A Quick Post About Hulk Hogan

I didn't watch wrestling as a kid. It wasn't allowed; my parents didn't want me and my brother practicing wrestling moves on each other, among other reasons. The matter was ultimately academic; Whenever I'd sneak a peek on a Saturday morning after a healthy dose of cartoons, after about five minutes of watching Hulk Hogan rambling about "Hulkamania this!" and "Hulkamania that!" I'd say to myself, "This is boring." and then go play outside. 

So, thank you, Hulk Hogan, for the sunlight, grass stains, sprinklers, and quality time with the neighborhood kids. 

Admittedly, I do find the history of professional wrestling interesting, the way it dovetails with the advent of cable television, and especially how Pay-Per-View saved it from death and turned it into a multi-million dollar media empire. 

There's an infamous story of Hulk Hogan knocking out Richard Belzer on a talk show while Mr. T sulked. I won't go into the full details, but the basics of it are that Hogan and Mr. T were under the impression that there would be a row of kids in wheelchairs for a meet and greet if they came on the show. They showed up because wrestling was not in a great place and needed all the publicity it could muster. There were no kids in wheelchairs and Mr. T became reticent and cagey, which is understandable. As for Hogan, he agreed to demonstrate a wrestling move on Belzer and subsequently knocked him out in the process. Hogan admitted to putting a little more strength into the move than he was supposed to. Belzer would receive nine stitches on the back of his head from when he slipped out of Hogan's grasp and hit the floor. The incident took place in 1985 and was settled out of court by 1990 for an undisclosed amount Belzer would put toward buying a property in France. 

I only heard about this incident a few years ago because my roommate was a big Law & Order: Special Victims Unit fan and especially liked Richard Belzer's character of Munch. 

Richard Belzer would die in 2023 in Bozouls, France, of complications from a respiratory illness. 

“Diane, Stardate 3.14159…”

Audiobooks were an essential component of long car rides with the family in the mid to late 1990’s. John Grisham was generally first choice because we watched a lot of courtroom dramas together, especially LA Law and Reasonable Doubts. Tony Hillerman was the close second because we were living in New Mexico and his stories were set in and around the area, so that was a nice touch. Other cures for boredom included Douglas Adams with The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, Tom Clancy’s Op Center, and Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. On the whole, we kept it pretty eclectic.

These were on cassette, and were typically abridged to fit a roughly 6-8 hour length. You’d need a lot of cassettes for an unabridged version and books on audio CD’s weren’t especially common at that point. After all, carmakers weren’t going to replace their tape decks until the electronics companies worked out better anti-skip protections in their portable players, thereby relieving any worries of playback in cars going down bumpy or unfinished roads.

Sidenote before we go on about audiobooks: You know what my most and least favorite form of optical media is? The MP3-CD. On the one hand, this was the best of both worlds, maximizing an already amazing level of storage capacity by replacing the AIFF audio files with MP3’s, allowing several hours worth of reasonable quality audio instead of roughly one. On the other hand, this was hands-down the hardest thing to explain to people when I worked at Target in 1998. People would see MP3-compatible CD players and think, “Oh! It’s a CD Player with an MP3 player attached to it so I can use one or the other.” And you’d have to explain to them that you put the MP3 files on the CD’s and that’s how you play it back. Some people got downright angry when you explained this to them, accusing you of giving them attitude when all you’re trying to do is save them from disappointment and a return trip to the store for a refund. Recordable CD’s were also fairly new face at this time, so you’re essentially explaining two technologies at once. Some audiobook publishers did have the foresight to put their books on MP3-CD’s since spoken word doesn’t suffer that much quality loss in the compression of an MP3 file, but overall this was a very rare sight that sold poorly, likely for all the reasons I just outlined.

Audible is one of the best services Amazon has on offer, and I say that without any sort of irony or snark. Digital rights issues aside (do you own it or are you renting it, etc.), this allowed for fully unabridged audiobooks to be appreciated in a format that wasn’t prone to all the weaknesses of CD’s or cassettes. It’s opened a floodgate for content that would otherwise have to deal with the logistics of publishing their stories to physical media and then distributing them nationwide to bookstores, among other issues that can lead to works not finding the audiences they deserve.

For example, one of the first titles I came across on Audible wasn’t so much a book as much as it was a kind of brochure for a game. It’s called Til Morning’s Light: The Private Blog of Erica Page. It’s written by Ross Berger, narrated by Stephanie Sheh, and has a total runtime of 35 minutes. Between the length and promotional aspect, there was no asking price, so it kind of seemed like a no-brainer for trying out this new platform. As the title implies, it’s told from a first person perspective in the style of a blog, a modern take on epistolary literature. The game it serves as a prequel to is developed by WayForward Technologies (a seasoned developer/publisher known for franchises such as Shantae and Mighty Switch Force) and was originally an exclusive launch title for the ill-fated FirePhone. It would eventually be released to the iPhone before ultimately being delisted a short time later. I never got a chance to try it, so I can’t comment on it or how the “audiolog” ties into the narrative. This was released in 2014, so it’s led me to wonder how this would have been available were it not for Audible, if it had been released earlier. 35 minutes is a very short time to put on a cassette and sell in, say, game stores as part of a pre-order for the game. Would it even be worth the expense for the publisher in the first place? Chances are, it would have simply been a website, no audio narration whatsoever. Had it been released for something like the original Playstation, the game’s CD would have been playable on a standard audio CD player, provided you skipped the first track (which was the game data), something a lot of people wouldn’t have known to do in the first place (see Sidenote).

That said, something like this did come out on physical media, all the way back in 1990, and has also been made available today through Audible for a reasonable price.

“Diane…”: The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper was originally released on audiocassette to coincide with the David Lynch and Mark Frost television series Twin Peaks, which ran for two seasons from 1990 through 1991. This was followed by a prequel movie, Fire Walk With Me, in 1992, and was eventually revived for a third season in 2017 for Showtime. There’s also been a number of books related to the series, including The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, written by David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Lynch. It was released around the same time as “Diane”, written by Scott Frost, and they do share some DNA in that both are epistolary works, much like Til Morning’s Light.

“Diane” has a total runtime of about 45 minutes, which would make it about the length of a typical music album on cassette or CD. I have no record of how much it cost upon release, but it’s reasonable to assume it was competitive with albums of the time, maybe between 10 and 15 USD. On Audible, I got it for less than 4. What makes “Diane” interesting is how it was produced. Throughout the TV series, FBI Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan) talks into a micro cassette recorder about the details of his case before the tapes are sent off to his secretary Diane Evans (who is never seen nor directly heard from) back at the Bureau’s Pittsburgh office. “Diane” contains these clips from the TV show (with the background music and even most sound effects removed) along with new entries recorded by MacLachlan himself. There’s a notable difference in audio quality between what’s clearly recorded in a studio and what’s lifted from the audio tracks of the television series. Some diligent fans have made YouTube videos of “Diane” synced up with the original scenes when applicable and stills for the “new” recordings.

I should mention in the interest of full disclosure that I did not watch Twin Peaks when it came out, mostly because I was 9 years old at the time and shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles occupied most of my television consumption. At best, I have the vaguest whispers of memories of people talking about how weird the show was, but I wouldn’t learn more of it until many years later when reviews and retrospectives of horror games like Silent Hill would make frequent references to the show. The 2010 horror game Deadly Premonition is practically an interactive adaptation of the series, borrowing many themes, plot points, and imagery from the show. I wouldn’t actually get to watch the show proper until only a few years ago, I think shortly before the Showtime revival in 2017. Those first two seasons and, as of just today, Fire Walk With Me are all I’ve seen. The third season is on a very long to-do list I may never get to. My overall impression of the show is that it’s worth watching, but if it doesn’t grip you in the pilot, no one’s going to hold it against you if you don’t bother with it.

It’s one of those works of media whose influence has come to overshadow it, to the point that someone new to the series in this modern world would probably wonder what all the hype was about. Lynch and Frost are unique voices, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a show that matches its off-beat quirks and idiosyncrasies, but in other areas such as tone and subject matter, the show has been surpassed by other police and forensic procedurals or courtroom and medical dramas. It pushed the envelope, but others have pushed it further since then. I’m not saying any of this to knock it. Though I do have some issues with the show I’ll expound upon another time, it’s deserving of respect and appreciation for what it is and what it led to in terms of the medium of television.

As for “Diane” it’s an odd duck, its very existence rather enigmatic. Between its brevity and fragmented presentation, it doesn’t really offer much substance as a piece of ancillary media. To be fair, it would be pretty tacky if it merely summarized the story arc of season 1, that being the murder of Laura Palmer, in a mere 45 minutes with a few name drops and a little more background on Cooper’s character. It would also be very easy to simply dismiss it as a quick cash grab, but it’s got too much effort behind it for that. A cash grab would have only compiled the recordings from the show and not bothered with the studio portions. Still, it’s overall a very unsatisfying little experience. Maybe it could have done with a part two. The tape only covers roughly the first season (leaving us just before the big reveal), and as the second season got underway, the narrative device of Cooper’s tape recorded messages to Diane played a smaller role. In all likelihood, there wasn’t enough interest by that time to give such a project a second go around.

Kyle MacLachlan would receive a Grammy nomination for “Diane” in the Spoken Word category, along with John F. Kennedy Jr., Jimmy Stewart, Garrison Keillor, and George Burns, with Burns winning for Gracie: A Love story, his biography of his late wife, Gracie Allen. Not a bad lineup to be a part of. 

Afterword: I wrote some months ago about how Douglas Adams’ radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future was not available through the BBC’s website anymore. I learned today while browsing Audible for Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul that the Future radio series is available there along with an addendum entitled, “Did Douglas Get It Right?”.

The Blogspot of Games

My first blog was Yahoo!360° (circa 2005-2006?).
My oldest blog that’s still around today is technically DeviantART (Dec 2007).
My second oldest blog still active today is Blogger (May 2008)

After 360° closed down, I migrated my blog over to a site called Multiply, which didn’t last more than a year before transforming to an e-commerce site and eventually shutting down altogether some years later. Blogger, meanwhile, has frankly managed to defy the odds and stay up and running for all these years. I’ve speculated before that the only reason Google keeps Blogger around is because of the goodwill it builds with users, the potential backlash of closing it down, and the overall small footprint it takes up on Google’s servers simply not being worth the effort to delete. It does worry me that the day may come when I have to say goodbye to Blogger. I’m not sure what I’ll do at that point besides go all-in on WordPress (where I’ve been since Dec 2014).

In my last entry, I wrote about the Crazy Castle videogame franchise, a series I’ve never actually played beyond once holding the box of the first game in a grocery store in the American midwest in 1989. Videogames have been a part of my life as long as movies, starting with the Atari 2600 all the way to my current collection of consoles that’s only one generation behind the current lineup. This meant I also read quite a number of videogame magazines such as Nintendo Power and Gamepro. Eventually, I found my way to the internet, where games journalism wasn’t bound by the conventions of print media. One of these sites was Gamespot, which is still active today. Not content with merely being a place to post articles about the games industry, Gamespot wanted to be a haven for gamers, a place where a community could thrive, where people could make connections and share their experiences with titles both new and old.

To this end, they offered a blogging service.

Although there were no real hard and fast rules about what you could post there, it maybe wouldn’t be the best place to host your travelogue of Europe or your collection of photos of telegraph poles or your thoughts on the self-determination of the South Moldavian people. Generally, if you were reading someone’s blog on Gamespot, you were reading about games, maybe anime, possibly movies, and technology as it pertained to the gaming space (graphics cards, console specs, etc.). As I was exploring options in case Blogger went the way of Multiply and 360°, I started a blog there in August of 2009. My first entry was announcing a short story I’d written that was posted to both my DeviantART and my Freeservers site (which is still somehow up and running). My last entry came in October of 2014 with a review of Velocity 2X, a PSVita game and sequel to a really nifty shooter originally released for the PSP. 47 total blog entries in those years, and I’d almost completely forgotten about it. I think the only reason I’d checked back in on it was I was wondering whatever happened to the site 1UP, as I had a small presence there. 1UP is completely gone, folded into another publication with all records of user-generated content wiped. That was when I remembered Gamespot and managed to uncover my old account there.

It really took me back. For one entry, I was complaining about how I couldn’t use certain words like class and style because, the way the site was coded, these would cause a Javascript error. I had to spell them with 5’s. Even “classic” caused an issue. I seem to remember this error was fixed, but I never bothered to correct my entries. In another entry, Gamespot seemed to think the name Shizuru was a curse word and wouldn’t let me post until I changed it to something else. Makes me wonder how people with Shih Tzus coped when they wanted to share their dog pictures.

In the years since making these entries, Gamespot has undergone many massive changes to their backend (all the technical stuff under the bonnet, so to speak), so a number of images I posted to my entries are broken, though at least one of them can still be seen if I access the site on my phone instead of my Mac or iPad. Most of them were covers of games, while others are complete mysteries as to what they were. One of them was about a portable NES console, which really doesn’t narrow it down given how lucrative that little market was, so I have no idea what image I’d have to use if I were to archive or preserve the blog.

As of this writing, Gamespot not only still has my blog up and running (images notwithstanding), but I can make a new entry anytime I want (maybe I should test to see if class and style still cause coding issues). They don’t offer any sort of migration tool the way 360° did. So, if I were to archive these 47 entries, I’d have to do it the old fashioned way of going through one by one and copy-pasting them into Notes or Pages before I could re-upload them to Blogger or WordPress. I don’t think I’ll go that far, unless I want to repost something on an anniversary or in regard to a recent event. As I said, my last entry there was a review of Velocity 2X in 2014, a series that’s remained stagnant to this day while Futurlab (its developer) focuses on Powerwash Simulator 2. Someday, maybe there will be a Velocity 3, and on that day, I’ll dig up my old Gamespot review and we can all contrast and compare, see what’s been improved, what still needs work, and even where the series can go from here.

Game on, everybody.

A July 4th Post About Videogames Because I Can

Nostalgia is not only a drug; it is the ultimate abusive relationship. You start out loving something before growing tired of it. Eventually, you stop caring about it potentially to the point that you hate it. Next thing you know, it’s been years since even thinking about it and suddenly you want it back to the point of putting tears in your eyes.

Believe it or not, there was a point in time when we collectively hated translucent casings on our electronics. We thought it looked downright ugly. It’s only been in recent years with the rise of identical-looking smartphones and samey notebook computers that we look back on those see-through housings with fondness. From the perspective of those old laptops and music players, we’re standing outside with a Bluetooth speaker over our heads blasting love songs via Spotify, only probably way more pathetic and certainly not going to end the way that movie did.

I was thinking about all this today having just beaten Monument Valley on my iPad, including all its add-on chapters. I know I’m about eleventy-billion years late to the party on these games, but they’re new enough to me to be interesting and old enough to everyone else to be retro. I got it through Netflix, who is delisting the game a few days from now. I’m probably not going to get to the sequels in that time, but maybe I’ll just buy the damn things from the app store after all.

Speaking of abusive relationships, puzzle games and I have a similar standing as RPG’s in that I love them dearly, but I don’t have time for them. I have a rather addictive personality, and as such generally don’t play games on my phone because of the distraction and time sink. If I want to play a game, I’ve got to work for it, fire up the Playstation or the Switch and sit my ass down on the couch. There are still games on my phone, mostly as a contingency plan if I’m stuck somewhere for a while and need my dopamine fix. The exception to that is Pokemon Go, which I’ve been playing religiously for some years now. In my defense, at least that game has me get up and out of the house when it isn’t exhaustingly hot or blisteringly cold. When it came to Monument Valley, I was certainly aware of the games, but I never gave them much thought. I saw a few screenshots and clips of gameplay and my response was a resounding, “It’s probably okay, but so what?” It reminded me of a game I tried out on my PSP called Echochrome. The games have a fair bit in common in that they both involve navigating Escherian landscapes using a combination of dream logic and lateral thinking. Echochrome predates Monument Valley by a few years, the former very much still a product of buttons and joystick gaming while the latter was born and bred to work with a touchscreen, be it a phone or, better yet, a tablet.

This led me to thinking of similar sort of puzzle games, ones that involve navigating a space rather than simply sliding blocks or matching tiles. One of these games is Crazy Castle for the NES. Specifically, and depending on what region of the world you reside in, Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle (more on this in a moment). The game has you navigate a scene while dodging enemies in order to collect a number of carrots before moving on to the next level, of which there are 60. For a NES game, that number certainly seems crazy, until you realize each level only occupies about two screens worth of real estate and they employ a kind of modular construction. I remember my brother and I losing our minds at the idea of Bubble Bobble having some 100 levels, until we realized each level was only a screen and of a similarly repetitive level design. Although I do remember playing Bubble Bobble as a rental from a local grocery store in the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin, I never actually played Crazy Castle. I don’t even think I knew it was a puzzle game. Frankly, in my mind, at that time a puzzle game consisted of falling blocks or sliding tiles. I do remember seeing the game at the same grocery store and reading the back of the box. What stood out to me most was this image of Bugs Bunny embracing a female version of himself in a blue dress. According to the text blurb, this is Honey Bunny, a character who has appeared in a few classic Looney Tunes shorts, though her design has never been set in stone. The image on the box baffled me because of how much like Bugs she looked. In fact, she looked like Bugs when he’s wearing a dress to fool Elmer Fudd. On the whole, it seemed weird to me to give Bugs a love interest at all, much less in a videogame, as if someone said, “It’s a videogame! You gotta rescue a damsel!”

It turns out the reason for the love interest is rooted in the game’s origin. This was around 1989 and in Japan the game originally starred Roger Rabbit (his wife Jessica being the captive Honey Bunny). As for bringing it to America, there was a problem. There was already a Roger Rabbit game on the NES and not produced by Kemco. So, the game was reworked graphically to feature Looney Tunes characters.

More games would be released in the Crazy Castle series, at least 5 depending on how you set up your spreadsheet, with multiple versions of each one depending on the region of their release. For the Japanese version of the second game, Roger Rabbit was replaced with Mickey Mouse. North America would still get Bugs Bunny right up until the 5th game in the series, which would star Woody Woodpecker. As for other regions, intellectual properties varied, from Garfield to the Ghostbusters to a Danish troll named Hugo.

It’s interesting to compare these titles to Monument Valley and Echochrome in terms of their presentation. In Echochrome, the character you have to guide around the impossible objects is an articulated artist’s mannequin, going with the game’s ultra-minimalist aesthetic, almost as if you’re playing a prototype rather than something finished. Monument Valley has you take on the role of Princess Ida, a small and silent little girl in a white dress and conical hat as she traverses a sea of soothing color gradients and isometric architecture. While the game has a story, it is not emphasized beyond some cryptic lines of text, the ending being almost symbolic more than anything concrete. Ironically, Crazy Castle has an equally anonymous quality about it, so much so that any number of characters and scenarios can be swapped out as needed, leaving the game with no real identity of its own. The closest thing the game had to an original character was in the Japanese version of the third game, with Mickey Mouse being replaced by Kid Klown, who would go on to have his own series of completely different games from Kemco. This game would see a release in North America, though its connection to the Crazy Castle franchise was nowhere to be seen as it does play a bit differently than the Bugs and Woody entries.

Having a major IP attached to a game creates a number of problems when it comes to preservation. While an original cartridge of Bugs Bunny Crazy Castles is neither rare nor fetching some high price on auction sites, it’s not been made available through any current console platform, namely the NES library of the Nintendo Switch. I don’t know how exactly the licensing deals work for that particular service (notably they haven’t removed or retired any games from the library, unlike Netflix), but having to deal with both a game developer/publisher as well as the owners of the license, in this case Warner Bros., has got to be a nightmare. This is the unfortunate fate of many licensed games, especially older games from the 8 and 16-bit era. They’re made to cash in on name recognition, they sell as many copies as they can, and then they fade into the haze of memory until suddenly they’re wanted again.

If Gex can come back, maybe there’s still hope for Crazy Castle.

Boof Jark: My AI Pledge

A wise man once said that one man’s software is another man’s AI. As such, it’s important we establish some kind of clear, working definition of what’s being referred to when it comes to AI-generated content. For example, the ghosts in Pac-Man are AI. That’s not what we’re talking about. Spellcheck is arguably a kind of AI, but it’s not what we’re talking about, and I’ll even give a pass to predictive text for reasons that will hopefully become clear as we progress. Case in point, I only had to write “prog” and follow it up with the tab key to write the rest of “progress”. Another writing tool I feel I should disclose use of is an oldie called Grammatik. It launched around 1981 by Aspen Software before eventually being absorbed into Corel's WordPerfect, which was how I was introduced to it circa mid 1990’s. Bear in mind, this was not a Large Language Model trained on all the text in the world. I have absolutely no idea how it worked, but it’s not important because outside of obvious things like run-ons caused by a misplaced period, I never relied on it more than I trusted my own two eyes giving my paper a once-over (and that was only the first line of defense). It was also oddly fixated on the idea of passive voice, a grammatical concept that I think I understand and I know I’ve had explained to me countless times, but I couldn’t spot it in the wild or stop myself from writing it if my life depended on it. If anyone knows a really good mnemonic for it, I’d love to hear it. It’s also worth noting that Grammatik couldn’t really learn as you wrote. At best, you could tell it what to ignore, but it wouldn’t remember what you told it to ignore the next time you reopened the document, so it was only useful if you wrote in crazy, uninterrupted marathon sessions a la Jack Kerouac. Most importantly, Grammatik couldn’t offer suggestions for how to revise something beyond “You’ve started every sentence in this paragraph with the same word. Avoid repetition.”, it certainly couldn’t offer suggestions about tone, and it definitely could not fabricate a full essay on my behalf from a briefly descriptive prompt. I was still doing the work, and that’s the key distinction to keep in mind. 

To put it another way: Who is driving the car? The one in the driver’s seat with the wheel in hand, or the one in the passenger seat giving directions? The officer who pulled you over already knows, but he’d really like to hear it from you. 

I don’t know if it was on Medium or Substack where I saw about a half-dozen AI generated images in a row while scrolling and saw red for a moment before closing the tab, toppling a chair, and storming out of the room grumbling about the decline of Western Civilization. That’s a slight exaggeration; I would never do that to a perfectly innocent chair. Besides, the last thing you want is to make a chair mad at you. They won’t stand for it. 

What upsets me most about this trend is the fact that these writers are often the first, loudest, and yet most eloquent at bemoaning the fates and predicaments of artists, creatives, and professionals in general in the face of this ever-changing landscape that AI is slowly consuming. It makes me want to grab them by the shoulders, shake them like they’re the first character to go hysterical in a disaster movie, and scream, “YOU ARE NOT HELPING!” and finish off with a slap across the cheek. For the record, I have the kind of upper body strength that makes Mr. Burns look like Sugar Ray Leonard at the height of his career, so if you’re afraid of this potentially becoming reality for you, rest assured you’ll barely feel a stiff breeze. I’ll also likely collapse from the exertion while breathily asking if you’ve had enough, so the only pain you’re guaranteed to feel in the whole ordeal is the pain in your sides from laughing.

I made a note on Substack (their version of a Tweet) to essentially complain and vent, vowing that if I saw an AI header image to an article, I wasn’t going to read it. I wasn’t addressing anyone in particular; it was not about naming and shaming. As you may have heard from your parents at one point while disciplining you, I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at what happened. Moreover, I'm saying this because I want you to do better, and I know you’re more than capable of it, whatever your self-doubt is saying about you right now. 

As for doing better, these are your options.

1. Learn to draw and/or take photos. 
2. Use a stock image service; you’ll be paying real artists or at least using works volunteered by willing artists. 
3. Commission a human artist directly. 

This is the part where I acknowledge that I am fully aware of the potential pitfall of my pledge in that I may well mistake something genuine for something AI-generated, therefore missing out on something authentic, inspiring, compelling, and any other praise I could throw at it. That said, let’s be real, a lot of what we collectively refer to as AI Slop is pretty samey. I think the best description I ever heard for it is, “Well-rendered but badly-drawn” with tells such as heavily-detailed shading and color gradients while the proper lacing of shoes and/or number of fingers on a hand is spotty at best. Basically, a painterly once-over of a hasty sketch. Even more basically, polished shit. There are other descriptors, but these are the most polite. 

“Well, those AI generators can make some really photorealistic results that are harder to detect, especially if you know how to—“ 

If you’re willing to put that much effort into hiding your use of AI, you have even less of an excuse to not employ any of the alternatives I’ve listed. 

Before I go, I’ll reward you for getting this far with an explanation of just what in Hel’s Realm Boof Jark is. I don’t know where it was posted, maybe Instagram or LinkedIn, but it was an image of two boats on the shore of a deserted island, one filled with fruits and vegetables (along with eggs and a rooster because MidJourney doesn't know how poultry reproduction works), the other filled with all manner of meats, including a package of Boof Jark. I mean, you seriously couldn’t be bothered to take the most basic pen tool and write some block letters on a white box? 

Speaking of handwriting, which I’m notably not using for this, I’ll close with a story about Bob Ross. He once received a letter from a fan saddened that he couldn’t follow along with the painting sessions because his hands shook too much. Bob Ross, being the absolute legend that is Bob Ross, assured this person, “Well, then you can draw trees better than I can, because trees are rarely straight.”

Behind the Scenes

Blue Snake Mambo (Zootopia 2 Teaser Analysis)

It was VH1's Pop-Up Video series that made me aware of the fact that there exist people in this modern and connected world who are not convinced NASA got anyone to the moon. It's also where I learned an embarrassingly high number of people do not think our sun is a star. When I started looking into the whole "lunar hoax" phenomenon, something caught my attention. One of the "gotchas" or "tells" that the entire lunar excursion was filmed on a soundstage is the absence of stars from the photos or the live video feed. 

The reason this caught my attention was because, in all my years of seeing these images, I had never noticed there were no stars. Needless to say, it didn't take me very long to figure out why you can't see the stars in these photos (though there seem to be a few points of light in the one pictured above from Apollo 14). Put simply, you can't see the stars because it's not night time on the moon when the photos were taken. It's literally broad daylight. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to see the surface or the astronauts. The sky doesn't look like broad daylight because the moon has no atmosphere to color the sky in the trademark hues of a day on the Earth. The story amongst the hoaxers is that the director (who may or may not be Stanley Kubrick, depending on who you ask) didn't like how the stars looked on set, so opted to turn them off, never mind the suspicion this might cause because surely people would expect to see the stars... and I never said this was a good explanation, just one of their talking points. 

Also, it's not like the Apollo missions are the first time we've seen images taken from the lunar surface. The Surveyor program started years before Apollo 11. The Soviets even took photos with their Lunokhod program. Did they also make the same creative decision on their own sets? Were they afraid people wouldn't believe them if they showed stars in an effort to out the Apollo program as a fraud? 

In the words of Ron White, "I told you that story to tell you this one."

Zootopia 2 dropped a teaser trailer a few days ago. Trailers, as a rule, feature scenes from the final cut of the film. Teasers, by contrast, often play by their own rules, mostly because they're shorter, but also because they're made earlier in production. I think the best example of this is Terminator 2, whose teaser showed an assembly line building an army of endoskeletons. This scene is nowhere in the movie and was made entirely for the teaser. Zootopia 2's trailer seems to have gone above and beyond regarding tailor-made content, almost acting like some kind of vertical slice of the finished film. We see a variety of environments as well as a rapid-fire slideshow of the cast, all framed by a trio of hamsters jumping around on a synthesizer to provide our soundtrack. 

The premise seems to revolve around a blue snake that's found its way to Zootopia and is being pursued by the poli---Wait a damned minute.  
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Were there no reptiles in the first Zootopia movie? Wasn't there an alligator or a gecko or something like that, somewhere in the background of the nudist colony or the DMV? 

I'm seriously having a bit of an existential crisis here. 

Turns out, no, there were no reptiles in the entirety of the film. There were also no birds (which may well be our hint at a Zootopia 3). From what I could gather, the first Zootopia film was kept strictly to mammals as a way to make the worldbuilding and story less cluttered, letting us focus on the predator/prey dynamic. 

Now it seems we're putting a new wrinkle in the dynamic by examining the relationship between hot-blooded mammals and cold-blooded reptiles. Of course, there are plenty of herbivorous reptiles, that's not the problem. This new separation (segregation) seems to have much deeper roots than the eaters and the eaten. The only concern I have is whether or not we'll just be retreading the same ground as the first movie, only with new placeholders for real world issues. 

While I like the first Zootopia movie, I'm not the most arduous fan of it. It's well-made, very imaginative, and has a great message, but the best part for me was the dichotomy and tension between Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde. This time around, they're obviously on more friendly terms, especially with them both being police officers. I imagine they'll still have their disagreements, and we'll doubtless have situations of the fox's street smarts and the rabbit's book smarts. I only wonder if they'll have an overall smaller role in the main plot of the movie. 

In any case, this is a good teaser. I like that it's mostly original content as a good teaser should be. It gives us a good sense of what we're in for in terms of scope. It certainly preserves the absurdist humor of the first film. Moreover, it made me want to take a second look at the first movie for context. That's legitimately impressive. 

A Rant (Part 1 of X)

Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, is said to have hailed the internet as the death of the novel. Makes me wonder what he thinks of movies, given I’m sure more people have seen the Trainspotting movie than read the original book, to say nothing of all the people led to his books on the power of the film. Maybe he doesn’t consider that a fair comparison since the internet, despite the rise of short-form audio-visual content like TikTok or Instagram, is still largely a text-based affair. It's been argued that we’re reading less and less as time goes on, but the reality is that people are reading as much as ever, they’re just reading things other than books, magazines, and newspapers.

To build on Mr. Welsh’s assertion, if there’s one singular iota of beef I have with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, it’s that they’ve almost singlehandedly killed blogging. Microblogging offers a conciseness and brevity that’s simply easier to digest in short, controlled bursts of scrolling. I remember an English teacher telling me about how the Industrial Revolution lit a fire under the short fiction market because people were simply too busy to read a full novel, preferring instead a tighter narrative that could be read in a sitting.

This is not me complaining about any shrinking traffic to my own blogs; they were never that high to begin with. Rather, my complaint has to do with the way too many people are using social media to share their thoughts. Essentially, they’re trying to jam the round peg of long-form blogging into the square hole of microblogging, and it’s frustrating that people aren’t more upset about it.

Here’s what I mean: In the latter years of Twitter, before the Elongated Muskrat came along, there seemed to be an uptick in people posting multi-part tweets to get around the character limit. Specifically, after the death of TotalBiscuit the Cynical Brit from bowel cancer, a certain user made a very long chain of Twitter posts about his axes to grind with the former vlogger (complete with an image of several axes leaning against a wall). I don’t remember if he was a journalist or a game developer, and I don’t care to dignify his display of pettiness with a check, but all I could think when I was scrolling through it to see how many replies to his own Tweet he needed was, “Why doesn’t he just make this a blog post and put the link to it in a Tweet?” People can still reply to what he said below the Tweet; they can just go to the blog, read it, and then come back with their thoughts on it.

Look, I can understand when you need a little more room to say what you want to say. Even the most generous character limits can be frustrating to work within. If I see someone posting a reply to their own post to finish their thought, that honestly doesn’t bother me. If it’s a reply to their own post giving some additional context, or reacting to the general vibe of the other replies they’re getting, I have absolutely no problem with that. Sometimes, we don’t choose the right words and we need to add some qualifiers. It happens.

What does make me angry is when you’ve essentially taken a long form blogpost, chopped it up into sentences, and then posted them one at a time to a microblogging site, just hoping that people will be able to navigate the thread amid all the other replies from people responding to it. Seriously, if you need that much room, get a blog.

The sad reality of why this is happening has many roots, the first of which is that some people simply like to keep their online presence more centralized. They’d rather focus on one site than micromanage a thousand different pages, leading to at least one inevitably being neglected. Secondly, it may simply not be worth it for them to set up a blog just for that one especially long stream of consciousness. Thirdly, and most tragic of all, is that social media users are creatures of habit. Many don’t feel like following a link to an external site, even if the URL clearly shows where they’re going and isn’t potentially some kind of trap.

On that note, remember TinyURL and Bitly? On paper, it sounds like a great way to put web addresses in Tweets so you wouldn’t use up as much of the character limit. In practice, it’s absolutely awful because all you’d have is a string of numbers and letters. You could have been getting sent absolutely anywhere and the internet is a dangerous place. Nowadays, more sites offer shortened versions of their URLs for this very reason. You now know for sure you’re clicking on a link to a YouTube video or a Twitter post or a Wordpress blog. Also, social media platforms have gotten better at integrating URLs without it eating up half of your character limit. You may even get a little preview window of what you’re going to see.

Before I go, I should address another use of social media microblogging, and that’s using it to publish fiction. There’s two approaches this takes. One is a more traditional method that builds on what we’ve talked about with people trying other shoehorn longer form writing into a format that favors succinctness. An example of this is Ratha’s Island by Clare Bell, which was essentially “serialized” to Twitter one sentence at a time, one post per day at roughly the same time. The other form of “Twitter fiction” is a modern take on the literary genre of Epistolary fiction. Epistolary fiction is a subgenre of fiction that presents its story in the form of letters and other documents written directly by the characters in the story. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the go-to example of this that most people are probably familiar with. In the case of Twitter fiction, sometimes called “unfiction” due to the interactive quality of using social media, An account is made “in character” and it is that character relating events in their life as though they were posting to social media as anyone else would. A good example of this is a horror story called The Sun Vanished, about someone waking up in a world where the sun has been inexplicably blocked out, among other odd goings-on. The only problem with this approach is that social media platforms don’t make it very easy to read posts in chronological order from the beginning. Also, unless each post is labeled as part of a greater work of fiction (which is immersion-breaking), it’s more than possible to mislead casual readers into thinking they’re interacting with a real person’s journey, especially if it’s of the less fantastical variety.

The reason why I like the “in character account” better than the piecemeal presentation of a novel is that the former takes advantage of the medium and conforms to its inner workings, whereas the other is an old dinosaur trying in vain to adapt to the new world.

Star Wars Day 2025

In observance of May the 4th, this is my own personal recommended/definitive watch order of the Star Wars films if you're somehow still uninitiated or know someone who is. This is movies only, no TV shows, no videogames, no novels, just theatrical films so you can manage your watch time easier.

Revenge of the Sith
Rogue One
A New Hope
Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
The Force Awakens
The Last Jedi

Honorable Mentions/Qualifiers:
Jury's still out on Rise of Skywalker. I like it a little better every time I see it, but not by very much, and I haven't forgiven it for how angry it made me the first time. I'll leave you to guess the moment when I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from yelling "Bullshit!" at the screen and ruin everyone else's theater outing. The Han Solo film is in a similar standing; The first time I saw it, I was not impressed, but upon a rewatch some time later, I enjoyed it a lot more. Overall, though, while it never made me angry like Rise, I find it a very uneven movie. Basically, all the scenes with Han and Chewie are great. The rest of the film is a rather bland and uninspired heist movie. I've always had mixed feelings about Ron Howard as a director. Visuals aren't his strong suit and I think he trusts his actors a little too much at times, not really pushing the best performances out of them. In the best scenarios, you get someone seasoned like Tom Hanks in front of his camera, and you're in for a good time. In the worst, you put him in charge of some relative unknowns who haven't found their voices, and it's clear he prefers a hands-off approach with little to fall back on. This leads to actors looking a tad lost on screen, which at least is on brand for a young, fish-out-of-water Han Solo.

As for the two prequel films I left off the order, I should point out I'm actually something of a Phantom Menace apologist. However, at this point in the franchise's lifespan and with everything else we've been given to spend our time with, I'm okay with saying you can skip that one. Before Rise, Attack of the Clones was the one Star Wars film I actively disliked. Even then, I once made a list of 5 things I liked about it. I don't quite remember what they are anymore (I don't even think I ended up posting it to Tumblr which I originally wrote it for). Also, fun fact about Attack of the Clones: this was the first Star Wars movie to not be filmed on traditional 35mm film. It was shot on high definition digital video... and unfortunately, you could tell. I still remember when I saw it in the theater the first time, there was a fairly dark scene with Obi-Wan and Anakin on opposite sides of the screen talking, and you could see compression artifacts in the dark space between them. It was practically a checkerboard pattern of deep purples and dark grays, with each square as big as the actors' heads. Roger Ebert made a similar observation in his review, so I know my experience was not unique. Fortunately, the technology behind the transition from analog film to digital video, especially in projection, has gotten a lot better. It was certainly no longer an issue by the time we got to Revenge of the Sith.

Speaking of clones, I'm also not bothering to include the animated Clone Wars film, as that was really more like a pilot for the TV series that just happened to get a theatrical run. Thanks to a modest budget of less than 10 million dollars, it was able to make a fair bit of money at the box office, though still stands as the lowest grossing Star Wars movie at just shy of 70 million. For comparison, Solo made a little under 400 million dollars against a budget of 330 million and that was considered enough of a failure to get the Obi-Wan movie scrapped and reworked into a miniseries on Disney+. As a rule, studios tend to take about half of the gross (and budgets don't include expenses like marketing and promotion), so, depending on who you ask, Solo is the first Star Wars movie to lose money. The Mandalorian & Grogu is set to release next year in theaters. It will be interesting to see how it fares.

While this has been primarily a watch order list, I'll touch briefly on ranking the Star Wars films, most favorite to least favorite. I'm not going to give the full rundown; as I've said, jury's out on a few of them and it's sometimes hard to qualify what's a "least liked" and what warrants an "actively disliked". In any case, it would be a tier list, rather than assigning each movie a unique ranking number. For example, I love Last Jedi and Rogue One. I love them equally, and it's for exact opposite reasons. One honors the past, the other looks towards the future, and I simply could never put one above or below the other. It wouldn't be fair. On a similar note, although A New Hope is not my favorite, I'd either have to leave it off the list entirely or put it right at the top purely on principle. Just as I respect Last Jedi for taking risks and Rogue One for sticking to what it knows, I respect A New Hope for taking that first step, walking so the rest could run. If I woke up tomorrow to find all the other Star Wars media apart from A New Hope had been erased from existence, I'd be very sad... for about twenty minutes, and then I'd sit and watch it for the umpteenth time and all would feel right with the world again.

May The Force be with you.

Everything New Is Old Again

 Disclaimer: This post has not been sponsored by 8BitDo. 

I got a new keyboard. It's from the fine folks over at 8BitDo. Not only do they make some awesome controllers for the Nintendo Switch, but they also have some mechanical keyboards on offer. I'd been eyeing one for some time since Logitech, in their wisdom, decided to discontinue the G413 Carbon (and replace it with some pale imitations and alternates) and I was worried about the impending day when it would stop working. I have a backup for my mouse, but the closest thing I had to a backup keyboard was the Nimbleback I use with my iPad. It's a fine keyboard, but I want to keep it available to carry with my iPad rather than be tied down to the Mac mini. 

As for 8BitDo, this came in a few different flavors, the first two themed after the original NES and its Japanese counterpart, the Famicom. When I checked their site a few days ago, I found not only had they expanded the keyboard to include a number pad, but they had two other styles of the original, including a translucent green XBox themed one (which was very tempting with its early 2000's aesthetic) and the one I ended up buying, based on the Commodore 64. 

Put simply, and if you'll forgive the pun, it was love at first byte: The large print on the dark brown concave keycaps, the tan body, and all topped off with a rainbow sticker along the upper edge and a big, red LED indicating that it's on and connected.

For perspective, I was born in 1981 and my first computer in the house was an Apple IIgs circa 1986, which is the equivalent of having a brand new Porsche as your first car. I have no real nostalgia for the Commodore 64; I don't even think I'd heard of it until the 1990's. According to Wikipedia, it was discontinued in 1994. Needless to say, a IIgs and a C64 look nothing alike, and have even less in common under the bonnet. I saw plenty of other computers and typewriters that looked more like the C64 in terms of the color scheme, so maybe that's where my nostalgia lies. 

As for the typing experience, it's phenomenal, though the backspace key is a little difficult to reach as the whole keyboard as a substantial slope (it doesn't even have feet on the underside to prop it up). It is notably louder than my G413, especially the space bar, but that's due to it having tactile keys rather than linear. Linear keys, like those in the G413, have all the advantages of a mechanical keyboard switch, namely not needing to press the key all the way down for it to register the keystroke, with the added benefit of letting you subtly control the volume of the keypresses. If you press softly and deliberately, it's no louder than any other keyboard, including non-mechanical ones. Think of it like slamming a door or closing it slowly depending on your mood. As for the C64 keyboard, there's really no minimum or maximum volume, as each key emits a distinct click for each press. Another notable difference is the lack of a resonance. On the G413, there's a metallic clang with each keypress, especially the space bar. I'm not sure what causes this besides a lack of dampening in the housing. With the C64, no such noise, only the distinct plastic-on-plastic clunk of the keys, and I love it. 

If I ever fall out of love with it, it does give me the option of swapping out the key switches for any other variety of my choosing, which I'm almost tempted to do for the space bar. It just sounds so different from the other keys. Then again, it's technically two keys being pressed down instead of one, so maybe that's why it sounds different. 

Pardon the rambling. It's the hype of having a new keyboard. I've been in more of a writing mood than a drawing one of late. My art block that's plagued me over most of last year still hasn't left. I also rediscovered a website called Writer (from Big Huge Labs). It's a browser-based word processor/note taking app that offers a minimalist, distraction-free writing experience (which is a little ironic given it's on a browser rather than a standalone app). Its biggest perk is the ability to select the color scheme of your background and text, which I've set to values consistent with an old school amber display. 

It almost makes me wish my monitor were smaller so I could put it on its side like some vintage workstation from Xerox. I've learned recently that you can purchase iMacs without their stands, opting instead for a VESA mount, so you could conceivably orient it sideways. I only wish they came in colors other than their muted rainbow variety. If they made a brown that matched my keyboard, I'd go for that. I could have sworn they had a black one available, but maybe I'm thinking of an older model. There's a light silver one, not even Apple's enigmatically inconsistent Space Grey. 

I can respect Apple and Microsoft not giving users this level of customization in their respective word processing apps, Pages and Word. To be fair, they do have accessibility options to create a high contrast or inverted color version of the display that can kind of sort of recreate the experience of an old school monochrome display. Even the browser based version of Word gives you the option of a dark mode.

It never fails to impress me the evolution of the word processor, from something boutique to something pedestrian. It's like the influence of the Gutenberg press bringing literature to the masses, then mass market paperbacks, and now ebooks and web pages. The craft of writing belongs to everyone, and my goal in life at this point is to grow into an old man hunched over a keyboard, probably driving the neighbors in the retirement village batty with the clickity-clack of my mechanical keyboard some kid probably custom-built for me out of sympathy to the cause. Maybe they were forced to visit the home as some kind of community service or church program and took an interest in my setup. They continued to visit long after the program ended, checking to make sure everything still worked, swapping out key switches and waiting eagerly to see if I approve or not. One day maybe they'll come and get told the bad news that I passed away the previous night, found at my desk slumped over the keyboard mid-documenttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt....

Words That Stay

Since 11 SEP 22 SUN, I've been keeping a journal of my medications. It started with keeping track of when I was taking Ibuprofen to help with some shoulder pain I was having. Later on, it extended to me tracking my symptoms while on my new medications. I went from Zoloft to Prozac and a mood stabilizer called Olanzapine instead of an anxiety medication whose name I don't remember because I rarely took it (it was designated "as needed"). We tried some other medications before settling on the Olanzapine, and the journal was used to track my symptoms and potential side effects. 

Originally, I used Evernote to create and update the journal. After some time, I became frustrated with how Evernote was performing. Frankly, there is no excuse in 2025 for updating a text file to have input lag. The file size wasn't even especially large by Evernote standards, yet updating it was a test of my patience. I could finish a sentence before the first word finished appearing. I wrote to Evernote about this and got absolutely no response. Between that and their price hike, I decided not to renew my subscription, only keeping it around as an archive. I moved the journal to Apple Notes on 01 SEP 24 SUN. I had some reservations about it because it didn't seem to have many of the same features as Evernote. 

When it comes to Apple software, a phrase you may hear time and again is how something will be simple and easy, but rarely if ever obvious or discoverable. For example, in my journal, each entry is headed by the date, and the rest of it is a series of bullet points, each followed by a timestamp. With Evernote, making bullet points is fairly straightforward; the icon for it is right there in plain sight. With Notes, the option to format your text that way is not exactly obvious. I felt silly having to look up how to make them. At this point, it's second nature, and one could argue growing pains come with the territory for any piece of software, even a note taking app. 

Note taking apps kind of baffle me the more I think about it. You'll find no shortage of debates online about what differentiates a note taking app like Evernote or Notion from a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. The closest thing there really is to a consensus is that a word processor is interested in what your text will look like when printed out, be it on physical paper or something more convenient like a PDF or an ePub file. Note taking apps, by contrast, are designed to help you get your thoughts down as quickly and painlessly as possible, making itself as malleable as possible to your stream of consciousness. On top of this, note taking apps add a number of quality of life features to help you organize those thoughts once you've committed them to text. 

This led me to something of a dilemma. There's an old saying that goes, "Never write down what you don't want spoken aloud in public." At the same time, a journal, by its very nature, is a record of your private thoughts, and there's nothing wrong with keeping it that way. Somewhere between these perspectives rests another quality of journals that nobody really likes to talk about, the fact that they have the capacity to survive you. 

Barring chucking it in the fire before you snuff it as the late Virgil requested (and was ultimately ignored), your journal is the very definition of an open book once your time has passed. It's like any other book on a shelf, able to be opened and read at another person's leisure, no real permission required. At worst (maybe best?), you were the sort of meticulous person who encrypted their journals by writing in some indecipherable shorthand or even a simple substitution cipher. Maybe you were one of those legends who developed a full language and your book can join the likes of the Voynich Manuscript. 

Of course, that's all assuming your journal is a physical book. 

Basically, with a physical book, the part about it surviving you is baked in to the medium. A digital file, by contrast, is somewhat more obscure, especially in this era of increased concerns over privacy in the face of large scale data leaks. 

One of the reasons I keep this journal, most entries of which are simply timestamps for when I took my Prozac and mood stabilizer, is for the sake of my doctors and counselor, so I could refer back to any date and time to aid recalling symptoms or changes in my behavior or whatever else may be relevant. In this regard, it's very helpful since I'm right there to scroll through it. However, what happens when I die? I don't expect anyone other than have the foresight to use my face or fingerprint to open the iPhone or iPad (respectively), much less know the PIN for when those means of entry fail. My Mac mini is old school, using a simple password for entry, and nobody knows that. These are all good things for security purposes, but leave much to be desired on the sharing front. The best I can hope for is to have enough time to blurt out a password or text a link to someone before my eyes close for the final time. 

Maybe I could leave some kind of puzzle-like paper trail for someone to figure out if they felt like going on an adventure, an adventure to discover when and why I stopped drinking coffee. Spoiler alert, it didn't play nice with my medications.