monster hunter

Down with a Sickness

I caught a cold this past weekend, which I don’t prefer, but there are also benefits to being sick that I’ve found. For an overthinker (such as Muah), having a head cold is a kind of performance enhancing drug. There’s less indecision because of the desperation to get something done and get to more rest.

[There are no survivors between being irritably sick and the pillow at the end of the day.]

Sports can be easier to play. For example, I play goalie in ice hockey and there’s a constant mental battle of not thinking versus “reading the play” (or recognizing patterns during play to make the best decision for being in position to make a save). When sober (not sick), sometimes the internal debate leads to pucks going in the net because you were too busy figuring out what you should be doing. When sick, all that thinking goes away because your thoughts follow this specific inner monologue: “I’m sick and this sucks. I’m sick and this sucks. I’m sick and…”

And there’s less thinking about what to do. In my experience, I play better like this.

However, if it’s somebody’s birthday weekend (such as Muah) and there were plans to leave town and celebrate, there’s no real benefit to being sick. I had to cancel plans and stay home to rest. Luckily, on this particular weekend, there were other things to celebrate.

Like this:

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Monster Hunter Rise Launch:

I can’t express how great it feels to play this game. Everything in this game feels so good: the gameplay, the world, the little nuanced charm and humor. To be more specific, this game feels like what a video game ought to feel like. You want to keep playing, the world is vibrant and engrossing, and there’s something to find on every quest. It’s a delight that’s made with such care and love.

I don’t write reviews of games. I just want people to play good stuff. I modeled my website after this game for a reason and that’s because I knew it was going to be special.

Great stuff Capcom.

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Mike Birbiglia’s Worldwide Pizza Party

I attended a virtual comedy show on Saturday night. It was hosted by Mike Birbiglia, one of my favorite comics, and featured guest appearances by Aisling Bea and Nish Kumar. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the format was so charming and cozy that I wondered why comedy wasn’t delivered this way before. Being on a Zoom call, the show lacked the energy of a live performance (the sound of a mic and sound system, the collective mood and energy of the audience), but it was funny and fulfilling in a way that was both different and needed during a pandemic.

The show was called “The Worldwide Comedy Pizza Party”, and Mike’s entire act was devoted to bits about pizza. Truly. And it still played well! Mike began the show with some banter with the audience, which consisted of couples and singles perched on a couch or computer chair facing a webcam. He introduced his guest comedian host, Aisling Bea, who attempted to make a homemade pizza while the show went on. It was very much a “Late Night Talk Show” type of bit, but it was charming and funny all the same.

Mike’s style of delivering jokes through a virtual show is by flipping through notecards at a large corkboard. He recites the bit, which is still a work in progress, and depending on the levels laughter through the Zoom audience’s reduced mic volume, he moves on to the next joke.

Mike brought up that he’d like to perhaps film a comedy special as a virtual show. I think it works for how he was delivering his jokes; some worked, some did not, but he would always show the camera the title of the joke he just performed on his many notecards, which always made the crowd laugh from recognition. Obviously, you can’t show a large crowd at a club a handwritten notecard for a laugh, but it worked on a webcam setup.

Which, to me, was interesting because it showed how standup comedy can evolve depending on the medium.

The show was roughly an hour and half and worth the price of admission ($25). Perhaps the most cathartic part was the preshow and reading the Zoom chat. Everyone was happy to be there, happy to share where they were watching from (Sweden, Argentina, Toronto, Maryland, California, Michigan, etc) and what local pizza they had bought for the pizza party.

For me, who was sick and couldn’t watch this show with a friend, it was further proof that there are better things in this world if you look for them.

Plus, Mike Birbiglia is one of the big reasons this website exists at all. Mike writes about why he makes the things he does on his website:

“You’re doing it for the people who might feel better about something in their lives because of something you’re willing to admit about yours.”

After reading that, it was time to share.

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Wishing everyone as well as they can. You’re not alone out there,

Like Straightening Trumpets Delayed

I’ve delayed posting a new short story that I promised last week. I hope you’ll understand. It was one of those, “I didn’t get what I was doing until last minute!” kind of situations.

So, another draft is needed.

No new release date, yet, but it’s coming. Just needs some more time.

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Shake, Shake, Shake It Off

Here’s a weird memory:

When I was six or seven, I noticed something unusual when I urinated. Sometimes, for no particular reason, alongside the yellowed stream that splashed into the toilet bowl, a few droplets would trickle onto my hands as well. I was sharp as a six-year-old, so there was only one logical conclusion: there was a miniature hole on the underside of my urethra and some of the pee escaped through it onto my hands.

Oh, don’t worry—this was disgusting to me, too, and I wanted answers.

This happened frequently enough that I sought a second opinion. I told my parents about this seepage, this invisible aberration that caused warm liquid to splash over my hands and pantlegs every so often—quite the inconvenience. I don’t remember their initial reactions (I’m an adult now, so I can’t imagine it was some degree of skepticism), but they eventually said to me, lovingly, “Well, tell us if it happens again and we’ll take a look.”

Flashforward a week later and I sounded the alarm that it was happening again. My dad knocked on the door, entered the bathroom, and observed (somewhere along the spectrum of chagrin) that, indeed, a small trickle of urine escaped onto my hands, but ONLY towards the conclusion of my urination.

The diagnosis:

“Do you shake it off when you’re done?”

“Why would I do that?”

Twenty-five years later and there hasn’t been a similar recurrence, which leads me to believe the miniature hole in my urethra healed as I grew older.

Either that, or a Taylor Swift song had far greater ramifications for an anatomically confused 6-year-old boy than I ever realized.

Anyway, if there was ever a moral to this story, it’s this: if you’re new to the website and this is the first thing you’ve read…

Welcome! It’s so nice you stopped by!

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Vulfpeck – Madison Square Garden – September 28, 2019

I liked this band before, but upon listening to Vulfpeck’s Madison Square Garden performance on YouTube, I’m a much bigger fan. Great live bands do that—outside the recording studio, the energy is tripled, reverberating through the crowd as sound waves do through air molecules, literally creating a vibe (get it: vibration). In my brief two summers of being a stagehand for live bands, being part of many shows and watching crowds come alive, Vulfpeck is among the best.

Particularly, there’s a section in the video (that I’ll link below) called “Christmas in L.A.” that is manically silly and beautiful. In the way Freddy Mercury belted operatic sing-alongs to stadiums, so, too, did Vulfpack reach a crowd.

It’s one of those performances that you wished you were there for, like Live AID or the prime-time performances at the Reading Music Festival in the UK.

More than that, it’s a glimpse into a world that I hope still exists on the other side of COVID, when we can visit again, when the world is ready.

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Monster Hunter Rise Demo Version 2

If you haven’t guessed what the aesthetic of this website is referencing, it’s an upcoming Nintendo Switch release: Monster Hunter Rise. An updated demo launched on the Nintendo eShop this past week, complete with a tediously difficult quest to defeat Magnamalo, the main monster of the game. You have 15-minutes to defeat an overly tuned monster that will wipe out nearly all of your 30-credited attempts. I couldn’t beat him, even with multiple weapon types and masterful party members.

That said, performance on Nintendo Switch is a little rough. The frame rate is a problem, making reactions delayed and all the harder to execute. The game launches for PC in 2022 and I’m hoping many of these issues are resolved once the game is running on better hardware.

Still, the additions of better and freer movement and new attack loadouts are the most radical and needed changes to the series in over a decade. If this is the direction of the Monster Hunter series going forward, it’s bound to be an exciting hunt when Monster Hunter World 2 is inevitably announced.

Weekly Post-Ed #6