My interest in “cute guys” is usually piqued in one of the following ways:
Scenario 1:
*Sees Wikipedia article and black and white photo about some inventor/scientist from the 19th century. Said inventor/scientist is usually wearing a three piece suit and top hat.*
Pike: Guhhh *adds to “must date when my time machine is invented” list*
Scenario 2:
Any hot guy in a waistcoat.
Pike: @_@
Scenario 3:
At work.
Pike: “OMG, I’m so tired of people coming and asking me stupid questions about the crickets. NO IT’S NOT ICE, IT’S A GEL WATER. GET IT RIGHT.”
Random Cute Guy With Australian Accent: “Hi, I’m a random cute guy with an Australian accent. I’m going to ask stupid questions about the crickets now.”
Pike: “Okay ^___^”
Scenario 4:
Pike: “Hmm, that guy is okay I guess. I mean, he’s kinda… OMG IS HE WEARING AN OMEGA SEAMASTER? I’M PRETTY SURE HE’S WEARING AN OMEGA SEAMASTER. HOLYSHIZ. COME OVER HERE SO I CAN DROOL ON YOUR WRIST AND WE CAN DISCUSS HOROLOGY LONG INTO THE NIGHT. … … … I mean uh, cute butt.”
We’re getting to that point where most of the games I have yet to cover fall somewhere on my “Top Favorites” list. I haven’t talked about most of them since I fear I won’t be able to do them justice. But since I can’t put them off forever, have one of my faves.
See, of all the traditional platforming Mario games (aka, not Kart/RPG/etc.) … this has always been my favorite:
Maybe it’s the solid gameplay. Or the catchy music. Or the quirky design. Or all of the above. All I know is that sometimes, when I have 20 or 30 minutes to kill and nothing else to do, I can pull out SMB3 and play through the first world for the millionth time and enjoy every freaking second of it.
Come on, guys. You KNOW this music makes you happy.
There were a ton of secrets in this game– getting “behind” the trees and bushes for one, or those warp whistles that would take you to far off levels. I knew and played around with all the secrets, but one day I sat down, determined to play through the whole thing from start to finish without the whistle.
…I got to about halfway through world seven and couldn’t get any farther. Curse you freaking pipe maze!
Still, seven of eight isn’t bad, and eight is pretty near impossible anyway from what I’ve played by using the whistles, so it’s not like I ever would’ve beaten it anyway.
Man. Thinking about that Pipe World still makes me shudder a bit.
Really, though, have you ever just sat down and thought about the Mushroom Kingdom? It’s filled with flying turtles, pipes with plants that shoot fire at you, airships, raccoon suits that make you fly, and shoes that you can bounce around in.
…
I want to live there.
I hope it’s the SMB 3 version.
P.S. – WHO REMEMBERS THE MCDONALDS HAPPY MEAL TOYS??
Because I seriously had all of them. The Goomba didn’t work very well, though.
Recently, the esteemed Bell wrote about things she sees on the street that make her rageface. Well, I have a confession:
I’m an angry driver too.
No, I’m not gonna use the horn or even the finger, but my tendency to sputter assorted epithets into the aether while driving is Very High. Here, then, in no particular order, are a list of triggers for me:
Tailgating. I really can’t think of anything more passive-aggressive. Yes, I see what you are trying to tell me, Mr. Two Inches Away From My Rear Bumper. You know what, I’m probably going over the speed limit, and it won’t kill you if you add an extra ten seconds to your travel time. Deal with it. Thanks.
(P.S. I am always super tempted to slam on my brakes here and use “I was trying to avoid hitting a squirrel” as my defense. Truth.)
People Who Won’t Slow Down Even Though the Traffic Light Has Been Yellow For Like 15 Seconds Already. I have no problem with speeding through the yellow light if it just turned yellow and you’re well on your way into the intersection. But if it’s going to have been red for quite some time by the time you get there… really? Really?
Related:
People Who Run Through Red Lights: This is particularly bad in this town, in fact I once heard a local joke go something like this: “What does a red light in Bozeman mean? … … … only three more cars to go! *ba dum psh*”
It’s so true, too.
Seriously, people. Slow down.
That said:
Lights That Are Red For No Reason: You know when there’s nobody at the intersection but the light turns red anyway? What’s up with that?
People Who Cut You Off And/Or Go at the Four-Way When It’s Not Their Turn. Self-explanatory.
Cop Hot Spots: You know what I’m talking about, right? There’s always that one intersection or that one road where cops just love to find some obscure spot to hide out in. Like good lab rats getting shocked, the entire world quickly figures out where these hot spots are and adjusts their behavior accordingly, so pretty soon you’ve got random stretches of road where everyone is going like 5-10mph under the speed limit. You know, just to be sure.
This:
People Who Drive the Heck Out of Their Cars. My car and I have a special relationship. I take good care of him… er, it (of course my car isn’t secretly a Transformer or anything… I mean, that would just be silly *shifty eyes* *cough*) and it takes care of me. I accelerate at a nice, steady pace and I don’t overdo it.
It really drives me up the wall when people try to push their car for more than it can handle. You can tell because it makes a horrible noise, and because I have mental issues and anthropomorphize everything I always picture the poor car just straining with its eyes shut, about to give out.
Like I said. Treat your car well and it will treat you well in return.
*pats her car, which is most certainly not secretly a Transformer or anything. Nope. Not at all.*
Remember back in the day when the original Pokémon was the biggest deal in the world? You know what the first non-Game-Boy Pokémon game was? That’s right. Pokémon Freaking Snap.
Everybody was stoked over this game. I mean really, this was a huge deal for us oldschool Poké-freaks who lived in a bizarre world filled with rumors of Mew being under the truck by the S.S. Anne or the Celadon Dept. store thirsty girl giving you a “Pikablu” if you gave her enough drinks. Pokémon Snap was a dream fulfilled. Finally we got to see Pokémon in those glorious, blocky, N64 polygons.
The premise of the game is pretty simple: Go around and take pictures of Pokémon. You get points based on the pictures you take. Then you can sort the pictures into albums and stuff. I know it sounds like some sort of Flash or Facebook game gone wrong or something, but somehow the game managed to be fiendishly addicting.
Also, hitting Mew in the head with an apple over and over again in the last level was hilarious. Especially because it would go “Me-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-eew” as you did so.
…actually, though, there is one reason in particular why this is today’s Classic Video Game Monday. That reason is the Poké Flute song that can be heard here from about 0:16 to 0:31:
I have hummed and whistled this tune all the freaking time ever since this game came out eleven years ago.
I am juuuuust about to leave on a Big Road Trip which will have me out-of-state for a while. As such, don’t expect any updates on either blog until next Monday at the earliest.
In the meantime, have a semi-related video that I made sometime last year:
Lode Runner is one of those games that should probably be more well known than it is. Not to say the game isn’t already pretty well-known, but, you know, in my opinion there should be a chicken in every pot and a Lode Runner in every household.
This oldschool favorite (I played it on the Commodore 64) worked as follows: You, as an adventurous young stick figure, climb up ladders and monkey-bar your way across polls to collect little cubes on the ground, while trying to avoid a bunch of other stick figures who for some reason are out to get you. Also, I guess they’re robots are something.
Fortunately for you, you have a shovel, and you can dig holes into the ground behind you, which your enemies will fall into. This is relatively humane when you do it from higher platforms, but if you do it while on ground level they’ll wind up buried alive.
…fortunately for them, they respawn. Hmm. I suddenly wonder about the ethics of killing someone in a world where you respawn a minute later. There should be a video game philosophy class somewhere.
Also, this song is now stuck in your head.
Anyways, this whole deceptively simple premise is the fuel behind a remarkably addictive puzzle game with probably about a hundred levels, plus a level editor, which was a pretty radical idea at the time. I remember my dad loved this game and got really far. To level 64 or something, which was unheard of for Baby Pike, who plinked around at level nine.
This game spawned a sequel that I also played, called Lode Runner’s Rescue, which had exactly one thing in common with the original game and that one thing was the name “Lode Runner” in the title. Still, for having nothing whatsoever to do with the original, that game was also pretty dang fun. Too bad I can’t find anything about it on Google, so you’ll just have to trust me on this.
Lode Runner is still around– I’ve seen clones of it in the Ubuntu repositories and remakes pop up on various platforms every so often. (Heehee, platforms. I see what I did there.)
But the best praise for it? Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov called it his favorite puzzle game. You can’t get much more legit than that.
So through a very long and convoluted series of events which I shall not recount here, it appears that I am moving again. This time I’m not just moving across town, though. I’m actually returning to my birthplace and moving to:
Specifically the whole island part in the middle of Puget Sound there.
What’s really funny is that I was actually born there so it’s a homecoming more than anything, but I moved away when I was like, 1, so I don’t remember anything. I do remember snatches of the Seattle area, where I lived for a few years after, but even those memories are sketchy. So instead my paranoid brain last night came up with a list of things that scare me about this impending move:
1.) Slugs. They don’t have those here in Podunk Montana. I was looking forward to never seeing one again, but…
2.) Trees. According to my allergist I am allergic to “All trees, all molds, all grasses, and all weeds”. Actually as I type this I have a kleenex stuck up my nose. My solution is clearly to move to the Evergreen State, apparently.
3.) Being at sea level, which freaks me out for some reason, possibly because I’m used to being a mile high and surrounded my mountains. Did I mention that deep water terrifies me?
4.) Traffic/highways etc. I love driving. I do not love billions of cars. Tailgaters scare the daylights out of me. “Rush Hour” here in Montana means I’ll be waiting an extra twenty seconds at the stop light and I might be a few minutes late. I don’t wanna think about how it will be when I’m like an hour from Seattle, especially since commutes and such seem to be likely.
5.) Nobody knowing how to drive in the snow, and me not knowing how to drive in anything BUT snow. Actually I have no idea if that’s true or not, it’s just my guess. When I took Driver’s Ed, there were raging snowstorms going on, the roads were a solid sheet of ice, and I was constantly swerving to avoid hitting deer. I am the master at that sort of thing, but unfortunately they don’t teach us rednecks how to survive in the city. I still don’t know how to parallel park.
But! I am making myself think of the positives, such as:
– More job opportunities
– SteamCon
– More school opportunities
– SteamCon
– Being closer to a ton of friends/family
– SteamCon
– Actually being close to a real city with real stuff
– SteamCon
…who me, one-track mind? *innocent*
Anyways this whole thing is apparently happening next month or something, so this will be exciting.
I don’t know if I have ever mentioned this anywhere but I have this massive infatuation with most types of modern transportation. And I’m not even sure why.
FLYING! I love flying. Airplanes are like the greatest thing. I’m that person who insists on the window seat, uses up every exposure on her camera within ten minutes of takeoff, and generally geeks out over the entire process. Last time I flew it was probably comical; twentysomething me bouncing around in the seat, in stark contrast to the six year old kid next to me who spent the entire flight quietly reading a novel. I dunno, maybe it’d be different if I had to fly everywhere as part of business trips all the time and I was jaded, but I don’t actually fly very often so I get to geek out over it, thank you very much.
CARS. I love cars. And not so much in the whole sup dawg, pimp-my-ride kind of way either. No, my love of cars is more abstract. I love cars because I love driving and I love driving because unless I win the lottery, it’s the closest I’ll ever get to flying my own plane.
AC on, music cranked to 11, cruisin’ down the freeway. One With My Machine. I don’t care, I’m still free, you can’t take my road from me. That’s what I’m talking about.
Now this little love affair of mine tends to put me at odds with the increasingly common zeitgeist that I should be carpooling or biking or something. Putting aside the fact that I hate bikes for various reasons (Hyperbole and a Half is pretty spot on here), or that carpooling is out because I get nervous when other people are in My Car (perhaps because then I can’t get away with squeakily belting out Poker Face)… I understand the sentiment behind said zeitgeist. But it’s hard for me to get into it when I am so very in love with my 2002 Toyota Corolla which allows me to be blissfully free for ten minutes a day.
See, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m fine with tree-hugging, so long as I can do it in a specially constructed tree-hugging robot suit with all the extra bells and whistles and lasers and jetpacks.
Basically my idea of the future is nature and fuzzy animals living in harmony with robot suits and lots and lots of mechanical bunnies.
I like my idea of the future.
Also, lemme know if you find any tree-hugging robot suits laying around that are in need of a good home.
One of Nintendo’s Really Good Decisions was the decision to launch the Super Smash Brothers franchise.
A fighter that doesn’t take itself seriously… pretty much at all, while still providing silly amounts of replay value and being a game that pretty much anyone can pick up and play. Yes, folks, this is a win.
I think what initially won me over was the hammer. See, I grew up playing the original Donkey Kong. The original Donkey Kong includes a hammer, which kills everything, as it plays this little ditty. I had aaaaaaaalmost forgotten about this hammer, and it itself had aaaaaaaalmost faded into obscurity, when Super Smash Bros. came out. And they had a hammer. I sort of died little bit from the sheer levels of Awesome and Win.
You know what other item was great?
The freakin’ BASEBALL BAT.
Because if you time it juuust right, it’s a one-hit KO. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing that sparkle on your bat as time seems to slow down riiiight before it happens…
…
And that noise. CRACK.
It’s the most satisfying noise in the world.
I can’t find any good vids on YouTube but YOU KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT.
So, anyway. Pikachu was my favorite character, because come on, it’s freaking Pikachu. We all know what happens when Pikachu gets serious:
I got pretty good with him. I mean, I was never one of those super-die-hard SSB players, but I could hold my own. One time for a school project I went to some other student’s house and we played SSB for a little while. The other kids (well, we were college age, but you know) tried to talk me into playing and at first I refused, cause it had been a while and I was rusty, but finally I relented and grabbed a controller and bust out Pikachu. I won. It was glorious.
Actual photo of Pike playing Smash Bros. Note the goggles.
Ahh, good times.
Really though, classic game right here. I never really got into the successors, though that’s mostly due to lack of time more than anything. (Oh, and not owning a Wii kind of complicates things.) But yeah. One of the better things Nintendo has ever done? Undoubtedly.
When you work in a pet store you soon learn which questions you will be asked more often than others. Aside from the standard fare like “Do the GloFish really glow in the dark” (No), “Can I feed rabbit food to my guinea pig” (No), and “Can I put a goldfish in a bowl/why not/my hairdresser’s sister’s best friend did it for years/pleeeeeeeeease” (…), I am also very frequently asked how I can stand to be around crickets every day. People usually ask this when I’m elbow deep in the cricket bin and I have said insects crawling up my arms.
Now most normal people would probably wonder why I’m able to do this, but seeing as I do this several times a day, several hours a week, I’m very used to it by now and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. As such, the aforementioned question still sort of catches me off guard. I scoop crickets, I count crickets, I feed and water crickets, and I catch them with my bare hands all the time. It’s just a cricket, after all. They’re actually kind of cute.
I have a bizarre relationship with bugs. Some of them I don’t mind. Some of them creep me out but they don’t bother me so long as they keep a safe distance from me– spiders fall into this category. I’m not terrified by them but I’d rather they just stay somewhere where I cannot see them.
But there are two insects that I 100% cannot stand no matter what.
Exhibit A: Moths
…
…
…you know what, I went to Google Image search to find a picture to put here and I closed the tab in about two seconds because CREEPY FLAPPY FUZZY AUGH
The really weird thing is that when people find out how terrified I am of moths, they usually proceed to ask if I hate Mothra/the moths in WoW/Venomoth from Pokemon/etc. The answer is… not really. They actually sort of gain this weird sort of bumbling cuteness when you blow them up to a big enough size. But the little guys horrify me beyond belief. I think it’s the whole random twitchy movements and those ugly flappy wings AAAHHH
And yes, butterflies creep me out a little too.
But yeah. Moving on. *composes self*
Exhibit B: Daddy Long Legs
Yeah, screw you Google Image Search. I’m not even gonna try this one.
Long…
Creepy…
Twitchy…
They live in the receiving room at work…
*shudder*
All other insects, I can live with. Spiders I can handle so long as they’re far away. Superworms are gross but not really scary. Giant evil grasshoppers… well so long as they’re in the yard and not in the house and I don’t have to go outside, then okay.
…but I don’t do moths or Daddy Long Legs. Ever.
…OMG I just saw a picture of like 50 Daddy Long Legs all in one place. I HATE YOU GOOGLE OMG WHY DID I WRITE THIS POST *runs away*
