2012 Updates

12/26 - One More Present
I was gearing to have my opinion ruin Christmas with a fifth round of Bizarre Search Queries, but I guess everybody was online because I just could not get FileZilla to make a connection yesterday. So I guess it'll have to ruin your Boxing Day, instead.


12/12 - Weiss, You Dumbass!
September, October, and November quickies.

There were a few more movies I watched in September that I omitted because I was having so much trouble writing the quickies I decided I needed to rewatch them, those being Batman Begins, Watership Down, and My Fellow Americans, although it might say plenty about the movie itself that I am not looking forward to sitting through Batman Begins again. I also dropped Cat Ballou because I remembered and cared even less about it than Batman Begins, and The Great Escape because I hate reviewing movie classics since (A) I go into them feeling like my opinion has already been decided, so I sit through the movie on autopilot, and (B) do I really need to review it? It's like reviewing Pac-Man.

Oh, and happy 12/12/12.

UPDATE UPDATE 12/16 - Oh hey, a list I submitted to TopTenz got published: Top 10 Best Christmas Songs (That Everyone Finds Annoying), although I submitted it as "The Ten Best Christmas Songs (For Enraging Everybody in the Store)". Put your sanity somewhere it won't get damaged and check it out.

I also added a link to this article under Miscellany in the File Cabinet.


11/25 - Oh No!
So now that an ad on the page has expired, I've revamped the main page of Lemmings FOREVER. I also edited the format of the Products and Oddities pages to be less terrible. Speaking of terrible, I was meaning to get an article on the Genesis Quest gamebook up as well, but the book is so crap I could only invest enough shits in it to get the bones of the article down. It's a draining ordeal trying to write about this thing, but I'll still try because I love you all.

Eventually I'll rewrite the existing pages to meet my current standards, but I think I should finally create pages for Paintball and Revolution first. I know I'm missing a lot of other games like Oh No!, Christmas, and Wild World, but I think I'll hold off on those until I rewrite the older, sloppier pages.


11/10 - The Boomstick Connection
Brace yourself for some Terrible Crossover Fanfiction in MOREC.

I'm also going to hold off on the Quickies and post the September, October, and November ones in December. I recently got a part-time temp job which has taken a bite out of my free time. But maybe once I get used to it it'll also help me differenciate work from pleasure and get back into a rhythm of rationing my day instead of slacking off everything because I have all the time in the world to do it. Still, I'd like to focus my time and energy on the other thing I've got planned, which I'm aiming to get up on a specific day.


10/23 - Then the Helmet Would Fly Off and Brain the Bionic Commando
Today I look at the comments section of Cracked in a brief Cracked Comment Adventure. I also added Perfect Lemmings to the Links. It's a Japanese site, but they linked to me, so it's only fair I return the favor.

Yeah, that probably wasn't worth a month long wait, but I'm steadily working on a few things and have at least two big updates coming in November (the September and October quickies obviously, and a desperately needed overhaul to one of the sections), but hope to be able to put up a third.


09/23 - Disco Robot Simon Belmont, or Surfer Dude Alucard?
My final Cracked article for the moment: 7 Video Game Easter Eggs Designed to Screw With Your Head. That's the last in the pipeline, though I've got another one bouncing around the workshop. But don't expect it anytime soon and I'm willing to take my time on it, because on this one about batshit Easter eggs I made some spectacular boo-boos in the draft I sent in. There were typos I noticed after turning it in, I completely forgot to put links to many of the videos I got the pictures from in the text (Here's the Silent Hill 2 dog video, and here's the Perfect Dark cheese wedges. The video demonstrating the Cluckshot is here. The Saints Row Bunny videos can be found here and here), and I left an entire sentence out somewhere (although the editor completely rewrote that paragraph anyway). I took that as a sign to take a break, and maybe do some work around here. There's a video project I've been sitting on for a while, and I've had an idea on a running theme in the book reviews for a while, and figured it's about time I actually get to work on them.

I've added a list for Wario: Master of Disguise in the Music downloads, though there's only one (very kickass) song. I also added some buttons to the top of the page to email me and the Q&A to make them a little more accessible, and figured it was about time to set out a tip jar for donations.


09/11 - Dagget's Asking About His Own Voice Actor, Okay?
And, my second Cracked article is up: The 7 Most Horrifying Moments From Children's Video Games.

By the way, on the previous one, the line "The game's use of a female protagonist would be slightly more progressive if it had, y'know, made any difference at all." seems to have a lot of people in a tizzy at me. I should clarify right now that I didn't write that - it was added by an editor. In fact, I didn't write any of the image captions, with the possible exception of "It's basically that scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ... IN SPACE." which was a modified version of a joke I made in the main text of the draft I submitted. Of course, I also didn't write "If Inafune had had his way, M. Bison could have been defeated only by a well placed Ha-Do-Inafune from Ryu." so maybe I should stop talking.

In any case, July and August quickies are up. So wait, all I did in July was read a six-volume manga series I started late in June, and watch two movies? Well, I also poured a lot of that month into a meaty game I didn't actually finish until August, but I was also in a house with no air conditioning during that heat wave we had, and couldn't work up the energy to do much more than lie around.

And hey, more fun from WaterMelon. I recently got a newsletter from them announcing their intentions to develop a Super Nintendo game. Gee, I thought they were a 16-bit factory and wouldn't develop for "8-bitters in disguise".


08/31 - Cracked Up
For those of you coming here as part of their daily thing, I got an article published on Cracked: The 6 Craziest Ways Creators Hid Themselves in Video Games. I went ahead and added a link to my Cracked profile in the File Cabinet. As a teaser, my second article is in the pipeline so expect that in a few weeks (unless, I dunno, they hold it off for closer to Halloween considering the nature of the article) and I just submitted my third.

And as a present to site readers old and new, there's some music for Jamestown in the Music section. July and August quickies will come soon.


07/25 - Summer Cleaning
Well, the Steam sale was a disappointment. I guess after people abused the Winter sale, they dropped that achievments for prizes thing from last year, which was what made the last couple sales so awesome. Still, I snagged Ys Origin for $8, so it wasn't a complete dud.

Meanwhile, I've been doing some tidying up around the site. I altered the layout of the main page a bit, revised or removed some clumsily written crap that had been sitting around since I first launched the site years ago, and finally got around to updating the more poorly drawn section links on the main page. If anybody's wondering why Honen Calzoun is screaming at Jay Resop, it's for letting his site get desecrated by a couple of twats.

While doing the new Comics Corner image, I discovered pretty much the final nail in the coffin of my sprite comicing career - during all the computer changes and OS reinstalls, I appear to have lost my sprite collection. The Comics Corner image was thrown together with what I found in old MS Paint work files and comics, including that bizarre panicing Robotnik. There were... some other... interesting things in those old work stations. Such as...


...whatever the fuck this is.

Seriously, I have no idea what I intended to use that for. Was it from an alternate version of Adventures of Lemmy I thankfully ditched, was I just screwing around, or was I leaving secrets on my harddrive to baffle and/or creep out my future self?

I edited the comic intros in the Comics Corner and tidied up Mario Busters, of all things. The way I had the images stored was a colossal mess, so I reorganized it, and edited the chapter pages slightly, namely putting in the freaking option to go to the next chapter from each one instead of making you go back to the main page and selecting the next one (an interface made even more cumbersome by Jay's comics still linking to when my site was on SMBHQ). Also, I noticed Mario Busters is no longer listed on the NC comics page, for some reason. Fortunately the chapters Jay did still existed, so I downloaded them, converted them to my template, and uploaded them to my own server since NC is basically dead anyway. If Jay has a problem with this he's free to email me. And this is petty, but I was just way too creeped out by the old pupil-less CK, so I went and fixed that in both my and Jay's comics.

I also dumped the three Single Chapter comics because they were shit. And what the hell, I used to spell the Comics Corner with an X? Man, have I come a long way...

I then did a little polishing on Suito Homu. Most of the commentary still held up, but some of it was a little wonky and other lines made me cringe, particularly in the early chapters while I was still getting into the swing of it.

I was also planning to make the Bestiary main page a little less crap, but couldn't because of some in-text ads I'd agreed to host for a year. So that's going to have to wait until those ads expire.

For some actual material, here's Bizarre Search Queries Volume 4.

On a random note, last week I got a WaterMelon newsletter informing me about their upcoming projects. Shit, I thought they would have removed me from their mailing list after the stink I raised (and actually thought they did when months passed since the last one).

UPDATE UPDATE 7/26: Well, I found an easy fix to making the Bestiary less terrible until I can completely overhaul it: remove the flowery header images.


07/05 - Angry Because the Steam Summer Sale Still Hasn't Started
May and June quickies. I guess to make up for only watching maybe five movies last year, 2012 has been the year of the movie for me.

Also, a couple more changes to this MOREC. See, on the list of female villains, I got Seere and Manah mixed up - Seere's is Manah's brother. Also, the alien queen from Ecco the Dolphin is apparently called the Vortex Queen, and has been changed accordingly.


06/06 - And A Belated Apology For the Phrase "Furious Mass Eargy"
Remember that rant about Pier Solar I wrote back in March? Three months ago today in fact? Well, I found something amazing in my Inbox about a week ago. I'll just let you read about it in WaterMelon Blasting Again (STOP GROANING).

Yeah, I guess that got a little mean towards the end, but damn, I had to vent my frustrations with that game. So to bring a little more cheer to the site here's my first File Cabinet writeup in over a year, Video Game Box Art I Actually Like. The list is by no means final. I just gathered enough images to have something to start with, and will add more as I go along.


05/24 - AWESOMESAUCE
If you actually read these little entries about my life, you might recall me complaining about the state of my ability to get pictures a while back. Basically, the computer with a capture card I used for most of the captured pictures on this site finally died one day. It was AGP, my new computer was PCI, so I bought a new capture card for the new computer. The only software I could get to run in real time... basically, the pictures I got from it were blurry and just looked like shit. Well, one day, recalling some PCI Device error messages the old computer, I got the idea that AGP might have only applied to the graphics card, and ripped the old capture card out of the old computer to see if it would go into the new one. IT WORKED. IT. FUCKING. WORKED. I once again have the old WinTV software, meaning I can take nice looking shots again.

I've got March and April quickies. I also went back and replaced some blurryass eyesore shots from January and December 2011.

And over in MOREC, Bizarre Search Queries Vol. 3. There were jokes that would have been screwed up if I'd moved them around, so I just threw them up chronologically on one list.


04/28 - How Time Flies
Over in Game Music I added four more songs to Cthulhu Saves the World, and made a section for Plants vs. Zombies with two songs. I also added links to the top of that page to take you right to the game listings, and added links to more spots for game music.

I also added GameWTFs to the links, and took White Rabbit Press off. In the past few months, I've become seriously unhappy with them. I swear, every time I've used their Express service since the earthquake disaster, they've added more fees to it ($4 for each additional package they have to consolidate? What the fuck? Like I have any control over how many boxes Amazon decides to ship my stuff in), to the point that the shipping/service fee for my most recent order was more than the items themselves. If you're ordering books and CDs, it's cheaper just to import directly through Amazon. It was awesome at first, getting things like Meta Fight EX and the 4th and 5th Sunsoft Memorials through them, and maybe it's a combination of those memories and it still being cheaper than the likes of Play-Asia for games (getting Captain Rainbow through WRE did not cost me $70) that explains why I still use them periodically, but I just don't feel comfortable plugging that place on my Links anymore.

Finally, I randomly added a note about the "Shadow Queen" to Site Tracking Adventures 1.


03/06 - Blasted Process
Alrighty then, got several things for you today. First up, January and Februrary 2012 quickies. Yes, they're freaking long.

Second, I edited some of the descriptions for the TG-CD Shadow of the Beast songs in Game Music after replaying the game and noticed some of the music was used differently from the Amiga version.

Third, some grumpy WaterMelon Blasting in MOREC. No, it's not about shooting fruit with a tank.

And finally, just to be less of a sourpuss, I've added Ask Dr. Robotnik to the links.


02/27 - A Little Cheese With Your Whine
Remember when I said I wouldn't keep you up to date on that lamer unless he sent me something hilarious? Well, he sent me something hilarious.


02/20 - Stop the Madness
I decided I'm going to post both the January and Februrary quickies at the beginning of March. In fact, I'm thinking of making the quickies bimonthly, although I'll still put each month on its own page. That's because I feel the reason I only did quickies last year was because of the quickies themselves, and the pressure to get them out on time, plus the feeling of "Eh, I already updated this month" caused me to slack off everything else.

Today I've compiled a second volume of bizarre search queries in MOREC. This time around I grouped searches about a subject I get frequently together, instead of posting certain dates I got a lot of strange material. Yeah, I got a ton of Daniel X searches, but he doesn't get his own heading because fuck him.


02/14 - Lovey Dovey
For Valentine's Day I'm giving you 2011 in Review. January 2012 quickies shouldn't be too far off.


02/01 - Do We Turn Into Assholes Or Something?
We finally got December Quickies. You might notice on this one I started posting images for books. That's because I found they get lost in the lineup without a picture to flag them. I'll have a year in review thing for 2011 later. When I get the January Quickies up, you'll probably see what I was doing instead of writing this stuff.


01/14 - Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh Wgah'nagl Fhtagn
I threw up some music to Cthulhu Saves the World in the Music section, and also added some bouncing Skitties to my favorite songs. I've also added a question on advertising on Codiekitty.com to the Q&A.


01/05 - Join the Club
December Quickies'll have to wait. Today I've got Site Tracking Adventures in MOREC, proving that if you're an idiot, you don't need to send me retarded emails to catch my attention.