Category: Random

Waluigi

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

If you follow me on Twitter or Mastodon you may have noticed I started writing a Waluigi story a few weeks ago. His disclusion from Smash Bros. is a disillusion on my part. I mean, I can identify with the guy. Not the mean, nasty parts–well, not all of them–but his self-pitying feeling that everyone does better than him. If he can just find something to give him an edge, that one thing to give him a boost (which for him is usually cheating), he can show the world that he’s the greatest and then lord it over everyone who said he’d never make it!

Of course, I’d never do that, noooo.

Anyway, if you follow anything Nintendo you’ve probably heard of the memes, the rotten memes, the harassing, but maybe you’ve also heard of the more artistic, good stuff. This is none of that. This is more of a look at Waluigi. I was talking with a friend about him the other day and thought the resulting discussion was interesting.

WA more

The First Pokemon Trainer

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

So like

were the first people in Kanto and the surrounding areas from Pallet Town? And the first-ever Pokemon Trainer was REALLY BAD AT NAMING THINGS?

So this first Pokemon Trainer leaves Pallet Town, no one has ever ventured outside it, no human, they probably arrived to the region on boats to the south shore of it, and this person just goes into this field with some birds and rats and says “this path shall be named! Route 1.”

They move on to more fields and a forest area and declare, “this path shall be named! route 2.”

They keep going until they hit mountains. Nope, not gonna climb that. Head east. “this! name! route 3.” They hit another mountain but find a path through it, and upon emerging they declare route 4. Then they head south for some reason, that’s route 5. And the routes are just numbered in the order they visited? For some reason they didn’t notice 24 and 25 until everywhere else, and then after they mapped it all out they headed back home only to notice more stuff to the west and they headed to route 26 and Johto? I guess they went back to the mountains for route 28 and then route 29, etc.?

After they mapped Kanto and Johto, and maybe subsequently Hoenn and Sinnoh in that order, people left Pallet Town and began to build new towns. These people were better at naming things. They were kind of creative but derivative and homesick so they springboarded from pallet.

Obviously in Unova, Kalos, and Alola there was a different First Pokemon Trainer who was also usually pretty bad at naming things. Everything not named route _ was named by someone else later.

The Pokemon World is weird. Yes, the naming conventions of locations is what makes it weird.

Let’s improve board games

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

I was thinking about board games recently. What if they made a new version of the board game Sorry where each piece works differently? There’s the normal piece, then the Scout who moves +4 but can only knock out other pieces by sliding,the paladin who moves -2 but can’t be knocked out by sliding, and the ninja who can choose not to slide but can only knock out a piece by landing next to them?

okay but what i really want is The Game of Life to have special abilities for each job, just being a set amount of money is boring

Savethrift

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

With some of the games coming for the Nintendo Switch later this year I’m gonna want to get one soon, but the stock has been pretty abysmal from what I’ve heard, so I figured it’d be a good idea to get one sooner rather than later. I called Wal-Mart today (look it’s the only nearby place that has game systems, everything else is on the east side near the mall all we got here on the west side are trees and lakes, PFFT NATURE) and they had a couple in stock.

But I was like, ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhshhhhshhhshshhsshhswaieurduncare

I’ll definitely want one before mid-August; still don’t know if I’m getting Spla2n, I want more friends who are getting it. But half the time I’m like “i’m going to buy this thing” and five seconds later I’m like “i really really don’t want to buy this thing”. And buying something when you don’t want to sounds insane so I end up not doing it.

This is probably a habit I want to cultivate. Some people are spendthrifts. I’m a savethrift. Some people want to spend money all the time. I want to spend money never.

Neighbors

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

It’s kind of hard to tell without the volume up high, but there is a constant semi-rythmical thumping like from drums. I assume it’s drums? Someone in the upstairs apartment is apparently playing drums? At completely random times of the day/night, at that?

WHY IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE

anyway i’ve just had the need of complaining about this. sometimes–more than I care for–i would really like to be deaf, and it is legit for this reason i still haven’t cleared out my right ear since it kind of acts as a natural noise reducer sometimes……….

Sorry, too much information.

NEIGHBORS, WHADDYA GONNA DO

Anyway people seem to be setting off fireworks outside so yaaay more noise. The thing is, I would trade all the music in the world for silence. But at what cost? Oh, right, all the music in the world. Okay!

Shadow the Hedgehog Summary Dialogues

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

For those who don’t know, the video game Shadow the Hedgehog (spin-off of the Sonic the Hedgehog series starring the rival antihero character Shadow the Hedgehog, big surprise there) featured a branching storypath. You could do evil or heroic missions, usually helping the main villain Black Doom or assisting a friendly Sonic character from the series, or sometimes you can just ignore both paths, and the story and level you go to change depending on the mission you go to. This means you could do some evil stuff but then change to hero and end up in a level you’d have been to if you did mostly hero stuff.

This also means the story is usually disjointed and doesn’t follow very well.

Sega also gave a name to every storyline you can do, 326 in all. Because of the weirdness of some of these paths, I wrote a summary in dialogue form. Here’s storyline #157, Diabolical Power:

Black Doom: SHADOW KILL THOSE SOLDIERS
Shadow: lol nope
Black Doom: WHAT, FINE, THEN GO ACTIVATE OUR RUINS
Shadow: lol nope
Black Doom: RGHA;R FINE GO DESTROY THESE OTHER SOLDIERS
Shadow: lol nope
Black Doom: OH YEAH WELL GUESS WHAT WE DON’T NEED YOU ANYWAY WE GOT OUR RUINS FLOATING, SO GO BLOW UP THAT DOCTOR GUY
Shadow: Oh okay actually I will go blow him up, he’s annoying.
Black Doom: YESSS, GOOD, NOW DESTROY THE PRESIDENT’S PLANE
Shadow: lol nope
Black Doom: THAT’S IT YOU’RE COMING HOME AND DESTROYING THESE SOLDIERBOTS IN OUR BLACK COMET
Shadow: oh. okay. that’s fair.
Sonic: I can’t let you do this, Shadow!
Shadow: nope i work for black doom now
Black Doom: YES BUT YOU’RE A TERRIBLE EMPLOYEE SO YOU’RE DEMOTED TO JANITOR

And here is Shadow the Hedgehog storyline #73, An Eternal Rival…

Black Doom: SHADOW, KILL THESE SOLDIERS
Shadow: kay
Black Doom: NOW SHADOW, DESTROY THESE INTERNETS
Rouge: Hi Shadow
Shadow: actually i’m gonna help the hot girl
Black Doom: WHAT. WELL AT LEAST DESTROY MORE SOLDIERS.
Shadow: nah i’m turning over a new leaf.
Charmy: Hey Shadow!! Wanna help me!!
Shadow: no you’re not a hot girl
Dr. Eggman: What about me?
Shadow: you’re cool so okay
Black Doom: YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING FOR ME.
Sonic: Hey Shadow!
Shadow: oh my god go away sonic, black doom if i blow up some defense systems for you will you make sonic go away
Black Doom: YES. WHATEVER. DO AS I SAY.
Shadow: okay but after this i’m going to ignore you entirely and deal with my angst by killing dr. eggman
Dr. Eggman: What was that?
Shadow: i mean activating his volcano defenses
Dr. Eggman: Oh, splendid!
Shadow: haha jk i’ma kill you *karate chop*
Dr. Eggman: nooo

Anyway. I kind of want to do a whole series of this. Maybe not for all 326 though.

Merry Clichemas! Have a Clichemas tale

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

I originally went shopping around the end of November. By “went shopping” I mean I ordered stuff online. There were lists for each people, and I got stuff on the list, and got them delivered, and wrapped them, and all was good.

I got my brother the movies Interstellar and The Brothers Grimsby. Turns out his girlfriend also got him those later! She didn’t know, I don’t think.

Before I’d ordered I’d shown my mom the gifts so she was aware. I got my dad The Princess Bride (the movie). You know where this is going; my mom got my dad that movie, too! An older release, actually, at an actual store nearby. Well, I told her I’d gotten him that. I thought she returned it. She didn’t. Must have slipped her mind. He got two copies!

It’s the Clichemas of duplicate gifts.

My mom got my brother’s girlfriend Secret Life of Pets, my dad got my mom Secret Life of Pets, and my mom also got my dad Secret Life of Pets.

Sheesh.

Communication is key to any good Clichemas.

I’ll tell you what Clichemas is in a couple years.

Merry End of 2016!

Apparently there’s a presidential debate tonight, so let’s look at the candidates as VIDEO GAME CHARACTERS

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

On one side, we have Donald Trump. He’s a default character available from the beginning. He hits really hard, but he’s slow. He has a degree of unpredictability that, somehow, just makes him really predictable. A lot of rookies play as him because, against another rookie or easy CPUs he often is easy to win with.

Then we have Hillary Clinton. She’s another default character available from the start, and she has a lot of skills and strength that makes her a strong character, but all her moves are difficult to pull off and require a lot of practice. Like, a really lot of practice. You doing anything else with your life? You won’t be able to use her very well. You need a lot of money time to get good with her, and those who do are usually able to beat everyone else easily. A novice can hardly beat anyone.

We also have Jill Stein! She’s a hidden, unlockable, hidden character who is really difficult to unlock. However, she’s easy to use and strong, so a novice is able to use her well, as is someone who has practiced with her a lot. She’s high in the tier list. Not top tier, though. That’s Diddy Kong, who was removed from the race for throwing mud. Or maybe it was poop. Either way, she does have some weaknesses, such as an inability to use items well.

Gary Johnson is also a hidden, unlockable character, but he’s the joke character. He’s not very good. At all. Though he’s also difficult to unlock.

Also, Bernie Sanders has been found in the game’s coding. He was cut from the final version, but he’s still in the game’s files in incomplete form. There’s some really specific and complex glitches that can let you play as him, and for the most part he works without much trouble. For the most part it’s just that a match with him and Clinton leads to some game crashes. He generally plays like a stronger Jill Stein but has his own set of weaknesses.

I hope you enjoyed this complete turnaround of my previous statement about being unable to social media anymore because I started my dayjob today.

Random chance in writing

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

I actually randomize a…n almost bizarre amount of stuff in the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos. Some events I randomize–I’m pretty sure the initial setup of the four battles in chapter 17 of Darmenzi had the participants of the four fights randomized, and from there I just wrote how it would naturally play out. I hadn’t planned how they would turn out (though the orb then got nabbed by someone else anyway so it wasn’t that critical, I guess).

But that’s not all. Every time I develop a new character, whether premeditated for a future book or someone written in as I’m writing, I’ll open up a random number generator and randomly determine a number of features for the character, gender/sex being a big one. Regardless of any preconceived notions I have about a character, I’ll randomize what sex they are. (A lot of older characters I didn’t do this for because they’ve existed in such a way for so long.) Another datapoint: glasses. It turns out a lot of people nowadays need corrective eyewear. It’s not really such a nerd accessory anymore, and you can’t remove the need for vision correctiveness by just being cool (although you can just wear contact lenses, I guess).

Oh yeah, and sexual orientation. That’s randomized.

(Not all of these things are fully randomized, and some of them could be subject to change as I get to know a character. One character just had to have eyeglasses. Another character I simply realized, as I worked out the plot for a future story, was certainly homosexual.)

Anyway, my point here is that I randomly determine so much in writing that why don’t I try to use it to help me write blog posts? TO WIKIPEDIA’S RANDOM ARTICLE FEATURE

…

ong what if someone wrote a story with wikipedia’s articles as the characters, and there’s a group of article characters that are orphans ong

Er… there are a lot. Like, more than the population of a big town. More than the population of the town I used to live in.

And they’re all on a deserted island alone. There’s a Wikipedia war or something, probably like an edit war, and the orphaned articles get stranded on an island filled with pies, and only one of them can be Lord of the Pies, coming this fall to Reality Show TVision.