Ook the Librarian

Some stores sell a little shelf for your shower crunchwraps. They have a little suction cup on them. It’s a really clever design.

Crunchwrap supreme. Next question.

You know what? It’s kinda nice that it may come down to mainstream culture to bring this poison down. It just highlights how different our culture is from our politics. I’m not sure I have point.

We should consider it a faux pas for a news organization to report on the punditry of other news org that is “two steps below it”.

If nbcnews wants to cover something “conservatives” are saying, they shouldn’t reach deep. They should consider the twitter account End Wokeness to be so far beneath it that reporting on it directly should feel dirty.

Now if fox news or even newsmax picks it up, then maybe start attacking this nonsense. Right now it seems to the crazies that we are taking them seriously. Why else would NBC News cover it?

I don’t see how dead naming is cool simply because it will hurt her polling with racists.

Edit: Ok, explain the joke. Why is the birtherism of saying “Barrack HUSSEIN Obama” funny on our side? Why should we respect Caitlin Jenner’s chosen name but not Nikki’s? If it’s not a joke, that is, you think it’s a genuinely good idea for news outlets to refer to her this way, why?

So from personal experience, I learned Obama’s middle name from the mouths’ of racists, I learned Biden’s middle name from the mouths’ toxic masculine chauvinists, and I only hear Jenner’s deadname from bigots. I don’t like playing the “true name” game.

Edit 2: Ok downvoters, you’ve convinced me that it is ok to stress politicians’ birth names in order to show disagreement. Can you now please provide a list of white politicians whose birth names we should use in order to show we do not support them? I guess we can just put their names in parentheses or something if that is easier.

Oh cool! Another Thing. I love how many of my minor problems are solved just by buying another Thing. My home is now a perfect curation of all Things I own to fix my minor problems. Do you need a little more power from your headphone jack? Get this Thing! Keep it with you; it’s not much help after you lose it. What’s that? You don’t even listen at full volume using the jack? Don’t you understand. It sounds slightly better. You idiots won’t know headroom if came up and bit you on the face.

In short, I kinda like my built-in headphone jack.

I never beat it as a kid either. I barely played it. I thought it was cryptic and punishing, although 9-year-old me wouldn’t have used those words. Just a simple “This game is dumb.” worked.

In fact, I thought it was pretty universally reviled. I’ve since learned that this is due the to fact that a child’s gaming social-sphere in the 90s could be quite limited.

About 5 years ago, glancing across a bookshelf, a certain game cart happened to catch my eye. I couldn’t tell you why it was this particular game cart that my attention ;) but I really started to think about it. I don’t actually know anything about Zelda 2 (other than “This game is dumb.”). So then I thought, maybe it wasn’t for kids. Nine-year-olds are pretty ego-centric. The NES was one of our toys. No adults were playing these things. Did I mention my social-sphere?

It then occured to me: I’m a blank slate. I know next to nothing about the progression, the map, or anything. Of course along the way, I found things familiar, and I knew things like >!Shadow Link was the final boss!< but I didn’t know >!how to cheese the Shadow Link fight!<.

So I gave it an honest, no-help-other-than-the-game’s-original-manual playthrough. Yadda-yadda-yadda, Zelda 2 is one of the best games on the NES, and in my book, that makes it one of the best games ever.

In hindsight, Zelda 1 is cryptic af. “The 10th enemy has the bomb”, “gumble gumble”, “shaka when the walls fell”, wtf? If you’d like to know what the 10th enemy thing is: >!hopefully someone below explains drop counts because I’m sure as fuck not going to!<. How was a kid or adult going to figure that out?

My Z2 playthrough took days, maybe 10, but my memory is fuzzy. I got pretty stuck >!looking for the mirror!< and I wondered around for a full day with no progress although I felt like I understood where the game wanted me to go. About halfway through the next day, I read the manual. I didn’t actually think when I started that I was going to do a no-help-other-than-the-manual playthrough. I thought of as a no-internet-on-an-80s-game playthrough. After the realization that the manual wasn’t outside help, I did use the internet for that. Well as soon as I learned >!hammers can chop down trees!<, I was on my way. The rest of the playthrough went smoothly, apart from being hard as fuck.

I would be careful with the word “always”. A softlock can occur by entering a later dungeon to steal some of its keys. You can use the surplus keys to beat an early dungeon without collecting its item. This locks the item in the dungeon. Hope you didn’t need that later.

the fact that you basically have to read the manual

This is no joke and deserves a bit of emphasis. NES games expect you to read the manual.

I did my first play of Zelda 2 about 5 years ago. I didn’t like it as kid, but I loved my adult playthrough. I will note that this was one of the games that I got stuck until I read the manual.

Another Z2 pointer, to anyone that wants to give it a go, is that you can logically “soft lock” the game with bad key management. It’s unlikely, but if you like to look for unintended orders to do game goals, it could happen.

I’m a voter, my friend. I can complain about a party all damn day. If you think that a political party is going get a dime from me before they can even convince me to vote for them, you have strange spending habits.

If you like the ideas of the Green Party, vote for them at the local level. The fact that they don’t seem to want to govern at the local level is enough for me to ignore them as an option.