Pikachu Hori Battle Pad

Got my Pikachu GameCube controller today! Looks great, except it has to be hooked up to a Wiimote. Missed that little detail when I pre-ordered it :/

Super Smash Bros Soundtrack

Vince got this in the mail yesterday. Club Nintendo members get this for free after purchasing/registering the 3DS and Wii version for the game. This is one of the last few things to get from Club Nintendo before it shuts in a few months.

Still waiting for Mewtwo!

CHAPPiE

Vince and I watched “CHAPPiE” over the weekend. It was better than “Elysium” and the visual effects were amazing, as expected from Neill Blompkamp. My only major complaint for the movie was that it focused too much on Ninja and Yolandi (South Africa’s hip hop group Die Antwoord) than Chappie himself. I guess since I work at a robotics company, I was hoping to see the film cover more on robotics and artificial intelligence. “Big Hero Six” briefly covered this in their introduction, so I was expecting the same thing here. 

Nonetheless, Chappie was SO adorable and made the film worth watching.

ROH Wrestling

Vince and I attended ROH’s 13th Anniversary Show in the Mardi Gras Ballroom at the Orleans Hotel & Casino. It was our first time going to it and the card had a few familiar faces from WWE - Matt Sydal (Evan Borne) and Maria - and from TNA - AJ Styles and most recently, Samoa Joe. We haven’t been following ROH in a long while but this show gave us a reason to start watching again. I got myself a ROH shirt and Vince wore his Bullet Club shirt. We were there for nearly 5 hours o_o ROH Wrestling Vince and I attended ROH’s 13th Anniversary Show in the Mardi Gras Ballroom at the Orleans Hotel & Casino. It was our first time going to it and the card had a few familiar faces from WWE - Matt Sydal (Evan Borne) and Maria - and from TNA - AJ Styles and most recently, Samoa Joe. We haven’t been following ROH in a long while but this show gave us a reason to start watching again.

I got myself a ROH shirt and Vince wore his Bullet Club shirt. We were there for nearly 5 hours o_o

What? Another blog?!

Yup, another blog! This one is a little special because I want to track where Vince and I are to going this year. It's going to be somewhat of a travel blog, toy blog, and kitty blog. I'll try to cross-post here so that this bloggie doesn't get abandoned like my old Xanga and Livejournal blogs.

Vince & Sheila

  

http://vince-sheila.tumblr.com/

TIL: Student loans sucks

It's been a little over a year since I graduated from Institute-That-Must-Not-Be-Named: Online Division and while I'm pretty happy with the job position I'm currently in, I'm really not happy with my financial situation. In other words, I'm drowning with student loans, and it sucks.

First off, I know how I got here. I knew the big financial risk I was taking with going back to school. I knew the mistakes I made along the way. So there's no point in me ranting how I could've done things differently.... again. I'm one of the young adults that are faced with a high figure student loan debt that is significantly higher than their annual salary and are trying to find ways to deal with it.

So what did I do? First, I got severely depressed, which is hard not to do in this kind of situation. Even though I was making more money with my new job, I hated seeing such a big chunk of it going towards Sallie Mae every month. I depleted most of my savings account to pay off a few of the federal loans so I'm somewhat in a better position now but it still sucks because there's still more loans to take care of. I was bitterly jealous because Vince was student debt free, thanks to his family being smart with their money. He's able to splurge and save up, while I live in personal poverty. That feeling sucks.

So what did I really do? After browsing subreddits on student loans and personal finance, I decided to do something about it. Instead of being bitter about throwing money at Sallie Mae AND Navient, I decided to come up with a plan to really tackle my debt. I applied for IBR/PAYE, which can help you lower your monthly payments without having to defer or go into forbearance. THIS REALLY HELPS. You don't have to write a letter about your hardships, just see if you're eligible and apply for it. I was approved and I saw my payments go down by a lot. I had extra money but I had to discipline myself to use that extra money towards paying my private loan with the highest interest rate. Applying for IBR/PAYE extends the life of the loan but there's no penalty in paying more than the minimum amount.

I'm not happy with my financial situation and it still sucks but at least I'm determined to get this debt managed. Some people might be happy paying their loans for 10-25 years but I'd rather get out of debt fast.

Number of times "SUCKS" was used: 5

Cupcats are back! Well... sorta.

If the cupcat designs look familiar, it's because it's from Sugar Nyao.
This was a project my friend Pam and I were working on... and off... and on... and off. It never took off because it was never really decided what Sugar Nyao should be: is it artwork? A cute clothing line? Concept design for a game app? A webcomic? We thought of doing a kickstarter to make prints and shirts. We had a cute story developed for the cupcats and the human mascots, Sugar (with purple hair) and Nyao (with turquoise hair). I was really excited about this because I would be drawing again and I wanted to see if we could be the lucky few to get stuff like this off the ground.

So what happened? We got busy with life. Pam and her hubby, Joel, welcomed their first child and I was transitioning into a new job as well as graduating from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (Online Division). The project was never put on hold. It just lost steam.

One good thing about the downtime was that I got familiar with Illustrator. My god, vector makes everything so much easier. I was doing the previous stuff in Photoshop but I was spending too much time faking it to look like vector with the Paths and Pen Tool. So, instead of feeling bummed about Sugar Nyao, I decided to do it as a little art project for myself. The cupcat design is not original obviously but I wanted to do something fun with it.

 

Cosplaying cupcats? Sure, why not. I've seen cooler and/or weirder stuff at artist alleys anyways :)