Spider-Man!  Can’t wait for the photoshoot!  So, I told him my answer and he told me that he was going to be the Blue Ranger again, but this time, he was going to bring his Power Lance with him.  Isn’t that something: we wouldn’t be twinning at all at C2E2!  Maybe next year!  Oh, and by the way, there’s a reason why I had One More Day capitalized; you can Google it if you don’t know what it means.

After I did my morning routine, it was time for me to put on the Spidey suit.  Putting on the suit is a little different from a Power Rangers suit: there’s a U-shape opening in the back instead of a vertical opening.  Trying the suit on for the first time weeks earlier, it took a little getting used to, but I’ve been able to manage it.  Also, it turns out that it doesn’t matter who you go to for your Spider-Man suit, they all have U-shape openings.

I put the suit on with no problem and I did remember to wear the lanyard with the pass instead of accidentally leaving it on my Power Rangers belt.  Given that the temperature was a little too cold, I took the Blue Ranger hoodie again and went to my car at 8:30AM.  For just in case purposes, I brought my other glasses with me and put it in the glove compartment.  Thankfully, I didn’t need to use those glasses as the glasses that I wore that day went about just fine.  Plus, the MIB3 case really came in handy for my glasses in case anybody wanted pics of or with me.

Like the previous day, I took King Dr. to McCormick Place Parking Lot A and I stayed in the car until I felt like it was time for me to get out.  I killed some time by listening to music of course and I can’t remember what playlist I was listening to.  I wanna say it was Saints Row the Third, but I’m not really sure.  What I do remember was that I ended my music listening with the Hip Hop Spider-Man remix.  I had my mask on, my glasses in my MIB3 glasses case and got out with my things.  I put the Blue Ranger hoodie in the trunk and walked my way to the con.

I was able to navigate my way there, but there was a problem: my lenses were fogging up.  I had a plan to record myself getting into character talking about how Spidey had to fill in for both Peter Parker and myself at the same time, but because my lenses were fogging up and I could barely see, I decided not to take the chance and took my mask off, put my glasses on and walked towards the entrance of McCormick Place.

What surprised me about the walk towards the building was that my legs were in less pain than before: I felt lighter on my legs and I felt like I could actually walk up and down the two flights of stairs of McCormick Place.  I went through the regular queue line and waited until it was time for us to be let in.  To kill some time, I logged onto the Wi-Fi network, I took a selfie and posted it on Facebook, I looked through my Facebook newsfeed and I did all of that while I had my mask on.

While I was waiting in line, I had another idea: wait until everybody’s let in and do the selfie vlog I meant to do outside while in the building.  It was something I never would’ve done as a Power Ranger (and I couldn’t either thanks to the voice blockage), but as Spider-Man, I felt very confident in doing it.  When it was a little past 10AM, they let everybody in and it was time to do the final day of C2E2 2016!

When I found an opening, I decided to open the camera app on my phone and I started to record myself.  With my Spider-Man cosplay, screen touching is a hassle.  I would have to press harder or find a way to get my hand to press in order for the touch to register.  On my first attempt, it didn’t record at all.  Once I was able to get the thing to record, well, here’s the following video!

Trust me, it was all done on one take.  After I had that video done, I decided to go to Tico Thousands one more time and get a pic with him.  But, before I could do that, I had to get a pic with a character I don’t recall ever seeing at a comic convention: Squirrel Girl!  Since Squirrel Girl’s a property of Marvel, it felt appropriate to get a pic with her.

If you notice, my mask was not positioned correctly and it’s going to be pretty much like that the whole con.  I hadn’t had enough practice with putting the mask on since it’s tight on my face (but doesn’t squeeze it, so don’t worry about that) and it’s a little bit aggravating to take off.  Since I’m mostly in a hurry to put the mask on, I just go by the philosophy of as long as I can see from both lenses, I’m fine.  After that, I was going to go to Artist Alley when I got stopped by a guy from one exhibit table.

The guy was showing me some things his table had to offer and the main thing he wanted to show me were these things called Dragon Pets.  He asked me what my favorite color was and I told him that I was torn between red and blue since those were the colors I was wearing.  He went with a blue one and showed me how maneuverable those things were and wrapped one around my wrist.  If you see a picture of one on my wrist in the photo gallery, that’s why I took that picture.  He even mentioned that it glows in the dark too, which I really wasn’t impressed by because I don’t need a nightlight.  I took one of the business cards and said I’d think about getting one in the future, but that was really a nice way of saying thanks for wasting my time.  I’m not interested in this thing at all.  If it wasn’t for me getting the business card, I wouldn’t have remembered who the vendor was.

I made my way to Artist Alley and besides taking some pictures, I went to Tico Thousands’ table and said that I wanted one more thing from him and I’d be done with him for the rest of the con: get a picture.  We got our picture taken with both my camera and his camera phone and just like I’d told him, I never saw him again for the rest of the con.

Since I was dressed up as a Marvel character, what better way to do things before the Marvel photoshoot and get my picture taken at the Marvel booth?  I headed there and once I got there, there was an old-school Spider-Man cosplayer getting his picture taken to the right end of the stage facing my direction.  I made haste and took my glasses off, put it in its case, put my mask on and got ready to get a pic with the Spider-Man cosplayer.

The cosplayer thought I looked awesome and I tried my best to imitate the exact pose he did.  It turned out I wasn’t away from him enough to imitate the pose, but then again, due to my eyesight, I couldn’t see exactly how he posed.  Again, I tried my best and it came out pretty great in my opinion.

After that pic was taken, I noticed that some people were getting their picture taken on the Marvel stage with a Captain America shield.  I walked around to the other side and there was a short line of people getting ready to get their picture taken with the official Captain America shield.  Since I was Spider-Man, I thought it would be pretty fitting to imitate Spidey’s arrival on the Captain America: Civil War trailer, even though prints of that suit hadn’t existed yet.

When it was my turn, the guy who was giving people the shield to hold had gotten my camera and he was actually the same guy whom I was in contact with on Facebook a lot prior to Wizard World Chicago 2013.  When I had gotten the shield, it felt like I was holding Thor’s Mjolnir as it was heavy.  It was so heavy, I couldn’t even make it to the middle of the stage and just went with the pose.  Even though I don’t have the pose completely on point, it’s one of my favorite photos of the day.

When I got off the stage, I decided to walk around the con a bit and see if there were any cosplayers I wanted to take a picture with or of.  At one point, I had stumbled upon Orlando Belisle, Jr. and we got to talking for a bit.  Seeing that I hadn’t seen him on Channel Awesome content for a while, I had wondered if he was still with Channel Awesome and he said that he was and that he was talking with Doug Walker about doing a skit or something and that he should be on a few shows soon.  While he was giving me his answer, I saw a Miles Morales cosplayer walking by.  After that brief talk, I was on Operation Find Miles Morales, but he was gone.  Oh well!  I’ll probably catch him at the Marvel Photoshoot later!

While I was walking around the front portion of the stage, I had seen an interesting Spider-Man cosplayer walking by.  He was a Spider-Man dressed in hip-hop gear and I thought he looked too awesome to not get a picture with.  I made haste with getting my mask on, got to him and requested a pic.  Of course, we had to do a hip-hop pose!

After that pic was taken, I was walking down to the Dial Up Games booth when I had seen a Wonder Woman cosplayer with her back turned and……I’ll let the following meme tell you what I thought about her.

In my opinion, Wonder Woman’s costume is designed for women with Dat Ass and it ‘s usually disappointing to see Wonder Woman cosplayers without that feature.  It turned out that that Wonder Woman cosplayer is the same one I had seen from Wizard World Chicago 2014 Day 1 and last year’s C2E2 Day 2.  I didn’t realize it and I knew she looked familiar, but it looks like every year, her body’s been getting better looking.  It was so good, I had to take a picture of her instead of with her.  If I do see her again while I’m Spider-Man though, I’ll do a versus pic because Marvel vs. DC dammit!  Also, I haven’t done that kind of picture at all on this day.  Hell, I never took a pic with a DC cosplayer as Spidey!

Moving on, I had discovered that I was getting some picture requests as Spider-Man and I had to remember that I can speak now!  Being a Power Ranger cosplayer, the helmet prevents you from being heard from somebody outside the helmet, but a Spider-Man mask doesn’t block your voice at all.  If I noticed somebody trying to take my picture with my camera in the vertical position (trust me, my eyesight’s not that bad without my glasses and I notice it every time it happens), I would tell the person to take my pic in the horizontal position instead, or at least get a pic in both angles.  If I got a pic with a kid or two, I’d ask for a high five instead of hoping they’d see my suggestion like when I was a Power Ranger.  Speaking of kids, I was pretty interested with one kid.

With this one kid, what impressed me about him was that he knew I was wearing some sort of lens on my mask.  I think he also asked me about what kind of material my Spider logo was (Eva foam).  I can’t remember other things about him, but I could tell this kid was very knowledgeable about Spider-Man costumes not from Party City.  To make matters sweet, he was wearing an Amazing Spider-Man 2 suit too.  The kid wanted my pic of course and in return, I wanted the same.  With the flexing of muscles pose, that was the kid’s idea, not mine.

Some time later, I had seen something that kind of made me jealous: Power Rangers cosplayers.  They were one-half of the Ranger core: Red, Black and Pink.  I wished I was Blue at that point, but Flame Water Cosplay was the Blue Ranger that day, so I’d leave that to him.  As expected, they were getting picture requests like crazy and I was one of those people who wanted to get a pic with them.  Here’s the crazy thing: I was generating as much attention as they were!

I was getting picture requests from other people while I was waiting on my turn and this one picture request was the funniest I’ve ever experienced and it involved a baby.  This one mother wanted to get a pic of me and her son, but her son was like deathly afraid of masked characters.  Anytime the baby was getting close to me or see me, he’d cry.  She told me about the situation and asked if I would take my mask off.  I did so and that calmed the baby down.  Right when we were going to get our picture taken, I put my mask back on and the baby cried again.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t get our picture taken, but I was laughing on the inside; hell, I’m laughing as I’m typing this!

If I remember correctly, I think that person was the same person I told that I had been a Power Ranger cosplayer before and to trust me in that the Power Ranger cosplayers weren’t going anywhere.  If I did, then I also told her that the baby will get over the masked character fears next year.  I remember being somewhat afraid like that when I was a kid, but I wasn’t even thinking about that at the time; I just thought that the baby being afraid of Spider-Man was hilarious.  Now that I think about it, will that baby grow up to be a future J. Jonah Jamison?  He better not be!

After a little bit of time passed, I requested the Rangers to get a picture with their master (since Spider-Man did cause Super Sentai/Power Rangers to be born) and of course, I got my picture taken.  I didn’t expect the Rangers to do web-shooting poses and with my poor eyesight, I wouldn’t have noticed.  I guess it’s for the best anyway.

Nearly 10 minutes later, I had encountered a second group of Power Rangers: the same group from Day 1 that were the Blue Ranger, “Gold” Ranger and White Ranger.  If I was the Blue Ranger, we’d be twinning, but at least I got a pic with some other Rangers!

After all of that, we’re still at around 11:40AM!  It was going to be almost time for the Marvel Photoshoot, so in order for me to not miss it, I decided to leave and make my way to the front.  As I was about to go to the exit, I had seen my Black Ranger friend (also known as Super Black Man and here’s his Facebook fan page) leaving too and he was dressed as the Symbiote Spider-Man from that dreadful Spider-Man 3.  When he saw me, he slowed down so that I could catch up and he asked me if I was going to the Marvel Photoshoot.  I said that I was and I followed him there.  Obviously, we got stopped along the way for picture requests, but it didn’t cause us to get late at all.

When we got to the bottom of the steps, we made a left and continued on until we saw a bunch of Marvel cosplayers.  When SBM and I were stopped for picture requests, after pics were taken, I kept my mask on from before the photoshoot began until we were no longer needed for a bit.  It was while we were waiting for the photoshoots to begin when I had the biggest fun I’ve ever had at C2E2 period and it’ll make sense after I tell you why it was fun.

I was standing next to a Scarlet Spider cosplayer and there was this one Deadpool cosplayer who was pretty much acting like Deadpool.  I guess he noticed me dressed up as The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Spider-Man and he had mentioned that I was going to be on Captain America: Civil War.  I decided to get into character and act like I didn’t know the fourth wall existed, so I was like what are you talking about!  I asked the Scarlet Spider what Deadpool was talking about and he explained it.  Well, there goes the not-breaking-the-fourth-wall thing!

We had talked for a bit and I don’t know what led to this one thing, but at some point, he pointed out a Gwen Stacy cosplayer to me and she was right across from me.  Even with my bad eyesight, I could notice the long green coat, black shirt and purple skirt.  I acted like I was in tears because of what we know happened on TASM2 (and here’s a video of a Captain Spidey cosplayer seeing the death over and over again like a jerk) and I had mentioned that Harry had killed her.  Yes, I know it was Spider-Man who actually killed her, but I had to be in character there.  What happened next was the most fun I’ve ever had.

I don’t think I remember exactly how the conversation went, but it was something that was stuck in my head for a while.  To make this a little bit like my self-debates, I’ll have the Deadpool cosplayer be in red while I’ll be in blue.  And yes, we were yelling the entire time.

DID SOMEBODY SAY HARRY POTTER?!

NO, I WAS TALKING ABOUT HARRY OSBORNE!  IT WAS HIS FAULT WHY GWEN STACY DIED!

THEN YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE BROUGHT HER WITH YOU!

I DIDN’T!

THEN YOU SHOULD’VE HAD HER FURTHER AWAY!

I DID!  I TRAPPED HER ON A POLICE CAR AND WENT TO FIGHT ELECTRO ALONE!  SHE SOMEHOW DROVE THE POLICE CAR TO MY DIRECTION AND GOT IN HARM’S WAY!

It was at that point when we were instructed to go to the non-operated escalators and that’s when the Deadpool cosplayer said that Gwen wasn’t right for me anyway.  I didn’t say anything, but in my mind, I was like good point.  Even though we were arguing, we were in character and it was so much fun to have an improvised conversation.  I don’t know if I’ll ever do something like that again at next year’s C2E2 or any upcoming cons this year, but that’s something I could never do as a Power Ranger.

I went to the top of the escalator on the left side of the pictures, so if you see any C2E2 2016 Marvel Photoshoot pictures, that’s where you’ll see me.  Oh, and just in case you still can’t find me, here’s an easier way: if you see Rap Battle Spidey, I’m to his right.

With the heroes-villain ratio, there were way more heroes than there were villains.  When we did the heroes vs. villains photo shoot, the odds looked very stacked against the villains.  After that portion was done, they asked for the Deadpool cosplayers to make it to the floor so that group shots of them could be done; everybody else had to look like they were conversating with each other.  Since there were a couple of Spider-Gwen cosplayers to my right, I asked one of them how she was still alive as I watched her die.  One of the people there had mentioned to me that my character died in her universe (which I already knew), but there wasn’t much talk after that.

After the photographers were done with the Deadpools, they asked for Spider-Verse to come down.  This was the moment I couldn’t wait for, so you knew I had to come down.  I didn’t even notice this as it was happening, but when I saw pictures of the moment, I noticed the impossible: there were different Spider-Men.  There wasn’t one Spider-Man that was the same as the other.  Hell, even the Spider-Gwens were different and they all wore the exact same suit.

Photo courtesy of Brett Bergen Photography.

After that, we did another round and this time, I had to move from the right to the left and in came a Sandman cosplayer.  The photographer wanted us to attack the Sandman cosplayer and that was a good thing for me because I was close to a Gwen Stacy cosplayer and she was lying down like she was dead; at least I could play it off like Sandman killed her in Spider-Man 3!

Photo courtesy of Darthbx Photography from Facebook.

After that was done, it was time for us Spideys to take a break.  I forgot to mention that before it was time for us to get our pictures taken, I took off my lanyard and put it in my bag.  I knew the risk of doing that, but thankfully, my lanyard was never stolen.  I decided to get some pics with some people and one of them was with the Miles Morales cosplayer I meant to get earlier.

When I was about to put my camera back in my bag, I noticed the Gwen Stacy cosplayer nearby, so I had to get a pic with her.  Instead of posting the pic right now, it’ll be posted at the end of the blog to set you guys up for clicking to my Flickr page for the Day 3 photos.

Earlier while we were getting our pictures taken, one of the photographers had asked us if we wanted to do a Civil War photo.  I think you all know the answer to that one: of course we did!  I thought that because of the insane amount of hero cosplayers, we were going to do the versus photos on the ground and not the escalators, but I was wrong; I didn’t even notice they were doing that until the middle of the first round.  After the first round was done, I hurried over to the Team Iron Man side and did versus photos there.

The third round had us doing different versus poses, but this time with three Lokis coming down the escalators.  After that was done, they had every Marvel character be on the escalators as possible, which meant I had to go up some.  Little did I know, Ann Foley, the costume designer of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., was there and we all got a picture with her and the Infinity Gauntlet cosplayer.

Once those sets of photos were done, it was time for individual photoshoots.  SBM decided that was it for him, so he had left.  I went back to my bag to see what time it was (I think it was around 1PM) and I decided to stick around and take part in the individual photoshoots.  Right in front of me was a Doctor Strange cosplayer and right behind me were a QuickSilver and Scarlet Witch cosplaying couple from Age of Ultron.  We went through five different photographers and I did three different poses for all five of them.

Coming up with fifteen different poses on the fly as Spider-Man was no easy task, especially considering the fact that I didn’t spend enough time practicing Spider-Man poses, let alone researching them.  I managed to come up with fifteen poses and after that, I decided to head back to the show floor and kill as much time there as I could, putting my lanyard back on in the process.

It was around 1:30PM when I decided to go back, but I decided to go to the Family HQ section first.  I saw a Lego Batman cosplayer there and took a picture of him, I took a couple of pics of Disney Princesses at the main entrance of McCormick Place, and I took a few more hallway pics before going back in the show floor.  Unlike the previous day, we were just let in without having to go through the queue line process.

I walked around the place getting some new pics with and of different cosplayers and I can say for sure that there were some Marvel cosplayers who had no idea about the Marvel photoshoot.  When I spotted a Jessica Jones cosplayer, I had to get a pic with her since (in character) she’s a former classmate of mine.  Speaking of Jessica Jones, I saw a Jessica Jones cosplayer on each day: on Day 1, there was one who was with Luke Cage.  On Day 2, she was with a Kilgrave cosplayer; he was the one who took the pic!  On this day, like typical Jessica Jones, she was by herself.  The look on her face in the following pic is pure gold in my opinion!

When it was around 3PM, I decided I was going to go and grab me something to eat.  You might have noticed on my Day 2 blog that I didn’t mention anything about getting something to eat, and that’s because I didn’t eat that day at C2E2!  I guess being around people makes me less hungry or something.  Like Day 1 somewhat, I picked up a slice of sausage pizza and some Doritos, but I didn’t pick up a chocolate chip cookie and I picked up some orange Fanta.  If the Fanta wasn’t there, my only options were water, Coca-Cola and Coke Zero.  Not being a fan of Coke and purchasing water, I probably would’ve gone liquid-less in my meal, but thankfully, the Fanta was there.

I had originally ordered forearm zippers for my costume because I didn’t know how to take off the Wizard World wrist passes without cutting them.  Because of the large opening around the wrist pass, I thought it would be better to slide the hand area under them and have the wrist pass over my suit.  In this instance, a forearm zipper was a great idea as it allowed me to get my hands free while not separating the hand area from my suit.

After I was done eating, I put my remains in the garbage and on my way back, one guy came up to me and told me that he didn’t want to disturb me while I was eating, but since I was done, he asked if he could get a pic with me.  Of course, I obliged with his pic request and it was a good thing he did too because zipping the wrists is a pain to do by myself and making the zippers invisible was probably not a good idea on my end.  I had him zip the zippers for me and after I got my mask on, I took a pic with him.  After that, it was time to kill some extra time!

One of the things that caught my attention was seeing some Star Wars cosplayers, but there was one that caught my attention: a Stormtrooper with Darth Maul paint on him.  I had been searching for a Darth Maul cosplayer all day (even asking a Darth Talon cosplayer where he was in the process), but with no success.  Since that Stormtrooper had the Darth Maul look to him, I thought he was close enough to get a Spider-Man vs. Darth Maul pic with and I got the pic!

When it was 4PM, it was crunch time.  There was one more objective I had to do as Spider-Man: buy something Spider-Man related.  The thing I decided I wanted to buy was a Spider-Man hoodie, especially since I was going to go outside in the cold in just my suit before getting to my car.  I went to the StylinOnline booth and looked at one Spider-Man hoodie and decided to try to buy it.  I asked one of the people working there how much the hoodie cost and he said $60; I immediately put the hoodie right back where I found it.

If I didn’t buy some food for myself, I would’ve bought the hoodie with no problem.  But, since I had less than $60 on me, I had to go with an alternative route.  Since I said in a previous blog that I was more into getting a cap, I decided to look for one.  There were two problems with that: they were all snapbacks and the largest size was too small for my head.  Well damn!  What could I buy that’s Spider-Man related?  Since I had already bought a Spider-Man comic book last year and I doubted that any vendors were selling hardcopies of Spider-Verse, I decided not to get a comic book of Spider-Man.

The only option I could think of was something I had never gotten in my life: Pop Vinyls.  I had seen a Spider-Man Pop Vinyl earlier, but I couldn’t remember where exactly.  I went through a lot of vendors trying to find a Spider-Man Pop Vinyl, but I was unsuccessful.  Then I remembered one section that had a large Spider-Man doll hanging around, so I went there.

It was at that vendor when I saw the only Spider-Man Pop Vinyl that they had: a Miles Morales one.  There was at one point during the day when someone called me Miles Morales and I wasn’t wearing my mask when it happened.  I thought to myself at that time I’ll take it.  Speaking of I’ll take it, that’s exactly what came to mind when I saw the Miles Morales Pop Vinyl.  I paid the $35 for it and I succeeded in the category of getting something Spider-Man related!

When it was 4:45PM, it was 15 minutes to go before the end of C2E2 2016 and I decided to call it quits.  I left the show floor, got a couple of pics along the way, took off my lanyard and put it and my camera in the bag, then walked back to the car.

As soon as I exited the building, my body felt the chills from outside.  The chills were actually thanks to the under tunnel area and as soon as I got out of it, the temperature warmed up.  It was like 42 degrees outside at the time I believe and I couldn’t have felt better ever since I escaped the underpass.  Well, except for putting back on my Blue Ranger hoodie of course.  Since the sun was up, I put on my sunglasses and exited McCormick Place, never to see it again until April 21-23 of next year!

When I went home, I decided to take the alternate route of getting to the expressway and it turned out that the alternate entry to the expressway was the same way I would’ve gone to had the parking area my friend and I used to go to didn’t get taken down.  I could’ve visited the area to see if anything new happened, but that never crossed my mind.  Thankfully there was no construction going on the whole way through and I made it back with no problems.

Once I made it back, I went to my room, grabbed my phone, put my mask back on and did the following video, all on one take…

I was supposed to show off my Pop Vinyl figure as I had it next to me, but I forgot about it.  To make up for it, I took a pic of me next to the Pop Vinyl figure and that concludes my testimony of C2E2 2016!

As you can see, there was a lot of stuff happening at C2E2 Day 3 and on Microsoft Word, this is page 10.  I had a lot of fun as Spider-Man and the whole thing makes me want to retire as a Power Ranger for next year’s event.  Given the situation with my Green Ranger cosplay, that can’t happen.

It kind of sucks that I really had some fun on this day than on days past, but I had the best time of my life at last year’s C2E2.  Moving the con to March was a bad idea in my opinion and the weather decided to agree with me too.  I love that C2E2 this year didn’t get in the way of the NBA Playoffs (even though that really didn’t matter last year), but I prefer C2E2 being in April instead of March.

I will be back at C2E2 next year and I will once again take part of the Marvel Photoshoot, but I will be a different Spider-Man this time.  Which one?  I’ll reveal that to you guys at another time, but until then, click on the picture underneath this paragraph for Day 3 pics (over 100 again) and I’m out!