It's already over a month since our beloved Ruby left us for the next world, and I still miss her terribly.

I think I'd go so far as to say this is probably the most difficult loss I've ever had to deal with in my life to date. I've lost pets before, and it's always been a tragic, terrible experience, but there was something about Ruby in particular that felt… special.

Perhaps it was the fact that she and her companion (possibly mother?) Meg were the first "big" pets I'd ever had for myself. Andie and I had kept rats for a few years beforehand and they had all been delightful companions to have around (despite the smell of rat piss)… but a pet like a cat is a longer-term commitment, a companion for a more significant amount of your life, and someone with whom you develop a much more intimate connection.

In my experience with cats over the years, different cats are comfortable with varying amounts of intimacy.

The cat I grew up with, Penelope, was a somewhat haughty cat who very much believed that she was in charge of the household — but not in a purely selfish way. On the contrary, she could often be found "taking care" of us in various ways; my parents are very fond of telling the story how, when I was a very young child, she would sit outside my bedroom if I was ill, and if I started crying, she would come and fetch my mother. In her later years, she had that unique ability cats have to know when you need some company, and she would come and spend time with you to listen to your problems.

After Penelope passed away of old age, it wasn't long before my family decided that we didn't want to live without a cat, and so we acquired Kitty from a nearby rescue shelter. Kitty was not the name we would have given a cat, but she already knew and responded to it, so Kitty it was.

Kitty apparently came from a home where she had been somewhat terrorised by a dog, and as such was somewhat wary when we first got her. She was particularly afraid of going outside, and seemingly rather small for her supposed age. It didn't take long for her to understand that she had found herself in a loving family, however, and quickly blossomed into a cat who liked nothing more than to jump on your lap and fall over. Even if you were a self-professed "not a cat person". She was particularly fond of demonstrating this affectionate side of herself on our local rock star Don Airey (of Deep Purple fame) whenever he came to visit.

And Ruby… she was one of the friendliest cats I've ever come across. She adored me, and that was a wonderful feeling. Andie noted that Ruby would often come and "ask" her where I was when I wasn't yet home from work, and if I'd shut myself in the living room to record some videos, Ruby would always want to come in and join me.

If I was sitting on the sofa (which, let's face it, I usually am), Ruby would come and sit with me, and would always arrange herself in such a way that as much of her body as possible was resting against me. This was something that she did with such frequency that I even drew reference to it in my coverage of the visual novel series Nekopara last year.

Meg is extremely affectionate too, I have to add — and probably more so since Ruby left us — but it's hard not to miss those feelings of genuine love and warmth from someone who isn't here any more. I miss her so much, and I wish things could be different; I wish she didn't have to leave us so soon, and that I could be writing something happier right now with her softness resting against my thigh as it had done on so many other occasions.

But it's not to be. Ruby may be somewhere else now — somewhere that I hope she's as happy as she was when she was with us — but she'll also always be with me in my heart. I'll never forget her and the love she made me feel, and I'll strive to make her proud.

[Good morning! I drafted this yesterday and then got distracted by some combination of cats, making videos, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and/or Atelier Rorona. Apologies. I present it now for your delectation.]

Let us continue on our journey through my own personal Manor of Sleep, with the third and final room that seems to crop up regularly in my dreams.

This last one is much more mundane, but it's appeared often enough in my subconscious thoughts for it to feel like it's "important".

Whenever I visit this last room, it's always night time, and there's the feeling like the house is playing host to a party, but there's never anyone there. I'm on the ground floor, the details and layout of which are lost to the mists of the subconscious aside from what I'm about to describe, and despite knowing that something unusual is going on, I don't feel the need to go looking for people.

Where the dream becomes vivid and memorable is just before I reach the main room in question. I round the corner of a passageway on the ground floor, and walk down a couple of steps to a slightly lower level, though not a whole new storey of the building. Then I make a left turn and open a glass door to pass into what appears to be a long, thin conservatory of sorts.

The room has windows on all sides — even the one that connects to the corridor outside — and has covered tables down its left edge. Whenever I enter this room, these tables are always filled with various pieces of party food, but I never eat any of them. I always feel like I'm looking for someone or something when I come in here, so there's no time to eat; I never actually find them, though.

The exterior windows look out into a somewhat overgrown garden. Attempts have obviously been made to tame it so it isn't completely unmanaged, but there's still rather more foliage out there than one might see in a well-maintained outdoor area.

There's a piano in one corner of the room; a nice-looking but aged upright with music stacked atop it. I feel inclined to play it, but the someone or something I'm looking for is more important, so I never do.

Ultimately I never spend particularly long in this room, but for some reason the memory of it is unusually vivid. I'm sure it all means something, but as yet I'm at a loss. I find myself constantly expecting to walk into a house in reality and discover I'm actually in "the Manor of Sleep", but I feel the terrifying toilet I described in part 1 probably means this is unlikely to happen!

A brief break from the Manor of Sleep today to update you on my Slimming World progress, should you be interested.

It was our second week on the programme this week; our third week of attending the group. And it seems things have been going pretty well — over the course of those two weeks, I've lost a little over half a stone already.

This is very pleasing indeed. Based on my previous experience, the rate of weight loss tends to slow down a bit after the initial couple of weeks, but that's fine; I simply want an overall downward trend, because I often think back to how good it felt last time around when I dropped over six stone in total and could once again do things like fit into jeans, cross my legs and see my knob.

This time around Andie and I have been making a real effort with the "speed food" you eat on the programme; for the unfamiliar, Slimming World is based primarily around the concept of "free foods" that you can eat as much of as you like per day and still maintain your weight loss. These tend to be foods that provide energy without a ton of sugar and fat, so include everything from fruit and veg to things like pasta, rice and lean meat. "Speed" foods are a subdivision of the free foods that have particularly good energy density or something; they make you feel full and provide the nutrition you need while minimising calorie, carb and fat intake.

You're supposed to try and emphasise "speed" foods as much as you can on the programme — the ideal is apparently to try and incorporate them into each meal so that they occupy a third of your plate or more. Last time around, we struggled a bit to incorporate these in a practical manner; I, in particular, am not especially fond of a lot of vegetables, so chomping through a third of a plateful of them could sometimes feel like a bit of a chore, making meals somewhat less enjoyable.

However, we've come across a couple of good solutions this time around: frozen fruit in "overnight oats" and vegetable soup. The latter in particular is a revelation; it turns out that in a lot of cases, the vegetables I'm not a big fan of primarily irk me due to their texture rather than their flavour, and if you turn them into unidentifiable mush, I will happily down a whole bowlful of them, especially if said soup is seasoned nicely and perhaps has a bit of "free" meat in it.

"Overnight oats," meanwhile, if you're unfamiliar, involves getting a pot or bowl or something then creating a "layered" concoction involving 40g of oats, some fat-free yogurt and some frozen fruit. You then stick this in the fridge overnight and the fruit thaws, the yogurt sort of oozes through the gaps in the oats and the whole thing becomes… well, fruity, oaty mush, to be honest, but depending on the fruit you use, it can be very nice indeed.

One of the good side-effects of overnight oats, I've found, is that it takes quite a long time to eat for various reasons. You probably could shovel it down yourself, but I find with the acidity of a lot of fruit, it's something I prefer to take my time over a bit more. It's supposedly good to eat things more slowly anyway, because it allows your body to have time to tell you when it's full and satisfied rather than you feeling like you need a little something extra. To have something that seemingly makes me want to eat slowly would seem to be an effective way of managing this — and it's a much more substantial breakfast than a couple of cereal bars, too.

So anyway. That's all been going well so far. I hope the good progress continues; I'm feeling quite motivated at the moment after a long period of not being quite able to summon up the energy to get started on weight loss again. My aim is to end up feeling at least somewhat like I felt when I wrote this piece in 2015. We'll see how things go, however. Perhaps updating you all on my progress every so often will help keep me honest!

Ten days! A far cry off the 2,541 days I managed last time around, but every journey single step blah blah blah whatever. Don't forget if you're enjoying my ramblings here to share my Patreon page with other people and encourage them to sign up — it'd be great to get some more people reading.

Anyway, today I thought I'd continue my exploration of my own personal "Manor of Sleep" (which most people reading this will probably already recognise as a Project Zero 3 reference, but I thought I'd make that fact explicit just in case) that I started describing yesterday.

We shall leave the floor of two toilets behind today and proceed up to the top floor of the house. Up a wooden staircase that leads directly to a panelled wooden door we go; the door opens with a creak, leading us into an expansive attic room that is right in the pitched roof of the house. The ceiling has exposed beams, the floor is wooden — though thankfully not rotten like the toilet of terror — and the whole thing has an oddly "dark" atmosphere. Not in a menacing or evil sort of way; it's just the sort of room that you feel like a bright light would be inappropriate in.

The first time I recall dreaming of this room, I was actually preparing to move out of it. I don't know where I was going, but I was evidently in the process of packing up the room; some of my things were still there, but certain shelves were bare. On other occasions, my mind has visited this room while I still occupied it fully.

From the door, there's a short, narrow passageway that is just a little wider than the doorway. On the right side are some shelves that are set into the wall; they're pretty deep. On various occasions, these have been filled with video games, scale models and character figures, and books. When I dreamed of "moving out" of the room, it was in these shelves that I'd often find things that I'd thought I'd lost — things I'd been looking for for a long time.

The left wall opens up into the full width of the room after a short distance, and in the "alcove" created is a bed. This is quite low to the ground, but always looks extremely comfy. The duvet on it is a deep purple in colour, and the bed is always unmade, as if someone (or maybe I?) had just got out of it. The right wall, meanwhile, continues with the built-in shelves for about half of the total length of the wall, and then there is a traditional-looking work desk that is always covered with piles of hardback books.

There's a lamp over the head of the bed. This is one memory that's a bit hazy; I can't remember exactly how this lamp is attached to anything, though the amount of light it puts out (or lack thereof) reminds me of a childhood "clip-on" reading lamp I had with a flexible neck, leading me to believe it might be one of those clipped on to another shelf.

There's another lamp on the desk; one of those "banker"-style ones that I've always thought looked quite cool. It doesn't put out a lot of light into the room in general, but it lights up the desk and its contents very well.

A fairly normal room so far, albeit a dimly-lit one — the only light comes from those two lamps, as there doesn't appear to be a conventional ceiling light. What makes it stand out to me in my memory is the fact that the walls aren't bare; in fact, they're all completely covered in velvet drapes — again, a deep purple in colour, adorned with gold embroidery trim. The sort of thing you'd expect to see in a stereotypical fortune teller's establishment.

The built-in shelves on the right wall of the room also have these curtains attached; they're always tied back whenever I've seen them, but in theory it would be possible to draw the curtains and cover the contents of the shelves. Occasionally — though not every time I "visit", the shelves are also adorned with white fairy lights, which brings a welcome additional source of light into the room besides the lamp over the head of the bed.

The floor is bare but treated floorboards, but there is a large crimson-coloured rug in the centre of the empty space. This is soft to walk on, but not deep pile by any means; it makes the room feel less like an "attic" and more homely.

It's still an unusual, strange room, for sure, but it's one in which I feel oddly at peace. It's certainly a far cry from the terrifying portal to the poo dimension that the toilet just one floor below offered…

I've been having trouble sleeping off and on for the last few years.

I suspect this is mostly related to my anxiety issues, though just recently it hasn't been so much a sense of anxiety that has been keeping me awake as simply not being particularly comfortable.

A possible side-effect of this is that when I actually do get to sleep, I tend to have fairly vivid dreams. And, interestingly, I've found that some of them seem to be connected… or at least my brain has interpreted them as being such when I think back over them after the fact.

I often dream of a house. I've never seen the outside of the house, but I know it's a pretty big one. I have a feeling it may be inspired by a few large country houses that I've stayed in over the years — most notably the house my friend Tim grew up in, and a house that Andie and I stayed in for (if I remember correctly) her sister's birthday one year. It's not identical to either, though, just "inspired" by.

Different dreams have taken me to different parts of the house. I've never had a dream in which I go through the whole house, which is why I say I believe it's my brain "filling in the gaps" and connecting these dreams together rather than the dream itself explicitly stating those things. I shall attempt to assemble the "information" I know so far over the course of a few posts.

The first dream I recall having of the house took place on its middle floor. This mostly consisted of a long corridor that ran from one side of the house to the other, with a staircase at either end. There were stairs up to the top floor at just one end of this corridor.  The floor was carpeted and the fittings fairly "modern"; despite having the feeling of a country house, on this floor there were no exposed beams or anything, just fairly plain painted walls adorned with a few pictures down one side, and at least two doors on the other.

The two doors I can particularly remember both led to bathrooms. One of these bathrooms was perfectly normal, but for whatever reason I'd always find myself unable to get in there. Perhaps someone was in there, or perhaps I just felt "repelled" by it for some reason. This meant I would inevitably find myself drawn to the other bathroom; I don't recall that it was because of a particular need to go to the toilet or anything, I was just drawn there in this particular dream.

The other bathroom was not normal. In contrast to the rather modern corridor, the interior of this one had a bare wooden floor that had rotted quite severely. It was the kind of floor you step on and feel like you might go right through it. And there was some sort of peculiar space-time distortion in there that meant the toilet was actually much further away than it appeared to be at first glace.

As I approached the toilet, the floor finally gave way, splintering with a sickening crunch as a huge hole formed. I leaped back from it to prevent falling, but found myself peering into it regardless. Rather than the floor below, however, the interior of the hole appeared to contain some kind of portal; it was a swirling, violet-coloured tunnel adorned with brightly lit markings that rotated around it in a manner oddly reminiscent of a particularly distasteful 1970s lamp. The markings reminded me, oddly, of leopard-print.

This was obviously an unusual sight in itself, but I felt a particularly threatening aura coming from the hole and knew I had to get away from it as soon as possible. I realised a dull noise that had been present since I entered the room was increasing in volume and intensity, and I was being "pulled" towards the hole by an unknown force. Meanwhile, the toilet was starting to overflow with disgusting sludge that leaked down into the hole, further solidifying my feeling that I really didn't want to see what was in there.

I'd say I ran, but I'm pretty sure I woke up at that point, so I'm not sure if I actually did or not.

Anyway, that's the first memory I have of this strange house in my dreams, which probably says more about me than you wanted to know. More to come.

Yesterday was a little bit bleak, and for that I make no apologies; these posts are all about "the uncut Pete", as it were, and thus there will be an element of taking the rough with the smooth.

However, I'm also conscious that nobody wants to read doom and gloom all the time, so I'll make an effort to talk about something positive today. And the first thing that comes to mind when I try and think happy thoughts right now is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

I wrote on MoeGamer the other day about how I've always had slightly mixed feelings about the Super Smash Bros. games, and attributed those mixed feelings to the fact that I've never really "stuck with them" for very long. In the case of the Wii U version, this was primarily down to the relative lack of good single-player modes — this isn't to say that they were completely absent or anything, but it lacked a sense of real "structure" to what you were doing.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Smash Ultimate hereafter) addresses this common complaint very well indeed, with a wide selection of excellent single-player modes alongside its flexible multiplayer options. I've been having a lot of fun with it since release day, and in the process it's also helping me to understand and appreciate the game as a whole a bit better.

The main feature for many people is the Adventure mode, also known as World of Light. Here, you begin with just Kirby and have to walk around a map, clearing various fights and unlocking equippable Spirits or playable fighters in the process. Each fight has its own distinct characteristics that relates to the Spirit in question, adjusting the game rules and overall "handling" of the match in various ways, forcing you to adapt to different situations and, where possible, to make good use of Spirits you already own to counter various situations.

Much like Mario Tennis Aces' similar Adventure mode, World of Light is designed to train you how to deal with various situations in the game. Sometimes you'll be up against a foe that spams a particular move, so you need to figure out a way to get around that. On one occasion, you face a giant enemy in a stamina-based battle; they don't attack, but you have a very tight time limit, meaning you need to figure out what are the best ways to inflict a lot of damage quickly. And sometimes there will be environmental hazards to deal with alongside your opponents.

I've so far found this to be a remarkably effective means of encouraging me to experiment with different tactics, strategies and usage of moves. There's a really satisfying sense of achievement when you clear a tough battle, and there's always a wide choice of things to do if you find yourself particularly stuck on one specific challenge.

Outside of World of Light, I've been playing a lot of Classic mode to unlock characters. This is a conventional "arcade-style" format in which you play through a linear sequence of stages; the twist is that each character on the roster has their own "route" through the game that is broadly themed around them in terms of both opponents and rules. Ryu, for example, has a series of stamina matches against foes whose colour schemes have been chosen to make them resemble various Street Fighter II characters — Donkey Kong with green fur to represent Blanka, that sort of thing. At the conclusion of each character's Classic mode, there's a boss fight in which you take on an enemy with an actual health bar; these foes aren't just Master Hand and Crazy Hand from previous Smash games, either. Instead, there are several different bosses to take on, with the one you confront being broadly thematically appropriate to the character you've picked. Simon Belmont fights Dracula, for example, while Young Link fights Ganon. Rathalos from Monster Hunter even puts in an appearance, though I forget offhand who gets that particular pleasure as their final confrontation.

Besides being mechanically solid, full of content and overall well-designed, the thing I'm enjoying most about Smash Ultimate is that it's just an unashamed celebration of gaming. It's ridiculous and doesn't make any sense; it's just designed to make you happy. It's one of many games where Nintendo is embracing its background as a toy manufacturer — and indeed, the very concept of Super Smash Bros. since the beginning has supposedly been a kid playing with action figures than any of this actually happening.

As nonsensical and joyfully ridiculous as it may be, Smash Ultimate is most definitely Nintendo at play… and inviting you in for the fun, too. It's hard to recall the last game I played that was so antithetical to modern cynicism and apathy as Smash Ultimate is; whether you love or loathe actually playing it, it's hard to deny the fact that, more than anything, it wants to make everyone around it smile.

One of the most common mental health complaints I see people talking about these days is "impostor syndrome".

The term was apparently originally defined in 1978, but, like many mental health issues, it has become much more widely recognised and understood over the course of the last few years. People are a lot more comfortable and confident talking about such issues now we have the Internet; for all we complain about our online world being full of "toxicity" and trolls, it's hard to deny the feeling of connection one can feel from being able to put something out there and hear back from people who truly understand you, even if they're thousands of miles away.

I wouldn't say I suffer from impostor syndrome regularly, but there are occasions when it does hit me. And when it hits, it tends to hit pretty hard, bringing with it a mild to moderate feeling of anxiety. The trouble with it is, that attack of anxiety doesn't have an immediately obvious, concrete trigger, and thus it's difficult to take steps to deal with it. And, as someone who has a bit of a problem with anxiety, those anxious feelings then tend to stick around for a while.

Ultimately I just have to try and "talk myself down", as it were. When I start feeling impostor syndrome at work, I need to tell myself that I'm not the only person who makes mistakes or doesn't understand things at times. When I start feeling impostor syndrome over my creative projects — particularly MoeGamer and my videos — I need to tell myself that my priority has always been having fun with them; I'm doing them for myself, and the fact that anyone is reading and watching them, let alone financially supporting them, is something incredibly special that I'm enormously thankful for.

On that note, I have a sincere request, dearest Patrons. I've been hovering somewhere between $70 and $80 a month for over a year now here on Patreon, but I'm really keen to grow this page and my creative projects in general. I'd love to, at the very least, break the $100 a month mark in the new year.

So my request is thus: if you enjoy my work, please do share it with your family and friends… and share this Patreon page, too, especially if you feel they might enjoy these daily updates alongside my work on the main site. And please feel free to tag me in when you do so! A simple share of an article on social media can lead to some interesting discussions.

I have always believed that creators should get paid for the work they do — and this applies to me, too. I work hard on MoeGamer as a passion project, but it's something I've grown to be really proud of over the course of the last few years. Just a simple like, comment or share on social media brings me reassurance that I'm not crazy for doing what I do and being so emotionally invested in it; someone signing up to become a Patron makes me more grateful than you can possibly understand.

Apologies if this comes across a little like e-begging, but my Patreon earnings have been yo-yoing like crazy recently and it's been bringing me a little of that impostor syndrome anxiety I've described above, off and on. So if you're able to help in your own small way, I'd greatly appreciate it… probably more than you realise!

Thanks for listening. Getting this off my chest has helped a little. Now to try and distract myself for the rest of the day!

You may recall that yesterday I was somewhat bamboozled by the fact I had received a "delivery failed" notification from Amazon for my copy of Smash Bros, yet somehow the game had still arrived.

Well, today I solved the mystery. I figured I'd pop along to the post office just in case someone had made a terrible mistake somewhere; the worst that could happen is that I'd end up with two copies of Super Smash Bros, in which case, yay, free trade-in credit.

Turns out the Royal Mail had messed up; while the Amazon package was delivered successfully, there were also two other packages (pictured above) which couldn't be delivered: one required a signature, and one was too big to go through the letterbox. As such, the postman had recorded the failed delivery and attached this information to the Amazon tracking; the other two packages had not come from Amazon, however. Confusion ensued.

Doubtless you're champing at the bit to discover exactly what was in these mysterious packages that I have now retrieved. So I shall keep you in suspense no longer, dear reader.

The white package was from CEX, our national chain of second-hand games stores. After writing my MoeGamer Awards piece the other day about collecting for the Wii U, I figured it was time to add a few more Wii U titles to my collection. The Wii U is interesting in that there aren't a huge number of games that are exclusively available for it, but those that are exclusives are well worth having. In other words, it's well within most people's reach to have a "complete" Wii U collection, of at the very least the exclusive releases; I'm probably not going to bother with the multiplatform games that also had a Wii U release, because the PS4 versions of those will be better in most cases. Also a lot of them are titles I'm not especially interested in.

Anyway, these are four games that I was missing from my collection, and prices seem to be dropping gradually for Wii U games, so I figured I'd pick these up while they weren't terribly expensive. I anticipate in a few years Wii U's small install base and status as a "failure" will make it and its software quite sought after by collectors, so I'm trying to fill out that library now while everyone still just thinks "lol, Wii U".

The second was from boutique publisher Strictly Limited Games who, like their more well-known counterpart Limited Run Games, release physical versions of digital-only games in strictly limited quantities. I saw a while back that they had some Vita copies of shoot 'em up Gundemoniums still available, so I snagged one. Gundemonium Recollection, a previous incarnation of this game for PC and PS3, is one of my absolute favourite shoot 'em ups, so I was very happy for the opportunity to own some sort of physical version of the game. I'm not sure offhand how Gundemoniums differs from its predecessor, but I'm interested and excited to find out.

Well, if I can drag myself away from Super Smash Bros. that is… I'm making good progress on unlocking the roster!

Moments after I wrote that post yesterday, I thought "I'll just see if Smash has been delivered yet", only to discover a notification from Amazon that they'd attempted and failed to deliver it.

Needless to say, I was extremely disappointed by this, but since the notification arrived just a few minutes before I was going to nip home for lunch anyway, I thought I'd see if I could catch the postman and acquire the bounty he was now holding hostage.

To my surprise, when I reached my house I discovered an Amazon package pushed through my letterbox containing a copy of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. And a card saying that the Royal Mail had missed me. So anyway. A happy ending, if a bizarre one.

Also Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is very good indeed, thank you very much, so I am looking forward to exploring that further over the festive period. Chris and I will also likely be talking about it in detail on the next episode of The MoeGamer Podcast, which should hopefully be in a little over a week or so, all being well. So please look forward to that! (In the meantime, catch up on our previous episodes here; we're really proud of what we've put together for this show to date!)

Anyway. Onto the main point of today's post, which is to share how much Christmas my wife Andie has successfully festooned our house with. Here's a tree with a cock in it:

For those curious, the cock in question is a Fleshlight-brand "Mr Limpy" big floppy cock that I bought Andie as a joke gift a few years back. And yes, just a joke; being a big floppy cock it's not… ah, "functional" as such, though I understand that some trans men make use of it as a "packer" (work it out) if they feel like they want to be particularly well-endowed. It's travelled around with us ever since, and I always like to see it in the Christmas tree. And occasionally whirl it around my head as dear Lord, is it ever gloriously stretchy and fun to swing around like a lasso.

The tree sits at the near side of the living room; here's the other aspect, which is actually looking surprisingly bare, now that I look at it! The game shelves remain unadorned, though the ceiling has now been decorated with some shiny chain things that are pretty much as old as Andie and me. They're still holding up surprisingly well, much as I believe my parents are still in possession of a number of Christmas decorations from my childhood and even earlier.

The TV unit is at least surrounded by fairy lights, however, which is a nice look. On the TV you see my YouTube video on Atari 8-bit classic Pharaoh's Curse, which I was checking a bit of information on while preparing another video today.

And this is the stairway up to, uh, upstairs. It is probably the most Christmassy part of the house at the moment. Though Andie still has some decorations left, so I'm pretty sure there are going to be more adornments in various locations before the evening is through.

Hope you're having a pleasant weekend. I am! Nothing to worry about, so I can just sit back and enjoy the grind of unlocking everyone in Smash…

It was an absolutely miserable  morning today, with torrential downpours. Not an environment particularly conducive to getting up and trying to be productive.

Still, it's brightened up a bit now, and I'm in a reasonable mood today. I'm not crippled with agonising pain like I was yesterday morning, I lost 3.5lb in the first week of Slimming World (a little less than I hoped based on past experience, but still a good result!) and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is out today.

I wrote a little about my thoughts on the upcoming Super Smash Bros. Ultimate over on MoeGamer the other day, so check that out if you want to know a bit more; I won't reiterate what I said there save for the fact that I'm looking forward to trying the new game, and feel like the more substantial single-player content is going to keep me interested in it for a lot longer than previous installments.

Last night, aside from the great weigh-in, was spent re-acquainting myself with Atelier Rorona via its recent "DX" release on Nintendo Switch. I was fortunate enough to acquire review codes for the whole Arland trilogy, so now I'm intending to cover those in January. I know I said a little while back that I wouldn't be doing a whole series in one go again, but… well, I just got £80 worth of free games on the understanding that I'd write about them, so I better write about them!

Besides, I'm already familiar with Rorona from playing its two previous releases, the games themselves aren't super-long for a single playthrough, and if necessary they're ripe for further exploration in my New Game Plus series of videos, where I take on various titles' postgame content. Well, currently just Project Zero's postgame content, but that's the long-term intention anyway.

I've been meaning to write about the Arland games in one form or another since their PS3 release, so it's nice to finally have a good reason and incentive to. Plus I get to have them in pleasingly "complete" editions on a handheld system — the only thing I'm a bit sad about is the fact they have no physical releases, but at least I have the original PS3 games boxed. And you never know, maybe Limited Run Games or some such boutique publisher will end up putting out a proper physical version at some point in the future. You never know!

Rorona is a game that is special to me, but it's hard to say exactly why. I just really like its "comfy", pleasant nature; it's a pleasure to play, and all its characters are just a delight to hang out with. That said, it also has a few bittersweet memories attached to it; it was one of the last games I covered at USgamer, and a title that I clashed with my "replacement" Bob Mackey over, because Bob Mackey is a massive bellend who thinks a game having cute girls in it is "creepy". But fuck him. Positivity! Breathe.

Anyway. I just have to survive the usual Friday tedium until this afternoon, when I can go home and enjoy being bad at Super Smash Bros. once again. I'm looking forward to exploring the new game, and no doubt there'll be some videos and/or some articles on the subject in the near future, so please look forward to that!

I hope you have a good Friday!