2025 begins with WTF

Wednesdays. Thursdays. Fridays. WTF! The last time a year started on a Wednesday was 2020 and we all know how that went down. Yet we blindly travel forward throughout time as if we have a choice in the matter at hand. And, HEY, I decided to do a blog post that can be sent as a newsletter this time instead of writing a newsletter that can not easily be converted into a blog post.

A Quick Reflection

Conventions

In 2024 I hit the convention scene about as hard as I could. Mostly retro gaming shows. I traveled from Ypsilanti, MI to Milwaukee, Twin Cities, Columbus, Kansas City, Austin, Long Island, Chicago, and Philadelphia. I set up the LoBlast booth at 11 different events in total and logged over 11,000 tax deductible miles on my car’s odometer.

It was an aggressive schedule, and one I can’t afford to repeat in 2025. On average, I did better than break even on these adventures, but merely doing better than breaking even doesn’t necessarily pay all the bills. Not to mention all the time and energy spent preparing and traveling for these things. Been a helluva learning experience that I greatly enjoy.

The best part of doing these conventions was the people. I have been so blessed to meet, network, and/or befriend countless individuals at these shows. Many stimulating characters, some of which I see at multiple events, being friendly and sharing a genuine interest for tech and entertainment of the past.

LoBlast will do a handful of events in 2025. I’ll be vending at MAGfest Jan 23-26 in National Harbor, MD. The rest are TBD.

Products

I think my greatest challenge has been expanding the offerings of the LoBlast catalog. When I decided to start a business a few years back, I thought I would be focusing on audio gear. Then I got very distracted making GunTneR for the NES which was a personal bucket list item. Fortunately or unfortunately, I got hooked on making software for this antiquated gaming device.

While I have many game ideas, the priority on the NES side has been porting Ted Sterchi’s Orange Island for the past 18 months. It wasn’t until last October, however, that I started working on it full time. I’m not sure how sustainable that is at this point. There’s been a huge amount of progress on this in 2024, but, due to the project’s scale and three different gameplay modes, there’s still a lot more to do. Even though it often stresses me out, it’s mostly a pure joy to work on and something I very much believe is worth doing.

Bleeplers sell well at conventions, and overall the Bleepler kickstarter from last spring was a success. That being said, it feels very difficult to market to people online when they can’t directly hold and experience them. I also had the big hiccup of learning that directly driving the speaker with the 555 timer chip was not smart. Though, having already ordered 250 PCBs, I found a work around by stress testing each chip. But it really messes with my confidence when I don’t know what I don’t know until I ask an electronics engineering friend, “why for this suck?” to be told “because you don’t do that” despite it being within spec of the datasheet.

Conclusions

Wow, I just came on here to say a couple simpler things like “holiday sales were about 10% of my lowball guesstimate and I’m sitting on a bunch of bleeplers so I’m not raising the price after all” and “I recently had a couple big annual business bills and my business bank account is literally at a balance of two dollars and seventy-some cents and because printful has a bizarre policy of taking money from the seller before taking the seller’s customer’s money which would instantly overdraft my account, I have hidden all printful items from the loblast shop until my stripe balance is deposited.” Then I realized what time of year it is and thought I should be thoughtful, reviewing the previous year. So for 4+ hours and across 2 days I worked on this short blog post. Is this why I never make any youtube videos? I should stop trying to write them first!?!?

I don’t know what 2025 has in store and neither do you.

Thank you so much for participating in my story. Have a mighty, mighty day!