Category: Blog

Game Time!

November 13, 2025

Nintendo recently added a ‘Nintendo Store’ app to the App Store. It can be used to make purchases (for your Switch or Switch 2) as well as preorder games and keep track of upcoming releases.

I don’t care about these features and will never use them. I downloaded the app for this:

Once you link your Nintendo account, the app contains detailed gameplay history. And not just for Switch, but also going back through 3DS and even WiiU! You can browse through your entire history of gameplay, which in my case is hundreds of games going back over 14 years. Using this app I learned the first game I played on my 3DS was back on November 29, 2011:

Even before playing this particular game, I had used some of the inbuilt 3DS apps, and they’re included in the data as well.

Switch games even include a record of every time you played a game and for how long, like this:

I was curious about two things, those being the games I had played the most and my longest game sessions. Since you can sort by playtime, these weren’t difficult to find.

As you can see exactly 20 games have been played for more than 100 hours. The list includes five Monster Hunter games, all four Xenoblade games and two games played by KLS (Kingdoms of Amalur and The Witcher 3). The four games on the top row all have over 300 hours of gameplay, and the next six all have over 200 hours. While I have played other Monster Hunter games than the ones listed above, these five games alone were played more than 1100 hours combined (that’s over 45 days). It’s also worth noting that the 3DS data is historical now: the last play date for Puzzle & Crossing Z is several years ago (before the 3DS shop closed) but I’ve played the game as recently as this year.

What about the longest play session?

I really loved Monster Hunter Rise, and played it like a demon when it came out – including a 14.5 hour marathon the day after release. But on June 29, 2022 – the release day of the Sunbreak expansion – I went on an absolute bender. This was during the summer so I was off work and still not traveling because Australia and Japan hadn’t reopened. I had a glorious 18+ session that filled my day, and I believe it was the last time I’ve done such a mad thing 🙂

I found many epic (12+ hour) game sessions, and they occurred for every game with over 300 hours except for Animal Crossing which doesn’t lend itself to marathon play sessions. There were even two consecutive days where I played Diablo II for 13+ hours each day!

This is a cool app, and I wish we could even take it one step further and download the data to analyze it further. If you’ve got a Switch and are curious about your play history I recommend this.

Antiquing

September 20, 2025

We visited an antique show and a couple of antique shops today. I’m feeling poorly and tired since I got my Covid shot yesterday but there was a lot of cool things to see and that energized me. Here’s most of what we bought:

The left is a (wooden) box of postcards that was tied in such a way you couldn’t see the cards. For $5 I (of course) took a risk and it turned out to be a good buy since it was about 20 cards that will all be good for postcrossing. The right was a set of 12 ‘hotel’ cards that only cost a few dollars and will also be sent via postcrossing.

We bought these great stickers from an artist that specialized in dark and hellish art. If you want one of these let me know. I probably should bought a t-shirt…

More postcards, in this actual autographed cards from DJs of a NYC radio station. They seem quite old (1980s?) and the guy on the left is well-known enough to have his own Wikipedia page! I’ll be sending both of these home next time we go to NYC 🙂

This lot of old (70s and 80s) comics cost me $20, which is a good price considering they’re all in good condition and are even bagged and boarded. I think the seller just didn’t want to carry them back to his car after the show! I’m especially looking forward to reading the Godzilla ones.

This is a photo of two guys in a field – from May 1980 – that has been printed on the back to be a postcard! I wonder who these people are, and how their private photo ended up in a random box of stuff at an antique fair? Even though it’s flimsy (as old printed photos were) I’m certainly going to mail this one day and see if it arrives.

Kristin purchased this silver ‘uranium glass’ ring. The girl that crafted this gets her glass from the Czech Republic and the ring came with a black light so we could appreciate how it glows (photo on right).

It’s quite a niche: specializing in jewelry using uranium glass. And selling it outdoors on a sunny day is its own challenge, but hers was a unique display and KLS likes it even when not ‘glowing’.

Look at this weird puzzle postcard! The puzzle is inside a shallow plastic tray which is sealed in plastic and has a space to address and write on the other side. It’s hard to believe this would ever arrive safely, but of course I’m going to put that to the test.

The same guy I bought the comics from had these ten RPG handbooks, and I was interested in the GURPs Horror one. When I asked how much he said he’d sell me all ten books for $5, a deal so insane I couldn’t open my wallet fast enough. I like reading old RPG sourcebooks and these will last me years.

Last but not least is this set of 10 postcards that the seller described as ‘Chinese propaganda’. Of indeterminate age, they cost me only $2 and they are all printed on the front with the label ‘female Chinese soldiers‘. I took the seller at face value, but when I got them home and opened them I’m really wondering what these actually are.

The back of each – they are all unique – seems to have a short piece of fiction printed on it. The above screenshot is a translation and I’m sure you agree this doesn’t exactly seem like propaganda. Whatever these are, they’re strange and I love them. Want one?

I’ll end with an item I didn’t buy: this laughably long matchbook from Santa’s Workshop, which is a Christmas-themed ‘theme park’ north of hear close to Canada. Look at the length of this thing! If it was a third of the price, I probably would have bought it just because of how silly it is 🙂

As I said this was most of what we bought. I also picked up a couple of gifts that will remain secret, and KLS got some vegan cake and a cookie 🙂

Two Months In The Air

September 9, 2025

An offhand comment by a student yesterday – “You must have spent a lot of time on planes?” got me thinking. I’ve always wondered how many days in total I’d spent in flight, so it was time to calculate it.

This proved to be difficult, and forgetting details about decades-old trips means my conclusions will be an underestimate. But I did my best to tabulate all my flights and consulted a database of times to calculate the total.

As best I can tell, I’ve taken at least 220 flights in my life, starting from my flight to the USA back in 1993.

In total, the flying time for these flights is about 1290 hours, or just under fifty-four days spent in-flight. Almost two months of my life spent sitting on a plane!

If we look at miles, I have flown at least 640,000 air miles in total. This is enough to fly around the world over 25 times.

This total includes 64 pan-pacific flights, and 37 flights that crossed the equator.

The above is my lifetime total frequent flyer miles as of today. For about half the time I’ve flown I never signed up for a mileage program, and it’s only been about five years that I’ve been collecting them. If I had my lifetime earned mileage, I’d be able to get multiple free first-class tickets to anywhere!

Only 36% of my flights have been international, but about 75% of my flying time and miles are from the international flights.

I was curious how this compared to the ‘average’ person but statistics about flights taken and international travel are surprisingly hard to find. It seems Americans – the world’s most frequent flyers – take about 2 flights a year and only 25% of those are international, so I’m well above average.

As mentioned this is an estimate, and doesn’t include flights taken as a child (to Germany and Australia) and likely omits domestic flights forgotten over the years. But even at 54 days total… that’s a lot!

I wonder how many more flights are in my future?

Robot Claw