Crosswords
Sunday: 53:13 (1 Google)
Monday: 7:20
Tuesday: 10:35

Sunday was pretty brutal. I didn't really what was going on with the theme until I solved it, which it is too bad, because it's actually kinda neat.

Love Letter to Metroid, Part 1

I was watching some marathon speed-runners talking about their introduction to Super Metroid and at least two said they hadn't heard of Samus Aran until Super Smash Bros. I could barely suppress a sob. Born too late to explore the world, too early to explore the universe, born at just the right time to play Metroid games when they were new.

The first Metroid was first released for the NES in America in 1987. There was a sequel for the old Game Boy in 1991. Super Metroid came to the Super Nintendo in 1994. It was a straight sequel to the second game. It was the largest game, memory-wise for the SNES at the time. At 24 megs, it was 6 times as large as Super Mario World. It has frequently been called the best single-player game for the SNES, and it holds up so well, people are still trying to set world records 24 years later.

"I had hardly gone beyond the asteroid belt when I picked up a distress signal! Ceres Station was under attack!!"

So you start with a totally un-powered Samus. They never explain why she doesn't have all those missiles and abilities she acquired in the first two games (most of the sequels fix this plot hole). Ceres has a short linear path, you find dead scientists and the metroid baby missing. You meet up at the end with Ridley, a miniboss from the original game (the creature in Alien was a large influence on the designers of Metroid, and they named Ridley after the movie's director). Technically, if you shoot it enough times, it will run away, but if it almost kills you, it does the same thing, taking the baby metroid with it. You follow them to Zebes, the setting of the first game.

Shigeru Miyamoto, inventor of Donkey Kong, Mario, and Zelda, among many others, was the producer for Super Metroid. He likes to say "You must first show players something they cannot do." Super Metroid is a master class.

After your ship lands, you can try to go right, but will find yourself blocked by a wall. You might be able to get over it, but you can't quite jump high enough. So you go left, and then down. You pass several doors, but most are inaccessible because you can't get fit to get under a barrier, or require missiles to open. At the bottom, you come across a burned out area which leads to a familiar room - it's the same room that you fought the original end boss in the first game! Travelling further along, you come to an elevator. The elevator leads to a place which looks just like the place you started in the first game. Directly to your left, in the same place it was in the first game, is the morphing ball. You can't actually get out of the morphing ball area without using it, and if you had gone right without getting it, you would find yourself unable to proceed. A little further along, you find some missiles and another cute callback with a hidden item in the same location it was in the original game too. But it's too high to reach, as it was in the original. If only you could jump higher... Things you can't do are all over the place. Then you get items, and you can. Returning to the original corridor, lots of new areas are opened up. Yet every time you go somewhere new, you see more things you can't do yet. Someone had a video on YouTube with their unpopular negative opinion of Super Metroid. They complained about the back-tracking. Yes, that's kind of the idea. I wonder if he complains about that in Super Mario 64 because you have to enter the same level 6 times

Crossword
Saturday: under 40:00 (2 Google)

I paused the timer to answer my phone and forgot to restart it. I know I started partway into one episode of Stranger Things and finished before it was over.

Advertisements, Part 2

It was my mom's birthday today, and I completely neglected to call her. This happened last year too, and I feel awful about it. I remembered to call my dad on his.

So, my mom is a true blue democrat. Her parents were pretty staunch republicans, but they grew up when the North was the Republican stronghold and the South had the Democrats, before the script was flipped. She was born a little late to be a hippie, and I think both my parents were out of the country during a lot of the Civil Rights movement, bu they were socially conscious anyway.

In 2004, my mom got involved with (by which I mean she donated to and got email from) moveon.org, one of the earlier all online political action groups. They put together this ad and raised tons of money, intending to run it during the Super Bowl in 2004.



Obviously, CBS wouldn't touch that ad with a 10-foot pole. So instead, they ran it at halftime on CNN during halftime. I was watching the Super Bowl, and my mom made me change the channel at halftime, just so she could see it.

And that's the story of how I missed the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction.

Crosswords:
Thursday: 13:42
Friday: 24:58 (1 Google)

Unpopular opinion: I don't mind TV ads (or whatever you call hulu. Streaming services need a universal acronym. (SS would be a bad choice)).

I wouldn't mind if they were a little less frequent, or shorter in duration, but I don't mind that they exist. They allow me to process things and retain information. When I'm binge-watching on Netflix, a lot can fade into the background and bleed together. I got through the latest season of Jessica Jones precisely because I didn't try and watch the whole thing in one weekend, and rarely watched two episodes back-to-back. Technically, I watched Season 2 of Stranger Things, but I can't tell you a single thing about it. I need to go back and do it slowly.

It's a little more ok if it's something I've seen before, like Law & Order or Lost or West Wing, but that's because I've seen those shows 3+ times so I don't need to focus as much to pick up the story (Lost, in particular, was really good at timing its breaks on tiny cliffhangers, pretty much forcing you to watch ads when it was on TV, and it's impressively easy to watch 6 episodes in a row like a zombie when streaming). So anyway, I bring this up because I've been binge-watching ER on hulu for the past month or two (it's a long series). I watch a few shows on hulu, but mostly new stuff, like the latest X-Files or Simpsons. They have ads, but like I said, I don't mind. However, every single ad break is a "Sorry, we're unable to load a message from our sponsors" and it tries to shame you into turning off your ad blocker. Here's the thing. AdBlock IS disabled on hulu. It was messing with functionality, and it wasn't really blocking ads effectively. I'd rather have a lame ad than 1-2 minutes of dead air in any case most of the time. The dead space seems to last infinitely longer, even if ER ads would tend to not be geared towards me (it's Chick TV). Although, they have should me profiled. I'm linked through facebook, so I expect they have my basic info, and I was pretty careful when cultivating my ad preferences when they were doing that. I get video game and movie trailers when I watch X-Files, which is exactly what I want. When I watch SVU (also Chick TV), I get Sephora.

Crosswords
Tuesday: 8:43
Wednesday: 9:51

The worst thing about about living here (or perhaps its the best thing about living in New York) is that things shut down. I'm kinda hungry, but there's nothing I can do about it. No all-night diners here (there's a Denny's in El Cerrito). And of course, the public transportation isn't 24 hours either. Its nt really insomnia. I'm just fucking around too much napping during the day. I should get back to Final Fantasy. It's good to have a project.

Saturday: 29:40 (2 Google)
Sunday: 33:37
Monday: 8:55

I've been having a lot of fun playing Magic recently. By winning. In the last four Friday Night Magic tournaments, I've gone 11-1, including a 3-week streak of winning outright (no splits in the finals). Sure, one week was broken with the Phoenix and Chupacabra, but anther was tribe-less B/G with no synergy (I had sweet rare Champion of Dusk, but I had only 2 other vampires) and U/G with essentially zero awesome Merfolk. Last Friday was A25. I had a sketchy U/W/r deck with some sweetness like Luminarch Ascension and Cloudblazer. Plus Urbis Protector and a Cloudshift for extra nuttiness. I didn't think it was all that good, but Ascension is really good when your opponent gets mana-screwed, and I found myself in the finals against Craig. Craig is a good drafter and a good player. He has shown his deck to various spectators, provoking double-takes and guffaws. He was several seats away from me at the draft, so I didn't know what was up.



Craig had opened this card and first-picked it, of course. He then went full-on cycling. A25 has all the basic landcycling cards. Weak to cast, but obviously insane with Living Death. He then received ANOTHER Living Death something like 3rd-4th pick in the second pack! The card has a lot of text, I guess. Perhaps players unfamiliar with this card didn't read down far enough where the small print says "You win the game." Craig even had 2 Nihil Spellbomb to break the symmetry, Ravenous Chupacabra, and even Hell's Caretaker for more shenanigans. I got possibly my best possible draw game 2, cast Ascension turn 2, got it active turn 6. I could make 3 Angels a turn. The first Living Death was not fatal. The second one was. Who expects the second identical (and it should be an automatic first pick, people!) rare? Despite going a reasonable 2-1 in the end, it felt like I scrubbed out.

Saturday: 35:06 (1 Google, and I was kind of drunk)

I could have sworn, when Zvi Mowshowitz reviewed this card the first time it was printed in Scourge, his exact quote was "WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY?" but I looked it up and I was wrong. (He definitely said that about something, but what? I mean, he has a reputation as something of an alarmist, so it could have been a lot of things, whether they ended up being a problem or not.) Still, when this card was printed, Goblins was already among the best decks, and this was just absurdly over-the-top. Goblin Piledriver was a monster with this card around. Later on, it found a home in Extended, accelerating Goblin Ringleader into more Goblins like Skirk Prosepector, then Seething Song, and Empty the Warrens, turning a normal creature deck into a combo deck on demand. And it returns in Dominaria.

Many of its old friends aren't around anymore, too old even for Modern (Seething Song and Chrome Mox, key cards in the old days, are recent enough but banned). Siege-Gang Commander is back, and that's a very nice combo. Only the rules-tricky cards have been previewed, so I haven't seen much else in the Goblin department, but you don't have this card in the file without a lot of theme to back it up, and I hope it adds up to something good. If you can't appreciate a good Goblin deck in the format, you have no soul. What kind of Magic player are you, anyway?

The only Goblins that see play in Modern right now are Kiki-Jiki and Goblin Guide, but this has a chance to change that. I had completely forgotten that Piledriver got a reprint in Origins, making him legal for Modern Warren Instigator can do really amazing things with the right support, and it's so sad that it never got to do that in any format, considering its inspiration, Goblin Lackey, was good enough to get banned (partly because of Siege-Gang). Modern is fickle, though, and I'm not sure 5C Humans isn't just better (whose existence adds a lot of splash damage to boot).

Thursday: 20:43
Friday: 15:45

If I wanted to do a real data set, I'd have to institute some sort of regimen, same time of day, sobriety level, etc. I'm far too lazy for that, but it is odd to see  Wed-Thu-Fri decreasing in time.

Kibler: "on the list"?
Lauren-: Kibs, let me explain, you are "not" on the list ... but it would be "some fun" if you were
Kibler: what is "the list"?
Lauren-: surely you men have a list?
Kibler: i have many lists.
Kibler: most of them start with "4 llanowar elf"









About a month ago, right after WotC posted their answers to the designer test, I called this card being included in the upcoming Dominaria set. Elvish Mystic has replaced these of late, since Llanowar Forest is a plane-specific site. But Dominaria is that plane. I'm pretty good with Core Set predictions (when Slivers were spoiled for M14, I called Mutavault). WotC also accidentally spoiled the card notes for the set a month early, revealing many of the new cards. Lots of Legends and "Legends matter" cards. There will be much to talk about, but this might actually be the card with the most impact. The only reason this card was even on the list is because they're changing templating, so it's just T: Add G. They're also replacing "he or she" and their adjuncts with the now-acceptable "they." (In other futurism, I had already done this in my custom set almost two years ago.)

One-drop acceleration has not really existed since Innistrad. The first Innistrad! Elvish Mystic was last legal in 2015! There will be many new players who never played in a world with this ability. Lightning Bolt was just a good burn spell; an Elf can change a whole format.

Crossword: 21:28

Oof, pretty brutal.

Crossword 9:12

I was up super late last night, to the point that you could call it this morning. I was doing the Harper's puzzle that I lost. And I actually finished it. Killed my circadian rhythm, but worth it. A good day for other reasons too. I'm a rock in a sea of chaos.

Crossword 7:45

I'm not sure, but I think at the beginning of the week, at least, I would go faster on paper. The way I use the computer to enter is probably slower. With my right hand on the arrow keys to move between boxes, I often end up typing words by pecking with my left instead of typing. Not so much slower when I'm filling out some missing squares, but bad when I know the whole answer. It's the sort of thing I should research, but I'm not going to start buying the paper - that's a habit more expensive than smoking.

Crossword 30:05

Decent puzzle. A half hour is maybe a little easy for the Goldilocks zone. It might have been easier if I'd picked up the full theme. The first word of each theme answer had an extra letter, turning regular phrases into wacky ones. What I didn't notice, since I finished them out of order, was that it was one word, getting longer one letter at a time: IN-SIN-SING-STING-STRING-STARING-STARTING-STARTLING.

Oh my god, I just realized further interconnectedness!

The first theme answer is "In thought as much," with the N extra. The second is "Sin some small way," with the S. The next is "Sing of omission." But look - The IN of the first actually goes with the second phrase, as SIN goes with the third. This holds through all the theme answers, and isn't forced at all. OK, upgrading to great puzzle. In theory, studying the theme as it unfolded would have made the theme answers even easier, and if I had seen that, I might have gone so fast, I'd be annoyed. But it's very cool to realize in retrospect.

Friday 51:38 (3 Google, numerous mistakes)
Saturday 14:28

Another brutal Friday? At least I was backed up by Rex Parker, who called the puzzle very challenging, Saturday challenging, like double-my-normal-Friday-time challenging. So it's not just me. (Rex Parker is semi-pro. His Friday time was over 10 minutes, and Saturday was just over 6. My ratio was...different). This one was co-authored by Rachel Maddow as part of their celebrity series, which is probably why it showed up on a weekday instead of Saturday, but they could have clued some things a little easier. ASNER got clued as seven-time primetime Emmy award winning actor. The problem is, more than one person has done that, and seven isn't even the record. I had to google quite deep to find that one (also used to find the 1928 Olympics site and a 1965 Michael Caine movie). But god damn, look at that Saturday time. Might be a PB for Saturday, though really, this should have been the Friday puzzle, and Maddow's today. You might say I used Google once. One clue was "Kid with a moving life story?" I had AN _YB_ _T, and immediately thought "oh, the Toy Story kid. What's his last name?" So I looked it up. And it was BOOT, which fit well. But I couldn't get the words around it to work. Eventually, I checked squares. The N was wrong (it was a guess, but seemed educated), and the answer was ARMY BRAT, which is, to be fair, a better answer (nice clue, too). So the Google may have actually hindered me. I had wanted the M for the cross, but that made ANMY, which isn't going anywhere. If I had rechecked and doubted the N, it would have been much easier to see ARMY and I would have saved time (that was the last clue to fall).

I did 3-0 FNM for the second week in a row, and didn't need a broken mythic rare to do it. In fact, my deck had zero synergy other than a good curve and decent (but not overwhelming) removal. Good old Black-Green tribeless. I looked over at the other 6-man draft and there was a guy with two Merfolk Mistbinder and the unblockable 1/1 Merfolk by turn 4. In the 6-man. No Merfolk drafters in my 8-man pod; no Mistbinders, I saw Shapers of Nature 7th pick, a last pick 2/1 that can fly if you have a Merfolk. So sad.

Friday nights stretch long for me. If I didn't do the puzzle Thursday night, it might not get done until tomorrow, which is the reason I've skipped Friday posts the last couple of weeks. Other things to do become unlocked Friday nights, like the Wall Street Journal variety puzzle. I just hope it's not an Acrostic. I don't hate the NY Times Acrostics, but mostly because the Times has a sweet HTML app to do them with. They are tedious as fuck on paper, and harder to edit if you get a clue wrong. I lean pretty heavily on the "check puzzle" button, but I feel ok about it. I also dropped by the library and got the March Harper's puzzle. I was doing reasonably well, but when Magic started, I just flipped it over to keep score with. And then I obviously threw it away, forgetting there was a puzzle on it. Oh well. It's easy enough to reconstruct, as the clues are hard enough to be memorable if you solve them. When I was on a diagramless kick, I did all the ones in the Times archive, dating back to 1997. I did one of those old ones again yesterday, and while some clues rang a bell, I didn't remember anything about the theme or the grid shape (which is the hard part anyway). My recall on cryptic clues is much, much better.

To make art, topless isn't incorrect. (5)

PAINT (to make art) - P (topless) = AIN'T (isn't incorrect)

I solved this backwards, of course. Getting to "paint" from just "to make art" is very hard, but the "isn't incorrect" is a sometimes crossword clue, often "Isn't wrong?" I've also seen "Ain't right?" for ISN'T. Question marks help those clues, to tip off the reader to something a little off about the clue, but in cryptics, you just sort of assume it's there all the time.

Wednesday: 11:07
Thursday: 21:52 (but distracted by X-Files)

Last night's X-Files was a fun one. Reminded me quite a bit of Black Mirror, but with a more humorous spin. Mulder and Scully are tormented by their smart phones/homes/cars and an army of drones after declining a tip at an automated sushi place.  The interesting thing is that there is almost zero dialogue. Mulder and Scully are apart for much of the episode. As that makes the show very visual, it distracted me from the crossword. But there's a deeper subtext too. That our technology, which promises to keep us connected, actually alienates us from each other. You can learn and grow so much more from a conversation than another BuzzFeed listicle.