Today was the day for doing Christmas stuff with Izzy's family, since Christmas Eve was far too cold and icy to walk to all the various bus stops we would need to get to. Today would've been perfect weather, high 50s/low 60s, except that it also decided to rain all day. I will say this: at least it wasn't snow.

Anyway, celebrations were fun but tiring. When I got home, I reinstalled retroarch (which I hadn't yet done since my last OS reinstall) because I wanted to kick up my heels and ring in the new year in the traditional fashion: with some Donkey Kong Jr.

I hit a snafu when my emulator wasn't recognizing any of the Donkey Kong I was downloading. It was playing all the old roms I had saved on my data partition just fine, but any new NES roms were throwing the same error. I spent a good 20 minutes of my precious holiday troubleshooting, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on.

Eventually I realized what the problem was: my google search had brought me to the no-intro headerless rom collection. Headerless roms are like normal roms except they don't work and you can't play them. Why the hell does this collection even exist??

Anyway, there's a link there to the non-headerless collection, so I tracked down the Donkey Kong Classics rom ('cause Donkey Kong Sr. is good to have on hand too) and here's my score:

Read 'em and weep: one hundred and six thousand, six hundred points. Can you do better? Sumbit a screenshot of your New Years' Eve Donkey Kong Jr. score and be acknowledged!

I was hoping my score would be a multiple of 2023, but it turns out there aren't very many of those that end in 0. I'd basically have to do twice as well as I just did, so it looks like I have a lot of training to do.

Happy halloween, everyone 🦝