April 26-27th, 2025
LVL UP EXPO 2025 took place April 25-27th, and lucky for me, I was able to go with my girlfriend, some of her family, and a friend (on Saturday). It was my first convention, and woo nelly did I have a good time, even if I walked around 32k steps and my feet are hurting like hell. Honestly it's all becoming a blur; not in the bad way of course, I had a fucking ball. I saw a lot of amazing cosplayers and that made me super happy (even got pictures! one with a Yuna (FFX), Travis Touchdown (No More Heroes), and Juri (SF6), bought stuff, ate food, fun times all around. We watched Smash both Day 2 and Day 3, Tekken day 2 (saw one of my classmate's competing!) The day 3 Smash match we watched (MkLeo vs Onin) was super cool and me and my girlfriend were like super interested in it. We also saw Hungrybox playing Wordle?? and one of the words (the one we got to see, at least) was Mango LOL.
Here's some of the stuff I got (half of it was my girlfriend's birthday gift to me :))
Charm of Juno from Overwatch 2 by x3Dustco!
In reality, Kiriko was there and she's my fav Overwatch 2 character (favorite to play, at least), but I wanted to let my girlfriend pick :D Was nice seeing some merch for my dying game....
Psyduck and Isabelle plushies!
I fought hard agaisnt the Psyduck (pretty expensive booth!!) but ultimately lost, but I still love him :D The Isabelle plushie was because I kept joking about it with my girlfriend (who is also named Isabelle), and on the last hour got me the plushie :p
Original character print by crystalheartedkat! I eyed this booth HEAVY during both days, and on the last one I caved and got this small print for just 5 bucks!!
Overall, I just had a really good time and this weekend was like the best ever!! God bless nerds.
— murohe, nicholas
April 10th, 2025
Ah.. It's been, what, 8 months since I last updated my blog? (on Neocities at least.) Safe to say, a lot has happened since the start of the school year, and I'm not complaining about any of it.
Wouldn't want to spoil the really fun part straight-ahead, so I'll give an overview on how life has been. In one word? Enjoyable. I've reconnected with a lot of people from freshman year, I've met some new friends, and I think I finally found my place at this school. I'm less afraid to be myself around people, and letting myself be myself has improved my wellbeing a lot (who could've thought?) I grew to like my classes, especially my APs (Stats and especially AP Lit) but in return, I now have a deep burning hatred for my animation teacher LOL. That's as bad as the year has been I think. Obviously I've had my downs but it's a lot easier to get myself out of those or just not let them change the course of my life.
So now!!! The really fun part!!!! On the whole "meeting new people" kick, I just so happened to sit near this girl because we had a lot of friends in common. We weren't 100% strangers, we had talked about 2 times in 2 years, and I sat behind her for the entirety of sophmore year (she didn't even know!) We hit it off embarassingly fast. One of our first one-on-one convos was about how we both had websites and how we're both into mid 2000s tech (if you can't see where this is going God you're oblivious.) August to November we get really close: we're both in the same friend servers and we had classes with eachother everyday. And apparently I didn't know this at the time, but this was a pretty good recipe for developing a crush on her. One thing leads to another and now we've been dating since November :D It's been a really fun ride so far, and don't tell her I said this, but I think I've been superglued to the car seat.... oh well!!
TLDR: Life is really fun when you hang with people who don't make you feel unwanted, I love my girlfriend, life is good.
— murohe, nicholas