Today, I walked into One Stop to ask if my preordered Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker game arrived in the store. It has not. I need to wait another day.

I feel curious to see how the game turns out. I played the past Dragon Warrior Monsters games. I found them enjoyable at first, but the games began feeling like a chore to play after winning the second tournament. Just like Pokemon, the Dragon Quest Monsters series involves lots of level-grinding to power up the various monsters I obtain. I don't like level-grinding. I hear that the latest entry of the series fixes that problem by having players apply points to skills sets, which are types of skills the monsters learn. When I would breed monsters together, their shared points for skill sets will get added together for the offspring. By doing lots of breeding, I could totally bypass tedious level-grinding. So, I'm curious to see if I will actually enjoy Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker in its entirety-unlike my experience with the prior two games in the series.

My main reason for wanting to get this game right away is because doing so will earn me more mini-medals on Slime Knights. Slime Knights is an Internet site funded by Square Enix as a tool to promote games in the Dragon Quest series. Mini-medals are the currency that members earn on the site. We can spend the currency to purchase prizes from the site's store. People earn the currency from completing various challenges, such as writing about their hype for a Dragon Quest game in their blogs. I do nearly every single challenge, and I strive at being a top member on the site. Lately, there are challenges in which people earn mini-medals for proving they received Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, and future challenges and trivia will likely require owning the game. For this reason, I feel anxious to obtain the game, right away.

I finally moved to my new home in the Los Angeles area. Whoo-hoo! Now, I can look for work at video game companies, and I would be geographically qualified for any available work. (I tried sending resumes a few years back, and companies responded negatively about me living in Arizona.) I'm still getting settled in by making sure to pay my first bills, locate health services, and the like. Once that is all done, I can start job hunting. I hope to get started with the job hunt right after Halloween.

The latest mission at Slime Knights is to create Halloween art. I created an illustration of Dragon Quest monsters dressed up as human jocks. The flyguy is dressed as a cheerleader, golem is a football player, and muddyman is a basketball player. I used stock images of the monsters, I adorned them with clothing, and I created the background in Adobe Illustrator.