Delish.com has gone too far

Real, actual screenshots from the renegade recipe website.

The time I was Hamlet

In the spring of 1996 I was getting ready to graduate from high school. I had a light class load, with the only non-elective on my schedule being AP English with Mr. White. Despite the time I could have theoretically devoted to that class, however, by mid-way through the school year I had convinced Mr. White that I was a slacker.

The problem was that my writing, which was strong, only counted for about half my grade, and was at odds with my tendency to perform poorly on tests (because the tests were consistently on the subject of literature I didn't find enjoyable). That, combined with my sense of humor (which always seemed to be causing the teacher inconvenience rather than amusement), created a haze of mistrust between Mr. White and me, at least in my perception. But in the second half of the academic year, an opportunity to convince Mr. White that I actually wanted to pass his class presented itself.

The final work in our lengthy Shakespeare unit was The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Mr. White gave us an assignment. Near as I can remember, the requirements were:

1. It had to be a presentation of some kind (he might have actually told us we had to make a video project...I don't know if teachers were allowed to assign things like that technically, but at any rate, every project submitted in my class was a video)
2. It had to be at least ten minutes in length
3. It had to be related in some way to Hamlet

Students formed groups to tackle the project. My group teamed me up with my close friend Ben, and Brandi and Emily, who were both dating other friends of mine. 

I knew that being grouped with Ben would be an advantage for our project. He was the one among us who showed filmmaker tendencies. He understood cinematography, was versed in film as a culture and had already developed a filmmaking style visibly influenced by Lloyd Kaufman (appropriately, Ben would go on to intern at Troma after university). So we set out to make our own abridged, modern-setting version of Hamlet with Ben writing the screenplay, directing the action and doing most of the camerawork.

The cast fell into place quickly: I was Hamlet (knowing full well that I was a poor actor but ready to "ham" it up all the same, if you'll pardon the expression). Brandi was Ophelia and showed a zany side I had never seen while portraying her descent into madness. And Emily played straight-man to the rest of us clowns in her depiction of Gertrude. We knew that Ben needed to appear on screen in order to get credit for the project, so he played both R (Rosencrantz) and G (Guildenstern), who never appeared on screen simultaneously. But that left us with a bunch of roles we couldn't cover with just our team of four, so we enlisted help, not just from outside our group, but from outside our own graduating class. Alumni cameos, if you like.

We asked our mutual friends Kennan, Jeff, another Ben (we'll call him Ben R.) and Matt, all of whom had already finished high school but would be recognized by anyone who saw our movie, to complete the cast. Kennan played the father-son duo of Polonius and Laertes (again, they never appeared on screen together), Jeff filled in as the gravedigger, Ben R. was Horatio. And Matt, the best actor among us, stole the show as Claudius as well as the ghost. Matt's performance easily garnered the biggest laughs from anyone who saw our movie. He was brilliant.

To adapt the story for a modern setting, we did away with the "kingdom" scenario and reimagined Kronborg Castle as a pizza business, which Hamlet, an ambitious heir who had been experimenting with a "new" triangular cutting technique (as opposed to grid-wise square cutting) was to inherit until his treacherous uncle Claudius swooped in. We would replace the daggers and swords with handguns and pizza cutters, and the title character's Elizabethan frilled shirts with a moody black-sportcoat-over-black-turtleneck combo that made me look like a goth college professor. Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes would come out later, in the fall of the same year. But unlike Romeo + Juliet, our production mixed famous lines from the original with modern parlance, often making for strange interactions.

If this all sounds awfully involved, it was. It took several days to shoot. It's difficult for teenagers to take something seriously, and this was made evident by the countless takes that had to be done to get a scene on camera without a catastrophic character break or uncontrolled laughter. In particular, I remember what felt like dozens of takes of the scene where Laertes discovers Ophelia drowned in about four inches of water in a bathtub. What should have been serious was made farcical by Kennan's inability to say the line, "Oh no, this is madness! Revenge is paramount!" without laughing.

("Revenge is paramount" was a recurring line in the movie, spoken by multiple characters. I always imagined trailers and posters for our movie with the tagline, "This summer, revenge is paramount.")

The project needed to be ten minutes or more in length, but Mr. White hadn't given us a limit, so we ended up making a 35-minute rendition of the story. And I saw an opportunity to "redeem" myself in the eyes of Mr. White by going the extra mile and writing an original musical score for the movie we made.

I had been making music (mostly laughably bad dance tracks) on the household Macintosh LC II for several years leading up to this, but had never attempted music for video before. For inspiration I drew from Dan Forden's music for the Mortal Kombat series, Metroid, Super Metroid and Drew Neumann's music for the Æon Flux animated series. The resulting themes were appropriately melodramatic for Hamlet, but far too serious-sounding in contrast to the absurdity happening on the screen: actors' accents fluctuating at random, Polonius's cotton-ball mustache falling off, R and G finishing each other's sentences.

At the time, we faced a number of technological barriers to this endeavor. For the shooting itself, we were limited to using Ben's handheld Video8 recorder and its built-in microphone. For the music, all I had was my father's Performer sequencing software and a Roland Sound Canvas SC-55. And worst of all was the "post-production" process I used to get the music and a few sound effects onto the final copy:

After receiving all the scenes on VHS from Ben, I had to dub the tape with a line-in mic connected so that the copy would have the original audio, plus the mic audio on it. I pointed the mic at the speakers of a boombox playing the music cues and a couple of sound effects (which I had to sync to the action in real time, starting over from the beginning of the movie when I made a mistake). By the time the finished product came out, it had lost quality from being copied twice (once from Video8 to VHS, and again from one VHS to another for the sound). The final dub also had opening and ending titles that I made by pointing a camcorder on a tripod at a computer monitor.

But ultimately, we succeeded. Mr. White dedicated most of a class period to showing our 35-minute video, which received applause at the end. As class ended and the end title music faded, the music for the morning announcements started on the school's loudspeakers – again, it was the end title theme from Hamlet (because I, who was in charge of the audio for the morning announcements that year, had used the Hamlet music during recording the previous afternoon). It was a media blitz event! And we all got A's.

Mr. White would go on to show our video, as an example of a job a little too well done, for years after my friends and I graduated. In fact, my younger brother, who attended Mr. White's class thirteen years later, told me that even his class watched our Hamlet video. Ben, Brandi, Emily and I were legends at our high school.

This week I converted most of the music from the movie from audio cassette to digital form and put it up on my music YouTube channel. Three short tracks, each one less than a minute long, are missing. I also don't have a good recording of the shorter version of the end titles music that was used in the movie, but I've included a longer version here. The music's not great, but it takes me back to the time when I wrote it and reminds me of what an effort the whole project was. Check the video description for details about what happens in each scene.

Space Pirate Collection IV came out yesterday

My fourth game and movie tribute album is now available at https://jessejacethomas.bandcamp.com/ The tracklist: Liu Kang Get Down (Mortal Kombat vs The Immortals Jurassic Muzak (Jurassic Park I and II SNES) The Greenest Path (Hollow Knight) Puzzle in the Pit (Mortal Kombat / Mortal Kombat Deception) Fight On (Killer Instinct) Arthur Breaks the Ice (Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts) Stoic Beat (The Shawshank Redemption) Blackout Gibraltar (Overwatch / Call of Duty: Black Ops 4) Shimmer in the Shrine (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) What is it to Live (Ghost in the Shell)

Only slightly distorted pictures of Donald Trump (part 1)

It's my new thing. Get ready to love the internet all over again.

Beating Metroid's first quest in under an hour

Last week I made up my mind to face a demon of my childhood — the Metroid (1986) on the NES. Intimidating, not because I couldn’t finish it, but because of something I thought I’d never be able to do: finish the first playthrough in under an hour to get the best ending.

When I played Metroid as a child, I went in basically blind. I didn’t have maps or strategy guides, so I went about it in a trial-and-error kind of way. I think I tried to make my own map at some point, but that in and of itself was a huge project; before I had finished mapping the game, I think I had moved on to some other difficult game like Bionic Commando and couldn’t be bothered to actually put my map to good use.

I did eventually finish the game in my childhood, but I did so in probably the least efficient manner possible. Metroid shows one of five different ending images of the main character depending on how long it takes the player to finish the game. The grand prize among these is awarded when the game is beat within 60 minutes, and shows a scientifically unlikely image of Samus standing on the barren surface of a featureless planetoid in a bikini and a pair of boots, happily waving at the player (presumably right before she asphyxiates and dies).

Silver Star < Medal of Honor < THIS

So Adult Me, now nearly 40 years old, went about re-creating the plan to achieve this ending. Normally I prefer visuals, i.e. maps, but Metroid’s world is so convoluted and repetitious, just looking at it in map form raises my blood pressure. In addition, having a map doesn’t really ensure the player will move through the game in the most time-efficient way possible. The non-linear nature of the game requires backtracking and allows flexibility, so even if you know where everything is, you still have to decide the order in which you do the tasks the game requires. So I decided to express my route through the game in the form of written steps.

A post shared by Jesse Thomas (@jessejacethomas) on Jul 31, 2018 at 6:40pm PDT

My favored route changed a few times in the course of this preparation, always in favor of efficiency. For example, don’t ask me why, but at first I had it in my mind that I needed to pick up the long beam before the bombs. No particular reason, other than that was how I’d always done it back in the day. But at some point I realized there’d be less backtracking if I got the bombs first. This change shaved a couple of minutes off my clear time, as did several other changes like it along the way.

As is the case with all of my NES gameplay videos, I made my attempt using an emulator. Normally emulators offer advantages, the greatest being save states. I don’t like using save states because it diminishes from the desperation and drama that were integral to the gaming experience of the 8-bit era. So, in this case, I only saved my game state at the points where the password screen came up (an equivalent action to writing down and using the password).

This, combined with my concern about how long it would take to grind to full health after getting a game over, meant I would commit to starting over from the beginning if I died on the Kraid boss fight, which I did several times, in attempts not shown in this video. Without the wave beam (which is technically an optional item) or the varia suit, Kraid is easily the hardest fight in the game. But saving Kraid until after visiting Norfair to get the varia suit costs valuable time, so I went into that fight less ready than I would have been had I not been aiming for the best ending. Even on the attempt recorded here, I came within one hit of dying before I beat him.

Happily, after beating Kraid the whole game gets easier. In a way, Kraid is the Harvey Weinstein of Metroid. His defeat kicks off a veritable “me too” movement allowing Samus to prosecute all her abusers to the full extent of the law. 

See? Literally the same. 

Yes, I did use the quick death input (the “up and A” trick) to jump to the password screen and save time while backtracking. In the end, I probably didn’t need to; my clear time (from selecting “START” to activating the final elevator, minus the time the game was paused) was about 48 minutes 40 seconds. I also abstained from using game-breaking glitches (like the “wall climb,” AKA the “door jump”) or sequence-breaking exploits (like crossing into Tourian without activating the bridge).

By the way, for all the advantages of using an emulator, there is one serious disadvantage. When Samus takes damage, she flickers. Because she flickers at a rate just slightly faster than the refresh rate of a 60 Hz monitor, she sometimes disappears completely after taking damage. When she takes a hit and falls into lava, this results in real frustration. Trying to guide an invisible Samus out of lava is like trying to flip an invisible 200-pound pancake while someone tickles you.

In the attempt that ended up in this video, there is a precarious period in the Norfair section of the game in which my health literally dropped to one, and stayed under 20 points for some time. (Apologies for the several minutes of low health warning alarm that resulted from this. That’s one of the most stress-inducing sounds in the history of video games.) But I wasn’t too worried about dying because, having recently gotten a password, I could have resumed play from right after having beaten Kraid and suffered no real setback. Luckily I enjoyed special treatment from the little "lava dragon" enemies, who unanimously agreed not to spit fireballs at me for some reason. Then I made it to the screw attack item, a major turning point for Samus’s offensive power, and reached the Miniboss Hideout II energy tank without dying. Finally, in Tourian, I had good luck in the form of one crucial missile drop from killing a metroid, which allowed me to survive the final room without running out of missiles.

Finally achieving Metroid's best ending made me want to revisit other tough games from my childhood. Bionic Commando, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Battletoads...games I cleared as a younger man, but have to muster up some patience to clear now. When I do, you can be sure I'll make videos.

The time Whilce Portacio drew Wolverine with two left feet

It totally happened. I had this in poster form on my bedroom wall as a teenager. After having the poster for a couple years, I noticed there was an issue with Logan's feet.

At least Psylocke looks good.

Hanamaki Matsuri 2017

Four years ago I wrote about the Hanamaki Matsuri, a three-day festival in my wife's hometown in Iwate Prefecture. Since then, a few of the food offerings have changed, but not much else. Unless you count the fact that, in 2015, the event actually made it into the Guinness Book of World Records with the most mikoshi on display at a single location (114).

This year there were only 104 mikoshi, but it's still the same good time it always was.

That last picture is from the shishiodori (deer dance), in which a hundred men and women in scary, predatory deer costumes jump around while playing noisy drums. It's probably the single coolest thing about Iwate Prefecture.

Never be bored again

Though it may seem like the very concept of life in Japan ought to be an endless source of entertainment and fascination in and of itself, expats do occasionally become bored. Want to know what we do when we get bored?

We directly translate the kanji that make up the names of places around the Tokyo metropolitan area into English, then assign them a North American state or province where they'd seem "at home." For example:

Akabane　→　赤羽 (red+feather)　→　Red Feather, Wyoming

Akabane is a major station in Kita Ward, Tokyo. Its name is made of two kanji characters: 赤 (aka, meaning "red") and 羽 (hane, meaning "feather"). The -hane makes a euphonic change to -bane, making the full name easier to pronounce. And "Red Feather" sounds like the name of a town one might find in Wyoming.

Now that you've got the basic principle, let's do some more!

Ueno　→　上野 (up field)　→　Upfield, New York

Nippori　→　日暮里 (day living village)　→　Livingston, Vermont

Uguisudani　→　鶯谷 (nightingale valley)　→　Warbler Valley, Virginia

Shinbashi　→　新橋 (new bridge)　→　Newbridge, Connecticut

Saginuma　→　鷺沼 (heron marsh)　→　Heron Marsh, Alberta, Canada

Jiyugaoka　→　自由が丘 (freedom hill)　→　Liberty Hill, Texas

Roppongi　→　六本木 (six pine trees)　→　Six Pines, Minnesota

Ochanomizu　→　御茶ノ水 (tea water)　→　Teawater, Massachusetts

Occasionally, English isn't the best target language for this game. "Yokohama," for example, means "beach to the side," but good luck finding a town with a name like that in the US. The Spanish equivalent, however, seems much more believable:

Yokohama　→　横浜 (side beach)　→　Playa al Lado, California

Akihabara　→　秋葉原 (autumn leaf meadow)　→　Prado Otoñal, New Mexico

Or maybe French is more your bag(-uette).

Aoyama　→　青山 (blue/green mountain)　→　Montbleu, Montana

Ikebukuro　→　池袋 (pond bag)　→　Sac du Lac, Wisconsin


See? It's fun.

Let's end GameStop

According to my records, I’ve visited the US about six times since I moved to Japan in 2003. No matter how many times I go back, I’m consistently stunned by the same thing every time: GameStop. Or rather, the fact that GameStop still exists.

GameStop really, really should have gone bankrupt by now. Capitalist Darwinism should have wiped its smug mug off the face of the Earth. I cannot begin to estimate the number of times I’ve seen a GameStop, thought to myself, “Hey, I wanna go in there,” and about five minutes later thought, “Why did I go in there?” I cannot recall a single visit to a GameStop store in my lifetime that did not result in disappointment, frustration or rage.

Why talk about this now? Q1 2017 has been a parade of negative publicity, from questionable policies to slipping share prices. This is in addition to what has been a years-long train of horror stories told by current and former employees and customers of the company that shed light on what is an increasingly dysfunctional organization. Bad press about GameStop is nothing new, and it never seems to go away.

From my perspective, the whole thing is amplified by a number of factors which, together, serve as ample evidence for the thesis statement, “GameStop is the worst ever and must be destroyed.”

1. In America, “pre-owned” means “in terrible condition.”

This isn't GameStop's fault, but it sure doesn't help their cause.

GameStop deals in pre-owned product, and in the US, this means they sell trash. Sorry for the awful generalization, but consumers in the US just do not take good care of their digital media. It’s like they’ve all got McDonald’s beef patties where their hands should be. I worked at Hollywood Video for a few years while I was a student and witnessed PlayStation 2 games being rented in brand-new condition, then being returned five days later looking like someone had used them to play Frisbee with the family dog. In what I estimate to be 30 percent of cases, a new DVD or disc-based game would be visibly damaged after one rental. It was as if our entire customer base consisted of three-year-old children who wore Freddy Krueger claws at all times. True story: A customer returned a copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 that had snapped clean in two, telling us that his child “threw it at the wall.”
To put my observation in context, in Japan, rental discs stay comparatively pristine for a long time (although I'm speaking only about Japanese rental DVDs, blue ray discs and music CDs; game rentals aren't a thing here.

For a GameStop customer, this prevailing culture of not giving a shit means that buying any pre-owned product from them is like Russian roulette – but with worse odds. And since I don’t get to try my purchases out until I get them back to Japan, returning them to the store isn’t an option. I guess I could ask the sales clerk to show me the disc before selling it to me, but that brings me to point number 2…

2. GameStop’s sales staff excel neither at customer service nor in their knowledge of games.

GameStop employees don't answer customer questions in the interest of guiding the customer to a purchase that will make the customer happy. Most of the time, they only answer questions in such a way as to show off their own esoteric knowledge and oh-so-valuable opinions about video games.

Customer: [Indicates a copy of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare for the Xbox One] Is this a good shooting game?Clerk: Well, it's fine, but if you really want a good shooting game, you should check out Timesplitters on the PlayStation 2.Customer: I haven't owned a PS2 in years.Clerk: Yeah, well, that's your loss.

Exactly who has benefited from this exchange? Nobody. The clerk has made public his superior knowledge of now-hard-to-find games that came out at the turn of the millennium, so good for him, I guess. He also, however, displayed zero knowledge on the game about which he was asked.

I was in a GameStop with my friend a few years ago and we came across the game Brütal Legend.

Friend: Have you played this? It's not bad.Me: No...is it the same genre as Darksiders? I wasn't so into that.Friend: Only a little, but it's more like...Clerk: [Standing at least five meters away] Darksiders is awesome and so is that game right there! You should absolutely buy it!

Serioiusly, what the hell? Nobody asked the clerk for his opinion, but he just couldn't contain himself. Either this "sales technique" has worked for him before, or he's got an irresistible compulsion to join every game-related conversation within earshot. And it's not like my friend and I were talking loudly. The GameStop guy would have had to eavesdrop on us pretty hard to hear what we were saying. Or maybe it would be easy for him to hear, because most GameStop stores don't have many obstructions on the store floor, which leads me to my third point:

3. GameStop stores waste unbelievable amounts of space

There's a big GameStop near my mother's house that has what I estimate to be about 1000 square feet of retail space. Guess what's in that store? Less than two and a half walls' worth of shelves. And that's all. In the middle, where a normal store manager would arrange point-of-purchase displays and island gondolas, this store had enough empty space for a pro wrestling ring. After looking at one wall's shelves, I felt like I needed to run to the opposite wall, climb up the shelves and do a flying elbow drop.

I visited this GameStop in 2013, saw how empty it was, and made a mental note that I shouldn't expect it to still be there come my next visit to the US. But upon visiting in 2015, the empty GameStop was still in business. And still empty.

GameStop is rarely the most affordable source of used games, but that point is underscored in this case; I can't help but feel like every product sold there has to have its price inflated slightly to compensate for the fact that the store's management don't know how to use space efficiently.

4. GameStop renders products impossible to resell

This is the absolute worst, and the reason I've resolved never to shop at GameStop ever again.

I tend to sell games that I've finished to used game shops. This keeps my collection from getting out of control and allows me to spend more money on other important things, like food for my daughter. (Quirky, I know. Feeding my child is sort of a hobby of mine.)

But good luck re-selling anything you purchased from a GameStop, because they apply price stickers indiscriminately. They'll put a price tag directly onto a game's case, defying you to peel it off. But don't peel it off, unless you like your game cases adorned with patches of sticky residue which rob them of their resale value, not to mention make them disgusting to handle and doom them to be perpetually caked with dust and garbage. On one infuriating occasion, I purchased a used copy of Marvel Ultimate Alliance that had a price tag applied not to the plastic case, but to the paper artwork inside the case. Obviously it would be impossible to peel the sticker off without ripping the artwork, which is why I still have the game despite no longer owning a PSP.

And when there's no case, they stick the price tag directly onto the game's instruction manual, or even directly onto the game media. In another PSP example, I bought a used copy of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories from the GameStop in Appleton, WI's Fox River Mall. Because there was no case, they had put the price tag directly onto the UMD, and then put that into a plastic baggie (which raises the question, why didn't they stick the price tag onto the baggie instead of onto the UMD?). With the price sticker on it, the UMD didn't fit properly into my PSP, so I peeled it off. Presto, one sticky, lint-magnet copy of GTA:LCS.

Maybe the store is called GameStop because it's the final stop for physical software resale, before the games are finally too messed up to change hands any more.

Again, I must contrast this with my experience in Japan, where second-hand games look like new, and can continue to look like new for as long as their owners take care of them. In this regard, visiting the US is like taking a time machine back to the barbarism of medieval times...a forgotten age when men beheaded each other for the slightest scorn, women were bought and sold like so much cattle and Gamecube discs didn't work because they were plastered with dirty glue and dead insects.

Put all this in the context of any other kind of retailer. You wouldn't buy from a furniture store whose cashiers second-guess your home decor choices because their manager told them to "push the leather sofas." You wouldn't buy from a record store whose discs are scratched and unplayable. You wouldn't buy from a bakery whose bagels are covered with stickers.

We all need to quit shopping at GameStop.

Space Pirate Collection II dropped last night

Space Pirate Collection II, my second album of covers and remixes, is available for download from my Bandcamp.com page. This time it's all game music tributes, from old (Mega Man II and Blaster Master) to new (Minecraft and Overwatch).

It took me such a long time to finish this album. I hope you all find it to your liking.

My brain wrote a children's book while I slept

Last night I dreamed that my wife and daughter had just come home from the library with a children's book, whose title I initially misread as Ramon and the Big-Ass Hotel. After doing a double-take and inspecting the title more closely, I found it was actually the equally-unlikely Ramon and the Big-Arse Hotel.

The story revolved around Ramon, a young boy who wanted, more than anything, to live in a hotel. The hotel in question was a massive, red building whose only exit was a spiraling ramp leading down to a deep pit full of foam rubber chunks.

Except for the title, which needs some work, it's my opinion that this children's book would be a massive hit and should be written as soon as possible.

Happy meme year

2016 may have been the worst year since mankind first started talking about years, but it did give rise to an internet meme that I particularly enjoy: the "Me at the End of 2016" meme. You've probably seen a bunch of these; there's no shortage. But that won't stop me making my own.

OK, this one may be a bit esoteric. Long story short, the kid on the left and the sea monster on the right are the same guy.

That last one makes me want to cry.

Happy new year, everyone! May your 2017 be comparatively painless.

Let's Learn Japanese: Takumirosu

The Japanese preschool TV world was rocked this week by Mitani Takumi's announcement that she would "graduate" (which is a flowery way of saying "quit") her role as Takumi-neesan on NHK's morning children's show Okaasan to Issho. The announcement prompted an online outpouring of grief from her fans.

Let me clarify "fans." I don't mean the kids who watch the show. I mean their dads.

With a soft, motherly manner and a competent soprano voice to match, Takumi-neesan is a weekday morning favorite among one crucial demographic: fathers of small children, whose wives can't sing. So dads across Japan heard the news and started flooding internet forums with the word Takumirosu (her first name plus rosu, from the English word "loss").

This isn't the first time the public has mourned the "loss" of a celebrity in such a manner, nor is it exclusively men who react in such a way. In September 2015, women across Japan reacted with Fukuyamarosu when rugged pop crooner Fukuyama Masaharu got married.

Mitani's decision to quit is likely a combination of factors. For example, at 29 years of age, she's probably caught in a tug of war between her deafening biological clock and the draconian contractural requirements imposed on her by NHK – you know, just standard rules like:

• no boyfriends
• no childbirth
• no tattoos
• no eating on the sidewalk
• NO YELLING ON THE BUS

Takumi-neesan was already on Okaasan to Issho when I became a father, and has been since then until now, so I have known no other Uta no Oneesan ("Song Lady," her de facto title). Weekday mornings won't be the same without her.

It's good to be the king

The greatest benefit to be had from completing the Bubblegum Hill event in Candy Crush Soda isn't a package of lollipop hammers or an hour of unlimited continues. It's a rare reminder of the player name you chose upon starting the game and then promptly forgot about.

Welcome to Castle Diabetes!

Taiyō no Tomato

I don't always eat ramen, but when I do, I eat tomato ramen.

To be perfectly clear, I almost never eat ramen. It's heavy, salty and oily, and I'm still detoxing from eight years of living in Setagaya near a particularly ramen-heavy stretch of Kannana Street. I make an exception, however, for the ramen at Taiyō no Tomato. 

Pictured here: Tomato cheese ramen set "A"

Taiyō no Tomato (meaning "Tomato of the Sun") is a Kanto-area chain of restaurants specializing in ramen that ditches the typical Japanese soup (salt, miso, soy sauce, pork bone, etc.) and throws in Western elements like tomato soup, eggplant, cheese and basil. As East-meets-West fusions go, it's pretty good. Recently the chain has grown overseas to include locations in Taipei and Hong Kong.

Let me tell you a few things about eating at Taiyō no Tomato:

1. It's kind of like the print-club section of the game center: Be ready to feel weird if you go stag. The Shinjuku MyLord location is pretty much always populated with 90% women and 10% couples. Every time I visit on my own, I'm the only man seated alone. Apparently tomato ramen isn't a very macho food.
2. You will, with absolute certainty, burn your mouth on the stuff. Hot ramen plus molten cheese equals delicious nerve damage to the inside of your mouth.
3. Get the cheese gyoza (pictured at right in the photo above). Your heart will frown in disapproval at all the cholesterol, but your stomach will look up at you as if in a trance and say, "thank you sir may I have another."
4. As dictated by Taiyō no Tomato's cultural norms, save the rice that comes with your ramen. After you've eaten the noodles, spoon the remaining soup onto the rice to form a hidden dish: risotto.

Tech support

I'm in the process of redesigning this blog's color scheme, as you will have noticed from the sudden photo-negative effect that has taken hold around here. Unfortunately, what should have been a relatively easy conversion has been stalled by an apparent change to Blogger.com's image uploading protocols. When I upload my new white version of the titlebar, which is quite dapper if I do say so myself, it gets compressed very badly.

Does anyone know how to correct this? I've tried uploading the image at smaller sizes, in different formats, and even with a simplified color pallet. Nothing works. Every time I end up with an ugly, fuzzy JPEG.

If you can help me with this, I'd be so very appreciative.

UPDATE:

I seem to have it under control. But what a pain in the face.

Please let me know what you think about the new style. I'm told that dark text on light background is easier on the eyes than the white-on-black theme I was using before, but I have to balance that advice against the fact that the person who gave it to me may have had no idea what he was talking about.

The time I made a hit video game

In 1996, I was finishing high school. As was typical of high school seniors at the time, my schedule had a lot of room for elective courses. One of the electives I took was Computer Math, a semester of learning basic programming principles. For the most part it wasn't thrilling (I had already taught myself the fundamentals of BASIC on the family Texas Instruments 99/4A as a younger boy, and this class didn't get into anything more advanced than subroutines and "if-then" statements), but the class's final project was the most engaging final project I would ever complete in my student life: a HyperCard dungeon.

HyperCard was a Mac-based programming tool that could best be described as an intranet of "cards," which could be hyperlinked and made interactive using buttons. A collection of cards that worked together for a purpose were called a "stack." Using a uniquely accessible and English-like scripting protocol called HyperTalk, users could create databases, presentation visuals and point-and-click adventures.

"Dungeons," my teacher called those.

This assignment had a checklist of things that needed to be present in a student's dungeon in order to earn points toward a grade for the project. Game elements like locked doors with keys, pitfalls, sound effects, animation and Easter eggs were all assigned point values and made part of the grading criteria. If memory serves, 50 of these points constituted a passing grade.

I went all out, creating the very best dungeon I could with the resources at my disposal. As a result, my dungeon scored 150 points, the maximum score my teacher was willing to award. It also became popular among students in other classes who found my dungeon on the Macs in the computer lab and started playing it when they were supposed to be typing essays about Lord of the Flies.

Today I used an OS9 emulator to open my old HyperCard dungeon (titled, The House of Death, Darkness, Decay and Doom) for the first time in close to twenty years. Unfortunately, the animations and sounds don't work well on a modern computer, and the text fields are all kinds of broken. It's also full of stuff that, even twenty years ago, was only funny to me and the stoner kid who sat next to me in Computer Math class. Stuff like a .WAV file of David Letterman saying "bubble wrap":



In the basement, there's a laundry room with a port in the wall that looks like a laundry chute...



...but when you inspect the laundry chute, it turns out to be a window to Team Behm Auto Mall (an eastern-Wisconsin used car dealership). After hearing my voice doing an unflattering impersonation of Mark Behm's nasal TV ad salutation ("Hi folks, Mark Behm, Team Behm!"), poor Mark and his dog are crushed by a dump truck that falls from the sky.



Whether or not you witness the death of Mark Behm has no bearing on your ability to reach the end of the dungeon. It's just something to do.

As you'd expect, it's rather cruel for a point-and-click adventure. Lots of doors and clickable objects lead to instant death, regardless of the logic involved:

The game's "climax" comes when the player uses a computer terminal to "decrease the power" of the dungeon's evil proprietor.

Better than Metal Gear, anyway.

For all its limitations, HyperCard was one of my favorite things about the Mac OS Classic environment. I continued using it, mostly to make random text generators for my own amusement, all the way up until the advent of OS X. This one created fictional pro-wrestling match summaries:



And this one was called Insult Me:



But don't just take my word for it. Check out this video of the Fashionable Eyewear Brothers showing off HyperCard's raw computing power. Personally I think the whole thing would feel a little more authentic with a musical underpinning of Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now."

YouTomb: Young Turks vs. boh3m3

On January 14, this blog will celebrate the 11th anniversary of its first post. Exactly one month later, YouTube will celebrate the 11th anniversary of its establishment (and it will be still two more months before the anniversary of its first video post).

Yes. Chorus, Isolate, Confirm is older than YouTube.

This gives me an idea for a new feature: a fond look back at YouTube videos and personalities of yore that stand the test of time (or don't). And I'm calling it YouTomb.

Way back in 2006, in a post called "Nobody cares why you tube," I gave my evaluation of an irritating video from an irritating user with the irritating handle "boh3m3." The video, now long gone, was a call to action inviting other YouTubers to prop a camera in front of their face and expound on their YouTubular motivations (I mean, other than the white-hot, blinding narcissism). One could argue that such a rallying cry constitutes terrorism.

Luckily I wasn't the only person who felt boh3m3's (god, it hurts just to type that bullshit) post warranted a swift tearing down, because along came Ben, Cenk and Jill, also known as the Young Turks.

I was a big Young Turks fan at the time. I even had a t-shirt. And I swear I didn't just follow them because Jill was a smirking goddess of political talk radio, although that helped.

Damn, girl, you got like DAAAAMN

The Turks' reaction to "Why do you tube" is still online, and still a source of that unique blend of anger and joy that only something fantastically awful can deliver.

The joke wasn't funny until I made it funny

I never want to hear the phrase "selective grief" again

I will lay out in plain terms why putting a French flag filter on your Facebook profile image does not constitute "selective grief."

1. All grief -- and for that matter, all emotion -- is selective. Humans aren't capable of anything but selective emotion. The opposite of "selective grief" would be "total grief," in which we express grief for every single grief-causing thing that happens in the world at any given moment. Guess what, nobody has enough time on his hands to show "total grief," because bad things happen every minute. Selective grief is the best anyone can do.
2. It's not grief, it's a profile photo. A picture on Facebook doesn't constitute grief, nor does it prove the act of grieving. It's not even designed to do that. By Facebook's own description, the French flag filter is meant to "show solidarity with the victims" of the Paris terror attack. Selective grief? No. Selective Facebook participation, maybe. But again, what other kind of Facebook participation is there?
3. Westerners are numb to the idea Middle East violence (yes, that means you too, Lebanon) through no fault of their own. When a terror attack happens in Paris, it makes big headlines because we aren't used to it. That's what makes it "news." The Syrian civil war, on the other hand, has been spilling into neighboring countries since it began in 2011 (and into Lebanon since 2012), yet it took an attack on Paris to bring some people's attention to this fact. Which people are those? Mainly the ones whining about selective grief.

I now consider the matter closed. "Selective grief" will henceforth be added to my list of Phrases That Trigger My Auto-Ignore Response. It'll be in good company there, with friends like "law-abiding gun owner" and "War on [anything]."