MS Word's Thesaurus Is Too Flexible.

Seriously, you know it's bad when you can't find a good synonym so you give the thing a word and wind up entertaining yourself seeing how off-track you can get from your original meaning. Here's tonight's example. It's not the best, but I find it amusing to see that I accidentally almost came full-circle with this one:

weather

erode

wear away

wear out

exhaust

drain

sap

liquid

fluid

solution

explanation

details

information

in turn

one by one

alone

unaided

independently

in competition

in contention

arguing

in conflict

fighting

war

combat

contest

race

event

affair

issue

problem

crisis

disaster

blow

gust

squall

storm

Note: I've stumbled upon a better chain, which I'll post once it reaches an end. Technically, this one could have gone on, but I got tired of navigating the different storms to find a way on. I've since looked at it and found that "gust" gives you a couple of options....

Why do I want to be a ROM hacker?

So I can do stuff like this! Can you believe these are the fruits of somebody's hackwork on Super Mario World?







And to think that I can hardly edit levels, let alone make all sorts of custom sprites and programming modifications! Why? Because the "community" is a DISorganization that cannot tell me what I actually need to know! Alas, it frustrates me to no end. I suppose they say much of the hobby is self-taught because it HAS to be for any newcomers to learn anything. *Sigh* My hope lives on, though. I've got too many great ideas to waste by giving up. And this guy is one of the biggest pros I've ever seen, so it would be foolhardy to become discouraged by comparison. If every artist did that, we'd only have a handful of paintings, music, etc. in the world because few would make use of whatever talent they had.

I have a feeling that's a lesson I'm going to be hit with again and again throughout life.

If I Made a Rubik's Cube ...

I've had a share of what I consider to be great product ideas, but this one almost leaves me shaking my own head. I half think this is brilliant and half think it's psychotic, so I'm curious to know what others' opinions on this are -- especially if you're a big Rubik's Cube nut. So here we go.

I don't have any first-hand experience but I imagine that as those Cubes get bigger and bigger they just pack on more layers of the same puzzle. Granted, this makes things more challenging, but I'm looking at a different approach. Rather than solving some 30x30x30 monstrosity, I want to make a toy that both challenges one's knowledge of what has to be done as well as their ability to look ahead and formulate a procedure ahead of time.

This Cube would be computerized, with colored lights instead of stickers, so it could jumble the whole thing up automatically and determine the number of moves required to solve it. This number would be set as a limit, and it would keep track of the turns made, counting down until the allotted number was reached. If you didn't solve it at that point, game over!

Here's the best part: the name, which I initially came up with as a joke and which gave root to the whole idea in the first place. I'd call it the "Rubikon Cube" -- once you've started turning it, there's no turning back!

I don't know about you, but I'm glad I won't be getting one of those in my basket this year. Happy Easter!

New DS Zelda ...

... with a steam locomotive?!? How industrial must Hyrule become? And can Link have to do absolutely everything on his own, like back in the pre-Navi days, please? And if Zelda is in this one, how does Ganondorf come into play? Is this a brand-new story, or did the water level drop since Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass? Does Link start out running a train-powered postal service? Is that what's with the one shot with Zelda in the teaser? Did the old postman bite the dust after his accident in Twilight Princess? Perhaps this is in between Twilight Princess and Wind Waker, and tells the story of how the world became a cartoon? Would that explain the big statue Link seems to be controlling in the teaser, which reminds me of those from Twilight Princess that you could move with the Dominion Rod? Does this finally link up Wind Waker with its predecessors by ending in a massive flood because Link melts the polar ice caps with all the carbons his cannon-sporting choo-choo produces? Did nobody ever tell him there's a reason the hero wears green? Oh boy, can we have a political satire of a Zelda game?? At the rate things are moving, the next generation of Zelda titles will have no swords, will they? Or will Nintendo pull the Final Fantasy stunt and throw anachronistic restraints to the wind? When will Link get a Buster Sword, huh?? He's got Power Bracelets, he could wield it, right? Won't Ganondorf eventually forget the Triforce of Power, then, and settle for H-bombs? And when things get that high-tech, will Link's sword be able to shoot beams again, for crying out loud?!? Will it have some built-in laser device? For that matter, at the stage of technology things are currently at, why hasn't Link bought a weed-wacker so he doesn't have to slice grass by hand? Aren't spherical bombs with rope wicks getting a little old-fashioned? How long will it be before magic doesn't exist any more, as there's been less and less of it in the past few games? Golly, is all this modernization the reason the difficulty level has dropped so low?? Does Link have his degrees to operate these things? Oh, but Hyrule doesn't have an education system, does it? That'll be next, right? And has any monarchy in history ever lasted this long? When's the revolution, man? How is the line of princesses continuing when there hasn't been a king since A Link to the Past and Minish Cap, and history tells of no queen whatsoever? Can I take a look at the genealogy of the Hylian royal family, please? Or would it just say, "Zelda, Zelda, Zelda, Zelda, Zelda, Zelda...."? Has this all been fake, and the princess is in another castle? When will the Triforce of Courage be renamed "the Triforce of Blind, Emotionless Adventure"? Does Link really have courage, or is he a retarded instruction-follower? Is that why a side character has to tell him everything nowadays? And why is anyone still trying to connect these games in a timeline? Isn't it obvious now that the goddesses are creating the world over and over again, inducing small differences and bringing about variations of the same events in a quest to get their story just right? Isn't there a Hylian legend that says, "The goddesses saw that what they had made was cool but not good enough, so they said 'Be interesting and multiply ... You shall have dominion over whatever monsters you can overpower ... We shall watch and most likely forsake you, going off to build a new existence when you get boring.'"? When will Nintendo turn the series over to me so I can do things right?

Falcon Punch: Kirby Remix!

During an period of brain-flushing the buried panic of school and the exhaustion of researching aluminum, I came across the following video.



Somebody sure put their time and editing skills to good use. This is meaningless, yet it had me laughing so hard!

Voice-acting, my foot.

See, this is what happens when you give a character gibberish voice-acting that's any more sophisticated than in Star Fox.

Random Update Time!

I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Absolutely spectacular.

I just went out driving in our subdivision with my dad, and MAN is our car's gas pedal better than my instructor's car's!

I am still annoyed with the ROM hacking so-called "community" because they only explain pieces of things.

I found this translation hack of Zelda II. Oh, the nostalgia, trying to decipher the Latin with the aid of memories of the original English.

The Powder Game has added a second player ability.

It is the fourth anniversary of my diagnosis with diabetes.