Every year without fail since I started posting uninteresting excerpts from my life on the Internet, I've made a post to mark my new age on my birthday. This year, I was still recovering from an illness - we were still able to go out to a fondue restaurant in the evening, but I didn't want to look at a screen and so I missed the day itself. Therefore, now that I'm a little better I'm cheating by artificially modifying the time of the post - the only remaining symptom is that my ears are blocked and so I can't really hear, and as the television is currently on, this leaves my present situation substantially improved.

Receiving birthday gifts has made me feel younger in a very welcome way again, though - something due in no small part to lupineangel having given me two 90s gamebooks at Furfright that I subsequently forgot to even mention. One is a tie-in with The Crystal Maze and the other is a Sonic one, and they both use elements from their inspiration show/game in odd and fascinating ways. The most striking thing about the Sonic book (quite apart from how it was written by someone who enjoys watching people suffer and consists mainly of blind left/right choices with no possible distinction between the right and the wrong route) is how British it is - I had obviously never really noticed the distinct vernacular that Britain has when I lived there, but it's now very strange reading these characters talking like they went to school at Grange Hill.

To my great surprise I opened a 3DSXL on the morning of the 15th! It's very sleek and metallic blue and looks slightly like a very wide mechanical frog with piercing camera eyes - Whitney had arranged with her parents to upgrade my handheld when she visited them in California, and we've been playing the latest Professor Layton game on it. The 3D effect is surprisingly non-terrible - I haven't really used it extensively because we both need to see the screen, but it's fascinating seeing things pop out of the flat surface (once you've adjusted the "Make your head hurt this much" slider to a comfortable level). It came at a good time because coincidentally I had just started with handheld games again, getting back into Etrian Odyssey - but that one's going to stay in the original DS for now because I fear that this super-advanced piece of technology would detect the obvious pirate cartridge and fire some inward laser beams to disintegrate it or something.

My own parents provided a gift voucher to smarten me up for the winter. At Whitney's direction, we spent this on a jacket that was once owned by Inspector Gadget and transforms into about sixteen different configurations - with or without hood, linerless, liner alone, and so on. It's a lot less bulky than the sort of Antarctic exploration coat that I've been using since I was in university, but the lining is made of some sort of symbiotic flesh and so can keep you warm a lot more efficiently - we will be testing this in Scotland at the end of the month.

By coincidence, I received this beautiful "hanging" badge from o-kemono a couple of days before my birthday, something I'd commissioned from him at the recent convention. Quite apart from being quite possibly the most adorable thing I've ever received, the whole "clinging to the keyboard" aesthetic makes it a surprisingly accurate representation of me when I was about three years old.

And as mentioned at the start of the week, kjorteo got me Elite Beat Agents, which is sort of like a cross between DDR and Incredible Crisis and is as relentlessly manic as you would expect as a result. It's a rhythm action game and parts of it involve twirling a spinner around on the screen really fast - so I'm using the older DS to play that until the Invisiblescreen for the new one arrives. The Trauma Center games traumatized it enough already - I think by the end of the week I may have cut a perfect circle out of the screen like Bugs Bunny sawing around Daffy Duck playing the piano.

The new one's power light switches from blue to red when it needs charging, though, instead of from green to orange. That alone is worth the upgrade.