An unintended and unwanted vacation

By now many have already come to wonder why Tamer Union seemed to disappear overnight. The truth is that around February 29th, my laptop of four years experienced a "big freeze" from which it did not recover. It started to hang while using Firefox, and never stopped hanging. An attempted system restart seemed to resolve the issue, but opening any webbrowser immediately lead to another freeze. This old computer had been experiencing problems for some time before--slowdown, repeated battery failure and charger breakdown, the hardware gradually coming apart from too much wear--and so it was not an entirely unexpected outcome.

I found and ordered a new laptop, but experienced repeated problems with the company I ordered from repeatedly canceling the order, then not responding when I contacted their customer service about the issue. After resolving a particularly grating incident where they attempted to collect payment after having canceled my order, I finally ordered from a different company, and have been forced to wait for its arrival since then. I was eventually able to restore partial functionality to my old laptop, but it remained unpredictable and difficult to work from. Several other factors hit me simultaneously; I was accepted into a master's program that will be requiring me to teach undergraduate classes starting in the fall, and have hit the high point in my undergraduate work while also returning to my school's Japanese program to complete my last semester. Various other issues, like my PayPal account having been potentially compromised, kept drawing my attention during all this. Unfortunately with so much weighing down, it's been hard to find time to write. I can't remember the last time I had a moment where there was nothing demanding my immediate attention. During this time I remained hesitant to use the Blogger mobile app, as it's infamous for reverting posts to previous versions, and deleting them outright.

My replacement computer arrived today, and while I am bringing Tamer Union back up to speed, I'd encourage you to look at a side project I had originally wanted to launch before losing computer access. I began collecting information about the Rockman EXE x Hanayashiki event on the side several weeks ago, and when I realized there were no large outlets reporting on it I chose to aggregate them on a webpage. It's a small project and not one that's particularly demanding, but it's interesting that Capcom chose to cash in on EXE’s 15th anniversary all the same.

Currently there are several things to address. Prior to this, I was working on translating an important interview with Aoi Eir on the meaning of Accentier and her thoughts on Digimon. I also have an exclusive multipage interview with Taiki from ILLUSTRATION 2016 that I have yet to power through.This is on top of the updates that I never got a chance to write, and the glaring elephant in the living room; -next 0rder- launched today. My LP of it will be delayed by the shipping time, and the fact that unlike with Cyber Sleuth, I will not be doing a blind LP. Blind LPs, while interesting, are much slower in the long run than playing through the game once and then playing through for the web after. Fortunately, my university's spring break starts up next week.