Category: geekery

I’m passionate about comics. I really love them. It bothers me that the Sunday comic section has shrunk in the last few years from six pages to only four. There are still the same number of comics, they’ve just been severely compressed.

But my big concern… why do my favorite comics keep dying? Why? It’s not fair. Brilliant, funny comics like Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, and Bloom County wither away and die while miserable pieces of shit like Family Circus, Hi and Lois, and Blondie continue to spew their humorless drivel over my comics page each and every day.

They’re not funny. I don’t know anyone who thinks that they are. Why are they still taking up space? Even Dilbert would be better than Rex Morgan. Would it be so hard to swap out Ziggy for I Need Help? I don’t think so.

And it’s not just print comic strips, either. My favorite webcomics keep dying, too. The first webcomic I ever read, The Parking Lot is Full, folded a couple years ago. It’s a very, very unsettling comic. There are things like this and this that honestly scare the hell out of me.

Krazy Larry, another excellent, frequently hilarious comic, has recently died. It’s been several months since the last update, with no word at all from the author.

Men In Hats, another one of my favorites, has recently stopped updating. It hasn’t been that long since the last update, but it’s been long enough to worry me.

It’s disappointing. I don’t have much hope for Krazy Larry, but I think that Men In Hats will pull back from the brink.

After listing a bunch of dead comics, I suppose I should list some current ones. I read General Protection Fault Comics (by a geek, for geeks), 8-Bit Theatre (also by a geek, for geeks), and Penny Arcade (I think you get the pattern by now).

So check them out. The archives for most of these comics had me laughing until I had tears in my eyes.

I just bought The Legend of Zelda for my Gameboy Advance. The GBA I purchased through entirely legal means, and did not steal from Kmart as revenge for getting screwed out of a week of paid vacation. Nor did I steal Super Mario Advance 4 and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That would have been wrong.

It’s almost identical to the original version for the Nintendo, with one major exception… the Engrish has been corrected! This is the storyline explanation taken verbatim from the original version for the Nintendo.

Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? And that was the fun of it. Back in the day, when video games weren’t a multi-billion dollar industry, programmers did a lot of the translation. And they weren’t good at it. Occasionally the game would tell you things like “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US,” and you’d stare at the TV, shake your head in wonder and think, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Anyway, they fixed the into in the version for the GBA, much to my disappointment. The intro now reads:

If they were going to change things, they may as well have made a couple gameplay improvements as well. It’s still a pain in the ass to change between items. Would it have been hard to make the L and R buttons switch between items? I don’t think so. In the original, you were limited to a maximum of 255 rupees because of extremely limited memory on the cartridge. A single byte was allocated to store this information, making the maximum storable value 255. (If you were a programmer, you’d understand. It has to do with binary. I won’t bore you any further with it.)

Memory concerns are no longer an issue with the GBA. And yet they didn’t change this. It’s annoying.

I haven’t found any other major changes in the game. I’ll keep you updated, though. Because I’m sure you were enthralled by this entry.  Incidentally, Mike, we were both wrong. It’s not a warp whistle, and it’s not an ocarina. It’s a recorder.