#uploading christmas art five days late

[cheeseproducts]

A merry Worumas to all

[soyouareandrewdobson]

Charles Schulz vs Andrew Dobson: What a Blockhead!

There are certain things about Dobson’s behavior and particularly his approach at being a nerd and presenting himself as someone who enjoys the art of storytelling that I have issues with. Issues I want to tackle on in more detail within later entries quite a bit.

One such tendency is, that he mocks directly or indirectly the work and accomplishments of others.

See, if Dobson doesn’t like you as a content creator because he does not like something you work on, he will try to show it. He will make stupid assumptions of you (like how he accused Kojima of being a sexist creep because of Quiet and how he deals with “male gaze” in MGS compared to Death Stranding), half heartedly mock you (look at anything he makes about Ethan Van Sciver) or he will call a piece of work boring and dull based on a minor element instead of overarching problems (calling Batman the character a white supremacist based on the dumb work of only one author).

By doing that he also tries indirectly to insinuate that he is better in some manner, though most of the time it really just shows his own ego and that his pet peeves are rather petty compared to the overall quality of the work he criticizes as well as its flaws.

One such sight of ego boosting while mocking the work of his better is in my opinion to be found in this comic he uploaded sometimes around 2016/17 randomly online.

This comic in my opinion is both laughable and insulting. Why? I will explain soon.

First however I want to clarify that I get that this comic is supposed to be a joke mostly. The old “What others expect, what I expect” thing, where the punchline is supposed to be the discrepancy between the two fractions and what they expect, mostly by making one of the expectations come off as worse than the other. However, I find the punchline to be Charlie Brown (and as such what Dobson seems to see as something he does not want to be favorable compared too) quite insulting. Why, as I said, will be elaborated on sooner.

First, let me just get on the part I find laughable: The fact that Dobson in his own head seems to believe he can be even remotely compared to people like Paul Dinni, Bruce Timm, Greg Weismann, Justin Roiland, Miyazaki, Shigeru Miyamoto and all the other character creators and animators whose creations we see in the first panel.

 Dobson, don’t make me laugh. Putting aside the fact that those people are animators more than cartoonists, what makes you even believe in your wildest dreams you are on the same level as them? The fact you too are an animator, seeing how you graduated from an art school with a degree in that field? I have seen your contributions to the field and honestly, I would expect a bit more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0tdWNCrIxo

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps6PfiUCxHQ

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PyonOqClf8

 I give you credit, you can animate. Which is more than I can say for myself when it comes to the arts. But when you look what other freelance animators can do online, some of them younger than you and NOT with a degree in animation…

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=64&v=FmkAcGz1BJk&feature=emb_title

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97IfPfjSaDg

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEUoxQ4qSfs

 Viviepop’s demo reels alone are just gorgeous to look at and more fluid than what I have seen of you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlha-KOKCc

 And it is not just the technical quality, Dobson. It is also just the overall “originality” of your work. Cause this is the thing with those animators hinted on in the first pic and even many, many freelancers/fanartists as well as webcomic creators online: They have a spark of originality in presentation and storytelling that you lack. I will one day go more into detail for that, but here is the most brutal thing I can say at the moment: I know shitty porn fanfictions, that have more plot development and character growth than all of Alex ze Pirate.

Your characters and stories tend to be derivative and you barely take any risks in telling a story. Neither in your fanbased work (like the Miraculous comics) nor your original content (mostly because you take comfort in four panel strips anyway)  and when you have an idea for something on which the basis idea actually sounds good, you screw it up by a lackluster execution. One example I want to give for that, would be this fanart of yours in regard to Steven Universe.  

(I apologize for not getting one in better quality) This pic was something Dobson created around 2015 for Steven Universe. The picture is supposed to show Lapis, trapped under the ocean following the events of the season 1 finale of the show. A very emotional situation if you are aware of why Lapis sacrificed herself and was “banned” to the ocean floor. Short explanation: Fused with Jasper and then took primarily control of the fused being they became (Malachite) by using her water powers to bond it with heavy water chains on the ocean floor, so that Jasper would not hurt Steven anymore.

 How much of that was even an emotional strain on her and her psyche was in one episode of season 2 even a theme, as seen here.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK3l8mGNhMg

 I am not even a fan of the show and I get the emotional weight and impact of Lapis actions.

So… why is that not conveyed in the artwork? If you are so talented Dobson, why is none of the strain and despair on the character? The idea of a pic showing Lapis under water, longingly looking up, even in despair is a good basis for a fanart. But the execution lacks any emotional detail. You want to know how I would execute the thing if I had the artistic talent? Make the picture a huge horizontal pic, where we slowly decent from water surface down the ocean. The light getting dimmer. Blue turning into dark. The silhouette of a hand and an arm similar to Malachite’s in the background, trying to travel up, the fingertips barely touching the surface. Heavy chains around the flesh. Symbolic of the fusion trying to break free and cause havoc. And down on the dark bottom, beaten and exhausted Lapis with tears in her eyes and chains all over her body like she is Jacob Marley, desperately trying to keep Malachite at bay for the sake of the only being on earth who ever showed just a little bit of kindness towards her.

 Why can’t we have something like this here, Dobson? If you were even remotely as original as the creators you want to be compared with, I think you could come up with something like that and perhaps even draw it.

But you know, his delusions of being as good as them is one thing. It is even funny.

Pissing over the Peanuts is another. Dobson, what are you trying to hint at?

That people comparing you to Charles Schulz and his creation is in your eyes automatically a sort of insult? That it is something that should at best only be a mockable punchline in a comparison?

Just to clarify a few things: I am NOT much of a fan of Charlie Brown and the Peanuts as a property. As a child, I was just not very entertained by them. Yes, I saw animated movies, episodes and specials of them here and there and my grandparents gave me volumes of them to read, but as a whole I never thought them quite as entertaining than other comics or cartoons I watched. Some parts of Peanuts animation felt to me often times like just dead air (especially parts of Snooby dancing with Woodstuck, as they had no function to move the plots forward) and I really could not stand how some characters treat Charles on a regular basis. I mean, we all agree that Lucy is one of the worst female characters in fiction and that even while we hate Family Guy, this clip likely gave some of us some sort of satisfaction, right?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZkJAx8FycI

 But before the Peanuts fan out there go and want my head on a silver platter, let me make one thing clear: I may not like the Peanuts franchise… but I respect it and the man behind it.

 Charles Schulz drew the comic strip from October 1950 till late 1999 (the final strip being finished months before it would be published on February 13 of 2000, one day after he died of colon cancer) , creating a total amount of 17,897 Peanuts’ strips. His work marks a major impact in the nature of newspaper comic strips and inspired many people out there, including Bill Watterson, to create comics or be in the field of animation. His achievements include among other things, that he created what many people consider the first animated Christmas special ever. The names of his creations became nicknames for the Apollo 10 command module and its’ lunar modul. Four of the five Peanuts movies in existence (animated made for tv specials not withstanding now) were written by him. And the fifth was only not by him, because that one came out in 2015, a decade and a half after he died.

And speaking of things Schulz wrote for the Peanuts, let me mention two things. Two things that though I am not a fan of the Peanuts, I have mad respect for existing in the realm of animation. Two animated specials that stuck with me ever since I was eight.

 “What have we learnt, Charlie Brown?” from 1983 and “Why, Charlie Brown, Why?” from 1990.

 In the first special, which functions as a semi sequel to the fourth Peanuts’ movie “Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown”, the characters actually travel across France and after ending up on Omaha Beach and Ypres the special turns into a tribute to the soldiers who fought in World War 1 and 2, elaborating on the sacrifices made during the war by showing actual footage of fights, recordings of Eisenhower and reciting the poem “In Flanders Fields” among other things. Do you know how impactful it is to learn about the world wars as a small kid, by being reminded of the actual sacrifices others made in order for your own grandparents to survive?

 And speaking of grandparents, I lost my grandmother as a child by cancer. So when I saw the second special I mentioned, you can bet it stuck with me. After all, of all the things in the world, the Peanuts addressing the seriousness of cancer by having a story where a friend of Linus is diagnosed with leukemia and we follow the emotional impact it has on Linus and the girl? Again, I may not like the franchise, but I am not ashamed to admit I think the special treats the subject with a lot of respect and dignity while telling a good story. You bet your ass I get a bit teary eyed when the little girl survives her leukemia treatment and finally gets on that swing again. Those two specials alone are more mature than ¾ of the shit Dobson likes to gosh about, including his oh so precious gay space rocks. And just for those things existing I have respect for Schulz, his creation and the impact it had on so many people. As such, Dobson “belittling” the Peanuts, at least for me, is a freaking insult. The only way Dobson could have been even more insulting is if he called Schulz something derogative.  Dobson should be glad if his life’s work in total could even amount to 10% of what Schulz has done and achieved.

 Cause Dobson, you are NOT a Charles Schulz. Schulz served during the second world war on the front, fighting actual Nazis instead of calling idiots on the internet fascists for not liking Star Wars. He had integrity and work ethics that drove him to draw and write over 17.000 strips, while you can not even finish one FREAKING story. He knew how to tackle a mature subject, while you make shitty shipping jokes involving Ladybug and Cat Noir and claim Steven Universe knows how to be about psychological trauma, when it just romanticizes abuse. He may have drawn simplistically, but at least he could tell a joke instead of constantly berating others for not sharing his opinion. He did all of that and more without having graduated from college.

 And what have you done, Andrew Dobson?

If Dobson reads this, there is one thing in my opinion he should take away from more than anything else: That if people compare him to Charles Schulz’s work, that it means a) he should not be ashamed of it and b) they overestimate him.

[willow-salix]

Isolation update and this was based on two prompts by @eirabach and @cloudkicker09 for the irrelief challenge by @gumnut-logic. Big thanks to the amazing @avengedbiologist for the art collab!

Day 83 of Isolation on Tracy Island and our poor Virgil is still feeling a little tender . His back is a lot better but he’s still having to be careful how he’s sitting and so we’ve banned him from doing anything remotely strenuous. For Virg, this is hard. He’s usually quite happy to chill out for a few hours and do nothing but that’s when it's on his terms, not when he’s been ordered to stay put. Then he needs some bribery.

“OK,” I started, “what do you want? What’s gonna get you to stay put?”

He thought about it for a moment or two and then he dropped his bombshell.

“Couch day. If I have to stay put, so do you all.”

I glanced around at everyone else who nodded. They could do that.

“On one condition,” Virgil threw in. “You know those special things we ordered online a few weeks ago and were saving for Christmas?”

My mouth dropped in shock. “Oh, ohmigods! Are they here? Did they arrive?”

He nodded, grinning evilly. “Picked them up last supply run and hid them in my wardrobe.”

“Yessss! Can I go get them?”

He nodded again.

“Woohoo!” I ran off like I had Thunderbird Three up my butt.

“Why do I get the feeling that we’re going to hate this?” I heard John sigh as I left the room.

***

“I feel ridiculous,” John groaned, looking down at his outfit in obvious disgust.

“Nooo,” I assured him. “You look gorgeous!”

“Well I love mine!” Alan grinned, spinning around to look at his reflection in the window.

“Me too,” Gordon agreed, checking out his backside in another window. “Look at my little fin!”

“Mines a tad too short,” Scott pointed down where he was showing a good six inches of ankle and hairy calf below the cuffs.

“Mines so comfy,” Virgil moaned, snuggling deeper into the warm material.

“Mines actually kind of cool,” Kayo admitted. She looked as awesome as always, curled up like a cat in one of Alan’s bucket seats, her black and silver onesie fitted her like a glove and she was clearly revelling in the soft warmth it provided.

“I’m not putting the hood up,” John stated, thumping down on the couch and crossing his arms in protest.

“Oh come on, it’s so cosy,” Alan wheedled, having already tugged up the hood of his red onesie, the pointy top forming the nose cone of his Thunderbird.

Virgil and I had been rather bored, it had been late and we had stumbled across a fan site that had made its own International Rescue merchandise. A few clicks later and we had purchased one of every onesie they possessed and then found me a cute little halloween bat onesie so I could join in. I loved it and was currently flapping my wings excitedly.

Virgil's was, of course, big and green, the yellow trim and red cuffs looked great on him. His hood was rounded like Two’s nose and his arms had flaps of material that attached down to his sides to give him wings. The large lettering of Thunderbird Two straight down his sides completed the look.

Gordon’s was bright yellow with a red stripe around the middle and midway up his calves and he had a fin that started halfway down his back and reached right down to his butt, flaring out wider the lower it got. His also said Thunderbird Four down the sides.

Alan’s had a grey striped strip around his belly and back, a white collar and white cuffs and was just the cutest thing ever with Thunderbird Three running down his chest in white and with a white three on each ankle.

Scott’s was simply glorious, his hood sported a pointy red cone, two dark grey stripes circled his upper chest and back and his arms also had wings like Virgil’s. The lower legs (which was more just below the knee for him) were blue and the ankles and cuffs were the same dark grey as the stripes on his chest. Thunderbird One was written in white on his chest and he looked amazing. Clearly he thought so too if the poses he was striking were any indication.

John’s was a little more elaborate than the other boys and honestly I don’t completely blame him for his reaction. His hood had a soft, bendy circle hovering above it like a weird angel halo, made to represent Five’s gravity ring and was grey on the outside and red on the inside, which also had International Rescue written on it in white letters. His chest area was a puffy ball where the monitoring station would be, making him look like he had suddenly developed a massive beer belly. The legs were yellow and his ankles (it was a little short on him too) had two stiff panels that stuck out. I thought they were adorable, he hated them with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.

“Stop being so grumpy,” I told him, dropping down next to him and attempting to snuggle the bad mood out of him as we all prepared to watch Virgil’s movie of choice, La La Land, another musical but this was his day so we weren’t going to complain.

Drinks were gathered, snacks were shared out and everyone got comfy as the movie started. Surprisingly enough it wasn’t one that I’d watched before and I found it quite enjoyable although Alan and Gordon were clearly not impressed, come to think of it, neither were Kayo and Scott.

As soon as the movie ended all four of them made their escape, leaving John and I to keep Virgil company.

“This was not part of the deal,” Virgil yelled after them, they ignored him. “You have to at least keep your onesies on!” he ordered.

“Sorry about them,” I said, getting up to fetch him another drink and at his request, his sketchbook and pencils.”You just can’t trust family.”

“What am I, invisible?” John asked, batting at one side of the gravity ring that kept getting in his way.

“No, you’re awesome,” I answered.

“Suck up,” Virgil laughed, then winced when his back twinged.

“Will you sit still!” I ordered, plumping his pillow and settling him back.

“Is she always this bossy?”

“Hard to imagine, given how quiet she usually is, but yes,” John answered dryly, picking up his abandoned book. I smacked his shoulder in retaliation but still used him as a pillow as I located the magazine I’d been reading and went back to the article about vampires in Scotland.

We chilled quietly for around half an hour before a voice broke the silence.

“John, I’m bored.”

“You don’t get bored, EOS,” he replied, glancing over at her portable drive which he’d left on the coffee table. “At least you’re not supposed to.”

“It feels like I am. You told me that when someone has nothing left to do they get bored, that’s why you keep sending Alan out to collect space debris.”

Virgil sniggered.

“I have finished all the tasks you set for me and I have downloaded today’s statistics to your comm so now, I believe, I am bored.”

EOS had been brilliant in keeping Five running smoothly in between John’s daily visits in which he spent a few hours with her checking in on the world. Sometimes I went with him, or one of the others, but she had been alone for the majority of the time. We had grown used to checking in with her at night too, talking to her before we settled for the night and she often popped up with a question or two during the day.

With so little to do for International Rescue in the way of actually rescuing people she had taken to it upon herself to work her way through every encyclopedia that had ever been uploaded to the internet, to familiarize herself with customs and cultures around the world and, weirdest of all, pop culture and slang words. That had made for some interesting conversations, especially when the younger two got involved.

“What are you all doing to relieve your boredom?” she asked.

“Reading,” I answered, lifting my magazine to show her.

“Reading,” John answered, displaying his book.

“Drawing,” Virgil answered.

Her lights flickered for a few seconds.

“Reading I understand, if one wishes to gain knowledge then reading is an acceptable way to do so. But drawing serves no purpose.”

“Uh oh,” John muttered, ducking into his hood.

“Serves no purpose?” Virgil gasped, shocked to his very core by her words. “Of course it does.”

“It has no function.”

“It does!”

“Can we not argue about this?” I asked.

“I’m not arguing,” Virgil insisted. “I’m educating, is that OK?.”

“Anything that will keep her occupied,” John shrugged. EOS had taken to playing with the comms and the fire alarms when she had nothing to do, so we needed more to amuse her.

Virgil reached for the drive but groaned, his back protesting. I got up and fetched it for him, handing it over. He settled back against his cushions and set the drive on his shoulder like a weird parrot.

“Art,” he began, “can’t be broken down into functions and reasoning, art is about feeling.” He sketched a few lines on his pad. “Humans are complicated creatures; they all have different likes and dislikes, things that they love and things that they hate. Art, above all else, makes us feel, even if it's a negative emotion.”

Virgil had a lovely voice to listen to, soft and warm, you just couldn’t help but pay attention to everything he said. I put my magazine down and snuggled closer to John, settling like it was story time.

“Art comes in many forms, music, literature, photography, sculpting, cooking, anything and everything that is creative is a form of art. For as long as there has been humans, there has been art, humans have an inherent need to create, to make things, to leave their mark on the world in some way or another. Look at you.”

“What about me?” EOS asked, having been listening silently, her lights flickering thoughtfully.

“You evolved from game code that John created, you yourself are a form of art. And you yourself create things every day.”

“How do I?” EOS had been learning to emulate tone and expressions, putting them into her voice whenever she thought it was appropriate, it could be pretty hit or miss, but this time she sounded genuinely puzzled.

“You form pictures, you create charts, you correlate data and display it. That’s a form of art.”

“But that art has a purpose, it's to display information.”

“And so does all art, it can be pretty, it can be ugly, you might not understand it, but it will still make you feel something. That’s it’s purpose.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“People like to see pretty things, they make them feel better when they feel bad. Pictures can remind them of good things, paintings of people they love make them smile, pictures of places they have been to bring back memories of good things.”

“Why do you draw when you could just take a photograph? Drawings and paintings are not accurate, they are filled with inaccuracies.”

“Because some things can’t be captured with a photograph, they may not exist anywhere but in your own mind.”

“I cannot picture something that I have no reference for. If it does not exist it cannot be pictured.”

“Of course it can, things can't be simplified to if they can be referenced or not, you can paint emotions, you can play feelings, you can bake love. If what you are making makes you feel, or when you look at something, hear something, taste something or smell something, it can trigger emotions within you.”

“I’m not sure I understand, because I cannot feel.”

“Of course you can, you feel love, friendship, loneliness, you feel a lot and you’re learning more every day,” John assured her.

“But they are not art, I cannot picture those things,” EOS argued.

“I’ll show you what I mean,” Virgil assured her.

Virgil turned to a fresh sheet of paper and picked up his pencil.

“It’s human nature to create faces and pictures of things that we cannot see but that we interact with,” Virgil continued, his pencil flying over the page. “How do you two picture EOS?”

“I see her as a small girl, not too young because they are annoying,” I started, ignoring John’s snort of amusement, I can’t help it if I’m not a kiddy person. “Maybe around ten, eleven years old, a tween that can swing between moody and loving in an instant.”

“Accurate,” John agreed.

“I picture her with hair down to her shoulders maybe, sometimes in pigtails if she’s in a bratty mood.”

“I’m never bratty,” EOS argued petulantly.

"I beg to differ," John whispered to me.

“I see her hair as maybe a strawberry blonde, maybe somewhere between John and Gordon’s hair colour,” I continued, getting into my stride. Having had no part of her creation and no understanding of how code or computers of any kind worked all I had been able to do was assign her a face so I knew who I was talking to. Virgil was right, us humans always had to put a face to a voice. If we heard someone on the radio we would get an impression of who the voice could belong to, what the person speaking would look like and I had done exactly that.

“I’ve never really thought about it before, but I think she’d have green eyes,” John added, his eyes closed as if he were picturing her in his mind.

“With a cute little nose and a smattering of freckles just like Alan has,” I added.

“I sound quite pleasant,” EOS said thoughtfully.

“What clothes would you choose?” Virgil asked, still sketching.

“Since I live in Thunderbird Five, if I had a body to clothe I would need a suit like John’s.”

“Makes sense,” Virgil agreed, frowning slightly as he concentrated on his work.

“I think I would like a hairband like Kayo has,” EOS mused.

“Hairband, got it,” Virgil answered her, pencil moving back and forth in soft strokes a few more times. “OK, finished.” He turned his pad around for us to see.

“Oh, she’s adorable!” I squeaked. “She’s just how I pictured her.”

“She’s very cute,” John smiled. “Can I keep that?”

“Sure, I’ll colour it later for you.” Virgil turned the pad for EOS to see. “That’s you, EOS.”

“That’s me?”

“Well, it’s how we picture you. See, your body doesn’t exist, this face doesn’t exist, but it’s still in our heads. It’s how we see you and when we look at this, we feel happy and we feel love, because it’s you. Do you understand art now?”

“Yes,” her tone had changed from thoughtful to confident. “Yes I think I do.”

[lovemesomesurveys]

Have you ever had a teacher hit on you? Have you ever hit on a teacher? Nope and nope.

Do you tend to eat more on Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas? >> I don’t eat any more than usual on any holiday. My appetite and tastes remain the same no matter what day of the year it is. <<< That’s how I am now because my appetite has changed a lot the last few years. I actually used to be a big foodie, especially around the holidays. Now my appetite isn’t even close to what it used to be. It sucks.

Three more days until what? Until Friday.

Do you know what an 'AMV' is? No.

Who do you not like more: your dentist, your eye doctor, or your doctor? I don’t do well with any kind of doctor, I get major anxiety. However, the eye doctor isn’t as bad. I just don’t like getting eye drops and numbing my eyes.

Why do/don't you like cats? It’s not that I don’t like them, I just don’t have the connection like I do with dogs. I love doggos. 

What is your favorite music artist's hair like? I don’t have one particular favorite music artist.

Do you like Crayola or Rose Art better? Crayola, no competition.

What is your favorite type of dog? Labs and German Shepherds.

Have you ever considered making videos for YouTube? I actually have uploaded a few videos in my younger days. Major cringe. They’ll never see the light of day again.

What is your favorite type of nut? Pistachios, cashews, and peanuts.

What would you do if it snowed right now? I’d be in a complete state of shock for one because it doesn’t snow in my city. Ever. It would certainly be a miracle. I’d love it.

Where would you move, if you would move anywhere? I’m not sure, but my family and I definitely want to move.

Do you like it when people touch your hair? I used to like it when I was a kid. 

Do you think you have a sad life? :/

Lets say someone calls you at 3 AM and you're sleeping, what do you say? I have no idea who would even be calling me because the only ones who call me are my parents and brother, who all would be here at home, asleep, at 3AM.

If it was a text would you ignore it or reply? I guess if it was a text then it likely would be someone I know, some other family member, in which case it would have to be a serious emergency for them to be calling or texting me, especially at 3AM. I would definitely respond. 

Do you know anyone who DOSEN'T like the POTC movies? I’m not a big fan.

What's one award show you have to watch every year? I like to watch the music award shows and ones like the MTV Movie Awards.

What is the last five words you've said out loud? “Oh wow, that’s pretty cool.”

What subject do you just not get at all? Math.

How often do you go shopping just for fun? I do a lot of online window shopping, adding stuff to my cart here and there, and sometimes it makes its way to “complete purchase” haha.

When did you start wearing makeup, if you even do? When I was in middle school.

What's the show that you can't miss a week of? There’s several I keep up with. 

On that note, what's the worst show on television? *shrug*

Who do you like more: the Batman or the Joker? I like both, actually. I really liked the newer Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix. 

How many songs are on your iPod/MP3 player? I don’t remember, I haven’t used my iPod since 2012.

Current book/s you're reading? “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” by Willow Rose. I’m reading one of her murder mystery series and this one the books all have nursery rhyme/fairytale related titles.

How would you go about making a peach color with paints? Pink and yellow.

Why do some people like stuffed animals?  >> ... Have you seen a stuffed animal? They’re fucking great, is why. <<< Exactly! Especially giraffe ones.

What's your favorite Panic At The Disco album? A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out.

Do you ever feel like no haircut suits your face? Yeah. My hair just sucks.

Best time of the day? Late night/early morning hours.

[breaniebree]

Can you share your journey as a writer? How the idea of writing fanfics came into your mind? Do you have other own fiction too? Also how do start a particular fanfic? As in do you make notes, timeline or character sketches and stuff or do you just go ahead and write and then make notes on facts?

What an interesting question -- thank you for asking!  This is literally going to be a novel response (letting you know in advance LOL)

My journey as a writer... I guess I always wrote things down, started as a child when I wrote in a diary and then as I got older I wrote a little poetry, none of it very good (though I wrote a poem when I was twelve to describe the loss I felt when my Nana, my great-grandmother died, and my aunt read it aloud at her funeral).  I wrote a few short stories, just little things, prompts from teachers in school and such and then one day I decided I wanted to write my own story.  But funnily enough, it actually came about through fan fiction.  

I used to love this book series back when I was ten called Trash by Cherie Bennett, and I was completely in love with the characters Chelsey and Nick, and when Jazz claimed that she was pregnant and Nick was the father and it did ended on a cliffhanger and I didn’t have the next book, I remember writing my own version of what happened next -- God, looking back, it was probably terrible, I definitely don’t have it anymore.  Pretty sure the book series isn’t that great looking back at it now, but when I was ten, it was great! LOL.  I also wrote a side story for Demetrius and Karma, so even then I guess I branched off into subplots.  When I was fourteen, I started my own original series, which I am still currently working on and probably will be for the rest of my life if I’m honest -- it’s changed over the years, but the characters and my ultimate goal have stayed the same.

How did writing fanfiction come into mind?  

Well, with Harry Potter, it was because of my friend Chris.  We used to talk on the phone every single night after school for hours on end and after HBP came out and Harry and Ginny were FINALLY together only for him break up with her, I was so livid that I had to wait to find out what happened!  I remember Chris and I debated what would happen in the last book for ages and one day I must have ranted too much because he told me to go write my own story if I didn’t want to wait, so I did.  

I was seventeen and it was Harry Potter and the Prophecy Fulfilled: Which looking back at it now, I think it’s not exactly the greatest story lol and you can definitely see where I’ve improved since then.  After finishing HPPH, I ended up still having different ideas, all Hinny, and went on to write a few one-shots: Almost Too Late and Beautiful Mess.  Then I started writing A Different Beginning, which turned into my Beginning series: A Different Beginning, A New Beginning, Why Don’t We Just Dance?, Life Is Fickle Like That, Graduation Party, and The Reunion.  Those of you who have been reading my fanfiction since the beginning know that I originally posted the above stories on SIYE between 2005 and 2007 and had then completed (except for the second half of Life is Fickle onwards before Deathly Hallows was published).  I didn’t start posting on fanfiction.net until 2008 and only recently on Ao3.  Somewhere in between writing the Beginning Series, I also wrote a few other Hinny one-shots including The Greatest Gift, She Never Lets It Get To Her Heart, I Loved Her First (actually Arthur POV, which I later incorporated into the Beginning Series), The River (which is a standalone but also can be read as part of the Beginning Series), When the Sand Runs Out, and then the mini-series Padfoot’s Advice (Late Night Talks with Padfoot 1 & 2, Padfoot’s Advice, and Secrets from the Past).  Then I wrote the short Hinny/Romione story: The Trouble With Secrets and was inspired to write a Jily series, which I did with Crazy Little Thing Called Love, which could technically be a prequel to the Beginning Series as I kept some of the story similar.  I also wrote a Jily one-shot called Flowers and another Hinny one-shot called I Don’t Like Your Girlfriend.

I didn’t plan on writing any more fanfiction as university became busy, but then in 2017 I started writing these little Missing Moments for Harry and Ginny both before HBP and then during, and then after.  I just sort of compiled them on my computer for a while, wondering if it would turn into a story or not and then the idea came to me one day for A Second Chance after seeing some fan art of a five-year-old-Harry in sunshades and a leather jacket while riding a child’s motorbike next to Sirius in the same outfit and the next thing I knew, this story just pored out of me in February of 2018, I had the first twelve chapters written by March and another five by April.  I started posting the Missing Moments compilation, added a few more things including the Remus and Petunia scene from ASC and kept writing A Second Chance and in May, decided it was time to share it and uploaded the first twelve chapters.  

By the time I realized it was going to be a long one, I knew which characters I would sacrifice and how it would end, but how I was going to get there I still have no idea.  I’m not a writer who methodically plots.  I have a few general bullet points at the end of my current WIP chapter and that’s really it.  I add to it occasionally as I go, but mostly, I just write as I go along.  I can’t tell you how many chapters it will be or how long it will take me to get to the next section because frankly, it’s constantly changes.  I do not write in chronological order, which means I am often writing anywhere between 2-6 chapters at the same time depending on what scene has drawn my attention.  I might write something today that fits in the chapter I am currently working on and then by the time I finish writing other stuff, I realize that it doesn’t really fit there and stick it ahead into the next chapter or ten chapters from now.  I write where my heart takes me and where my creativity flows.  

I rarely ever work on more than one story at the same time, though I did write the short Newtina one-shot for my friend Heather as a Christmas present in 2018.  She requested it and I couldn’t write it, I found it so hard as I like them but it’s not characters I loved enough to write so I did it with a Luna spin-in, which I found helped.  I never take writing requests so this was very different for me, but I think it turned out cute: Say Love, ‘Cause We Got All the Time in the World.  I only recently uploaded it a month or so ago because I found it on my computer LOL.

Do you make notes, timeline or character sketches and stuff or do you just go ahead and write and then make notes on facts?

Once I am into the story, my notes are EXTREMELY detailed.  I do have a time line and separate documents for the following:

Character lists and family trees

General notes on: Political stuff, bills I’ve written, the sacred 28 document I wrote, tattoos mentioned, important dates, moon cycle dates of Remus’ life, classes I’ve invented (what they are about, who teaches them etc), textbook list per school year, notes on each Animagus form and information about their animals, actual time tables I wrote up Monday to Friday for Harry’s third/fourth, and fifth year, details of Zee and Tonks’ engagement rings, history and outline of Dante’s circles of hell with notes on how to incorporate into story, notes on pregnancy, character’s wands, geographic locations of characters, and any other little notes I think are important but don’t belong in the bullet points at the end of my current WIP chapter

History and ancestry of each family (from Harry Potter Lexicon, Pottermore, Harry Potter wiki, and my own personal creations).  This also includes manor information for Potter, Black, Longbottom, Nott, and Malfoy.

Hogwarts lay-out including stuff I’ve added or made up

Ministry of Magic departments and people (known and created)

List of spells (including ones I’ve made up and which chapter and which character introduced it to who)

List and pictures of Sirius’ motorbikes with information on each one

List of Pensieve memories and marauder moments (crossed out which ones I’ve shared already, some are written and waiting to be used and others just a general idea)

Terms and phrases from different languages I’ve used in the past

My playlist of songs I have mentioned in the story

An entire document dedicated to Operation FUVP including a Voldemort timeline which I have now shared in the story itself (also includes when and where each character found the Horcruxes)

A list of some of the recipes I mentioned, and 

I have a 72 page document that is literally just detailed chapter summaries to help me remember what the hell I’ve written LOL (also highlights introductions to new characters in a different font colour to help me find out when people were introduced).

Hope this answers your question -- thank you again for asking!

[dreamingofketchup]

ash & dust

Merry Christmas to the amazing @ghost-kaiju!! I’m your secret santa! I hope you’ll enjoy this fic and the rest of the holidays! (and hopefully this will be uploaded to ao3 soon if I actually figure out how that site works haha)

I picked your first prompt: Kakuzu and Hidan: tag team of hitmen/assassins in modern AU (art or fic)

The Organization gathered the best hitmen from all around the world, masters of deception and assassination; freaks and outcasts and terrifyingly strong. Their methods are not the cleanest – but they always get the job done.

Kakuzu was considered a veteran among the members. No one really knew where he came from; they wasn't even sure Kakuzu was his real name and not many could claim that they had ever seen his face. There were only two things they were sure about: he would do anything for the right amount of money and he never fails a mission.

And his latest partner (Kakuzu preferred not to talk about what happened to the ones before him), Hidan, was also a peculiar one. A runaway kid who started out from the drug business in one of the gangs in the other side of the country and who soon gained fame when he – all alone in a summer afternoon (almost a year ago by now), wielding only his knife and a gun - murdered the head of the rival gang. And survived. That was when the Boss took interest in him and offered Hidan a place in the Organization. He refused at first. Then he refused again. Only when he realized – almost too late – how many people were after him (after the disgustingly high bounty on his head) did he accept the offer of the Akatsuki. No one really understood why didn't the Boss just hand him over for the money.

Together they were unstoppable. Hidan might not have been the most discreet one around – but he sure as hell enjoyed his job. Too loudly usually, lord, he just wouldn't shut up for a moment - but he was not afraid to get his hands dirty. Kakuzu was sure he would successfully finish a mission even if he got both his arms blown off. That brat was a fucking mess.

Kakuzu had to admit that Hidan, despite being the insufferable little bitch he usually was, complemented him quite well. The way he killed was ruthless and painful, but he was honest; he never killed from behind. He always told his victims what he's there for; sometimes they fled, some tried and fought back. Every now and then Kakuzu would watch him fight through the scope of his rifle, the fire in Hidan's eyes (he never bothered to ask about the unnatural eye colour; that was the least weird thing about Hidan), his rapid movements full of pure strength and brutality. He was anything but majestic, a demon incarnate, ugly and loud and ecstatic. It was so different from Kakuzu's cold and habitual professionalism; Hidan was alive when he was playing with death.

And nowadays there was something else in the way Hidan fought. A month or two ago while digging through Kakuzu's book collection he found an old book (Kakuzu couldn't even remember seeing it; he hadn't the slightest idea how it got there.) about an ancient, long forgotten religion, built on violence, pain and human sacrifice. It was practiced thousands of years ago, but Hidan claimed there were still people who called themselves the followers of the vengeful and bloodthirsty Jashin. And he would pray before a mission, holding onto some ugly handmade rosary. It was weird and disturbing, his devotion to this newly-found deity – and the prayers had the tendency to get annoyingly long. Kakuzu in exchange complained a lot about it, even though he understood him way too well; in this profession, in this life one needs such a fixation to avoid going insane.

---------

A few days ago the Boss called both of them to assign them a new mission; not a top one but better than nothing. All they had to do was to get rid of an enforcer and his posse from a Northern City gang. It wasn't unusual for the Organization to get involved in gang or mafia issues; the Boss could always dispatch someone who had affiliations with someone around. And this time it was Hidan. The target was part of a gang named Coppers who originated in Yugakure, Hidan's hometown, operating somewhere in the western blocks of the city. Hidan still had his sources (and the stupidity to actually accept the mission and go back) and Kakuzu decided not to ask too much.

The day of the mission arrived and it was time for him to leave now. Half past five; Hidan should be here already.

And as he left his flat, he could already spot the man leaning against his car on the sidewalk, eyes closed, rosary brought upon his chapped lips. He didn't pay attention even as he approached him. Kakuzu stood next to him in silence for almost a minute. Hidan knew that he was there. Kakuzu knew that he knew. The usual.

- Hey.

No answer. He tried again. Hidan didn't even bother.

- Couldn't you have done this at home? We should get going, idiot.

- Fuck off, I'm in the middle of something. - Hidan hummed, eyes still closed. They were going to be late.

- Can you really say “fuck” in a prayer?

- I'm praying for a good kill and you scold me for swearing? Nice.

- That's not what I meant. But could you just finish it in the car? - He threw their bags in the trunk of the car. He was starting to lose his patience.

- Whatever. I'm going to have to start again anyways, because someone interrupted me.

At that point Kakuzu decided not to say anything. He got in and reluctantly though, but Hidan crawled on the passenger seat too. He started his prayer again, and Kakuzu began driving. If there was one thing he was grateful about in Hidan's fucked up religion is that at least the prayers were silent. Mostly. After about twenty minutes of silence Hidan opened his eyes. He leaned back, stretching his arms.

- Finally that we got a fucking mission. It's really been a while.

- Yeah. - Kakuzu nodded.

- The Boss hates me I tell ya. That's why I hardly ever get any missions.

- Kakuzu decided to bite back his initial reply for this, and right before his silence could have been classified as awkward he could change the topic.

- So you know those guys?

- More or less. The Coppers were our buddies. They are real big on smuggling and whores, at least they were back then. Knew a chick there, always got her meth from me.

- Doesn't it feel weird, going back to them with this contract? - Kakuzu glanced over to his partner.

- Listen, they would've gladly shot me for a dime if things turned that way. And in fact, things did fucking turn that way so I don't give a shit.

- Fair enough.

Hidan sighed and rested his head against the window. They were sitting in silence for minutes. The sky was dark; tiny yellow dots indicated the neighbouring towns on the horizon.

- I wonder how things go up there nowadays.

- You miss them?

- You could say. I dunno. These kinds of people were my family for so long. As close as it can get with such people I mean, we just didn't hate each other as much. Better than nothing.

- Crime brings people together. - Kakuzu nodded.

- Yeah. Hard times but I liked it there.

- Would you like to go back?

- I couldn't, even if I wanted to. - he started fiddling with his rosary, staring out of the window blankly - And I really don't get why they turned on me. I did what they wanted, damnit.

- Trust me, I know the feeling. - Kakuzu sighed. His markings would not let him forget that even if he wanted to. – But my bet's on the money.

- Yeah, of course, I know, money's the most important thing, it makes the world go round and it's the only thing that matters, yeah, yeah. - Hidan groaned, his words soaked in the purest sarcasm.

Kakuzu didn't respond to his obvious bait, being lost deep in his thoughts. Maybe they really weren't that different after all; no wonder Hidan chose to get pulled into this disturbing borderline fanatism he calls religion. He had to keep his thoughts occupied with something. Yes, he knew this too well.

- We're almost there. - Hidan's voice pulled him back from his thoughts.

They soon reached Yugakure. It was already dark, old street lamps and buzzing neons guiding them through the streets. They parked down a few streets further; as they got out Kakuzu pulled up his hood and adjusted his vest, looking around the street. To put it mildly, it was ugly and worn; so many of the buildings in ruins, and those that were intact were covered in graffiti and piss. Nobody cared to clean the trash from the street. Hidan started talking, as if he noticed the way Kakuzu stared.

- You know, for so long this hellhole had the reputation of being the nicest, cleanest place up in the North. Really. Then about, let's say, ten years ago... - he was visibly struggling to find the right words. He touched the rosary hanging on his neck - shit happened. Man, I was a snotty lil kid but I still remember the riots. Half the city was in flames. Everything went downhills since and nobody fucking cares.

- I remember hearing it in the news once, yes.

- So yeah, that's fucking it. Welcome to Yu' I guess.

- Great. - Kakuzu sighed - Let's get going.

The streets were empty. On one balcony Kakuzu saw two girls smoking, but that's all he could say about the life he saw in the city so far. Even the street of the bar was relatively empty, a few drunk people leaning by the walls, smoking god knows what and talking about matters he was sure he should be grateful he didn't hear. He was eyeing a taller building across the bar; that roof would be just good. He pulled up his scarf higher on his face.

- Let's get to it. Find a good place. And take care.

- Fine. - Hidan waved and turned around; he decided it was time for him to cover his face too.

Kakuzu picked up his bag and took his way to the rooftop. The old exit ladder was painfully creaky, threatening to fall apart with every step. Hidan was waiting in the alley a few meters away from the bar. Kakuzu could see his lanky figure clear from the rooftop, as the blinking neon painted him in a different color with every blink. There was that particular shade of red which suited him so well. But the green wasn't bad either.

The Target should be coming out soon. He put his rifle together and waited. Every now and then a group of drunk people would come out but none fitted the description and the photographs. He was sure Hidan was already at the end of his patience.

Not an hour passed when another group of men came out. Five of them; ragged clothes, greasy hair and already shitfaced enough that none of them could walk straight. He recognized the man from the photograph, walking behind the others. He had a bottle in hand but he really looked like he would simply pass out if he had one more sip. Kakuzu leaned closer to the edge of the rooftop and waited a few seconds. One of the men looked up. Too late.

- Get ready. - Kakuzu said into his headset. He pulled the trigger.

These long seconds never failed to send chills down his spine; the shock, the gasps, the despair – the body falling on the ground, confused shouting, the disguised fear in their eyes that they will be the next, that they should try and reach for their gun---

But they can only fail.

He saw Hidan walk towards the confused group, hands tucked in his pocket. That shit-eating grin on his face would have been a reason enough for those guys to pull a weapon on him.

- What- what the fuck is happening? - a surprisingly sober voice could be heard from the small group.

- Vulture's back bitch, that's what's happening. - Hidan grinned, gun already in his hand; he looked into his eyes as he pulled the trigger.

But that boy was fast, the bullet only grazed his scalp as he jumped away. He pulled out his gun – but he didn't have the chance to use it as a bullet came flying from the left, hitting the gun out of his hand. The next bullet went for the spine. The boy fell on the ground with a heavy thud, dust flying in the air around him.

- I could've dealt with him alone! - Hidan shouted angrily; Kakuzu just smiled and reloaded. He was sure of that.

But Hidan didn't have time to be angry as another guy rushed at him, flinging a knife around wildly. Hidan was laughing loudly. He could avoid the cuts easily; the combination of alcohol and adrenaline is good for bloodthirst but not for coordination. Hidan was still having his fun nevertheless; next thing Kakuzu heard was him shooting that drunk bastard on the knee before starting to beat him up.

The gunshots didn't seem to faze the citizens and neither did the wailing of that man; Kakuzu expected turmoil and police sirens, people to be barging out of the bar to see what's happening. But nothing. The silence, save for that drunkard's screams, was disturbing – what kind of people are these, what the hell's going on, is this a trap?-, but it only made their job easier. Hidan kept on punching the guy until his face was all dark and unrecognizable – when did he put on those brass knuckles – and he kept on rambling about how he will be a fine sacrifice, he has been chosen, Jashin will appreciate him. Kakuzu sighed and looked away and tried not to listen to the rest of this speech.

There were two people left when Hidan started fighting with this one but it seems they have run away; so there are still sensible people left in this city. He wondered if they would alert anyone and he could only hope Hidan would finish his fascinating brutality soon. He started packing his stuff.

Then the body fell on the ground lifeless. Kakuzu got his bag and climbed down the ladder, rifle in his hand. Just in case. He found Hidan standing by his building, kissing his rosary yet again. Lord, they'll be caught if he starts praying here. But he was lucky, Hidan opened his eyes right as he got off the ladder.

- Man, this was too quick. They were no match. - Hidan walked up to him, wiping his hands in his once-white shirt.

- Can anyone be?

Hidan laughed out loud; his voice echoed from the dirty walls. Somewhere in the distance a dog started barking.

- But Vulture? Really? That's the lamest name I've ever heard. - Kakuzu continued.

- Fuck off. Whose prison name was Stitches anyways?

- Wow, you actually remembered something I told you?

- I was just guessing.

The streets were empty as they left. Nobody followed them, they couldn't even hear any sirens, nothing. They got to the car in safety, which Kakuzu carefully checked before getting in. Nothing. Again.

- This place is fucking weird. - Kakuzu sighed as they got in the car.

- Told ya. - Hidan laughed.

- This wasn't exactly a subtle attack and no one cared. You were there and no one fucking cared. I prepared for a bounty hunter or two, and nothing, not even the police came. Not that I mind.

-Yeah. Well, everyone is so invested in their own bullshittery that they just don't give a fuck about others.

- So I guess you are only an urban legend now at best.

- Most likely. Fuckin' great.

- I see. You want one? - he asked as he pulled out a cigarette packet out of his pocket. Hidan held his hand out immediately.

- What kinda fucking question is that?

Hidan put the cigarette between his teeth and with a smirk he leaned closer to light it with the end of Kakuzu's.

- That's pretty much the least practical way to light a cigarette. - Kakuzu rolled his eyes, but his light grin betrayed him.

- Oh shut up, you know you find it hot. - Hidan laughed, blowing out the smoke.

- You are hopeless.

And they left the city. Mission accomplished.

[daleisgreat]

35 Years of NES - Flashback Special!

It took me 12 minutes to set up this shot of what encapsulates my NES fandom! Please sit down and listen for awhile as I recount my life and times as a NES kid! This October in a couple months will mark the 35th anniversary of the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America so that means it is time for another flashback special where I recount my personal history with the NES. This is the 11th platform that has gotten the flashback special treatment from me in the little over a year I have been doing them and if you want to get caught up with the rest make sure to check out the links at the bottom of this entry! Furthermore, if you are looking for a more traditional anniversary piece chronologically highlighting the history of the system and its top games I have you covered there too. At the bottom of this article I have embedded old podcasts of mine I recently uploaded to YouTube from my personal archives where we highlight the system as a whole on its 25th anniversary ten years ago. I additionally have podcasts from my history of RPG and comic book videogame series highlighting the NES entries from those genres that are all featured at the bottom of this article to keep that NES anniversary train rolling for the rest of the year! Being Introduced to the Power

I will never forget the first impression the NES made on me because it was the first time I ever witnessed and played a videogame! It was the Christmas shopping season of 1988 and I just got home from Kindergarten class to see my older sister playing some electronic contraption that was absolutely foreign to me. My eyes soon gazed upon the TV where a crudely pixelated man in red overalls was running and jumping across the screen to the catchiest of background music jingles that will always stick with me. She soon enough passed along the NES’s vintage rectangular controller to me and within minutes I was hooked as I sunk my teeth into my first videogame, Super Mario Bros.. Our family got the ‘Power Set’ which had the 3-in-1 cart featuring Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet along with the Power Pad and Zapper accessories. I was too little to figure out how to operate the Power Pad at the time and rarely played World Class Track Meet, but the family did get a decent amount of playtime in Duck Hunt and groveled over how we could never shoot that damn dog! We always kept coming back to Super Mario Bros though. I had no idea what I was doing as a five-year-old at that time, but I knew I had to give it my all to get Mario to jump to the top (and over???) of the flagpole at the end of most levels. Eventually I stumbled my way accidentally jumping into hidden blocks that contained SECRETS like extra lives, bonus coin blocks and vines that lead to bonus coin rooms and warp zones! Much like today how I have to explore every nook and cranny in the latest open world sandbox game, Super Mario Bros. planted the seeds for that gaming mindset in me to jump around and explore everything to find whatever secrets Nintendo had in store for good ‘ol Mario.

The minus world was the ultimate secret in videogames for so many years that it was the #1 secret of the top 100 secrets in the 100th issue of Nintendo Power. It took me about a couple years of trying over and over and taking advantage of all the warp zones and extra live secrets I could, but the original Super Mario Bros. was the first game I ever finished. When I thought I discovered all the secrets in the original Super Mario Bros. a friend or cousin would power it on and showed me all new secrets and tips that blew me away. First it was getting to time a jump just right on a koopa troopa coming down the block stairs so Mario would repeatedly jump on them to get near-infinite lives. Then they showed me the hidden warp zones….and then there was the day after much repeated attempts that my cousin showed me the much talked about ‘minus world’ in the game that perplexed me so much that I lambasted him with questions about said level’s eye-opening odd level design. ‘Why did the level never end? Why is this magical force sucking Mario through the bricks, cousin….IS MARIO A GHOST!?!?’ That tripped me out as a Kindergartner, but not as much as the most sinister-looking baddie in the game, the dastardly Hammer Bros!!!! No I am not talking about the adorably-huggable hammer bros. from Super Mario Bros. 3, I am talking about the spiky-squiggly-shaped monsters that chucked super-sharp-metal-thingies at Mario!!! The original Hammer Bros. petrified five-year-old Dale!!! Just see for yourself below…

Encountering the Hammer Bros. for the first time in a night level only amplified the terror they unleashed! I was terrified of them, but what was especially terrifying was how Nintendo gave them a paint of cuteness by their look in Super Mario Bros. 3 as you can see above on their right. You can almost look walk right up and give them a hug! Bring back the sinister OG hammer bro Nintendo! As much as I loved the original Super Mario Bros., I never got to put a lot of playtime into its sequels. I think they were always rented out at the local video store. I do recall watching my cousin finishing Super Mario Bros. 2 and watching in awe the quality of the ending ‘dream’ cinematic that stirs controversies to this day! I never played much original NES Super Mario Bros. 3 either until I got Super Mario All-Stars where I later played a ton of both of those games, but that is a story for another day. The Joy of Renting and Garage Sale-ing

Speaking of renting though, it was how I played almost all my NES games for the first couple years our family had the NES. I was too young to realize games could be purchased at the store and thought games could only be rented at the video store….at least that is what I think my mom caused me to believe anyways. Looking back I loved those early NES years perusing the local video store and only going by misleading box art on what to rent. There are four specific renting memories stood out from those years around the end of the 1980s. One is playing a ton of the first CastleVania and being perplexed at why the heart pickups did not restore health, second is perishing repeatedly in the original Mega Man right from the start which got me to swore off the franchise for a few decades (more on that later). Another time I freaked out at the video store receiving my copy of Tengen’s RBI Baseball and discovering how their black cartridges differed than the standard NES gray carts, but only to have the video clerk assure me they would work on the NES. Finally, my favorite rental memory was getting gleeful goosebumps as a result of the mesmerizing beats of what is my single favorite NES theme, yes I am talking about the ‘Moon Theme’ of Duck Tales. A theme so powerful it still gives me the shivers to this day.

Behold the single best NES stage music of all time!! Now listen to it for ten hours straight!!!! I mentioned in previous flashback specials how I grew up with divorced parents. I would visit my dad on the weekends and he would usually be a system a generation behind because he was big on garage sales and people were getting rid of their old systems typically when the next system was hitting. So when the NES was the primary system, I would play Atari 2600 at my dad’s on the weekends. Around the time SNES launched in 1991 was when my dad finally got a NES, and he would have another regular NES game or two every several weeks he found at another garage sale. I recall the first four games he got with his NES: Days of Thunder, Gauntlet II, Ikari Warriors and 10-Yard Fight!

My dad bought whatever he thought was a deal at the time of those garage sales, and the quality of games he brought back varied greatly. His garage sale bargain was how I first played classic hits like the original Legend of Zelda and Maniac Mansion. I was seriously into both of those games even though I struggled to make progress in Zelda because all I had was the packed in map to guide me in the pre-Internet and strategy guide days. I made my own dungeon maps in Zelda, and loved trying to figure out the way to get past its increasingly trickier dungeons and puzzles, but eventually got stuck after the third dungeon and could not deduce the pattern in its version of the ‘Lost Woods’ for the life of me. Maniac Mansion was the first adventure game I was exposed to and was instantly hooked, even with the clunky and censored NES port I was resilient in attempting to figure my way around the lighthearted obstacles of the mansion and trying to hide from its alien residents. Reflecting back on my fandom for Maniac Mansion, it got me confident that if I was aware of the PC gaming scene of the late 80s/early 90s instead of the NES scene that I would see myself being head over heels for the countless adventure games from Sierra and Lucas Arts at the time. There were other times however my dad would come back from a garage sale with not-so-desirable titles like XEXYX, Dash Galaxy and Rocket Ranger, but sometimes his picks were a surprise. I somehow got locked into the addictive nature of the stock market game of Wall Street Kid and played far more of that than I had any right to. My dad eventually got the four player adaptor for the NES and the family tried to do the unthinkable one day and dedicate an afternoon to finishing Gauntlet II. We loved that game, but never had time to finish it in a session because the levels just kept never ending and we presumed it had to end by level 100. So one of my favorite NES memories is when the family gathered determined to finish level 100…which we did, but our bravery was for naught when we were all stunned to see that was not the end of the game. I believe we got to around level 130-ish before we eventually threw up our arms and powered off the NES. How the hell were we suppose to know back then that the levels procedurally generated!?!

Gauntlet II and Ikari Warriors were two of the four games that came with the NES my dad purchased at a garage sale and thus we invested countless hours in both, yet both titles we failed at finishing! My dad, brother and I played far too much Ikari Warriors together. I know it is a sloppily designed game with a lot of glitches and other hiccups, but the setting and atmosphere of Ikari Warriors rode the coattails of the infectious Rambo-hype of the 80s. Ikari Warriors on the NES felt like more of a faithful videogame adaptation of that film than the actual Rambo NES games itself. Ikari Warriors was the next best thing by chucking grenades and wreaking havoc with a tank, especially with a second player in co-op! That game burned through lives to the point of where I expected there to be a cheat code to get more lives because it would hang at the game over screen for a good 10 seconds so eventually I mashed buttons until I memorized that ‘A,B,B,A’ unlocked three more lives! I was super proud of being able to figure out a cheat code on my own! The levels in Ikari Warriors went on forever though, and regardless of having near-infinite lives with that code, we would eventually get bored and/or confused at that awkward fourth stage with the bizarre piping the warriors would get hung up on. Over the years the odd gameplay quirks of Ikari Warriors I look back at fondly I came to discover that everyone else detested as one of the worst NES titles, which I feel is a bit much. If my words cannot do it justice, then James Rolfe captured the highs and lows of Ikari Warriors perfectly in an episode of Angry Videogame Nerd I highly recommend giving a watch by clicking or pressing here. Playing with a Different Sort of Power

Over the years I came to find out that the mega popular Nintendo Power magazine was the go-to source for NES fandom of that era. I am an outlier in this case as I was not aware of the magazine until well into the 16-bit era. I chalk this up to never buying games brand new at the time where most new games on Nintendo platforms came bundled with Nintendo Power subscription inserts which I did not become keen to until getting new GameBoy games in 1993. So where was I to get all my latest NES coverage in the late 80s and early 90s before the Internet and then completely oblivious to the videogame magazine market? Through super cheesy, early 90s videogame-themed TV shows! There was not an official Nintendo Power show, but there was an awesome game show on weekday mornings for a couple years in the early 90s called Video Power that showcased kids playing the latest NES games in various challenges. Nickelodeon had a videogame TV show too, which was another game show called Nick Arcade. They had kids answering trivia and competing in various arcade game and virtual reality-esque challenges. The magazine GamePro also endorsed a TV show at the time and it featured more traditional game coverage and I recall it having an over-the-top host showcasing the latest secrets and tips. If you are not familiar with these shows, they are fun to look back on as they capture the goofy ‘extreme kids’ nature that dominated the early 90s. James Rolfe once again does a nice breakdown video of Nick Arcade and Video Power I will embed below or you can click or press here to check it out. These three shows and the latest gossip with classmates and friends were the only ways I got my news about the latest NES games back then.

Nick Arcade and Video Power are dissected in the above video and those TV game shows were how I was initially glued into the latest NES games as a kid. NES ‘Rights of Passage’ For those that grew up with the NES, I bet you have a good idea where this is going. Anyone that owned the traditional rectangular NES with the flip cover of doom will know that model of the NES was notorious for only powering up games about half the time. Recess-rumors lead us all to believe that blowing into the cartridges made them work better, and while it usually did I still remember my dad buying cleaning kits at the store and insisting using it to clean the games instead of blowing into them…but I like many other NES-kids were super impatient and instead went with the blowing/jiggling the NES-cartridge ever so gently into place….and sometimes wiggling the cartridge up and down several times before firmly locking the cartridge into place and powering on the system. That was the way I convinced myself to get NES games to power on their first try with a 60% success rate! For younger readers here who are doubting me, I am not kidding. This was a thing….seriously! Click or press here for proof where the GameSpot crew of 2005 detail their near identical NES-troubleshooting demonstrations in their excellent video on the NES!

As the header above alludes to, that was one of several ‘rights of passage’ for all NES-kids of the era. The so-bad-its good animated show, Captain N the Game Master likely was part of your Saturday morning cartoon lineup (yes, I have the DVD set, be on the lookout for a review…eventually). Another one was ‘NES-thumb.’ I love Nintendo’s directional-pad, but on the NES longer play sessions with button-mashy-prone games would result in it leaving a scouring imprint on the thumb for hours! I feel safe to say a majority of NES-kids encountered an awful LJN-published game based off one of their personal favorite licensed properties of the 80s. For me it was the atrocious X-Men title, its agonizingly bad Back to the Future game and most of their WWF games. As much as I loved the Ikari Warriors code described above, the most popular code spread across several NES games was the ‘Konami’ code. Ask any then game player 35+ and they likely would be able to subconsciously spout it off to you instantaneously! John Cena turned the code into his best t-shirt design! Calling Nintendo’s long distance-fee heavy hotline for the latest tips from Nintendo’s endorsed gameplay counselors was another thing that got kids to surprise their parents with $100+ phone bills. The last big hurrah for NES-kids was going to see The Wizard at the end of 1989 to see a few precious minutes of Super Mario Bros. 3 gameplay a couple months before its release! I could go on about The Wizard forever, but that was why I covered it here on my blog last week instead so if you want to know all about the Nintendo adver-film, then click or press here for my entry on it! 8-Bit Sports Fun for Everyone! Talking to other core gamers and listening to many gaming podcasts over the years one irk-ing trend is of most ardent game players shaming sports game fans. I understand why the main EA Sports and 2K Sports games are sim-focused experiences that are not for everyone, but they continue to sell well and have their dedicated fanbase. Back in the 8-bit and most of the 16-bit generation, sports games were simpler pick-up-and-play affairs that worked for almost anyone, especially on the NES with its simpler graphics and only having two primary action buttons. The first sports game I got into on NES was Double Dribble which blew me away with its ‘cinematic’ dunks. Nintendo’s Ice Hockey was a huge favorite of mine and it featured fast, scoring heavy action, and had fights, overtime and shootouts all crammed into a NES cartridge. I thought it was the best hockey game on the NES, and then I discovered the more brutal and up close fights in Konami’s Blades of Steel! There were a deluge of baseball games on the NES and the two I got into the most were the original RBI Baseball and BaseWars. RBI Baseball had the illusion of realistic baseball, but simple enough for anyone to grasp. It had a twee-art style, happy-go-lucky background music to nod along with and was one of the first baseball games to feature real MLB players. BaseWars frigging ruled! Futuristic teams of robots duked it out on the diamond and would engage in battles when attempting a tag out!

For pigskin NES classics, the first one I got into was 10-Yard Fight! It had rather….particular…controls for a launch-era NES football game, but I eventually adapted to it. I know now that Tecmo Bowl and especially its sequel, Tecmo Super Bowl were the cream of the crop of NES football games, but I never got a chance to play them until many years after the fact (and I was still blown away by my friend’s first play he picked against me which was scrambling to the back of his endzone and unleashing a 100-yard touchdown pass!). My own personal top pick is NES Play Action Football, a gridiron game that will forever have a place in my heart! I have everlasting memories of my dad teaming up with me to take on the computer. The passing controls in this game are garbage so we only did running plays, but the players ran absurdly slow…and that was even when factoring in there was a turbo speed button! My dad and I however learned to own that ridiculous control scheme! I would hand off the ball to him and then I would take control of the linemen and block defenders for him as he ever-so-gradually-inched-his-way-across-the-field. I am not embellishing by saying it took a good two whole minutes to traverse about 80 yards. It was completely asinine, but I felt a huge sense of accomplishment with every first down and touchdown my dad and I accomplished with our teamwork! That covers the four major American sports, but there was also a lot of representation from the ESPN Ocho tier of sports games. I loved me some Super Dodge Ball and loved going through its world cup mode. Its adorable oversized character graphics carried over into Nintendo’s soccer game, Nintendo World Cup. Nintendo also delivered two excellent golf titles on the system with the self-titled Golf during the black box launch era of the NES, and a more fleshed out version of that game with a career mode and three courses in NES Open Tournament Golf. Konami’s pair of International Track & Field titles were excellent arcade conversions. Finally, I would be remiss if I was not to give Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out a little love here. I ate up the puzzle pattern boxing gameplay with its distinctive roster of foes for the affable Little Mac. I wish I was not awful at it as I could only get to Bald Bull before my inferior skills met their match.

I invested countless hours into marginally satisfactory NES wrestling games. The cream of the crud pictured above is Wrestlemania Challenge and Tecmo World Wrestling. The wrestling nut in me begrudgingly admits there is not a five star grappler on the NES. All the WWF games range from middling to atrocious. WWF Wrestlemania Challenge I would say was marginally solid because it had functinal enough gameplay, a decent roster with wrestlers not seen in many other games at that time like Rick Rude & Andre the Giant, featured finishing moves and best of all one of the few wrestling games that played AWESOME chiptune renditions of the wrestler's theme music throughout gameplay! Avoid Tag Team Wrestling and M.U.S.C.L.E. at all costs, both of those abysmal wrestling games make all the LJN WWF games seem competently made. Pro Wrestling is good for a launch era game, but it is very limiting all things considered. I had a lot of fun with WCW Wrestling back then, but its unique controls have not aged well. I would have to give Tecmo World Wrestling the nod as my favorite NES wrasslin’ game because of solid controls, Tecmo’s trademark cinematics and its goofy announcer providing nonstop text play-by-play on the bottom of the screen that constantly had my attention.

Some of my favorite driving NES games seen above are Micro Machines on the left and Super Off Road on the right. A Micro Machines game with the same style of core racing mechanics has appeared in almost every console generation since! Super Off Road is probably my favorite four player NES game. Driving and motorsports were another favorite of mine, and the NES was loaded with them! My two favorites were Super Off-Road and Super Sprint. The former because it was a pretty faithful conversion of the arcade game and had four player support my family and friends clocked many hours with. Super Sprint had a similar overhead view of the whole track, but felt like it had more realistic handling, yet still contained many increasingly tough obstacles to overcome. In a strange twist, I later found a couple years ago the developers of Super Off-Road made a F1 style of that game that is also four player compatible in Indy Heat, but it also features pit stops where you can ram over the pit crew! Excitebike was an early childhood rental favorite as I loved going over the ramps and wiping out and randomly assembling a mish-mash of parts of a course in the track editor. I was bummed the NES never got the excellent OutRun from the arcades so I had to suffice with Square’s take on the checkpoint-based driving game, Rad Racer and its sequel a couple years later which were almost, but not quite on par with Sega’s flagship arcade driving game. RC Pro-AM and Micro Machines I am a huge fan of both racing games that feature an overhead camera that locks on and follows the car from a birds-eye view unlike the average behind the car camera perspectives that dominated that era. Collecting for the NES As the 1990s wore on a local video store selling its excess stock and a local game store called Tiger Play were my go to spots for a few years for used videogames. I will never forget lucking into a $2 copy of Tengen’s Tetris at the video store. Eventually eBay opened the floodgates to track down a lot of the NES games I rambled on about above. A regional annual retro game convention, The Midwest Gaming Classic, I attended several times over the past 15 years also attributed to many of my NES games. One year I was ecstatic to get a fan translation of the original Mother game that Nintendo would later officially release on the WiiU as Earthbound Beginnings. I was also ecstatic to get a fan mod updated rosters version of Tecmo Super Bowl. I eventually got a NES-clone system towards the end of 2000s that handled NES games exponentially better than the original Nintendo system and also allowed the ability to play Japanese Famicom games. At MGC I would buy one or two random cheap Famicom games a year to make use of the Famicom slot. I only wound up with several Famicom games, with highlights being Baseball, Tetris and Mighty Final Fight.

The last trip I made out to MGC in 2018 I went in with the goal to finish off my Power Pad game collection and hunt down the last three Power Pad compatible games I did not own to officially have all eight or nine Power Pad games. After perusing the many vendors there I was able to track down the much treasured copies of Athletic World, Eggsplode/Street Cop and Dance Aerobics down, along with a bonus homebrew NES cornhole/bag toss game, Tailgate Party, that also took advantage of the Power Pad. A couple years ago YouTube creator, Pat Contri released his exhaustive Ultimate Nintendo Guide to the NES Library coffee table book/tome that reviewed every single NES game. I read it over the course of a year via a few pages a night before bed. It naturally turned me onto several games I either long forgotten about or completely went over my head and I wound up tracking them down online. That book got me wound up on a NES four player game kick and I have about a dozen four player NES games right now. One night a couple years ago I did a four player NES party night and managed to have a fair amount of fun with some friends going at it in Super Off-Road, Gauntlet II and Super Jeopardy. Right now my preferred way to play NES cartridges is via the Retron 5 system. I know that clone system is a little polarizing because of its emulation software it uses, but I love its performance at playing NES games and other cartridge based systems on my HDTV without the fuzzy graphics and lag that happens when plugging in old composite/RCA cables that came with the NES. I also love that it allows save states and the equivalent of Game Genie cheat codes. A couple years ago I finally got around to playing through SNK’s action-RPG, Crystalis and I would be lying if I said I did not take advantage of save states and a couple of the cheats. Official Nintendo NES Preservation Nintendo has been doing their part, for better and worse, at keeping the NES catalog alive digitally going back to the launch of the Wii in 2006. I picked up several NES games digitally for the Wii at $5 apiece for the Wii’s Virtual Console. I did the exact same thing a few years later for the WiiU and 3DS. The Virtual Console was a handy feature I took advantage of somewhat, but I think it far benefitted younger gamers who were being introduced to those classics for the first time. Nintendo spawned the mini-console craze a few years ago with them debuting the NES Classic, which packed 30 first and third party NES games into a pint sized version of a plug-and-play NES. It featured a solid lineup of games across all genres and was a great bargain considering strong library of games. The emulation quality was leagues better compared to the Virtual Console and the NES Classic feature better implementation of save states and now the ability to rewind gameplay. I brought the NES Classic over to family gatherings and it was a hit all night long.

The NES Classic and NES Channel on the Switch are my two top legitimate recommended ways to digitally dive into the NES library! The best part about the NES Classic was how easy it was to mod and upload your own games to. I know the various RetroPi’s and Mister devices have been capable of this for awhile, but there is something special about the NES Classic’s interface that makes it the preferred way for me to re-experience these NES gems. For a little last minute prep for this article, I loaded up Nintendo’s latest way to experience NES games via the NES Channel on the Switch. Right now it has a little over 50 unique NES (and a small selection of Famicom) games available to play in North America. I dabbled with a few different game for a little over an hour, and finished off my session by playing through the first several stages of Super Mario Bros. again. Nintendo once again stepped up their emulation efforts here by having even better functioning save states and rewind features and now the ability to do online two player. I got my nephew to play with me online and it worked surprisingly well…..other than my fifth grade nephew initially being a little crabby at the graphics being ‘old’ at least. I do not hear many people touting this feature that much and I think it is awesome that Nintendo made this back catalog online and all things considered is part of a great value for $25 a year for Nintendo’s online Switch service.

If those two options do not interest you than there are a ton of other NES games that got re-released as part of collections on many systems over the years. On the current gen alone I would recommend the first Mega Man Legacy Collection that collects the first eight Mega Man games, of which the first six are the NES games. That was how I first experienced Mega Man 2 after the aforementioned boycotting of the brand. Yes, it was after decades of reading testimonials on how Mega Man 2 is one of the all-time greats for the NES I finally played it off that collection a few years ago and loved it. It also allows save states thank goodness, or else I would never be able to conquer that final gauntlet leading up to Dr. Wily! Other recommended collections would include the digital collections Konami released last year rounding up the early entries of the CastleVania and Contra games, both of which have all their NES installments. I highly suggest getting Capcom’s Disney Afternoon Collection that has six of the best licensed NES platformers such as both Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers games. SNK released an excellent 40th anniversary collection last year too which includes several of their NES games including my beloved Ikari Warriors and its two lesser sequels. The Double Dragon and Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle gathers the Double Dragon trilogy, and a ton of Technos favorites like River City Ransom, Super Dodge Ball and nearly a dozen others that until now were exclusive in Japan. For younger readers not familiar with the NES library, these are all recommended ways to legit first experience a healthy chunk of some of the best games of the NES library! The Power Lives On…. I cannot believe it has already been nearly 35 years since the NES first launched in North America. Since it is the system of my childhood, I will always be super nostalgic about it. The NES introduced me to the world of videogames and I have been hooked ever since. My favorite game for it would have to be the original Super Mario Bros., with podium finishes going to The Legend of Zelda and yes, the dastardly Ikari Warriors. Whenever I go into a retro game shop or convention I almost instinctively find myself glomming towards the NES section in hopes of finding some long neglected title to have in my collection even though I constantly remind myself I have every game I want for it. Many thanks for making it through this beast of a read and indulging my lifetime of NES memories and I hope I have either introduced you to some new NES factoids and games here or at least had a fun trip down memory lane with me. If you want to indulge me in more NES retrospectives, but in audio form this time, I have embedded a few podcasts I recently un-vaulted from my archives below.

Here is the all-encompassing retrospective I did on the NES for its 25th anniversary 10 years ago.

And here is where we do a deep dive on all the comic book videogames on the NES.

To wrap it up, here is podcast deep dive on all the RPG games on the NES.

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

You have not lived the late 80s/early 90s NES fervor without watching a whole episode of Video Power. I present this episode above for your consumption!

Wait a Second, Did I Forget Some Games? Bonus Overtime!!!! I know, I know…I have rambled on forever so that is why I officially concluded this flashback just above. However, if you are somehow, someway still scrolling down and find yourself here I have a few more NES favorites and memories I would love to share so they do not remain on the cutting room floor. First off, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trilogy on the NES I have to get some reflections on! That first game….what a mess of a platformer it turned out to be. I did love its theme music though! TMNT fever was ubiquitous during the NES generation and I was an ardent fan of the shelled heroes like almost all kids my age so I forced myself to put way too much time into it than I should have. Several years ago I revisited it and finally finished it, well after the help of Game Genie cheat codes that is. Even with the cheats that swimming level remains a tumultuous effort to persevere through.

TMNT II: The Arcade Game is exponentially better and is a pretty decent port of the first arcade game. While the graphics are dialed back significantly to run on the NES, that did not stop my friend Matt and I revisiting and romping through this and its sequel several times over the years. TMNT III: The Manhatten Project is a NES exclusive, and featured the same arcade brawling engine as its predecessor, but this one has colorful beach levels with foot soldiers that toss sand at the turtles!! Yes, I have played the NES version of TMNT Tournament Figheters and I will give props to Konami for mustering everything they could out of the NES graphically by late 1993 and making it the only proper 2D fighter on the NES, but it simply does not measure up to its vastly superior SNES counterpart. There are some first party Nintendo games I held off from touching on in the main feature because I have had only minimal experience with them. It is totally on me! There was one more renting memory I refrained from above, and that is dealing with Metroid. Bottom line, it spooked me too much around age six or seven to progress far into it and I remember being irate at going back a screen to see enemies I eliminated moments earlier had respawned again. I need to correct this and revisit it someday. Kirby’s Adventure I briefly played on the NES Classic to briefly try it out before moving on to different games and I never got around getting back to it. That is another NES regret I must rectify as I have played through and enjoyed past Kirby games before! Nintendo’s official licensed version of Tetris is a good playing and looking version of the classic puzzler, but it lacked one key thing the Tengen version had and that is multiplayer! My dad and I played a ton of competitive and co-op multiplayer of Tengen’s Tetris. The Tengen version also had the more Russian-flavored art style that made the visuals pop more. The co-op mode was surprisingly addictive teaming up with my dad to clear a wider, single drop box. I was surprised no other Tetris revisited this idea until it was announced days ago for the upcoming deluxe version of Tetris Effect on Xbox Series X.

Nintendo's Tetris is on the left, Tengen's Tetris is on the right. I love the unique aesthetics and music in both of them, but Tengen's version had an excellent 2-player VS. and co-op modes that made it highly sought after, especially after Nintendo got it banned from stores! The only traditional RPG I put a lot of time into on the NES was the first Dragon Warrior. I rented it, and borrowed it another time from a friend later on and enjoyed the early parts of the game before I ventured out under-leveled and was too young to grasp the concept of grinding to level up in order to properly square off against the tougher foes. I eventually got much farther into it when it was re-released on GameBoy Color. Wait a second, does Zelda II: The Adventure of Link count as an RPG? I have heard for years people argue whether the Zelda series is considered a true RPG and I have always been on the side of classifying them in the action-adventure genre, but Zelda II is incredibly different from all other entries in the series and has leveling up and experience points involved so I would make an exception that Zelda II be considered an RPG. Unfortunately, it was another one that was too brutal for me in my childhood and I never got that far in it. I want to finally wrap this beast up by applauding the preservation market for unearthing several prototypes and lost games that were finished, but never released. Some of the more famous examples of this are Capcom’s California Raisins, a NES version of SimCity and last year the UWC Wrestling title that was canned at the final minute before resurfacing with noticeable roster and gameplay changes as WCW Wrestling. I also want to commend the smaller publisher and indie game scene for finding the resources to release new games on actual physical NES cartridges. They may be unlicensed, but it nevertheless puts a smile on my face to see new NES games being released today! Okay, with that I am finished for real this time! Many thanks again for spending an afternoon powering through this!

You heard my favorite NES background music earlier with the Duck Tales' 'Moon Theme.' Now behold the worst NES music...no 1942 does not qualify. I am talking about this grinding, ear screeching exuse for music that is the general background stage music for Back to the Future. You are Still Here!? Even after all these videos and links and over 6000 words of my babbling of NES nostalgia? I guess then I have one more story to share since you made it this far. This one is not a moment I am proud of. Sometimes being a NES kid brings out a…..darkness among rival NES kids. I was spending an afternoon at a cousins playing NES games all day. The same one who showed me the Super Mario Bros. 2 ending. The same one who we decided to put on hockey gloves to mimic the fights in Blades of Steel, though thinking back in hindsight I think we got our mimicking of the hockey fight in reverse and we should have had gloves off.

My cousing introduced me to some of my favorite NES sports games like Double Dribble and Blades of Steel. And as you are about to see, it brought out the worst in us! Anyways, this day he was showing me Double Dribble and we played it all afternoon. It impressed the hell out of me by having the national anthem opening and its cinematic dunks! Towards the end of the day we were playing other games when my mom arrived to pick me up. As I was getting ready to leave and my cousin was distracted playing a different game my NES-darkness overtook me and I thought I could ‘borrow’ my cousin’s copy of Double Dribble without asking him. I think I slid another game in Double Dribble’s place where it was on the carpet and I was super slick by flipping it upside down so he would not see the label. Yeah, I only made it out about halfway to my mom’s car outside when he came barreling out and we play-wrestled on the ground for a brief moment until I forked over that copy of Double Dribble. I must have been around eight or nine at the time and one dumb kid to try and pull that off……I should have went for his copy of Super Mario Bros. 2 instead! I am kidding of course, kids do not be like dumb NES-kid Dale and mess with your friend’s games! Extremely not cool, hugging out with a heartfelt apology, now that is cool, no wait, it is emphatically…..Totally Rad!

[arplis]

Arplis - News: My 22 Goals for 2019

Goal #1 — Spend More Time Doing What I Love I think we only have about 60% of the boxes unpacked, but the best part is all nervous energy is gone and I don’t even care that we’re sleeping on a mattress on the floor or that our stuff is strewn all over the house.  In another week or so things will be in their place, we’ll have a proper bed to sleep in and I’ll have found the hairdryer. Moving is super stressful, but all the hard stuff is over now {well, the HH does still have to put the treadmill together but that’s his problem, not mine}. 😉 Goal #2 — Garden, Garden, Garden The color pallet for the front garden at the new place is going to be blue, pink, white and green. I’ve already ordered 200 white, and 200 pink tulip bulbs as well as 500 tiny grape hyacinth {muscari} to plant in the front flower bed. {Don’t you think that’s a dreamy color combination?} Now all I need to do is hunt down 9 blue hydrangea plants and about 36 baby gem boxwoods and I’ll be good to go. Oh, and maybe one or two pink common hibiscus for the tall corner in the front. And then HEY… I can settle in for winter and worry about the rest later. 😉 Also, I thought I’d mention that Botanical Interests is offering 30% off seeds right now in case you wanted to do a little late fall/winter sowing. {I’ll be planting a bunch of poppy seeds just before the first hard freeze}. Goal #3 — Plant an Orchard {Calling it Quits on this one.} I never did get around to planting an orchard, but Lemon and all but 2 of her babies survived the journey and the new place has a plum tree so that part is good. And, I think there might be room for an espalier tree or two at the back of the new house so I may get an orchard after all. But, it wouldn’t be planted until next spring. Goal #4 — Gussy Up the Potting Shed Done! I left the potting bench but took the party lights with me. Goal #5 — Grow Enough Extra Vegetables, Eggs and Flowers to Earn $1500 at my little roadside vegetable stand. It was totally my intention to grow a ton of fruits and vegetables to sell at the farm-stand when I made my list of goals for 2019 last winter, but then we moved. So, that whole goal was sort of a bust. The new peeps wanted the vegetable stand, and we were happy to leave it for them since it was made specifically to match the front of the house, so hopefully the tradition will continue. Goal #6 — Finish Every Single Unfinished Rug Hooking Project in My Pattern Bin + 10 Things from back Issues of Magazines/Books I’ve Been Meaning to Make.  I finally finished the turkey rug I’ve been working on the past few weeks along with a few other things and I was able to upload them to my Etsy shop this weekend. I also hooked another pumpkin and a cat head and will try to get those listed along with some new wool bundles later this week. I still have a ton of things to hook if I’m going to meet my goal of clearing out my pattern bin, but I think once November and December roll around, the HH won’t be able to pry me off the couch because I’ll be in full on hooking mode and I’ll be able to finish all my rugs by the end of the year. 73 rugs in my pattern bin {now down to 34} 183 hooked flowers {finished 133, now down to 51} 10 “things” from back issues of magazines {finished 0} Goal #7 — Create 12 New Rug Hooking Patterns {with at least half of them being large ones} DONE! So far this year I’ve added 12 new rug hooking patterns and 13 beginner rug hooking kits to my Etsy shop. New rug hooking patterns I’ve created and added to My Etsy Shop this year: Tullia and Thomas Turkey Double Nantucket Whale Runner Miss Henny and Penny Miss Penny Simple Kitty Primitive Flowers 2 Fat Cats Annabell’s Big Day Old Fashioned Double Tulip Fat Brown Hen Busy Little Bee Queen Bee Rug Hooking Kits Busy Little Bee {in 2 different colors} Folk Art Heart Small Nantucket Whale Primitive Crow Miss Robin {in 2 different colors} Simple Kitty Primitive Flowers Sunflowers A Basket of Spring Posies Fat Brown Hen Chicky’s Garden Goal #8 — Split and Stack 2 Cords of Wood for Next Winter  All that firewood! We sold it. 😉 Goal #9 — Do Something with the 5,002 Photos on My Phone Current number of photos on phone is 10 million. Goal #10 –Lose the Muffin Top I went out for a walk yesterday and guess what I spotted… A little hello from Mrs. HB. Hahaha! I still think it’s weird there are people walking the streets and picking their teeth. Why can’t they do this in the privacy of their own homes? WHY!? WHY!? I just don’t understand. *The shoes are made by DuckFeet style: Jylland {you can get a $30 off coupon HERE}. Someone always asks.  Goal #11 — Run, Walk or Crawl a 5k, 10k, Half Marathon and Marathon Hey! I have picked out not only a 5k Turkey Trot but a half marathon as well. Looks like this goal will be wrapped on Thanksgiving. Saaaweet! Goal #12 — Read or Listen to 26 New Books {17 down, 8 to go} I finished Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand and highly recommend it. And also requested a few more audiobooks. Currently on Request: I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron Mr. Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley Books I’ve Read or Listened to So Far This Year: Marilla of Green Gables #1 Still my favorite The Great Alone #2 The Aviator’s Wife #3 Before We Were Yours #4 Secrets of a Charmed Life #5 Where’d You Go, Bernadette #6 Carnegie’s Maid #7 The Gown #8 Unbroken #9 The Alice Network #10 The Shape of Mercy #11 Will’s Red Coat #12 Big Little Lies #13 Bunny Mellon  {Doesn’t count because it was my second time} On Writing {Doesn’t count because it was my third time} Walden Finder’s Keepers Delicious! Following Atticus Goal #13 — Try 52 New Recipes. 24 down, 30 recipes to go. OCTOBER. October is going to be my month for cooking! Goal #14 — Clean Up 52 Old Recipes on the Blog 9 down, 44 to go. I’ll get crackin’ once fall {and cooler temps} come around. Goal #15 — Fill 100 Canning Jars 48 down, 52 to go. I won’t be able to get any canning done in the next few weeks but I am planning on getting some jam on the shelves for us to use on toast as well as to give away this Christmas. I’ll probably need at least another month to get settled in though. Oh! And get this. The new house has a root cellar… AND the perfect spot for storing canned goods. 😉 I’ll have to show you the space when I get some time. So far this year I’ve I canned: 7 jars Peach Jam 7 jars of Strawberry Jam 15 jars of Carrot Cake Jam 15 jars of Spiced Pear Jam  4 jars of Almond Pears. Goal #16 — Finish Furnishing Our House So here’s the funny thing…. Even though we sold the old house and a boatload of furniture, I am still keeping this goal. I already have my eye on some pieces for the family room and then all I need is a new bed and we’re good to go. The new place is much smaller than the old one and so getting the entire house furnished by the end of the year, is going to be a snap. High five for downsizing. Goal #17 – 52 Dates with the HH {28 down, 24 to go} We went to a fancy-schmancy restaurant to celebrate.  😉 Goal #18 — Take One Adult Education Class Done {I’ve taken 3!} I’m keeping the first class I took with my neighbor top secret for now {Mel know’s what it is though} 😉 Spoon Carving Class with Heather. Mini pottery lesson {I loved it! and now I want to sign up for a full class} Goal #19 — Secret {for now} Holiday Project The big reveal will be on Friday, November 1st. So now you know why I had to push back the date on the big reveal. I have all the supplies on hand to get started and my practice piece done, but I still have boxes to unpack and the need to get the majority of the house in order before I start on the main holiday project as its going to need it’s own little assembly line set up. Goal #20 — Create 12 Wowie Zowie Party Platters 5 down, 7 to go. Finally! I made some pickety bits. 😉 Goal #21 — Visit 12 General Stores 8 down 4 to go. So far this year we’ve visited: Chase’s Daily {I think it should count} Squam Lake Marketplace Harrisville General Store Dodge’s Store in New Boston, New Hampshire Zeb’s General Store in North Conway, New Hampshire Dan and Whit’s in Norwich, Vermont Hussey’s General Store in Windsor, Maine Goal #22 — Compete with Carole….. Get on My Front Door Game On I can still compete with Carole from afar, right? Once we get closer to Halloween I’ll hang Mrs. HB’s spectacular Halloween wreath she sent me. But for now, I’ll settle for a few pumpkins and a swag of Indian corn on the door. Front Door Bling I’ve Made So Far This Year to Compete with Carole: Late January : Valentine Heart Late February : Shamrock Late March : Giant Carrot May: White wave petunia hanging basket June/July: Tin Star and Flag Bunting August : Sunflower September: Indian corn and pumpkins ************** How about YOU? What are your goals for 2019? If you told us about them HERE, check in! We want to know how you are doing. Because seriously, it’s so much easier to get those goals checked off your list when you have people rooting for you! 🙂 Have a great day everyone, Mavis You can read more about my 22 goals for 2019 HERE. Have a Great Day! The post – Week 38 of 52 appeared first on One Hundred Dollars a Month. This content was original published at One Hundred Dollars a Month and is copyrighted material. If you are reading this on another website it is being published without consent.          Comments So many questions…. *did Girl go with you? *oh no! Like ... by tia in boise A series on HOW you got rid of stuff would be helpful -garage ... by Anne The grape hyacinth image is lovely and reminds me of the ... by Mel Me too. I have been busy but somehow I must have missed that ... by Ginger Ha-ha! Yes, will HH be firing up the grill. by Ginger Plus 5 more... Related Stories – Week 39 of 52 – Week 37 of 52 – Week 36 of 52 #12GoalsForTheNewYear

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/my-22-goals-for-2020

[mtg-weekly-recap]

MTG Weekly Tumblr Recap: April 17th

202: There’s Something About Nissa (04.13.17) | Durdling Around

Welcome to this week’s subtly blue-mana infused edition! So many things to look at this week, including a look at the spoilers for Amonkhet, more of the Gods and the Planeswalkers that love them, this week’s Magic Story, “The Writing on the Wall,” as well as a minor revision that echoed loudly. And as always there has been some great fan-art from many wonderful artists. Join us under in the desert paradise that is this issue of the Magic: the Gathering Weekly Tumblr Recap.

1. Spoilers for Choice

Forsake the Worldly | Original MTG art by @steveargyle

Wow! The second and final week of Amonkhet spoilers came upon us like a sandstorm. The Amonkhetu pantheon of deities has been filled out with cards for Oketra, Rhonas and Bontu showing us that not all god’s combat restrictions were created equal. Oketra and Rhonas, who have an interest in creatures being present, or simply being big seem to promote a very safe and straightforward playstyle, as opposed to having to have creatures around to kill, or sandbagging 7 cards in your hand, or simply going all out with no cards in hand to respond to your opponent. It remains to be seen if the unusual play styles encouraged by the Grixis gods. 

Speaking of Gods, and the Planeswalkers who love them, Nissa, Steward of Elements was also unveiled and was full of surprises. Firstly, a new Nissa planeswalker so soon after her Kaladesh and Planeswalker deck iterations. Secondly she had been shifted to a Green-Blue casting cost, something that had been slowly and subtly infusing her appearances in the story. Finally, Nissa, Steward of Elements marks the first planeswalker card with X in its cost ever! This has the minds of constructed brewers from Standard to Commander percolating with ways to take advantage of this ability.

Gods of Amonkhet | Original MTG art by Chase Stone

With the full spoiler unveiled on Friday, we have an inkling of understanding of the limited archetypes that Amonkhet draft and sealed will offer. From the overwhelmingly grinding value of White and Blue’s embalm themes, to Red and White’s aggressive, go-wide with team pumping effects, it remains to be seen how the speed of the format will play, although signs point in the general direction of a slower format.

As with every time new toys are given to the brew-masters and jank-junkies, new combos and archetypes float around Tumblr, either for magical-christmas-land value that kills on turn 3, or the flavor absurdity of a Heart-Piercer Manticore flinging an Aradara Express to the face of an opponent that it also is driving. (thanks to @transreliquat for that amazing visual)

— Liam W, @coincidencetheories

2. Standard Shakeup?

Gideon of the Trials | Original MtG art by Izzy

Amonkhet is in a fantastic position to shake up Standard, providing competent answers to the two menaces of Standard: Mardu Vehicles, and Saheeli combo.  

Gideon may have shouldered a ballista into rubble, but Red has the real automotive issues in Amonkhet! Harsh Mentor is a callback to red’s punisher effects of olde, and punishes your opponent for turning their cars on. By force is a fantastic way to eliminate their vehicles, and scales magnificently. 

Saheeli cat didn’t get as many options, but the one answer we got for it is absolute. Trespasser’s curse forbids the combo from even going off for just 2 mana. Alternatively, Haze of Pollen can stop it for a turn, and give you an extra turn to take the combo apart.

– Nick D, @nick-dowdle-jeskai-judicator

2. This  Week’s Magic Story Review

The Writing on the Wall by Alison Luhrs

Foul Orchard | Original MTG art by Mark Poole

As the Second Sun inches its way closer to the horns of Bolas on the horizon, the Gatewatch try to make sense of the plane. When we begin the third installment of the Amonkhet story, Nissa has a dream in which she communicates with the soul on the plane. It’s sick, corrupted and crying out for help.

Nissa wakes Chandra up and the two take a walk outside to try and make sense of the city of Naktamun. Everyone seems very young and always training. They encounter Hapatra, who appears to be in her mid 30’s and is the oldest person they’ve seen so far. 

Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons | Original MTG art by Tyler Jacobson

One of the most interesting things they discover are pictoglyphs on an older building. These pictoglyphs tell of the gods of Amonkhet, but instead of the five we know, there are eight gods. Above the glyphs of the eight gods is a more recently made carving of Bolas’s horns. When Nissa confronts Oketra about this, the god’s reaction is possibly one of the scariest things from this storyline so far: “the cat’s ears twitch back in a moment of fleeting, subconscious fear.” When a god is afraid, things are very wrong.

There’s much more in this story. In a bit there’s a whole section about Nissa/Chandra and the post-publication edit one of their interactions received. But there’s also more to be learned about Amonkhetu sarcophagi. For the world building fans among us, this was a super interesting story, where we are left with more questions than we started. Keep your eyes open for hints in artwork and flavour texts. By next wednesday I hope we get some more revelations about Amonkhet’s history.

— Alma V, @hopelessly-vorthosian

3. Gruul-Gate (Chandra x Nissa Discourse)

Trash | Art by @inudono​

Shortly after the release of the Magic Story on Wednesday, some Tumblr users noticed that the there was some changes to story. The changes were only a few sentences, but it was a conversation between Nissa and Chandra. Originally, the context in the story appeared to hint that Chandra had romantic feelings towards Nissa, but after the second version went up those implied feelings were hard to detect.

The Community responded with confusion at first. @voiceofallmtg was one of the first blogs to make a post  about the change, even showing screenshots of the edit. Others, like @suddenlycomics did not want to express panic until there was an official statement from Wizards. All in all, there was a lot of discussion throughout the Community about the edit in the Magic Story. Others, like @bace-jeleren did express mild frustration, but, like the rest of the Community, wanted to hear what Wizards would say.

Comparison of the two versions, Original on the left, final/updated version on the right | Picture by @bachelor-biomancer

Other discussions that occurred within the Community were about why the Community was even upset about a change in the story. Some had confusion, thinking that the Tumblr users who ship Nissa and Chandra together were disappointed that their pairing wasn’t canon. In reality, it was about representation and some of the Commuity felt cheated that their possible representation was ripped from them with the edits in the Story. Some Tumblr users, like @the-foxwolf, said that the edit is not as big a deal as the Community was expressing becuase the edit changes nothing about the context of the story.

Later in the day there was an official response  from @wizardsmagic that helped to alleviate the confusion and frustration about the edit. Wizards stated that there are multiple versions of Magic Stories during the editing process, and that an earlier version was uploaded by mistake and there was no intent to change the context of the conversation. There was relief from the Community that that it was simply a mistake and it remained true to authorial intent. @flavoracle even expressed that is was a “perfectly reasonable explanation.” 

Others however, were still upset about the edit in the story, because it still showed that the hints at LGBT+ representation in the Gatewatch is harder to detect in the new version then it was in the older one. Tumblr user @commandtower-solring-go, who asked the question that got the official response from Wizard, made a post , expressing their disappoint at the cuts, because it leaves out details and that “ the original really does a good job to normalise the idea of non-straight relationships in the multiverse.” All in all, there were a lot of mixed emotions from the Community in regard to the Magic Story change. 

What do you, the Community, think? Do you like the original version or the new version better? Do you think there is a change in context, or is the intent of the conversation still there?

— Chelsea W, @chelsea-beleren-vess

4. When It Hits the Fan-Art

Gideon Seeking | Original art by @oddsbod

It’s painting cats and dogs this week! With all the danger and menace and thrilling action on Amonkhet and the Trials of the Gods, @jakaltimes took on a more sedate subject, the Sacred Cat and the Flameblade Adept. On a similar theme, @sticksandsharks gives an interpretation of Hazoret and Oketra. and from this week’s Magic Story, The Writing on the Wall, @hirafel gives us a short animation of the unexpected breakfast visitor, 

The Gatewatch feature heavily this week, with offerings such as @erybiadraws‘s Happy Gideon, @sketchydoodles‘s Amonkhet Nissa, Jace by @0x00fj and a cheeky Liliana, by @circlesmadeofglass

Finally for the retro crowd, we have a series of pixel-art masterpieces from @the-panther4444, looking either like an authentic early 90s dungeon crawler, or possibly MTGO’s latest graphics update.

— Liam W, @coincidencetheories 

5. Quoth the RavenMan

(Source) | @dragons-suck

Late Sunday evening found the Community engaged in a long discussion about the identity of the Raven Man. Naturally, this led to some top-quality memeage. Here is a collection of some of the memes that were created:

Reblog if you think the guy on the left is also the guy on the right

@chelsea-beleren-vess​

Is the Raven Man secretly a 1/1 trampler for G?

@kideon

My Raven Man theory, by Chanda-Nalaar

@chandra-nalaar​

If anyone here is *not* the Raven Man, please raise your hand.

@phyrexian-without-a-cause

— Compiled by Chelsea W, @chelsea-beleren-vess

5. Manic Scribes

Manic Scribe | Original MTG Art by Matt Stewart

This week, for those looking to hide from all the spoiler seasons mania, here are some articles from around the web that you don’t have to frantically be refreshing pages to see if they’re superseded by the latest new reveal! Top 10 Limited Formats by Mike Sigrist,  (ChannelFireball.com) Graveborn Muse: Mind-Altering Substances by Daryl Bockett   @gathering-magic​ examines cards that subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) mess with how the game is played 

Why Aren’t There More Women Playing Magic by @not-another-mtg-fanblog

Kolaghan’s Commander by Ryan Sainio @hipstersofthecoast offers some reasons why you might actually play Dragonlord Kolaghan in Commander The Trials of Amonkhet Prerelease by Inkwell Looter, (Magic.wizards.com)

— Compiled by Liam W, @coincidencetheories

…and finally: An Historic Absence?

@askkrenko makes the point that with the absence of Goblins in Innistrad, Kaladesh and Amonkhet, the last Standard legal goblins were released in Oath of the Gatewatch. While there have been absences of varying length before, the regularity of goblins in the core set means that Goblins have always been in standard even before standard was a format (looking retroactively). However, if the currently unknown plane that follows the Hour of Devastation, it is entirely possible that we will have the first Goblin-less standard in Magic history. Perhaps we will find out when announcement day comes in June, perhaps we will remain in suspense…

Thank you again for reading this week’s issue of the MTG Weekly Tumblr Recap. Hope to see you next week!

Interested in contributing to the Recap? Want to keep track of notable posts and trends throughout the MTG community on a given week? Or write a short blurb on a specific topic? Do you just want to make us aware of one specific topic or post? Please PM our main editor @the-burnished-hart or any of our staff writers!

[socialattractionuk]

When we emigrated, my girlfriend and I had to prove our love

Marcy and I started dating in January 2015. It was my second year at the University of York, and her first. She’d made it her new year’s resolution to ask me out and did it in the middle of exam week, right after we’d watched The Princess Bride in her cramped room. 

We watched anime, played old video games and made elaborate Nigella Lawson brownies. When I went to summer school in Japan that year, Marcy flew out to meet me in Tokyo and we spent a hazy three weeks travelling by train to tiny mountain towns and huge festivals. It was paradise.   

Two years later and I was applying for a Master’s degree. Brexit had happened. Hate crimes were rising. People had started to stare when Marcy and I held hands in public. People yelled at us in the street. I wanted to yell back but Marcy would stop me, not wanting a fuss.

I wanted to leave the UK, but only if we left together. ‘How do you feel about me applying to Master’s degrees far away?’ I asked. ‘I’m looking at programmes in Melbourne, Toronto and Vancouver.’ 

She thought about it for maybe 10 seconds. ‘I’ve always wanted to live in Canada.��

Aside from my summer in Tokyo, we’d both lived in England our whole lives. I knew my great-aunt had moved to Canada in the 70s, but I doubted immigration would be that easy anymore.

I was accepted into the University of British Columbia, and that’s when the paperwork started. The good news was Marcy was eligible for a visa as my common-law partner, which meant that she would have the same rights as if we were married. The bad news: we had to prove our relationship.

The border agency gave us a strict list of what counted as proof that we were truly in love – and we had none of it.

The countless photos of us counted for nothing, the art we decorated our walls with had no weight, the friends who referred to us as ‘Marv’, like we were a single entity, didn’t factor in (Picture: V Wells)

Despite spending every night together for two years, complete with couples’ Interrail trips and shared Sainsbury’s orders, we had no financial assets or legal recognition of our coupledom. We didn’t share a lease or own any property together — we had never officially lived together. 

The countless photos of us counted for nothing. The art we decorated our walls with had no weight. The friends who referred to us as ‘Marv’, like we were a single entity, didn’t factor in. It was crushing to realise that our relationship had no paper trail. So we made one.

We opened a shared bank account (that we haven’t touched since) and I combed through our bank statements to prove we split groceries. I submitted all our shared expenses as part of the visa application. 

Crucially, we visited a notary and signed a statement swearing our common-law status. It was weird to give a stranger money to have them rubber-stamp a document that ‘proved’ our relationship, but it made the Canadian government happy and we could have been charged with perjury if it was false, which was quite a compelling reason to be honest. 

In the end, it didn’t matter to us: you can’t quantify love and devotion with a piece of paper. 

Canada’s immigration process is terrifying. You pay a fortune and upload your documents to a website, and they disappear into a void. There’s no way to contact anyone to ask for updates and no way to know if you did everything right. 

I was worried that, after everything we had been through to be together, my shy girlfriend was destined to spend her days waiting for me

Marcy and I spent a lot of late nights figuring out contingency plans. Long distance. Six-month visitor visas. I even jokingly suggested getting married, aged 22, to see if that helped our chances. I was that certain that we’d be together forever (I still am). 

After a couple of months of anxious waiting, our visas came through in the summer around the same time Marcy graduated… we had qualified. There it was, in black and white: ‘common-law spouse’. We didn’t need to get married – Canada thought we were as good as wed. I was too relieved to feel anything else.

We landed there at the end of August 2017, a week before my 23rd birthday and four months after applying for visas.

In Vancouver, you can stand on the beach and see ocean and mountains, skyscrapers and mountains. It’s beautiful – and sometimes lonely. I had my friends from my course; Marcy didn’t know anyone. 

She spent the first week overwhelmed by the wide roads and weird supermarkets and unfamiliar measurement systems. I was worried that, after everything we had been through to be together, my shy girlfriend was destined to spend her days waiting for me.

Marcy chose me, and I chose her, and we chose to move together (Picture: V Wells)

I was concerned Marcy might resent me for upending her life for nothing and worried that she might want to break up with me. Her visa was attached to mine: she could only live in Canada so long as we’re together. What if she was only staying with me so she didn’t have to leave?

But Marcy thrived. She started our Dungeons and Dragons group that still meets every Saturday. She attended technology and video game meet-ups and got to know local creators. She started working at Lush, and brought home squashed soap and vegan perfume. 

Canada has become somewhere safe where Marcy gets to be herself and where we get to be us, together. Moving here meant we had to build a whole new support system from scratch but I’ve always been her biggest fan, and she’s always been mine. Five years later, we’re still as in love as ever.

I cherish the little things: explaining the heteronormative core conceit of Love Is Blind while we cook curry; playing video games together on the sofa. One day, we’ll probably get married. I’ve already got an engagement ring for her, hidden in the back of my underwear drawer. 

More: Gaming

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At night we lie awake in bed and worry about our future in Canada: the permanent residency we have yet to obtain, the citizenship tests we have yet to take, the hoops we have yet to jump through. But love isn’t in signing pieces of paper that say you’re in a relationship. It’s in the little moments spent in each other’s presence. 

It’s making each other tea in the morning without being asked. It’s holding hands automatically when you leave the house. It’s supporting each other’s far-fetched ideas — like cooking 28 roast potatoes each for Christmas dinner, or getting really into growing houseplants, or agreeing to move to another country together. And there’s nobody else in the world I’d rather be eating potatoes or growing plants or living in a three-room apartment with. 

I don’t believe in fate, or miracles, or soul mates. There are thousands of people in the world who any one of us could connect with at any time. But Marcy chose me, and I chose her, and we chose to move together.

Taking that risk proves our love and devotion more than any document could. And I promise to keep choosing her, over and over.

Last week, in Love, Or Something Like It: When sex became too painful, I learnt to love without it

Share your love story

Love, Or Something Like It is a new series for Metro.co.uk, covering everything from mating and dating to lust and loss, to find out what love is and how to find it in the present day. If you have a love story to share, email rosy.edwards@metro.co.uk

MORE: Living together almost wrecked my relationship so now we live happily apart

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[ajl1963]

If you had asked me, before June 23rd, if I knew who George Switzer was I would have replied no. If you had also asked me if I had ever heard of Micarta, I would have said what’s that? In just two days (it’s June 25th as I start to write this), I now know who George Switzer was and what Micarta is. Now you maybe asking, how did I come into such knowledge or perhaps more accurately, why would I care? Well on Sunday June 23rd, Chris and I went to the Golden Nugget Flea Market. Past readers will know that this is a favorite flea market of ours. Anyway, a vendor had on his table a striking orange and black tray with an aluminum frame. In the center of the tray is a stylized sail boat, moon and star of dyed aluminum embedded in a black band. Two strips of anodized aluminum separate the black band from the orange. It easily caught my eye and after Chris negotiated with the seller to bundle the tray with a Manning-Bowman chrome powder box we got both items for a very good price. I would learn how good the deal was a little later that morning.

  The 1933 Nocturne Micarta tray, designed by George Switzer for Westinghouse. From the author’s collection.

  In the car on the way home, I Googled “Art Deco black and orange tray with sail boat”.  One of the results was a 1stdibs.com dealer who is selling the tray and described it as being designed by George Switzer for Westinghouse. Now I was able to dig deeper into this tray’s history. I also learned that Switzer designed five other Micarta trays for Westinghouse in 1932. So now I wanted to find out exactly what was Micarta.

  Micarta

Under pressure and high heat a combination of linen, canvas, paper, fiberglass and other fabrics, creates a laminate that Westinghouse branded as Micarta.

When introduced in the early 1910s, Micarta’s usage was for electrical equipment. An article in Machinery described the new material:

MICARTA – A SUBSTITUTE FOR FIBER, RAWHIDE, HARD RUBBER, ETC.

A remarkable new material to take the place of hard fiber, glass, hard rubber, molded compounds, etc. has been developed by the Westinghouse Electrical and Mfg, Co, East Pittsburg, Pa. The material, which is known as “Micarta” is used for brush holder insulation, gear blanks, conduit for automobile wiring, for arc shields in circuit-breakers.

Micarta is a hard, tan colored material having a mechanical strength about fifty per cent greater than hard fiber. Micarta is not brittle and will not warp, expand or shrink with age or exposure to the weather but takes a high polish, presenting a finished appearance. 

Machinery, August, 1913, Pg. 942

To expand the market for Micarta, Westinghouse developed new uses for Micarta by the late 1920’s. They began manufacturing it in a variety of colors and patterns, such as wood grain or marble, making it perfect for wall panelling.

  Pages 6 & 7 from an early 1930’s Westinghouse booklet showing the many decorative uses of Micarta. Image from the Internet Archive.

  George Switzer

George Switzer (1900 – 1940). Photo from the New York Times, October 9, 1940.

In 1932, Westinghouse thought Micarta would be a perfect material for decorative trays. They contracted industrial designer George Switzer to design a series of trays for the company. Although mostly forgotten today (he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry), in the 1930’s Switzer was a well known as Gilbert Rohde, Donald Deskey and Henry Dreyfuss.

Born in Plymouth, Indiana on March 6, 1900, Switzer graduated with honors from the University of Illinois. In Chicago, after college, he found employment with the advertising firm Wasey & Co. In two years he left to go work for Young & Rubicam in New York. This led to his designing everything from envelope stickers, messengers’ uniforms and delivery trucks for Kurt H. Volk, Inc., typographers. This work established his name and in 1929 Switzer set out on his own opening his own designing and consulting firm. He produced designs for sixty-five companies encompassing all sorts of things including letter heads, sausage labels and a Roll-Royce car body. In 1937, against 12,000 other entries he won two of the three awards in the “All America Package Competition” with his modernistic package designs for  the Eagle Pencil Company and the Geo. A. Hormel Company.

In 1940, Switzer underwent an operation for mastoiditis. While recuperating at his cousin’s home in Prattsville, New York, he died suddenly in the early morning hours of October 8th at the age of forty. His body is interred at the Oak Hill Cemetery,  Plymouth, Indiana, his hometown.

  Westinghouse Micarta Trays

Looking for new uses for Micarta, Westinghouse approached Switzer. In 1932 he designed five modernistic, Micarta trays for the company. Retailing for around $5.00, these trays were available in finer stores by the 1932 Christmas season.

  Westinghouse Micarta logo stamped into the back of the 1932 trays. Image from Decaso.com

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Empire motif elements done in a more modern style. Image from Decaso.com

Modernistic stripes. Image from Decaso.com

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An stylized Asian fisherman about to land the big one. Image from Decaso.com

This design is called Nocturne. Image from Decaso.com.

Dynamic, a transportation themed tray, featuring a stylized racing car, airplane and speed boat. This is the most famous of Switzer’s Westinghouse trays. Image from Decaso.com.

  Christmas 1932 men’s gift suggestions from Harper’s Bazaar. Under the gadgets section is the striped Micarta tray for $5.00 available at Bonwit Tellers. Magazine page from ProQuest.com

  Walter Rendell Storey in his October 30, 1932, New York Times Sunday Magazine article on interior design had this to say of these new trays:

New trays of diverse and interesting kinds have recently appeared in response to a growing  consciousness of their varied uses and decorative possibilities. Some of the latest ones are combinations of wood and metal; others are synthetic compounds immune to cigarette burns and beverage stains. 

Of the new trays, perhaps the most striking is a series of beverage trays with designs developed in thin sheets of varied-hued aluminum inlaid on a glossy black ground. The motifs have been developed in a contemporary manner; there is one entitled “Dynamic,” which the designer, George Switzer, has interpreted by a stylized airplane. The traditional theme, “Nocturne,” has a sail boat beneath a yellow crescent moon with the deep-green water lighted by a streak of vermilion. For the period room the designer has created a most effective arrangement of empire motifs, namely, the arrow, star and laurel wreath of victory. These trays are stamped out from under enormous pressure from a material originally developed for insulating electric light switches. 

New York Times, Sunday Magazine, October 30, 1932, Pgs. 12 & 15.

  In 1933 Switzer modified the Nocturne tray. A frame of aluminum, with handles, encompassed bands of orange and black Micarta. A slight rearrangement of the moon and star was another difference on this tray. For the 1933 Christmas season Westinghouse sold this tray for $1.00 ($20.00 in 2019) as a special promotional item. When buying one of several other Westinghouse products at full price, the Nocturne could be yours for just a dollar.

  Westinghouse 1933 Christmas advertisement, featuring the $1.00 Nocturne tray promotion. Ad from the New York Herald-Tribune, December 10, 1933, Pg. SM15

  The above ad mentions the “Stunning $3.95 Micarta tray a gorgeous Christmas Gift for only $1.00”. I have yet to find evidence of this tray being sold  anytime earlier in the year. It appears it was only used for the Christmas promotion. And, if that is the case, such a short production life explains its rarity today.

As I mentioned earlier in the post, while Googling for info about the tray, I found two selling on line. One on ebay and the other from a high end antique store specializing in Art Deco items. Both are selling for over $1,100.00.

The Nocturne has even become part of the permanent collections at the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery.

  1933 Nocturne Tray, Yale University Art Gallery. Photograph from artgallery.yale.edu.

  So now that I have the 1933 tray, I want to get the five 1932 trays. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

  Anthony & Chris (The Freakin’, Tiquen’ Guys)

    George Switzer Micarta Trays for Westinghouse

[ciathyzareposts]

Sam and Max Hit the Road

Day of the Tentacle wasn’t the only splendid adventure game which LucasArts released in 1993. Some five months after that classic, just in time for Christmas, they unveiled Sam & Max Hit the Road.

At first glance, the two games may seem disarmingly, even dismayingly similar; Sam and Max is yet another cartoon comedy in an oeuvre fairly bursting with the things. Look a little harder, though, and some pronounced differences in the two games’ personalities quickly start to emerge. Day of the Tentacle is clever and funny in a mildly subversive but family-friendly way, very much of a piece with the old Warner Bros. cartoons its aesthetic presentation so consciously emulates. Sam & Max, however, is something else entirely, more in tune with an early 1990s wave of boundary-pushing prime-time cartoons for an older audience — think The Simpsons and Beavis & Butt-Head — than the Saturday morning reels of yore. Certainly there are no life lessons to be derived herein; steeped in postmodern cynicism, this game has a moral foundation that is, as its principal creator once put, “built on quicksand.” Yet it has a saving grace: it’s really, really funny. If anything, it’s even funnier than Day of the Tentacle, which is quite a high bar to clear. This is a game with some real bite to it — and I’m not just talking about the prominent incisors on Max, the violently unhinged rabbit who so often steals the show.

Max’s partner Sam is a modestly more stable Irish wolfhound in a rumpled three-piece suit who walks and talks like a cross between Joe Friday and Maxwell Smart. Together, the two of them solve crimes in the tradition of hard-bitten detectives like Sam Spade. Or, as Sam the dog prefers to put it, they’re “freelance police,” working “to protect the rights of all those whose rights seem to require protecting at whatever particular time seems appropriate or convenient to all involved parties.” As for Max, he just likes to beat, blow, shoot, and generally eff stuff up.

Sam and Max first made their names as the stars of an underground comic book, and carried a certain underground sensibility with them when they strolled onto our monitor screens. The safe suburban world of gaming had never seen anything quite like this duo — boldly but also smartly written, aggressively confrontational, and absolutely hilarious as they wandered a landscape built out of junk media and decrepit Americana.

This not-so-cuddly duo of anthropomorphized animals was the brainchild of one Steve Purcell, a San Francisco artist who invented them with a little help from his brother while both were still children. When he enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts circa 1980, he started drawing them for the student newspaper there. They fell by the wayside, however, when Purcell graduated and started taking work as an independent illustrator wherever he could find it, drawing everything from computer-game boxes to Marvel comics.

While Purcell was making ends meet thusly, a friend of his named Steve Moncuse was enjoying considerable buzz within the San Francisco hipster scene for his self-published series of Fish Police comics, which bore some obvious conceptual similarities to Sam and Max. Eager to add some mammals to his stable of marine investigators, Moncuse convinced Purcell to make a full-fledged Sam & Max comic book for his own Fishwrap Productions. “I had never written, penciled, and inked my own comic book before that,” remembers Purcell — but he was up for the challenge. In 1987, the first issue of Sam & Max: Freelance Police was published, containing two stories in its 32 pages. Over the next six years or so, more showcases for the animal detectives appeared intermittently under a variety of formats and imprints, whenever Purcell could spare enough time from his paying gigs — there was very little money at all in underground comics — to draw them. By 1993, their scattered canon was enough to fill perhaps half a dozen traditional comic books.

Said canon was marked not only by conventional comics storytelling — if anything involving the pair could ever be described as conventional — but also by a number of more interactive “activities” for the reader: Sam and Max paper dolls, puppets, etc., all sketchily described and sketchily implemented in cheap black-and-white newsprint. (The sketchiness of it all was, of course, part of the joke.) There was even a Sam & Max On the Road Official Board Game, a roll-and-move exercise in random happenstance: “Go back 2 spaces for dried-up donuts and soda”; “Kids unconscious from poisoned hamburgers. Zoom 3 spaces past Santa’s village without a tantrum”; “Get gas — lose a turn and don’t touch anything in the rest room.”

In the meanwhile, Steve Purcell the respectable above-ground commercial artist found himself working for none other than LucasArts. Shortly after the publication of the first Sam & Max comic, he was hired by them to illustrate what he intriguingly describes as “a role-playing game with cat-head babes.” When that project rather unsurprisingly got cancelled, he was laid off, but was soon brought back on again to draw the box art for the second SCUMM adventure game, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. That worked won him a full-time job, upon which there followed much more in-game and box art for more adventures: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Loom, the first two Monkey Island games.

Steve Purcell circa 1988.

Purcell didn’t come to LucasArts alone: a certain dog and rabbit accompanied him to his new job. The place was filled with bright young men, with young men’s taste for humor that might not always pass muster with the censors in the executive suites. (For proof, one need only look to the acronyms associated with key components of the SCUMM engine, which were tortured into conformance with various forms of bodily fluid: SPIT, FLEM, BYLE, MMUCUS.) Sam and Max fit right into this milieu. Indeed, the pair began to infiltrate LucasArts’s computers almost immediately, as, bowing to his colleagues’ demands, Purcell conjured up some graphics of them for everyone to play around with. Already by the time a couple of new hires named Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer were enrolled in the so-called “SCUMM University” in late 1989, Purcell’s creations had become fixtures of office life. Schafer:

Every afternoon Ron [Gilbert] would come up and tell us how to do one thing, like, “Here’s how you add a room to the game” or “Here’s how you add a character.” We had this Sam & Max art that Steve Purcell had made just for SCUMM U, which was Sam and Max’s office, which I don’t think ever saw the light of day. It had a few animation states — a staticy television set, rabbit ears made out of a coat hanger that could be in two different positions, and we’d go, “I’m gonna make the static on the TV animate,” and then we’d spend all day doing that, and by the end of it we were pooling in art assets from Indiana Jones, and all the Scummlets started making their own crazy, weird, improvisational SCUMM games set partially in the Sam & Max universe. I had a remote-control car in mine that would drive through a mouse hole in their office and then would come out of a filing cabinet in Nazi Germany…

Except for Nazi Germany, most of these things — including the office, the television with a coat-hanger antenna, and even the mouse hole — would later appear in the official Sam & Max game, albeit with dramatically upgraded graphics.

But even well before that came to be, Sam and Max were already getting a form of official recognition from LucasArts, one that the people in the executive suites probably weren’t really aware of. The first two Monkey Island games, the first two Indiana Jones games, and Day of the Tentacle all found somewhere to shoehorn in a mention of the LucasArts staff’s favorite comics characters. When in 1990 LucasArts instituted a newsletter for their fans in the tradition of Infocom’s old New Zork Times, they asked Purcell to provide a Sam & Max comic strip for each issue.

Still, there’s a considerable distance between such sly insertions as these and a full-fledged Sam & Max computer game. The latter may well owe its existence to expediency as much as anything else. In 1992, LucasArts’s management wanted a second adventure to join Day of the Tentacle on their release docket for 1993, but had yet to approve a project plan for same. As time ran short, Sam and Max had virtually the entire creative staff pulling for them, along with a wealth of rough art and design ideas that had been kicked around through the likes of SCUMM University for years by that point. So, Sam and Max got to make an unlikely transition from underground comics characters to the stars of a very mainstream, very mass-market computer game from The House That Star Wars Built.

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SM.mp4

Ironically, the Sam & Max game got the green light just as Purcell himself was pulling back a bit from LucasArts. After some three years of full-time employment there, he’d just elected to return to freelancing, sometimes for LucasArts but sometimes for others. Thus the official designers for the game became a heretofore unheralded pair named Sean Clark and Mike Stemmle, who had worked as programmers on earlier SCUMM games. One can all too easily imagine such an arrangement going horribly wrong, missing the unique tone of the comics entirely. But thankfully, Clark and Stemmle proved to have a gift of their own for that trademark Sam & Max form of comedic mayhem, while Purcell himself and his soon-to-be wife Collette Michaud — another LucasArts artist, whom he had met on the job — made time to write or at least to edit most of the dialog.

Another obvious risk to the project was that of bowdlerization by nervous managers and marketers. Here again, though, it got lucky. Purcell:

I think the game is really close to the spirit of the comics. There’s violence, mild cursing, and a commendable lack of respect for authority, not to mention circus freaks and yetis. There’s less gunplay in the game simply because a gun is a terrible object to give someone to use in an adventure game unless you carefully guide the player to use it in a more interesting way. I don’t remember anything getting cut by management. Much to their credit, I think they trusted our judgment.

The theme of the game whose full title became Sam & Max Hit the Road was drawn from that old joke of a board game, as well as from kitschy roadside America more generally. By 1993, the cozy tradition of the cross-country family road trip — Route 66 and all that jazz — was starting to feel a little shabby in a post-oil embargo, post-interstate highway, postmodern America. Sam & Max steers into that shabbiness with a gonzo sensibility that’s more Hunter S. Thompson than Jack Kerouac; none of that romance-of-the-open-road nonsense for this duo! Instead they take us to pathetic would-be tourist traps like “The World’s Largest Ball of Twine!”, “Gator Golf,” “The Mystery Vortex,” “The Celebrity Vegetable Museum,” and “Frog Rock” (which doesn’t look much like a frog at all). The game tempers any sepia-toned nostalgia it might be tempted to evoke with an awareness that, really, all of this stuff was pretty tacky and stupid even in its heyday. And I haven’t even mentioned the spot-on parody of Graceland — presented here as Bumpusville, home of Conroy Bumpus, singer of the country classic “Let’s Get Drunk and Shoot Things.”

Smuckey’s convenience store, a monument to a homogeneous junk-food culture that stretches from sea to shining sea; there are several Smuckey’s in the game, and they all look exactly the same. “Max, crack open the Tang and those little cereal boxes with the perforated backs. I love that crap!”

And the reason for all this cross-country travel? Well, Sam and Max themselves never seem all that interested in the central mystery of the game, so why should we be? For the record, though, it’s something about a Sasquatch or yeti or something who’s escaped — or been kidnapped — from a carnival show. Jump through enough hoops and you’ll be rewarded with a bizarre denouement involving, as Sam puts it, “the wholesale destruction of the modern symbols of civilization in the western United States. You bet we’re proud!”

Suffice to say that you don’t play this game for the plot; you play it for the humor. A quarter century on from its creation, the latter has lost none of its sharpness. Sam & Max Hits the Road remains a veritable master class in comedy writing, with a sense of effortlessness about it that many another adventure game, huffing and puffing all too visibly in its own desperate efforts to be funny, could stand to learn from. Writing this game wasn’t truly effortless, of course, but rather involved countless hours of careful honing; as any of the great comedians working in any medium will tell you, being funny is first and foremost hard work. Yet the end result ought to feel spontaneous and easy, as it does here. The verbal jokes and visual gags are never belabored, never beat into the ground. On the contrary: they come so thick and fast that they can sometimes be a bit difficult to catch and appreciate. This is one of the few games I can think of that benefit from replaying just in order to savor all of the layers of its writing and presentation.

A Brief, Unsatisfying Interview with Sam and Max

Could you introduce yourselves?

Sam: I’m Sam. He’s Max. He’s a bunny. I’m a dog. We’re dangerous, but we work cheap.

How did you two form the Freelance Police?

Max: It was easy once we filed the monolithic heap o’ documents with the local government. They didn’t even notice that in the paperwork I claimed to be a nine-foot hamster and referred to myself as The Scatman.

Sam: Did you know that anybody can walk into a store and buy a real police badge? It really comes in handy when you want to enter the homes of people you don’t know.

What’s the toughest case you’ve ever cracked?

Sam: I guess the toughest case we cracked was when I lost the car keys and went as far as to have Max’s stomach pumped before I realized they fell down behind the radiator.

What special skills do each of you bring to the job?

Sam: Well, I have the ability to drive a car, enjoy a home-cooked meal, and get lost in a good book simultaneously.

Max: I can open a can of tuna fish with my own face.

In the best spirit of postmodern comedy, Sam and Max unleash a constant stream of blatant or subtle meta-textual commentary. When other games try to do this sort of thing, they tend to overplay their hand, with the result coming off as nervous tics on the part of creators who lack confidence in the integrity of their own fictions. Sam & Max Hit the Road, however, knows its fiction has no integrity, and revels in it. Likewise, it knows that we know how the highly artificial guide rails of genre-based storytelling run, and acknowledges that shared understanding. The selection of media tropes the game riffs off of is deep and broad, placing high and low culture on an equal footing, as any good postmodernist should. (“Every time I catch enough fish to fill a net, the helicopter swoops down and carries the fish to the Ball of Twine diner,” says one poor Sisyphus of a fisherman. “It’s like being stuck in a Norman Mailer novel.”)

But the greatest comedy goldmine here is always Max, who’s fun to watch even when he’s not really doing anything. He prowls restlessly about every area you visit, a perpetual live wire who looks likely to do something highly inappropriate and profoundly dangerous at every moment. LucasArts took an interesting approach to controlling the two protagonists. Rather than being able to switch direct control between Sam and Max, as in their previous multi-protagonist games Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, you ostensibly control Sam alone, but can “use” Max upon things in the world like you might an inventory object. It’s a brilliant choice. Max’s greatest comedic virtue is his sheer unpredictability, and this approach preserves that; even when you’re consciously “using” Max on something, you never know quite what he’s going to do.

Dialog works the same way; instead of presenting you with a cut-and-dried menu of questions or statements to make in conversations, the game lets you choose between the abstract options of a question, an exclamation, or the always worthwhile choice of the complete non sequitur. For “nothing would kill a joke worse than reading it before you hear it,” as Steve Purcell puts it.

In other ways as well, Sam and Max became a field for considerable experimentation with what had been the standard LucasArts adventure interface ever since Maniac Mansion: an interactive picture of your surroundings filling the top three-quarters or so of the screen, a menu of verbs filling the bottom of the screen. Sam and Max‘s design team eliminated the latter entirely for the first (and only) time since Loom; instead of clicking a verb on a menu here, you right-click to cycle the mouse cursor through them (with one of your options being that aforementioned Max “verb”). Although welcome in the sense that it gave LucasArts’s talented artists more room to paint their scenes, the new approach can be just a little awkward to work with, requiring an awful lot of repetitive clicking even once you’ve managed to cement in your mind what each of the cursor icons actually means.

One can make vaguely similar complaint about other aspects of Sam & Max. Certainly in comparison to Day of the Tentacle, a game which LucasArts polished to a well-nigh unprecedented sheen, Sam & Max can come across as ever so slightly ramshackle. Its scenes are often designed to scroll as the protagonists move across them. This is fair enough in itself, but it’s sometimes difficult to identify what is and isn’t a hard edge, especially in certain scenes where you must click in just the right vertical spot on one edge or the other to progress further to the left or right. This was such a problem for me when I played the game recently that I wound up consulting a walkthrough on a few occasions when I thought I was completely stumped, only to find that I simply hadn’t fully explored a location due to this interface confusion. These sorts of issues — sometimes referred to as “fake difficulty” in that they’re fundamentally external to the world being explored — were admittedly par for the course in the games from LucasArts’s contemporaries. But LucasArts themselves had made their name by rising above them to a perhaps greater extent than they manage here.

A particularly hard-nosed critic might also find reason to complain about some of the individual puzzles. Although the game does stay scrupulously true to the letter of the LucasArts design philosophy of no deaths and no dead ends, quite a few of the puzzles here are so warped that they can really only be solved via the tried-and-true “use everything on everything else” approach. While this feels thoroughly true to the anarchic spirit of the game’s source material, it’s much more debatable in the context of good adventure design in the abstract.

But then again, the whole game is so lively, and so full of funny responses and hilarious Easter eggs, that it’s usually more entertaining than tedious to lawn-mower through its scenes in this way. And there is a smattering of really good set-piece puzzles to enjoy as well. The “Gator Golf” scene, in which Sam gets to play golf on an alligator-infested swamp of a course, is an example of a puzzle that’s both intellectually stimulating and absolutely hilarious, the sort of thing that could only have appeared in Sam & Max Hit the Road. To alleviate the tension when you aren’t sure how to proceed, there’s also a few superfluous action games, like the rather grisly take on Battleship that’s known here as Car Bomb and a concoction known as Highway Surfin’ which combines a speeding automobile, Max on the roof of said automobile, and a bunch of low-hanging road signs. If not exactly good in the way we conventionally define such things, the mini-games are, like just about everything else about Sam & Max Hit the Road, really, really funny.

But the game’s rougher edges perhaps aren’t all down to the gleefully low-rent nature of its source material. Once again, a comparison with Sam & Max‘s immediate predecessor on the LucasArts release docket can be instructive in this context. Superlative though Day of the Tentacle‘s execution was, that game was also at the end of the day a thoroughly safe choice for LucasArts — the sequel to a beloved game, built around a style of cartoon humor with which Middle America was long-acquainted. Sam & Max, on the other hand, was a more dangerous proposition in more than one sense of the word. Even as we laud LucasArts’s management for the real bravery it took to let their creative staff make and release it at all, we can also see signs that they weren’t willing to pour quite the same amount of time and money into such a relatively risky concept. Tellingly, they didn’t pull out all the stops to release a CD-ROM-based “talkie” version of Sam & Max at the same time as the floppy-disk-based version, as they had for Day of the Tentacle. Instead they decided to wait a bit, to make sure there was in fact a market out there worthy of the additional investment.

Some of the first reviews would actually seem to confirm any suspicions LucasArts’s management might have had that Sam & Max could be more of a niche taste than a crowd pleaser. Charles Ardai, writing for Computer Gaming World, found all of the “self-referential jokes, sneering remarks, deadpan derision, sarcasm, and ridicule” — even the “unnerving” jazz-influenced soundtrack — to be decidedly off-putting. “Sarcastic New York intellectuals like [some of] my friends will find its tone wholly agreeable,” he concluded, “but whether it plays in Peoria remains to be seen” — thereby echoing a question that was doubtless much on the mind of some at LucasArts.

But, happily for everyone concerned, Sam & Max didn’t prove the commercial disaster which some of the Nervous Nellies at LucasArts might have feared. Right from the beginning, significant numbers of gamers responded strongly to the same edgy humor that seemed to leave some reviewers a little nonplussed. Interestingly, the early British reviews were much more uniformly positive than the American ones, perhaps reflecting the longstanding British taste for a drier, less literal stripe of humor — or perhaps just reflecting the longstanding British fascination with the weirder aspects of Americana. Rick Barba, writing for the British Electronic Entertainment, loved it unreservedly: “It’s hip, funny, adult, and well-written. It’s what literate adventure gamers have been craving for years.”

With the games’ sales and extremely positive reception in at least some quarters having sufficiently allayed any doubts at LucasArts, the CD-ROM version appeared about six months after the floppy-based version. It was well worth the wait. The same production team that had made Day of the Tentacle such a lesson to the rest of the industry in how to do a talkie right took charge of Sam & Max as well, with similarly stellar results. Sam and Max themselves were voiced by a pair of cartoon veterans named Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson respectively, both of whom were perfect for their roles. After hearing its stars for the first time, it becomes almost impossible to imagine playing Sam & Max without their voices. And this, of course, is just the reaction a talkie ought to provoke.

Since Sam & Max Hit the Road, the titular pair have continued their exploits in the pages of more comic books, in a brief-lived and sadly bowdlerized television series, and eventually in a string of episodic adventure games from Telltale Games, who have positioned themselves as the post-millennial heirs apparent to the LucasArts adventure tradition. Yet I’m not sure whether they’ve ever again been quite as sharp and funny as they were here, in their very first computer game. I can certainly write that, despite the competition from all of these other iterations of what’s developed into a minor media franchise in its own right, the stature of the original Sam & Max computer game has only grown over the years. Today it continues to stand out from the field of its contemporaries as a harbinger of a gaming future that would admit more diverse voices to the dialog, drawing from a more sophisticated palette of non-ludic cultural influences. Most of all, however, it remains what it has always been: one of the funniest games ever made. What better reason could you need to play it?

(Sources: the omnibus comic Sam & Max Surfin’ the Highway by Steve Purcell; Computer Gaming World of April 1991, January 1992, August 1993, and February 1994; Retro Gamer 22, 28, 70, 110, and 116; CD-ROM Today of August/September 1994; Edge of February 1994; Electronic Entertainment of March 1994; Game Developer of March 2006; LucasArts’s newsletter The Adventurer of Fall 1990, Spring 1991, Fall 1991, Spring 1992, Fall 1992, Spring 1993, and Winter 1994. Also “The History of Sam & Max,” as presented on the old Telltale Games home page.

A remastered version of Sam & Max Hit the Road is available for purchase from GOG.com and other digital storefronts.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/sam-and-max-hit-the-road/

[jenniestallcup-blog]

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Then he informed me that they need to cast a spell of return rear of love on him, they did the spell spreading on after 6 days he called me on phone, to forgive him that he still love me and that he did unknown what take place to him that he have to leave me, it was the spell i casted on him that brought him back to me once again. Facebook has been trying to resolve know the best method to allow you regulate the Information Feed without being complicated. Words With Pals 2 takes the head-to-head, word-building competitors of 2009's Words With Pals as well as includes a solo obstacle setting, a team-based lightning round setting, strategy-improving boosts, and an updated social thesaurus that includes 50,000 words. In the real world, shedding touch with individuals takes place normally and effortlessly, yet on Facebook, unfriending is booked just for breakups and also acts of malevolence. However with a great deal of controversy over what does it cost? phony information is shared on the site, and exactly how that might have influenced major political occasions like the EU vote in the UK and also the last United States basic election, Facebook is using its new goal declaration to spearhead a more proactive stance about exactly how and just what news and other information obtains shared on its platform. He says he now discovers it challenging to maintain relationships. It supplies all kind of tales it thinks might interest you, a different information feed motivating you to look further afield than just at just what your pals are sharing. For my own enjoyment, I shuffle them backwards and forwards the top-five pecking order, and also occasionally kick one out for a new friend, only to have to place them back in when I bear in mind that you can not make old pals. Yet Tim Harness, 54, and his child Josie, 18, are "good friends" on Facebook and perfectly happy. IMessages has actually already replicated more fun-loving conversation applications in a lot of ways, however video conversation is still very dull. You maintain the dish permanently as well as can use it a limitless amount of times in video game provided you have the sources. To add someone while you get on a video or audio conversation, faucet on the screen as well as choose the new add individual" symbol, after that touch on individuals you want to include. I anticipate the moment individuals invest in Facebook and some procedures of engagement will decrease. When any of your connections could come to be close friends, then it has actually gotten to the pinnacle of that connection. It is a meeting partnership that is shared by two individuals that respect each other, trust each other, as well as desire only the best for each various other. Mr Zuckerberg likewise warns the changes might strike traffic: Now, I intend to be clear: by making these adjustments, I anticipate the time people spend on Facebook as well as some actions of interaction will decrease.

[garland34201-blog]

Do not Fall For This educator Scam.

2 Week To A Much better teacher.

This workshop, led by Dr Loretta Giorcelli, checked out a few of the devices and also techniques that are successfully being used in second setups, along with some resources that educators can utilize to deal with individual learners requires in an academically diverse class. The best as well as most common frustration that numerous moms and dads in our team have is the absence of knowledge that teachers have concerning Very Delicate Kids. Some could state that the most vital factor to consider would certainly be income and advantages yet these ought to be a second consideration to just what you want to do as well as that you will be collaborating with. . We began making use of Marzano in my NJ school district in response to new Educator Assessment regulations passed lately. It allows the instructor to look at any kind of material you might have supplied and consider any particular concerns or circumstances to share. Educators will additionally find out the brain development process to make sure that they know exactly how the mind is influenced by finding out and also behavior. Today i feel like i do it more so on the last day if school or after ive had them like the year prior to or my instructors this year if i give them something for christmas and so on

Ways to Find out instructor.

Over the following five articles, I will certainly focus on each of these elements and give easy-to-implement concepts that teachers can think about to improve classroom practice. HOWEVER, just because an educator should react to a circumstance does mean the instructor has to penalize the pupil. Primarily, this means that the trainee needs to ask 3 of his/her turning group partners in order to help solve their issue prior to they approach the teacher. Most information systems security (click through the next article) managers and also most classroom educators will leap at the chance to have a knowledgeable teacher accountable of a classroom while the regular instructor is missing from college. I am no more a class instructor, though, since I enjoy my discipline of mentor background, however with the brand-new stress being put on instructors as well as my lack of ability managing class (I taught in the city, but classroom monitoring is required everywhere), I just could not manage it. I additionally was most lately at a charter college that made training practically impossible because of the unreasonable workload I was provided. The ideas are based upon the author's experience observing lessons shown by experienced instructors on Trinity Diploma training courses and also newbie instructors on Certificate programs. I don't keep in mind a specific educator who made a distinction to me. However the fascinating aspect of my organization with instructors is that I was bordered by them. Still, in many places instructor works pay well and also manage adequate vacation time to earn them appealing. There are absolutely great deals of techniques that could help people expand these skills, however many terrific teachers have exceptional mentor instinct.

9 Ways teacher Can Make You Invincible

Load your candy gifts in ornamental boxes and also position them in plastic present bags, and also maintain gifts cold right prior to delivery. The genuine problem is educators transforming the entire class right into grammar lesson, rejecting the students the right to work and participate on exercises. Still, an instructor has a task to identify how to communicate an understanding and a recognition for youngsters's globes. He recognizes that true love can wait if it is actually like that a teacher really feels for his student. . I have actually seen much more splits from educators in the last couple of years compared to you could picture. There should be an art job, game, a treat(sometimes) as well as an objective for every single 10th day. An instructor of average intelligence and outstanding communicative capabilities is far more reliable compared to a brilliant who cannot articulate. Teacher touches life and transforms right into a very happy, prosperous as well as healthy and balanced life. When student teacher relationships move from the healthy inspiring level to a enchanting or sexual setting, difficulties begin to arise as well as both the pupil and instructor will certainly experience in the long run. I will certainly upload this at a school where I have a special program - I know several teachers who will certainly like this stuff (along with me). Teachers could get assistance for their class procedures by sending out a letter of intro home with pupils and consisting of a copy of the classroom treatments for the moms and dads to evaluate. Thus, in short we can obtain that, in her prejudice the instructor harms both the kid who is favoured and the youngster that is not. In fact, the wrongdoing will certainly more than likely escalate and also the instructor will be required to deal with it anyway. Johnson took criticism so hard he made a decision not to compete reelection in 1968.) After Nixon took office, nonetheless, the war dragged on and also on. The checklist of dead grew with every week. However these root training designs could have been influenced by the reality that many of the initial reflection educators right here spoke no English, or they came from cultures where the typical training technique was to have trainees learn only by going to pieces as well as trial-and-error. Whether you are a brand-new teacher, or a teacher with years of experience, professional educator advancement is a really valuable experience. You are a veteran instructor as well as have considerable experience, still polishing and rejuvenating your return to can get you a couple of difficult job settings. A more trusted resource is the educator recruitment web site They are designed to help you in locating that ideal mentor job in Florida (or any kind of state for that matter). For example, one can be an instructor as well as there could after that be a variety of individuals who see them as having all the solutions.

[thepreseedblog]

I am just quoting some of the statements from the whole article to make for a shorter read for my readers of the future. 

1. Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most important project in the world: developing artificial super-intelligence. Musk countered that this was one reason we needed to colonize Mars—so that we’ll have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity. Amused, Hassabis said that A.I. would simply follow humans to Mars.

2. An unassuming but competitive 40-year-old, Hassabis is regarded as the Merlin who will likely help conjure our A.I. children. 

3. With a neural lace inside your skull you would flash data from your brain, wirelessly, to your digital devices or to virtually unlimited computing power in the cloud. “For a meaningful partial-brain interface, I think we’re roughly four or five years away.”

4. Elon Musk smiled when I mentioned to him that he comes across as something of an Ayn Rand-ian hero. “I have heard that before,” he said in his slight South African accent. “She obviously has a fairly extreme set of views, but she has some good points in there.”

5. Marc Mathieu, the chief marketing officer of Samsung USA, who has gone fly-fishing in Iceland with Musk, calls him “a cross between Steve Jobs and Jules Verne.”As they danced at their wedding reception, Justine later recalled, Musk informed her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.”

6. As he told me, “we are the first species capable of self-annihilation.”

7. 28 years away from the Rapture-like “Singularity”—the moment when the spiraling capabilities of self-improving artificial super-intelligence will far exceed human intelligence, and human beings will merge with A.I. to create the “god-like” hybrid beings of the future.

8. y, in another shock to the system, an A.I. program showed that it could bluff. Libratus, built by two Carnegie Mellon researchers, was able to crush top poker players at Texas Hold ‘Em.

9.  “Sex robots? I think those are quite likely.”

10. Last June, a researcher at DeepMind co-authored a paper outlining a way to design a “big red button” that could be used as a kill switch to stop A.I. from inflicting harm.

11. Google executives say Larry Page’s view on A.I. is shaped by his frustration about how many systems are sub-optimal—from systems that book trips to systems that price crops. He believes that A.I. will improve people’s lives and has said that, when human needs are more easily met, people will “have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests.” 

12. Some in Silicon Valley argue that Musk is interested less in saving the world than in buffing his brand, and that he is exploiting a deeply rooted conflict: the one between man and machine, and our fear that the creation will turn against us. They gripe that his epic good-versus-evil story line is about luring talent at discount rates and incubating his own A.I. software for cars and rockets. It’s certainly true that the Bay Area has always had a healthy respect for making a buck. As Sam Spade said in The Maltese Falcon, “Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken.”

13. Zuckerberg introduced his A.I. butler, Jarvis, right before Christmas. With the soothing voice of Morgan Freeman, it was able to help with music, lights, and even making toast. I asked the real-life Iron Man, Musk, about Zuckerberg’s Jarvis, when it was in its earliest stages. “I wouldn’t call it A.I. to have your household functions automated,” Musk said. “It’s really not A.I. to turn the lights on, set the temperature.”

14. “His wife, Talulah, told me they had late-night conversations about A.I. at home,” Vance noted. “Elon is brutally logical. The way he tackles everything is like moving chess pieces around. When he plays this scenario out in his head, it doesn’t end well for people.

15. on HBO’s Silicon Valley: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”

16. Zuckerberg replied. And clearly throwing shade at Musk, he continued: “Some people fear-monger about how A.I. is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc.” 

17. “If we slow down progress in deference to unfounded concerns, we stand in the way of real gains.” He compared A.I. jitters to early fears about airplanes, noting, “We didn’t rush to put rules in place about how airplanes should work before we figured out how they’d fly in the first place.”

18. Zuckerberg can be just as dismissive. Asked in Germany whether Musk’s apocalyptic forebodings were “hysterical” or “valid,” Zuckerberg replied “hysterical.” 

19. “Do you own a house?,” Tegmark asked me. “Do you own fire insurance? The consensus in Puerto Rico was that we needed fire insurance. When we got fire and messed up with it, we invented the fire extinguisher. When we got cars and messed up, we invented the seat belt, air bag, and traffic light. But with nuclear weapons and A.I., we don’t want to learn from our mistakes. We want to plan ahead.” (Musk reminded Tegmark that a precaution as sensible as seat belts had provoked fierce opposition from the automobile industry.)

20. Meanwhile, the European Union has been looking into legal issues arising from the advent of robots and A.I.—such as whether robots have “personhood” or (as one Financial Times contributor wondered) should be considered more like slaves in Roman law.

21. Steve Wozniak has wondered publicly whether he is destined to be a family pet for robot overlords. “We started feeding our dog filet,” he told me about his own pet, over lunch with his wife, Janet, at the Original Hick’ry Pit, in Walnut Creek. “Once you start thinking you could be one, that’s how you want them treated.”

22. When I went to Peter Thiel’s elegant San Francisco office, dominated by two giant chessboards, Thiel, one of the original donors to OpenAI and a committed contrarian, said he worried that Musk’s resistance could actually be accelerating A.I. research because his end-of-the-world warnings are increasing interest in the field.

23. He went on: “There’s some sense in which the A.I. question encapsulates all of people’s hopes and fears about the computer age. I think people’s intuitions do just really break down when they’re pushed to these limits because we’ve never dealt with entities that are smarter than humans on this planet.”

24. Kurzweil has a keen interest in cats and keeps a collection of 300 cat figurines in his Northern California home. At the restaurant, he asked for almond milk but couldn’t get any. The 69-year-old eats strange health concoctions and takes 90 pills a day, eager to achieve immortality—or “indefinite extensions to the existence of our mind file”—which means merging with machines. He has such an urge to merge that he sometimes uses the word “we” when talking about super-intelligent future beings—a far cry from Musk’s more ominous “they.”

25. “That’s just not true. I’m the one who articulated the dangers,” Kurzweil said. “The promise and peril are deeply intertwined,” he continued. “Fire kept us warm and cooked our food and also burned down our houses . . . . Furthermore, there are strategies to control the peril, as there have been with biotechnology guidelines.” He summarized the three stages of the human response to new technology as Wow!, Uh-Oh, and What Other Choice Do We Have but to Move Forward? “The list of things humans can do better than computers is getting smaller and smaller,” he said. “But we create these tools to extend our long reach.” 26. Just as, two hundred million years ago, mammalian brains developed a neocortex that eventually enabled humans to “invent language and science and art and technology,” by the 2030s, Kurzweil predicts, we will be cyborgs, with nanobots the size of blood cells connecting us to synthetic neocortices in the cloud, giving us access to virtual reality and augmented reality from within our own nervous systems. “We will be funnier; we will be more musical; we will increase our wisdom,” he said, ultimately, as I understand it, producing a herd of Beethovens and Einsteins. Nanobots in our veins and arteries will cure diseases and heal our bodies from the inside.He allows that Musk’s bête noire could come true. He notes that our A.I. progeny “may be friendly and may not be” and that “if it’s not friendly, we may have to fight it.” And perhaps the only way to fight it would be “to get an A.I. on your side that’s even smarter.” 27. Russell doesn’t give a fig whether A.I. might enable more Einsteins and Beethovens. One more Ludwig doesn’t balance the risk of destroying humanity. “As if somehow intelligence was the thing that mattered and not the quality of human experience,” he said, with exasperation. “I think if we replaced ourselves with machines that as far as we know would have no conscious existence, no matter how many amazing things they invented, I think that would be the biggest possible tragedy.” Nick Bostrom has called the idea of a society of technological awesomeness with no human beings a “Disneyland without children.” 28.  ‘Well, we’ll upload ourselves into the machines, so we’ll still have consciousness but we’ll be machines.’ Which I would find, well, completely implausible.”

29. “Yann LeCun keeps saying that there’s no reason why machines would have any self-preservation instinct,” Russell said. “And it’s simply and mathematically false. I mean, it’s so obvious that a machine will have self-preservation even if you don’t program it in because if you say, ‘Fetch the coffee,’ it can’t fetch the coffee if it’s dead. So if you give it any goal whatsoever, it has a reason to preserve its own existence to achieve that goal. And if you threaten it on your way to getting coffee, it’s going to kill you because any risk to the coffee has to be countered. People have explained this to LeCun in very simple terms.”

30. Russell debunked the two most common arguments for why we shouldn’t worry: “One is: It’ll never happen, which is like saying we are driving towards the cliff but we’re bound to run out of gas before we get there. And that doesn’t seem like a good way to manage the affairs of the human race. And the other is: Not to worry—we will just build robots that collaborate with us and we’ll be in human-robot teams. Which begs the question: If your robot doesn’t agree with your objectives, how do you form a team with it?”

31. “If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, don’t imagine marching humanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone else’s. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead. 32. “From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”