The server is up, and there was much rejoicing

I also updated my "Defunct Kmart List" after almost a year. Check them out in the links above.

Christmas

Sorry for not updating recently, we're still trying to get the "meat" of the website up and running.

Here are the things I got for Christmas.

My siblings got me these games. Munchkin is great, though I have now two different sets that are generally incompatible with each other (the other one is zombie-themed)

Books. I tend to like books, but these aren't exactly what I had in mind. I like cookbooks, but one from the "Better Homes & Gardens" will be staying at my parents' house (they got it from Half Price Books' clearance, so no hard loss). The other, "Captain Easy", I had to look up online to see what it was. It might be fun to go through it once, but 1930s newspaper serials are hard to follow, especially when they aren't redrawn into collections later. The others are a bit less useful since I've completed most of college by this point.

VIDEO GAME T-SHIRTS. YESSSSSS. And an Oak Ridge National Labs shirt.

Candies bought from an British import store in Houston, and a bag of coffee.

More "practical" gifts, though the Austin map is a bit of a "fun" thing since I do enjoy maps of that sort. Even though it's older (note the used bookstore tag on it), it DOES show some of the new toll roads which were put up recently (even if it's "opening fall 2007"). Not shown: a $25 gift card to H-E-B, and a new keyboard which I'll pick out later.
It's not everything I asked for (a lot of it I didn't) but Christmas was great to spend with my family, and that was great. Step two: go to Amazon for the things I need/really want but didn't get. Example: EXPO markers.

A Carbon-izer Christmas Eve

The Christmas Eve I had 12 years ago was a memorable but happy one. My first Burger King Crossian'wich (I also got a BK Kids Club "newsletter", by that time the Gang had pretty much disappeared). Said newsletter had Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring stuff with 12 collectible toys. I'd love to scan it and show it to you, but unfortunately, despite storage, it was found by my cat who significantly damaged it. Regardless, it was a bit strange to see some toys and rather simple puzzles contrasted with a somewhat violent PG-13 film. It was great going to Baton Rouge, playing Rockin' Kats, and all that, but this year was marked with a breakdown, news that my younger cousins got swine flu, and the time when Die Hard was outvoted by Scrabble and Kung Fu Panda.

Regardless, it was still enjoyable, though I was still saddened by continuing changes along State Highway 6. Calvert had recently demolished this old building, even though it had been lacking a roof for more than a decade. I never was able to find its address, even today, and a Sanborn Fire Insurance map only shows that it was a pool hall and shooting gallery a century ago.

I also tried some more head cheese this morning, which I bought the other day. For those that don't know, it is a cold cut that involves cooking various undesirable ham byproducts (snouts, tongues) with spices and letting them congeal together. While obviously not a "delicacy" (there's some soft cartilidge-y stuff to go through), it is interesting, though I've had trouble convincing others to try it ("Pork snouts" being the first ingredient). Hopefully Santa will come tonight.

The Sunflower Motel

A picture postcard from a motel, that with some Google-based research, was torn down in 2005.

This was from my late great uncle, the checkmark is which room he stayed at.

Notes on yesterday

- Watched Thor: The Dark World. Disregarding the fact that movies tend to screw up somehow when I'm watching them in theaters (they didn't get the sounds and lights correct for the first 10 minutes), another of the post-Avenger films just doesn't seem to be as great as the previous ones. Sure, there were some great moments (better than Iron Man 3, I felt--which I didn't care for) but I felt that the stinger (Loki faking his own death and replacing Odin) mucked with the happy ending and good sacrifice of Loki, though in fairness, he did save Thor and Jane.

- Played The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. I discovered an old save file from 2005 of mine but I decided to go for a new file (honestly, I never got past anything beyond landing in the Forsaken Fortress). Like Ocarina of Time, all the major plot elements have been spoiled, but it's a blast. And with the release of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD, it becomes timely as well!

- Tried "Thai Kitchen: Pad Thai" microwave dish, which I wanted to try since I got it with a bunch of other food items for my birthday a few months back. Despite obvious warning signs, such as overwhelmingly negative reviews on Amazon, the noodles smelling like Play-Doh, and a few other facts, it created a foul smell in the microwave, and I tossed it. The contingency plan: a fully-loaded baked (microwaved) potato worked better.

- Learned the sad fate of MobyGames and how its new corporate owner botched the site layout (unchanged since '99 and a bit dated, but it worked and worked well). It's a shame, because it was comprehensive, well-known, and other alternatives are awful.

What to write

The hard thing about a blog (and now a website) is what to write. No more politics (at least very often)...that seems bitter and won't make you friends. Video games too make you seem like an embittered nerd. Stuff that would be better on Facebook is too narcissistic. I suppose what I should do is just what strikes my fancy, I suppose.

Frankly, general blog writing should take a backseat to the new things coming up. I plan to launch another feature "Carbon-izer U", featuring educational stuff, and of course plan to pad out those others up there, but I need server space (Dropbox seems a bit risky to host HTML pages on long term). That's why, when linking to the stuff that I have up there now, don't link directly to them. That all should be sorted out later.

A Word on Raising the Minimum Wage

With all this talk about raising the minimum wage, particularly for fast food workers, no way would I even come close to supporting that when those clowns often do at least one of the following:

1) Screw up the order somehow: worst case is if they charge you for something without actually serving it
2) The old problem where you're the only one in the restaurant, it takes forever, and your food is still somehow lukewarm
3) Blatant food safety violations (I stopped going to a certain Burger King after watching someone assemble my sandwich without gloves)
4) Fry container knocked over in bag.

Meanwhile, burgers get smaller and price continues to climb, so that's a strike against the industry as a whole (and no, having a TV that plays news will not make me like fast food more).

The whole idea is bad. Good workers who care about what they're doing should get higher wages than those that don't care (and move up the career ladder, as they should), and anyone striking should be on the short list for firing--there's a bunch of teenagers and college students out there who will happily do it for the same price and deliver service with a smile. Debate is welcome.

1990s Games and Other Systems

Last night, after a weary hit of finals, I wanted to play some games, but the only things that came to mind on the SNES emulator were The Lost Vikings and Final Fantasy VI, prompting me to give "Boxer", the DOSBox-based Mac tool a spin. While Boxer performs beautifully, my distaste with DOS began to formulate. Ignoring the fact that DOS is a nasty, cryptic mess, it's true that DOS got tons of good games for the 1990s--the market share was huge, but as a gaming machine, it's terrible.

In one corner, there's the Mac, with a superior user interface, with higher resolution, and even decent sound (the Mac's native sound chip won't blow anyone away, but didn't need expensive sound cards like DOS did to not sound like garbage). In the other, there's the SNES and Genesis. While neither could handle CD-based games very well (Sega CD was not exactly a revolution, and of course the SNES had no CD input at all), and the SNES had the Genesis beat in nearly every category (though the Genesis had a few neat features and some extremely effective marketing).

This isn't the case anymore, as between the Mac and PC you've got a formidable system. Console games just aren't what they used to be, and Nintendo has fallen onto a third-tier system riding on its extremely popular franchises and multiplayer-focused abilities.

I'm not going to turn this into a whole "consoles vs. PCs battle", even though one of the reasons why computers are superior gaming machines is not just upgradeable specs, affordable software, and non-game uses, it's also the ability to play legacy software with not much effort. Consoles are still superior in other aspects, particularly in the ease of use in setting something up to play, the fact that even when buying old games, they're tuned to the system (emulators for systems made after 1994 often require a lot of fiddling to get to work properly, if they do work properly at all), and nothing beats playing games on the TV.

In 2011, I gave up on the Nintendo fanboyism and accepted computers as the superior system (getting a Steam account, though I have far less games than you'd think) but still have a love for the vintage, particularly consoles.

One thing I've always wondered about is the fall of Sega. Atari's fall stemmed from some awful and arrogant choices back in the mid-1980s and any efforts to return post-1984 were undermined by Jack Tramiel's control (reminds me of a certain discount store/department store company, whose name rhymes with "tears"), but Sega's was different. The Sega CD notwithstanding (it was awful looking back, but at the time wasn't a bad idea), the real problem starts with two bad choices in the mid-1990s:

1) The Sega Saturn's botched launch, screwing over discount stores and having very few games at launch
2) The Sega 32X.

Now, I know that the Saturn was an extremely expensive console ($400) but I think had it launched with the ability to play Genesis cartridges and Sega CD games, it would've at least given a boost in the "software" department.

The Dreamcast of course had other problems, and even if the Saturn had backwards compatibility it had other problems (particularly difficult development problems--it rendered everything in quadrilaterals instead of the industry standard of triangles, which warped textures at best).

The Nintendo 64 was sadly doomed either way. The N64 had great games, but cartridges held a fraction of the data CDs did and were more expensive than CD games (games never went below $30, many new releases were $70-$80, and that was late 1990s money). If Nintendo 64 had released the 64DD as planned and even managed to get the storage size upped to equivalent CD sizes (the disks were planned as 64MB, as opposed to Super Mario 64's 8MB, but cartridges eventually got to that size by the time Conker's Bad Fur Day rolled around in 2001, and that was puny compared to the 550+ MB capacity CDs had), then it could've worked, but that would've made the machine even more expensive. From there on out, every system was awful was in a special way. The GameCube's problems were detailed in the 2011 post, and the Wii, released in late 2006 (a fantastic time in the history of Nintendo, which I am absolutely sure we'll never see again) was completely unlike anything on the market and lowered the barrier to entry to video games by creating a new controller, was the "Virtual Console", which re-released old games from the NES, SNES, and N64, which you bought off the system for a small fee. Although there were some mixed feelings about it then, notably a flat $5 price for NES games which seemed reasonable for classics (The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros.) but a waste of money for others (Donkey Kong Jr. Math, Pinball). It also made you feel better since you pirated all of them years earlier but refuse to pay some jacked-up price at the video game store.

It sold a ton of systems for years but really fell apart later, marred by shovelware, the inferior power compared to the 360 and the PS3, and the controller working against it when it came to games. The Wii U...well, the less said the better.

In the end, there is going to be no "super system". Even the vaunted computer systems often need a lot of tinkering to play games, even ones released on older variants of same system.