Fast Food: Ads Versus Reality.

An oldie but a goodie, Jeff from The West Virginia Surf Report shows what fast food items look like in ads, contrasted with what one's he recently purchased looked like.

You should flip around on his site, there's plenty of funny stuff. Of note are his hilarious reviews of over-hyped fast-food menu items, and his hilarious interpretation of the "treatment affects" of the drug Alli.

If you've got a really strong stomach, you could also check out his infamous telling of the macaroni and beef situation.

Ronald McMugen.

What's that you say? That video isn't holy-crap crazy enough for ya? Well get a load of this-



A little bit of Hatsume Miku thrown in the mix for good measure =)

Ready for a third round? Here's Ronald vs. Colonel Sanders.

WTF Is Going On Here? - Part 4.

A mashup of just about every NES game ever released. This is totally awesome. I'm still recovering.

8-Bit A-Team.

Pretty self-explanatory.

Gun's N Roses Demand Apology From Dr. Pepper.

Apparently the Dr. Pepper campaign offering free soda if GNR released 'Chinese Democracy' in 2008 backfired in a big way.

I was looking for an up to date version of the story, but the "Chinese Democracy When?" blog has apparently shut itself down to only invited guests.

WTF Is Going On Here? - Part 3

Your guess is as good as mine...

50 Feet Of Color-TV Wire!

Found this at Goodwill Blue Hangar a while back. My girlfriend at the time, who was 26, was like "Color TV Wire? What do you use this for?".

She had absolutely no idea what it was used for. Odds were pretty likely she never had to set up a classic pair of "rabbit-ears" antennae, or was too young to remember.

It was such a strange object to set up such a noticeable rift in age (we're only 5 years apart!) I had to pick it up. The End =)

Welcome To The Obsolete Hardware Website!

The Obsolete Hardware Website... Wow. what a great resource. A virtual online museum of the early 80s home computer boom. To give you some scope, check out this page, where they arrange photos of all 100 computers together, where you can experience the diversity in design. It's great fun, and includes hardware I never knew existed, like the sexy little number below.

NSFW: Warcraft Dwarf Player Catches Two Elves Cyber-Sexing In Tram Tunnel.

YAR YAR HUMP HUMP! - an amusing first person account of a Warcrafter catching two other players role-playing humping in the Deeprun Tram. It's NSFW, but it's PG, and pretty damn funny.

Admin Note (05/2010): It appears the original classic tale of "Yar Yar Hump Hump" is no more. Or it's at least stashed away on some WoW forum thread I absolutely do not care enough to chase down. What's that you say? You want a link to a webcomic fanfic of the WoW fanfic? Because you're obviously an incredibly terrible person? Suit yourself.

Wake 'N' Bacon, A Homebrew Bacon-Based Alarm Clock.

Instead of harshly jarring you awake with an alarm, the Wake N Bacon alarm clock gently nudges you awake with the smell of fresh-cooked bacon, via two halogen lamps inside that slow cook the bacon, starting 10 minutes before you intend to awake.

Onion A.V. Club Taste-Tests Bacon Infused Vodka.

"It tastes like I'm having a stroke."

One of many colorful reactions the Onion A.V. Club had to the taste of bacon-infused vodka (not currently on the market, but they explain how to make it in the article).

You'd be pretty severely limited to what you could mix it with, but they cobbled together a drink called the BLTini that actually sounded kinda tasty.

Dorktastic Photos Of The 1984 Atari 2600 Swordquest:Fireworld Championship.

Here is a site containing a brief summary and scans of pictures from the Championship Competition for the Atari 2600 game Swordquest Fireworld, including pics of the winner Michael Rideout with his prize, the chalice. Apparently the photos were discovered in a random shoebox of Atari games found in a thrift store.

The Most Intense, Emotionally Draining Boss Battle Evar.

The fight against last boss Giygas in "Earthbound". Not only is he just about the scariest thing ever seen in a Super Nintendo game, with music that sets the mood, but the battle with him is incredibly intense, with the characters calling out through prayer to all of their friends and eventually to the player him/herself to pray for them and their safety.

And the strange dialog Giygas spouts during the battle? It's a reference to a childhood trauma designer Shigesato Itoi experienced as a child, when he went into the wrong theater and saw an exploitation movie called "The Military Policeman And The Dismembered Beauty". The graphic rape scene in the movie horrified him, and the dialog Gigyas speaks is culled from the dialog of that scene.

People swear that as Giygas is dying, he turns into a fetus, which I almost see (keep an eye out around 7:38 in the second video). There's another rumor that there's a voice saying "Let Me Out". I don't really hear it, but keep an ear out at the transitions at 4:38 and 6:53. I think it's just our brains trying to find patterns in the strange sounds.

Well, anyway, that's awesome. Here's that same battle replicated in MUGEN.



And here's Giygas being confronted by Evil Homer.



And here's an excellent 3D rendering of Giygas's lair.

I Used To Be A Nihilist, Til I Saw A Jetpack Brontosaurus.

Jetpack Brontosaurus (Coming Soon!) from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.

The above is a trailer for the game Jetpack Brontosaurus from the game website Blurst.com. In the game, you play an Apatasaurus named Brontosaurus who is dreaming he has a jetpack. Between the concept and the gorgeous music, this is so wonderful I can barely stand it.

Then, when typing in "Jetpack Brontosaurus" into Youtube, I got this gem, called "Rocket Belt Rawr"...



How could you ever have doubts on the innate goodness of the universe when there are two easy to find and free games starring a brontosaurus with a jetpack?

8-Bit Christmas Album From Doctor Octoroc

This is a really cool 8-Bit Christmas album from Doctor Octoroc, where not only are the classic carrols rendered 8-bit, but also reimagined in the style of a classic NES game's music!

Awesome =)

How my will shall be read!

Do any of you fine people remember The Frantics? This skit may bring back some memories!

2 Classic NES Games You'd Never Guess Were Sequels.

This is FAXANADU-



If you've never played it before, here's what it's like-



And this is LEGACY OF THE WIZARD-



And this is what this game is like-

Not a whole lot alike between these two games, huh? Well, somehow they are both part of the same series, one that also contains games even less similar, like Legend of Heroes on the Turbografx CD and Sorcerian (one of my personal favorite Adventure/RPG games). I can find almost nothing similar between any of these games; no recurring characters, locations, or even basic mechanics of gameplay.

Anyway, I can't explain it either.

'Worship' By Mark P. Hensel

Just wanted to show off a cool video by Austin Artist Mark P. Hensel. Snagged it off the Awthum Empire site.

This Guy Gets A Nigerian Scammer To Carve A Commodore 64 Out Of Wood.

Damn, what a score!

One of the crazy scambaiters at 419 Eater managed to convince a Nigerian 419 scammer to make several carvings, including a replica of a Commodore 64.

Curses. Foiled Again.

Well, crap. I ranted to literally everybody that would listen that when Apple released the SDK for the iPhone, I wanted to make a port of "Rogue" for the iPhone.

Well, someone else just did.

Gandreas Software just released a very faithful port for the iPhone, with some really innovative extra features, like the ability to pinch/zoom the graphics, switch from ASCII to graphics by tilting the iPhone, and including gesture-based commands as well.

It actually looks pretty cool.

A New Evil Has Awakened.

-THIS SITE WILL BE DEDICATED TO DOCUMENTING WHAT FOOLS WE ALL MAKE OF OURSELVES WHEN WE ARE OFF OUR HEADS

-LAUNCHES JANUARY 2009

-SEND US PHOTOS AND VIDEO LINKS OF YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS COMPLETELY TRASHED NOW

How many times have we all made fools of ourselves drunken, drugged up or just generally off our faces? Luckily we seem to have a built-in sense of shame that helps us to block it out. Blackouts. Unaccounted gaps in the memories from the night before.

Things that we never quite remember until some fast-thinking smartass pulls out their camera or phone and drops you an email the next day with a photo of you puking outside the burger bar, asleep in the club, peeing in the gutter, or flashing your butt at a passing coach of grannies on their way home from a Cliff Richard concert.

Then, as you sit there blushing with the heat of embarrassment tingling across your whole body, you suddenly wish somebody had had the humanity to say ‘You should go home.’

Just send us the photos or video links to post up for the world to see:

info@youshouldgohome.com

I know I'm going to regret mentioning this website. It's just a matter of time until I wind up on it. Sigh.

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Gets Rickrolled.

I don't know about you, but I think that this probably counts as the death of the Rickroll. Once you've reached the status of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, there is no way you can claim to be an underground phenomenon.

Rick Astley seems like a good sport. But he looks just as confused as everyone else as to what exactly he's doing, or what it's supposed to mean.

Have A Totally Anime Thanksgiving From The Year 20X6.

Monday's Short On Homestar Runner is pretty cool. It's a special involving the 20X6 versions of the characters learning how to give thanks, while simultaneously cramming in every single stock anime technique in existence.

Keep an eye out for the tractor decked out like Kaneda's motorcycle from Akira, and the American Dragon Ball Z parody ending.

8-Bit Vanilla Sky (With River City Ransom Sprites!).

Most of the time, I feel like I'm the only one left that still likes the movie "Vanilla Sky".

And we all know how I feel about River City Ransom, god amongst mere video games.

Here is a video that collides River City Ransom with Vanilla Sky, and creates a sandwich made of awesome.

Funeral For An X-Box 360.

This link was sent to me by my Myspace friend Monica McCoy. It's of the funeral tiggerboy from Gamespot UK performed for his X-Box 360. Pretty cute.

Whoa is that a Virtual Boy? I've only seen one of those in my life, and it was a store demo I fooled around with when I was 15. It gave me a headache.

It's also cool that he included a Sega with a 32X AND a Master System converter in the slot. Forwards AND backwards compatibility represented!

Rar.

Garfield Minus Garfield

I've totally fallen in love with the site Garfield Minus Garfield. This guy takes the daily "Garfield" strip... and removes Garfield.

That's it.

You may wonder why that would be entertaining, but it creates an entirely new strip, one of the seemingly neverending mental breakdowns of John Arbuckle... alone, genuflecting and making desperate pleas to the empty air.

Massive, Massive Collection Of Obama Buttons.

You find this massive of a collection of McCain buttons, you know how to get a hold of me and I'll post it. I'm non-partisan; I voted for Robocop/Unicorn.

I have a similar article on Politics Of Apathy.

What is Barack Obama Doing For You Right Now?

Just wasted quite a bit of time with Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle, where just a click can remind you what he's done for you lately.

Because he cares.

I have a similar article posted to Politics Of Apathy.

We Are 138.

But what does that mean?

Man, I accidently forced Dorkstuff to a screeching halt. I had reserved the "138th post" for myself, but now that it's here, I'm not sure what I want to post.

Not really sure what the significance of this number is. It shows up frequently in George Lucas movies (along with the number 23). The same goes for the Simpsons (for both 138 and 23). In fact, the Simpsons celebrated their 138th episode with a commemorative episode (rather than their 100th).

And of course the number is heavily associated with the punk band The Misfits.



But what is the big deal about the number? According to Wikipedia, it's a sphenic number, which means it is also square-free and has a Moebius function result of negative 1. Maybe that means more to you than to me.

Curiously, when you factor it out, you get 23*2*3. That may be a clue.

It's also the IMDB number for Leonardo DiCaprio.

Take a moment and ponder the significance of this number.

Wikipedia Entry On The Number 138.
One Thirty Eight Dot Com

Beautiful.

This. Is. A. Real. Unedited. Advertisement. For. A. Real. Product.

It's called the Rejuvenique RJV10KIT Facial Toning Mask Kit. But it looks like something you'd buy in a Philip K. Dick novel.

Now you know what to get me for Christmas. If you really, really like me, you'll include an Alex Chiu immortality ring. And a Razor Gator.

<3

"Botox seems pretty tame compared to facial self-tazing", to quote Antinous from Boing Boing.

Super Obama World

If youre the kind of person that thinks a really, really weak Super Mario World clone with *only* *one* *track* *of* *infuriatingly* *annoying* *music* and cornball "political" humor that your parents would chuckle at is you're kind of bag, then click on the above picture.

I've posted this same article to Politics Of Apathy.

BADLY ANIMATED MAN!!!

This is from a show in 1992 named Raw Toonage. IT's weird, it's odd, it's pretty dorky.

Bette Midler Is Married To One Of The Kipper Kids?

Anyone who partied with me since 1998 has been forced to watch this strange VHS tape I scored from a drifter junkie punk rock friend (along with some great Dallas punk EPs, Policy FTW!) for about $20. The tape with the graffiti scrawl on it that says "Smells Like Butterscotch, Yo!". You either already know what I'm talking about, or have this to look forward to, some booze-and-lulz sodden 3AM.

It turned out to be a great score, a collage of Dangerous Brothers Episodes, Liquid Television stuff, footage of him humping his girlfriend, The Butthole Surfers Movie, an awesome film about lesbian persecution in the 50s, scratchy animation set to authentic alien abduction confessions, and "K.O. Kippers", my first introduction to the Kipper Kids - Harry and Harry Kipper.

Harry and Harry Kipper, if you've never heard of them, are for all practical purposes the unholy identical twins of Pere Ubu and Popeye.

They seemed really familar to me, and they were. Turns out they had bit parts in UHF and the Oingo Boingo movie "Forbidden Planet".

For some reason, it took me a decade to look these guys up on Wikipedia, and it turns out that one of them has been married to Bette Midler since 1984. I'm unsure why I find this strange at this point, but I do.

Anyway, here's a video with Bette Midler and both Kipper Kids from that period.

The Most Famous Songs Weird Al Never Wrote.

This is the "Not Al" page, which attempts to document every song wrongly attributed to "Weird" Al Yankovic, as well as list the actual author.

Getting Your Bacon's Worth.

If you haven't had a chance to check out www.cockeyed.com, you should check out their entertaining series "How Much Is Inside".

In just shy of 50 adventures, this guy makes a 73 foot long Cheerios necklace, simulates the huge messy puddle an entire human body's content of blood would make, lipsticks up a girls legs almost up to the knee, figures out what kind of suitcase will hold a million dollars, and tapes up an 100 foot long strip of pornographic images down an elementary school hallway. All in the name of science.

And he seems to have a lot of fun doing it.

He comes up with several surprising results. Like working out that a 2-liter bottle of soda contains 2 liters of soda and 4 liters of carbon dioxide. Or that cheap batteries, while they last half as long as brand-name batteries, are actually 3 times as economical by price per hour.

But this one one really suprised me. He weighs out a package of Oscar Meyer bacon bits, and compares it by weight to actual cooked Oscar Meyer bacon. Turns out, bacon bits cost half as much by weight as actual cooked bacon.

For some reason, I always thought it would be the other way around. Weird.

The Condiment Packet Museum.

It's here, you're here, you might as well check it out. You know you want to.

A frighteningly thourough collection (currently at 724!) of modern condiment packages from restaurants.

EDIT (05/2010): The bigger, 929-entry museum is no more. I'm currently linking to another one I found. Yes, you read that right. There is apparently more than one online condiment packet museum in existence, or at least there was. The one I'm linking to now was apparently founded in 2005, so hopefully that means it will stick around. Also, this one offers buttons. Yay!

Hey, it could have value. This guy and a hot chick found out that the average ketchup packet contains 2.5 cents of ketchup. And that's in 2001 dollars!

Marzipan From Homestar Runner Dressed As Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The above image is from this year's Homestar Runner Halloween cartoon "Most In The Graveyard". Marzipan is dressed as Stevie Ray Vaughan. Thought some of ya might get a kick out of that.

Stark, No-Nonsense Guide To Lunchbox Collecting.

The fellows at Lunchbox Library have put together this tight little no-BS guide to the values of metal lunchboxes made between 1950-1987. They also reccommend placing the following button on your eBay auctions so your customers can look for themselves and see what kind of deal you're giving them, as well as revealing you to be someone that does their homework -

Free Appraisals

Photoshop Interface Rendered In Real-World Objects

Ganked this from Boing Boing. A Photoshop application window, rendered in real items. A link in the title leads to a Flickr photoset regarding it.

A History of Rock and Roll.....Polka Style!

As only Weird Al can do....

We can also learn about the Elements!

In case you have a science test soon! Lego style....

THE ATOM SONG!!!!

You can learn all about the atom now!!!

Austin's own Amanda Lepre Perorming the Wizards And Warriors Theme

Shweet.

Admin Note: Turns out this was an early rehearsal of what became the awesome Austin video game tribute band Descendants Of Erdrick. Again, shweet.

Excellent TI-99 Cartridge Rarity Guide

Here is an excellent rarity guide resource for cartridges for the Texas Instruments TI-99 system. Includes details on peripherals used, whether or not it included speech synthesis, and screenshots as well!

It's really graphics heavy. If you're more into text, and want a different opinion, this seems to be a popular and heavily mirrored resource as well.

Surefire Way To Triple Money You Already Have, Without Investing!

Let's face it. The current economic times are shaky. But I was recently clued in by a recent email about a fact overlooked by the media:

Apparently the dollar has fallen so low, and the bullion value has risen to the point where pennies are now worth more in copper than their currency value!

They're the only non-fiat currency we have left in this country! Empty your piggy banks before they drop the grid on us! AAAAAAUGH!

Just kidding. Don't go trying to melt down your pennies - First of all, it's a hoax. And it's not just a hoax, it's illegal. And it's not just illegal, it won't work.

Pennies made before 1982 are worth a fraction of a penny more in copper, but you physically couldn't carry enough to make a significant profit (a 24-ounce bottle, filled to the brim, is about $16 worth of pennies which would rake in about $4 profit, roughly).

Anyway, forget about all of that. What I'm about to suggest is perfectly legal, definitely has the potential to at least triple money you already have, and could be used as an excuse to spend an afternoon with family (or a really boring date)...



This, my friends, is a "wheat penny". Instantly identifiable, even common wheat pennies are worth 3 cents to collectors, as long as they are in reasonably good condition. And there is still plenty of them in circulation. As a personal experiment, I went through the change bucket in my room, which had about $8 in pennies. In about 10 minutes, I found I had 5 3-cent wheats and even 2 5-cent ones! It may not be worth your time to dig around your house for a couple of extra cents worth of coinage, but if it's something you keep an eye out for and seperate as soon as a cashier hands you change, it can quickly add up!

Happy hunting!

Current Wheat Cent Prices.

Current Bullion Melt Value Of American Coins.

Baconaisse, Because Everything Should Taste Like Bacon.

The new, hip sandwich spread, from the guys who make Bacon Salt.

Snagged from Boing Boing.

Bobcat Goldthwait Talking About Nirvana

Bobcat Goldthwait discussing opening for Nirvana during the In Utero tour on the Bob And Tom show, April 11, 2007. I have yet to find the video of him rapelling nude on YouTube. I guess it's for the best.

Funny 23-Minute Long Play Of Custom Super Mario Bros Level

"Super Mario: Frustration" is right! Apparently this was a video found on tuduo.com, and the commentary was added after the fact. But the truth is, it's pretty damn funny.

Huge (But Incorrect) Collection of American Flagg Comic Book Covers

This site chronicles the covers of Howard Chaykin's excellent (some, specifically me, would say masterpiece) comic book series American Flagg. If you've never heard of it, the story involves a group of steampunk-ish officers of a Ranger Squad (Plexus Rangers) and specifically a ranger named Reuben Flagg (who joined the force after playing one on television) and an incredibly tangled series of bureaucratic catastrophies that would be impossible to summarize (to give you an idea, his cat becomes mayor around issue 31).

If at all possible for you, it's worth checking out. As you can see from the covers, the artwork is gorgeous (especially the early issues), and it's satire of a sex and celebtrity obsessed culture choked with crooked officials is dead on.

Unfortunately, the collection on this website is incorrect, and instead of showing the covers of the first 12 issues of American Flagg, it is showing the first 12 covers of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg a later 12-issue story arc from 1988.

Live Action Duck Hunt!

From what I can gather, this is from a skit performed at an anime convention in Boston earlier this year.

WTF Is Going On Here? - Part 2

It looks like it's NSFW, but it's actually PG. No clue what is going on though.

What Andy Griffith Thinks Of Modern Information Gathering

I know even the meme of using this clip is kinda old, but it's still so hard to believe the country has swung so far to the right that cornball down-home wisdom from Mayberry sounds downright, um, liberal... almost leftist.

Free Dr.Pepper To Everyone (But Slash And Buckethead)!

First of all, no I am not getting money for this =P

Second of all, I know the whole "Dr.Pepper Will Give Everyone In America A Free Soda If Guns'N Roses Releases 'Chinese Democracy' This Year" is kinda old news by now too.

I just got through reading the text of the press release (link above provided by the obviously devoted fan/Dr.Pepper marketing agent responsible for the website 'Chinese Democracy When?')

Couple of things caught my attention, and actually gave me a little chuckle:

1) Apparently Slash and Buckethead are excluded, and will not get a free soda. Slash's response is here.

2) The wording itself is pretty humorous as well. Can't speak for everyone, but being told an album is "Dr.Pepper for the ears" isn't exactly gonna make me run out and buy it.

Rar.

Another Piece Of My Childhood (Aquarena Springs) Is Being Bulldozed.

When I was a kid, it wasn't really summer until the family made a field trip to Aquarena Springs, usually on the way to a bigger event (like the now-defunt Astro World).

It was low-key but still pretty fun, especially when I was smaller. Glass-bottom boats, light-gun gunslinging, playing tic-tac-toe against a chicken, mermaid shows, and a diving-swimming pig named Ralph!

It was corny, but it had character. It's a shame to think of it as gone. Although it's cool that they're endeavoring to restore the land to the state it was a century ago.

Rare Footage Of The Very First Ever 'Strider' Game

"Wait" you say, "that just looks like footage from a Japanese release of the Nintendo version of Strider! What's the big deal?"

Oh ye of little faith! You forget one thing:

There was no Japanese Famicom release of Strider!

This is a commercial for what would have been the Famicom release of 'Strider', which was never released because they decided on an arcade debut instead (the one we're all familiar with).

Here's a speedrun (like you didn't see THIS coming) of the Sega Genesis version, which stays true to the epic arcade anti-cyber-communist manifesto that is STRIDER.



Once the game exploded in popularity, easily becoming one of Capcom's most recognized franchises, the abandoned Famicom version (the ORIGINAL version of the game, mind you) was ported over to the NES...

And even with this guy instructing you how to skip half the game, you can easily tell that it is vastly different. Still an amazing game, and one of the best (uneasily wrestling the first Mega Man and Bionic Commander for the title) of the Captain Commando "Challenge Series" NES releases.

The Ballad Of River City Ransom 2

The excellent website Lost Levels, dedicated to covering games that weren't (not to be confused with the other excellent site Games That Weren't), regaled this excellent tale of Armen Casarjian and the unlikely tale of what could have been an excellent tribute sequel to one of the best games ever made, River City Ransom.

The story's not long, so I'll summarize. In 2003, when Armen was 21 and working for Atari, he found out that the trademark for River City Ransom was running out (for the love of God, how?), and on a whim applied for it. Lo and behold, he got it. After assembling a small team, they attempted to fulfill all our dreams and make a sequel for the Game Boy Advance.

And because nothing works out like the movies would make you believe, Armen found out at a convention that Atlus just then (a decade and a half after the first release) decided to make a sequel to River City Ransom on the Game Boy Advance. Cruel, cruel irony.

Against the recommendation of his lawyer, Armen and his scrappy little crew backed off with their project, considering they only owned the trademark on the title, and not the charachters, plot or music.

And now if you don't mind, I'm gonna Google how to research trademark expiration.

Weezer and AMVs...

Ok, I know this is old, but does a real Faye Valentine exist? and Fooly Cooly is super rad!!

Lord British Is Hanging Out In Outer Space Right Now

When I was 11 years old, Richard Garriott was one of my heroes. Being a kid in the late 80s, I idolized a lot of people (Ronald Reagan, Stephen King, Vanilla Ice, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) that today might seem laughable (actually, Eastman and Laird's TMNT still kinda rocks, so I take that back), but no matter what, my respect for Richard Garriot has NEVER wavered.

He personally created and programmed (I would venture to say) the most innovative, seminal computer RPG since Collossal Cave/Adventure. He then built the success of that game (Ultima) into an amazing Austin-based computer game empire (Origin Systems) that had a good run of nearly dominating the genre. Anyone else ever went to the Origin System's HQ for their Halloween haunted house? If not, you totally missed out.

Anyway, I've idolized this cat for nearly 20 years and he's in space now! How awesome is that!

Rar =)

Death By 8-Bit Zombie

The infamous "Death By Zombie" ending from the game "Uninvited"; the NES and Atari ST versions.

123456 POKEMON! New Lemon Demon Song!

Holy crap this song is still making me chuckle! And I totally approve of the newest addition of 8-bit crunch to the multi-layer 4 cheese lasagna that is the music of Lemon Demon.

Man am I going to be tormenting my friends and loved ones with lines from this track in the next couple of days...

In case you've never heard of Neil Cicierega (aka Lemon Demon), he's the guy that, at 15 years old, invented the video technique/genre Animutation, and before he turned 20 releasd a track ("The Ultimate Showdown Of Ultimate Destiny") that became the #1 hit on The Dr.Demento Show for that year (video below).

Long Have Been The Days I've Wanted To Mash A Morphoid...

...nearly two decades in fact. Sometime in spring of 1989, in the back of a Video Games and Strategy magazine, I saw a short review of "Bashi Bazook: Morphoid Masher" and the above picture. And ever since, I had never seen any more than the above picture. But holy crap, did that look like a super cool game. Unfortunately, it was never released in the U.S. So I've searched and searched, and pretty much been given scarce information, and as always, the above picture.

All that's changed fairly recently. A while back I found THIS article, and the loads of screenshots which got me back on the chase. Then, paydirt!

A full on Long Play of the entire game.








Don't have time for all that? Here's a 13 minute Speed Run! That's right, a Long Play AND a Speed Run in the same article! Hey, after 20 years of searching, I want to share the wealth!

The Night The Teenagers Ruled The World!

I just found this great fansite for 80s B-Rated Zombie movie "Night Of The Comet". It's got everything; trivia, quotes, memoramblia, bios of the cast... Above is the trailer, voiced by Optimus Prime himself. Below is a fun vid by Pirated Video where they whittled the whole movie down to 10 minutes. It's full of spoilers, so don't watch it if ya wanna check out the movie for more than just nostalgia.

Oh, and of course DMK has 23 cars.

The Conet Project, And Why You May Wanna Hold Onto Your Old TV.

We pretty much all know by now that television is switching over to a digital signal next year, and without a converter box, we will no longer be able to receive our favorite shows. That's hardly news.

But what's gonna happen to that huge bandwidth of broadcast signal? It's not going to simply dissappear... There is plenty of speculation as to who is going to be using those signals, from cell phones to emergency broadcasts to homeland security.

What about those of us curious enough to hold on to our regular tvs, or happen to have some of those old-school radios that pick up TV signals? What do you think we may be able to find scanning those "unused" frequencies?

Have you ever heard of a Numbers Station?

Scanning the shortwave dial, occasionally you will come across a funny little robotic voice (usually female) reading off a series of seemingly random letters and numbers. Reports of accidentally finding such stations date back to World War I, which could make them among the earliest radio broadcasts. References to them have been used as plot points in films since Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphee, appearing in Red Dawn, Toy Soldiers, Vanilla Sky and the television series Lost.

Funny thing is, nobody (at least nobody you or I are likely to know in our lifetime) has any idea where these signals are really coming from, or what their purpose is.

In 1997, Iridial Disks released a 4-CD collection called The Conet Project a found-sound project based on the work of numbers station enthusiast Akin Fernandez. The collection has been circulating around the underground since. As of recently, Iridial has released the collection as a series of free downloads from their site.

It's highly unlikely that anything broadcast along these newly acquired frequencies would be broadcast unencrypted. Without delving any further into speculation, all we can do is hold onto our rabbit ears and see for ourselves.

Reactable Improvisation Demo

Excellent improvisational video by the guys that created the Reactable Demo video previously posted by Chad. Actually, it looks like all these videos are on the Youtube profile of one of the guys who made the thing.

Enjoy.

Atari 2600 Rarity Guide

Provided by the excellent source of everything Atari (vintage and homebrew), AtariAge, here is an excellent rarity guide for collectors. It's a great source to roughly estimate how much you might have to pay to replace your childhood collection (HINT: usually not very much)

Or for someone such as myself to find that of my personal collection of about 140 games, only one rates even a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 for rarity. Meh.

5 Most Brutal Deaths In The "Funny" Pages

Considering the impending death of Opus (previously known from "Bloom County" and "Outland"), I've deceided to chronicle the 5 most gruesome deaths in syndicated comic strip history.

Even in the "safe" confines of the "funny" pages, death is no stranger. Usually such tragedies are meant to humanize the series, and are usually played out with well-though out empathy (who didn't cry over the dead bird or the baby raccoon in Calvin and Hobbes?).

I'm not documenting any of those.

I found the five most cruel, senseless, or downright bizarre deaths in the history of comic strips. Here we go:

5. ABOUT 3% OF DICK TRACY'S VILLAINS.

Chester Gould (Dick Tracy's creator) had little qualms about killing off bad guys. Legend states he actually maintained a miniature cemetary in his back yard, erecting a gravestone for every Dick Tracy villain that ever met his fate (and later adding gravestones for real life villains like Adolf Hitler and Mussolini). Within this top five, I want to submit the top 5 most brutal deaths in the Dick Tracy strip-

5) Queenie - Plunging into a steamboat's smokestack.
4) Gargles - Completely dismembered by falling panes of glass.
3) Jerome Trohs - Scalded to death in an outdoor shower by his mom.
4) Laffy - Bled to death by wounds suffered from a broken ether bottle, but he was laughing so hard he couldn't seek help.
1) Heels Beels - Hid in a prop soda bottle to evade capture. The soda bottle was lifted to a billboard sign 200 feet above the ground. With noone to hear his cries for help, he died of exposure and thirst.

4) ALDO KELRAST (FROM THE MARY WORTH COMIC STRIP)

This mustachioed, Chef Boyardee-looking individual pestered Mary Worth with his devotion, until after an intevention by Mary's friends (apparently so sick of her meddling in their lives, they wanted to meddle in hers), poor lonely Aldo got wasted and drove his car off a cliff. While at his funeral, Mary was asked if she was thinking of Aldo. Knowing the story arc was indeed at a close, Mary replied that her thoughts were actually on the handsome young doctor she met.

Aldo got served at his own funeral!

3) JOHN DARLING

This beloved character spin-off of Tom Batuik's popular "Funky Winkerbean" comic strip met his end when Tom, as he was enduring licensing issues with syndication, took things into his own hands and drew in a gunman to blow the main character to pieces in front of thousands of funny pages readers.

2) GARFIELD

Yeah, even Garfield himself. Even if it was an exploration by Jim Davis, you couldn't possibly make a list like this without mentioning a week of probably what might just about the most jarring, disturbing series of strips to appear in the funnies, especially in the mind of the average comic strip reader, besides...

1) DOUG MARLETTE ACCIDENTALLY EULOGIZING HIMSELF.

Pulitzer Prize winning Doug Marlette was known for his syndicated comic strip "Kudzu", which ran for 26 years before the author's fatal car crash. A prominent gag in the strip was preacher Will B Dunn, whose strips had him eulogizing unnamed bereaved, while having a hard time actually saying anything good about them. As most professional comic strip artists turn in art nearly a month before it is published, the comic strip ran for nearly a month after his death, including a comic stip shortly after which portrayed Will B. Dunn presiding over the funeral of a man who had passed in a car wreck.

A Brief History Of Rogue & ONE HUNDRED POSTS!!!

Ever heard of a little game called LEGEND OF ZELDA? Ever heard of a game called GAUNTLET?

Ever played a video game in your life where in real-time (not turn-based time) you moved some little nebbish through a maze to retrieve some treasure at the bottom and brought it back up to the surface?

If you've ever done anything like that in your life, hang loose for a second. I'm devoting my 100th post to telling you about the first computer game ever devised with that premise.

We're talking about the computer game "Rogue", the first 3/4 view (or at least that's how later 8-bit versions were rendered) dungeon-crawler video game ever.

Rogue was developed in 1980 by Michael Toy, Glen Wichman, and Ken Arnold. It revolved heavily on a library of routines developed by Ken Arnold that allowed direct cursor positioning, a library he called "curses". I didn't even know about the previous two guys until just now, mainly because the Apple II version (the one I used to play of course) was made directly by Ken Arnold himself.

Despite it's simplicity, it had endless replay value because every aspect of the game was randomized. No matter how good you were at the game, there was always the chance that a roll of some invisible dice would throw you into a completely doomed situation. That concept has always appealed to me.

Gauntlet was the first arcade release that truly captured the feel of Rogue - wait, no I'm lying. Berzerk would probably be better suited for that role. Oh, and Venture... man that game sure was underrated.

My favorite true-to-the spirit "Rogue" based game also turns out to be one of the last, "Dragon Crystal" for Sega Master System/Game Gear (game footage above). Not only do the mazes change each time you play, but each time you start over, all the items in the game are unlabeled and are just designated by colors, and you have to figure out by trial and error what is helpful and what is harmful. If I was stuck on a desert island with just one game, it would probably be Dragon Crystal (I'd find some way to smuggle Clash At Demonhead out there too, tho.)

Well, on that note, ONE HUNDRED POSTS!!!

P.S. If this blog interested you at all check this out. These guys are working hard to make sure every classic version of Rogue remains compatible with current computer systems.

They're Gonna Kill Opus!!! =[

*sniffle*

I've LOVED the Bloom County comic strip series since I was 8 years old, and have been doodling him on book covers and homework assignments equally as long. It was literally a halfway point between the political commentary of Doonesbury (which I was a bit too young to understand, but was trying to with MAD Magazine) and the whimsy of Calvin and Hobbes.

Now it seems Berke Breathed, the creator, is ending his third installment starring the plucky penguin ("Bloom County", "Outland" and now "Opus") by literally killing him off.

“With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I’m suspending my comic strip to assist the nation. The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently and write funny stories for America’s kids. I call on John McCain to join me.”

Anyone familiar with my comic book series knows about my penchant for killing off characters and bringing them back with no explanation. It's a comic book staple.

But from what I'm reading, Berke seems pretty serious. I wouldn't put it past him to pull a John Darling on us. (Google it. I'll wait.)

In the interview he made for "Fresh Air" on NPR earlier today, Berke related that he was surprised by how sad he felt drawing the last strip.

It doesn't surprise me at all =[

Opus' last comic strip is November 2, 2008.

Zombie Versus Shark!

You know this is exactly what you were waiting to see all day, even if you didn't know it yet.

What can I say? I aim to please!

Admin Note: This clip is from the Lucio Fulci movie Zombi 2.

Updated Admin Note (05/2010): An imitation/overdub travesty of this viral vid is in the new Windows 7 commercial.

Masonic History Was Revealed To Me In A Video Game!

It's 1993, and I'm a reasonably normal, if moody, Southern Baptist high school sophmore. I can't remember and can't currently imagine how I wound up playing "Exile" (XZR 2) in Japan on the Sega Genesis. I mean, the basic premise is that you are playing a Muslim during the Crusades! Weren't they supposed to be the "bad guys"?

The game turned out to be an incredibly awesome and innovative side-scrolling RPG-adventure game (my favorite genre of games). It was even cooler when I managed to chase down the Turbografx CD version of the game, with added scenes and less censorship (The main charachter has a cigarette dangling off his lip the whole game! ROXORZ!)

Then I start to learn a little history, and things get weird. Turns out everyone in the game is based on REAL PEOPLE. Roughly.

You play Sadler, who is not only a Muslim mercenary, but an actual Hashishim. You know, the legendary renegade Islamic cult, followers of the Aga Khan sect founded by Hassan I Sabbah, that not only do we get the word "assassin" from, but also where we get the ridiculously innacurate idea that all Muslims believe that dying for Islam will give them a metric ton of virgins to hump.

The fact that Sadler rejected all of that (to the point of killing his leader/father in the previous game, never released in the US or on a system that has existed in 20 years) to become a cynical atheist with a penchant for hallucinogenic drugs (the latter being erased from the American releases as well) makes him, as far as I'm concerned, the coolest video game charachter EVAR.



During the game, you encounter the Templar Knights (as well as their leader Hugh de Payens, another major character), the ghost of Noah, Cathar Monks, Middle Eastern Mystery Cults, renegade Buddhist monk Nichiren... all while chasing this shape-changing MacGuffin called the "Holimax"...

then you are flung back in time to confront Mediterranean Mystery Cults, make allies with Pythagoras himself, and solve the murder of Hiram Abis - leading up to a final showdown in the Garden Of Eden Itself.

In short, twenty tons of historical awesome.

All names in the U.S. release are butchered and distorted, which somehow doesn't surprise me. I still find it hard to believe this game was ever released in the first place.

Strangely enough, though, shortly after this game was released in the US, a sequel emerged. One that inexplicably resurrected popular characters from the previous game, had legendarily bad play control, and dumped all the religious, political, and spiritual themes of it's predecessor.

Sometimes I think that the Illuminati infiltrated the company that released it and indulged themselves in making that sequel that totally took a crap on the previous games. It's the only logical conclusion.