Stray thoughts floating in the neurosoup of the day

Alex Jones bankruptcy

Today's episode of knowledge fight started with Dan saying (paraphrasing) "of course, this is the first episode since the big news about Alex declaring bankruptcy" and I was like whaaaat? Fellas, I don't know anything about Alex Jones but what Dan tells me. You can't just drop a bombshell like that all caʒ

I fucking hope AJ isn't able to use loopholes and sleazebag accounting to weasel out of consequences for his crimes. They're so egregious and his lawyers are so incompetent I can't imagine this doing anything but delaying the inevitable, but civil court is so easy to game if you have money to hire someone who's good at gaming it. I sincerely hope he eats shit

Tokimeki Memorial fan translation

I can't believe they pulled it off. The amount of text in that game is legendary, and the UI is notoriously unfriendly to alphabetical text. The font in the screenshots is pretty thin, and some of the menus look a little awkward, but it looks playable

I appreciate them localizing the title, but I'd have gone the whole 9 yards and called it "Heartthrob High" (in English, "Heartthrob Memorial" sounds more like a sexy hospital)¹

I wonder how much this is thanks to Tim Rogers' 6-hour video review of the game. I'm sure the patch was at some stage of completion before the video, there's no way they made the whole thing in a year, but I'd bet the video bringing the game to more people's attention helped renew interest in the project

Also holy heck, that video has nearly a million views! Nice! I'll have to re-watch it soon, it's still my favorite Action Button review despite being for a game I'll probably never play, even now that the patch is available

It's not that I don't want to play a dating sim, it's just that I find these kinds of management/raising sims extremely frustrating because there's no way to be good at them. I don't know how to figure out a strategy. The one I have experience with is Long Live the Queen, and I still think it's a rad concept, but in practice it's just random luck and trial and error. I train the skills I think will be most useful until I die in a horse-riding accident. I start over and make sure to train the equestrian skill, survive that skill check, then die by getting hit with an arrow. Okay, now I need to train equestrian and dodging. There's no way to get better at the game, it's just dying over and over until you learn what skills you have to train to survive all the skill checks (or using a guide, and then what's the point? Might as well watch someone play on youtube)

Maybe I'd enjoy Heartthrob High more because IIRC there are no "fail" states; or if there are, they're rare and unlikely. You might not date the girl you were hoping to by the end, but that's just life. Sometimes love doesn't work out the way you expect. Maybe I'll give it a shot

Also this is kind of weird:

MSU-1 files are not required to play the translation, but are highly recommended for the best experience. They add an animated intro video, voiced confessions, and voiced ending song.

I shouldn't be surprised, I knew a lot more is becoming possible with emulator modding, like the cool-as-hell HD mode 7 mod (reddit link) but I didn't know patching in CD audio is a thing. I assume they ripped the audio from the PC Engine-CD version of the game, which makes me wonder why they didn't translate that version. I figure it's because the SNES romhacking tools are more robust, but dang, this means they had to go through and manually associate every piece of VO with every voiced line in the game². That's a heck of an undertaking. I prefer playing games without voiceover, so if I play I'll stick with the vanilla ROM, but it's cool that it's possible

fanfic mashups

For some reason this asinine joke popped into my head when I woke up:

Please, President Obama is my father's name. Call me Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way

And now I want to do a crossover meta-fanfic where I take characters (or specific characterizations) from other people's fanfics and try to mash them up into a story

My first idea is, Obama is EDDRW's dad, and he's collecting the chaos emeralds to make his daughter's wish come true (in this universe, they obey Dragonball rules) but along the way, he has to fight Sonic, John Freeman, etc. who are also after the chaos emeralds for their own purposes

I don't want to make it funny by just aping the bad spelling and grammar of the originals, though. The funniest outcome would be the incongruity of the fanfic ideas written "seriously"

The downside of this plan is that I'd probably have to actually read "My Immortal" to figure out what EDDRW would want. It's not as fun if I just make her a generic goth teen caricature

Well, I'll put a pin in it (and eventually take it out and throw the idea in the trash when I need the pin for something else)

"That happened", explained some guy

Why is the phrase "a person familiar with the matter" so ubiquitous in journalism? What's wrong with "an anonymous source"? Can't we assume that whoever you're quoting is familiar with the matter? They wouldn't be a source otherwise! It has such a junior-high-essay feel. If they're trying to make it sound more trustworthy it has the opposite effect 🦝

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1. Erratum: although now I'm re-listening to the Action Button review one day in the future, and I'm reminded that there's already a dating sim on the NES called "Tokimeki Highschool" by Hironobu Sakaguchi of Final Fantasy fame, so perhaps the translator didn't want to toe-step any current or future fan translations of that game↩

2. Erratum #2: or if I had read a little more closely, I would have realized that it says "voiced confessions", and I'm not sure what counts as a "confession", but it's definitely nowhere close to every line in the game↩