Hobbies: we’re out of beta, we’re releasing on time (Video Games): In a cold, harsh world like this, Yuki considers it a blessing that he has been given a chance to make a legit living from one of his favorite pastimes. He’s been playing video games since he got his first bright green, brick-sized OG Gameboy as a kid, and his love for them has only grown. He’s been loyal to the
Legend of Zelda series since he was a kid, he adores the madcap lunacy of the
Saints Row series and the
Yakuza franchise, and his deep, abiding love of the
Doom franchise has led to a notable appreciation for both FPS games and any kind of game with cool-looking demons in it (though he will never love any of these games as much as he loves
Doom). That said, he has just as much love for fighting games (the more ridiculous, the better), RPGs with multiple love interests and/or character/story paths and/or play-style options, otome games dating sims and visual novels, classic MetroidVania platformers, FromSoft games with maddeningly difficult bosses, puzzle games (he has a small army of plush Companion Cubes from the
Portal games), survival horror games, and abstruse point-and-click adventure games (Yuki thinks
The Goat Puzzle from
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars is hilarious, you’re all just mean).
Yuki just really loves video games. He thinks they’re neat and loves that, yes, it takes some hustle? But he can still make a decent living off of playing video games and sharing his opinions about them.
and the science gets done, and you make a neat gun (Tinkering): Life, the universe, and everything tend, in Yuki’s experience, to be very complicated. He doesn’t like getting bogged down in too much pointless drama or letting himself get so wrapped up in the complex things he can’t do anything about. The problem with this is that he can’t ignore the complexities of life into non-existence, and especially when these complexities are making things Difficult for the people he cares about, they make Yuki feel helpless and frustrated. Feeling like that makes him want to fix things.
Enter, tinkering: seeing what he can make out of broken tech that he found in gods-know-where, trying to fix things that other people tell him are definitely broken, helping the tech crew at Scandals Bar fix busted stage-lights or figure out why something isn’t working with the upstage screen that the performers when they have video components to their performances (e.g., projecting the lyrics to “
Wig In A Box” from
Hedwig and the Angry Inch, for the part of
the song where the performer
asks people to sing along), building some absurd Rube Goldberg device just for the sake of doing so, etc. It started with Lego and K’nex sets when he was a kid (and Yuki does still enjoy building those when he’s in the mood), but as an adult, he prefers messing around with things that other people might enjoy, that might help them in some way, etc. People and the snags they get themselves into may be complicated, difficult, and in some situations, unsolvable. Tinkering, though? More often than not, Yuki can put that together in a way that makes sense, and maybe also in a way that helps them.
His favorite specific kind of tinkering will likely always be porting John Romero’s
Doom onto things that nominally should not be able to play
Doom. Some of the things he’s managed to play it on include: a TI-84 graphing calculator; an ipod classic; Kiyoshi’s old Nintendo DS; one of the treadmills at Kiyoshi’s gym; a vape; a thermostat; the FitBit his sister gave him for Christmas one year; a Kindle; a boring PowerPoint presentation; Microsoft Excel; a LeapFrog tablet; an iphone (both independently and within the Pokémon Go app); an old Nokia phone that still worked despite being run over by a car; a Tamagotchi; and a microwave. Were he ever to Awaken into any of Destiny City’s powered factions, he would almost definitely try to work with a Mauvian to make some of their tech run
Doom. True, he couldn’t really post that on youtube or any relevant subreddits to get an easy-ish low-key viral post, but making
Doom run on things it shouldn’t stopped being about Internet clout around the time he messed around to make it run on the old Nokia.
At this point, his perpetual
“But can I make it run Doom?” quest is all about: 1. the personal challenge, and 2. the fact that he enjoys playing
Doom.
look at me, still talking when there’s science to do (Gossip): As far as his own life is concerned, Yuki prefers to keep things as drama-free and uncomplicated as possible……but other people’s lives? Those are allowed and encouraged to have all kinds of Things going on. He loves talking to people, and a good way to get people talking is to express an interest in whatever petty personal dramas are on their nerves right now (or, if they don’t want to talk about themselves, whatever petty dramas about other people they are interested in). Maybe Yuki could stand to get more emotionally invested, or at least to acknowledge that these goings-on are more than simply an entertaining means of creating conversation? But he feels like he’s doing just fine, thanks.
anyway, this cake is great, it’s so delicious and moist (Cooking): Yuki started learning how to cook because the dorm food in undergrad was not his favorite. He developed a taste for it because, in his search, he turned to various blogs and Food Network shows, and the room for experimentation really appealed to him. In a way, his love of cooking is an extension of his love of tinkering: he has various materials in front of him (ingredients), a task at hand (turn them into a decent meal), and he accomplishes this by messing around, trying out different combinations of tricks and ideas, and seeing what happens. The big thing that sets cooking apart is that Yuki can use his cooking to make sure the people he cares about make time to take actual care of themselves (not always a guarantee with his tinkering, for all he tries his best).
Virtues: i’m not even angry, i’m being so sincere right now (Honest): Yuki can be polite, and he can be diplomatic, but he doesn’t see a point in mincing words too much. Sure, Yuki doesn’t want to be
cruel if he can avoid it, but at what point does “trying to tell the truth without hurting someone’s feelings” become “mincing words so much that you might as well be lying about them”? He finds that the answer varies somewhat from situation to situation, but generally speaking, the best option, in his eyes, is being direct and open with people. Tell them your boundaries, let them know when something sounds like a bad idea, don’t keep things pent up when something upsets you. Maybe people won’t like it in the short term, but it’s better for everyone in the long run.
as they burned, it hurt because i felt so happy for you (Loyal): From the outside, the standards that govern how and when Yuki gives out his loyalty can seem extremely arbitrary (because they usually are). Sometimes, he’s won over by sharing mutual interests and being an enjoyable person to spend time with, or by repeated shows of reliability—but other times, he’s won over by crashing into his life and being so irrepressibly yourself that he simply needs to know more. Either way, once Yuki lets someone into his circle of friends or decides that a cause is important to him, he has a hard time being swayed from that loyalty. Although this loyalty is never romantic—Yuki is aromantic, so he doesn’t feel that way about anyone—Yuki’s loyalty often runs as deep as he understands romantic love is supposed to do. He deeply values the people he lets into his heart, and as much as possible, he doesn’t like to leave them hanging.
but there’s no sense crying over every mistake (Doesn’t Sweat The Small Stuff): Yuki likes to stick to the KISS rule:
Keep
It
Simple,
Stupid. He definitely doesn’t know all the different philosophical principles ever in the universe, but Occam’s Razor is his favorite. Don’t give yourself more problems than you need. When problems arise, just pause, take a few deep breaths and step back from the situation, then reassess things. Usually, the problems in question will prove themselves significantly less tangled, messy, and complicated than they appear. All Yuki thinks you accomplish by getting wound up about problems that
might happen or minutiae that
might be relevant? Is wasting time and making yourself sick.
so, i’m glad i got burned, think of all the things we learned (Adaptable): Yuki doesn’t enjoy being pinned down and likes to keep himself flexible (at least as far as his reactions to things are concerned, because he is not always very flexible physically). Plans might change at the drop of a hat based on all kinds of unpredictable factors, several of which you might not even realize exist until they crash into your face and become a problem. So, somewhat as an extension of not sweating the small stuff, Yuki likes to stay open-minded in general and more specifically, he tries not to get too hung up on things needing to go in a specific fashion. Why waste time on sticking to an exact plan before you know if any given idea works in the first place?
Flaws:even though you broke my heart and killed me (Blunt): Yuki’s personal standards for judging an acceptable level of honesty do not always align with most people’s. He often says things that people might not want to hear, and may not always do so with the tact that you might like him to display. If your name isn’t “Kiyoshi Sakurazawa,” you will probably have to deal with him speaking his mind in ways that are not particularly considerate. Again, he doesn’t usually
want or
intend to be overly cruel with most people; more often than not, he either is only thinking about expressing himself rather than the effects thereof, or he is trying to be somehow helpful. Yuki fully understands the concept of
“If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all”……but he doesn’t always agree with that idea, A., and B., a lot of the things he says that run afoul of this……don’t necessarily ping for him as things that might upset someone, because he sees it as “just being honest.”
None of which is to say that Yuki unapologetically stands by everything he says that gets under someone’s skin. If he’s made aware of it when he causes genuine hurt or upset for somebody, Yuki most often apologizes and shows genuine contrition because he
does usually mean for his blunt comments to be more fun or constructive than harmful. But even so, the biggest lesson that tends to stick from those experiences is that he needs to adjust how he expresses himself for
that person specifically, rather than any larger or more general ideas about tactfulness.
go ahead and leave me, i think i’d prefer to stay inside (Conflict-Averse): Yuki doesn’t see himself as somebody who can dish it out but can’t take it……but in a lot of ways, he
really is. When somebody meets his bluntness with overall well-intentioned response, he can handle it, even if the response is snarky, but when someone snaps back or bites back in genuine anger, Yuki folds and backs down from something that he started (often with a remark about how it’s “really not that serious”). He doesn’t
need for everyone he meets to like him, but knowing that someone actively
dislikes him simultaneously annoys him and makes him inclined to give up on pursuing anything further or trying to change their mind. Apologizing to a hurt person is one thing (very important, Yuki will do it easily), but apologizing to someone who’s angry seems, to Yuki, unnecessarily stressful and honestly pointless. No sense in harshing the chill vibes by trying to appease someone who’s probably a jerk anyway, right (even if Yuki was the one in the wrong here or someone dislikes him because of something he did to upset them)?
This also extends to causes he cares about: regardless of how much Yuki cares about something, he prefers to act on that care in ways that are fairly low-conflict and minimal risk. Charity streams are great, fundraisers are great, retweeting/sharing information posts is great, Chaotic Good hacking is great (not that Yuki can do it himself, but he does admire the Chaotic Good hackers who’ve tried to expose things like the Panama Papers)—but you probably won’t catch him at an actual meatspace gathering unless Kiyoshi made him come. Yuki will especially avoid any meatspace activism if that “gathering” is really more of a “protest.” No matter how non-violent any given gathering is
supposed to be, there’s always a risk of a protest
getting violent, and no, thanks, Yuki would prefer not to. He agrees that
someone should fight for important causes, but it doesn’t have to be
him, does it? Please just let him stay in his chill vibes.
you just keep on trying ‘til you run out of cake (Indulgent): Want to know the secret of life, in Yuki’s less than humble opinion?
Most things count as “small stuff.” If you get hung up on everything, you close yourself off from all kinds of possibilities
and you can miss out on all kinds of fun new experiences—the latter of which, Yuki minds more as a possible negative outcome of anything. Life is a difficult thing to happen to anybody, and everybody ends up dead eventually, insofar as he knows. Large parts of the world really, really suck; the universe is a fundamentally cold, uncaring place; and a lot of people are, not to put too fine a point on it, b*****d-coated bastards with b*****d filling. Whenever possible—and sometimes even in situations where he really probably should focus on something else (c.f., his habit of texting, checking Twitter, and otherwise looking at his phone while walking)—Yuki likes to indulge in any given little fun or nice thing that gives him some happiness, even if it’s temporary and/or fleeting.
maybe you’ll find someone else to help you (Distractible): Yuki likes to keep himself and his plans both open and as flexible as possible, and yes, there are some very good reasons for this……but sometimes, Yuki just gets distracted by something, almost always something that seems Very Fun right this second, and derails things or causes problems for himself in the process. Most often, this takes the form of having some kind of project that he needs to work on for his blog, his channel, and/or for his work, but instead getting caught up in some different new game because ooooh, he found a totally batshit fighting game where you play as major figures from the French Revolution, he
really needs to make sure Charlotte Corday and Camille Desmoulins are good or ******** will be
sad about it.
However, it can also be the case that Yuki gets so wrapped up in his phone that he wanders right into a youma without thinking about it and needs a rescue. Or that, in the middle of getting rescued from said youma, he gets behind cover and leans out of it again anyway because the senshi or knights rescuing him are cute boys and
sue him, okay, he likes appreciating cute boys. Or, in the middle of some hypothetical bar fight (powered up or not), he might run out of cover because he thinks he figured out why the jukebox in this bar is broken and ooooh, he needs to get out his little tinkering kit and try to fix it.
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