My MAS stick was pissing me off so I ordered a custom joystick from DreadedFist, who is a rather well-known custom stick maker on shoryuken.com. With a custom image for the panel, some cash and 6 weeks of patience, I became the proud owner of the Shimako Stick, the only one of its kind. DF doesn’t make sticks anymore so I’m rather fortunate that I got one of his final pieces of work. Click on the images for a better view.

Oh, Shimako, why do you look so beautiful on white medium density fiberboard?

Anyways, here are the specs:

• Sanwa JLF Stick – White
• 9 Sanwa buttons – White (3 of them are on the back wall)
• Octogonal gate
• PCB used – Playstation DualShock controller

However, life is not all peaches and cream. That’s because Sanwa parts are for Japanese arcade machines and I have to relearn just about everything I’ve known for the past 15 years. After about a half a day of practice, I can do AHVBs consistently on both sides. I can’t DP from the second player side. And I can forget about doing the Magneto ROM infinite ever again. The curved Japanese button configuration basically makes it impossible to do the infinite using the slide method (I keep getting the FK instead of the LK after the airdash). I guess it’s claw or nothing with this thing.

Well, enough about the Shimako Stick, let’s get to some other news.

Rosa Samia represent

It’s been about three weeks since the end of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, but I have to brag a little that my bracket was perfect from the Elite Eight all the way to the end of the tournament. I destroyed everyone in my pool and I even ended up in the 99th percentile in all of Yahoo! Sports. I believe it was the power of my bracket’s name.

Group results
My bracket

You’ll probably never hear about me talk about NCAA pools ever again, seeing as how I’m almost guaranteed to do worse than how I did this year for the rest of my life.

Well? What about the Marimite anime? What about Ichigo Mashimaro?

Ichigo Mashimaro is torture in optical disc format. I’ve actually had more fun watching it with the audio commentary track instead of the original dialogue. I did this for both OVA episodes so far and I do not regret it one bit.

As for Marimite, all I’ll say is that it’s hard to grab my attention for more than 24 minutes. I can’t even masturbate for 24 minutes without pausing to check my email at least twice within that timespan. I can’t imagine what will happen if I had to endure 50 minutes Yumi and Sachiko’s eternal staring contest of utterly irrelevant proportions (because nothing happens in this stupid show).