Breakfast with Amber

September 2022: The Splat Grind

Like I said in June, I got an internship. Mom suggested I find one so that I have some work experience before I actually enter the workforce, and what I found was Relevnt. I applied in May and got accepted in June at what was labeled as an interview. The internship was virtual, which was a weight off my shoulders because I don't have a car, and Lyfts ain't cheap, so I didn't have to worry about going to a place. I could just make podcasts from the comfort and privacy of my dorm room.

That's what Relevnt was, a podcasting app. Well, it's a group chat app with live podcasting, so there wasn't any recording audio, adjusting the levels, adding music and sound effects, none of that. In fact, when I took a podcasting class in spring, I was surprised by how much work went into a podcast. On Relevnt, you just hit record and start talking. Now every voice crack and misspoken word is on the internet forever.

My job was to create one or two podcasts per week on one of the Relevnt Originals channels, which were run by Relevnt itself. I picked the Gamer Talk channel because I am such a gamer. My first idea was called See You In Rayman 4. It walked the line between talking about video game facts and video game opinions; I'd pick three games that all had one thing in common and talk about how each one related to that original topic. For example, the first episode was "Good Game, Wrong Franchise," and it was about three games from well-known franchises that had good ideas and execution, but they performed poorly in comparison to the rest of the series because they were a completely different genre and probably should have just been a standalone game or the start of its own series. The games I chose were Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, the car-building sequel to the beloved platformer, Star Fox Adventures, which has the rail-shooting mascot going on a Zelda-like adventure and was going to be its own game before Miyamoto slapped Fox's name onto it, and Crash of the Titans, which is more of a beat-em-up than the platformers Crash Bandicoot is known for.

Just do one of those a week for the semester, and I should be good. That is, until Splatoon 3 came.

Check the date. It's September 2022, and the release of Splatoon 3 is just around the corner. It also just so happens that at one of our weekly meetings, our manager, Sama, said she wanted us to make one podcast a month on Welcome to Relevnt, a channel people are automatically dropped into when they join the app. I volunteered for September 9, the release date for Splatoon 3, because I had an idea: I was going to tell Splatoon stories until I ran out of Splatoon stories.

I opened up a Google Doc and started writing down all of the memorable moments I could think of from my days of playing Splatoon 2. I wrote about how I got Splatoon 2 and how I chose the Inkbrush as my main weapon, about the time I went a whole Turf War without getting splatted and the time I made it to the 7-second mark before getting crushed by a Splat Roller, about internet connectivity issues, about breaking up a squid party and getting hunted by the partiers, about the absolutely abysmal Salmon Run round I had that made me stop playing, about all the Splatfests I was in.

Once I was done with Splatoon 2, I moved on to the Splatoon 3 Splatfest World Premiere, which had already happened at this point. I picked Team Rock so I could say "Team Rock, blasting off at the speed of light!" The Splatfest would last 12 hours on a Saturday, including during D&D, so that morning, I sent a message in the GroupMe saying, "If you see me on my Switch tonight, it's because I'm playing the Splatoon 3 Splatfest World Premiere. The splat grind stops for no one."

Andrew replied, "Document each game you make top of the leaderboard up until the beginning of the session and I'll give you an increasing inspiration die starting at a d4."

I had no idea what leaderboard he was talking about.

William asked what team I was on. I said Rock. He said, "Yes!!!