Wow. There’s a huge disparity between the brows on those two. No matter how blurry the first pics are, the thickness of Luigi’s brows would be noticeable. The person in that camera footage definitely doesn’t have thick eyebrows like Luigi :/

That does sound equally as torturous.

Haha, right?

What?! Doesn’t everybody do that?

That’s exactly how I felt by Kafka on the Shore. I thought it was a really dreamy, surreal journey. Very unique kind of feel. I remember really liking it, to the extent that I thought he might be my new favorite author. But subsequent works I’ve tried to get into haven’t roped me in like that book unfortunately.

Kafka did, but after that I’ve had trouble getting over that default setting time and time again. I still have Sputnik from the library, so I might push ahead and see if it lures me in, but I’m still annoyed by the repetitive use of the same motifs.

For sure! Kick ass score! Trying to show me up, eh? :P

Good stuff. Take a look at Ultimate Success next if you end up enjoying that album. Really anything by them is great, but Ultimate Success is their newest, I believe, so you can see where they are at musically now.

I can understand the occasional reference, or encounter with a character who has those qualities. But almost every book with every main or supporting character gets to be ridiculous. “Meet Amami Tutsudo, she’s the owner of the local bakery known for her undying love for Chopin, her mind soars with his transcendent movements, which she plays while baking her acclaimed loaves of bread.”

Zip is the best. Bill Griffith is one of my favorite cartoonists.

Oh, that’s awesome. I didn’t know they were. I’m excited ;D

Not surprising at all. He has the vibe of a 8 year old telling me,“by the way, did I ever tell you about how much I love MINECRAFT!,” over and over again. I suppose the thing that gets me is that I’ve never seen an author inject a personal interest in something in their work to this degree. I’ve read a few authors where you can kind of get a feel for certain things they like, but they usually aren’t so obvious and overt about putting those interests on blast. It’s just jarring to me.

Yeah, I dabbled a bit with the full game since I own it through itch.io. But never played past the third stage. I’m no stranger towards brutal platformers though, so maybe that gave me a little bit of a boost. I can hold my own with fairly difficult games and have even tried my hand at some Mario Kaizo hacks. That said, I still felt like I was doing a lot worse than I was apparently. It’s also been quite some time since I really took on a challenge of this difficulty, as I have been mostly been playing cozy stuff like TOEM and GNOG lately. I’m really enjoying the change of pace though, it feels good to beat a good challenge like this again. I’m playing through Celeste Classic 2 now, and I’ll be playing the full Celeste soon as well.

Haha, and here I was thinking that I did horribly. I saw someone on a random reddit thread say they did it in 400 and something.

As I was typing this out I rechecked the thread and they we’re playing the full PC version with assist mode on. Apparently the PC version has the original playable within the game at some point. A quick Google search put the average at 1000-1200 or more deaths for the Pico-8 version.

So, damn. That makes me feel pretty awesome lol. Thanks for the kind words, you made my day!

Right on, that’s good on them. I was honestly disappointed to learn that they were deniers years ago, which definitely effected my ability to watch the show afterwards. I’ll have to check out the episode when I can.

Oh, I didn’t realize they’d revisited the gag. Thanks for the head’s up.

Kudos. That got an unexpected, but much needed, hearty chuckle out of me :D

That episode is commonly misunderstood. I too had always thought they were lampooning climate change deniers, but Matt and Trey were actually poking fun of Al Gore and An Inconvient Truth as alarmist. They’ve since apologized for the episode, but it’s wild that it’s so often confused for satirizing the very thing it was mocking. For me I just assumed that Matt and Trey wouldn’t be deniers so it never occured to me until I found out their true intention and now it’s pretty cringy to watch that episode since it’s a lot more obvious. Here’s an article about it:

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a25127458/south-park-climate-change-manbearpig-apology-season-22-episode-7/

Excellent! I noticed that there seems to be a lot of UK stuff that is explicitly working-class versus American. Interesting to say the least. It seems like, for whatever reason, it’s a little bit more prevalent in the UK. Maybe it’s just the responses I’ve gotten so far, but I have noticed there seem to be a disproportionate amount.

Parenti, in Blackshirt in Reds, covers this topic excellently. He does not gloss over the flaws and corruptions in the USSR, but he is realistic in giving a fair assessment of their successes in the midst of their failures. A big point being what you mentioned above: the USSR had to continue focusing production towards just being on even footing with the US in terms of defense, to protect against the very real threat of the US overthrowing the government as they were doing in so many other communist countries. At no time during the USSR’s existence were they ever not under attack by some outside force or another (the NAZIs, CIA, multi-national capitalist interests etc). Here’s a good quote talking about the Stalin era and progressive policies during that time:

During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism didn’t work” is to ignore that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in the living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti