Castle Magus

I post this not (just) for the discussion of Lavender Town or even for the brief tangent into Stranger Things, as interesting as all of that was, but for this brief bit here. Hearing that, just those eight seconds or so, I was suddenly flooded with memories of the original Revelations: Persona on the original Playstation. It's not quite the same, but it was enough to bring it all back.

I wonder what Charles Cornell would make of something like Awakening Legend (i.e. the theme that played whenever someone's persona awakened for the first time). It's probably my favorite track in the whole series, and it was an almost literal crime that deserved capital punishment that they didn't have an updated version of it in the PSP remake.

As much as I liked the JPop stuff in the later games (Persona 3 and onward), I'll always have a soft spot for the first two games. (That said, the later games had some real bangers, too. [Still haven't touched Persona 5 at all, yet, thanks to it still to this day being infested with Denuvo on Steam, so can't really say anything about the music from that one.])

"Nick, Jesse, and Stephan take a trip to Universal Fan Fest 2025 and see what the fans are festing about."

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I've been to Universal Florida once, back when the Back to the Future ride was still there, and... that's about the only thing I remember about Universal Florida.

The above video was at Universal Hollywood, though, not Universal Florida.

Fuck Donald Trump.

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"On May 1, 1969, Fred Rogers, host of the (then) recently nationally syndicated children's television series, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (named Misterogers' Neighborhood at the time), testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce Subcommittee on Communications to defend $20 million in federal funding proposed for the newly formed non-profit Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was at risk of being reduced to $10 million. Subcommittee chairman, Senator John Pastore (D-RI), unfamiliar with Fred Rogers, is initially abrasive toward him. Over the course of Rogers' 6 minutes of testimony, Pastore's demeanor gradually transitions to one of awe and admiration as Rogers speaks."

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What does Donald Trump do with the mad that he feels? He takes it out on the rest of the world, and we all suffer for it.

Donald Trump is probably the closest thing to an "anti-Mister Rogers" as humanity has produced so far.

Anyway, in conclusion, to hell forever with Donald Trump, as usual, along with all the Congressshitsmears who did this.

A post on WIL WHEATON dot NET.

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"Wil Wheaton on His Star Trek Family and His New Podcast Storytime with Wil Wheaton"

"Hi everyone, happy Tuesday! I am so excited for this week’s episode. I’m talking to the one and only Wil Wheaton! You know Wil from his roles as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: Next Generation, Gordie in Stand By Me and his appearances on The Big Bang Theory. Wil is also a super-nerd and a prolific audiobook reader. He has a new podcast called Storytime with Wil Wheaton, where he reads a new short speculative fiction story each episode and I highly recommend it! We had such a lovely conversation— Wil is a deep thinker and one of the kindest people I know. I can’t wait for you to get to know him a little bit better! Stick around after the interview for the hindsight, where my producer Jeph and I talk about the episode, as well as some upcoming live podcast recordings, our new Patreon and oh yeah, time travel!"

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Apparently the only thing you have to do to get me to watch an entire hour and a half episode of your podcast is simply to have Wil Wheaton on as the guest for that episode. Like so.

Also, it's kind of funny, because I'm sure most other geeknerds (or is the proper term "nerdgeeks"? *shrug*) like me would know Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica. Here's the thing, though... I have never seen anything of Battlestar Galactica, either the 2004 version or the original show or anything else, outside of maybe an occasional clip on Youtube or something that I don't even remember now. (I always tend to get it confused with Babylon 5, as well, which is another geeknerd show that starts with the letter "B" and of which I have yet to see a single episode. How far in the toilet is my geeknerd cred now?) Nor have I seen any of that other nerdgeek stuff like all that Star Wars stuff mentioned on her Wikipedia page there. What I have seen a fair bit of her in, though, is Longmire, because there is an over-the-air TV channel which I don't recall the name of right now that my sister watches, and it airs a metric assload of Longmire episodes, back to back, on at least a weekly if not daily basis, and I see bits and pieces of it whenever I happen to exit my room to go the kitchen or something (also stuff like Stargate SG-1 and The Closer/Major Crimes and Rizzoli & Isles and NCIS and whatever else that channel [those channels?] tend to air, but that's beside the point). Beyond that, I have no other experience with pretty much anything Katee Sackhoff has done, unfortunately. At least as of right now. So far. Yet.

Okay, so...

There's a fair bit of overlap here with what Wil said in the Mayim Bialik podcast and what he has said on his own blog, but there's a lot of stuff that's new, too. That's one of the cool things about Wil is that even if he's telling largely the same story as one he's told before, elsewhere, he's still able to put a new spin on it. It's not just the same thing, over and over.

At one point, early on, Wil says that if he could give up all of his acting success if it meant that he would instead have a normal childhood where he had parents who weren't terrible, he would do it in a heartbeat. However, later on, about halfway into the episode, when asked about if he could time travel and change something, would he do it, he says that if he could go back and change the bad things about his childhood, he would not do it, if it meant that it led to him never meeting Anne, his wife. It was an interesting contrast. His acting career he would sacrifice in a moment, if it meant he could instead have had a good childhood with loving parents, but not his wife and her kids that he later adopted as his own. By the way, his stories about his wife's children, separately, asking him to formally, officially adopt them when they were each 18 was very touching.

Oh, and the short story they were talking about is Wikihistory. I'm glad Wil mentioned it because it gave me an excuse to read it again (this will be the fourth of fifth time now). In fact, I literally paused the video, then went and read it again, before returning to the video. It's definitely as good as he says it is (though he did get some of the details about it wrong, i.e. there was no "baby Schlimmel" or whatever).

And the fish story is this one or one of several like it told by Michio Kaku.

Finally... I haven't gotten around to it as of yet, but I think I'm going to start actually making the time to go through It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton now. Perhaps even getting started right now, in fact.

"There's always going to be shitty people in the world, that's just how it is, but we can choose whether we're going to be one of them."

I'm mostly like Woolie in the above video in that I haven't seen the Devil May Cry Netflix thing yet, but I'm also not like Woolie (or Pat or Gene) in that the only Devil May Cry that I've played at all is the first one, and also I have little to no interest in seeing the Netflix Devil May Cry thing to start with (and even less, now). I've seen some LPs of the later games, but I haven't touched them myself. Basically everything I know about the later Devil May Cry games comes almost solely from these guys.

So anyway... apparently, this new Devil May Cry Netflix show sucks balls, I guess? They do compare it (unfavorably) to the first Netflix Castlevania show, and I would probably agree with most of what they said about that, here.

So... I just finished my 4th to 6th playthroughs of the Blackwell series of point-and-click adventure games (4th of the final game, 5th to 6th of the previous four). Played them all with the commentary on again.

I'm not going to say a whole lot about the games again here, as I've already done that. Instead I'm just going to embed a couple of Youtube videos, containing short cartoons that were created 15 years ago as promotions for the games, but which I only learned existed about twenty minutes ago or so.

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"Blackwell Cartoon #1: 'On the Town'"

"Joey encourages Rosangela to get out more, with interesting results."

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"Blackwell Cartoon #2: 'Television'"

"Rosa teaches Joey about television reruns."

A post on WIL WHEATON dot NET with an amusing, semi-embarrassing anecdote about an incident that occurred on the bridge of the USS Enterprise-D.

There was also a follow up comment to the Reddit version of the above linked post.

"Lani, Jesse, and Stephan test their might with 1995's Mortal Kombat!"

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It's almost 6am, so instead of going to bed like I should be doing, I will instead post this. And then go to bed.

Yeah, the first Mortal Kombat movie is probably what I would consider to be the first ever video game movie that was actually passably good. Before that was Super Mario Bros: The Movie, then Double Dragon, and then Street Fighter: The Movie (and I forgot that the DD movie actually came out a month or two before the SF movie). I still say that SMB:TM was a kinda sorta okay movie... it just wasn't really Super Mario Bros. at all. Double Dragon was dogshit, and not even in a "so bad it's good" kind of way. Street Fighter, on the other hand, was so hilariously bad that it kind of rounded the corner to being good again. (I am so there when TFS reviews that one, which they said in this video will probably be the one they do next.) And after that... well... a metric assload of other movies based on video games, a few of which were okay, most of which were garbage, and also most of which I have not seen myself (and most of the few I've seen skewed more toward garbage than not).

Again, though, Mortal Kombat was the first one that actually felt like it did justice to the game it was portraying, for the most part. But... then along came the sequel, Annihilation, which was pretty much Double Dragon-level dogshit. Aside from those two, I haven't seen any of the other movies (animated or live action) or the TV shows (or "web show" in the latter case) that were based on Mortal Kombat.

Hey, The American Conservative, how about you drink double the body weights of your entire staff in bovine diarrhea, fuck all the way off, and die the most ignominious death it is possible for a publication to die? That'd be super great, thanks. And Peter Tonguette, whoever the fuck you are, all of the above goes triple for you, personally, as the writer of that worse-than-worthless piece of shit article.

On a lighter note, re: David Lynch, here is this. I haven't seen The Straight Story yet, myself, but it's on the list.

Over the past month or two, I watched all of Twin Peaks (including the movie, of course) for the first time, finishing season 3 yesterday. I'll probably write a more thorough post about that at some point in the next day or three, but for now, I'm just going to embed this video of the show's composer, Angelo Badalamenti, explaining how he and David Lynch came up with "Laura Palmer's Theme," i.e. probably the most well known piece of music from the show (expect for maybe the main theme itself).

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