great food if your oxen can ford the river
Maybe I am too accustomed to the stereotyped labeling of the northeast united states and national chains but I can’t help wondering if this Mexican restaurant primarily serves corn meal biscuits and any rabbits you caught en route. Stranger still, it is in Helen, a German-themed tourist town, in north Georgia.
I was there for four days last week. I took thousands of pictures. Some of them weren’t even blurry, but I am too tired to finish this sentence. I also spent two days in Atlanta, the Coca Cola capital of the world, also in Georgia. For once I was in an area where I could reliably trust no place would only have pepsi when I wanted coke, but I just drank water the whole time, and occasionally iced tea.

They don’t have “iced tea” in Georgia either, preferring unpalatable “sweet tea” but that is great once I squeeze four lemon slices into it. And here is a picture of that, apparently. You can tell I was out of my home since the broken android brand mobile device I usually employ in this era is visible here so I must have been using the bigger mechanical digital camera that I bring on long trips, because it takes pictures of the wider variety of supermarkets and public restrooms I visit away from my home much faster and blurrier than any touch-screen device. A drink that isn’t good, at all, “starry.”

I never heard of it before I got to the Laguardia airport; I researched the matter and learned that Sierra Mist sodee pop was discontinued at some point. Then replaced with “mist twist,” then returned, then discontinued again and replaced with this.
Unless it was singularly responsible for the debilitating bladder ache I felt for the next hour before I was free to tend to that, I would say that Starry “hits” exactly the same as every other bland “lemon-lime” drink since 7-up changed its recipe to taste like Sprite in 1998. And even that I didn’t think about until this napkip was already crumpled, on its way out and separated from the actual product it accompanied, hence this being one of the blurry shots I mentioned.
I asked for starry because the drink was “free” and despite flying out of Atlanta and offering coca cola’s horrid Minute Maid “”juice”” brand, the flight only stocked Pepsi-brand non-juices, I wanted to ingest some calories on the flight, but was morally opposed to purchasing food at airport prices.

I had reluctantly reacquainted myself with Minute Maid on the previous week’s incoming flight and imagined I was set for life on that. So what the heck I thought, I will try this thing that it wants me so badly to try. And indeed it was badly.

I would like a proper national brand of this stuff.
That is not Mt. Dew; apart from the garish dye they are fairly dissimilar. For sodas, I mean.
Even the local restaurants that have Foxon Park on tap don’t offer the green flavor. Instead they have “Gassosa,” which tastes like Sprite.

It is frustrating that a company which has a superior citrus drink more heavily emphasizes the one that tastes like a less-good but better-known citrus drink. But that is how capitalism works. Most effort is put into remaking, rebooting, and ripping off stuff that already exists and aren’t great but are proven to generate revenue. But even with that in mind I don’t know why pepsi makes a big fuss over releasing a new soda that is indistinguishable from its old soda.

It’s essentially what McDonalds does with the mcrib sandwiches, getting press every other week when “it’s back” even though nobody seems to notice or care when it leaves. the pepsi company has to design and manufacture new logos and labels (and inadequately sized promotional napkins), and distribute them to every business that was selling sierra mist whenever it does this, if those places even go to the trouble of changing the drink machine labels, nevermind the menus, which makes building name recognition for the rebranded product complicated, since if somebody orders sierra mist off last month’s menu and gets a cup of Starry instead they probably won’t even notice. Unless the server says “sorry, we have starry” and then the buyer has to wonder what starry is and ponder whether to try it. Heapwhile mcdonalds just has to dust off the rip-shaped mold that the meat paste and pork syrup get sprayed into and pull the “mcrib is back!” sign out from under the counter.

Incidootily it is peculiar to me what a hullabaloo mcdonalds made about ‘grimace’s birthday’ last week when the character hasn’t been used in a quarter century and is best known now for appearing in a 1980s ad with Trump. All the mcdonalds characters got revoked because they were designed to represent mcdonalds food (including grimace, though not in my lifetime), which the company needed to be able to insist it was not targeting at children. They could show Ronald McDonald doing “healthy” things like playing basketball or doing his taxes or whatever, since he is at his core just a human who dresses funny. But you can’t rehabilitate the Hamburglar; he exists only to steal hamburgers and Mcdonalds isn’t allowed to put hamburgers into its marketing aimed at kids anymore, even though hamburgers is what it sells. And mcdonalds still has special “meals” specifically FOR kids, which have the same food in them, packed into boxes covered with imagery of OTHER company’s characters in promotion of material that will rot kids’ brains just as much as the food will rot their other organs. Everybody with money is lying, and the regulators all know it, but they don’t have enough funding or resources themselves to care about it. Meatwhile the politicians running on the platform of ostensibly protecting “our kids” get financed by companies like McDonalds and its happy meal cobranders, and want nothing more than to cut funding for regulation further, then seal the deal by appointing their like-minded buddies to all the chief positions. ha, ha haaaaaa

i SUPPOSE pepsi might be planning some longer term scheme, with a massive “Sierra Mist is BACK!” campaign planned for if its pseudonym doesn’t catch on, like when Coca Cola reintroduced “Coke Classic!” after New! Coke flopped in 1985 (which I am not old enough to remember but it was a popular joke topic for years). HOWEVER that only worked because Coca Cola was already the market leader and was just spooked by pepsi’s cola supposedly winning “blind taste test”s, in addition to fears that an alternative Coke would steal market share points from the main coke and might let pepsi claim to be the number one cola just because it didn’t have a second pepsi, unless new coke BECAME the main coke. The fragile egos of billionaires afraid of imaginary numbers were the only factor*. Whereas Sierra Mist was hardly bought by anyone at the time of its most recent supposed removal.
*AND the reason for the flop was the fragile cultural identifies of rednecks who care about marketing too much and mistake brand preference for cultural identity + bullying from complacent attention seeking doofuses who don’t have real problems. They have a lot in common with those now protesting woke. Woke is the new New Coke. I liked old 7-up better than new 7-up or the other drinks it changed itself to be as less-good-as but it truly is not of great importance to me.

anyway I have to go clean out the car since it looks like a hurricane tore off the roof and flooded it while I was away.

isn’t it enough to beat up on these meeply little space aliens without stealing their handkerchiefs?


You’re not even going to let them wipe away their tears after you bop them into the air so they get stuck with their points in the ground?

If I had been consulted I would have insisted on giving them big smiles, stupid-looking ears and or bowties so players would understand that these creatures deserved this outcome.

See, how easy was that? Too easy. It does not deserve to succeed
WELL now that I have drawn and looked at this thing I realize it strongly resembles most of the moogles in the game. Why can’t I beat them up?

ARRRGF what WORTHLESS moogles! They already weren’t qualified to do a job and now they aren’t trying to! They are even named after how worthless they are! And now they are on my web page! I can’t handle this! I’m leaving.

Another day, another creepy yellow sky.

I am going to have to start wearing a helmet when I go outside now.

Assuming the subject event is “breathing,” how am I meant to avoid that which wouldn’t be worse than not avoiding it?

a creature previously identified as zipe or eemp that i want to be able to jump, like the fyip now can, but also jump kick despite those requiring different animations because i am never efficient where it counts.

i like the idea of fyips flopping over if they try and jump down from too high a point. obviously i haven’t made any frames for that yet! but zipes being glop-formed (similar to dopes) simply splotch on the ground slightly. i have not planned nearly well enough to have their glop characteristics matter more deeply than that.
also now seeing these against this dark background I realize how inconsistently colored they are, a likely consequence of the regular jump frames being totally new while the kicking frames I initially drew in 2019 before I introduced shadow colors and simply altered this week. Of course the jump pose uses a walk frame as a base, BUT both the walk and kick attack were based on 2003/4 era sprites, with the kicking motion made after I amended the game palette to have two extra dark browns, which I guess carried over into the remade sprites to some degree even though those were all made with the same number of browns available, so in fact they didn’t match before either, but it wasn’t as glaring as this since the shadows weren’t colored then. Does that make sense? It shouldn’t. I will need to see which looks less out of place once I implement the new set of motions. The creature being colored isn’t nearly as tough as it thinks it is whatever the case.

today is this website’s twenty first or twenty second anniversary. I do not talk about my birth-day but i mention its. However I named myself “bimshwel” after it and retroactively renamed it to just be this/the/that website so I owe it at least this courtesy. It will continue to be malnourished on update quality.

as someone who watched the manda lorian show when it was new and managed to enjoy it at the time despite the hype and my disapproval for the streaming platform being paid for by someone in my home, my immediate mental interpretation of the illustration on this object was “gremlin hiding in grimy toilet.” I don’t know what a tub tread is but it probably isn’t meant to be used in this location relative to the tub’s.

counter-intuitively, encanto being reduced to flat colors and simple shapes deprives it of a substantial quantity of disingenuous murderability, though certainly not being able to hear it also helps.

I don’t know what this is for either, but if a scent’s origin is a factory sealed package then it definitely isn’t natural. Maybe this is for scaring animals off your property.

an important rule for using currency portraits to advertise your business: make sure that if you’re going to crop within the existing dark backdrop so that it risks looking like hair and push the contrast so that the shadow under the nose risks looking like a mustache that these don’t combine to read as Hitler when seen from a distance.

yeah

also a good idea: don’t put a cartoon hitler in your official corporate logo. the “stars and stripes” 19th century bed attire isn’t fooling anyone (It also doesn’t makes sense since the stripes are inconsistently oriented between the sleeves and the middle part). even if you later remove the mustache and change the name of your company to “mattress firm” a few years later some creep on the internet is always going to remember.

I think it is telling that Sleepy teams up with two veterans of the Avengers but NOT Captain America. I understand it was mutual; Captain America objected to Sleepy ripping off his aesthetic and Sleepy objected to Captain America’s conduct during their previous meetings.

can it be mere coincidence that Tucky Carlson was terminated from Fox News only days after I linked him to mortimewde stapleton meepmire? Yes, but I shall pretend otherwise until I can get meepmire somehow terminated from existence.

hey look it’s

Worst Selling Video Games volume 7

bravely default on your mortgage

a boy and his job

bengazi warriors

david crane’s amazing dentist

stop & shop’n music

space partitioners

super smash bronchitis

profoundly mediocre giana sisters

the guardian nemitz

shining whores

phonograph recca

schtickmaster

charlie cristalis

marvel super sneeros

fantastic dentures of dizzy

bad dudes vs good dudes

papal mario

super mario land 2: six geese-a-laying

Hey Punk! Are you MARK A RUFFALO

uncharted wafers

road trash

nobunaga’s air conditioner

argylevania 2: simon’s sweatervest

catch it and spank

lode punner

kuros: delusions of grandeur

jazz jack

chortle kombat

simshanty

shitty connection

aghast ninja

nincompoop gaiden

shinobee 52

revolution eggs

arby’s baseball

yie arby’s kungfood

Rygarby’s

Jackie Chan’s Action Tomfoolery

sylvan failure

desert strike: return to the picket line

blake scab: planet strikebreaker

Bubblo the Relaxobath

bubble bible

Chrono Sauce

part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
part 6 I can’t believe I used Five Weekends at Bernie’s already
part 8 comes after this one!

for the first time in united states of america history a president, former or otherwise, has been criminally indicted. but I want to talk about something more important.

not the most imaginative vegetation but the movement makes a difference compared to the old versions.

I also tried to make their scales relative to each other more consistent, but I did not succeed! These are full size and the gifs are between 20% and 25% of full size.
I should see about adding stripes to something since the spots may get tiresome. I have the power to make the spots glow in darkness by making an overlay for each frame with only brightness values, which I already did for the eyes on one of the imps, though I am wary of doing too much of that after all the slowdown I have already had from sprite over-laying.
the colors seem at first a tad flat relative to the old versions that I made with whatever colors I felt like, but the solution to that is more directly within my grasp without additional images needing to be loaded than brightness is.

I still CAN use whatever colors I want, but I desire to keep animated objects within the 256 color game palette so that the file sizes would be lower than true color images, since these are quite larger than before, over 1000×1000 pixels per frame, on average, and there are quite a number of frames! But I am able to alter how the palette is accessed. The game itself runs in true color mode; the palette is a vestige of the regular 1993 doom engine that gzdoom (what I am using) is built upon, but can still have graphics mapped to it, which allows them to be REMAPPED to colors which are NOT in the palette. Ha ha! I have probably mentioned this before but suspect that I explained it poorlier than this.

Unfortunately this program, called Slade, has a strange malfunction in its palette recoloring manager –apart from its frustratingly small window sections that ordinarily can’t be resized and the few that can will rapidly revert to their default size– that will copy the first gradient color on to the second one if a graphic that the palette change is applied to already exists within a set of definitions that I view within this editor. And it may not be apparent here but I have swapped seven sets of colors so far, two gradients for every set of 16 colors, because a single gradient across that many looks worse than the regular palette. And so I must immediately remove the data for that palette change from the file and put it into a different one that will never be opened in this editor ever again. and if I didn’t get the colors correct –which I can’t really be sure of until I see it within the game– I have to manually text-edit the color numbers to tweak them. HOWEVER up until maybe two weeks ago I also created them by text-entering the numbers so this tedious inconvenience is still an improvement. Even with the bug it lets me establish which palette indexes are being replaced rather fast.

so I only need to figure out HALF of this!

I had a dream of seeing famous French singer/cartoon character “Carlos” directing some sort of production with a local musician– initially I understood to be someone who resembled MC Hammer and came up to me in the street earlier but later Carlos’ possibly fictional daughter called me on the telephone and said it was actually her– in a restroom of a Paris metro station, and wondering later if i should go back to get video proof. I assumed the dream implausible since Carlos got dead in 2008, before I took video regularly or went to France,

but apparently I was misinformed. You might think it is referring to someone named Carlo but it is in fact a real band made up of real bearded people that [au] pays [de] homage to Carlos and just doesn’t understand how ownership apostrophes work because French doesn’t use those and I guess they want this title to catch the attention of non-french speakers who have heard of Carlos and are curious about developments in his life (after or otherwise), all me of them.

with my curiosity fulfilled I don’t actually need to hear any of their performances. I may even have had a performance of Jope and Some dopes at the same venue and charged as much money. Also don’t read the page at that link. It is from 2004 and I have probably not read it since posting it but it looks complicated. It it just to indicate that I was briefly involved with a local performing arts event of dubious merit and effectiveness.

The clouds are on heroin now. It certainly explains all the erratic and extreme weather. lately. I am surprised I haven’t heard anybody talking about this.

what i HAVE observed people talking about (or one person quote-tweeting a quote-tweet about):

I see why the Central Intelligence Agency cancelled this: “listen kids you THINK bin Laden is a bold patriot leading the fight for justice from his cave, but he’s actually on the front lines flying across the desert, controlling matter with his mind and fighting off multiple white infidels at once with a double laser sword”

Although the text in the apparent source, this 2014 article, indicates the toys were meant to be part of good will packages. Based on the minimal context year-old twitter post I thought the figures would have been given out separate from anything else, in order to make their intent less clear. It does not to me seem sensible for US allies, cronies or conscripts to be appearing sympathetic to bin Laden up front because that potentially undermines their message; the toy might never actually be played with or it could be lost or the larger package it was contained within could be stolen before it reveals its true nature, quite apart from if the MEANING of the transformation comes across in the intended fashion. Just giving out the toys at all risks sending the message: Osama bin-Laden is a well meaning merry fellow! Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. Don’t believe what we told you about him up to this point!

And then assuming the toy does go to a child who does witness the paint fall off, that kid then needs to deduce “OH i get it now, the people who gave us this DON’T actually like Osama bin-Laden. Well consider me convinced! I don’t like him either now. I will be sure to pass this along when a local warlord kidnaps my mother and tapes a bomb to my father’s chest.”
I suppose this story is funnier the less context you have.

I also saw another old twittor post last week that explained how to view articles on sites like washington post’s without creating an account, which would actually be practical information to have and I didn’t bother to take note of where that was nor of the specific instructions. Listen I can’t keep up with everything. I need to focus on what’s important like one year old posts on a broken social media platform about nine year old news stories about twenty-year old weird stuff that the CIA ultimately decided against doing.

and also teaching vaguely dog-rodent people how to jump

I don’t know how much to attribute to the original script, the unofficial translation or the artwork, but Scenario 3 of Shining Force III is rife with incel energy
To clarify, this game and Shining the Holy Ark use the word “innovator” to refer to a person who has special powers granted by otherworldly “spirit”s, the portrait artist(s) seemed to favor half-closed eyes and the unofficial translation was done by nerds still playing a dorky old sega saturn game 20 years after it came out.
And I wish I could have been one of those nerds, to a degree, it but I just never had time to, and worried I would be overwhelmed by the apparent complexity of it relative to earlier games in the series, so I eventually gave up on the idea of me doing it any time soon and just watched videos of other people playing it (while I attempted art-work) to satisfy my curiosity about it as best I might.
But now I realize it fundamentally does not change a whole lot from its predecessors. But still by very nature of being a cd console game coming out in the wake of Final Fantasy 7 everything takes longer to load and longer to show. I regret missing out on the one time my ancient habit of leveling up EVERY hero regardless of apparent inferiority would actually matter, but really it doesn’t matter very hard; one battle in each of the first two “scenario”s requires that you send a backup group apart from your main force of 12 to a different location.
also the pictures with the pink-nosed weirdo are blurrier because the less-blurry shots are from play-throughs by people who changed the names of the primary heroes Synbios, Medion and Julian. If the pictures were from me playing the game I would also have changed the hero names but I wouldn’t change them to normal people names like internet dorks generally do. Synbios at least is a goofy enough name that it looks like something I would come up with.
And i NEEDED several different people’s videos. The game has an immense quantity of dialog, video people seem to skip most of it, but the blurry person put up videos exclusively of dialog. Another video person played it properly and efficiently but skipped a great amount of optional material and had an annoying habit of talking over the video about stuff that hadn’t happened yet, while a yet different player didn’t talk and accomplished all tasks but didn’t necessarily play fair either, so I wanted additional perspective on encounters that seemed too easy. And I still screwed that up because I didn’t want to see really important battles done easily first, but then the guy who played properly would still find some excuse to give away needless plot details. But I didn’t want to mute the audio either because sometimes he said interesting things, and I also didn’t THINK of that until late in the process. oh oh ohhhhhhh! what a cruel life.

2022 in pictures.

this really isn’t necessary since I already made a video and most pictures that would be rightly eligible for this entry tended to be bunched into a single entry in a single month. The video also was not necessary and so i am doing this anyway.

january

february

march

april

may

june

july

august

september

october

november

december

that just about dumbs it up.

That ain’t religion. That’s the way ya do it. Holidays for nothin’ and your gifts for free.
I can’t tell if this decoration is meant to be ironic or is just ugly. I am however definitely concerned that I plausibly believe people might decorate their homes ironically.

I instinctively read “doing” here like a sound effect that rhymes with “boing”

yes, like that. Wells Fargo, the bank of almost an evil wrestling clown.

Are you having a tough time financially? HAW HAW CAPITALISM GOTCHA!

I recently determined that “Hazbin Hotel,” mentioned occasionally by a few people on twitter whom I have mild awareness of but don’t understand, is not the same thing as Habbo Hotel, a terrible casual game best known by me for at one time being repeatedly disrupted by gangs of “ironic” racists who I assume spend their their free time making christmas decorations now.

not a bean: despite this new found clarity I still don’t know what it IS, only what it isn’t.

whatever you say, wolf man

Matlock looks disgusted that I get to watch his show for free. Gunsmoke looks like he is daring me to refer to him as if “Gunsmoke” is his name, or possibly is hurt that I already did.

I encountered an old nemesis while walking outside a few nights ago.

I want to ask how Norm intends to give Connecticut residents equal access to the Rush Jet but I assume his staff don’t deserve to put up with that.

I am grateful to have gotten to spend time with New Haven Connecticut’s historic first electric toilet this weekend

the entire bimshwel family is saddened to hear of the death of Queenie McBear. We remain inspired to learn lessons about individuality and friendship by your purple stretch pants and pierced ears. Would that we all could own a bicycle with as many speeds as yours.