This post is a little over a month late, but while I was sitting through some of the talks at the April APS meeting, I thought that I should put some of my ideas about it in writing. I didn’t have anything to present at the conference, but since it was local, I just bought a student pass and took the weekend to listen to what was going on and talk to a lot of different people.

After dedicating an embarrassing amount of hours to Monster Hunter World over the past four weeks, I’ve technically reached endgame and spent enough time exploring what there is to do to be able to write up my feelings about this game. Typically, I talk these things over with my friends or rant on my Twitter instead of writing a post for these things, but because my friends enjoy the game so much and because some of my followers are trying really hard to avoid spoilers, writing these things into the void is the most utilitarian way for me to get these thoughts off my mind. For those unaware of what Monster Hunter is about, it’s a pretty simple concept. You kill monsters and take their parts to make better gear so you can fight stronger monsters. If I had to give another game similar to the Monster Hunter concept, I’d offer up World of Warcraft and Vindictus as two games that share a lot of general features with monster hunter. I think the similarities between Vindictus and Monster Hunter are pretty obvious, but not many people have played Vindictus, so I figured I’d offer up WoW, where I think the sense of gear progression and content progression is pretty similar to Monster Hunter.

There have actually been very few changes to the site layout since the last post, which is a problem. However, I wanted to briefly put into writing the things floating though my head over the past month or so regarding what should happen to the site.

For this summer, I came out to Livermore, California to work at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with Dr. Soltz on heavy-ion data and specifically improved detection of jets and jet quenching in heavy-ion collisions. I have just begun my seventh week, which means I have passed the halfway point for the internship. So it seems that now is as good a time as ever to review what I’m working on and what my thoughts at this stage are.

I’ve made no secret of my guilty pleasure of listening to Korean pop music. One night, a couple of my friends and I were tossing around recommendations and we eventually started just posting a little bit of everything, just for exposure, so that people could find what they liked best. I’ve decided to aggregate the results of that discussion in a couple Youtube playlists for people who happen to be looking for something new or for people are just looking to go on a nostalgia trip.