Yesterday, with enough long overdue SEO maintenance out of the way, I did manage to work through a lot of my sports card resource posts, albeit sifting through many links either dead, co-opted, or inactive. 

[Future me: I still have some of these posts over on Obscure Curiosities.]

I also began to outline my massive Yu-Gi-Oh Blackwing series which is likely to be simmering on the back burner while more pressing and necessary updates of new and returning Pokemon in Scarlet and Violet take priority. 

[Future me: The Blackwings series is still on the back burner in 2025…but I will return to talking about them one of these days. They’re still my favorite archetype in Yu-Gi-Oh. Frankly, the Scarlet and Violet analyses did poorly outside of a couple surprising Pokemon, so I wish I’d spent the time on Blackwings instead.]

Other than digging into a couple Substack editions I put in my holding bin, today will mostly be a leisure day with perhaps a bit of embellishment on Farigarif mixed in. 

The Blackwing series I’m referring to is about the popular deck archetype in Yu-Gi-Oh! I didn’t start working on that until July 2023… when it suddenly blew up in popularity because everyone wanted to play retro formats. 

[Future me: What I was playing on my Alienware Gaming PC laptop before it blew up in my face…]

Doom Eternal is a great concept but it is so nonstop BS. The gameplay loop is asinine: shoot an enemy and be forced to “glory kill” it when it’s blinking. The best way to rearm? Chainsaw a zombie. Yeah, that makes complete logical sense.  Always dealing with low health and low ammo and getting f’ed over stressed me out to the point of my chronic fatigue going on overload. Screw that. It burned me out so bad I tried to play Forza Horizon 5, but still fuming from that Doom nonsense, when I lost a close race I lost my temper. So much for today being relaxing… I passed out for an hour and a half.

At least my Overwatch 2 start went well, Widowmaker is my favorite character for damage and Ana for support and the tank girl (whatever her name is) for… the tank. I feel like I’m best at supporting and shooting my allies to heal them; weird, but I like that career route. Maybe I’ll play later, but likely the queue will be way too long…

[Future me: Overwatch 2 was fun for about a week…the game just got too hyper-competitive for my increasingly casual playstyle.]

Bored out of my mind after dinner, I found that Disney Dreamlight Valley was free with an XBox game pass. It’s basically a better (more engaging) version of Animal Crossing. While it’s a relaxing sort of mindless fun, there is a nasty glitch with an early Mickey quest that I can’t complete. Apparently, it’s a known issue…

After spending the better part of an hour trying to do a fix I found for the Mickey quest, I looked again. It turns out the glitch was much more easily fixed than I thought. It took checking four websites to get the right answer… two were entirely wrong and one didn’t actually offer a real fix at all! Online game guides seem entirely worthless for the most part now… at least I got to the point where now I can unlock more of the map and get more characters, woo! It’s a very laid back and chill game that requires no brainpower or memorizing anything really. Just what I need to unwind.

[Future me: I actually played that Disney game for quite awhile. But, eventually, it got so grindy I quit out of frustration. The gameplay loop gets way too repetitive, although I do appreciate the really whacky story arcs of the various characters and how they interact with the game world. I’d even play some more on Apple Arcade at a future date…and they fixed that Mickey glitch by then, but got bored with it again.]

Tomorrow I want to update my “which Scarlet and Violet starter is best” article with some Google Trends data. It seems my Green Grass kitty (Sprigatito) is in the lead, at least in search volume… Also I greatly prefer these starters to generation 8’s lot, although I’m very fond of Scorbunny, Cinderace, and Inteleon. I love all three designs from Gen 7, too, even though Incineroar is a bit too humanoid for me, although the design inspiration makes sense. For me, though, the pinnacle starter Pokemon are always going to be the first gen. 

In the long run, Fuecoco (the fire starter) gained a slight lead. But Sprigatito still is, and always will be, my favorite starter from Scarlet and Violet. 

[Future me, Sprigatito would take that trend lead back eventually in 2025, but barely. There were huge spikes in search traffic for each of them in ‘25, I’m associating with the Pokemon GO community day for each of the three Paldea starters. Interesting stuff to look at in future, actually.]

Didn’t read much, mostly put things in the ‘on hold’ folder… I only watched a couple of OK videos that were good, but not much to write about. Kind of a slow day, but I needed a break.