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

10-28-2022 updating this website may not be feasible again before novemeber. do you care? somebody told me you did.

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realizing that a dirk is essentially a dork has profoundly changed my world view.

my first experience with this was in the Batman Nintendo ES game. somebody with access to the instruction manual proclaimed the disk-like weapon that splits into 3 a “dirk.” that really isn’t what a dirk is but sure enough the manual really does call it that. which means batman is pretty much throwing dorks at his foes. imagine how close he must have come to using Burt Ward as a weapon back in the 1960s.

a few years later while playing final fantasy threex my elder brother had the hero Relm use the “sketch” attack against Hidon and totally screwed up the game, resulting in multiplicity of rare items like gem box and illumina, but more importantly HUNDREDS of dirks. which as we know MIGHT AS WELL be hundreds of dorks. think of the damage you could inflict with THAT much unrepentent corniness on your side.

players these days apparently gripe about the heroes Cyan, Gau and Umaro, but at least they have honor enough to REFUSE to use a dirk.

Sabin also doesn’t use dirks either but he also spend s a lot of time rushing bums and in most cases I consider that disreputable.

Although in this specific instance Sabin engages a foe who used to be a regularish person who was SO greedy that he transformed into a lizard, that is not always the case.

(I don’t know what chief programmer Kan Naito is talking about here, I just think the way he says the title at the start is funny)

The sega genesis game Landostoka contains, as a clue, the poemoid

What happens when dorks get dangerous?

Correct, skeletons.
I mean that “skeletons” is the correct answer, not that skeletons themselves make wise decisions. You solve the puzzle by ignoring all the skeletons except the one that isn’t white, then beating it up. In skeleton lore, having a dumb color makes you a dork, which is a sin against God requiring your immediate termination. Skeletons have also historically been racist. that is just history. In fact all these skeletons reveal themselves as dorks just by the way they JUMP without extra animation frames to go up stairs, but since that doesn’t come across in a screen shot I cannot for the moment effectively criticize them for that.

initially I misremembered the skeletons here as being knights possibly due to this corny line being permanently enshrined in my consciousness

and consequently referred to knight lore rather than skeleton lore.

This is important because my next point referred to the Ultimate Play The Game game “Knight Lore,” which involves no knightly deeds or insults whatsoever, only slowwwwly traversing a castle named “knightlore” which is itself pretty dorky, without even the assistance of any dirks. instead your fragile traverser becomes a werewolf who seems to be no less fragile but does waste an extra 3-6 seconds of his life and yours changing to and back after the approximate amount of time it takes to walk across 5 room. All times are relative because any moving objects apart from the protagonist in a room slows it down considerably.
this game achieved massive critical acclaim. From dorks.

I cannot confirm a rumor that the werewolf’s appearance and ill-acclimation to video games inspired Paul “TX Critter” Fusco to create ALF, I can merely start that rumor right now.

complete freedom to pick up objects and drop objects, unless touching them destroys you

COINCIDENTALLY, there is another nearly identical game called Batman that involves Batman doing the exact same thing, just in a cave. Batman no longer needs to use dorks as weapons; verily, he can’t use weapons at all and is victimized by everything, for he has become the dork.

Don’t read that. The story is that a bunch of characters you won’t see are somewhere else because batman can’t keep track of his stuff and apparently is so clever that he placed fatal duplicates of his stuff as traps for, apparently, himself, in his own cave

they DARE to make THIS the box art for such a game.
People associate disappointing licensed games with the nes, and it seems like a miracle that Batman got a good one, dorks notwithstanding, but he actually beat the simpsons and ninja turtles to point-missing nonsense by several years

1980s computer software companies were just cranking this trash out. Since Ultimate Play The Game pioneered this isometric interface amidst a crown of minimalist black-void background side-view games people were in awe of it even though the computers of that period were too wimpy to do anything interesting with it, and apart from that Ultimate Play The Game’s developers were more about abusing players than entertaining them. This was made plain when with access to more powerful Nintendo hardware and calling themselves Rare Ltd, a self-labeling improvement, I admit, rather than making a GOOD isometric adventure game they made Roger Rabbit, Wrestlemania and Battletoads instead. Also Snake Rattle n Roll which actually is isometric but I don’t known enough to hate that enough to complain about it. However they licensed Knight Lore to Jaleco who made an even worse version of the game than they did.

I can’t remember what I was talking about. Stay away from video games. They will ruin your life even if you don’t have time to play them anymore.

I was trying to sort out what prints I had, and saw an old picture that I thought was funny but could be improved. It wasn’t this one, but when trying to find the image file for that one I found this one first. As with that, I thought it was funny, and finally saw what was wrong with it that I couldn’t make sense of years ago: the two primary figures have different line weights. ha I know how to fix that, just make the lines thinner on the bigger character. BUT since I saw the resolution was lower than my present standard, despite being more than high enough to make an 8.5×11 inch print, and me not INTENDING to print this anyway, I redrew the whole thing, but still couldn’t be at peace with my way of using lines from years ago, and so started blending it up, and the more it changed the less what hadn’t changed still worked, and now it is a mess. And it is the only thing I worked on today. a FEW parts are better but the primary part is not. Bad bad bad.
this also reminds me
An unimportant non-player character in some dragon-warrior-looking nes (I think) video game proclaims “Good good good.” when talked at by the player, possibly after some objective has been met. I thought this was in Star Tropics but that seems not to be the case. Whatever was it?

am concerned it might be Ultima Exodus. I don’t think I have it in me to seek out all the inanity-spouting imbeciles of that Sosaria in the near future.
I last played Ultima Exodus so long ago that the blue-armored dork here is literally the first time I used the name “Elpse.”

Inexplicably a text dump of supposedly all the dialog in the game has been made, and “good good good” was not in there,

though this is almost as dorky a thing to say. Within the context of the game, surely I am too BUSY failing at saving the realm to read books. Within the context of somebody playing a game, obviously I am not reading books nor likely to any time soon if I expect to complete this game without cheating. Though I question if it is possible to play “properly” and not lose. There may be a larger message here, but I am not playing real life properly and such a message may seem like an excuse. But even trying and failing to improve one’s singular, limited skill is more productive than trying to crack NES ultimas or regular ultimas. Unfortunately I already determined that nearly ten years ago, so even learning from that I haven’t really gotten better at.

I had hoped to present this as printed art-work for the october art show i keep worrying about but not really doing anything solid to prepare for, if anything can be done at all, but it may need to be reconfigured as a horizontally oriented piece, or a thoroughly print-incompatible square, since it continually mutates. When it started it only had five characters!
if you had told me that including final fantasy auron would have made this picture take so much longer I would have believed you, but I wasn’t going to ask you about that! but his shiny belt trinkets give toejam something to look at once I finally looked up its original game and realized it is not a prankster sort who would be tripping whirloxandra (pitchfork-bearing swamp beast) on purpose, at least not without making it look like an accident. Not that anyone knows Auron has belt trinkets but he certainly looks weird enough to be accepted as having belt trinkets if you didn’t know he did. But does shining force domingo fit in here? Not really. but having domingo small on the left (where shining force gaiden’s pink clone amigo presently is) just because I thought of it late didn’t seem right since I like Shining Force more than most other video games. Maybe I will think of 12 more mouthless video game heroes and hero-adjacents that will make this setup totally dysfunctional tomorrow and that will save me from believing it can work.