Breakfast with Amber

October 2022: Fresh Squid Drip

With that, we move on to October 2022. I was young and obsessed with Splatoon 3. (Honestly, though, who isn't obsessed with Splatoon 3.) I made sure to play every day, and like with practically everything else, I had a system. I would alternate between different game modes every day. Once I hit level 4, I unlocked Salmon Run, so I alternated between Turf War and Salmon Run, and then when I hit level 10, I'd circle between Turf War, Ranked, and Salmon Run.

Technically, I could have started playing Ranked as soon as I imported my Splatoon 2 save data, but I just wanted to get some practice with the easier modes before I jumped into Ranked. Even with the individual Ranked modes, I didn't start playing them all indiscriminately. Following the advice of the official Splatoon 2 Splategy Guide, I started out playing Splat Zones, which at this point was the only Ranked mode I had ever played. Once I won a series of Splat Zones, I moved on to Tower Control, which at this point is better than Splat Zones, as I've discovered. Once I won a series that was majority Tower Control, I moved on to Rainmaker. If I were still playing Splatoon 3, once I won a series that was majority Rainmaker, I'd move on to Clam Blitz. I reached Rainmaker in spring, and even though it's December, I don't think I would have made it to Clam Blitz by now because Rainmaker ain't easy.

But it was still October, and my birthday was coming up. Just like last year, I was going to go all out (if your definition of going all out is watching the Invader Zim movie on a Netflix free trial, painting the BTS logo on a pumpkin at a Halloween party, and heating yourself some Hormel spaghetti for dinner). I had already had most of my day planned out. First, I'd watch The Bad Guys on Peacock first thing in the morning because I had reviewed it on Studio 21 when it came out and thought it was worth watching just for the animation. Second, I'd put on the "Peace Love K-Pop" shirt I had just gotten from my parents and head out to Mabee for breakfast, and I wasn't going to get my ordinary breakfast. I was going to get whatever they were making at the grill station, which is usually pancakes or something like that.

I'd have most of the morning off, but then I'd go to game development and then dance, which I thought would be fun to do on my birthday, but then I discovered that class was canceled. Luckily, that gave me more time for lunch. That day, I was going to go to Pap's Burgers, a local burger restaurant that was in the pop-up stand at Coates Student Center that day, and get myself a chicken sandwich and fries. Even though I didn't have dance that day, I had something else to entertain me: one of my favorite YouTubers, Failboat, decided to stream himself playing After Alterna in Splatoon 3 but with the twist that he had bought $400 worth of gift cards and would announce some of the numbers each time he died so that whenever he finished saying a number, the chat could race onto the store's website and try to redeem it. I was in that birthday mode, so I spent $10 of my own money to send a superchat saying it was my birthday. His superchat-reading text-to-speech system, Lil Chatty, was on the fritz, so I was worried he'd miss it, but he eventually noticed it and wished me a happy birthday. I was honored even though it took him three tries to pronounce my name. It's alright. I'm used to it.

I had to leave the stream and stop my lunch short (yes, it was a lot of food, enough that I still had some left at 2:15) so I could go to my Jane Eyre seminar, making this the second year in a row I had a three-hour-long seminar on my birthday. Afterwards was the Swashbucklers hall dinner, which just so happens to be on Wednesdays. I usually didn't go, but I figured I'd tag along this time since I was my birthday. Then that evening, I'd partake in the Trinity tradition of getting dunked in the fountain by my friends except it wasn't so much dunking as it was watching me as I ran a lap in the fountain.

But what was I supposed to do between dinner and the fountain dunk? That was the question rattling through my brain as I paced across the Studio 21 set on the week before my birthday. What did I do last year? I swung by a trivia night being held by the Trinity pride club, but was that really it? Nothing on the docket seemed to be at the level of "big birthday celebration" I was craving. That's when I remembered I still hadn't played Splatoon 3 yet that day.