Late Summer Miscellania
Oct 14, 2026 - digitalily
Mid-October already, and not a ton of sanding work completed to show for it ^^;So it goes.
VCFMW 2026
Earlier last month I ended up attending Vintage Computer Festival Midwest for the first time. I had some awareness of it previously, but it wasn't until I saw the youtuber LGR's vlog of his trip to it last year (which, doesn't feature VCFMW itself a ton, but still) that I became really interested.
I'm really no expert when it comes to the vast majority of what was on display, but it was a very cool experience getting to see what people are doing with older tech, and the way in which these devices were impactful back in the day. A lot of things don't have such an important history, though, and the sheer number of frankly bizarre devices of the early 00s demonstrates that well enough. I ended up quite tempted by this small yet wide little netbook despite the fact that it has a horrendous battery and terrible ergonomics, but it looked very interesting so what can I say? And being tempted is something you really have to watch out for, as most tables were selling certain pieces. VCFMW is the kind of event where participants are constantly on the look out for some white whale or the other, as one man's trash may very well be someone's treasure. I was glad to catch a couple of booths with PC-98 Touhou games on display and for passers by to try their hand at, which was definitely a contributing factor to attending.
I'll tell you why not- because:
Modding My Own GBA SP
Well, I guess I have a backup in case something goes wrong? ... was my justification, but I quickly discovered that the risky part of the mod (replacing the charging port with a USB-C port) was in fact notorious for leading people to ruin their SPs so I decided against doing it and just did a screen replacement and shell swap.
The translucent purple is quite good in my opinion, though I think the texture leaves something to be desired. Fortunately just replacing the shell is second nature, but I expect to stay with this for a while. It's also amazing to me that you can load up a micro SD and play ROMhacks on original hardware this easily. I suppose by virtue of needing to be compatible with the emulators they typically run on it shouldn't be too surprising they also work here, but it's a novel thing for me so I find it quite cool.
Hatsune Miku x MTG
A Secret Lair Hatsune Miku themed Commander deck was released and despite my resistance to dropping more money on Magic this was a perfectly reasonable exception, especially since it allowed me to experiment with custom Dragon Shield card sleeves, which I think turned out quite nicely.
Game Things
While at VCFMW, BlizzCon was going on, during which a new character was announced for Heroes of the Storm for the first time in 6 years. HotS is a game I've put a lot of time into over the years and seeing the end of maintenance mode was not something on the bingo card given all the mismanagement the game (and Blizzard in general) has had. But with it being the first announcement and then hinting at another character being in development, things are looking nice for now. Time will tell if development truly gets reinvigorated long term, so here's to hoping.
RuneScape: Dragonwilds also had its 1.0 release which I played alongside another friend. 1.0 is a bit of a strong word given a lot of the bugginess and quality & polish issues the final area has, but this is a game that has gone quite far in the short amount of time it has had, from there not really being any idea of how it would do to being successful enough they released and executed on an ambitious roadmap to get to where we are now. It's a very cool thing to see. There was some notion that Jagex's game ventures that weren't RS3/OSRS were doomed to fail, and while Dragonwilds does still cling on to the RuneScape name, it's cool to see them finally get this success. Success which, alongside player requests for larger persistent Dragonwilds worlds, led to a very ambitious early announcement of RuneScape 4 at this year's RuneFest. As an OSRS player I don't imagine it'll ever be able to truly replace it for me, but I'll absolutely be checking it out, as I'd love to see the open world bones of Dragonwilds improved upon in an MMO context.
And that's more or less it for now. I have a pending update on the Tomoe cosplay (I am really bad about taking photos as I go along so bear with me) and while I'm not 100% decided on it yet, a post on Big Walk, which I've gone through most of by now, but we'll see! Until next time!