Steal Compass / Drive North / Disappear

I was curious, so I looked a little bit more into the "currency trading cards" I stumbled on the subreddit for the other day. These all come from a website called cardsmiths.com. My first thought was "oh, maybe this is more innocent than I thought." The currency cards were front-and-center, but they also sell trading cards for licensed properties like The Golden Girls, Bob Ross, and Street Fighter. If they managed to get a license as wholesome as The Golden Girls, surely they can't be all bad. My spouse loves that show, so I even briefly thought that I might get her some as a fun gift.

Well, the wholesome licenses are a smokescreen, it's just as shady as it looks. The first red flag is the big "we accept cryptocurrency!" Banner that's always at the top of the screen. Okay they have one product aimed at crypto weirdos, but maybe the rest of it is normal.

The second red flag is the price. The cheapest set of Golden Girls cards you can get is $20, and I wasn't sure at first how many cards you get for that price. The SKU label is "2-pack collector's box" which I initially thought meant you get 2 cards in a fancy box, which would be unhinged. You have to zoom in on the box to see what you actually get. "2 packs per box, 5 cards per pack". (This seems to be the base quantity across the board, I don't think they sell individual 5-card packs.)

10 cards for $20 is $2 per card, which might be acceptable if this was like a boutique, limited-run novelty set where you're buying the whole set at once, but if they're being mass-produced at a level where they sell blind packs, that's totally outrageous. Magic: The Gathering packs have shot up in price in recent years, but a booster pack of the most recent expansion works out to about $0.43 a card. You also get a decent discount for buying in bulk: a box of 36 booster packs is $175, which works out $0.35 a card, or about 20% cheaper than base price. Still not exactly a thrifty buy, but hey, at least with these cards you get to play a game.

You can also get the Golden Girls cards in bulk. The biggest box you can get is a "master case" of 48 boxes. Each box contains two packs of 5 cards, so 480 cards.

The master case of Golden Girls cards costs $950. $1.98 a card. A whopping 2% cheaper than buying individual boxes.



Fucking bonkers.

Look, trading cards have been around since the 1860s, and it's always been a little exploitative. Baseball cards were a sleazy way to separate kids from their pocket money. But they weren't an outright scam. Kids weren't buying them to collect a whole set, or as an "investment", they were buying them to collect the players they like, or the teams they like. There is entertainment value in trading with your friends and trying to get the cards you want. But this is a perversion of that. No one should ever spend a thousand bucks on a box of cards. The only reason to do that is if there's an expectation that they will someday be worth more than that, but here's the thing: nothing sold as a collectible will increase in value.

Baseball cards and comics sold in the first half of the 20th century shot up in value precisely because they weren't seen as collector's items. They were a bit of fun for kids that got tossed out once the novelty wore off. The ones that weren't thrown away are now worth a lot of money, because there's a bigger market of people wanting to recapture a bit of childhood nostalgia than there are copies of those objects. Adults who saw this happen in the 80s and 90s thought this would be a repeatable phenomenon, and they stocked up on baseball cards and comics carefully saved in plastic sleeves and mylar bags, and now they have a bunch of worthless perfectly-preserved paper and cardboard. They're worth less than nothing, because if the comics were read and the cards were traded and enjoyed, they'd at least had entertainment value.

The objects from the 80s and 90s that became valuable collectibles are all the things no one thought was worth keeping around: computers and electronics and video games. You always threw out or sold or gave away the old thing when you upgraded to the shiny new thing. And now we're seeing a similar thing happening to video games that happened to comics in the 80s. People are selling physical copies of homebrew console games for $60-$100, and people are buying them as collectibles, because they're thinking "if only I held onto that copy of Magical Chase when I had my turbografx, it'd be worth thousands! Now I have another chance!" But everyone buying new homebrew or licensed reproduction carts are thinking exactly the same thing. They're all going to sit around on a shelf, barely if ever be played, and eventually become landfill.

Anyway, the third red flag is the submenu at the top of the page that says "redemption programs". Explore it and learn about the sketchy lottery that they're running on top of the base scam. Randomly inserted into packs of cards are cards you can redeem for varying amounts of cryptocurrency. No prize values or odds are given, but the example image has a card they claim can be redeemed for 1 bitcoin, so they at least want to plant the idea in your head that you might get a card theoretically worth $65,000 (at time of writing)



Now I'm not a lawyer, there might be something about this that makes it technically legal, maybe there's some loophole that says it's not considered a lottery if you're not giving away cash or physical goods, but even if it's legal, it's still sick. Fuck this company, and fuck whoever agreed to give them the Golden Girls license. Rose, Dorothy, Blanche and Sophia would've kicked your ass

I saw my notes app on my home screen, so I thought I'd jot down a few thoughts. I don't know how things worked out this way. Serendipity, I guess.

I wish it was easier to clear the contents of the current note. I have to long-press somewhere on the screen, tap the three dots to expose the "select all" option, tap "select all", then press backspace. I guess it's not that burdensome, I just wish there was an "erase all" button I could tap. I can delete the whole note, but then I have to create a new note, which is another whole process. I don't want a process, I just want to clear the buffer. Rip the paper out of the typewriter and roll in a clean sheet. Actually I guess that's directly analogous to deleting the current note and creating a new one. Look, Tuesdays are rough for me right now. Apologies.

Tuesday is currently my therapy day, and for ease of making up time it's scheduled basically first thing in the morning. I normally have to be at work at 8:30, and therapy is either 08h00-09h00 or 08h30-09h00. She's usually able to schedule me for the full hour though. I have a 30 minute walk to work, so in theory I'm an hour late to work and I can stay an hour late, but in practice it takes me time to recover and there's usually *some*thing I need to do in the morning. This morning it was seeing the landlord about something I have to be there in person to sign a thing for, and that took some time, so I got to work at 10:30. My ADHD makes me sensitive to changes in my routine, so therapy is a little extra hard, but I'm being really brave about it.

One thing we've been talking about is whether I've been misdiagnosed and have actually had autism my whole life. My spouse suggested the possibility, and at first I thought it was unlikely, because there are a lot of symptoms I associate with autism that I don't experience, and in many cases am the diametric opposite. I don't infodump to people easily, I actually have a really hard time opening up to people. I don't get lifelong hyperfixations, my brain bounces around from thing to thing (for example, I might have a blog I update every day for a year and then lose interest for several months.) I don't struggle with empathy or telling how people feel by their expression, if anything I'm a little oversensitive in that respect. I'm reasonably okay picking up social cues. I don't stim or self-soothe (I like to fidget with things when my hands aren't doing anything, maybe that counts.) And I know autistic people aren't a monolith and don't all have the same struggles, and I know ADHD symptoms have some overlap with autism, I just thought I didn't identify with enough of the classical autism traits to qualify.

But I don't know if all of my neurodivergence can be explained by ADHD either. I don't know what it is. My therapist wasn't dismissive of the idea that it might be autism, but said she can't really help with the diagnosis and suggested I ask my psychiatrist, which I will at my our appointment. I asked my previous psychiatrist, who thankfully I only saw twice before he left for a different practice, and he was extremely dismissive. It was for practical reasons—he said the test is expensive, and an autism diagnosis wouldn't help me get any additional benefits or accomodations that I don't already qualify for with an ADHD diagnosis. And sure, fair enough, I'm not approaching this from a medicalist point of view where I'm like "I need an official diagnosis or I can't have autism", and in a perfect world, no diagnosis would be necessary. I could just be like "this is how my brain is, these are the reasonable accomodations I need,", and that'd be it. My current job is very accommodating. They let me work with the overhead fluorescent lights off (we have big windows that provide a lot of natural light) and they allow me to wear headphones all day while I work. But I might not be here forever, and wherever I work next might be like "Why do you need sensory accommodations? You're not autistic?" And maybe my psych can write a note like "my client needs these accomodations for ADHD" and everything will be fine, but I dunno. My current psych is a lot better, and he'll probably bring up the same cost/benefit warning, but I don't think he'll dismiss the idea out of hand. And hey, maybe I'm not! Maybe it's all ADHD or maybe I have some as-yet undiagnosed form of neurodivergence. I don't fundamentally care about the actual label, I just wanna understand my brain and get through life with as little suffering as possible. And I think I have an above-average understand of my brain and what it needs, I just need to figure out how to fulfill those needs in a social system that is hostile towards and punishes what it considers abnormal.

( Garbage Digest special insert )

For awhile I was forced to use Linux as my home OS, since every windows-capable computer I owned had some sort of problem. Eventually tax refund season came around and I had an extra $20 to gamble on a third-party replacement power supply for my Thinkpad x250, and that brought it back to life. So I'm back on good ol' windows 7 for as long as it's still viable. I expect eventually I'll have to go with linux permanently, which will be a bummer.

During my linux year, I used retroarch to play games, which is an awful program made by shitty people, but it seemed like the most viable option for an easy all-in-one emulation solution on linux. As long as I was forced to use retroarch, I signed up for an account with retroachievements.org, a site where people create fan-made unofficial "achievements" for old video games.

I'm lukewarm on the concept of achievements on the whole. I think when done well, they have the potential to add more value to a good game. I often go back and play games in unconventional ways, particularly RPGs, and having a system in place to track these unconventional play styles isn't inherently a bad thing. It's quite an old concept—Microsoft was the first to use the term "achievement" when the Xbox 360 came out, but as far as I know, the first game to track these kinds of meta-challenges was Nethack, whenever they introduced the conduct system.¹

Of course the idea of adding self-imposed challenges to a game is probably as old as games themselves, and developers factoring in these challenges when they design games is older than Nethack (Shigeru Miyamoto suggested Super Mario Bros. players who mastered the game could try playing without collecting a single coin.)

But when Microsoft systematized this idea on a platform level, and made them mandatory, that was a mistake. Suddenly, developers who hadn't given a lot of thought to optional challenges, or who were designing a game that's just not well-suited to them, had to come up with some bullshit.

The easiest solution, and in my opinion the most sensible one, is progression-based achievements. Achievements that unlock for completing a level, defeating a boss, seeing an important story cutscene, anything that's a part of simply progressing through the game. If you're required to come up with 20 achievements to publish your game, and design them such that anyone who completes the game gets all 20 achievements, that is totally ok. It can be useful to have a metric by which to judge how much time is left in a game, or players can just ignore them.

Unfortunately, the need to come up with bullshit achievements has created a few dark patterns that have carried over into the fan-made retro achievements. Here is a non-exhaustive list with examples:

Mind-numbing tedium

In Earthbound, the last character you recruit to your party is an eastern monk prince who can't use most of the modern western equipment in the game. However, there is one weapon he can use: the Sword of Kings, a fun reference to Dragon Quest 3 for the true RPG-heads. It can only be obtained as a random drop from one enemy in one location late in the game. It has a 1 in 128 chance of dropping. It was clearly designed as a fun easter egg to surprise and delight the small handful of players who get lucky enough to roll it, because it's not even very good. It's the only weapon in the game the character can use, and it's barely better than fighting bare-handed. Do the retro achievements expect you to walk back and forth fighting random battles for potentially hours to obtain this pointless item? You bet they do!

Playing badly on purpose

I love Fatal Labyrinth for the Megadrive. I loved it as a kid and I possibly love it even more now. It was my first roguelike, before I had ever heard of Rogue or understood what it meant for a game to be like it. I'm an expert at the game, and looking for new challenges and conducts. One of the retro achievements is called "I Think I'm Lost", and the "challenge" is to "explore 50 floors in a single playthrough". The labyrinth only has 30 floors, so the only way to get this achievement is to fall into a pit 20 times, something I've never done, not even when I was a kid and knew nothing about the game. It would be impossible to play this badly accidentally, and it's extremely not fun to do it on purpose. The best way I can think to get this achievement would be to repeatedly fall through the first pit you encounter. For example, if I find a pit on level 4, I would have to fall through it, replay level 3, and get back to the level 4 pit; then repeat this 20 times. Then finish the game. Surprise! It's secretly another "mind-numbing tedium" achievement!

"This game is cool, but remember this other game?"

Shadowrun for the Megadrive is one of my favorite action RPGs. I've replayed it a dozen times over the years, because there are many different ways you can approach it and each of the approaches is interesting in its own way. But one way you can't approach it is as a stealth game. One of the major game modes involves raiding corporate offices, including a couple mandatory missions, and with one exception (more on that later) any approach you take with these missions is going to involve constantly triggering alarms and gunning down guards. There are mechanics that make you think they would've liked to have included some sort of stealth system. There are security cameras you can sort of avoid, or shut down if you're able to hack into their computer system. You can get a silencer for your gun, which prevents an alarm from triggering when you shoot—but there are no stealth kills, every guard is going to take at least 2 shots to deal with, and guards always appear in groups of at least 2, so in practice the alarm is going to trigger when they immediately shoot back at you anyway. You can see the skeleton of something that might've been a stealth system, and maybe they just ran out of time to implement it.

Still, the set for Shadowrun has achievements like:

Solid Snake
Complete any Shadowrun in the Renraku Office without raising an alert or using invisibility

and

Kept You Waiting, Huh?
Get into the Fuchi building, get the Cyber-Heart and get out without raising an alert or using invisibility

So, it's interesting that they add that "no invisibility" qualifier, because the invisibility spell is the one actual mechanic with which you can engage with the game stealthily. Here's what happens if you enter a building and you're not invisible: a guard is standing there. A guard asks to see your ID. You either present the fake ID you can have made for a lot of money, or try to talk your way out. If the guard sees through the fake ID or doesn't buy your story, he attacks. Achievement failed. Reload the game and try again. The fake ID can certainly increase your odds of encountering a guard without triggering an alert, but without invisibility, you're proccing random events that may or may not trigger an alert all the time. Even with the 20,000 nuyen fake ID and a level 5 maglock passkey and maximum charisma for smooth-talking the guards, it's still just a series of die rolls; your preparation just helps the odds be slightly less in the corporation's favor. There is no skill involved. It's just loading your game over and over until you happen to win all the die rolls. At the risk of editorializing, one might think of this process as a kind of "mind-numbing tedium".²

Revenge of the nerds

There's a retro achievement for Final Fantasy 7 called Ancient Steps Retraced. The description is:

Beat the Temple of the Ancients in one session using magic materia only and without escaping or restoring MP.

Okay, kind of nonsensical, but it doesn't sound too bad. There are five types of materia: Magic, summon, support, command, and miscellaneous. I guess you have to use nothing but materia that lets you cast spells, right? No special commands or summoning?

Well, no, what there isn't sufficient space to explain is that you have to complete the dungeon using nothing but magic materia. No items equipped, no attacking, no using potions, just magic.

In fact, there's a whole laundry list of secret rules you have to follow that you can only know about if you read the description posted by the author in the forum for the achievement. Here's the full list of requirements:

( Ancient Steps Retraced )

What we have here is a nerd finally getting to exert dominance over those he perceives as his lessers. Everyone's going to fail on their first go, because they're going to interpret the challenge in good faith, as if it were written by a normal person trying to add value to an old game they love. Only when they get through the dungeon and have not unlocked the achievement will they maybe check the forum to see what's up, and discover that they've been pranked, and they're going to have to lick some nerd's boots if they want to complete the achievement set and get that shiny gold emblem on their profiles. An emphatic no thank you!

All that said, I recently learned that Bizhawk added retro achievement support, so I logged in and I've been messing around with achievements again. My profile name is dukeofthebump if you want to follow my progress. I'm mostly using it as kind of a video game diary, tracking how much of which games I've played, and which ones I've finished... but if the achievement set for a game I like is fun and doable, I'm not opposed to getting some of those shiny gold emblems. Because they're gold... and shiny 🦝

---

1. I've tried to figure out when conducts were added to the game but I haven't had much luck. The old versions page only goes back to 3.2.3, which doesn't have much information about it. The guidebook for version 3.3.0 talks about conducts, so they were formally in the game at least by 1999. I assumed that conducts were an informal player-imposed challenge until the developers decided to formally acknowledge them, but I can't figure out when this would've happened. It's possible they were in there in some form as early as 1985.

2. And besides, if Solid Snake had access to literal magic that made him literally invisible, don't you think he would've used it? Special Operations are all about getting the job done by any means necessary with whatever tools are available. I don't think Solid Snake would approve.

I was listening to my music library on my phone on shuffle. A song came up that I hadn't heard before, but thought it was interesting. I was going to make a note of it so I could listen to it again later, but I remembered that my music player had a "rate song" feature that I had disabled in the options.

"Ah," I thought, "If I enable the rating feature, then any time I want to make sure I remember a song later, I can just rate it. It'd be a lot faster and easier than opening the notes app and writing it down every time."

So I went into the options and enabled the "rate" function. It warned me that it might make the app use slightly more CPU, but I figured I could try it, and if it makes my phone slower/more unstable, I could always disable it again later.

I went back to the main interface, and each song had an empty star icon next to it, like this: ☆

I tapped on the star on the song I wanted to remember, and nothing happened; it just started playing the song again. I tried long-pressing on it, nothing. I tried everything I could think of, I double-tapped the star, I went into the help menu, every other sub menu, nothing, I saw no reference to the "rate" function other than the option to turn the function on or off.

I looked it up, read the readme on the project page, and noticed that in the screenshots, the interface looked different than mine. In the "now playing" section, every song has five ☆s you can tap, to rate a song from one ★☆☆☆☆ to five ★★★★★

So I tried updating the app, and that fixed it. The version I had, for whatever reason, had the option to enable the function but didn't yet actually have the functionality.

So, after several minutes of trial and error, I could finally rate the song, but I didn't need to: while figuring shit out, I had listened to the song so many times that (1) I couldn't possibly forget the name of it now, and (2) it was starting to get on my nerves 🙃

I dreamt that I was trudging up a snow-covered hill. The incline was steep, the footing was treacherous, and there was no sidewalk, so I was forced to walk in the road and stand aside whenever a car sped by. It was late at night, and I was trying to get home. The hill seemed indomitable; every time I crested what I thought was the top of the hill, I discovered that there was yet more ever-steeper hill to climb. At one point, out of concern for my safety, I carefully made my way back down the way I came and tried to find an alternate route. At the bottom of the hill was a mall, still open although it was by now the middle of the night. Any chance I had of catching a bus home was long past. I made my way through the labyrinthine mall. People were standing outside the entrances to clothes and electronic stores, shouting at anyone who walked by about their deals. Ominously, there were children playing and yelling in a little play area even though it was now getting on to 2 or 3 in the morning. Where were their parents? There seemed to be no adults present besides the shop criers. Finally, I made it to the other end of the mall. I pulled out my phone to try to navigate my way home from this end but the battery was dead. I put it back in my pocket. I left the mall, was hit by an icy blast of wind, and there was another hill. I felt despair, but all I could do was try to climb up this one. Eventually the sun came up, my eyes hurt from the snow glare, and still I trudged, cresting ridge after ridge...

It's a good thing dreams don't mean anything! 🥴

Well, it's been an eventful (glances at watch) two and a half weeks?! I didn't mean to go that long without a new journal entry, but I guess that's how eventfulness goes sometime.

Ranking the Atari 2600

Recently I was talking about Jeff Gerstmann's "Ranking the NES" series, and expressed interest in potentially doing something like that with the Atari 2600. My friend Mike, who I've collaborated on and off with for years, saw the entry, said that he liked the idea and suggested we could so something like that together. I was initially hesitant, because I didn't know how well it would work as a collaborative project, and was going to decline but suggest we find something else to play and record together instead (which may not have ever happened, you know how life can go.)

But I thought about it, and I realized that a second perspective could be just the shake-up that format needs. One of the best things about Jeff's series is watching him play a game he knows well and can explain in detail, both the game itself and its place in history; one of the other best things is watching him be impressed by a game he knows nothing about (whether it's impressively good or impressively bad.) With two people, we can get the best of both worlds for each game.

The idea is this: every week, each of us selects 3 games to bring to the show. For my games, I study the manual beforehand and try to learn as much as I can about it, and Mike does the same for his 3 games. We each play the games and record our local play session while talking about them over discord, alternating between one of his choices and one of mine. After each game (which we try to play for at least 10 minutes, but we can go over if we need more time) we switch to the shared google sheet showing the list of the best game ever made, and decide where it goes.

I was worried about this part too, since I wasn't sure how much our opinions would diverge, but it turns out that even when we disagree, it's fun to negotiate. We can state our positions, why we think the game deserves to be in Xth place on the list, and either persuade the other person or not. The stakes are so low that neither of us is going to get super heated, and it doesn't take long for us to find a compromise.

I think the format works really well, and I'd have fun with it even if we weren't recording for youtube, but I also think this is maybe the most entertaining thing we've done together and it'd be cool if we maybe got some more viewers. Mike's recording of our first session, by some mysterious blessing of the unknowable algorithm, has gotten 1,700 views, a number which is still slowly climbing up. He got about 10 new subscribers out of it, which puts him at around 90. I was more active on youtube in the mid 2000s than him, so I have 2,300 subscribers from sheer "right place at the right time" syndrome; I was doing "let's play" videos just as that was becoming a thing. It's a meaningless number though, since my videos still get on average about the same number of views as his. Nobody actually looks at their subscriptions page on youtube, they look at the homepage, which doesn't show you new videos from people you're subscribed to unless they're popular. Even "ringing the bell" often doesn't work; my spouse should get notifications, but she wouldn't have known about the new videos if I didn't tell her.

So Mike's recordings of the first two videos have gotten 1.7K and 73 views, mine have gotten 115 and 38. Not bad, considering our most recent videos before that have gotten somewhere between 10 and 30.

Of course, youtube doesn't recommend videos by anyone who isn't already popular except for the occasional weird fluke, so the only real way to get new viewers is to upload "shorts". Mike had the idea first, and he spent a long time cutting our first 2-hour show down to a 1-minute summary, for which he got a respectable 118 views. (note: I wrote this over a number of days, so as of this point the preceding numbers are out of date.)

I've taken a different tactic, uploading a larger quantity of simpler videos related to the main ranking show, which have gotten between 56 and 277 views. Nothing seems to have translated into more exposure for the real videos, but I can't focus on the day-to-day number or I'll go bonkers. Maybe after doing this for a few months, I'll see the overall trend line go up and feel more encouraged.

Not that my motivation ultimately comes from views; it would just be nice. The main thing I get is hanging out with my friend and doing something fun. However, I think these videos are pretty good, some of the most entertaining we've done. I like them, anyway. They're the kind of videos I'd want to watch. And it'd be nice if we could get them in front of the eyeballs of people who feel the same way. I know it's not for everyone, but there's a respectable number of people out there who would like what we do. But the algorithm doesn't care about niche potential, it just tries to put attention on whatever will get the most billions of views. Oh well, I'm still gonna have a good time and there's nothing they can do to stop me. If watching a couple old friends goof around with some even older video games is something you'd be interested in, here's my channel. If not, I get it.

Garbage day

A couple saturdays ago, I spent all day helping a friend of a friend get their apartment cleaned up to avoid getting evicted. I think it succeeded for now, but this person is in a dire psychological state and I'm very worried about them. The less said about this, the better.

Garbage day for my brain

I have a new psychiatrist and therapist. When I first moved from [home town] to [current town], it was at the height of the pandemic and telehealth was becoming more and more of a thing. So I was able to keep the same doctors I've had in [home town], which was nice. However, at some point they told me I'd have to have an in-person appointment for them to continue prescribing my necessary medication, so I had to start looking for someone local. I really should have done this a long time ago; the clinic administration was very disorganized and had messed up my prescription refills on multiple occasions, and I hadn't actually had a therapy appointment in a long time because my therapist there wasn't able to help with my current problems. I'm not upset with her, when I first started therapy she was very good at helping me process the trauma I'd never talked about, come to terms with myself as an adult and become a person I like. I'll always be grateful to her for that, and I guess since she was no longer able to help me, I figured I didn't need therapy anymore.

Obviously I do, and I was sort of in denial about that because I didn't want to go through the arduous process of finding a new therapist and having to explain my whole life history again, what I wasn't getting from my last therapist and what I need. Well, I asked my primary local doctor to help with a referral for a psychiatrist. There was nobody taking new patients, so I got put on an indefinite waiting list, which sucked, because I had to have an in-person appointment with my psychiatrist in [home town] in April or they wouldn't be able to help me anymore. Maybe my primary doctor would've been able to continue prescribing my meds in the interim, I don't know, but I didn't want to have to find out and I hated having a ticking timebomb hanging over my head like a mixed metaphor after a bender.

One day in December, I got a notification from my "health care app" (still a relatively new concept to me) that a psychiatrist in my healthcare system was taking new patients, and since I was on the waiting list I could make an appointment if I tapped "accept" within the next 30 minutes. If I was in the shower or otherwise not available during that 30 minutes, I guess I would've missed my chance and it would've gone to someone else on the waiting list. But I didn't hesitate, and they made me an appointment in January. It was still a month and change out, but at least I knew I'd be okay before the April deadline.

So I went in for an intake with the psychiatrist, and it was... a video appointment. The nurses took my vitals and led me to an exam room, where they brought in a little tablet computer with a zoom window open, and I talked to him like that. As it happens, he works out of [hometown]. Cue laugh track.

I understand why I had to come in though, it was for all the vitals stuff and for me to sign all the forms the government needs for me to keep getting the pills that make my brain work. It just struck me as funny, especially since nobody told me I'd be talking to the doctor on a tablet; so when I was in the waiting room before my appointment, my healthcare app popped up a notification informing me that my video appointment would start soon, and I could go ahead and join the meeting and the doctor would talk to me shortly. I went up and told the person at the reception desk what the app said, and confusedly said "uhh... am I supposed to be here?" They apologized that nobody told me and explained how it would work.

The actual appointment was fine. Medicaid only covers 15 minute appointments for psychiatry, so it was really just going over my meds, making sure I still need them, any side effects, need anything adjust, okay we'll talk again in a couple weeks. Most importantly, I said I wanted to start talking to a therapist again, and he made me an appointment with someone who was physically in that building, the same week as my psych follow-up. So I'd get to talk to him again via telehealth, but I'd have to go in the next day anyway. I didn't care. I was excited to get to talk to someone again. I didn't realize how much I needed it.

There's always that initial trepidation because I'm not sure what the person I'll talk to would be like—I looked her up on the clinic's website and it didn't have much information, other than she had a couple specialties that aren't particularly relevant to my problems, but they're good specialties to have and I felt optimistic we'd be on at least a more similar wavelength than me and my old therapist.

And I was right, she's great! She's closer to my own age and I felt like she understands the world much closer to the way I do than my last therapist, who was a decade or two my senior. Nothing wrong with that, but I was so happy when I told her I'm nonbinary and she didn't ask what that means or seem taken aback. I know this should be the expectation, but my country has one of the worst healthcare systems in the world and I live in the most backwards part of my country, so my expectations are in the gutter.

For therapy, we got an hour-long intake, and I was astonished that I was able to bring up pretty much everything I wanted to talk about and answer all her questions for the intake within the time limit. She's a much more efficient communicator than my last therapist, but not so efficient that I felt like I was being rushed. She was very engaged and seemed genuinely excited to talk to me. It was such a relief.

We scheduled weekly follow-ups, three telehealth and then one in-person. We've had one of the telehealth appointments so far, and it went fine, but it did make it a little bit awkward. I'm thinking of going back to in-person for all our future appointments, because I've since discovered that I'm allowed to stay late at work to make up time for doctor appointments pretty much whenever I want. I like having a low-anxiety reason to go somewhere besides work in the morning, and since our appointments are only 30 minutes now, it'll be nice if we can talk as efficiently as possible.

Books

I played halfway through Omegaland again so I could capture the frames for my "ghost reading a book" icon when I post about books, but I unfortunately haven't read much lately. I tried to take Angela Collier's advice about finally actually reading Lord of the Rings in her video The Scourge of the Shire: I acquired the audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. The thing is, he does have a wonderful voice, and I love listening to him, but reading it as an audiobook only amplifies the problem I had when I tried to read the books: they. Are. So. God. Dang. Slow. I don't care that the books are long, I don't automatically hate long books, but in the long books I like, they tend to be long because a lot of stuff happens in them. LotR seems to be long because every scene is 2-3 times longer than it needs to be. In the audiobook version, I listened as long as the entire length of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring (theatrical cut) before we even got out of the dang birthday party. I dunno. I love The Hobbit (the book and the Rankin-Bass animated version) but maybe the full epic saga just isn't for me.

The other book I've been reading in fits and starts on my phone is a memoir, and it's interesting but I don't know if it's worth talking about because I feel like the majority of it might be complete horseshit. I'll talk about it when I'm done maybe.

I guess that's it for now. I'll try to remember to make bite-sized entries more frequently for ease of consumption.

When I was a kid, my uncle had his Windows 98 computer audio going through his stereo system, so when I was staying over one night I dubbed his CD copy of Nirvana's "In Utero" to a blank tape. He had a G.I. Joe UI sound theme installed, and I was using the computer at the same time, so on my copy under the music you occasionally heard sound samples from the show, most memorably Cobra Commander shouting "Cobra! Retreat! Retreat!" when I closed a window. In Utero sounds wrong to me without it tbh

There are lots of youtube channels I get excited about when I see they release a new video, but the only thing I consider "appointment viewing" is Jeff Gerstmann's Ranking the NES series. I don't consume nearly as much video game content as I used to, and Jeff's the only ex-Giant Bomb host I kept watching after that whole thing imploded, but his solo old game videos were my favorite thing on GB after Mario Party Party, and I'm really glad Patreon is allowing him to continue doing what he does. Every Friday for the last 6 months, Jeff's been playing and ranking game for the NES, licensed and unlicensed, with the goal of eventually ranking every game released in the US. As of today he's ranked 178 games, an average of 7-8 per episode. He streams them live on Twitch then uploads the video to youtube. He streams while I'm at work, so I don't get to watch live, but I wouldn't have 3 uninterrupted hours to watch anyway. It's always the video I look forward to watching when I get home from work.

He doesn't play every game to completion, but he plays enough to get a feel for them, at which point he ranks them on a list. It always feels like he gives every game a fair shake, and he tries to be as true to his own taste and intuition as possible. He's been let down by games he remembered loving as a kid, and pleasantly surprised by games that are legendarily bad. For example, Spelunker, a game famous for being shitty, made it all the to #110. So far. It's sure to go down as he ranks more games, but he found something to appreciate in it. It sucks, but I like it.

I'm not really watching to see if he agrees with my opinions though, I'm watching because he plays everything thoughtfully and has something interesting to say about each game. I'm also discovering a lot of games I missed. The NES was my first game machine, and I had a shoebox full of games at one point (until the power supply died and my parents sold all my games 😢) but I came nowhere close to seeing the full library; even now, 30 years later, there are games I've never seen before, there are games Jeff has never seen before, and it's always exciting when he uncovers a good one. You can see the full ranking list at 8bitnintendo.science (maintained by a fan) if you're just curious about the rankings.

My favorite NES game is The Guardian Legend (I named myself after a character from it.) He hasn't played that one yet, but he has played Gun-Nac, an incredible shmup made by the same developers that I was previously completely unaware of. I knew the name, and I assumed it was a shmup, but I had no idea it was so good. Jeff was coming to it as a sequel to Zanac, a game he loved as a kid, so we both appreciated it from different angles. I don't know if he'll end up liking TGL; the action-adventure segments might not be his thing, and that'll be fine. I'm sure he'll appreciate the craft that went into it, even if it doesn't rank that highly.

I've been thinking of stealing the idea and doing a ranking of Atari 2600 games. I never had an Atari as a kid, and when I played at the homes of friends and family, it was always just the handful of big hits, so I don't have much nostalgia for it, but it might be interesting to watch someone look at them with fresh eyes. I have a full 2600 rom set (which isn't hard, it's only 20MB; everyone should have one!) and I poke at it occasionally, and I've found some hidden gems. One favorite Pressure Cooker, an activision game that set the template for high-pressure cooking games like Diner Dash and Overcooked, and I still think it's a lot of fun today. Another one I like is Cosmic Commuter (also by activision. They made a lot of great games in the early 80s. Not so much today) where you pick up passengers in a space bus. There need to be more games about mass transit.

Would they rank higher than Pitfall! and Yars' Revenge? Probably not, I'd have to do the science to be sure, but if not they wouldn't be far behind. Most people probably think of the 2600 as having a couple good games and mountains of trash—E.T. was turned into a literal mountain of trash—but I think the library deserves a closer look. (In an emulator, with a real controller. Let's not be silly.)

I got back into LPs for a little while last year but kind of petered out. I was in the middle of Magic Knight Rayearth for the Saturn, which is a cute game with great music, but unfortunately I found playing it a lot duller than I remembered. Maybe I can dip my toes back in by ranking some 2600 games. They could be a lot shorter than the NES ranking videos, and shorter than the kind of stuff I usually play. Maybe I could find time for like, an hour a week. Shrug

Back when I occasionally had some disposable income to spend on unnecessary tech junk, I got myself a Thinkpad X60 on ebay. It's a lovely little computer, one of my favorite form factors for a laptop. It's got a matte 4:3 display and a real non-chiclet keyboard that feels quite nice to type on. I had recently seen Vwestlife's video about it and there were plenty available on ebay for a reasonable price, so I picked one up. I bought that 10-year-old computer 7 years ago, and it's still going strong.

My original idea was to turn it into a dedicated portable word processor, and it served that function quite nicely. But at the time, I was working somewhere I had a bit of downtime and a computer I was reasonably sure wasn't being monitored, so I could do most of my writing there. I was also working the graveyard shift, so my unusual hours prevented me from going to the sorts of places I would use a portable word processor, cafes and restaurants and the library and such. So it didn't see much use at first.

I was glad I had it when my desktop computer died, because despite being nearly two decades old, it's still quite a capable little machine once you have some lightweight version of linux on it. I don't mean it's capable for what most people use the internet for, but it's more than capable for the sort of things I do. Firefox can sort of barely play youtube videos if you put it on the lowest quality, but if I used yt-dlp or an invidious instance to download them, VLC could play 720p video no problem (and on a 1024x768 screen, 720p is all you need.) I could play emulated games with retroarch and my USB controller. It even connected to my bluetooth headphones seamlessly. I could listen to music and browse the fediverse and read the occasional article. I could download books to read from libgen and play Cave Story. What else do I need?

Well, it's not a good machine for game development. Most of the tools I use will run on it, but the small screen and inability to plug it into a monitor really made it not suitable for any kind of creative work other than writing. Good for consumption, not so good for production.

Luckily, I now have a proper modern 2015 computer with Windows 7 I can plug into my monitor, so the trusty Thinkpad went back into storage. But recently I've been thinking of ways I can encourage myself to write more, so I decided it's time to make it a word processor again, and I thought it'd be interesting to some people if I talked about how. Distraction-free writing is something people are interested in, and there are apps and absurdly expensive bespoke devices available to help people achieve this, so maybe some people besides me would be interested in DIYing it.

First off, you obviously don't need a Thinkpad X60 to accomplish this, it's just what I like to type on. Any computer with a USB port and a proper configurable BIOS will work. You'll need a USB drive you can format, and it can be as small and cheap as possible. My current one is a 4GB microSD card in a microSD-SD adapter in a USB adapter. Not the most convenient option, but it's what I have. When I have a few bucks I'd like to get one of those tiny ones that sits almost flush with the USB port.

I used a Windows program called Rufus to format the card and create a bootable DOS flash drive. I then searched for a suitable DOS text editor. I had originally intended to just use EDIT.COM, the classic text editor that came with DOS 5.0 and later, but I discovered that it doesn't support wordwrapping, so it's good for editing .ini files and such but not suitable for the kind of longform writing I want to do with it. I tried a couple full-fledged word processors (George R.R. Martin famously swears by WordStar on a DOS machine to get his writing done) but they're overkill for my purposes: I don't need to do any text formatting and I don't need any advanced features, I just need to make a text file and transfer it to my main computer.

I settled on FreeDOS Edit 0.9a, a clone of EDIT.COM for the FreeDOS clone operating system. It looks exactly like EDIT.COM out of the box, right down to the eye-searing white-on-blue default color scheme, but it does thankfully have a monochrome option. Most crucially, it adds the missing wordwrap feature.²

When I want to write, wherever I am, I pull the laptop out of my backpack, stick in my USB drive, and press the power. It boots up almost instantly. I added a line to my AUTOEXEC.BAT file that immediately launches the editor with my BUFFER.TXT file, so I'm right where I left off.

( Short video demonstrating bootup time (1.4MB) )

Of course, I can create and save and load other text files if I want to work on something else. There's no on-screen battery indicator, but if the battery light on the machine itself starts blinking, I just hit CTRL-S and I can be assured nothing will be lost. With an incredibly light OS and no spinning disk, even this 20-year-old battery lasts a remarkably long time, and I've never found myself in a situation where the battery wears out before I do. This whole entry was written on the thinkpad over the course of a couple hours, and I could probably keep going for several hours more.


So instead of a bespoke device that costs six hundred freaking dollars for a single-board computer, mechanical keyboard and e-ink display, consider visiting ebay or a secondhand store and giving one of the thousands of old, obsolete and unloved laptops a second lease on life. You can get an old school³ chromebook on ebay for 30 bucks. I don't know how easy it is to install DOS on them, but there are guides that can help you jailbreak a chromebook and install linux; a text-only linux distro and micro will give you much the same experience.



2. Minor caveat: FDEDIT does "hard" line wrapping, so the text is formatted for the screen, but the file has a line break every 40 characters or so. Basically all it does is press "enter" for me once the cursor reaches the edge of the screen. Not having to do that is better than using EDIT.COM, but I'll keep looking for a good editor that doesn't do this. In the meantime, it's not too hard to fix the superfluous line breaks in post. ↩

3. An old chromebook that was used in a school, not "old-school". ↩

I've seen some revisionism about the original 16-bit Sonic the Hedgehog games. Some people have been claiming that not only do the games not hold up, but in fact they were never good; anyone who believed so as a kid was just bamboozled by marketing nonsense about blast processing and doing what Nintendon't. I'd like to set the record straight.

I can't defend any post-Megadrive Sonic game (except Sonic Mania, which owns) but there are three good 16-bit Sonic games and one that's okay, and I won't idly sit by and let people talk mess about pre-1995 Sonic.

The most common complaint I see is that it sucks when you lose momentum. You're running along, going fast as you gotta do, when suddenly you don't roll into a ball fast enough and get hit by an enemy. You're knocked back, your rings go flying everywhere, and suddenly you're at a standstill. If there's even a small incline ahead of you, you have to tediously trudge or jump your way forward until you get to a spot where you can get up to speed again.

I agree, this is frustrating, and it was a problem for sure—in Sonic the Hedgehog 1. They realized this was a problem and immediately fixed it in the next game in the series by adding the spin-dash. No matter where you are, you can press down on the D-pad and the jump button to instantly get back up to full speed. The three great Sonic games all had the spindash: Sonic 2, Sonic CD, and Sonic & Knuckles.¹ Yes, you lose momentum sometimes in Sonic 1, and it's not fun, but the levels are designed to make it as painless as possible. You usually have room to back up a bit to get back up to speed, and sometimes it gives you a spring to help you along. But Sonic 1 has some other rough edges, and I can see why people wouldn't be into it. That's why I just consider the game okay.

The other complaint I see a lot is that the marketing lied to us, the Sonic games aren't actually that fast, they're just as slow as any other platformer, and if you try to go fast you'll just hit obstacle after obstacle, until you run out of rings and die.

And, yes: the marketing lied to us. Sonic the Hedgehog is, for the most part, a traditional platformer. That's why it takes time for Sonic to build up momentum. The marketing implied that you'd just be blasting along at full speed all the time, and listen to me: you don't want that game. You know what that game is? Sonic Rush on the Nintendo DS. I'm not saying that game is bad, it's just not for me. It's for people who want that nonstop speedrun-oriented action. And judging by the mixed reception Sonic Rush and its sequel got, that's not most people. (although I am a big fan of the incredible soundtrack, by Hideki Naganuma of Jet Set Radio fame)

16-bit Sonic is a sidescrolling platformer, like Mario. Not as good as Mario, no one's going to argue that, but still pretty good. The levels are huge and contain a lot of secrets. That's why they give you a 10 minute time limit: sure, with enough practice you can get pretty good at the levels and speed through them in seconds, but for the casual player, they're much better if you play them like you'd play Mario. Take your time. Look around. There are portions of levels designed for you to go fast, usually somewhat on rails, and the sense of speed you get during these sections is fun, but you shouldn't let them dictate how you approach the rest of the game. Slow down! Enjoy the sights and sounds! The games are beautiful and the music owns. You do not, at the end of the day, got to go fast. If that's still not your cup of tea, that's fine, but they're good games.

1. Omission of Sonic 3 intentional. ↩