Category Archives: Personal Life

Finland and RIP Iwata

Hey guys, I’m going to Finland with Ronja for a while. So see ya’ll later.
Mostly I’ll just be meeting all her friends and seeing stuff around Helsinki. I’ll be back at the end of the month.

In other news, president of Nintendo Satoru Iwata passed away.
Dude led the development of the Wii and DS, and also did a lot of programming work on early Kirby and Pokemon games. He’s done a lot for gaming and will be missed. ):
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Sickness Blog

Hey guys, I thought I’d write about my epic 3 week adventure with glandular fever (aka “mono”).

So it started with me just feeling very tired for no reason. I thought “hey, I’ll just take a day off and rest a bit”. Nope.  4 days in I found a lump on my neck. I was also a bit feverish a few times. 7 days in I was still super tired and saw the doctor. She found that my lymph nodes were swollen and I had some sort of infection. I got put on antibiotics.

9 days in and Ronja came to live with me and look after me! That was cool, because my parents pissed off on holiday, and if I had to go through this whole thing by myself, I would have offed myself.

10 days in and the antibiotics hadn’t helped at all. My throat was starting to hurt, getting a bit worse every day. Eating solid food was difficult, and I started transitioning to mushy food. I also started throwing up almost every day! I think it was a side effect of this antibiotic, because it only happened when I was on it. So things were getting kind of crappy for me.

12 days in I saw the doctor again. Was diagnosed with tonsillitis cause my tonsils were all horrible and disgusting. I got put on a new antibiotic. Eating was incredibly painful. Even drinking water was painful. Talking was a little bit painful too. Normal painkillers didn’t really help. Nothing really gave me any pain relief.

16 days in and my throat was feeling a tiny bit better. Then suddenly red dots started appearing on my neck. Oh well, went to bed. Next day my face was red and most of my chest was all rashy and diseased looking. Great.

17 days in and I saw a doctor again. It was a weekend so I couldn’t go to my usual nearby place, and had to drive myself to hospital. I was quite lucky that I felt well enough to drive that morning. Well this doctor finally gave me some pain relief! Hurray! I got super strong codeine tablets, a 3rd antibiotic, and some anti-allergy tablets, just in case my rash was caused by an allergy. Doctor suggested I might have glandular fever, but it’s too early to say for sure.

I felt worse than ever, but the codeine tablets got me high, so I was in a good mood for the first time in ages. Was quite feverish for a few days. My rash kept spreading until it covered my whole body. It looked really bad but didn’t feel too bad. Mostly my skin was just really sensitive to touch. Even just the feeling of my clothes touching my skin was quite uncomfortable at times.

20 days in and I was starting to feel a bit better every day. Was starting to look like I would make it out of this alive. Went to see a 4th doctor for advice and blood tests.

25 days in and I was feeling almost normal. Went to the doctor’s again. Got my blood test results and they finally confirmed I had glandular fever! Woop! This was also my birthday, and the doctor gave me permission to have a few drinks, so that was cool. I still had to take my antibiotics for a few more days, but after that I should be safe to kiss people again!

So all of that was a huge waste of time. I was very unproductive.
For a lot of the time I was too tired and sick to even play video games!

Luckily once you get glandular fever you are immune for life, so I’ll never have to deal with that crap ever again. Apparently if you get glandular fever when you’re a kid, it’s quite harmless and most parents won’t even notice their kids have it. But if you get it in your 20’s, it will fuck you up. It’s a shame I never got it when I was a kid.

They should really work on a vaccine for that.

Anyway, I’m at 99% health now. My skin’s still a little bit red, and I’ve lost some weight and strength. But I’m feeling pretty good. I think I also managed not to infect Ronja. We’ll see how that goes.

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I am dead

Hay guys. I’ve been sick for the last week (and still am), so I haven’t done anything productive at all lately. I’ve just been sitting in bed and watching Orange Is The New Black, and playing a bit of Splatoon and Smash 4.

Splatoon is kind of awesome btw, but they’re gonna need to add some more gameplay modes if they want me to keep playing. I reached level 20 and then I got bored.

I also watched the Nintendo World Championship, which was surprisingly exciting at times. Mario Maker looks crazy fun. I was rooting for Cosmo.

Anyway, I’m going to Finland in 3 weeks, and hopefully I’ll get enough work done on Bullet Heaven 2 so that I can start beta testing it shortly after I get back. The game’s content is pretty much finished, all that’s missing is tons of debugging and balancing, and also translations. All that will probably still take a bit of time, but we’re getting there.

I’m noticing that I’m blogging a lot less than I used to. I guess that’s mostly because I’m in a relationship now and I don’t really feel the need to talk to strangers on the internet when I’ve already got someone to talk to about everything. But I’ll try to still write personal blogs every once in a while, cause it’s still kind of fun to archive things.

Catbug!

Hey guys, I got a Catbug!
He’s from Bravest Warriors. Ya’ll should watch it on YouTube if you don’t already. It’s by the Adventure Time guy.

I think he’s the cutest thing I own now. 😀

Got it off WeLoveFine.com for $25, plus $10 for shipping, plus $25 in customs fees (Yeah, I was pissed off about that). I’m gonna have to be really careful when buying stuff from America. (I live in the UK)

But yeah, I went out and did a little photoshoot with him. <3
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London and IGC

Hey guys!

I’ve spent most of the week in London with my girlfriend, Ronja, partly for business and partly for fun. We checked out the British Museum, King’s Cross station, Big Ben, lots of pubs, a wee church, and some other stuff. Didn’t get to see as much as I wanted to because of time and energy constraints, but oh well.

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Pretending to be a Harry Potter fan and failing miserably at faking enthusiasm

We attended IGC15 (the Indie Game Conference, sponsored by Microsoft!) and met up with tons of cool developers, a bunch of which I already knew from my previous visit to London. Unfortunately this conference wasn’t centered on web or Flash games like the last one I went to, so I didn’t recognize as many people as I had hoped, and a lot of the content wasn’t interesting to me. But that also meant I experienced quite a lot of new stuff, including trying a VR headset for the first time! I briefly played Smash Hit Plunder, and it was an awesome feeling. It worked much better than I expected, and I’m now really looking forward to seeing what sort of games take advantage of VR, while previously I wasn’t very interested.

Had a good time drinking with the other Flash game devs, and chatting about Kongregate and Armor Games and how that market is mostly dead. A lot of them are moving onto other stuff, including mobile games, client work or Steam games.

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At the pub with Jimp, Chris Jeff, Kupo, and Ronja

Anyway, the trip went really well overall. The train journey and hotel were way more comfortable than expected, the weather was decent, and we had a lot of fun. I’m feeling motivated to make some games!