Update 3.0

      Things have been good lately. You might even say great. I've been getting fewer hours at work these last two weeks but I've been using that free time wisely, getting in some great guitar practice. I'm back on the guitar grind working on jazz standards and improvising. It's been fun. Today I was working on Wes Montgomery's Four on Six. I can solo through the changes pretty well on that tune. I've also been watching a ton of anime, sleeping a lot, and just relaxing in general, sometimes even hanging out with my buddies. Life has been so good! This past Saturday I went to a fighting game event at CSUN (local college) where we played Smash 4, Blazblue, and Street Fighter V all night. It was a great night and some of the guys that go to the tournaments at Fire and Dice were there. I got to show off my skills with Bayonetta and I was able to dominate some people that were there on a big screen classroom projector. I would say that I've definitely gotten better as a player, especially my spacing and my neutral in particular but there are still people who are just more experienced than me. Meaning they've just played the game longer than I have and they know the ins and outs of more characters than I do. There were some guys there who were super good with like every character, it was cool to see. I'm more of a two main characters type of guy. If my Bayonetta doesn't stand a chance than most likely my Zero Suit Samus will probably lose and I'm more the type of guy to stick to my guns and just play the same character I tried to fight you with first. It was a great event! I just randomly hit up the guy organizing the event on Facebook and asked him for a ride, and lo and behold I got a ride! It all worked out because he doesn't live too far away from me. He's become a friend of mine that I look forward to hanging out with more in the future.
     I'm looking forward to the the end of this month in particular because on the 18th Pokken Tournament comes out and also I'm going on vacation with my family out on the ocean. I'm going to bring my Wii U so I can practice smash when I'm not relaxing out on the beach. I've been getting in some good use of my Ipod at work on my breaks listening to a lot of Coltrane. The jazz fire is still within me. I haven't forgotten about music and jazz in particular. In addition, when I went into work yesterday I saw the cover of the new Guitar World magazine and it has Dave Mustaine on the cover. He's really come a long way since Megadeth broke up twice, and now he has a new killer album with a Brazillian guitar virtuoso named Kiko Louriea. A lot of good things are coming up and a lot of good things have been happening recently. I would like to get more hours at work but sometimes its good to just take some time off and chillax. I'm planning on going to the next tournament at Fire and Dice tomorrow so we'll have to see how I do there. My record at smash tournaments is such a bad numbers game (0-2, I've only beaten two people in tournament) but when I think about how I've evolved as a player you can see that I've improved at the game so much that its incredible. At the same time though I need to have those good tournament results otherwise its just all talk. See ya on the next post where I'll tell you all about the tournament. This time I'm going to stay until the end and see who wins. It'll be great to watch the grand finals set. I want to say thank you for reading the blog whoever you are. The blog has reached 7,000 views which is just insane for a no-name music/gaming joe that's just started up their blog. I want to become bigger and reach a wider audience but this is definitely a good start. I'll definitely find ways to keep the blog entertaining and interesting. One of the things I want to get back into is the jazz album review series I used to do back in 2015. That was pretty exciting for me as a jazz fan and I believe I could go far as a music critic. The gaming stuff has taken over most of my writing at the moment but I will write about other stuff as well in the future. Thanks for reading!