January 20th, 2023
It's a new year! Hopefully, this year has been treating you nicely. I've been rather lazy.
I got this little fin device at Goodwill recently. It looks like an iPod accessory, and that'd be mostly right. It's the radioSHARK! It's a device that let's you listen to FM/AM radio straight on your computer! Not only that, you are also able to record straight from the software! It's so cool!
The device itself is very minimal. It only has the USB cable and a 3.5mm jack. The 3.5mm jack can be used with headphones to listen to the radio directly, or it could be used as an antenna, similar to how Android phones could tune into stations. Changing stations or bands are controlled via the radioSHARK software.
The software is spotty in modern Windows systems. It can change stations and bands just fine, but it cannot record anything. This isn't as bad as it seems, as the radioSHARK is detected as a microphone, so just open up a voice recorder and you can record from there. You do lose scheduled recordings and buffer seeking though.
The reception varies depending on the environment, obviously. I could pick up my news station and other major radio stations just fine. Some of the local stuff was tuned a bit spotty though. Those stations sounded better on my dedicated tuner rather than the radioSHARK.
A complaint that many forum posts had around this time was that AM reception was awful. The only AM station I was able to pick up was the news station. All the other stations had some heavy static, so I can parrot the complaints they had aswell. Though, in the end, it's AM stations, they don't really have anything to listen to outside of boring talk.
There's also another reason for that, this USB cable is rather short. It's only 3 feet long, which isn't enough for me to put this out where my actual antenna is. If I could get a cable extension, the reception would probably be way better.
Didn't feel like sacrificing storage for the audio file, so have a cool IIDX BGA edit.
Here's a recording from a station taken in Audacity. You can hear a good bit of noise in the recording. I was stationed far from a window, which probably didn't help with the signal all that much.
There isn't too much on this device. When looking it up on Google, I'm stuck in circles looking at information from the same few pages. There was a follow-up radioSHARK 2, which is in black, but it doesn't seem that different aside from software.
I wonder if there's any modern equivalent to this. Is there anything from the past few years that could let me listen to radio on my PC without using online streams? That'd be very cool! I loved sitting around and tuning to different stations.
Splatoon had a Splatfest this month that I participated in, which was Spicy vs. Sweet vs. Sour. I voted Sweet. I can say I definitely had the chance to play Turf War for a weekend.
They made a change to how Tricolor Turf War matches are setup. Any team can be defending or attacking, regardless of halftime results. It's a nice change, especially since you weren't guarenteed a side initally. From what little I played of Tricolor Turf War this Splatfest, I think the map is decent. I didn't play for long cause...
Me and a couple of friends played until we get a 100x battle! It took a good damn while to get one. We put almost 10 hours into the Splatfest to get one and lost by 1%. Afterwards, we went back into voice call and had a therapy session before getting another one an hour later. We won that one by a landslide!
Here's the point-of-view collage I made. I used an Aerospray RG with a million Special Charge Up. The Special Charge Up ability makes it so I need fewer points to activate the Booyah Bomb. Call it cheap and sweaty, I would agree, but I wanted to farm 10x battles and win the 100x battle we longed for.
An added bonus of winning 100x battles is the ability to take a picture on the floats of Deep Cut members. Since we were too late to get one before halftime, we could only get pictures of them in a single float.
I'm the one with the helmet on. It looks very ugly. I wish I could swap it out with my actual outfit. I guess it could go as punishment for bullying people for hours with an annoying setup.
Sweet won by a huge amount. With how much support I saw online, I'm pretty sure it would be obvious. I'm rather surprised that Sour managed to claim one category, they had a pitiful number of votes. It was a joke in the community how bad it was.
I claimed my reward of 24 Super Sea Snails and called it a night. I will never use these things.
A few days afterwards, I actually pulled the seasonal banner! I did not use any sort of seed checker, I swear! (I did.) I'm an honest man who loves to pull these things legit! (A lie.) I love the gacha! (I don't.)
Last month, I announced the Katamari Forever Platinum Stream! It's a series of streams that aimed to obtain the platinum trophy in Katamari Forever. Earlier this month, I finished it! It actually took less time than the We Love Katamari Perfect Stream, only clocking in at around 28 hours instead of WLKPS's 40 hours.
The following is a rundown for this final stream.
Initally, I was going to end the series by completing the collection and the punishment trophy in one stream, and then the co-op and leaderboard stream in another, but I just did them both at the same time, no need to save something so anti-climatic for another week. Good thing I did that, classes would've begun by then.
To start off the final stream, I created a burner PSN account named baby_eater_ to take the fall in possibly getting banned for the leaderboard trophy, as I do have a modded PS3. No word on any bans or not, and it won't matter if I do get banned because the trophy was obtained.
By this point, I needed 10 items before I would finally complete the collection. A quick and easy way was to just look at a guide for the item name, look it up on Google with 'Katamari Forever' appended to it. The only time this strategy didn't work was for the Children's Dentist Sign, which I found by going to levels with cities in them. For anyone wondering, it's in Make the Moon, on the side of the tall buildings near the stadium after reaching 12m. If you get too big, it'll despawn.
Of course, the Cowbear stage is back! Yes, I did collect the wrong item a handful of times. It was always a Kintaro Bear in this stream. A viewer said I should scare off those bears early and I tried to. I always got cold feet doing it, as it was a really risky tactic. I might scare the Kintaro Bears, but the Cowbear wouldn't be scared and possibly try launching my Katamari into something I wouldn't want.
After looking at the path of the Cowbear, I found out that the Kintaro Bears that guard the Cowbear do not show up when the Cowbear goes across the inner lake. So I rolled to 8 meters and dashed at the Cowbear once he set foot on the river. Bingo! This is my fourth Cowbear.
The next trophy was the one for reaching 50,000 points in the punishment minigame. The easiest way to get to the minigame is to play any of the fire stages and extinguish your flame. You can do it so quick in Hot Stuff, that the UI doesn't appear at all.
Multiple trophy guides online always say that the right side is the best side to cheese this minigame. I tried following that, but it didn't really help. I instead went to the left and it was basically a free trophy. During my run, the rocks were almost always dropping to the far right of me. I managed to get 70,000 points, demolishing the trophy.
The final trophy would be the trophy for playing the two-player mode 30 times. This is the most anti-climatic ending trophy ever. I played a few of the regular stages with it, but I realized the battle stages require only half the time of a normal stage, so I just played in there alone. After a good hour, boom. It's over.
Writing this, I still can't believe it's over. The game lasted way shorter than what I expected it to be. We Love Katamari Perfect Stream clocked in at around 40 hours, this series was only 28 hours. It might be because there was no roses to roll up, though.
Will I do another one on any other Katamari game? Outside of the possible We Love Katamari remaster happening, I don't think so. The only contenders would've been Beautiful Katamari or Me and My Katamari. I don't really like Damacy and Touch my Katamari is... Touch my Katamari.
I would've chosen Beautiful Katamari with a goal of getting all achievements, but there's achievements for playing the game for a certain amount of hours. How lame is that!? Even then, I don't have a working Xbox 360 and emulation crashes a lot, so I can't play it even if I wanted to. The other pick would be Me & My Katamari with the goal of completing the collection. The only issue with that is that the game gives me a headache looking at it.
One thing that was pretty annoying was my second controller. For the entire stream, I played using my PS4 controller hooked up to my PS3. My actual PS3 controller is pretty broken, a simple push of force and it'll start pressing random buttons. During multiplayer, the controller would simply disconnect and I couldn't play the game. It also didn't help that I needed it to go to the XMB to check trophies, which was a minefield cause the controller could just exit the game by itself. I seriously cannot believe I played through Persona 5 and Yakuza 4 with it before I got my PS4.
This year is going to be a reminder that time moves foward. I can't believe it's going to be 10 years since, like, Pokemon X & Y came out. Juice=Juice debuted in September, their debut single was the first Hello! Project thing I stumbled upon when I was a preteen. There was also Animal Crossing: New Leaf, but that came out the year prior in Japan, so does it count?
Well, that's it for this blog. I already signed up for my next classes in college, so here's to another busy semester. Woo-hoo!