Super Heros

Just a simple comic for all you loyal fans, done by me of course.

Spring semester officially done! GAME TIME!!!

The last two days I've been living in my room, making up for lost sleep since freakin' February! Even though only half of my grades have been processed, I have a feeling my GPA for my first semester will come out to a 3.8. Damn B ruining my happy fun time 4.0.

Yep, breaking commitments, sleeping until 3pm, watching horrible movies on Netflix, and eating food which will drastically reduce my life. Also, to get me more inspired to update this blog when I can't fathom why anyone would want to read the braingoop I leave here, I think I'll add fun pictures and captions.

Oh, also... if you enjoy retrogaming, well I have an early Xmas gift for you. A double review because I feel like it. Retron3 and Mother 1+2 English Patch


Retron3

For those who enjoy NES, your pretty lucky. Emulation has pretty much been fully covered on all platforms and even within other higher tier gaming systems like Animal Crossing for the GameCube. NES was my first step into gaming, while my younger generation had Atari and ColecoVision, I feel quite lucky to have been born in 1987, the time of NES awesomeness...

My lady love of my adolescence was SNES and so much so, I even have the utilities to rip from my own cartridges. My collection of eighty seven games is still around, and I make it a point to play them somewhat often.

Sega Genesis was the cool kid console on my block, and I did get it the year it came out, but the games didn't have the same love my SNES games had. Don't get me wrong, Altered Beast; Sonic and Knuckles; Shining Force; and Phantasy Star were fun and took much of my time, but I must have spent entire summers trying to get my characters in Secret of Mana to level 99 or in Super Mario RPG to 30 (stupid level caps).

Well for those who saved their cartridges, or have flashcarts like this for NES or this for Genesis or this for SNES, you have the ability to play all three of those games on one system. Introducing the Retron 3!

I bought one of these puppies a while back and gave it as a gift to another retrogaming friend since I already had all my systems. It played everything perfectly, even Starfox, MegaMan X, Super Gameboy and even a tower made of a GameGenie with Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in Sonic and Knuckles. I have only one gripe with this product, the colors onscreen were a bit brighter and/or washed out. Other than that, everything was perfect. You can also plug in any control, even those NES guns, and there is S-Video which I didn't use... it might have helped with the minor color problem in the Genesis.

You like? You buy? Well here's the link!

I can vouch for all the websites and products personally.


Mother 1+2 English translation patch

The awesomely red Tomato of Earthbound Central and from Mother 3 translation fame has personally retranslated Mother 1 from the original Japanese. This translation is much different from Earthbound Zero, also, this translation comes with the "Easy Ring" which doubles EXP and lowers encounter rates... hell it might also boost money gained and tuck you in at night for how amazing it makes it! I have fallen in love with Mother 1. The first few times I played it, it was just a painful grind, nothing was all that fun and I just wanted to get from point A to point B without fighting an assload of monsters who could either be destroyed in a few seconds or took all my damn PP just to kill and keep alive.

Mother 2 otherwise known as Earthbound didn't get the same treatment. It's items have been translated as well as PSI, everything else is in Japanese. There are really good reasons for this though, basically, the game was flawed while porting and it would take someone without a life to hack, and translate and fix everything. It isn't as easy as taking a script and dumping it in, everything in the game is basically in text format except chipsets, character sets and effects and all that code is also in the ingame text...

Alright go forth and game, and remember my friends, stay 16 bit ~.^

Finals...

I wish to wax poetic about Finals;

Oh, week of Finals
how I loathe you
damned professors waiting last minute
hands cramping, and forgetting
APA or MLA?
So tired, so sore, so bored
Hours of work, work work
Minutes of sleep sleep sleep
No, back to work

Yay, that was horrible, but guess what; there are no grades on interneting! It's simple a pass/fail and I am borderline. So in other news, I lost my 4.00 GPA, but it's still high; I lost the place I was going to move into, RAGE!!!; and I've found the true meaning of friendship with a little My Little Pony. In retrospect maybe I should have not watched the entire season in finals week.

To show I am not a liar and wanting someone to say my project I slaved over a hot Macbook Pro is decent...

Tah-dah

Mother's Day is tomorrow!

I whipped this up instead of doing my project so I don't have to get a phonecall tomorrow about how I am all the way in nowhere while she and my siblings are all blah-blah-blah. Hey, in my defense, at least in Nowhere, I have had an awesome dog who protects me from inexplicable Lovecraftian horrors.

Special Nowhere News; Newsflash!

"Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."

I love some corporate-driven holidays like Valentine's Day, Easter and Halloween because after these holidays, there is a surplus of delicious chocolate dirt cheap. Mother's day has more-so a surplus of pollen ridden flowers half dead in grocery stores, cheap cards trying to get you to express a heart-felt... feeling... and well, it just grinds my gears!

For all of those in a similar situation, feel free to print this out, fold it in half, and write something within. I did this in illustrator bored out of my mind on working on my project. It's not perfect by a longshot, but hey, it might get you out of an annoying conversation.

Games, prints, illustrator, finals, and bedfellows

Alright, these two weeks, the one prior and one coming up have been quite hell on me. Firstly, I have a load of super fun games I don't have time for. secondly, my intaglio printmaking class is ripping me a new art hole, my adobe illustrator suddenly went into trial mode and I cannot find my box or that stupid slip of keys, finals are on a whole different level... and I have a new lady to share my bed with.

Now, I am not complaining about the latter, but time is against me. I wish I had time to schedule in some Portal 2, Pokemon, and Dragon Age 2 along side my retro gaming and listening to Mindless Self Indulgence and The Left Rights... but my History of American Jazz class's final and final paper this Monday are like a giant weight on my soul.

Printmaking, for those who don't know, involves etching into a metal sheet, inking it, and printing it. My metal is zinc and I really enjoy just attacking my plates with a needle, while most like using acid to eat bits of the zinc away for an image. My method is faster but much harder to ink, the end result... well I have to, by hand, wipe a large piece of metal until it is just about ink free except for the ink in the lines. Down to the wire and my aqua-tinting is just being a royal pain in my ink! You see, aquatinting involves smashing a resin or hardened tree sap until it is a very fine powder, and sprinkling it onto the plate using a linen cloth, melting it onto the plate carefully at 250F and then using acid. It is just... really difficult!

So my other final involves doing two projects on Adobe Illustrator demonstrating a mastery of the program, and one day it told me it was on trail version, despite me using it all semester. Now a few techniques seem to have disappeared and I am left to complete two very intricate projects I've not even began by Monday at midnight.

The finals which passed were nice to finish, and I am keeping my A average across the board.

Oh, and my new lady friend has been taking up a lot of my time, mostly with me napping all day because a lack of sleep at night... oh, I am just bragging. Priorities! Work before play... but all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and all play but no work makes Jack blind and have hairy palms.

This video is my apology to not posting so much or commenting on y'alls posts. I have been reading them though... peace

Asian people love golf
...back in the day it was like cats cats cats

Been a few days... REVIEW!

I have a new lady friend, I have finals, I have drunken people celebrating the death of a man who is supposedly responsible for the death of thousands of others. I am not belitting the loss of the WTC and those people on that date for saying that, simply feel that death does not cure the illness.

As I step off of my soap box I want to tell all of you about something which has been keeping my retrogaming phresh and dope... please kill me for saying those things.

Yobo FC-16 Go

This device is a licensed product which plays Super Nintendo Cartridges. Oh it is portable and a console! It plays all of my games in a convenient portable way without emulation. I take this thing with me everywhere! The only bad part is the screen is a bit... fuzzy. Also if you touch the cart, it may reset the system. None-the-less I rarely have a problem. Sound is good and it even plays Super Mario RPG.

Good price on retro gaming systems and misc!

Neitzsche, not a Nazi

I remember reading a lot into how Neitzsche's writing influenced a lot of points in Hitler's "Mein Kampf," but in actuality he was the farthest from antisemitic. He has been quoted saying, "all anti-semites should be shot." While he did criticize the religion, he also criticized Christianity for it's slave mentality. I see the slave aspect much more in Christianity, but again both of those religions sprouted during times where the average lifespan was 1/3rd what it is today and the average person was a poor destitute farmer or worker with a large (6-7 children) family. Having something to keep one's mind of such a dreary existence was a principle part of life and has been for even those religions outside the western Europe.

The fearless blonde warrior was an allegory to a lion, the lion within us...

In the end, his family were very antisemitic and when Nietzsche died, his work was altered to suit the purpose of those who wanted to read it. This happens more often than not as well. There are countless posthumous autobiographies with chunks of the author's life removed to save face; there are the same where things have been added to make one look like they were a key player in the former's life.

It really all boils down to how writings evoke you; if you enjoy something like "Mein Kampf" yet didn't take away the underline message, it doesn't make you a Nazi, it just makes you someone who can read inbetween the lines. So in summation, books aren't bad, those who alter and destroy them are!