I had meant to have this blog released sometime last summer, since that was the best time for me to do some PC gaming.  I didn't release this blog last year for two reasons: I forgot about it and even if I didn't, I didn't find the right time to post the blog.  Since I'm in the mood to release a blog I had done last year that didn't get published, I decided that this blog is the best blog for that.  Enjoy!

You know what’s one of the worst things about being in a community?  The amount of complaining that goes on.  With the PC community, it can be more than that.  Not only do you have people complaining about what AMD’s not doing or bottlenecking, there’s also misinformation.  One of the things that’s been misinforming that I’m having a problem with is something that you see is in the title of this blog: overkill.

What is overkill?  Why is overkilling a problem?  Why is it that if I get this, that or the third, it’s overkill?  Before I get to what the term overkill means in the PC community, let’s take a look at what the word overkill means in general.  Logically, overkill would mean that you’re killing something that’s already dead.  According to dictionary.com, overkill can mean a capacity to destroy more than necessary with nuclear weapons for a victory in war, an instance of much destruction or an excess of what is required or suitable because of a desire or misjudgment.  When the PC community is talking about overkill, it’s the latter that they’re talking about instead of the other two.

If you get a power supply that’s more than necessary to run a PC, it’s overkill.  If you get a high-end CPU and/or a top-of-the-line GPU to play games at 1080p at 60 frames per second, that’s overkill.  If you’re getting a monitor that has 144hz, which allows you to play games at 144 frames per second max without the need to turn on V-Sync or any syncing technologies (G-Sync or FreeSync), and you’re not going to play first person shooters, then that’s overkill.  Along with bottleneck, this term can be so confusing that you might have a hard time trying to piece together a PC that not only doesn’t bottleneck, but also doesn’t cause you to do some overkilling.  Bottlenecks are more confusing to describe, so I’m not even going to bother with that, but overkill I can handle.  What I can tell you about overkill is this: if you have the money, forget about what those PC people are telling you because there’s nothing wrong with overkill!

Overkill is a term in the PC community that can prove to you how hypocritical the PC community can be.  Those people can be the reason why there are two sides of the gaming community: console gamers and PC gamers.  Consoles aren’t difficult to understand (or at least not confusing) and it’s pretty much impossible to overkill them.  With PCs, if you’re looking for the best bang for your buck and you’re trying to “future proof” your system, then your best bet is to do a little bit of overkilling.

Here’s what I mean about being hypocritical: PC gamers claim that you get the best frame-per-second average on PC than on consoles, but want to limit how many frames per second you should have when building your PC.  Let’s say for example that you have an AMD FX-6300 like I do.  With pairing a GPU, a Radeon R7 370X or an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 950 is the sweet spot for gaming at 1080p.  If you get a GPU that’s better than those GPUs, not only are you “bottlenecking” your GPU, but you’re also creating overkill.  My thing is this: as long as you still get 60 frames-per-second, why is getting an upgrade a problem?  It’s not their PC, so they shouldn’t be concerned with what’s inside your PC!

As far as what power supply you should have, there’s this excellent website that will help you narrow down what power supply you should get for your PC gaming needs.  If you’re going to overkill, then you might as well overkill right.  If I’m not mistaken, if you use that website, anything that website suggests you should get at minimum will be seen as an overkill to some people.

For example, with my current PC, I have a Sapphire Tri-X Radeon R9 290 and an AMD FX-6300.  I’m not going to go into details about what’s in my PC, but for the sake of results, the site says that I should get at least a 778W power supply.  Even though there’s no such thing as a 778W power supply, that would be considered overkill to some people in the PC community.  600W would be the sweet spot, but leave that to the people who have either been PC gaming for a while or people who are putting up random stuff and probably don’t know what they’re talking about.

What I think is going on here with the overkilling thing is that frames per second has gotten them confused.  There’s a difference between reaching a certain framerate and having a stable framerate.  When you hit non-overkill levels, it’s going to be a matter of time before you have to make an upgrade and it’s going to happen sooner rather than later.  Without overkilling, you may reach a certain framerate, but the chances of having a stable framerate could be low.  With overkilling, you’re minimizing the chances of having an unstable framerate, which will thus have you gaming with little to no lag, depending on your internet connection and others if you’re gaming online.

Going back to monitors, 144 frames per second is overkill if you’re playing today’s games because 144 frames per second is impossible to achieve unless you go all out and get the best hardware money can buy.  Maybe there’s something wrong with you if you get a 144hz monitor just to game at 60 frames per second, but if you want to achieve a higher framerate than that, older games can help you reach 144 frames per second easily.  You can go above 60 frames per second right now if you’re not gaming at 4K, but if you are gaming at 4K, for right now, you might as well stick with a 60hz monitor as it’s pretty tough to reach 70 frames per second at 4K resolutions without using SLI or Crossfire; that’s if you’re not planning on using more than one GPU at the same time.

Memory’s a good subject about overkills too.  8GBs is considered the sweet spot for gaming while going 16GBs is overkill.  There is a good reason for this though: unless you’re creating high quality videos (and are probably recording your gaming sessions), 16GBs aren’t needed and you aren’t going to see much difference with 16GBs as you would with 8GBs.  But, if you decide to go ahead and get 16GBs of RAM, then go ahead and do it; nobody’s stopping you except your wallet!  I would’ve gone 16GBs last year, but the reason why I didn’t is because 8GBs cost just as much then as 16GBs cost today, plus I didn’t have a need for 16GBs anyway.

There’s one last thing that gets talked about in terms of overkill and it might surprise you what that thing is: network Ethernet cables.  Right now, the cable that’s best for your internet connection is either Cat5e or Cat6 cables.  There are two additional types of Cat cables available right now: Cat6A and Cat7.  Cat6A and Cat7 cables are both shielded and they both offer speeds faster than Cat6, with Cat6A offering speeds up to 500 MHz (twice the speed of Cat6) while Cat7 offers speed up to 600 MHz.

Cat6 is the sweet spot for online streaming and other multiple internet activities without slowdown, but to insure that nothing happens to the internet connection (with the exception of ISPs messing with you of course), some people would go to a higher standard and get Cat6A or Cat7.  After researching online, I found out that according to some people, both Cat6A and Cat7 cables are overkill, simply because both cables have 10Gbps support and we’re not at the stage yet where 10Gbps is standard (we’re still at 1Gbps, which is more than enough for now).  I personally went with Cat7 because of a major internet connection issue I had earlier and so far, so good!

With all the talk about overkill, I’m surprised that I haven’t read anybody saying that getting this kind of hard drive is overkill and getting this kind of fan or having that many fans are overkill.  Why is that?  I guess it’s because they’re not overkill enough to cause a big scene on things.  If there’s one big reason why overkill would be a problem, it’s because of one thing and one thing only: $$$$$.  If you want to save money, then it’s best to not overkill.  But wouldn’t you be overkilling if you went with Intel and NVIDIA anyway?

Both Intel and NVIDIA make devices that have games run pretty smooth.  If AMD can run games at 60+ frames per second with their CPU and GPU being used together, then using the Intel and NVIDIA combination would be considered overkill because they perform better and they cost more than AMD with equivalent hardware.  What do the majority of PC gamers use according to Steam?  Intel and NVIDIA!  Who are the people telling you that getting this, that and the third is considered overkill?  Those who have Intel and NVIDIA PCs!  Hypocritical much huh?

If you have the money to commit overkill, then go ahead and do it.  Your PC won’t crash and burn; your wallet will.  If you’re not experiencing choppy framerates, then it’s money well spent.  I’ve done my share of overkilling and I couldn’t have been happier.  Hell, sometime in the future I might do some extreme overkilling, without overclocking of course.  If anything else PC-related comes to mind, then I’ll post that blog later.  Until the next blog, I’m out!

This year, I was going to do something I’ve never done before: attend all three days of Anime Central.  Since I wasn’t a fan of anime last year, I only went there for one day and that was for the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot.  This year, I wanted to go all three days with my friend since I went without telling him about it last year.  I came across some bad news before C2E2 got started: my friend wouldn’t be able to attend C2E2 and Anime Central due to payments on his late father’s new car.  Even though I still could’ve gone only one day at the con, I still went for all three days.  Why?  To make up for the fact that C2E2 was held in March instead of April and that mid-March was the coldest time for me to cosplay; ACen would be my remedy!

If you’ve read my C2E2 Day 1 Recap blog, you would know that I ran into a little mishap: my Fighting Spirit Green Ranger helmet broke.  When I think about it, the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger cosplay’s the main cosplay that I have troubles with.  With my Blue Ranger cosplay, the only problem I ran into was a fogged visor back at Wizard World Chicago 2013, which was fixed the next day.  The only problem I had with my Super Mario cosplay was that the gloves would get dirty pretty easily due to the fact that they were white.  The only problem with my Spider-Man cosplay is the bottom legs of the red spider being detached, but it’s not noticeable anyway.  With my Green Ranger cosplay, there was the shield being ripped twice (one at home and one at Wizard World Chicago 2013 Day 3), the green diamonds on the cuffs constantly coming apart no matter what glue I used, the hole that was supposed to hold one of the buttons for my Legacy Dragon Dagger sheath got a little more open, making the buttons come apart and forever damaging it, and now the helmet.  I guess the cosplay gods don’t want me to cosplay as the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger; we’ll see if that’s the case next year!

I thought that I could get rid of the glue with a nail polish remover, but it looks to be more complicated than I thought, so because of that, I couldn’t bring the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger to ACen for this day.  Instead, I opted for Spider-Man for this day.  I had no idea what I’d do for Day 3 at first, but then I found out that David Ngo was going to be at ACen, so for just in case purposes, I decided to cosplay as Spider-Man for Day 3 and it ended up being a smart decision on my end; I’ll get to why on the Day 3 blog.  With all that being said, let’s get to the testimony of the event!

On each day, I woke up at 7AM.  Learning my lesson from C2E2 2016 Day 1, I used Google Maps to see how long it would take for me to get from my house to the Donald Stephens Convention Center.  According to Google Maps, it would take at most an hour-and-a-half to get to the Donald Stephens Convention Center, due in large part to rush hour traffic.  So, in order for me to arrive at Anime Central before the starting time which was 10AM (on all three days by the way), I would have to leave at around 8:05AM.  Oh, and that’s if I wanted to arrive by 9:30AM.  There was one problem with that: my mother had borrowed the car to get some stuff from Meijer.  She didn’t come back until 8:25AM and I left immediately afterward.

Knowing that it would take me an hour-and-a-half to get to the Donald Stephens Convention Center, I would have to listen to an hour-and-a-half’s worth of music.  What I decided to do was listen to a playlist that I had recently created: 70s music.  When you think 70s music, you’re probably thinking of disco music and I did have disco music; I also had every song from Guitar Heroes II and III that were released in the 70s.  If there was a long version of a song, I was using that instead of the original.  I could show you the playlist, but that would make this already-about-to-be-long blog even longer, so I’ll spare you the details.

To my surprise, I made it to the building with time to spare.  When I got to the parking area, I was a little surprised to see that the price had increased from $13 to $15.  At least with that price, on pre-pay, it’s three $5 bills instead of one $10 bill and 3 $1 bills!  Because of my experience with Wizard World Chicago 2013, I’ll still use the pay-as-I’m-about-to-leave route since it’s faster than waiting your turn anyway.

I parked the car at lot 2B (and that way the remaining two days.  Also, it’s amazing that the drivers in front of me keep going up instead of the open way in front of them) and made a Facebook status that I had arrived.  It took me like eighty minutes to get to ACen and I still had time to spare.  I got out of my car and made my way to the building.

I didn’t immediately go to the Donald Stephens Convention Center by the way: I went straight to the Hyatt Regency Hotel location so that I could kill time and see where the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot was taking place.  The ACen Guidebook app said that it was located at the east wall of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel, but I couldn’t see where exactly.  Deciding that I had killed enough time as is, I decided to go back and head to the main hall of the Donald Stephens Convention Center.

As I was going down the escalator, I was so surprised at what I was seeing: the main hall being packed.  I arrived at ACen late last year on purpose, so I didn’t get to see that and I never experienced that at Wizard World Chicago (that’s probably because people lined up anywhere except the main hall), so seeing that many people going to ACen was mind-boggling.  Here’s a picture of what I saw…

It was a little after 10AM when people were let in.  Looking at the number of people who were waiting to get in, I thought the Exhibit Hall would be full, but that wasn’t the case.  Also, as a little bit of a spoiler alert: I didn’t get many picture requests.  It was so heartbreaking to not have people ask me for picture requests that it made me want to quit cosplaying as Spider-Man.  I know that Spider-Man’s not an anime character and as far as I know, there’s been no anime of him, but what the hell!  C2E2 surprised me in how many picture requests I had there, but Anime Central was a different story.  Hell, it got to the point where I sometimes forgot I was cosplaying and took pictures of cosplayers instead of with them.

After walking around the Exhibit Hall, I decided to go to the Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel and find the arcade area.  It was moved to a different location from last year, but the room was bigger and had more lighting too.  That was probably because not only did the arcade room have arcades, it also had multiple TVs with multiple game systems attached to them, from as early as the NES and as late as the current generation.  There was Street Fighter V being played (both arcades and consoles), Super Smash Bros. Melee, Brawl and U, some Naruto game and other stuff.  Just like last year, I didn’t play any arcade games even though money wasn’t necessary to play them.  After exploring the area some more, I decided to go back inside the DSCC and chill for a bit.

Before I went back, I saw an Aeris and Zack cosplayer and decided to get a picture of them.  After I had taken the picture, I asked the Aeris cosplayer if she would prefer to be called Aeris or Aerith.  She had no clue what I was talking about, but she went with Aerith.  The Zack cosplayer knew what I was talking about and told me that she had no idea about that controversy, to which I told the Aeris cosplayer that she’s lucky she knew nothing about it.  To be honest, I knew nothing about that controversy myself until she was introduced in Final Fantasy VII Machinabridged and reading the comments on that episode.

I did get lost for a little bit as I couldn’t remember my way back, but I eventually found my way without asking for help and not looking like I have no idea where I was going.  I went back to Hall A (where Anime Central was taking place) and I think I was going to chill for a bit in the Exhibit Hall when I heard someone call my name.  When I turned around, I saw a black guy with dreads wearing a Goku-inspired outfit.  For the first time in over a year, foxrevolution and I were reunited!

I knew foxrevolution was going to be there (as he always is), but unlike last year, I didn’t seek out to look for him.  If I remember correctly, he was the first person that day to ask me for a picture.  Of course I obliged and here’s one of the pics he took of me…

Also unlike last year, our interaction with each other wasn’t brief; we actually hung out for a lot longer this time.  In a way, it was a little bit weird because even though it was our second encounter together, it felt like we’ve been hanging with each other for years; I guess that’s what happens when you’re friends with someone over the internet for a while before you meet them in person.  I’m not saying that it was a bad experience because it was great; it’s just strange to think about when looking back.

I got to see foxrevolution hand out business cards to cosplayers he took pictures of and some pictures he took I think were thanks to me asking some cosplayers if I could take their picture.  Now that I think about it, there was one time when I was taking a picture that someone said that I should take some good photos for J. Jonah Jameson.  Even though JJJ never appeared in the Amazing Spider-Man franchise (except e-mails to Peter Parker in TASM2 which I don’t count), I played around with it and mentioned that he hates me anyway and I have no idea why.

After hanging around in that area for a bit, we went back to the main hall.  In one of the moments, I had seen a Piccolo and Super Saiyan 2 Gohan cosplayer together.  To make things better, the SSJ2 Gohan cosplayer was a kid, probably around 10-12 years old, which is the exact age Gohan was when he went SSJ2 for the first time.  When I took a pic of the Piccolo and SSJ2 Gohan cosplayers, I had asked the Piccolo cosplayer if he had taught Gohan how to dodge yet.  He looked confused and had no idea what I was talking about, but he still gave the right answer: no.  When I saw the confused look on his face, I was like aww, you don’t watch DragonBall Z Abridged!  He confirmed it, but the Gohan cosplayer knew what I was talking about and he was laughing at the reference.  In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a compilation video of Gohan being told to dodge.

My memory might be off for a bit, but I believe it was at some point after this when one of foxrevolution’s friends showed up.  They talked for a bit before foxrevolution introduced him to me.  I forgot his name (which doesn’t matter with this testimony as I didn’t use my friends’ name and I didn’t and will not use foxrevolution’s real first name), but we three hung out for a bit.

We traveled back to the Exhibit Hall and went to the panel room on the second floor and foxrevolution wanted to go to the Photography for Cosplay panel.  Since I had no interest in going to the panel, I decided to part ways with foxrevolution and his friend and we didn’t see each other again for a while.  I went around and took some pictures with and of cosplayers and when it was about to be 1PM, I left the building and went around to one of the loading docks to take part in the Star Wars photoshoot.  By taking part, I mean taking pictures of Star Wars cosplayers.

Prior to this photoshoot, I had only participated in one photoshoot, which was the Marvel photoshoot at C2E2.  Since I was in the shoot, I couldn’t take pictures and I didn’t think to have anybody take pictures with my camera on my behalf.  Because of that, I wasn’t prepared for the amount of pictures I was going to take.  For a photoshoot that was supposed to last 55 minutes, I took a crapload of them and I was going to do it again in the next hour for the Final Fantasy photoshoot at the same location.

I took pics of every scenario that was given and it was fun for me to take pictures.  It became more fun when people in front of me either moved elsewhere or left the shoot altogether, giving me a better view of taking pictures.  There was a DC photoshoot happening on two loading docks next to us while a Team Fortress 2 photoshoot was happening next to us and I took one pic of that shoot while waiting for the next scenario to happen at the Star Wars photoshoot.  Little did I know, foxrevolution was at the DC photoshoot taking pics of all the cosplayers there and getting his nekomimi fix for Cat(girl)urday.  I don’t recall if I had seen him again on this day or not, but this day was not the only day I encountered him; I’ll get to those on the next blog!

Another time I was at the Star Wars photoshoot, someone asked me if I was wearing underoos.  Not knowing what he was talking about, I mentioned what I was wearing underneath my suit (Team Under Armour).  Well, the tables have turned on me: there was a reference to my character I knew nothing about because I hadn’t seen the thing where the reference came from!  What reference was that?  Captain America: Civil War.  I have not seen the movie thus far, so I didn’t get the reference.  Now that I knew about the reference, I was going to be prepared for the next time someone mentions underoos to me and I had not seen CACW yet.

During the photoshoot, there was a Deadpool and a Batman cosplayer involved.  If you’re a Bat in the Sun fan, yes, they did indeed do a Darth Vader vs. Batman scenario.  On the last shoot, they asked for all cosplayers to get involved, including the ones not part of the Star Wars universe.  Since I was in cosplay, I had to get involved.  It was pretty much everybody versus Deadpool, so I just ran with it.  Also, that’s the only part I didn’t take pictures of.

After the Star Wars photoshoot had concluded, I decided to hang around for a bit and take pics of and with cosplayers.  One moment was with a Catwoman cosplayer and at that time, I was pretty much in CWB mode.  What’s CWB you ask?  It’s something I’ve been doing since Wizard World Chicago 2012: Cosplaying While Black.  I think I’ve seen more black cosplayers at Anime Central than I did at C2E2 and I was pretty much taking every opportunity I could to get pics of as many black cosplayers as possible.  Here’s that pic of me and the Catwoman cosplayer…

Little did I know, that cosplayer is a cosplayer foxrevolution knows about.  Her name is Kayla and he had done a photoshoot with her at last year’s ACen (which you can see here).  Once 2PM hit, it was time for the Final Fantasy photoshoot.  Since it was a cloudy day that day (and also no higher than 68 degrees with some wind), it was easy for me to keep my mask on and take pics of the photoshoot from beginning to end.  I did not remember to defog the lenses of my mask, but the lenses held up just fine.  Unlike the Star Wars photoshoot, I didn’t get involved with the photoshoot other than taking pictures.

During the middle of the photoshoot, some of my con friends showed up to greet me.  There were only two I could remember seeing despite my poor eyesight: Henshin Action Photography and the RyuuRanger cosplayer.  We talked for a bit and then they left, never seeing HAP until the next day and with the RyuuRanger cosplayer, never seeing him again.  I wouldn’t know with my pictures if I had gotten any good angles or if some of the pictures got blurry, but overall, no errors.  Sweet!  After that photoshoot was over, it was time to kill before I had to leave.

There was a little something that concerned me after the photoshoot was over: my camera’s battery.  It was down to one bar and the indicator was blinking.  It looked like I took so many pictures in one day that I nearly wasted my entire battery.  Fortunately, I had some backups, so I switched the batteries there.  I was originally going to attend the Attack on Titan photoshoot, but because of the battery situation, I decided to take a pass on that photoshoot and be done with photoshoots for the day.

As usual, I walked around, getting pictures taken and taking pictures (more the latter than the former) and there were two highlights: one being a Green Spider-Man and another with some Spider-Men.  With the Green Spider-Man, he wasn’t alone: he was with a green Deadpool as well.  When I took off my glasses and put on my mask, I had lost sight of them a little bit, but I knew where they were going.  In case I didn’t know, I had to find a lime green color and there they were.  I found them, asked for a pic with the Green Spider-Man cosplayer and here’s one of those results…

With the Spider-Men cosplayers (which happened a little bit afterwards), it actually started with one Spider-Man, but then multiplied later.  I had seen a Spider-Man cosplayer at the start of the con who looked similar to the one I encountered at C2E2, but not exactly: he looked more like he was cosplaying as Spider-Man cosplaying as Marty McFly, Jr. from Back to The Future Part II.  I didn’t get a pic with him at that time, but I didn’t think I’d get a pic with him period.  Well, I was proven wrong when I encountered him at the main hall!

I asked the Spider-Man cosplayer for a pic and he obliged.  After the pic was taken, there were some people who wanted to take a pic of us.  Next thing we knew, a couple more Spider-Man cosplayers showed up and we had gotten our picture taken.  During the process, the Marty McFly, Jr. Spider-Man cosplayer took those things off and went as just Spider-Man.  Little did I know, he was dressed as the Amazing Spider-Man 2 Spider-Man, just like I was, except from a different print.  Here’s the picture of a small Spider-Verse!

I killed some time around the con until it was about 6PM when I decided to call it quits and go home.  The Exhibit Hall closes at 6:30PM on both Friday and Saturday, and since I could’ve stayed around for an extra 30 minutes thanks to no NBA games being played that day, I decided that I wanted to just go home and watch SmackDown! since I missed out on that.  I also missed out on Judge Mathis, which I DVRed by the way.  I paid the $15 parking fee, went home, uploaded my pics of the day onto Flickr (I was shocked to see I had nearly 300 pics for a single day) and did some other stuff I won’t bore you the details on.  Overall, I had a pretty fun day that day and couldn’t wait for the next day.

On the bottom of this blog is a picture that when you click on it, will take you to the ACen Day 1 photo gallery from my Flickr page.  Until the next blog, click the picture, prepare to go through three pages of the photo gallery and I’m out!

C2E2 2016 Day 3 was the first time ever that I wasn’t a Power Ranger cosplayer at the event since I started cosplaying.  With Anime Central, this day was going to be the only day that I cosplayed as a Power Ranger.  Every year, Anime Central has the Tokusatsu/Power Rangers photoshoot happening on Day 2 and even if my Fighting Spirit Green Ranger helmet wasn’t destroyed, I still would’ve cosplayed this day as the Blue Ranger anyway as I wanted to see how my RavSeams suit would shine outdoors.  Since the photoshoot was happening outdoors, that made matters sweet to me.

As usual, I got up and did my daily routine which also included using Google Maps to see how long it would take me to get from my house to the Donald Stephens Convention Center.  Instead of an hour-and-a-half like the previous day, this time it was close to an hour.  If I wanted to get to the Donald Stephens Convention Center by 9:30AM, I had to leave at around 8:35AM.  It was exactly at that time when I left for the Donald Stephens Convention Center.

When I had left, I decided to do something I’ve never done before: let the box that carried my Blue Ranger helmet ride the passenger seat.  Since my friend wasn’t coming and I wasn’t picking anybody up, what was the point of having the helmet ride the back seat?  Nothing went wrong with that decision and I had arrived at around 9:25AM, listening to my Super Sentai playlist along the way.  I made a status update about arriving at the event and I walked toward the convention center.

Being that I was really early, I had to kill time by doing something.  Could I stand around and wait for everybody to be let in?  Could I walk around the main hall and take pictures of or with any interesting cosplays I had seen?  Could I try to find foxrevolution?  I rejected those ideas; as a matter of fact, those ideas never came to my mind.  The idea I had in mind was finding the exact spot where the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot was taking place.  Like I said in the previous blog, it was located at the eastern wall of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel, so I used the overhead walkway to make my way towards the Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel.

I hadn’t been outside since going into the parking lot and the weather was in the 70s and it was sunny.  When I got outside the hotel, the solar flare was getting to me, so I had to put on some shade.  Since I didn’t bring my sunglasses with me, I had to go with the next best thing: my helmet.  I kept my helmet on and walked my way toward the eastern wall of the Hyatt and when I got there, there weren’t many people there, but there were a couple of food trucks there.  I went to the spot where the photoshoot was supposed to take place and I took a couple of selfies there.  Then I went back to the hotel and walked my way toward the main hall.

When I got to the main hall, I saw that the place was more packed than the previous day.  I decided not to take any pictures of the crowd, but instead waited until it was time to let everybody in Exhibit Hall.  People weren’t let in until 10:02AM (it should’ve opened at 10AM) and before that could happen, I saw a couple of Halo Spartan cosplayers and I had to take a pic of them.  Normally, I wouldn’t take any pics of Halo Spartan cosplayers, but those two were very interesting for one reason and one reason only: the color of their armor.  Here’s how they look…

What’s so unique about those two colors?  It’s because of this: I’m a fan of Red vs. Blue, the Machinima web series that put Rooster Teeth on the map.  The black Spartan is Agent Tex (as in Texas) and the sky blue Spartan is Church.  Those two characters are a couple and their backstory will require another blog all by itself, so I won’t bore you with the details.  Also, if I mention anything more about those two, I could spoil Red vs. Blue for you and I think you know how much I hate spoilers.

Everybody were let in and I decided to walk around as usual looking for cosplayers to take pictures with or of.  Unlike last year’s event and the previous day, I had received more picture requests than I thought I would get.  Granted, it wasn’t as much as C2E2, but it was still a lot; so much so that it made me want to continue cosplaying as a Power Ranger.  After going around the Exhibit Hall, my next step was to go back to the Hyatt hotel and find some cosplayers there.

While I was at the hotel, there was one cosplayer that caught my attention: an Android 18 cosplayer.  I’ve seen Android 18 cosplayers before, so what made that cosplayer unique to me?  It was for two reasons: she was a CWB (Cosplaying While Black) and she was middle-aged.  I could’ve asked her for a pic, but she was eating, so I didn’t want to bother her with a picture request.  After going around the hotel and coming back, she was at the same spot, but was done eating.  I used that opportunity and asked her for a pic.  Thanks to that cosplayer, I don’t have to worry about cosplaying in my 50s, which won’t be for another 20 years or so.

After I had taken that picture, I decided to go outside and check the spot where the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot was taking place.  Once I went outside, I saw a Crash Test Dummy cosplayer holding a sign saying that he was on strike.  Of course, I had to take a pic of that.

As I walked a little bit more, I had noticed a Joker cosplayer getting his picture taken by an Asian photographer with his DSLR camera.  I couldn’t make the face, but I had a feeling that the photographer was David Ngo, so I decided to wait a bit until he was done with the Joker cosplayer.  Once he was done, I decided to take a pic of the Joker cosplayer and after that was done, the photographer asked to take a couple of pics of me.  Of course, I obliged and as of this blog, I haven’t seen the photos on David Ngo’s Facebook page and he hasn’t posted all of the Anime Central pics on his DTJaaaam website.  After going around the outside area, I decided to go back inside and to the main hall.

I walked around the main hall for a little bit and all of a sudden, I had heard my name being called.  When I looked around, I had seen Hensin Action Photography again, but this time, without my RyuuRanger friend.  We talked for a little bit and he had gotten a couple photos of me.  Speaking of that, here are the photos he e-mailed me that he took from C2E2 2016 earlier this year…

When he showed me the pics, I said the same thing then as I did at C2E2: every time I look at myself through his LCD screen, it don’t look like me at all; it looks like one of the Super Sentai suit actors from the show.  If I say that, that shows how accurate I’ve been getting with my Blue Ranger cosplay.  Of course, that’s what he said to me.  We talked for a little bit and then we separated, never to be seen again until later on that day.

I decided to go back to the Exhibit Hall and take a little break.  I took some pictures along the way before I sat down and checked my Facebook newsfeed.  After going through that, I decided to go back to the main hall, but not before taking a pic of a Donald Trump cosplayer.  I would normally leave him alone, but there was something about him that got me to take a pic of him.  I don’t remember what that was.

Oh yeah, that button!

When I got back to the main hall, I walked around for a little bit and a short time later, I had noticed some dreadlocks.  Seeing the style and texture of the dreadlocks, I knew who it was instantly: foxrevolution.  He was taking a picture of a cosplayer and I waited behind him until he was done.  Once he was done, I tapped him on the shoulder and we were reunited once again.

We hung out as usual, but this time, his friend from the previous day was there with him.  Even though we three had never hung around together that long, it felt like we had been friends for years.  With foxrevolution’s friend around, that meant that anytime he took a pic of a cosplayer, his friend would be the one to give the business card to the cosplayer instead of him.  Sometimes he still did it, but for the most part, it was his friend.

We went around the main hall and eventually made our way to the upstairs panel area.  I had seen a Videl cosplayer and I wanted to take a picture of her.  She didn’t want to take the pic without the Gohan cosplayer and I didn’t notice that her boyfriend (?) was cosplaying as Gohan.  That was a little bit of a big mistake on her end and I’ll explain why after the picture.

Why was it a mistake on her end?  It’s because I was in a DOOOOOOODGE!! mood and anytime I noticed a Gohan cosplayer (with the exception of the Great Saiyaman as I lose my chance every time for some reason), I would ask him if he’s learned to dodge yet.  In case you haven’t read my previous blog, the Dodge theme has to do with DragonBall Z Abridged.  If you’re a DBZ fan, you should check it out as it’s hilarious.

We went to look for the line for Panel 14 as that panel was for Posing for Cosplay Photos.  I wasn’t planning on going to the panel as it took place at 1:30PM and the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot was taking place at 2PM.  Also, even if I wasn’t going to take part in the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot, I still wouldn’t have attended the panel since I’m done with panels as I’ve lost interest in them.

When we found the line, we got on it, but like I said, I wasn’t planning on staying there.  While we were in line, I had seen the Tex and Church cosplayers ahead of us and I had asked foxrevolution if he got a pic of Agent Tex and Church.  Unfortunately, he had no idea what I was talking about.  Here’s where a little bit of an embarrassment came into play.

I gave out the following clues as to who I was talking about: pointing at the cosplayers, mentioning his friends’ shirt color (red) vs my cosplay color (blue) and then Red vs. Blue.  After the first clue, his friend was looking at him like he was ashamed that he was friends with foxrevolution.  Of course, he was a little dumbfounded once I mentioned Red vs. Blue and he admitted that he hasn’t been watching Machinima videos.  I can’t remember if he said that he had seen Red vs. Blue, but the fact that he couldn’t guess Red vs. Blue when I used the color clue left me completely surprised; that’s also when his friend told me that foxrevolution is the type of guy who will never get clues.  I’ll have to try to remember that in the future!

When I had realized that I was in line, I decided to part ways from foxrevolution and his friend and I went back to the main hall to kill some time before it was time to make it to the Tokusatsu/Power Rangers photoshoot.  I did just that, but a short time later, a surprise came my way: foxrevolution!  I thought the panel had ended so quickly, but it turned out that he and his friend had bounced after seeing how unorganized the panel was.  Some time was killed some more and we even got a pic of an old school Undertaker cosplayer.  Then, for reasons I can’t remember, we separated again, so I was going to be without a cameraperson to take photos of me with my camera at the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot.

I went outside and walked my way toward the area where the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot was taking place and when I was almost there, I saw a group of Tokusatsu cosplayers gathered around.  Instead of mentioning where the photoshoot was supposed to take place, I decided to hang around them and wait until it was time for the photoshoot to take place.  I did take a look at the area and there was a huge problem: a line of people ordering something from the food trucks.  Since there was no way for that area to be clear for the photoshoot, we had to move to the right side of the area where the photoshoot was supposed to take place.

I had two photoshoots scheduled for myself that day: the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot obviously and the One Punch Man photoshoot that happens immediately after that.  Also, both photoshoots were supposed to happen at the same spot, so it was going to be interesting to see how the One Punch Man photoshoot was going to happen.

The Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot was a little bit of a disappointment.  There were more Kamen Rider cosplayers (unmorphed) than there were Super Sentai cosplayers.  When it came to Zyuranger, there was a Green MMPR ninja ranger, a Geki demorphed crossplayer and myself, which made me the only Zyuranger cosplayer in a suit there.  There were some Captain Marvelous cosplayers (all but two were in their demorphed state) and there was one AbareKiller/White Dino Thunder Ranger who bailed before the photoshoots took place.  It was at that moment that I had an idea: I’ll take pics of scenarios that didn’t require me.  When the photoshoot began, that’s what happened until the end.

The last set of photos required every Tokusatsu cosplayer to be on the wall for a final shot.  I had noticed one person at the gathering who didn’t have a camera on her, so I gave my camera to her to have her take the final shots.  She took more pics than I thought, but they all came out great, so I kept them.  Unfortunately, the photoshoot lasted 37 minutes and not one request was for Zyuranger.  To make up for it, I took a pic with the Geki crossplayer.

I hung around for a bit until I decided to try to find the One Punch Man group of cosplayers.  I found them alright: at the exact same spot where the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai cosplayers were gathered before our photoshoot began.  I had never seen One Punch Man and I hadn’t read the comics either, but it was a nice gathering and there were some interesting cosplayers.  One cosplayer that caught my attention was a Tatsumaki cosplayer.  Granted, there were plenty of Tatsumaki cosplayers there (with one other Tatsumaki cosplayer I’ll get to later on in this blog), but what made this one Tatsumaki cosplayer stand out was this…

They make sure you ain't booty!

I’m just kidding!  There were no Booty Os in sight (that will be saved for the Day 3 blog), but her booty definitely caught my attention.  Looking at the back, you could clearly see buttcheeks and it was looking real good.  Unlike the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot, the photoshoot got started at that spot and unfortunately, the tree branches made taking pictures difficult, so they had to move the photoshoot somewhere else.  Also unlike the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot, the photoshoot didn’t take place at the side of the hotel: it took place at the lower tunnel area.  Since there wasn’t going to be a good shot of the photoshoot at that spot, I decided to stay at the edge area and take pictures from there.

While I was taking pictures, foxrevolution showed up.  He did realize a little bit later that he had forgotten about the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot, but I was okay with it.  Since there wasn’t a good spot to take pictures of the One Punch Man photoshoot, he decided not to take pictures of it.

Do you guys remember the Tatsumaki cosplayer I was talking about earlier?  You know, the one with the booty?  It turned out that I had taken a good shot of that booty while I was taking photos of the One Punch Man photoshoot unintentionally and here’s one of those pictures…

While we’re on the subject of booty, something very interesting happened while the One Punch Man photoshoot was going on.  There was one random guy who came up to me and I thought that he was going to ask me if he wanted to take a picture of me.  Instead, he wanted me to turn around.  I had no idea what that was for, but I did it anyway.  What he proceeded to do was tell his friend (and show him) an example of what an ass is supposed to look like; he did proceed to compliment me on having a great ass though.  foxrevolution and I were caught offguard by it and we both thought that it was hilarious.  It would’ve been better if a female had complimented me on my ass, but it was a guy who did it and I took the compliment.  Even though it was my second year being at Anime Central and Anime Central’s the only anime convention I’ve been to, I’ve got to say this: only at anime conventions will you see things like this happen!

Once the One Punch Man photoshoot concluded, foxrevolution and I went inside the Hyatt hotel to find some other cosplayers to take pictures of and, in my case, with.  While we were there, there were some people who wanted pics with me and of course I obliged.  There was one person who wanted to take cosplay pics with me: one of the Tatsumaki cosplayers.  No, it wasn’t the one with the booty, but it was one that I’m not sure what gender it is: I couldn’t tell if the person was a male or female, so I’ll just stick with Tatsumaki.

The Tatsumaki character had a Power Blaster with them and I took a pic with that character, I think from their phone.  In the process, foxrevolution decided to take pictures of the both of us with his camera and here’s one of those results…

After that was done, foxrevolution had to do something he somehow didn’t have time to do earlier this day: get a couple standalone pics of me.  I did one pose I hadn’t done before (and in a while) and here’s one of those results…

After chilling for a bit, we went back outside and went to some gathering that we had no idea was happening.  I saw my GokaiRed friend around and I had asked foxrevolution if he wanted to take a pic of my GokaiRed friend and he said of course.  So, I went to grab my GokaiRed friend, I told him that foxrevolution wanted a pic with him, said what’s up to Henshin Action Photography again, and had the GokaiRed cosplayer follow me to where foxrevolution was.

When we got there, there was one problem: foxrevolution was nowhere to be found!  In that moment, I had a Batman moment, but I was fortunate enough to stay still for a bit since he did return.  I forgot why he had left, but he was ready to take a few pics of my GokaiRed friend and he took the shots.  When that was over, I had asked my GokaiRed friend what was going on in that area and he said that there was a Final Fantasy photoshoot happening.  Having been to a Final Fantasy photoshoot the day prior, I had no idea that another one was happening that day, especially since that photoshoot wasn’t even a part of the ACen photoshoot schedule.

The GokaiRed friend had told me that the reason why there was no mention of it was because it was an unofficial photoshoot and the photoshoot was for a specific Final Fantasy game: Final Fantasy IX.  I haven’t played FFIX in 16 years and counting (plus I obviously lost my old game save, adding the fact that I never completed the game thanks to PlayStation technology), but I wasn’t interested in sticking around and taking pictures of the gathering, so foxrevolution and I moved on to the loading docks.

One thing that caught our attention at the loading docks was a modified paint job of a red Hyundai.  I’m not familiar with cars and models, so I couldn’t tell you what model it was and what year it was.  I guess it wouldn’t have mattered because the car had some anime paint job done to it and it looked incredible.  Also, there was Hip Hop Trooper right by it, pumping out some music through his boombox.  foxrevolution and I took pics of the car from different angles of course.

After spending a little bit of time there, we decided to head to the restaurant area which apparently was a smoking area.  I hate the smell of smoke, but it was going to have to be something I’d have to tolerate while I was at that spot since it was a smoking area.  There were a couple of cosplayers who caught my attention there: Nav’i cosplayers!  Obviously, they weren’t incredibly tall, but they did get my attention, so I had to take a pic of them.

After taking a few pics, there was one cosplayer who came out the restaurant door who got my attention: a Starfire cosplayer.  I’ve seen Starfire cosplayers before, but this one had the one thing other Starfire cosplayers I’ve seen before didn’t have: a voluptuous body.  That body was so on point, I had to take a picture of her.

If you think just by looking at her front that she’s got a good looking back side, then you’re absolutely right.  She was by far the best looking Starfire cosplayer I’ve ever seen and as a bonus, I got to see it in person!  foxrevolution and I got to hang out at that spot for a little bit (including the one time where he held the door open for like two minutes straight as there were that many people coming out) until he decided to go back inside to take some pictures at some photoshoot that I can’t remember.

foxrevolution had no idea where the photoshoot was taking place and I do believe the photoshoot was taking place at Cosplay Gathering 9, which was inside the building at a wall, which was underneath the stairs where we came from.  We couldn’t enter the Exhibit Hall from where we came from because that area was Exit Only, so we went up the stairs.  When we looked at the spot where the gathering was supposed to take place, there was like nobody there: there were no cosplayers, there weren’t a crowd of people taking pictures, nothing.  Another reason why I can’t remember what photoshoot foxrevolution wanted to go to was because at that point, he decided not to try to find the photoshoot.  So, back to the Hyatt hotel we went!

We had seen a Freakazoid cosplayer and took some pics of him (by that I mean I took one pic while foxrevolution took multiple pics).  A little bit after that, we sat down and rested, taking a pic of some Daft Punk cosplayers in the process.  Once we were well rested, we came across an anime cosplayer and foxrevolution wanted pics of the guy, but in the process, the guy wanted pics with me.  We did a couple of poses and foxrevolution was able to capture both moments and here are two of those pics…

After that was done, there were a couple CWBs that caught our attention with a unique cosplay of their own: the Eustace and Muriel Bagge cosplayers from Courage the Cowardly Dog.  At the time, I didn’t notice the Courage doll on the Muriel cosplayer, so I thought they were cosplaying as the farming couple from the American Gothic painting.  Either way, brings back nostalgia!

It was around 5:35PM at that point and I asked foxrevolution what he was planning on doing from that moment on.  He said that he was going to go back to the loading docks to take pictures at the Marvel photoshoot, which was something I thought about going to (even switching costumes from Blue Ranger to Spider-Man), but I ended up not going because I wanted to watch the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Toronto Raptors, which started at 7:30PM.  Oh, and the Marvel photoshoot started at 6PM.  I decided to part ways from foxrevolution and we didn’t see each other again for the rest of the day.

I went to one of the tables at the Hyatt hotel and checked my Facebook newsfeed.  After that was done, I decided to call it quits and walked back to my car.  It didn’t matter which way I took, there was one thing I couldn’t avoid: the long walk.  I chose to take the walkway up and go back to my car that way.  Now, if you’re wondering why I didn’t just stay for the Marvel photoshoot since I had enough time, here’s why I didn’t go: the Marvel photoshoot was scheduled to end at around 7PM and I live 40 minutes away from the convention center without traffic.  Since I take the Kennedy Expressway to and from the convention center (which was ranked the most bottlenecked highway of 2015 mind you), I couldn’t take any chances.  So, I had to leave as early as possible, which was coincidentally 6PM.

The long walk wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be; the leg pain was a different story.  Granted, it wasn’t as bad as it used to be, but being a Power Ranger cosplayer takes some toll on my legs, especially since the heel is like one inch high.  I’m planning on getting some gel insoles to see how they fare since the non-gel insoles aren’t working.

I made it back home at around 7PM and since I hadn’t eaten anything all day (considering the price of food at the convention center, you wouldn’t want to pay for food there either), I fixed myself something to eat just in time for the opening tip of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals.  I waited until halftime to upload the pics onto my Flickr page and let everybody on Facebook know that I uploaded the pics.  It was surprising to see how better the Raptors were at home than they were on the road (Blowout City when they played in Cleveland) and another blowout was starting to get very annoying.

Before I went to bed, I had realized that I had enough time on my hands, so I used that time to watch the Judge Mathis episode I missed out on.  When that was done, I went directly to bed, getting ready for the last day of the convention.

As you can see, there was a lot of stuff going on on this day.  If you’re wondering what happened to the Marvel photoshoot photos from foxrevolution, it turned out that he not only was late to the photoshoot, but he also saw the area being overcrowded, so he skipped it.  Actually, I don’t know if I got the late part right, but the gathering was too much for him to fight through just to get pics, so he eventually ditched the photoshoot.

I know there were a lot of pics posted on here, but there’s one last pic I want to show you guys: one of the last pics of the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot.  If you click on that picture, it will take you to my Flickr page that hosts the Day 2 photo gallery.  I can guarantee you that Day 3’s blog will be shorter than this blog since Day 3 was the shortest day of the con.  Until that blog comes, enjoy the pics and I’m out!

This day was a little bit of a strange day for me.  It was a strange day for a number of reasons, one in which I made a mistake I normally wouldn’t make, but I’ll get to that in a little bit.  Another thing that was strange was that this con’s the only con I know where the event (or rather, the Exhibit Hall) closes at 4PM instead of 5PM like all other cons.  The third and final reason why it was strange was because of something I’ll get to when I talk about showing up for the event.

Just like the other two days, I woke up at 7AM as usual and after doing my regular morning routine, I checked on Google Maps to see how long it would take me to get to the Donald Stephens Convention Center and to my surprise, it said from 40-50 minutes; that means that I’d get to the event a lot sooner than I’d think!  Then, after getting on my Spider-Man cosplay, I decided to do something a little bit different: taking a little bit of advice from RealTDragon’s unboxing video of his gender-bent Spider-Gwen suit, I put on my underhood that I normally use for my Power Rangers cosplay for my Spider-Man cosplay.

One of the problems that I have with my Spider-Man cosplay is that almost every time I put on the mask, it bends the top part of my ears and I’d have to waste a little bit of time putting them back up.  Not wanting to deal with that again for this day, I figured using my underhood would solve that problem.  Not only did the underhood solve that problem, it also made taking my mask off a lot easier too.  Why Zentai-Zentai.com (and RPC Studios for that matter) make detached masks have zippers, I have no idea.

One thing I didn’t mention about the day prior was that thanks to me cosplaying as a Power Ranger, I had no need for my glasses container, so I had left that at home.  Since I was cosplaying as Spider-Man again, it had to go right back in my bag.  Looking inside my bag, I had the container, my wallet and my camera.  My car keys were going to be in the bag once I left my car, but I felt like something was missing; I wasn’t used to my bag having just stuff like that.  When it was 8:30AM, I went and left to go to the con for one last time.

The trip took probably 40 minutes.  I was listening to my Jet Set Radio playlist on my way there and I was surprised at how quickly I was able to get from point A to point B; this thing was too good to be true!  When I was at the final stoplight before going into the parking lot, I had seen the usual people getting to the building and walking towards other places.  A little after going past the light, something clicked in my head and it’s the mistake I normally wouldn’t make and it was the first time I had made it: I FORGOT MY PASS!!  WHAT AN IDIOT I HAD BECOME!!

I didn’t notice the passes on the congoers, but for some apparent reason, it popped up in my head that I had forgotten my pass.  I was feeling my chest and I felt nothing but the spider foam on my suit and I even looked inside my bag and no pass was there.  I had come all the way there just to forget my pass and not be allowed entry into the Exhibit Hall.  Granted, the photoshoots I wanted to attend to were at the loading docks, which didn’t require a pass, but I didn’t want to waste the remaining time being at the main hall and hanging out outside, so making a U-turn (not illegally though, just going in and out a hotel past the Double Tree) and going back home I had to do.  Welp!  There goes gas!

It took me around 40 minutes to get back home, grab my pass, put it around my neck and drive back to the DSCC.  It’s quite baffling on my end that I put the pass in my bag for Day 1 just in case something like this happened, but for Day 3, I didn’t do such a thing at all.  What the hell was I thinking!  Granted, I could’ve just gone to Will Call and gotten a replacement badge, which would’ve cost me $30 (as evidenced by this page); filling up a car with gas would net me $15 or $20 depending on a gas station’s price.  I wasn’t even thinking about those two options, but I had picked the better one in my opinion.

I did fear that by doing what I had done, I wouldn’t spend much time at the convention center before going to the first photoshoot I wanted to attend: the Metal Gear Solid one.  When I was coming back, I had realized that I wouldn’t miss that much time since it’d still be in the 10 o’clock hour and the MGS photoshoot wasn’t until noon.  When I got back to the convention center (which took about 50 minutes or so and I had to deal with turning off shuffle on my Shuttle app, which I accidentally turned on on my way back home to grab my pass, not to mention having to pay attention to the road at the same time), it was around 10:35AM, so I had a good hour-and-a-half before going to the loading docks for the Metal Gear Solid photoshoot.

I walked the normal route I would go to for the DSCC and I was surprised to see how many people were packing up their stuff to go home.  Since many people did come to the event from different parts of the state and from other states, they had to stay in a hotel and since checkout’s at noon usually, that meant the turnout at ACen for this day would’ve been low, which is something that never happens at other cons.  With that look, it looked like I didn’t miss much.

When I was near the panel entry, I went there instead since it was a shortcut to the main hall.  After going through that and going down the stairs (the only way down is by escalator), I went to the main hall.  As soon as I got to the main hall, something I never would’ve expected happened: foxrevolution and his friends were right there.  Wait, I got that wrong: foxrevolution and his other friend were there; the one from the day before and the day before that didn’t join us until a little bit afterwards.

The new friend had on a pair of cat ear headphones that I wasn’t paying any attention to about where they came from.  Looking online, the only company that makes them is Axent, which had the headphones on their Indiegogo page, but you can get them on Brookstone.  Those could be the headphones, but I don’t know; foxrevolution will probably mention it in the comments.  Anyway, the headphones were customized a bit and I remember one cuff having blue and the other cuff having red (Red vs. Blue).  His friend also noticed that my glasses were similar to his, but we never mentioned where we got our glasses from (I got mine from America’s Best by the way).

We were just chilling and everything when I saw a petite Spider-Gwen cosplayer walk by.  I had missed my opportunity to get a pic with a Spider-Gwen cosplayer at C2E2 and I didn’t get that chance at Day 1 of ACen, so now was the time to make things right.  I asked for a pic and she obliged.  She wanted to do a floor pose for reasons I can’t remember and I was alright with that since I had no idea what pose I wanted to do anyway.  Here’s one of those pics (the other one being a little bit blurry)…

There was one thing I had forgotten to mention: the main hall was looking a little bit emptier than before, but it wasn’t enough to have foxrevolution, his friends and I be by ourselves at that spot.  There were some other people around, but moving around was so effortless.  A little bit later, there was this female Pikachu cosplayer who was so into character (by that I mean the only words coming out of her mouth was Pika).  I thought it was cute, so I took a pic.  Sometime after that, I spotted a Spider-Freddy cosplayer and I had to get a pic with him.  You’ll see what I mean with the following picture…

A little bit after that, we had spotted a Faith cosplayer from Mirror’s Edge (not Catalyst).  Little did I know (and by that I mean, I found out after looking through my pics when the con was over), it was the same Faith cosplayer from Day 1 of the event.  After foxrevolution took some pics of her, I asked for a pic with her.  Before that, his friend took some pics with my camera, but with this photo, I had foxrevolution take the pic.  He took a few shots before figuring out how to work the zoom feature on my camera and that makes me happy inside.

As a little bit of a shocker, when I first got my camera, I had no idea how to work the zoom feature on it and it took a friend of mine whose name’s similar to mine to show me how to work it, despite the fact that he’s never used a camera like that before.  Ever since then, anytime I would tell people how to use the zoom, they’d disappoint me by ignoring it.  Because of that, I no longer tell people how to use the zoom feature if I have them borrowing my camera.  Since I was in a hurry to get my picture taken, I didn’t tell foxrevolution how to work the zoom feature for my camera.  Thankfully, since he’s worked with cameras before and now, he figured it out and took the best shot he could; it’s too bad he can’t be my personal cameraperson at Wizard World Chicago nor C2E2!

After talking for a bit more, I had noticed a Bulma cosplayer from the Freeza saga and I was so quick to getting a picture of her, I didn’t even bother to use common courtesy and told the guys that I’d be right back; I just ran to her and asked for a picture.  After I had taken the pic, I was going to go back to where foxrevolution and his friends were, but they had followed me (not by running or jogging mind you) to where I was at.  foxrevolution mentioned afterwards that he’s seen my picture patterns, so he knew where I was going when I bolted.  Since there was nothing else better to do before it was time for the Metal Gear Solid photoshoot, it was time for us to get to the spot where the MGS photoshoot was taking place; oh, I forgot to mention that foxrevolution was going there as well, so that’s the only photoshoot throughout the entire con we were at together.

When we got to the restaurant area, there was a female cosplayer (who happens to be a CWB, which stands for Cosplaying While Black) and foxrevolution wanted a pic of her.  After that pic was taken, one of the staff members had asked his cat headphone wearing friend about his headphones.  Prior to that, that friend had mentioned that people had asked about his headphones all the time and he was getting annoyed by it; he was free from it until that point.  From my perspective, that was the only time he was asked about his headphones.

When we got to the loading dock spot where the MGS photoshoot was going to take place, we had noticed some Assassin’s Creed cosplayers having their own photoshoot right at the east parking lot.  Since they were busy, we couldn’t get a pic of them and that eventually became we never got a pic of them.  I think they had left to another spot for some more photoshoots, but all I know is that I never saw them again.  I did spend a little too much time looking at my reflection through the glass and couldn’t believe how much I rocked the Amazing Spider-Man 2 suit, although it’ll have to be replaced later.

While we were waiting for noon to hit, one lady had approached me and had asked me if I was a registered voter in the state of Illinois.  Of course I was and she wanted me to sign a form that I think had something to do with being able to vote for candidates other than Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump (this was before Donald Trump had clinched the Republican delegate numbers to represent them and Hilary the same with the Democrats) and I had signed the thing.  I immediately warned her that my friends were not from the state (by saying I don’t think those guys are from this state), but she decided to ask them anyway.  Of course, the answer was no since they were from Michigan, so she went about her business.

Sometime later, the friend from Days 1 & 2 had wanted something to eat from the food truck and he asked foxrevolution for some money for it.  foxrevolution gave that friend some money and I hadn’t seen him again until after the MGS photoshoot had concluded.  The other friend decided to chill in the shade on the grass, so when it was time for the photoshoot, I didn’t see him again until the photoshoot concluded.

foxrevolution and I got lucky with the photoshoot not because we were there early, but because we were some of the people in front line of photographers, so we had excellent viewing angles of the shoot and we didn’t lose our spot either.  foxrevolution took his pics from the ground while I took some standing shots and some ground shots as well behind him.  After going through various scenarios, there was a special thing that the cosplayers were going to do: they were going to sing the Snake Eater theme from Metal Gear Solid 3.

Recording them singing the theme was going to be a little bit of a problem for me since my camera’s video capture quality’s pretty lame, so that meant I had to take out my smartphone.  Getting to camera mode was easy (a couple of twists and I’m right on the app), but my suit’s glove or whatever you want to call it made pressing stuff on the camera difficult; I had a much easier time wearing my Power Rangers glove.  Fortunately, one press of the record button made the recording possible.  Unfortunately for me, making the transition caused me to miss the group singing the first line of the song, but I was able to capture the rest.  Here they are in their glory!

If you’ve seen the video, you saw that I ended the video when the guy asked if anybody were at the Masquerade.  He was going to sing Let It Go, but he did it in a Metal Gear Solid remix way, followed up by Do You Want To Build a Snowman in the form of Do You Want to Build an Army.  If I had known he was going to do that, I would’ve kept recording since I had enough space in my phone to do so.  It looked like foxrevolution recorded those two events, so I think I’m good.  When 50 minutes had passed, the MGS photoshoot had concluded.

foxrevolution and I went back to his friends and chilled for a bit.  Since the next photoshoot was happening at the same spot as the MGS photoshoot at 1PM (WWE photoshoot), I wasn’t going to go anywhere anyway.  Unfortunately, some bad news came for both me and foxrevolution: he had to go.  Because of the time shift difference and not wanting to be late going back home, he and his friends had to leave.  We said our good-byes and he and his friends walked out; I’ll see them again at ACen 2017!

If you haven’t read the Day 1 testimony blog, I mentioned that it was weird looking back and seeing that foxrevolution and I acted like we had been friends in person for a long time when we had only met a few times total.  foxrevolution was the first (and so far only) online friend I had made here on this site that I got to meet in person and the connection was like we were friends before Club IGN.  After going through that experience, it would be nice to meet some other MyIGN members in person, if I had the money and the patience to go where they are.

The WWE photoshoot was spectacular.  If you had been a WWE fan back when they were the WWF and are no longer a wrestling fan, this photoshoot would bring back memories.  If you were a WWF fan and are a WWE fan like I am, you’d feel right at home.  If you were an NXT fan, there wasn’t much there unless you was a fan of Asuka, Shinsuke Nakamura and/or Finn Balor.  There were a lot of cosplayers there, but even more CWBs than ever.  None of them had cosplayed as John Cena, but one of them did cosplay as Roman Reigns.  Another cosplayed as Seth Rollins, but none cosplayed Dean Ambrose, but there were a couple Dean Ambrose cosplayers there to form a Shield reunion.

There was a Kevin Owens cosplayer and I can’t remember if he brought the NXT title or someone else did, but the one John Cena cosplayer who looked to have the exact same body as John Cena did have the US title, so those guys were able to relive Kevin Owen’s Raw debut.  There was one CWB cosplaying as Shawn Michaels and another one cosplaying as Bret Hart, so they were able to relive the Montreal Screwjob.  Since there was nobody cosplaying as a WWE official, the guy cosplaying as Vince McMahon did the ring-the-bell reenactment.  The crowd chants were crazy, the atmosphere was amazing, it’s so hard to describe how great it was to be a part of that photoshoot; the closest thing I can say how the event felt like is by watching this video TimothyDeLaGhetto posted on his personal channel where he witnessed one of his friends competing in a wrestling match.  After that photoshoot concluded, it was time for me to waste the whole two hours I had left at the con.

I went back into the main hall and finally got in the Exhibit Hall.  When I got to Artist Alley, I had seen a Super Saiyan 2 Gohan and a Super Saiyan Goku cosplayer and I decided to get a pic of them.  To be sure I didn’t go through Day 1 again, I had asked the Gohan cosplayer if he had seen DBZ Abridged.  He said he did, so I had a question to ask him after I took the pic.

If you have read my previous two blogs, then you’d know what question I was going to ask.  If you haven’t read my previous two blogs, here’s the question that I asked: have you learned to dodge yet?  He said no, referencing his injured left arm (thanks to Cell) and his missing tooth (which wasn’t canon, but okay).  I tried to remember what running gag was being done for Goku other than him being a bigger idiot than his canon self, but the only thing I could think of was the muffin button.  I told the Goku cosplayer that there wasn’t a muffin button at the con and he responded by saying that he wished there were muffins around and that he could eat anything right about now; he wasn’t saying that in character either.

There was one running gag that I realized I missed out on and for a good reason: Kaio What!  With that running gag, every time Goku uses the Kaio-Ken and says it, his opponent would respond with Kaio What!  I had forgotten about that running gag because prior to Dragon Ball Super (which I haven’t watched yet as I’m waiting for the English dub since I like their voice acting better than the Japanese one), Goku had completely stopped using the Kaio-Ken after he had transformed into a Super Saiyan.  Even though I had seen The World’s Strongest Abridged a week prior (where the running gag made its return), it completely escaped my brain.  Anyway, more walking around I went!

While walking around the con some more, I had noticed another Spider-Man cosplayer, so you know I had to get a pic with that person.  When I had asked for a pic, I had found out that the Spider-Man cosplayer’s actually a crossplayer.  With that in mind, I just figured I’m cosplaying with my supposed-to-be daughter May Parker, even though she’s not wearing a Spider-Girl cosplay.  Thanks a lot One More Day for that!

A little bit later, I had seen a Green Ranger cosplayer and unlike Day 1, I decided to get a pic with him.  There were a few pics of us taken with my camera and little did I know, there was a kid or short person wearing a Deadpool mask who decided to photobomb us by having his gun pointed at me.  I didn’t notice until I looked back at the pics and was like that little devil!  Photobombs: there’s no escaping them!

I had decided to keep my mask on for a bit and I ran into a familiar problem: my lenses were fogging up.  I thought that with C2E2, my lenses were fogging because of the outside weather, but it had fogged up at times while I was in the showfloor; here it was once again gracing me with its presence!  Having to bite the bullet, I had to go to the bathroom, grab a piece of paper towel, put some liquid soap on it and rub that soap on the inside lenses.  I waited for like a minute before I cleaned the soap off with another paper towel and went on my way.  It’s funny that there are some things I’ve learned as a Power Rangers cosplayer that I had to apply to my Spider-Man cosplay and this was one of them.  For the rest of my time at the con, I’ve never had fogging issues again.

After going through the Exhibit Hall, I decided to go to the Hyatt hotel and check out the arcade area.  Of course, I took some pics with some cosplayers along the way and before I had went in there, I decided to go around the con for some time while wearing my mask.  In case you guys don’t know, I’m near-sighted, so that would be a bad thing as far as seeing things from a distance goes.  Well, that’s not quite true: I can’t read things from a distance, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t see things from a distance.  I was able to cross the street and move out of people’s way just fine and since I knew my way around the area, I wasn’t going to be lost.

When I got to the gaming area, it was packed, but not as packed as it was the day prior.  I saw a Margot Robbie Harley Quinn cosplayer and decided that since I had never taken a picture with one, I should do it that time.  I asked for a pic with her and she obliged.  Since she had a bat in her hands, I decided to have her hit me on the head with it and looking back at the pic, it looks like my spider sense tingled at the right time to do the one thing Gohan can’t do: DOOOOOOODGE!!

After spending a little bit of time at the hotel, I decided to go outside and check some of those areas out.  After crossing the street and going past the loading docks, I decided to stop by the area near a restaurant and scope the place out.  After a few short steps, I had come across a D.Va cosplayer.  At the time, I had no idea who D.Va was, but I was aware of Overwatch.  There were no Tracer and Widowmaker cosplayers there, but I thought the D.Va costume was awesome looking.  I had to get a pic with her and as a bonus, she’s a CWB too!

There were a few pics taken from my camera and on the last two or so, she thought that she had blinked, so the picture could’ve been messed up.  After reviewing the last pic, I had concluded that she didn’t blink on that pic, so she was good.  As I later found out, as a bonus, she didn’t blink on any of the pics taken.  It took me all the way to June 1st to find out who she was (the cosplayer, not the character she was cosplaying as), so I was in a way able to tell her that she didn’t blink on any of my pics on Facebook.  Speaking of Facebook, the cosplayer’s name is Victory Cosplay and here’s her page if you want to follow her there.

I got back in the building through the main hall and after spending a lot of time wearing my mask, I took my mask off and put my glasses back on.  I did take a few more pics with some cosplayers and of some cosplayers and I had intended on staying until closing time.  Since there were no more interesting cosplayers coming out of the Exhibit Hall before closing time, when 3:55PM hit, I decided to bounce and say good-bye to Anime Central.  It was a little bit sad that I had to walk away from the con and it sucks that it had to end, but overall, I had a great time there and I’ll be back next year for sure!  And I’ll be back at the Donald Stephens Convention Center in August for Wizard World Chicago!

I can see why my RyuuRanger friend thought that Anime Central was better than C2E2, but I’m still not convinced of that.  C2E2’s still the best con I’ve ever been to, but Anime Central is neck deep in there as the second best con I’ve attended.  I still have no plans to attend Anime Midwest this year, but I will be attending Wizard World Chicago again later on this year.  Unlike 4 years ago, it will not take place during the Olympics, so there will be no Olympic event I’ll have to miss.

Overall, I had a fantastic time at Anime Central this year and unlike last year, it didn’t feel like I didn’t belong there just because I don’t watch anime.  There were plenty of anime cosplayers and Spider-Man received little love there compared to C2E2 (which is one of the reasons why I love C2E2 more than any other con I’ve attended) and they were all unique in their own way.  Like I said before, I’ll go back next year, which will be a little bit weird since it’ll be the month after C2E2 instead of two months like this year.  Until that time comes, click on the picture at the bottom of this page to see more pics from this day’s event and I’m out!

What’s up you guys?  I know, I know: it’s been such a long time since I last blogged.  And I think I know what you’re thinking: what happened to you?  To, in a way, punish you for asking that question, I’ll answer it a lot later than you’d anticipate because my answer will be a part of this blog.

Since I haven’t blogged since my Anime Central 2016 Day 3 blog, I just couldn’t let 2016 end on that note.  Instead, I decided to blog about the worst moments of 2016.  If you look at last year’s blogs pertaining to 2015, you’ll see that I split them down into three categories (6 in total).  Fortunately for you, I will not be doing that kind of thing for this year’s blog; instead, I will do 16 moments that were bad for this year.  There were probably some more bad moments of 2016, but the following were the 16 that I could think of (with some I had to look up just to jog my memory).

Here’s how this blog will go down: the first 5 subjects will be gaming related, the next 6 will be world related and the last five will be me related.  Once we get there, I’ll tell you why I haven’t blogged since last July.  Without further ado, onto the list!

As hard as it may be to believe, I had never heard of No Man’s Sky until its controversy came about.  Maybe I haven’t been paying much attention to gaming news or I’m just not interested in non-gameplay trailers and I don’t buy into the hype of any game nowadays, but No Man’s Sky was off my radar until it became news in a negative way.  So, what’s the controversy behind No Man’s Sky?  Allow me to elaborate!

First off, I was surprised that following the disappointment of Watch_Dogs, Titanfall and Destiny, there wasn’t any game people were hyped for in 2015, with the closest being Mortal Kombat X thanks in large part to IGN not shutting up about it prior to release.  I guess the hype train took a year off and for this year, No Man’s Sky was the must-have game to get.  Multiple planets to explore, meeting up with new people, seeing the center of the universe, the possibilities were endless.  Once the game came out though, many of the things there were allegedly promised weren’t in the game.

The graphics were sub-par, even for PCs, the exploration wasn’t as good as claimed, the travelling lead to a disguised loading screen, and the end was a huge slap in the face.  This level of controversy even had Angry Joe looking back at everything Sean Murray said in interviews and threw the Phoenix Wright “Objection” picture over everything that was contradictory.  It’s also a classic case of never do public relations when you’re not a PR person.

Most recently, Hello Games, the developers of No Man’s Sky, were under investigation under the claims of false advertising on the Steam page of the game by an advertising firm called Advertisers Standing Authority, or ASA for short.  To gamers’ disappointments however, ASA cleared Hello Games of all wrongdoings with No Man’s Sky.  Even though ASA saw nothing wrong with the description of No Man’s Sky on the Steam page, damage has already been done: No Man’s Sky has received mostly negative reviews on their Steam page (30% positive as of December 3, 2016) and Steam has changed their policy on how game publishers should showcase their games on Steam.

It’s actually pretty shocking to see an independent developer receive the biggest negative attention of the year instead of a AAA company like Capcom.  It’s not like Capcom would do anything wrong with a franchise like Street Fighter, right?  What’s the worst Capcom could do?  Yeah, about that…

I’ve mentioned before how I hate the Release Now, Patch Later mindset that’s plagued this generation of gaming.  There’s also been accusations that games are being released incomplete and you’d have to pay for DLC to get the complete experience.  Ubisoft began to hear those cries and have announced that they won’t force gamers to buy DLC to get a full experience.  In Capcom’s case with Street Fighter V, it’s truly mind-boggling how they handled Street Fighter V’s release.

Capcom did announce before the release of Street Fighter V that there was going to be a free DLC story mode that would be released on June of this year (which ended up being July 1) and it was to expand the story mode that was already in the game.  Come to the disappointment of Street Fighter fans, prior to the free DLC, Story Mode was very short (4 fights for each character) and the mode was too easy.  Not only that, but the story felt rushed, like it was purposefully held back for the sake of the Story Mode DLC.  It’s fine that the DLC was free, but did the original Story Mode have to feel lackluster?  Gamers had to go through 4 months of mediocre Story Mode before they could get the full experience!

If you wanted to do the typical Arcade Mode where the story doesn’t matter, but you go through fighter after fighter until you meet the final boss and beat him/her and beat the game, you’ll be pissed to see that Arcade Mode’s not in the game.  How is it that the fighting game series that pioneered fighting games took away the one thing that made it popular?  That’s like Windows getting rid of the start button (oh wait)!  It was like Capcom gave the middle finger to everybody who aren’t online gamers and to this day, there’s still no Arcade Mode or whatever in the game.

Street Fighter V basically left a lot to be desired.  It had some fans go back to Street Fighter IV as they felt that that game was the better game and some fans even compared it to Mortal Kombat X in terms of how MKX got it right while Street Fighter V got it wrong.  That type of move really shouldn’t be surprising as Capcom has been making bad moves for a while.   And speaking of making moves…

I don’t gamble, so gambling stories usually don’t come to my radar unless it becomes a trending topic.  Since I’m subscribed to The Philip DeFranco Show, it was just a matter of time before CS:GO Lotto would be encountered by me.  Since the story involved a couple of YouTubers, it added to the controversy.

CS:GO Lotto was a gambling site where people would bet weapons skins on CS:GO matches and it was a fun way to break the Valve Terms of Service.  The website itself wasn’t the problem though: the problem was the owners of CSGo Lotto, who were Trevor “TMartn” Martin and Tom “Syndicate” Cassell.  They had both done videos promoting CS:GO Lotto and they both acted like it was a website they had no affiliation with and those videos got them in trouble not only with Valve, but also with their fans.  TMartn had done a response video claiming that he had done nothing wrong, but all it did was blow up in his face.  I believe he deleted the video, but knowing the internet, it’s not gone forever.

This next story is something PlayStation Plus gamers are not happy about…

I’ve had my PS3 for over 8 years now.  I still use it pretty much on a daily basis, but I only use it for watching TV Shows I’ve edited with VideoRedo and I use it to watch YouTube videos using the smartphone-to-PS3 connection.  Oh, I also occasionally watch Netflix shows as well!  I can tell you that despite getting a new wireless router and a much better connection from Day 1, not a time goes by where I hope that I don’t receive buffering issues.  If I watch YouTube videos on my phone or any of my PCs, I don’t worry about buffering issues because they rarely happen.  On my PS3, I have to worry about buffering every time because if it buffers once, it could take forever to resume playback, forcing me to close the program and wishing I had a device like Chromecast instead (which I will get next year).

I don’t own a PS4 and I probably won’t ever get a PS4 thanks to getting a kick-ass PC, but I’ve heard that the issue remains the same there.  If I have that kind of problem with my PS3, then can somebody tell me why $60 is the new justified price of PS Plus?  I’ve seen that the rising market was the reason for it, but the service remains the same.  If many gamers are saying that Xbox Live is better than PS Plus, then having PS Plus be $60 is like having the AMD Nano being the same price as the R9 Fury X, with the PS Plus being the Nano and Xbox Live being the Fury X.

Now that I think about it, I don’t even know why I’m complaining about PS Plus being $60 since I’ve never used it (except that one time when I had a free month of it thanks to the PSN Outage of 2011) and will probably never use it.  The last bit of gaming news does involve something I’ve used and I had used one of their products this year…

I guess it was inevitable, but it was bound to happen: the developers of Sleeping Dogs, United Front Games, had shut down on October 17 of this year.  I did play Sleeping Dogs last year, but it was borrowed.  It was also last year when I took advantage of a Newegg deal by buying the definitive edition for $7.50.  I did activate it, but I didn’t play it until the summer of this year.  The graphics have been changed for better and worse, but overall, the game ran better than the original and the anti-aliasing worked better as well.  It was just sad to hear that a sequel to Sleeping Dogs is never going to happen unless some other developer decides to take that reign.

I know, I know: there was already a sequel, but in MMO form called Triad Wars.  It was in beta and it was a direction United Front Games shouldn’t have gone in and I think it was because of that decision that caused United Front Games’ downfall.  Again, a proper sequel would’ve been great, but alas, United Front Games is no more.  Now onto the World Edition!

When it comes to politics, this year has been a terrible year of that.  You had Donald Trump representing the Republican Party while you had Hillary Clinton representing the Democratic Party.  Neither candidate was truly qualified to be our next president for the next four years and regardless of who had won, that person would’ve been on this list.

We all probably know why Donald Trump wasn’t fit to being our president, so I’ll do the opposite of what the media had been doing about him: I’ll be quiet.  The media had been saying so many bad things about Donald Trump, but ignored everything Hillary Clinton had done wrong or give their own perspective as to why Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have been our president.  We’ve had the e-mail scandal where her e-mails were left unencrypted for three straight months, putting our lives in jeopardy.  She’s also declared war on Russia via No-Fly Zones in Syria, which we know is something we shouldn’t do with Vladimir Putin. Oh, and let’s not forget the Democratic National Committee’s WikiLeaks scandal where they tried everything in their power to discredit Bernie Sanders as the representative to their party.  Those were just a few examples, so I’ll move on.

When I said that this year was terrible in terms of politics, it was mainly because of the political parties people associated themselves with.  Anybody on the Republican side were seen as racists, sexists, misogynistic and oblivious to any of their wrongdoing while the Democratic side ignored what happened to Bernie Sanders and considered everybody who were not pro-Hillary as enemies, including those who wanted nothing to do with either party.  If you vote third party, you’re voting for Trump is what they were saying.  They didn’t see any possibility of Donald Trump becoming president and when it did happen, protests occurred.

In my city, there were protests that lasted either the rest of the week or for an entire week.  I didn’t vote for either candidate (my vote went to Jill Stein) and I was left thinking that the protesters were being crybabies.  I’ve never seen that happen when George W. Bush became president on two straight elections, so why was this different?  It probably had something to do with the Electoral College not going their way.

Does the Electoral College need to be changed?  Yes, it does.  Does it need to be abolished?  I think not, for the simple fact of going by popular votes will take more than a day to tally.  I think the popular votes are still being counted to this day.  Using the Electoral College hastens how long we have to wait, although there should be a quicker process of how long we wait until we find out who the next president’s going to be.  I’ve talked too long about this subject and since I said my city earlier, let’s talk about that…

For years, Chicago’s been on the news because of the number of murders in the city.  This year, winter weather had no effect on the slowdown of murders as January hit a major high in murders in Chicago.  In just January alone, 51 people had been murdered and it was going to get worse.  As of December 3, 2016, there have been a total of nearly 700 murders in the city and we can expect that number to rise by the end of the year.

What is going on here?  Why has there been an increase in murders compared to years past?  One of the reasons that I’ve been told was because of how Cook County is last in gun-related charges.  I couldn’t find info on that, but in trying to find info, I came across this article that showed that gun-related charges had been dismissed for quite some time and that’s from a 2013 article. Also while doing some research, I came across this article which showed that a tax on bullets was a plan that backfired in Seattle, but was ignored by Cook County.  The end result?  What we’re experiencing right now: a hike in murders.  Here’s the crazy thing: it was only a couple months ago when these lawmakers realized that the problem is the criminals and not the weapons criminals were using.  It was a Captain Obvious moment that somehow didn’t involve Captain Obvious.  Let’s hope Kim Foxx can solve this problem next year!

I thought 2009 was a terrible year when it came to celebrity deaths.  We had lost Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays and Steve McNair within three months of each other.  This year I would have to say took the cake as more iconic people were taken away from us.

Here are the notable deaths that occurred in 2016: David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Tony Burton, Prince, Chyna, Kimbo Slice, Anton Yelchin, Muhammad Ali, Gene Wilder, Thomas Mikal Ford, Florence Henderson, Alan Thicke and just this past Thursday Craig Sager.  That’s too much celebrity death to take and this is one of the reasons why people have been saying that 2016 has been a terrible year.  Will 2017 fare any better?  Only one way to find out!

There was a gay bar in Orlando called Pulse and it was the place where people would come and have themselves a good time.  Well, those good times came to an end on June 12, 2016 when a guy (whose name I will not reveal) went into the club and went on a massive shooting spree.  The shooting spree was so massive, it was the deadliest mass shooting in US history: 49 people lost their lives and 53 people were injured.

Anybody who were in the club weren’t safe, not even people hiding in bathrooms.  The shooter had to have some kind of agenda and before new reports came in, it was purported to be a hate crime since Pulse was a gay club.  As it turned out, the shooter not only had a license to carry a gun, but he was a gay man himself.  His life ended that same night when he got into a gunfight with SWAT officers.

There was pretty much no way for Pulse to get itself back together.  Not only did they have people in mourning, but they also had to fix the damages that was caused by the mass murderer.  The place was shut down temporarily at first, but now it’s been shut down permanently as the city of Orlando had bought the club for $2.25 million and turned the nightclub into a memorial.  I wish for something like this to never happen again, but we all know it will happen again; we just don’t know when it’ll happen again.

The DC Extended Universe hasn’t been doing so well lately.  Despite the success of Man of Steel in the box office, many people have slammed the movie over its portrayal of Superman and the decisions that he made in the movie.  Earlier, Green Lantern had been released and it was poorly received; so much so that Ryan Reynolds mocked it in Deadpool.  With Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice supposing to be released in 2015, but got pushed back to 2016 due to Avengers: Age of Ultron, DC saw two of their movies being released this year, with the other being Suicide Squad.

Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice came out first and it didn’t fare better than Man of Steel in terms of reviews and reception.  Some people loved the movie while others blasted the movie as hard as Metropolis’ destruction in Man of Steel.  Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot’s performances were the highlight of the movie, but everything else was trashed, which isn’t a good sign for a Superman sequel.  There was no praise for Henry Cavill reprising his role as Superman and many people hated Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor.  The Extended Edition made the movie tolerable for some, but for me, the movie still sucked and the Extended version was the only version I saw.

Because of the controversy of Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad had a lot of reshoots done just to make the movie lighter than what DC movies had recently become; the result was a major disappointment.  Will Smith and Margot Robbie were praised for their role as Deadshot and Harley Quinn respectively, but Jared Leto’s Joker was reduced to like a cameo appearance.  It was disappointing for Jared Leto to find out even though he never watches his own movies.  Just like Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice, an extended version of the movie has been released for home use.

I don’t know if the extended version betters the movie or not, but the simple fact that the only movies DC released this year needed an extended version for home video shows how much DC has been messing up with their movies.  We can hope that Wonder Woman and Justice League can deliver next year, but until then, the only thing DC’s got going for them are the television shows, which had a kick-ass crossover series in late November-early December.

Speaking of something that was supposed to be kick-ass…

My brother had a Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone, a Samsung 250GB SSD and a 47” Samsung SmartTV.  My father got my sister a 32” Samsung HDTV for Christmas a few years ago and I had bought a used 120GB Samsung SSD and according to GPU-Z, my Sapphire Tri-X Radeon R9 290 has GDDR5 memory made by Samsung.  With reports of Galaxy Note 7s exploding (along with their washing machines), I’m just hoping that nothing that has Samsung products in our homes explode.

There were two separate incidents with the Galaxy Note 7 that eventually lead to Samsung discontinuing the Galaxy Note 7.  The first incident was the Note 7s exploding.  Since many people’s phones were being affected by the explosion, the phones had to be recalled and tested to see what was causing the explosions.  When the replacement Note 7s were released, it didn’t take long before those phones had to be recalled as well.

The first recall was due to battery issues (just like the hoverboards from last year), while the second was due to incompetence.  They didn’t test thoroughly to see if their diagnostic was correct or not and quickly shipped replacements.  Because of their incompetence, analysts estimated that they’ll be losing $17 billion over it.  Ouch!  When you add the Note 7 issues with the washing machine issues, it makes 2016 look like an awful year for Samsung.  Now let’s get to what made 2016 bad for me!

Because I haven’t blogged since the Anime Central Recap blogs, that meant that I didn’t do any Wizard World Chicago 2016 blogs.  Usually, I would do some blogs on Microsoft Word (I actually upgraded to the 2010 Edition on my main PC since it still uses Windows 7 and the default picture viewer sucks) and not publish them online for whatever reason, but this time, I didn’t even do that for Wizard World Chicago.  Because of that, I’ll have to give a quick recap and by quick, I mean shorter than I usually do.

My original cosplay lineup was going to be Dean Ambrose on Thursday, Blue Ranger on Friday, Amazing Spider-Man 2 Spider-Man on Saturday and Symbiote Spider-Man on Sunday.  Because Dean Ambrose was announced to being there on Friday, that meant that I had to make a cosplay change: casual wear on Thursday, Dean Ambrose on Friday, Amazing Spider-Man 2 Spider-Man on Saturday and Symbiote Spider-Man on Sunday.

I always knew that Thursday was a throwaway day, which is why I decided last year to stop cosplaying on that day.  I wanted to fight cosplaying as Dean Ambrose, but I couldn’t fight the feeling, so I decided to go with Thursday since I’d look casual and many people wouldn’t notice I was cosplaying as Dean Ambrose.  Since that was saved for Friday, it was casual wear for me.

After I had seen the USA Women’s Volleyball team lose a hearbreaking semifinals game against Serbia, I had left for Wizard World Chicago and things looked to be fine…until I went to the skyline entrance that is.  I didn’t take a picture of it immediately, but I waited until some time later to take a picture of the following…

I should’ve known Wizard World was going to find a way to piss me off as they do it every year except for 2012 (since it was new to me) and last year.  The skyline was a way for me to avoid waiting for the police to allow us to cross the street and cross the street with no effort.  Because the skyline was closed, I had to cross that damn street.  Also, people dropping others off had a limited entryway too.  I guess the reason why was because there was security and metal detectors we had to go through, which didn’t happen at any previous Wizard World Chicago events.  Then, after we entered the building, we needed our wrist pass just to go up the stairs, even if we were Hyatt Regency Hotel stayers.

After experiencing those things, I was left thinking that Wizard World Chicago must be trying their best to get me to skip next year’s event if they were going to treat their attendees like criminals.  The security check thing, I didn’t mind, but cutting off the skyline for an entire weekend was going to be enough to get me to skip Wizard World Chicago entirely.  I was so glad I didn’t cosplay that day because had I cosplayed, it would’ve ruined my cosplaying day entirely.

I didn’t bring up my friend throughout that testimony.  Well, there’s a reason for that…

If you’ve read my blog about my plans for C2E2 this year, you would’ve seen that my friend couldn’t attend C2E2 this year due to the fact that he had to make payments on his late father’s car.  I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, so I’ll mention it: my friend’s father died the day before Thanksgiving last year from a heart attack and before he died, he had bought a new car.  Since my friend was held responsible for making payments on the car, he had to give C2E2 a pass.  Then, he had to give Anime Central a pass for the exact same reason.  He didn’t give me a reason why he couldn’t attend Wizard World Chicago, but I’m glad he didn’t for Day 1 because I don’t know how he’d feel to not be able to walk through the skyline.

You may recall that there had been times where I wished I had gone to a convention by myself so that I wouldn’t feel restricted as to where to go and what to do.  I got my wish at Anime Central last year and I thought that it was an odd experience.  Then I got my wish again at Wizard World Chicago last year on Days 1 and 4.  It felt good to dictate what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go, but the one area where I missed my friend the most was when it came to getting my pictures taken with cosplayers.

What sucked about getting my picture taken without my friend was that I had to rely on strangers to take a picture for me.  That’s not much of a bad thing, except for the fact that some strangers will take pictures vertically instead of horizontally.  Why would you do that when it’s not your camera?  It’s worse when I’m a Power Ranger cosplayer because they won’t be able to hear me verbally, so I would have to make cues to let them know how I want my picture taken.

Since I was cosplaying as Spider-Man and I’m near-sighted, I thought that I wouldn’t be able to tell if a stranger was taking my picture in the vertical position or not, but to my amazement, 100% of the time I’d notice, and I didn’t have to squint to do it.  Also, by cosplaying as Spider-Man, I could tell them how to take my picture since the mask didn’t compress my voice.  Still, I missed my friend dearly and I hope to see him at C2E2 next year.  Oh, and speaking of C2E2…

I’ve already talked about this on my C2E2 2016 Recap blog, so I’ll make this very brief: temperatures were in the mid-50s on the week of C2E2 2016 and it surprised me.  Unfortunately, the weather’s temps went down on the day of C2E2 with highs of late 30s to early 40s.  It was by far the coldest con I’ve ever been to and I hope it continues to be that way.  Thankfully, next year’s C2E2 will be in late April (the 21-23 to be exact), so I don’t have to worry about late 30s-early 40s weather again!

There’s one thing that’s unavoidable when it comes to TV shows: cancellations.  So far this year, no show has been cancelled early, but there are two shows from ABC that’s looking to get the axe soon: Notorious and Conviction.  Notorious was basically a seat warmer for Scandal since Scandal was on break thanks to Kerry Washington’s pregnancy and once news broke out that ABC reduced the episode order from 13 to 10, it was a wrap for Notorious.  ABC claims that Notorious isn’t cancelled, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that when an episode order’s been reduced, it means that the show will be cancelled.

I hadn’t been watching Notorious and I would usually catch the last minute of the show just to watch How To Get Away With Murder, so its cancellation was no big deal to me.  With Conviction, it doesn’t affect me either because I had quit watching the show after episode 4.  I had missed the episode actually due to watching Monday Night Football and I had DVRed it, Gotham and Supergirl.  When I watched the three episodes in chronological order (Supergirl first since it ended at 8PM while Gotham ended at 8:01PM) and after watching some excellent episodes of Supergirl and Gotham, Conviction almost put me to sleep.

The acting sucked, the story sucked, there was nothing interesting about the show at all and that show made me think for a time that all ABC shows had poor acting.  The only reason why I watched the show was because of Hayley Atwell and she wasn’t even close to being enough to save that trainwreck of a show.  While I was watching the fall finale of Quantico, I looked at the preview of the next episode and it said that it was moving to Monday.  Since Dancing With The Stars takes up the first two hours of primetime on Mondays, that meant that Quantico was going to air at 9:01PM, which is essentially Conviction’s timeslot.

With Quantico moving to Monday, did that mean that Conviction was moving to Sunday or did that mean that the show was getting cancelled?  After doing some research, it turned out that ABC planned to air the whole 13 episodes of Conviction, they didn’t order any additional episodes, and it’s getting cancelled.  Since I stopped watching the show well before the announcement, my thought about that news was good riddance.  The same can’t be said for the next four shows.

I had a feeling that The Muppets was going to get cancelled, but I enjoyed every single episode of that show.  It sucked a little bit, but it was something I knew I could get over.  Going back to Hayley Atwell, it kind of sucked to see that Agent Carter had been cancelled as well.  The second season wasn’t as strong as the first (it was actually a little bit weak in my opinion) and it was frustrating to see a cliffhanger ending when the show was struggling as is.  Hopefully the upcoming Inhumans show can make up for it, although it won’t be a midseason replacement like Agent Carter was.

I knew something was fishy when The Mysteries of Laura’s second season had 16 episodes instead of 20 or more like the first season.  When the season finale happened in February, I had a feeling that the show was going to be cancelled.  I waited for months to see the inevitable and it was good while it lasted.  At least Lethal Weapon can take its place on the Wednesday at 7 timeslot, even though it’s on Fox unlike The Mysteries of Laura, which was on NBC.

I mentioned before about the 9PM Monday timeslot and Conviction was not a good replacement for one of my favorite shows: Castle.  After eight seasons, that show had gotten axed and as rare as it is for me to say this, I’m glad it got cancelled.  It’s not that I hated the show, but the cancellation was a form of mercy killing as if it had continued for another season, it would’ve been a monumental disaster.

Things went bad when it was announced that Stana Katic, the actress who played Detective Kate Beckett-Castle, was not returning for the 9th season.   Tamala Jones was leaving too, but her departure was not as big as Stana Katic.  There had been rumors about Stana’s relationship with Nathan Fillion being toxic; for example, he was a bully (I didn’t get that vibe when I met him last year), he made her cry multiple times and they went through therapy.  Whatever the case may be, Castle isn’t Castle without Kate Beckett-Castle and her departure (without killing her off on top of that) would not have looked good on the show.

If the show was to return for its 9th season, it would’ve been the final season and it would’ve gone 13 episodes.  Because of the backlash involving Stana’s departure, ABC decided to end Castle before things got worse.  So for this year, four of the shows that I used to watch got cancelled; five if you count the first four episodes of Conviction that I watched before I gave up on the show.  And now the moment you’ve probably been waiting for!

It’s been such a long time since I last blogged on here and, to be honest, I haven’t missed any of you guys.   It’s not that I hate my readers or anybody in the MyIGN community, but it’s been the lack of care IGN has placed on the MyIGN community as the same problems that plagued MyIGN at the start of the year has continued to plague MyIGN by the end of it.  The errors hadn’t been fixed and nothing has been done to either bring old MyIGNers back or to keep MyIGNers from leaving.  Not surprisingly, many have decided to leave, including long mainstay KRATOSGODOFWARIII.

Speaking of KRATOSGODOFWARIII, he had trouble logging into MyIGN (don’t we all) and it had gotten to the point where he had to create another account (KRATOS_THREE) and basically railed on IGN for not trying to get the errors fixed.  According to the last status he posted four months ago, here’s what he had to say…

I have said this before, but this time you are all witnessing that the conditions are getting worse everyday. We need to get the fuck out of here My IGN Community. Please find and agree on a site we can all move to away from this crumbling shithole.

From what I’ve heard, Google+ has been the go to place for MyIGNers who are sick of IGN doing absolutely NOTHING to improve MyIGN so that MyIGN could be a community again.  I do have a Google+ account (thanks to needing one so that I can use my at-the-time Moto X smartphone), but I’m not active on there, so don’t bother.  As far as blogging goes, I hadn’t typed up any new blogs on Word after my Anime Central blogs.  Hell, I didn’t do any type of blogging until September when I blogged about if Nintendo had learned their lesson from Wii U’s mistakes.  Sadly, that blog will have to come out next year if I feel like posting the blog.

It’s basically because of the lack of activity from MyIGN why I haven’t been blogging in and out of MyIGN.  I’ve gone through this before back in 2008 when I left ClubIGN and I hadn’t done any outside blogs until 2010.  There’s one other thing too: I forgot I had done a blog talking about the things I wanted to do for this year.  With that in mind, let’s recap briefly about the things I wanted to do this year.

With PC upgrades, for the first time ever if I’m not mistaken, I have not made any upgrades to my PC at all for the entire year.  The PC I came to 2016 with is the same PC I’m leaving 2016 with.  With my backup PC, I decided to upgrade it with the 95W version of the Phenom II X4 955 and I switched out the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 with the PowerColor Radeon HD 6850.  The backup PC is running Windows 10 1607 and I’m thinking of replacing the Radeon HD 6850 to at most a Radeon HD 7970/R9 280X.  With the current case for my backup PC, it can’t have a long card like the R9 290, but the 280X should suffice.  Again, it’s a secondary PC instead of a primary PC.

As you can see on my profile pic, I got a Spider-Man costume.  I ended up having two and I’ll replace the first one later as I not only got the measurements wrong, but also the lenses.  I have not picked up any N64 controllers and as you can see with this blog, I haven’t been more active on MyIGN (less active actually).  I only published two blogs that I hadn’t published yet and as I’ve stated before, my main PC uses Windows 7, so I didn’t upgrade my main PC to Windows 10.  I did try out Windows 10 on my main PC with a spare hard drive and it’s not enough to get me to jump over just yet.

I technically do have a new HD camcorder in the form of my Moto X as it shoots videos better than my Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS and it looks beautiful as well.  It’s because of that why I bought a tripod for smartphones.  Unless I replace the Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS for stills, I’ll still be using it for taking pictures while I’ll use the Moto X for videos.  Then again, I just upgraded to a Moto Z Force Droid, so I’ll be using that instead.  No, I will not buy the camera mod for it as it’s $250!  At that price, I might as well buy me a new point and shoot camera!

That’s a lot of stuff that I got off my chest after being gone for pretty much the second half of the year.  Even though there have been dark days, there have been brighter days and brighter moments in the year 2016.  So, to end 2016, my final blog of the year will be about the good moments of 2016.  Until then, I’ll see you on my next blog and I’m out!

Last time, I did a blog talking about the 16 worst moments of 2016 and like I always do every year, I would like to end the year talking about the best moments of 2016.  Just like last time, I will talk about gaming moments first, then general things and end it with things that happened to me.  Unfortunately for this blog, I couldn’t think of 5 great moments in gaming, so they will be four moments while the general stuff will have seven to make up for it.  Without further ado, here are the 16 best moments of 2016, starting with…

Going through my list of bad things that happened in 2015, I’m surprised I didn’t put Windows 10 Free Upgrade on there as Microsoft had been trying their best to convince Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users to upgrade to Windows 10.  Maybe my memory’s kind of messed up or something, but the free upgrade thing probably wasn’t that bad in 2015, but in 2016, it got worse.

If anybody downloaded and installed a program that blocked or disabled GWX.exe, a Windows update would pop up and if it got installed, GWX.exe would show up again.  There were even times when a pop up would show up saying that the PC would be installing Windows 10 and clicking X did nothing but confirm that you approved the installation.  Also, just like updated versions of Games for Windows Live when it came to creating offline accounts, the option to disable the update was hidden in a little print or something.

If you had no idea about that little option, then the only option people were left with was to disable Windows Update.  If many people had contracted a virus on their PC during the free upgrade period, Microsoft was put to blame because of the GWX.exe thing and because they were being ridiculously aggressive with trying to get people to upgrade to Windows 10.  It was an annoying and very frustrating experience for non-Windows 10 users everywhere.

On July 29, 2016, the free upgrade period had expired.  If you had managed to not upgrade to Windows 10 before then, then you’d be happy to see that the Windows 10 icon on the right side of your screen was no longer there.  Microsoft has ended their aggressiveness with trying to get users to upgrade to Windows 10 and now, if you want to upgrade to Windows 10, you’d either have to pay for it or download and use the Media Creation tool.  Either way, the nightmare’s over!

Are you sick and tired of your kids staying at home during the summer and playing videogames?  Don’t you wish that they would go outside and play while not forcing them into a program like the NFL’s Play60?  Do you want them to have fun while on their smartphone?  Oh, and before I forget: when I say “kids”, I mean kids at heart.  Well, if any of those questions has Yes as an answer, then Nintendo and Niantic Studios have something for you: Pokémon Go!

One of the biggest crazes of the summer was Pokémon Go.  It had gotten so big, not even Nintendo could predict how successful it could get.  You had people going outside using their smartphones to find a Pokémon somewhere and capturing it like they were in an actual Pokémon world.  Sometimes, trespassing was committed and also, sometimes robberies were committed (nobody was stealing Pokémon, but people playing Pokémon Go were getting robbed).  There was even one time that a Pokémon Go player had found a dead body while playing it.

I didn’t play Pokémon Go as I’m not a fan of Pokémon and even if I was, my phone’s OS wouldn’t allow me to play for that long because of how much battery was being drained (damn Lollipop), but I wasn’t going to say anything negative about people playing it as it was better than the murder rate of Chicago.  If people were having fun, then let them.  Of course, the craze came to an end thanks to a little thing called Fall.  Once temps went down, the fun stopped too.  It was a fun summer activity and who knows if people will get back to it next summer.

I didn’t put PS4 Slim on there as that’s the one thing Sony always does with the PlayStation: make a smaller version later.  I thought it would stop with the PS4 since the PS4 is small enough as is, but Sony just can’t help themselves making a smaller version of a PlayStation, now can they?  From what I gather, other than an optical port being missing, there isn’t much difference between the PS4 and the PS4 Slim.  Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about the systems that came out this year.

Sticking with the PS4, I want to talk about the Pro first.  It’s a little bit bigger than the PS4 and its hardware is a little bit better than the PS4, but there are two main advantages that the PS4 Pro has: 4K capabilities and SATA III support.  With 4K, gamers are able to play games at a 4K resolution and they’re able to watch 4K videos as well.  Unfortunately, the PS4 Pro does not have support for Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs, which is quite baffling as Sony was a huge pioneer for Blu-Ray during the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD wars.

Sticking with baffling, it’s quite baffling that the PS4 is still using SATA II in 2013.  SATA III came out in 2009 (which explains why the PS3 didn’t have SATA III support as it came out three years prior) and for the PS4 to use SATA II is quite idiotic on Sony’s part.  I don’t know if costs had anything to do with SATA II being used instead of SATA III, but it couldn’t have been that much since today’s motherboards uses SATA III (even the cheap ones).  It might not mean much to people using HDDs, but for people using SSDs, it meant a whole lot.  With SATA II, SSD speeds aren’t that good, but with SATA III, speeds are much better.  If you’re an SSD user with a SATA III SSD, that alone would be a good enough reason to get a PS4 Pro.

With the Xbox One S, it’s a system that’s clocked slightly better than the Xbox One and unlike the PS4, it has Ultra HD Blu-Ray playback support, which is quite baffling since Microsoft was on HD-DVD’s side with the Xbox 360.  What’s also great about it is its revised controller.  The controller looks pretty much the same, but it has a better grip support and it utilizes Bluetooth.  Since the controller uses Bluetooth, does that mean you can use the controller on Windows via Bluetooth?  Yes and no at the same time.

If you have Windows 10 1607 (which would be the latest version of Windows as of this blog), then yes, you can use Bluetooth to connect the Xbox One S controller to your PC.  If you have any OS older than Windows 10 1607, then no, there’s no Bluetooth support for your PC.  The controller still has support for wireless receivers, so you can use that if you still want to game wirelessly with that controller.

Another great feature that Microsoft used for the controller is Xbox Design Lab.  With it, you can customize your controller to be however you want it to look.  You can customize the body, bumpers and triggers, D-pad, thumbsticks, ABXY, view and menu, and the back.  If you want, you can also have a laser engraving planted on the bottom of your controller with you name, gamertag or anything else.

Due to customizing the controller, it will be $20 more, so that would be a total of $80.  If you use the laserprint option, that would be an additional $10, making the total price $90, and that’s without shipping and sales tax.  Before, you had to look elsewhere to get a customized controller like eBay or something, but now, Microsoft gives you that opportunity.  Sony hasn’t done it and Nintendo hasn’t done it, so kudos to Microsoft on that one!  And while we’re talking about Xbox…

Does anybody remember that one PS Vita commercial where it was advertised that you can continue your PS3 gameplay on your PS Vita?  If not, then here’s the commercial to refresh your memory!   If it looks like a feature the Switch does, then that’s because it is what Nintendo’s doing with the Switch.  Since the technology wasn’t implemented on the PS Vita, Sony got sued and lost the lawsuit because of it.  Where does that leave Microsoft?  Well, that’s where Xbox Play Anywhere comes into play (no pun intended)!

With Xbox Play Anywhere, gamers subscribed to Xbox Live will be able to play games on the Xbox One and Windows 10 without having to buy the same game twice.  As long as a game is out for Xbox One and Windows 10, then gamers will be able to buy one version of a game and have both versions of the game because of that.  For example, Forza Horizon 3 just came out for Windows 10.  If anybody bought the game for Windows 10, then that person automatically has the Xbox One version of the game as well.  Of course, this doesn’t count physical copies of Xbox One games, but free copies are great!

Did you notice that I said Windows 10 instead of PC?  Well, there’s a reason for that: in order for the Xbox Play Anywhere program to be used properly, you must either buy the game from the Windows Store on Windows 10 or you must buy the game from the Xbox App on Xbox One.  Sorry Steam users, but your copy is not compatible with Xbox Play Anywhere!

With Xbox Play Anywhere, not only do you have the same game on two different systems, but you also have DLCs and achievements on both systems.  You don’t earn the same achievement twice if you try to earn it on each platform, but it’s a very nice feature that Sony and Nintendo won’t be able to replicate, unless they come up with their own OS of course, which is highly unlikely.  Now, onto the general good news!

It seems like people have been so concerned about 2016 being a crappy year, but what they’ve failed to realize is that 2016 has been the year of About Time!  There are three About Time moments in 2016 that I will list and it looked like prior to this year that none of those things were going to happen.  I mean like it was a one-in-a-billionth chance that these things were going to happen and that one happened to have happened in a year where people say was the worst year of their lives.

One of those things that we never thought would happen was Leonardo DiCaprio winning an Oscar.  As talented of an actor as he has been, every time he got nominated for an Oscar, he was always snubbed for some other actor.  He had been snubbed so many times, him not winning an Oscar became a meme of its own.  In 2016, those memes were put to an end.

On Christmas of last year, one of his movies called The Revenant had been released to theatres.  He had done his usual acting job (which is nothing short of spectacular) and it looked like that movie might’ve been the movie that would get him an Oscar win.  Me personally, I found the movie to be rather boring and if history has shown me something, it’s usually the boring movies that win Oscar voters over, who are usually middle-aged white guys.

Leonardo DiCaprio gave a warm-hearting speech during his win and now there seems to be no new actor to make Oscar jokes to.  All that’s really left is for the Oscars to put an end to the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag they’ve been famous for for the past few years.  On the next subject of About Time…

Prior to this year, the city of Cleveland hadn’t won a sports championship since 1964 when the Cleveland Browns won the NFL championship, years before the Super Bowl was born.  They had to endure The Drive (even though The Drive resulted in overtime), The Fumble, The Shot, The Sweep & The Move (twice!).  Things started to look well for them when LeBron James came back to Cleveland in 2014 (The Return) and this year, they added two more titles to Cleveland (three if you count the Larry O’Brien trophy): The Comeback and The Win.

To put things in perspective, the Cleveland Cavaliers were going against the Golden State Warriors, a team that had an NBA record 73-9.  By setting that record, they eclipsed my 95-96 Chicago Bulls, who had a 72-10 record.  The Warriors were up in the Finals three games to one.  In NBA history, during that scenario, only eight teams forced a game six while only two teams forced a game seven, with no teams winning under those deficits.  Even though Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love weren’t injured this time unlike last year, it looked like this year was going to be another year of disappointments.

Game 5 happened in Golden State and the Cavs won.  Game 6 happened in Cleveland and the Cavs won again.  With Game 7, it was a tight one throughout, but in the end, once Kyrie Irving knocked down the game winning three, the impossible occurred: not only did the Cavs win a championship for Cleveland for the first time in 52 years, but the Cavs beat the odds that were so stacked against them, it was ridiculous.  Just typing this made me realize there’s one extra title I should’ve added on there: The Miracle.

I’ll end this portion with a quote that was taken from a Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen meme: 73-9 looks good, but 72-10 has a ring to it.

This topic and the next topic will be WWE-related, so I’m giving you a fair warning here.  When the roster split first happened back in 2002, I hated it.  I hated it because it showed how much of a mistake Vince McMahon made by getting rid of both WCW and ECW.  He made amends with ECW by bringing it back, but not in the way original ECW fans remembered it and it has now become NXT.  The roster split didn’t make any sense to me and I didn’t think it’d last long.  Well, the roster split ended back in 2012 when now President Elect Donald Trump declared that every Raw would be a SuperShow, which pitted Raw and SmackDown! on the same show.

Making Raw and SmackDown! wrestlers be on Raw diminished SmackDown! and the show had suffered for quite some time.   They brought in Mauro Ranallo in 2015 to make the show feel fresh and not bland, but as long as SmackDown! was still being taped, it would not do as well as Raw productively.  Also, because it was taped, the edited crowd noise was very noticeable.  It was like if SmackDown! wanted to succeed, they would have to quit airing the show pre-taped and go live.  Also, with the lack of a roster split, a new problem arrived: on-air talent.

With Raw and SmackDown! using the same roster, it meant that there were certain wrestlers who weren’t getting the screentime that they should have.  If the roster needed to be fully utilized (or at the very least, have less of an overcrowded talent of wrestlers each week), then a roster split would be a fantastic idea.  On July 19, 2016, our wish was granted: the first ever WWE Draft on SmackDown! Live!

There are still wrestlers on both shows who aren’t being utilized, but at the same time, some of those wrestlers wouldn’t be back on TV or wouldn’t be on TV at all if it wasn’t for the roster split.  I’ve been enjoying watching both Raw and SmackDown! Live (SmackDown! Live more) and if there’s another draft next year, then I welcome it!

This next entry was just too good not to share and in a way, it kind of ruins how I do lists or even think about them…

I would have to say that most of the times when I do a blog, they’re done in list form.  I don’t think about what’s on the list or what’s not on the list and I don’t even think about how important lists are.  Well this year, one man has caused a lot of people to start caring about lists and that man is Chris Jericho.

I’ll have to say that if it wasn’t for the List of Jericho, Raw would REEEEALLY suck compared to SmackDown! Live.  Anytime somebody would say something that would get on Chris Jericho’s nerves or if someone’s presence irritated him, do you know what he would do?  Do ya?  THEY JUST MADE THE LIST!!

Anytime Chris Jericho says YOU JUST MADE THE LIST!!, the fans would be so delighted and it would make their day.  Of course, with Chris Jericho being a heel, he would make The List not as memorable to us on purpose because he hates us that much.  Here’s a video of when The List of Jericho got started and (as a risky move to the uploader), here’s a compilation video of everybody who has been put on The List of Jericho.  Happy watching and I hope you get a kick out of it like I and the WWE Universe have.

If people had been reading upon the difficulties Rio de Janeiro had with setting up the Olympics, they would conclude that this year’s Olympics was going to be the worst Summer Olympics ever.   With a crime rate that would make Chicago jealous and water problems that were similar or worse than Flint, Michigan’s (not to mention the Zika virus), it caused some NBA players to take a pass at it.  As it turned out, nothing bad really happened, unless you count the diving pool’s water color being green and the Ryan Lochte gas station incident, which I won’t be getting into.

If anybody had no idea who Simone Biles was, watching the women’s gymnastics team would show why she was talked about a lot.  And speaking of Simone, in a 100m freestyle swimming race, Simone Manuel came from behind to win gold, making her the first black swimmer to win gold in the Olympic games.  There are more moments I would like to talk about, but that would take up too much time, so I’ll just leave them alone.

When it comes to the medal counts, the USA pretty much dominated there.  Not only did we have the most gold medals, but we also had the most silver and bronze medals as well, totaling 121 medals.  China was in second place with 70 medals.  If that doesn’t spell domination, then I don’t know what does.  It was like if you thought 2012 was something, you haven’t seen anything yet.  I guess it’s because Brazil is around our area why we dominated, but I don’t know.  Come 2020, the Olympics will be in Tokyo, so it’ll be very interesting to see how NBC handles that event since they did a spectacular job covering Rio 2016.

If I was blogging in 2005 like I’m blogging now, the Chicago White Sox would’ve been a topic of good things that had happened that year.  It’s too bad I wasn’t blogging like I am now in 2005 because not only was I not blogging in 2005, but the IGN blogging section didn’t become public until 2006, so I couldn’t blog about the White Sox winning the World Series even if I wanted to.  I can remedy that this year by talking about the Chicago Cubs though!

I thought that I would be dead and long gone before the Chicago Cubs would win the World Series.  I wasn’t one of those people who would say Next Year anytime the Cubs didn’t make the World Series because I was more of a White Sox fan (since I live on the South Side of Chicago) and I grew up hating the Cubs.  Of course, every year I would laugh on the inside anytime the Cubs didn’t make the World Series since my White Sox was the last team to have won a World Series for Chicago even if you take the 2005 World Series away.  To add a little cherry on top, on the day Back to the Future Part II said that the Chicago Cubs would win the World Series, they got swept by the New York Mets.  It was glorious!

I know what some of you are going to say: the White Sox sucked this year!  Yeah, well I don’t pay much attention to baseball, so I for the most part didn’t care.  Both the White Sox and the Chicago Cubs went off to a great start this season, but for some reason, the White Sox crumbled like they usually do while the Cubs continued to be the best team in the MLB.  For that to happen, it made perfect sense to fire Robin Ventura from his manager position.  Now let’s talk about the playoffs!

I actually started watching the MLB playoffs thanks to my father coming over and wanting to watch the game.  On the last game when the Cubs went against the San Francisco Giants, it was pretty shocking how that team choked up a big lead and got themselves eliminated.  It was a major choke job that not even the 2015-2016 Golden State Warriors could match (blew 3-1 lead jokes are still going strong!).

When the Cubs went against the LA Dodgers, I would only watch if my father visited; otherwise I would skip the game.  I did make a promise to myself though: if the Cubs made it to the World Series, I would watch every game.  When the Cubs finished the Dodgers, I kept my promise and I watched all 7 games of that World Series.

I didn’t watch all 7 games on my HDTV; I watched most of the series on my backup PC which is seated right next to my HDTV.  As far as I can remember, Saturday was the only day where I watched an entire game on my HDTV; the rest of the days I was watching the game on my backup PC while I was watching something else on my HDTV.  With Game 7, things were getting too intense that I had to switch over to the game on my HDTV and skip whatever NBA game I was watching.

When the blown lead by Aroldis Chapman forced the game to go to extra innings, I was a little bit scared.  Then, to add to the dramatics of the game, it started raining, so a rain delay happened.  It took about 20 minutes before the game resumed and when it did, that’s when the Cubs took control.  In the end, I and the rest of the world witnessed something we never thought we would see in our lifetime: the Chicago Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years!  Never mind the fact that the Cubs made it to the World Series for the first time since the end of World War II (1945); the Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years and Back to the Future Part II was off by one year!

I couldn’t help it: I celebrated too.  It was two straight years of Chicago winning a championship (the Blackhawks won last year’s Stanley Cup Finals) and it was a positive that Chicago needed with the gun violence being a staple of the city lately.  I became a Chicago Cubs bandwagoner and come the start of next year, I’ll be back to hating on the Cubs because White Sox fan for life!

Oh, I forgot something: the Cleveland Indians blew a 3-1 lead in the World Series.  I guess baseball’s not famous enough for people to create blown 3-1 lead jokes on the Indians like what’s been going on with the Warriors.  Then again, the Indians did have some injuries on their squad, so that might explain no 3-1 lead jokes on them.  Man that took way too long for someone who’s a Cubs hater.  Moving on!

There have been a few stories where an accidental text ended up being good stories.  There was one time when a bride sent a wedding invite to the wrong person, but the receiver and his buddies came to the wedding anyway.  That story was just two years ago; this story were under similar circumstances and had a similar result.

A grandmother named Wanda Dench was texting everybody in her group an invite to her house for Thanksgiving and one of the people she sent the group text to was Jamal Hinton.  When he saw the text, he asked who she was and she replied with his grandmother.  He asked her for a selfie and she obliged.  After that had happened, he sent his selfie pic to her showing that he was not her grandson.  Jokingly, he asked if he could still come and the reply was totally unexpected…

Of course you can. That's what grandmas do...feed everyone!

Being perplexed at the reply, he posted the photo onto social media and the pic went viral.  Who would’ve guessed that something like that could go viral?  Then again, that first link about the accidental wedding invite would’ve been a dead giveaway that something like this could go viral.  It was a set of good news that was so needed for 2016.

Here’s one question some of you might be asking: how did she accidentally get his number?  The answer to that is quite simple: her grandson had Jamal’s phone number, but he had recently changed it, so his old number became Jamal’s when he got his phone.  Since Wanda wasn’t informed about the number change, that’s what got this story involved.

Come Thanksgiving Day, Jamal and his family came over to Wanda’s house and they had themselves a pretty good Thanksgiving.  Will something like this happen again?  Maybe, but we won’t know unless something like this happens again.

To finish the last 5 moments of 2016 are the moments that had happened to me.  I’ll start this one off with…

It was at some point last year when my father had brought a laptop for me to try out.  It was a Dell Latitude D600 and it was ridiculously old.  I’m talking Windows XP with a 1.6 GHz Celeron processor and DDR memory old.  A laptop so old that it used PATA/IDE hard drives.  With that laptop’s case, it was so old, it was using a 40GB 4200RPM hard drive.  To make matters worse, it was actually running on Windows 7.

I had made some upgrades to it with the memory having 2GBs of RAM (since that’s the max DDR can handle for dual slots) and even got an 80GB 5400RPM PATA/IDE drive for it, but it wasn’t enough.  I did play around with it, but then I put it in the backburner, never to be used again.  This year, my father started working on laptops that were being thrown away by people who didn’t realize how good they had their laptops.

The first laptop my father brought to me was a Dell Inspiron 1501.  I remember the model because I got two of them right by me while I’m typing this.  The first one was a little bit damaged, but it still worked.  Also, it had its BIOS locked.  The second one came perfect and didn’t have its BIOS locked.  Unfortunately, both laptops couldn’t handle Windows 7 well, especially when it came to Windows Updates.  Then again, Windows Update has been acting strange lately and it sucks to look up how to solve that problem.  I haven’t encountered such a problem on my PC and that’s because I leave Windows Update alone until it bothers me to install the updates.

I used the second laptop and tried to upgrade it to the best of my ability.  I upgraded the memory from 1GB of DDR2 to 4GBs of DDR2 (since that’s the max DDR2 can do for dual slots), I upgraded the processor from the AMD Turion 64 MK-36 to the Turion 64 X2 TL-59 (even though the eBay seller had it listed as a TL-60, that bastard) and I even upgraded the hard drive to a 250GB 7200RPM hard drive.  Despite that, Windows Update still took forever to check for updates.  I played around with it some more too, but I eventually stopped using it.

This past summer, my father started bringing in more laptops for me to try out and possibly fix and since I had a Windows 10 disc I had gotten for free thanks to the Media Creation Tool, installing Windows 10 on the laptops was what I was usually doing.  There was one laptop that he brought that was a Lenovo Thinkpad and I can’t remember the exact model number for it, but it was an AMD one and the thing I loved about that laptop was that I could replace the processor of the laptop without having to take the laptop completely apart.  It was fast and responsive too; it was too bad my father was going to sell it.

One day, my father brought me a Fujitsu laptop and he wanted me to have it as it was a tablet of some sort.  The screen could spin around, it could be a laptop one minute and a tablet the next, and it came with a stylus.  There were two things missing from it though: memory and a hard drive.  Thanks to my father, I had some DDR3 memory lying around and since I had some unused laptop hard drives, I decided to use one of them as the hard drive for that laptop.

There were two more things that were missing for the laptop, which is the Fujitsu Lifebook T732: optical drive and a power adapter.  Without an optical drive, I couldn’t install any version of Windows on there and without a power adapter, I couldn’t turn the laptop on since the battery was completely drained.  I put it off to the side for a little bit, but then I couldn’t help but buy a power adapter for the laptop.  I didn’t buy an optical drive for it because I didn’t need one: I could create a Windows boot disk on an SD card and install Windows from there.  Once the power adapter came, I installed Windows 10 on it and it’s now my primary laptop.

I did hold off on getting a laptop for quite some time since I already had a smartphone and laptops are expensive.  The only time I would get a laptop was if it was given to me as a gift and this year was the year of free laptops for me.  I talked about that longer than I intended, so let’s move on before I get carried away some more.

The house I’m living in right now was built in the 1950s.  When I say that, you probably know what else needed to be said: it needed and needs a lot of renovations.  I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but at some point, the walls in this house will need some insulation, especially in my bedroom which is located on the western part of the house.  This also means that the vents will need some modifications as well.  But anyway, let’s look at what did get renovated this year!

A few years ago, my sister’s room, the upstairs hallway and the basement had their windows replaced.  This year, it was my room, my mother’s room and the living room that had their windows replaced.  I’ll only show my room’s windows, so I’ll show you what my windows looked like before they had gotten replaced.

Here’s how the windows looked after they were replaced.

What’s great about those new windows is that the screen can actually be moved!  Not only that, but my window A/C can be placed on either window without a wooden stick for it to sit on!  The windows were replaced on March, before I headed off to C2E2 and when summer came, I put the A/C on the window with the awning as I wanted the A/C to catch as little rain as possible.  The plan worked and I never took the A/C down until it was time for it to happen.

Speaking of summer, something interesting happened there too: the tiles on the kitchen ceiling came crumbling down!  Thankfully when it happened, nobody was in the kitchen, but it made one big pile of a mess.  Since my father was the one who put the tiles on the ceiling so many years ago (and he was inexperienced when he did it too), it was just a matter of time before it happened.  My mother called some professionals to renovate the ceiling and they replaced not only the kitchen ceiling, but the living room ceiling as well.  As a matter of fact, here are a couple of pictures I took of the kitchen ceiling after the ceiling collapse.

Here’s one picture of the new ceiling.

I think next year will be one new renovation and that is the upstairs toilet bowl as it’s leaking as of this blog.  I looked up info about leaked toilets and it looks like it’ll require some skills I don’t have and don’t want to try to have.  That toilet bowl was in this house before we even moved in (back in 1987), so it was only a matter of time before a replacement had to be made.

I’ve already covered all three days of C2E2, so you can see them here, here and here.  The last time I blogged before this week, I talked about my experience at Anime Central all three days which you can find here, here and here.  With Wizard World Chicago, I didn’t feel like doing a four-blog experience about it, so I didn’t say anything about it.  Like Wizard World Chicago tradition, they did something that pissed me off and I explained how they did that on my previous blog.  I’ll try to talk briefly about the rest of my experience there.

With Days 2-4, the skyline was not closed, but I had to go through metal detectors to get in.  I didn’t mind that since I wasn’t carrying any dangerous weapons on me.  On Day 2, I was cosplaying as Dean Ambrose, who was the WWE World Heavyweight Champion at the time, but I didn’t have a championship belt because they’re too expensive.  I usually have my cellphone clipped on my belt and I would have my wallet and keys in my pocket, but for the sake of not having anything show in my jeans, I had them in my bag.  I had no choice the last two days since I was cosplaying as Spider-Man, but I went through with no problem.

As expected, not many people noticed that I was cosplaying as Dean Ambrose.  And by not many, I mean only two people recognized who I was cosplaying as, with one of them being a Lando Calrissian cosplayer.  He had to ask me just to be sure that I was cosplaying as Dean Ambrose.  To make a long story short on that situation, I tried to explain what happened to my belt in character, a random stranger put his belt on me and then this pic happened.

Do you know who was the second person who noticed I was cosplaying as Dean Ambrose?  It was none other than…..Dean Ambrose himself!  I was originally going to cosplay as him on Day 1, but since it was announced that he was going to be there on Friday, I had to make some changes.  I paid for a Photo Op and an autograph for him and when it was my turn to take a photo with him, we fistpounded and the following pic happened…

With the autographing thing, I was surprised to see former WWE ref Tim White because not only was he not working with the WWE anymore as far as I know, but wasn’t he supposed to try to kill himself like he tried numerous times?  Anyway, after I had gotten my autograph and was about to leave, Dean said that if he needed me, he would call me.  Well why didn’t I get the call during the time he was helping James Ellsworth?  THAT SHOULD’VE BEEN ME DAMMIT!!

With Days 3 & 4, I was cosplaying as the Amazing Spider-Man 2 Spider-Man and the Symbiote Spider-Man.  I did get more picture requests there than at Anime Central, but it still felt lacking.  I don’t know why, but I get way more picture requests at C2E2 than I do at Wizard World, which is one of the reasons why I can’t wait to go to C2E2 every year.

I had a great time at all three cons (minus one day) and I can’t wait to do it all over again next year, starting with C2E2 and finally getting the opportunity to meet both Walter Jones and David Yost.  I may retire being the Blue Ranger after that, but you may never know.  In the meantime, if you want to see the pics that I took from Wizard World Chicago this year or any other conventions I’ve attended, you can check out the album page on my Flickr account here and favorite any picture you like.

Last year, I went through the horror of upgrading my Moto X to Lollipop, which is Android 5.1.  The constant battery drain, even when doing nothing was pissing me off and to make matters worse, Motorola wasn’t going to upgrade the Moto X to Marshmallow, which is Android 6.  Marshmallow was the OS that fixed the battery drain problem and in order for me to do that, I had to make an upgrade.

I was going to go back to LG and since I’m not the primary person who selects the phones, I had to deal with possibly sticking with Motorola.  When I saw the Moto Z series and saw the specs of the phones, I saw that no matter which phone I got, there was no headphone jack.  Damn you Motorola for following in Apple’s footsteps!  I did realize later that I never listen to music on my phone while the phone’s charging, so it was no big deal.

One thing I also noticed about the phones was that no matter which one you picked, they all have microSD support, something the Moto X lacked and, in my opinion, really needed.  As you can see from the title, the phone that I had gotten was the Moto Z Force and I had gotten it on December 6.

The phone’s thin, but large at the same time.  Its height is more than the Moto X, making the Moto X look like a really small phone by comparison.  The battery drain is still big, but not as big as the Moto X, the apps appear faster, the calls sound very clear when two people are using the same phone and I love the fact that I can see the battery percentage without having to install an app that does that.  The carry-over from one phone to the next was great thanks to Verizon Cloud and there was nothing for me to worry about…except for the lack of Moto’s Gallery app.

Google Photos is fine, but it’s not as organized as the Gallery app, so I’ll have to find an app that’s similar to Moto’s Gallery app from the Moto X.  Also, with the Cloud, the photos transfer, but not the folders in which they came from, so I had to fix that problem.  With the microSD card, I bought a 64GB one and I’m currently using that along with the 32GB SIM card in there, bringing a total of 96GBS being used in the phone (or rather 81.84GBs since we’re talking compression and the OS space).  So far, so good.

The alarm settings couldn’t be read through my microSD card, so I had to move the settings from my microSD card to my SIM card, but the problem with that was the Moto Z Force doesn’t come with a USB Type-C to USB cable, so I had to buy one.  Since the microSD card can only be inserted by taking out the SIM card as well, I might as well connect my phone to my PC to transfer music from there to my phone.  I also bought a case for the phone and it looks awesome.

As far as the mods go, I’m only interested in the camera mod, but since it’s $250, I might as well buy another camera with that money.  I’ll wait for more mods to come out to see if I have any interest in them, but until then, I’ll leave the mods alone.  As of this blog, I’m loving the Moto Z Force; I just hope Google doesn’t pull a Lollipop again for the next 2-3 years.  And now to the last one!

Every year, I’ve always made upgrades to my PC and I thought that I would never see the year where I wouldn’t be upgrading my PC at all.  When 2016 got started, I thought I would be upgrading my PC to either a 1080p monitor or get the AVerMedia Live Gamer HD capture card.  In the end, I got neither thing and there was no reason for me to upgrade my PC at all.

When I say no upgrading my PC, I mean upgrading my main PC.  The main PC I use to play my games on has the following specs…

ASUS M5A99X AM3+ Motherboard

AMD FX-6300 Six-Core AM3+ CPU

Sapphire Tri-X Radeon R9 290 GPU

Kingston Genesis 8GB 1866 MHz DDR3 RAM

Toshiba DT01AC300 3GB 7200PRM HDD

ASUS PCE-AC56 802.11ac PCI-e Wi-Fi Adapter

ASUS Xonar D1 Sound Card

AVerMedia C027 PCI-e HD Capture Card

There are more specs on there, but they’re irrelevant here.  I came into 2016 with those things in my main PC and quite shockingly, I will leave 2016 with those exact same specs.  I made no hardware changes inside my PC either for the first time in years or for the first time ever.  It’s also quite crazy to think that two years ago, I went an entire year without changing my processor and for this year, I didn’t make any changes to my entire PC.  That’s crazy!  That doesn’t mean however that I didn’t make any hardware changes to desktops this year.

First, let’s talk about my brother’s PC.  He hadn’t had any hardware changes inside his PC since 2013 when he built his own PC.  Unfortunately, last month, his liquid cooler’s pump had died.  I think it died since researching what happened to his PC points to it.  What was happening with his PC was that the CPU would get too hot; so hot to the point where his PC would shut down even with stock settings.  He didn’t have a backup cooling device (thanks to the Core i7 4930k not coming with its own cooler), so I bought the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO since a lot of people recommend it as the go-to air cooler.

Installing the Hyper 212 EVO was a pain in the ass, but no worse than the Corsair H60, which is the cooling device that went out on him.  Not only was his PC quieter, but his PC ran better than it’s ever been.  This is not to say that liquid cooling sucks, but what I am saying is that the Corsair H60 should be avoided as it is a terrible liquid cooler and to make matters worse, it’s the only one I’ve come across.

I made a couple of changes with my backup PC as well.  First, I used it to test out Windows 10 and I liked Windows 10 enough that I upgraded the main HDD from Windows 7 to Windows 10.  Then, because TV season was over, I switched the GPU at first temporarily, then permanently from the Radeon HD 3850 (single slot) to my previous GPU the PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 (dual slot).  Because of that change, when the fall television season arrived, I had to leave the TV Wonder HD 650 out and replace it with another USB TV Tuner, which was the AVerMedia Hybrid Volar Q.  Also, one final change: I replaced the AMD Athlon II X3 455 with the 95W version of the Phenom II X4 955.

The changes were made simply to make conversions faster.  By conversion, I mean make an mp4 version of an MPEG-2 file, which I was doing with TV shows that exceeded 4GB on MPEG-2 even without the commercials.  It still converts slow, but it’s faster than what I had before.  With the Athlon II X3 455, a single conversion would take 5-and-a-half hours.  With the Phenom II X4, it would take nearly 4 hours.  In case you’re wondering, the FX-6300 takes about two-and-a-quarter hours.  With those examples, that’s just from shows on Fox.  I haven’t tested my backup PC with shows from different networks yet.

What happened to the 1080p monitor and the AVerMedia Live Gamer HD?  Well, with the 1080p monitor, I had tested Windows 10 on my main PC with a separate hard drive and looking at the monitor settings, it had Digital instead of Analog on it.  I had no idea that there was a digital option on my monitor and I had no idea how to make that change.  So, when I went back to my main hard drive (which uses Windows 7), I looked up how to change my monitor from analog to digital and this post helped me out.  I made the change, the picture looks better and I decided to take another year off from getting a bigger monitor.

With the AVerMedia Live Gamer HD, I saw that it didn’t have support for game systems before the PS2, Xbox and GameCube and I really wanted to try out N64, SNES and Genesis games without emulators or other hardware stuff.  Yes, I know the picture will look ugly on a 20” monitor or bigger, but I would like to at least capture something from there.  Since the AVerMedia C027 can do HD and SD (but can’t do 1080p sadly), I’ll just stick with it for right now; I can’t game on 1080p anyway.

I will be making some hardware changes next year, but they won’t be too big.  Until that time comes, this concludes this list!

This is pretty crazy: this blog is longer than my previous blog.  Just by looking at the page count on Word 2010, my previous blog was 11 pages long; this blog is 15 pages long.  With this, it means that 2016 has been a good year for me and probably to this world and let’s hope that 2017 isn’t that bad.  Until the next blog (if there is going to be one), I’m out!