Game Journal #50 - Persona 4, Shopping, Chests

Hey dudes! Man, it's sure been a while, huh? Don't worry, I'm not losing motivation or anything like that. The reason behind the delay in journals was that I was playing Persona 4 Golden with my friend. For those of you who don't know, Persona is a jrpg! So of course, I couldn't stop playing it until I finished it. I've tried to get into the Persona series before, (I played the first one but didn't get very far before I lost interest) so I wasn't expecting much. But it was really fun! And it was educational, too. Now I've got a ton more ideas for stuff to add to my game!

Speaking of, here's a small quiz for ya. Guess who my favorite character is from Persona 4 based on this image:

No peeking! Did you guess?

Ok, then time for the answer! Did you guess the delinquent looking guy in the middle? Well... BZZT! You're wrong! My favorite is actually the brown haired dude with the headphones.

Shocking, isn't it? If you know me well, you know that I think bad boys are super cool. And they are, yeah. But Yosuke (brown haired guy) reminds me a lot of Dan, he even calls me "partner" haha. I also really like comic relief type of characters too. Plus, he's the first character you get, and I literally used him in the entire game because he was so useful. Early characters that have awesome stats are, well... awesome! From a game dev standpoint, I really appreciate it, because you feel a really tight bond with the character at the end. He's also my second-favorite JRPG type, the technical character. Someone who can attack, heal, and raise stats decently, while also being a little tanky. To compare, Rowan would be the closest.

Kanji (delinquent dude) is my second favorite. He's THICC beyond belief. Seriously, he had like 200 more health than everyone else, I'd use the strongest healing item (400 hp) and he'd STILL have more left to heal. Incredible. Dude took so many hits for my team, and he's the strongest, too. Once I got him, I literally never removed him from my team, not even once. That's right, not even when there were a bunch of wind-using enemies, and none that were weak to electric, and strong to physical. Kanji still did a ton of damage lol. Love my tank characters, simple as.

Speaking of tanks... I don't know if it was just me, but did anyone else have Chie dying in one hit all the time??? Drove me nuts. Left her off the team and never touched her again. Many such cases, sad.

Ok, that's about all for my review. I had fun playing it, but I thought the dungeons could've been harder. I played on Very Hard, and yet I was one-shotting everything. The bosses were fine in difficulty though. Oh yeah, there's also a literal gachi dungeon level that made me die laughing. The boss literally had the male emoji (♂) as his weapons. Coincidentally, he was also one of the ♂hardest♂ bosses. HmmMmMmMMmMMmmm... man, it's been so many years since 2008, and yet gachi still makes me laugh my head off. Rip Billy Herrington, you'll always be the boss of my gym.

Oh yeah, and one tip: Make sure you craft this guy.

Look familiar to you? Yeah?

Yeah, he's literally the doot skeleton meme. I called him "Mr. Doot." Persona 4 is all about the Doot meta, boys. Once I crafted him, I used him for the rest of the game, including the boss, and the final boss, and the final final boss, and the final final final boss. Yeah, I don't know why there were so many. But they were fun.

Anyway, life update time! I've been working at FedEx for about 3 weeks now. It's pretty comfy. If I had to say if UPS or FedEx is better, I'd say that FedEx is better overall, but UPS is better if you want to date a middle aged dude. Haha! Seriously, there were so many! But like most middle aged dudes, a lot of them were married. This is the struggle of liking mature men, people. 99% of the time, there's a ring. It never even began, bros.

Back to FedEx. The work load is a lot easier and more varied than UPS. At UPS, I placed packages on a belt depending on where it was going. I had to memorize what went where, and sometimes the placement would change for the day, and... ugh. I'm not very good at memorizing, so it was stressful for me. Plus, there was a belt that was above my head, meaning I had to lift some packages above my shoulders. Not a problem if the package is 2 pounds, but a pretty big one when you get ten 50 pounders in a row. A lot of the guys who worked there for years eventually had to get shoulder surgery from it. Yeah... pretty grim. At FedEx, there's a lot more jobs to do, and you can choose what you want. You can work the belt, which is taking packages off a conveyor and putting them in place to be loaded on a truck. You can scan, which is scanning the placed packages to update the tracking information, and you can load, which is putting the scanned packages into the truck. I mostly load, and it's comfy. Nice and solitary, I can keep to myself, and I get to play Tetris with packages to make sure they all fit correctly. Some of the packages are really heavy (like over 100 pounds) but I can slide them on the floor, and I don't have to lift them over my head like at UPS. Occasionally I'll scan if I have to, but it's mind numbingly boring so I don't like it.

The benefits are generally better at FedEx. Referral compensation is 200$ (100$ at UPS) tuition compensation is $5000 per year (I think it was 1000$ at UPS) and there's a lot of advertisement for upward growth in the company. At UPS, there were guys I knew that had the same entry position for over 10 years. Crazy, huh? Only thing I'd say that UPS has over FedEx is that it's unionized, so if you care about that, I guess it's a plus. But generally, FedEx gang gang. It's kinda freaky how much free stuff they give out. I already have 2 shirts, 15$ of store bucks, and they gave out snacks for like an entire week. Plus, they have free ice machines. ICE MACHINES, bro. In a warehouse, that's like liquid gold. They also have water coolers near the work area. Occasionally they'll have Gatorade in there too, which is really awesome. One thing I'll say is that FedEx doesn't have an official "break time" like UPS did (15 minutes.) That freaked me out when I heard, but it made sense after I started working. It's not constant work like UPS, there's a lot of downtime between packages. So there isn't really any need for a break at all. Overall, it's comfy, and I recommend working there if you want to exercise and get paid. One of my supervisors gave me a compliment because I was always moving around, haha. Well, I'm trying to lose weight, so yeah. It's my only exercise for the day, and it's intense enough that it targets all my muscles and gets me some cardio, too. I was finally able to cancel my gym membership due to this job. 24 more dollars saved a month, baby. Only thing I wish is that the pay was better. It's not bad certainly, but I got a little more at UPS. Oh well!

Finally, on to the changelog! There's actually not much because I was playing Persona, but I figured it'd be nice to make a journal since it's been a while from my last post. Here we go.

AAAAAAAnd time for the last life update! Today, I tried to change the brakes on my car. I went to a shop and they quoted me at 400 bucks. To change pads and bleed brakes, mind you. Ri-di-cu-lous. So I bought a bunch of tools to do it myself. Impact wrench, brake fluid, pads, impact sockets, turkey baster, brake grease, brake cleaner, wrenches, C-Clamp, WD-40 (lol)... and guess what. All of that together was STILL less than 400 dollars. It's insane how some mechanics commit highway robbery, seriously. Anyway, I went to the woods to work on my car (as I didn't want to make noise in a residential area,) and everything was going well. Until... I accidentally took the brake hose off, and brake fluid spontaneously combusted all over my face. Thankfully I have super fast eye reflexes and closed them in time, or I would've been in big trouble. (Brake fluid is really corrosive for eyes.) Look at this diagram to understand.

To get to the brakes, you have to unscrew the caliper first, and the bolts are on the side. The brake hose is slightly below the top bolt, so I mistakenly unscrewed that instead. Rookie mistake! Checking my pads, I saw they were fine, so I just greased them up. But because I opened the brake hose, I got air in my brake lines, so I had to go to a mechanic to bleed them. Sad hours. But fortunately, when they raised my car they noticed the muffler needed to be rewelded to the top of the undercarriage. So that saved me like 400 bucks in future repairs. Everything turned out pretty well, I guess! Pro tip: Always go to an independent mechanics instead of the corporate ones. The indie guys told me my brakes were fine, corpos told me they needed to be changed. Sad!

8/3/22

• All party default moves added

8/12/22

• Work on shops

8/13/22

• Work on shops

• Implemented chests

8/14/22

• More work on chests

Small, but mighty. Here's the week's video.

See ya soon, broskis.