Summer Recap
Baseball
I got really into baseball this year. I’ve always been a (very) casual baseball fan, but this year I decided to really follow the season. There are lots of fun story lines to follow, from Shohei Ohtani being the best baseball player ever, to Jacob Miziorowski crazy fastballs, to the White Sox making playoffs after a 100-loss season. My family are all longtime Giants fans, but watching their season was incredibly depressing, so I decided they would be my secondary team and that I would instead follow the Arizona Diamondbacks, which felt natural, being from Arizona. Plus, they share a similar Dodgers rivalry that the Giants do. It’s been awesome, though now a bit stressful as the Dbacks are still barely in the race for the postseason. This weekend is the end of the regular season. I want to believe!
I was able to go to two games at Chase Field this season. In June, I saw the Dbacks take on the Dodgers, and even got to see Shohei Ohtani pitch! I may hate the Dodgers out of obligation but it’s hard not to be a fan of Ohtani. This was a weeknight game, and it was packed, though unfortunately it was mostly Dodgers fans. The Dbacks got shut out here, which was disappointing, but it was an awesome experience nonetheless.
Earlier this month, I went to another game, this time a day game against the Phillies. This one was much more chill, with a sparse crowd and a good amount of Dbacks fans. We got pretty great seats, on the second level behind the home dugout.
While the Dbacks won this game, it was pretty boring, ending 1-0 off of a home run from Dbacks catcher James McCann.
The baseball season has been so fun and I look forward to the postseason!
LCS Finals
Later in June, the North American LCS finals were at ASU’s Mullet Arena. Even though I haven’t been following pro League of Legends as closely as I have in the past, I wanted to take the opportunity to go see it live. The last live League event I went to was Worlds 2016 in San Francisco, so it has definitely been a minute. Live League of Legends is so hype, the arena losing their minds every time a fight broke out in the game was amazing. LYON won the grand finals in a commanding 3-0 victory against Team Liquid, and qualified for the (then) upcoming Mid-season Invitational alongside the best teams in other regions. I loved seeing live League again, I hope there are more events in Arizona in the future!
Gunpla
I was able to build two Gunpla High Grade kits. I’ve been enjoying these a bit more than Transformers recently, because they cost less and are much higher quality than a lot of the recent figures Hasbro has been putting out. The build process is pretty relaxing too. I usually put something to watch on the TV (like a baseball game!) and then get to work. I’m planning to put together a page for these kits.
School
I also took a graduate computer architecture course over the summer. So far my masters classes have been fun and rewarding, and while I did learn a lot in this class, the project setup and especially grading timeline (6 weeks for the first grades to come through) led me to burn out pretty bad. As a result, I’m taking the fall semester off for a much needed mental reset. It has been so nice to work on my side projects again, including this website, and also make progress on my video game backlog.
And that is pretty much it for my summer update! I’m going to do my best to not go a year between site updates again.