The first thing to observe about 2 dollar buck choc is that it does indeed cost exactly two dollars. Years of deceptive advertising practices have made this seem to mysteriously come out cheaper than the $1.99 Symphony bar. Or perhaps this relates to the Buck Choc being fourteen ounces and the Symphony being four ounces, down from six ounces at the same price several weeks prior. But that is of minimal significance because I did not get to eat the Symphony bar. I decided to save the superior candy for later. When I had finished with the Buck Choc I placed the Symphony in my refrigeration unit, not realizing it would be another week before I had any appetite for anything remotely chocolately, by which point an unseen force had visited and abducted the item. I wish I had put the Buck Choc there first, because then not only would I have had less buck choc to eat later, this would undoubtedly be a good defense against future chocolate heists.
It was quickly pointed out to me that the company, Palmer, is the one responsible for much of the low quality seasonal candy which would have little chance of being purchased without some sort of gimmicky sense of urgency to appeal to someone other than that who would consume it. No kid with its parents’ dollars is going into a candy store and buying QuAX “the hollow milk flavored” The Yummy Ducky when there are Cadbury eggs available. Sadly, kids these days have little appreciation for molding expertise. Someone should tell them that most of Palmer’s Easter candy is kosher.
That anonym thing on the link is probably unnecessary, but I thrive on the unnecessary.
If you’ve ever received some of this at Halloween you know who to blame. The world makes just a tad more sense when you realize the same creative force came up with the idea to wrap budget Hanukkah gelt eight different ways throughout the year to keep kids from catching on as Buck Choc.
Although I must confess a bit of fondness for the 1960s design aesthetic on the individual pieces, this seems unlikely to be a conscious marketing decision and more probably a result of a product being introduced in the 1960s and Palmer never hiring anybody to update the packaging.
Much like the famous MILK DUDs, one of several hershey products no longer legally permitted but that allegedly were at one point to call themselves chocolate, reformulated to cut costs, because unlike symphony they weren’t big enough that two ounces could be brazenly chopped off and still leave something resembling a finished product, no legimitate claim of chocolate is made on the Buck Choc label, though “chocolaty” and of course “choc” are both present.
Which is fine with me since the difference between “choclate” and “chocolate flavored” is not quite so garish as I would have expected, ingredient-sounding wise. Because to me it is the “milk” which is most repulsive, so the more that is replaced with chemistry terminology the better I like it, just regarding the label. It only seems bad when your sole experience with non-chocolate comes in buck form. I have yet to taste this modern make of confection perpetrated by a company with any trace of a reputation to uphold. The fact that “doublecrisp” is evidently a registered trademark in the chocolate-not-mentioning field doesn’t mean anybody wants to rip it off.
Ordinarily I would not eat a thing I saw that looked that bad, with labelling that bad (another effect of firing your entire art staff in the 1960s is that whatever you produce in the future gets no art). But I just liked saying Buck Choc so much. It seemed so special, so otherworldy. Like it wanted to take me to a better place, both spiritually and in my own mind (those are different things, right?). Some people find Jesus, I found Buck Choc, despite its superior hiding skills. Jesus expects me to put 10 dollars in a basket in exchange for an hour in an arcane, depressing place. Buck Choc wants two dollars for Buck Choc. This concept was easier for me to grasp. Now older and wiser, I stick by the decision, reasoning that no god as just and all-knowing as the one told of in Catholic lore would allow Buck Choc to exist.
Day two:
Buck Choc is good for compulsive eaters because you can thoughtlessly bite at it for a long time without having to worry about replacing it. I had this next to me for several hours and didn’t even get past the 2. It will last much longer than a box of cheerios and tastes about the same. As the box. Although Cheerios have one eleventh the fat and contain actual nutritive ingredients, no official documentation is provided for the box. Also, there are some influential troublemakers who insist that cheerios thinks it is a drug. Nobody ever got addicted to Buck Choc.
A better comparison might be to a Hungry Man XXL dinner, a whole pound of sodium men (bucks) love. It’s possible they see the same chemist. They have many preservatives in common. Buck Choc is to candy what bagged black chicken nuggets at a Walgreens is to candy.
Day three:
Something is not right here. I must have eaten about half the bar yesterday. And yet observe that at this stage it is still almost as big as a dinosaur. But I can’t give up now. I’d be a buck chump. It is my destiny to be a buck champ.
Day four:
I forgot to take a picture of it before I started eating it. I believe I was down to the “last” nine squares, however. Rather a big step as it was now quite smaller than a bear. By this point it was down to about the size of a regular chocolate bar, only just big enough to poison a dragon with. But oh, ouch! What has caused my mysterious neck pain these past few days? There was only one major change in my life recently; choc it up to buck choc.
Day five:
Still not done. But there is less than there was. It has begun to collect dust.
And now it is done.
Arrr, somebody’s plundered me buck choc! You don’t need a telescope to see that. In fact, using a telescope at close range surely impedes your vision. Boya, has that recent largely publicized incident regarding modern day pirates, which actually have been making news for a couple of years, finally put a stop to twerps thinking themselves witty and clever by taking facetiously strong stances on the issue of pirates v ninjas? Ninjas are trained for battle. Pirates are just thugs on ships. I don’t see why there would be a question of which would “win in a fight.” You might as well put Zulu warriors against kids with spray paint or the Capital One ad vikings against actual vikings. A better contest would be which could survive longest on a diet consisting solely of Buck Choc and the Walgreens store brand Vitamin Water imitation the cashier, sensing I lived dangerously, asked me if I wanted to purchase, that a helpful sign informed me I would get free if the cashier forgot to mention it. Jeepers, thanks a lot, guy.
In summation, I ate Buck Choc and took pictures of it. In conclusion, this is the end.
Next time: the further adventures of Dude, da’ world’s most totally awesome chocolate transsexual Bunny.
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A non-racist sez:
I’m not racist, but ethnic minorities sure are crappy folks.
Lemphlyn sez:
Have you considered running for public office in Arizona?
Gil-Galad sez:
I thought this part of your article was funny.
“I’m tired of “funny” white rappers. Saying rhyming stuff over slow beats while wearing sunglasses isn’t in fact incredibly hard. I don’t think Andy Samberg invented them nor embodies their absolute worst qualities but he certainly empowered them. I realize I linked on more than one past occasion to a web [my-space] page by some Mad Dome Gettaz, but a: I am related to one of them and 2: they could actually rap, however big a fan of that I may not be.”
That’s what they call “Eminem Peanuts”. lol
Lemphlyn sez:
Ah, yes! I sometimes wonder if anybody ever sees those brief bits I attach to longer, unrelated things afterward, things that don’t seem well enough thought out to justify making a separate article-item about. I don’t know if anybody uses the rss feed, if it even works, but I suspect these updates aren’t reflected in that. And that’s probably good because I constantly make other minor, less significant modifications not worth getting in people’s business about.
These guys, though, they aren’t likely ripping off Eminem, I don’t think; the ones who do that lean more toward imitating his anger than his whimsy. These are just more dorks on the internet filming themselves latching onto an existing gimmick.
It is nice to see you beside that; I am not good with maintaining consistent presences on message forums. I need to remember to sort out my midis sometime.
Gil-Galad sez:
Oh yeah, I usually read articles or glance through them quickly to see if anything has changed. Since I know that some people don’t make another update for something small. However, I do suggest that you could make a small note in a larger article. UPDATE: 05-17-2009, etc in your own wittty style.
I imagine that it’s not pure imitation, of course the music appears to be in the same genre. So, you can hardly accuse every music genre of ripping off each other, even though that does indeed happen when other musicians see a success and want to be successful.
It is also nice to see you. I am also not good at maintaing message board posting for any period of time and I was also not feeling well for a period of time and was having a hard time concentrating. The doctor(s) that I’m seeing now are slowly trying to deduce what the problem is and are getting close, I think.
It’s funny though, for you it’s sorting out your MIDIs, for me it’s sorting out my NSFs. I have a project folder that is going well over a gig in size.
I’m also messing with translation hacking, as I’m finally getting lucky in getting script translators and some of the scripts have come back completed.
I’m glad that you remember our conversations over at ZMD. If you want to visit there or at Arc-Nova.org, that’s where I’m at most of the time. Sparse posting is usually the rule. lol
To tell you, I have been stopping here once in awhile, reading some of your articles. But is tough sometimes since I’m on dial-up. Interesting reading I must say.
Lemphlyn sez:
Dealing with afterthoughts and minor issues was easier before I used wordpress, because I made all updates, large or not large, the exact same way, and added the date whenever I felt inclined to do so, typically once every six days. Everything needs to be official and definitive now, which is not always totally compatible with the way I want to do things, but I still, for now, prefer it to having to manually move everything to archive pages.
I know I didn’t hear as much self-conscious “ha ha I’m so white” rapping until a year or two ago, and Eminem showed up long before that. But I will concede this point on the grounds that I have very little idea what I’m talking about most of the time. I just get problems frequently that I feel like I should say something about, and precisely what does not always occur to me until after I’ve said another thing, and then it is hard to bring up the subject again.
I don’t mean sort out in an ordering sense; my midi collection is fairly well organized. Or for me it is. I merely wish to finish the few finishable among the midis that I myself made and upload them here, with the hope that my proving an ability to excell, or at least not disappoint fantastically in one more irrelevant field will compensate some amount for my lack of actual world accomplishment. I seem to have 1.62 megabytes in 115 cakewalk wrk files, including duplicates and backups, so I won’t catch up to you for quite some time.
I haven’t played any video games in almost a month. Assuming you have some specific reason for making those translations, I’ll be sure to look through them later.
Interesting is good. I’ve been devoting a great deal of energy to some boring topics lately. And they are not done, either. I hope you don’t get overwhelmed with so many pictures, all trying to load at once. I don’t know how to make them wait their turn.
Anonymous sez:
Hello again,
Not to worry, I’ve found a partial solution to loading pages with lots of images. I have a proxy that compresses JPEGs more, lowering the file size, but also decreasing the color and increasing the detail loss. The good news is that I won’t have to deal with dial-up for awhile, as DSL is scheduled to be activated by Friday, at the latest according to the ISP.
As far as updating is concerned. I do the easiest way possible and the simplest. I prefer not to mess with code and other maitenance issues, when I can write a simple page and just “plug it in”. The prospect of making a new design for my page is something that I don’t care to think about, as the work involved is more than I want to do, unless I scrap some of the content I have, or rework it into another form. Anyways, I doubt I’ll change it because I’ve had that frameset since 1999(I think), I used it for Unknown Translations and then later converted it to use for my home page when each of us went our own way when J2e.com went down. Not to mention the fact that I’d rather spend more time working on my projects.
As far as the MIDIs are concerned. Let me know when you finish working on them, I will listen. I did listen to the other ones that you released at Zophar’s Domain.
I have a very large project, that I just pushed into a sub-directory, because I don’t feel like working on it right now. The reasons are; The ROM is 1MB, each 16K bank(64 of those 16K banks) has 3 tunes, 2 are repetitive. Instead of just plugging in banks, I need to converge the sequence data into 1-2 banks perhaps. So, I talked to Kevin Horton about his Action 52 kit and he sent it to me. I’m going to study it later on to see if it will help me in dealing with Golden KTV(weird Chinese Famicom game). Well, that’s my current music project.
As far as you saying, you don’t know what you’re talking about most of the time. I think that you do know what you’re talking about most of the time. Are you trying to tell me that you’re a rambler? lol
Lemphlyn sez:
I remember dial-up internet. No no, I remember America Online and Compuserve dial up internet. Nothing was ever easy like that. Even before I broke away, in 2006, plenty of sites had given up trying to accomodate non-dsl-or-whatever users. I hate to imagine how it goes now, with people thinking of nothing of embedding 10+ megabyte video clips in all possible places. I try not to post images over 15kilobytes (I have limited webspace, anyhow), but sometimes they just look too horrible under high compression rates, yet perhaps that is irrelevant when I so enjoy to post 20 of them all at once.
I say things that seem right and hope nobody corrects me. When somebody corrects me I can’t do much but grovel about it.
Rambling, though, also occurs and it’s helpful to have some thing that automatically hides old stuff after a while. Although I suppose I could just set the website to show the entries’ “titles” and let people click on those if they feel like it, in which event it would not be necessary to hide old things. Not regularly, anyhow. But then I would have to devise some new thing to do with the minor irrelevancies I add in afterward. Fwahhh… I’m just glad it sort of works, even if I can’t do some of the fun stuff I used to be able to with normal html. It can be good to have limits. The midis do not have limits and that is why they don’t get finished.
You’re certainly devoted to those nsfs. In a situation like that I would likely train myself to hate the music so I wouldn’t think it was worth the work to pull out.
Gil-Galad sez:
Whoops, forgot to put my name in for the last post I made.
AOL has always sucked and always will. AOL is unique in a lot of ways, having one of the largest communities of people. Tell me about it, I’ve had to figure out clever ways of getting around the bulky media. Yeah, I hope that people don’t put up lower quality images, but then again, no need to post near RAW quality photos from a digital camera. I lower image quality on all sites, if I want an image or to view it at better quality, I do so.
lol, hey, no one can be right all the time. Ain’t none of us perfect and never will be. I am glad when some people tell me errors and such with my own material, then I try to adjust such things.
As far as a lot of your older material. I don’t know hardly anything about WordPress, or I’d give you a suggestion or two. Generally speaking, I don’t really care for template designs.
Yes, I am devoted to NSFs. The format was made by Kevin Horton, based on the SID design. A few people had ripped them, but as many know they can be really difficult. The material that was out there at the time was too vague to be useful. So, I started doing it and then from there a lot of other people got into it and I showed people many methods to get the harder rips. So, I kind of got things rolling again in 2000. Have I gotten tired of it, I certainly have and at times I wanted to move on. Right now, I kind of am in a way moving on to other projects. But also, there are maybe a couple hundred left to rip, so I’m doing some of the harder ones that are suppored well in the format. My translation hacking is part of moving on. But in a way it is not. I started doing translation hacking and now I’m returning to it.
Well, I do have a great deal of patience for staying on track on a project, for the most part. You have to be able to do that in order to be a ROM hacker.
Pigbuster sez:
It’s weird seeing that someone owns a stuffed dragon that is exactly like the one I have myself. In fact, I’m looking at it now. I suppose it’s silly to be surprised that stuffed-creature-making companies produce more than one specific product, but I think it’s more a matter of having no idea where I got that dragon in the first place. It’s similar in structure to the fuzzy snake I got at IKEA, but other than that the only thing I know about it is that you can push the eyes down to make it look sad.
Lemphlyn sez:
Gil-Galad:
I am not fond of the templates. I had to work really hard to make this site look this outdated.
I was surprised when looking up nsfs for some reason I came to a wikipedia page with various links and your own was not included. And now yet more so, if you are indeed, in one or more ways, largely responsible for most of the sets that have been completed.
I can stay on a track, provided it’s my own track, I know what needs to be done, and there isn’t a great amount of urgency to progression along it. I foolishly involved myself in some aspiring computer game project run by some guy who neither speaks English well nor particularly knows what he’s doing and it’s agonizing. Since it’s for no money, I would just quit it outright if I didn’t get the impression most of the other listed contributors had done that right away.
Pigbuster:
It may have been purchased at Ikea. I was not involved. I do not buy these things. I would not buy these things. They come to me. I would be more interested in the bird’s origin, as the nature and location of its acquisition has long been a mystery, and likely predates my own life. Perhaps it will also continue on after my life ends. Perhaps the bird will even be involved in my undoing. Birds. I don’t trust ’em. I did on one single occasion encounter another of the same type as that bird, just palette-swapped, and I regret not interrogating its keeper on the subject.
The previous owner of the red bird, my cousin Patrick, whose wedding I attended, attested that the bird and its associate “flew in through the window one day.” Fine. But from where?
Gil-Galad sez:
>I am not fond of the templates. I had to work really hard to make >this site look this outdated.
I’m not fond of them either. You do a good job in making your site look “outdated”. Think of it more as closer to retro, perhaps. I don’t have a problem with that, myself.
>I was surprised when looking up nsfs for some reason I came to a >wikipedia page with various links and your own was not included. And >now yet more so, if you are indeed, in one or more ways, largely >responsible for most of the sets that have been completed.
I am responsible, for better or for worse of over 300 sets. I don’t know why I wasn’t included there, but maybe someday. I don’t do self-promotion, so that’s another reason why.
>I can stay on a track, provided it’s my own track, I know what needs >to be done, and there isn’t a great amount of urgency to progression >along it.
Well, it’s all a hobby and I’m not really worried about finishing anything. But if I do, I share it with the world.
>I foolishly involved myself in some aspiring computer game project >run by some guy who neither speaks English well nor particularly >knows what he’s doing and it’s agonizing. Since it’s for no money, I >would just quit it outright if I didn’t get the impression most of >the other listed contributors had done that right away.
I would quit if others were making money and I wasn’t, that’s a fact. But anyways, as far as free work is concerned. In certain ways I’m on a mission, not neccesarily obsessed with anything. As in the past, if you know emulation, people that worked on emulation and REing stuff for years until it was nearly just right. Kind of in a way I’m doing the same thing. Providing sound tracks and translating games to English. To me, it’s fun and intellectually challenging. If ever I wasn’t having fun in some form, I would quit. As the old saying goes, “It’s time to quit if you’re not having fun.”
As with most projects, I had to figure out why I was doing it. Then I figured it out, I’m doing something because I want the final product. That’s what I suggest you think about.
Finkeldey Fabrax sez:
I sometimes worry that everything I do is a hobby.
I appreciate your insight and integrity. I should make a wiki link to your page if I ever get over my fear of wikis.