ceci n'est pas un journal

I made a note to myself about buying A Voice Out Of Ramah next time I'm at Commonwealth Books. I didn't share it because I forgot to, ok. I wasn’t going to not share it because someone in Russia would be like “MWA HA HA! I’m going to buy that book so you can’t!” because there’s no fucking way they could pull that off in the less than 24 hours.
I bought it. Then I went to Falafel King. Today, I bought Jack Vance's To Live Forever at the library for 50 cents. I'd like to go to Harvard Books and Brookline Booksmith but I don't really have an excuse to go there right now.

A woman on the train had a tattoo of an anatomically realistic heart and a cactus. Another woman had a tatto of a death's head moth and a masked plague doctor.

Sadie (a black lab) was going for a swim in the river and enjoying it so much she didn't want to leave.

The Handel + Haydn Society said that they wanted to play this last year but then they decided that it did make sense because Beethoven felt increasingly isolated from society. The lyrics were redone in English by one of the Poets Laureate of the United States. It was jarring. It didn't quite have the spirit of the original poem, but things are different now.
I, too, have felt a loss of purpose in life caused by this pandemic.

Also, on Wednesday, there was a Gatorade bottle at the other side of the glass and I have no idea how it got there. Maybe a worker or perhaps some kind of hyperintelligent giraffopus left it there.

I saw Gabriella at the station. She did go and she brought Theresa with her, she just couldn’t find me in the crowd. Which makes sense because of the way the barriers were set up. I was in the front. They were in the middle somewhere. If I took a different train car. But instead, I found myself completely immersed in Phaid the Gambler.

I ganked this from Cook’d and Bomb’d
burning question: Remember when Uber and Lyft started inventing 'vehicles' that can transport 'multiple people' along a 'fixed route' as if it was a new and exciting idea?

Henri didn’t get as powerful as expected, he dwindled away as expected, and I was far enough north and east of landfall that I was spared the worst of it, as expected.
I saw seals in the ocean the day of the storm and a coyote trotting by the day before.

There was a man with a koi tattoo on his arm playing what sounded like the original Super Mario Bros, although I could not make out the music, only the jumping sounds and the coin sounds.

I found three dollar coins in the CharlieCard machine. One of these days, I'll have a complete collection of Mediocre Presidents. I just have Hayes and Tyler.

I did get Phaid the Gambler and Citizen Phaid at Brattle Books for 4 bucks each, On Wings of Song from a Little Free Library (some of the books were in Russian), and Synners (a signed copy of Synners!) for one dollar (!). The cover of Phaid the Gambler features a sandcrawler, an open-cockpit AT-ST, and a guy dressed as a glam rock version of Han Solo.

For dinner, I got a shawarma sub. That is to say, it's a sub roll with seasoned chicken, diced cucumbers, onions, green olives, tzadziki and tahini and hot sauce.
I met a husky named Reptar. His way of saying "Halt, I am Reptar" was not letting me move while he was licking my hand.

Holst - Second Suite For Military Band - an arrangement of multiple folksongs. Holst and his compatriot Vaughan Williams were the first to arrange for concert band (that is to say, an orchestra minus the strings. Add saxophone and a few extra tubas for good measure. Keep the harp.) music for the common people. Before then, it was music meant for officers and diplomats.
For those of you wondering “why isn’t the saxophone used in classical music,” it is. You just don’t notice it when it shows up.
Steven Stucky - Funeral Music for Queen Mary. Originally written by Henry Purcell, and arranged for concert band with 21st and 20th century ideas. That’s Mary of William and Mary, the husband and wife and also first cousins dual monarchs of the late 17th century, by the way, not Bloody Mary. And definitely not Mary, Turkmenistan.
Omar Thomas - Come Sunday - An ode to the Hammond Organ with echoes of swing, blues, and R&B. R&B? That’s just a catch-all term for music played by black people. The term was coined in the late 1940s, disappeared in the late 60s, and then was revived in 1990. The less polite term was race music. There were probably even less polite terms. The first part depicts the congregation coming together, the second divine rapture. I get my divine rapture from Prokofievesque Latin cacophony. Or maybe King Roger. But you do you, as long as you’re not hurting anyone.
He did a composition that we may hear next year based on the soundtracks of 60s blaxploitation films.
Ralph Vaughan Williams - English Folk Song Suite
Rossini - Overture to La Gazza Ladra. It’s an opera. About a kleptomaniac magpie. That’s a redundant redudancy. There’s an actual magpie in the opera who steals some silver spoons and a coin. In high school, I was friends with someone whose name was thrush and someone whose name was magpie. I use the word friend very loosely for the latter because she disappeared into a land of harpies, of buddha-toads, of centaur-angels, of whirlwind-women. In between the time I wrote this, I had a dream about someone entirely different I knew in high school. We were emphatically not friends.
William Grant Still - Animato: Humor from Afro-American Symphony - A bat flew above us.
Unfortunately, people aren’t hearing about William Grant Still and Florence Price from me, they’re hearing about them from Heather MacDonald.
I’m not asking you to listen to me about the coronavirus but you know, don’t do what Donny Don’t does, and by that, I mean, get vaccinated, wear a mask, keep your distance but don’t look like you’re trying to keep your distance, don’t lick doorknobs.
Amazing Grace - arranged by Frank Ticheli. The vocal part is performed instead by an oboe.
The Free Lance - from an operetta by Sousa
Semper Fidelis
I was hoping they’d play the Liberty Bell March as an overture but that might be far too silly.
The moon was low and sap brown.

burning question: how hard can it be to vaccinate the entire population of the Pitcairn Islands? There’s only 47 people there (approximately 38 are vaccinated, going by the chart). Also, it’s good to know that all your secret illegal accounts in the Cayman Islands are in good hands.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Polonaise from Eugene Onegin
Johann Sebastian Bach: Concert for Two Violins in D Minor - The violinists are Romanian. I'd never think that because the name Jojatu sounds Finnish. I guess when you say it aloud (J in Romanian is ʒ, because Romanian wants to be different. They even prounce the letter C as "k" and not "ts" like every other Eastern European country (unless you count Turkey as Eastern European)) it does.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony no. 2
Aaron Copland: El salón México - I don't know what it is about Copland but his music and the acoustics do not get along at all.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherezade
I'm pretty sure I've heard all of these before and have already commented on them. Just don't bother googling it. Instead, here's a story about trains in Bucharest. Piața Romană Metro Station has platforms that are less than a meter wide. Because the train station had to be built in secret, see. Because Elena Ceaușescu said "that those damn lazy college students can just walk." Not with those exact words. I dunno, something in Romanian.
The train I took to get home was one of the old Red Line trains, still chugging along for a few more years. Seems like the new ones were built to specifications, they were just built to the wrong specifications. I blame techies, personally. Not deliberate sabotage because it's not just the new orange line trains, but because techies are really good at creating issues.

So, uh, here are some other thoughts:

I think that white centrists/liberals are creating a racial disparity by targeting blacks and Hispanics with anti-vax propaganda and then exploiting that disparity.

Here’s a taxonomy of anti-vaxxers.
1. Republican elites, disaffected liberals, politically homeless types who are themselves vaccinated but grifting is far too profitable or because they're benefiting from the pandemic or because they want to use the pandemic as an excuse to kill things off quietly. Why, I'm convinced that this whole fiasco with mask mandates in schools is a Chestertonian ploy to get rid of public schools entirely. Disaffected liberals and politically homeless who themselves advocate vaccinations but are a part of the feminist to fascist pipeline, like Daisy Deadhead, are not at all absolved of blame.
2. The above, but they’ve fallen for their own grift and are therefore unvaccinated. Tim Pool Abi Roberts and many many other TERFs fall into this category. I mean, it makes sense, right? It's all cynicism about BIG PHARMA.
3. People who think they know better than the experts because they work in the medical field or, you know, because they read a shit-ton of Golden Age science fiction. A lot of them are part of self-publishing author cliques. After all, Saint Heinlein and Saint Kipling would not mandate vaccine. As Kipling once said, "just as the Cow must be allowed to say 'moo,' the Pangolin must be allowed to spread His Disease."
4. People like L. Jagi Lamplighter who genuinely believe that vaccines are made from the souls of the unborn and the DNA of Nephilim and/or Nepharim. Sheep leading sheep.
I had this thought after seeing a bunch of things knocked over: yeah, definitely the Nephilim DNA injections.
Vox Day falls under type 2 and type 4.

Vox Day's blogspot account is gone and for now, the world is a slightly better place. I'm hoping it's permanent. But I get the feeling that they'll bring it back quietly.
I think the reason they banned him is because the anti-vax movement was becoming a liability for them. It sure as hell wasn't the racism or the stalking or the harassment campaigns.

Or, in the words of some asshole on 4 chan:
They SHUT DOWN Vox Day blogspot! THEY SHUT HIM DOWN!
Burning Question: Who wrote that shit, Smilin’ Cynthia McKinney?

I think we’ve lost Praxis Stage but Brown Box Theater is still with us. I’d rather it be the opposite, because, while Brown Box Theater has actual production values, Praxis Stage holds shows in T accessible places and not in the wildlands of Plymouth or the glorified car suburb that is Allston. Or Uxbridge, Webster, and Boxborough. I have no idea where the hell those are. I looked it up and Boxborough is next to Littleton, near Pepperell and Berlin. Wilmington is near Lawrence. Uxbridge and Webster are on the northern border of Rhode Island.
The Artery said they had a performance in Cambridge, which is technically true, but is in fact referring to Cambridge, Maryland.
Long Wharf Park is the most optimal. It’s actually a pretty nice location if you can get over the fact that you’re in the Financial District on a weekend. There’s Tatte because if Israelis are good at things, it’s food and shooting themselves in the foot with regards to their relationships with the rest of the world. There’s Falafel King if you’re willing to walk. Google is telling me that Noon is still somehow open.

Across from me on the train ride in was a woman holding a tambourine. The fanky "new" train we were on was probably older than she was.

Despite being called Music and Healing, this isn't the week Longwood does their stuff.

Bedřich Smetana - Dance: Skočná (Dance of the Comedians) from Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride)
I swear this is the music used when the Coyote is chasing the Roadrunner and the video pauses to show the faux-Latin scientific names.

Sergei Rachmaninov, or Rachmaninoff, if you prefer. I think that Rakhmaninov might be even more accurate. - Symphonic Dances
His last orchestral work, written in a short timespan towards the end of his life. The first movement (Noon) is filled with youthful exuberance. The second movement (Twilight) is a stately waltz but one with an undercurrent of melancholy. The third movement (Midnight) is a Dies Irae but with a Russian hallelujah.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (They call him Taylor Coleridge in the liner notes but Taylor Coleridge is a poet, Coleridge-Taylor is the Sierra Leonian composer) - Dance nègre
It evokes birdsong. Maybe not birdsong in Sierra Leone, if Molucca is anything to go by.

Arturo Márquez - Danzón no. 2
The dancer with Parkinsons gave this an elegaic tinge.

I should probably point out that Heather MacDonald and City-Journal, which hides its far-right nature with a respectable name, is getting up in arms about the revival of black composers. In the article, which I will not link to but I will try to siphon off her pageviews by calling it out by the name "Classical Music's Suicide Pact" or "How Wokeness is Destroying Classical Music", she targets Florence Price specifically. Yes, I have noticed that Florence Price is getting more airplay on the radio but I thought that was due to her Boston connections. A commentor points out that many of Florence Price's current champions are also into avant-garde music. I myself am guilty of this. And I definitely recommend Christine Southworth, if you really want to cheese off BobTheButcher. They're not musicians. They're patrons and donors and only want to hear the fixed canon.
After eight years of Obama and conspiracy theories from the right, four years of Trumpism, and sixteen years of neoconservatism's failure to turn Afghanistan into a free market republic, I'd say racism is pretty fucking entrenched in the mainstream right.

Duke Ellington - The River
In between movements, someone read from postcards about experiences early on in the pandemic. The dog, an Aussie-Border Collie mix, in front of me really wanted to be part of the dance. In between me and the dog was a woman from Sydney, Australia.

I got my dinner at Pauli's and earlier, I had a thought that if there's a silver lining to Afghanistan falling to the Taliban, it's that the price of opiates is going to go way way up as they start extorting poppy growers, and when I got the sub, they had things set up for covid anyway and I doubt they'd let anyone into the bathroom anyway.
On Democratic Underground, they're blaming Pakistan and think that Afghanistan should be dissolved amongst Iran, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
I don't know if it's just spite or if this is just part of their authoritarian tendencies, because Pakistan is the only one of Afghanistan's neighbors with even a semblance of human rights.

The moon was a thin crescent the color of rust.

burning question: do you ever find yourself thinking that Subterranean Press is too affordable? Well, now you can buy Vox Day’s Summa Elvetica for 500 dollars.
That’s not the most expensive book I’ve ever seen but I get the feeling that the 50,000 dollar copy of Michael and the Magic Man is some kind of scam. I’m not over that. I’ll never be over that. I’m about as likely to read that book as I am to read Gold Fame Citrus (but for entirely unrelated reasons) (or, for that matter, Arts of Dark and Light, and this is for two reasons: one, the internet archive happened. Two, a thread on Sufficient Velocity happened. And that means I don’t have to read it barring the unlikely release of part two of Sea of Skulls and beyond. I mean, miracles happen. They just aren’t for our benefit. Even after 3.5 billion years of evolution shaping us into a worthy vessel for souls) but I’m sure it’s far better than Summa Elvetica.
I went on Subterranean’s website and apparently 500-800 dollars is standard for a “signed lettered edition,” whatever that means, and 150 for a “numbered edition,” whatever that means, which is also signed.
The signed and limited editions of books you can get elsewhere don’t bother me as much as the books that are Subterranean exclusives and also overpriced.

I just want to test something.
All views:


Views on this post, including mobile:

One of the things we lost in the pandemic is the descriptive programs. Instead of that, we get biographies of the violinist and vocalist. I'll do my best to write descriptions based on what I've heard and what I've read.

On the way in to Boston, there was a guy regaling his friends with stories about losing money at the casino, reasons to kidnap someone, Everclear, and having to destroy his uniform with a boxcutter because sometimes people acquire old uniforms and then steal things or whatever.
I found three books, two of which not even the Internet Archive has (Virtual Girl by Amy Thomson and Cassilee by Susan Coon. One, Cloudcry, by Sydney Van Scyoc, I was mistaken about), at Brattle Books, so that even if nothing else went right, August 5, 2021 would still be a victory.

Gabriella did show up, despite the rain and despite it being held on a Thursday instead of the typical Wednesday. Later, on the train ride home, there was a woman with a tattoo of a Medusa head on her leg and a woman with mesopelagic blue hair and matching mesopelagic blue eyeshadow. Earlier, someone spilled a bag of cheez-its on the train floor. I was hungry, but not that hungry.

George Gershwin - Strike Up The Band Overture
A really festive introduction for our first concert in almost two years. The trees seem more bedight in moss than usual, the gardens more overgrown. Perhaps it is neglect, perhaps just the unremitting rains of July.

Florence Price - Concert Overture no. 2
To me, it evokes Antonín Dvořák's 9th symphony, and quotes from Go Down Moses, up until the second part, where it becomes more triumphal, like a brassy late Henry Cowell. Then it goes back and forth between the fanfares and the increasingly intense spiritual. a woman with a sprawling dark birthmark on her arm took a picture of the stage. She had a yellow filter on her phone that made it look like a Hollywood movie set in early 21st century Mexico. So it goes.

William Grant Still - Spirituals

Nkeiru Okoye - I am Harriet Tubman, Free Woman
An excerpt from an opera about the life of Harriet Tubman. Harriet Tubman lived from 1822 to 1913. Nonetheless, the excerpt sounded like a Jazz Age torch song.

James P. Johnson - Drums
It delivers exactly what it promises and then some, and by that, I mean some brass and a flute solo. James P. Johnson was primarily a composer of jazz, and wrote the Charleston.

Jules Massenet - Thaïs: Méditation
An intermezzo for an opera as a duet between orchestra and violinist. By then, it was dark, and the church spire arose like a mutilated finger and pointed blasphemously at heaven.

Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony no. 5.
burning question: Isn’t it a wee bit premature to be claiming V for Victory? In their defense, they probably didn’t see it coming. I mean, I had that thought about prematurity back in June because I was expecting it to dwindle away by October, not August. I mean, who could have known that the anti-vax movement was so powerful? Oh, right, EVERYONE, because we can’t get vaccinated for lyme disease. Out pets can, but we can’t. Because of the autism hoax, you see.
Even the weather agrees with me. Or maybe it doesn't, I don't know, It's been doing this since the end of June.

I’m confident that I’ll get back to semi-regular updates by August. Remember how I said that these emotions on the edge of the Plutchik wheel don’t exist for me? If I did say that, anyway. Well, that’s not quite true. I’m confident about things but not full of confidence.
Sometimes I think the variants are going to reduce all our efforts to naught and sometimes I think we're at the phase in the pandemic in which it's mostly gone but people still want the excuse to kill off institutions quietly.
I don't want Figment to end. Figment had a place in a pre-Trump world as it must have a place in a post-Trump world. It's like Pride. Things got way better and yet Pride is still a thing.

So this is just me speculating here but the reason BLO isn’t doing Madame Butterfly has fuck and all to do with this current situation with stopasianhate or whatever and everything to do with the future not being so set in stone that they could put on a popular opera at half-capacity at best.

Without concerts, I’ve reverted back to the old ways of discovering music. Well, not the old ways, because that would involve listening to a station that no longer exists and even if it did, it would be playing the same exact shit they played ten years ago. Not those old ways either, because that would involve going on last.fm and browsing similar bands.


Unicorn Ensemble - Mari Stanko
Jenny Dee & The Deelinquents - The Moon Was Low
Drill - Painted Pictures
Ladyhawke - Chills
Deftones - Urantia
Los Silvertons - Por Ti Estoy Sufriendo - One of the things I’ve discovered on Radio.Garden is a Peruvian station in Chelsea, MA.
Charlotte Dipanda - Aléa Mba - and a pop station in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Tirana, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo all have really good classical stations.
Charlotte Mbango - Mbemba Iyo - Putumayo is really good in certain milieus, that is to say, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, West Africa, Western Europe. But they have some glaring blind spots, that is to say, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, East Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, really, the entire former Soviet Union, Scandinavia, Finland.
Jean Bikoko Aladin - Jolie Yèm - Really, anything formerly communist aside from Benin, and don't bother pointing out that they have a Cuba compilation because Fidel Castro is just a conservative wearing a beret.
Team Teamwork - Lyrically Inclined (J-E-N-O-V-A)
Circus Trees - The Theft
Strange Passage - Beneath the Flowers (and the Clovers)
Georgia - Started Out - You can debate about music as a whole all you want but I think pop music has definitely gotten better in the last five years. That's the second most controversial opinion I'll share this year.
William Basinski - O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow
Airiel - Bloom
Roomful of Teeth - Just Constellations
Ludwig van Beethoven - English Bulls - Did you know that Beethoven did a cycle of Irish songs? Because I sure as hell didn’t.
Men I Trust - Tailwhip - There are songs I like enough to seek out, there are songs I’ll tolerate but don’t really care enough about them to find out what they are or who they are by, and there are entire genres I’ll dismiss out of hand which we will get to later.
Hennah Kendall - Spark Catchers
Numinous - Vipassana
Värttinä - Seleniko
Henry Cowell - Concerto for Koto and Orchestra
Calico Blue - Santa Fe
Hadestown - Flowers
Molly Pinto Madigan - Swansong
White Hinterland - Mon ami la rose
Carissa Johnson - Somewherebound
Parannoul - 오늘의 하늘은 맑음 - I miss Best Music From Worst Korea
Kinoko Teikoku - フェイクワールドワンダーランド - I can understand a lack of Japanese pop because the record industry in Japan is basically like “how dare non-Japanese people listen to our music” but you’d think the Korean pop industry would be the opposite and submit stuff to Putumayo for compilations. I understand Iran because they haven’t had a music industry in 40 years.
Tomas Luis de Victoria - Requiem
Jorja Smith - Rose Rouge - It took me a few listens to get the lyrics.
Kaija Saariaho - Cinq reflets de ‘L’amour de loin’ - Ogg. For when you want all the disadvantages of mp3 and all the disadvantages of flac but none of the advantages of either.
Kindling - It Will - Huh, I must’ve downloaded some stuff from their bandcamp and then forgot about it.

Dishonorable mentions:
I take back what I said about Shake it for the Squirrels. Yes, it’s vapid. But it reaches the bare minimum of competence. They can play their instruments, although they probably shouldn't. And I only really mention it because obviously, it’s about the dumbasses that are known as grey squirrels. American red squirrels don’t go that far south. They’re mostly northeastern and midwesstern and mountain western, although they do have a presence in the mountains of Tennessee. Not Georgia. It could be about chipmunks but it would specify chipmunks because most people are only dimly aware that chipmunks are a type of squirrel.
There’s a song that may or may not be by Florida Georgia Line (I don’t think it is from a very very cursory look at the video, but then again, I could only stand to listen to FGL’s Long Live for about 3 seconds total. However, it is by far the most famous work of bro country that uses "long live" in its lyrics and it's impossible to find anything else) in which during the chorus, the singer yarls out "Looooaaaaooonngg liiiieeeeevvvvvvv" like an exceptionally amorous fox got his foot caught in a bear trap.
There were signs that the world was growing weary of bro-country but someone said that the coronavirus revived it.
People call bro-country hip hop for white people who are afraid of black people. That isn't accurate. You want to know what I think? Post-grunge, which is very dudebro, was by far the most dominant form of rock music in 2001. After 9-11, all of a sudden it became cool to be a good old boy because Bush had that folksy persona and Toby Keith was singing about putting a boot in your ass because that's the American way, and that siphoned off all the post-grunge people, and they just kinda sang about the same vapid shit but added a dopey fake southern accent and maybe a banjo. Even the Canadians. Except for My Darkest Days, apparently. Also, you had a period where every fading singer went country. No, I am not over Aaron Lewis. You're from Springfield, MA.
Kid Rock doesn’t count because he’s always been bro-country adjacent, even before bro-country was a thing.
I agree with Lauren in that I don’t like country unless it’s Johnny Cash or has some good fiddlin’.

As far as I can tell, Latma TV is defunct. And even if it wasn't, I doubt I'd be listening to their take on the latest war in Gaza. I have my own take. Hamas wants to make it clear that occupying Gaza is not worth the effort. Israel agrees with them. Meanwhile, Fatah doesn't give a shit, they just care about suspending elections indefinitely. Israel’s policy towards the West Bank is to just let Fatah do its thing until some settlers decide they want to live there. Or if they get too sympathetic towards Gaza. You are not allowed to relocate from Gaza to the West Bank but you are allowed to relocate to Gaza from the West Bank. In fact, Israel will make it super easy. Great weather. Beautiful views. Great fix-er-upper. $199999 or best offer.
If these recent post-treaty flareups are an attempt to force people from the West Bank to Gaza and then they can rule Gaza through Fatah, then somehow I don’t think they thought their cunning plan all the way through.

Speaking of worse music, 4chan’s /mu/ put out an album of Kid A covers. Um. It's bad. I’m not even sorry to say this. The only thing that really stands out is their cover of the Natioanl Anthem, which replaces the angry traffic jam trumpets and/or trombones with some guitar cacophony. And the vocals are exceptionally bad, even by kid /mu/ standards. It has two stars on Rate Your Music, which is more than it deserves.
the instrumentation on the whole thing is decent-ish (that might be my low expectations speaking) so it sounds like someone badly singing karaoke.

Continuity:
I ate a dragonfruit and I agree with both Primrose and the guy who lives alone and gets lonely so he buys swords to cut dragonfruit in half, and by that, I mean a dragonfruit tastes like a watered down kiwi.

Alyssa has tattoos of elemental sigils, of the moon going through its phases and of the planets, of the fuck-me light from Shadow of the Colossus, a game I need to play because I am reminded of the fact that there is a very good PS4 port. I didn’t seek out the PS3 port because I’ve heard it was a disaster. Not Mortal Kombat for Game Boy levels but nothing reaches that level. Oh, wait, there actually is worse: Ninja Turtles for DOS, which is literally unbeatable.

Tori has tattoos of the dust spirits from Spirited Away.
This actually happened last year.

The Happening World:
North Korea banned South Korean pop and it’s kind of understandable given that North Korea maintains control over their country by convincing them that as bad as things are, people are worse off literally everywhere else. Aside from the isolation, they really are just a bog-standard authoritarian state. The only really nasty thing they have is imprisoning entire families.
Myanmar maintains control with good old fashioned violence.
I honestly think that if North Korea wasn’t, you know, North Korea, it would get a partly free rating by Freedom House. Like Uganda. Like Mali. Like Zimbabwe. Like Aung San Suu Kyi’s Burma. Like Aung San Suu Kyi's Burma when it was committing genocide.
Oh yeah, there was a coup in Burma. I'm not sure why because Aung San Suu Kyi was just a rubber stamp for the army. Mali also had a coup. I'm not going to mourn Aung San Suu Kyi but Mali's different. Mali had one of the better political systems, and I say this, but it was a double-edged sword. On one hand, you won't get the Republican party degrading into the white people party, but on the other hand, ethnic groups and regions don't really get to air their grievances politically. The state of rebellion the Tuaregs have been in for the last fifty years tells me that it is far from a perfect system, but it's a far sight better than what they have now.
I would go into more detail about this had I went to the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s The Merchant of Venice. I’ve read that it was a response to Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, which was anti-semitic.

Burning question: Are robots like cops, in that they have to say "yes" if you ask them if they're robots?

Which translates to United State Presidential Race


The translation is "mostly" complete so I’m going to attempt it. I don’t know why I’m saying mostly complete. There’s a truth about limited memory and text.
There are probably ways around it, like combining common letter combinations like ch and th into a single character and reducing the letters you need to a lean 52 or even 26 or even 24 if you can find a way to not use Q and X.

[clicky]


Alas, Kang… I mean Bob Dole… isn’t playable and you can't run on a platform of "abortions for some, miniatuare American flags for others" which is apparently the winning formula for an election.
Also democrats are red and republicans are blue. That’s because this whole red state blue state thing started with the 2000 election, which went on for five weeks and so red and blue was ingrained into our collective consciousness. Before, they were pretty arbitrary, with blue usually being the incumbent party.


George H.W. Bush was the winner of the actual 1988 election. His running mate was Dan Quayle. If you've played Fallout 2, you might remember Daniel Bird, who talked entirely in Dan Quayle quotes.


For whatever reason, Margaret Thatcher is eligible to run for president. She is opposed to Japan. I’m not sure if the actual Margaret Thatcher was but back in the 1980s, Japanese electronics and pop culture were spreading across the world.



I always mix up Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson. Pat Robertson is a Charismatic evangelical who believes in faith healing and deflecting hurricanes with the power of prayer (and we can blame him for Hurricane Gloria), thinks that killing someone in a video game is akin to killing someone in real life, believes that termites don’t build things, attacks homosexuality and feminism (which encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians) and abortion and college students, had a child out of wedlock, called Scotland a dark land overrun by gays, possibly had business dealings with Charles Taylor and Mobutu Sese Seko and possibly embezzled charity money. Pat Buchanan is a paleoconservative isolationist holocaust-denier who attempted to stop the deportation of Karl Linnas and John Demjanjuk, and along with Donald Trump called for the lynching of the Central Park Five, who were wrongfully accused of rape. Buchanan briefly worked as communications director for Ronald Reagan. Both Pat Buchanan and Pat Boone, who is a conservative Christian who is well known for watered-down versions of rock&roll songs, wrote for World Net Daily.


Michael Dukakis was the front-runner on the Democratic side of things. He was taken down by accusations of being soft on crime, even though he had a double digit lead in the polls.
I've met him.
No, really.


Jesse Jackson is a reverend and civil rights leader. He looks kind of like Lando here.


I don’t think Suzuki is a real person. In real life, the rest of the candidates were Al Gore, Paul Simon, Dick Gephardt, and Gary Hart. Also Joe Biden. And Pat Schroeder.
No, not that Paul Simon. He won Illinois.


Everyone’s blood type is listed because in Japanese culture, blood types are a big deal.


But, hey, people probably know their blood type and that can be useful in many situations.


I don’t know my blood type. I do know my zodiac sign, mostly because I wasn’t raised by wolves. But that won't help me if I ever need a blood transfusion.


Anyway, my point is that your advisor doesn't affect the game in any way.


This entire game is a misnomer. You’re not running in a general election, you’re running in a primary.


No wonder why I can't win this. It's because my chosen candidate is campaigning in the Michigan primary somewhere in the far-flung reaches of South Dakota. I’m not sure what these people want. So I’d assume that the thing that farmers would like is opposing cuts to farming subsidiary aids, supporting agricultural product price support, and dealing with pollutants, because, I dunno, I assume these farmers grow sorghum or corn or wheat, not moo cows. Diamond and Silk did an entire song and fucking dance routine about letting the cows say moo, letting the moo cows fart, and letting the cows spread disease. Hey! You! Leave them farting cows alone! Unless I’m getting the sliders wrong.


The translation is... uh... lacking.




A guide tells me this is inaccurate. What it was in Japanese is “for” and “against” not “democrat” and “republican.” And to further complicate things, it’s not a binary choice, it’s a spectrum.
I don’t know what my voters want to hear and I don’t really know what I’m offering. Or maybe it’s because it’s Michigan and my base in Michigan isn’t farmers, it’s Detroit and college towns. And probably auto workers but I don’t know because the auto industry collapsed, putting the nail in Detroit’s coffin. There were attempts to revive it but they mostly failed. But maybe it’s like Trump. If I attack Japan enough, maybe I can get their approval.


25 is a good number. If you make too many speeches, you'll get tired, if you make it that far, that is. If you make too few, your approval rating will drop like a stone, if it hasn't already.
Let it be said that being left of center, even on things like civil rights, will not endear you to voters. Maybe try running on a platform of “as Overlord, all will kneel trembling before me and obey my brutal commands!”
In fact, Clinton, who was firmly in the center, didn’t win a majority of votes. He won because Perot was siphoning off votes. And apparently Clinton ran against Lyndon LaRouche of all people in the primaries.


The Earth platforms are as follows:
Developing resources, whaever that means. Promote or hinder.
Nuclear power generation. Promote or hinder.
Air pollution control. Strengthen or relax.
Civil rights movement. Promote or hinder.
Immigrant worker regulation. Promote or hinder.
Gun possession regulation. Promote or hinder.
AIDS patient isolation. Promote or hinder. In those days, AIDS was seen as a disease of gays and Africans and IV users and so little effort was made to combat it.
Anti-smoking measures. Promote or hinder. Recently, I had a conversation about Mrs. Doubtfire and how the climactic scene revolved around the smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants. I remember being asked which section we were to sit in as a kid but not as a teenager so maybe they were already on their way out. The ban came in MA in 2004, MD in 2008, NJ in 2006, and NY in 2003. Those are the only states I remember eating in restaurants in.


Defense platforms:
Budget cuts: support or oppose
Military strength increase: support or oppose
Strategic arms reduction treaty: support or oppose
Ban on nuclear weapons tests: support or oppose
Star Wars project: support or oppose.
No, not that Star Wars. The missile defense system. The massively impractical missile defense system. Assuming they could knock out ICBMs and deal with decoys, it was useless against cruise missiles. George Lucas wanted nothing to do with it. But again, we’re not basing our stance on Star Wars based on how fucking stupid it was, we’re basing it on what people want and I assume people thought it was a good idea because they voted Bush to be Reagan’s third term.
Anti-government support in Nicaragua.
I couldn’t tell you anything about Nicaragua in 1988 but Wikipedia can. By then, Daniel Ortega was president and the previous dictator Anastasio Somoza was living in exile in Honduras.
I brought this up before. In those days, Central America was seen as the next big flashpoint after Indochina. But really, it all goes back to the 19th century, when Before the American civil war, William Walker and his band of filibusters (read: paramilitaries) Central America in order to establish Anglophone outposts that would be friendly to slavery, and briefly took over Nicaragua (The Confederate States of America had plans to annex Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean islands and even chunks of Colombia and Venezuela. I’ll take “things that will never happen” for 1000), and then throughout the 20th century, when Nicaragua was a US client state.
Anyways, I think of the Sandanistas as a bunch of socially conservative frauds, while Somoza was pretty open about his fascism. TVTropes’ useful notes page for Nicaragua says that there are former Contras who support Ortega and former Sandanistas amongst the opposition. I can see that, because it turned out that Daniel Ortega was every bit as conservative as Somoza, just with a bit of a social welfare bent. It’s one of five countries with a total ban on abortion. He’s the Smilin’ Cynthia McKinney of Central America. In 1990, a coalition of every other party in Nicaragua defeated Ortega.
Supporting Somoza will get you points amongst the neoconservative and anti-communist crowd. Supporting Ortega will get you nowhere, like a lot of things in this game.

Anyway.
Nuclear weapon production: cease or continue.
Mutual reduction of the Soviet Union Defense Force: Support or oppose.


Economy:
Taxes for finance reform: support or oppose. Bush won by saying "no new taxes"
Cuts to farming subsidiary aids: Support or oppose.
Space shuttle projects: promote or hinder. If you ask me, space research and exploration should be unmanned because robots don't eat or go mad from isolation like we do, and they can go a lot further and in even more inhospitable places. There are seas on Titan and oceans on Europa waiting for our exploration and if we send a probe to Alpha Centauri, we might get results back in less than a century.
Spending restraint: Strengthen or relax.
Complete welfare: Strengthen or relax
Consumer protection: Support or oppose.
Agricultural product price support: Support or oppose
Computer program protection: Strengthen or relax


Social:
Christian morality: Promote or hinder.
Mandatory worship in public schools: Support or oppose
Patriotic education: Promote or hinder
Abolish obligatory bus transportation to school: Support or oppose. So when I saw this, I thought it would be about the busing programs. Basically, the school system in this country is Jim Crow's greatest triumph. Busing meant that certain kids in black-majority districts, where schools were oft underfunded, would be selected to go to school in other districts instead. White parents were pissed.

I don't know if there was a push from conservative or really any circles to cut funding to school buses and tell kids who had parents who worked or otherwise couldn't get them to school that they were shit out of luck. But, honestly, with all I've seen, I wouldn't put it above them.

Recognition of brain dead. Support or oppose.
Pornography regulation. Strengthen or oppose. The thing that united the second wave feminists and the moral majority, and the thing that inspired The Handmaid's Tale
Prohibition of abortion: Support or oppose.
Improvement of childcare environment. Promote or hinder.


This being a Japanese game, there's an entire section on US-Japan relations.
Japanese car import regulations. Strengthen or relax.
Regulation on dumping of Japanese goods. Strengthen or relax.
Imported agricultural produce freedom demands. Strengthen or relax.
Plans to include new trade laws. Support or oppose.
Withdrawing tariffs, surcharge on imports. Support or oppose.
Prohibition of whaling. Support or oppose.
Advancing Japanese capitalism. Promote or hinder.
Improving the defensive strength of Japan. Promote or Hinder. Japan isn't allowed to have an army, mostly because the last time they had one, the world is still reeling from it.


Rest of foreign policy.
Automobile import regulations. Strengthen or relax.
Apartheid sanctions: Strengthen or relax. Apartheid lasted until 1994. Ronald Reagan was ok with it. He said that the sanctions would mostly hurt the black majority. But let's be honest here. Things couldn't really get worse for them. Highest imprisonment and execution rate and being disqualified from all but the hottest and noisiest jobs. Critics of the regime were disappeared. De Klerk realized that South Africa was becoming a pariah state.
Truth is, Republicans viewed the ANC as communist.
Sanctions on Iran: Strengthen or relax. By 1988, Iraq was launching its final offensives, ending Iran's offensive capabilities and forcing a ceasefire. A few years later, Iraq invaded Kuwait and an international coalation ended the Iraqi Army.
Really, it's because they overthrew the fascist-sympathetic Shah.
COCOM regulations: Strengthen or relax. It's an agreement on what can and can not be sold to communist countres, if you want to know.
Panama Canal restoration: Support or oppose. So I don't know if restoration means handing the canal over to Panama or keeping it in US hands.
Relations with China: Promote or hinder.
Tariffs on oil imports: Support or hinder.







Some things they didn't bother to translate at all.






Spoiler alert: He didn't. I feel like usually front-runners don't. Nixon being a notable exception. AROOOOOOOO!
I think I’ll accept that beating this game or even making it as far as Super Tuesday is a hurdle I’ll never jump. I am starting to suspect that this game wants me to pick one specific policy and not deviate at all from their expectations.

In those days, the democrats had appeal among the working class. All age groups as a whole went for Bush, although there wasn’t really a spread. I knew about Reagan Youth.
Dukakis only won amongst people with an income under $12,500.

Anyways, I hope we get the all-clear signal soon but I'll see you in July at the latest.

burning question: I can understand people who downplay the virus because feedback loops and walled garden syndrome. However, how in Etro’s holy fuck are there people who are registered nurses who are this fucking ignorant? I knew she was conservative but I was honestly hoping she at least thought Trump bungled the pandemic horribly and would rather put up with four years of Biden. I don’t agree with it but I can vaguely see where her disdain for poor people and people who don’t speak English comes from. In fact, it kind of reminds me of Drow’s position that not only should English be an official language, everyone should learn English and only English. I guess I was wronger than a quick turtle. Maybe it’s because she’s that relatively small number of conservatives because she’s a misanthrope instead of being conservative because she’s in an established relationship with someone who's conservative.
burning question: I just answered my own question, didn’t I?

74 days until the vernal equinox


This game wasn’t released in North America because Nintendo hates us. Well, up until the Wii’s virtual console, which released it only in Japan, and then the Wii U, a system that flopped, which gave us the PAL version, which increases the speed and pitch of sounds.

[clicky clicky]


So, the plot, revealed in the manual, is that once in times unknown to us, there existed a world called Ufouria, where four species inhabited its lands in peace and harmony. Get it? Four. One day, Bop-Louie, Freeon-Leon, Shades, and Gil happened upon a gigantic crater when out on an adventure. In the crater was a crystal. Bop’s friends went close to grab it and the ground gave way and tumbling they went into the darkness. Bop-Louie climbed down.


In the Japanese version, Bop-Louie is a penguin.


Bop-Louie can’t swim but he can float.


In the Japanese version, the crows pooped on you instead of dropping weights on you.




You get a Mega Man esque password.


I’m not actually sure but I think you have to take the hit. It’s annoying because so far I’ve found no way to heal myself.

I later learned that you can stomp enemies by holding down when jumping.



Unfortunately, his friends have lost their memory.


This is an easy fight. When he picks that blob up and throws him, he’s usually standing too far away to do any damage.


I like his expression.


In the Japanese version, he's a girl dressed as a cat.


Technically, all characters can walk through snow. Freeon-Leon is the only one who can walk on ice without slipping.








This is the world. Later items allow you to see things onn the world.


Shades is a ghost who wears sunglasses. Double the pun!


This fight is just as easy but in a different way. Instead of throwing the guy at you from the other side of the screen, he instead gets close to you, jumps, and tosses him. And you can walk under it.


In the Japanese version, he speaks in archaic Japanese.




That's where the clown was. Unfortunately, it's locked.


I bet you thought that you needed Shades to get past this.


This is for much later, although I believe you can do it now.


This guy just drops you.


Those eggs are enemies.


But if you bring this egg to that bird in the nest, she'll be happy and take you somewhere with absolutely fuck-all to offer.




It was around this time that I learned you can stomp enemies by holding down and jumping. You have to do this to make this Rick and Morty side character looking fellow cough up a blob and then you have to throw the blob at him.




You get Bop-Louie's secret power by doing this.


That guy in the cloud also helps you and he takes you to a palette swap boss.


After you defeat him in the same manner as his green buddy, he transforms into a head and you stomp on him a few times.


The most useful powerup in the game.




Gill is also easy unless you lose control of that blob, in which case, it’s difficult to get it back. Try throwing the blob against the wall instead.


I think this portrait is supposed to be Freeon-Leon but the NES can only handle so many colors at a time.


In other words, Gil can swim.


In Japan, Gill’s name is Jennifer. I’ve heard that Gill is male in Japan but I dunno because Japanese has genderless pronouns and there are species of anglerfish in which the female is the size of a football and the males attach themselves to her and degenerate into gonads. Also, in actual Cornish, it should be written as Gwynnever, you big dumb idiots.



The keys are gold, silver, and mercury. No, wait, wrong game.


I also didn't learn that chests with medicine in them respawn, so I kept saving it for boss fights.




This guy you have to fight as Freeon-Leon who is quite slow. The only thing that makes him challenging.






This guy is annoying because in his first phase his hitbox is weird and in his second phase, he’s invisible due to flicker. I’m not sure if that’s intentional or just PAL framerates being weird.






This is agonizingly slow. Gil can only remove these blocks with his secret power. It takes two seconds to activate and it blows up everything in a one block radius. Even worse, going into the menu causes the blocks to reappear. I’m not entirely sure that was intentional.


The hitbox combined with the arc makes this guy annoying. The smiley guy pukes out a blob but it’s on a delay so that can screw you a bit too.


Water of Life is a full heal. I don't know if it respawns but even if it does, you have to use Freeon-Leon's freezing power to get to it and it's annoying enough and the game is easy enough that you can really just save it for the final boss.




You have to fight him with the secret power and spears rain down from the ceiling so you're going to get hit a lot.
This guy you have to attack with the special power and that takes a few seconds to activate. I assume you can use Freeon-Leon’s power too because you needed it to get to this boss in the first place. Or, at least, that’s how the game intended for you to get here. You can bounce off the enemies with Shades, get hit, switch to Gil, and hopefully get out of the lava before you die.


But once he loses his armor, he's completely helpless.


Otherwise, the only things you need to beat the game are the suction cups, the bombs, and the keys. Technically, you can beat the game without getting Shades but that requires pixel perfect jumping.






His expression is one of utter bliss, apparently.














Sadly, this is the only game of its type. There are other Hebereke games but they're puzzle games or racing games. It's also spiritually linked to Mr. Gimmick, a game I did not play for the Twelve Days of Wonky Roms, because Nestopia, the emulator I use to take easy screenshots, had graphical glitches.


It's a bit on the easy side but it's still worth playing.


burning question: So they call this game Ufouria despite the fact that not one second of this game is spent in the land of Ufouria? That's like calling Super Mario Bros. "Brooklyn."

75 days until the vernal equinox


Here's an obscure Japan-only game for the Famicom.

( Collapse )

burning question: Don't you hate when shitty people like the same things that you do? I'm not talking about things like Radiohead or whatever, which are so well-known that there are bound to be some dickholes who are fans, but more obscure things. I'm going through the SF Lovers' Digest and Curtis fucking Yarvin of the fucking Dark Enlightenment and NeoReaction movement is on there. Stop liking the things I do, you shit-hog who is friends with Steve Bannon.

76 days until the vernal equinox

In other news, vaccine distribution is going slower than hoped but they say they're working as fast as they can so I don't know if that was just officials being overly optimistic.

I found an advertisement for a Hellraiser video game that supposedly had one million worlds and it was the largest game for Nintendo. As soon as I saw that, I wanted to play it for the Twelve Days of Wonky Roms.
The thing is this: it doesn't actually exist.
I read that it used the Wolfenstein 3D engine but Wolfenstein 3D didn't exist then and the NES didn't have anywhere near the processing power to render something like Wolfenstein 3D so they tried to put a processor on the cartridge (chances are they couldn't get it to function properly) and I can't expect anything good given Color Dreams' track record.


Which means "Ninja Jajamaru: Galactic Battle."
In Japanese and Chinese, the word for galaxy is a compound word formed from "silver" and "river," not "milk."
In various northern European and Asian cultures, it's called the path of the birds.

[Click for Great Justice]

This was supposed to be released in America as Squash, with the characters renamed Maru and Cori and with a lot of terrible vegetable puns. There are rumors that Nintendo was responsible for this because it’s too similar to Super Mario Bros. 3. I don’t believe it because Nintendo allowed M.C. Kids which is equally Super Mario esque. If Nintendo is responsible, it’s probably because their policy on exporting a lot of games is similar to that of the Japanese music industry: non-Japanese are filthy gaijin so we can’t have them listening to our music, while the Japanese people living there have turned their back on the motherland and can not be allowed to listen to our music.


Nintendo had this tendency of generating hype and then pulling the rug out from under us. You know, Moon Crystal. Final Fantasy V. It's not like they left Moon Crystal a secret to everybody and a decade later, we learn that "oh, hey, there's this game that's Japan-only but someone translated it and it's really good." No. They had advertisements in Gamepro and everything.


The intro must be done by the Coach's Hotline guys.


In said abandoned American version, this was, instaed of being a spaceship, an unidentified flying onion.


Lettuce check it out, he says. I am not making that up.


Somehow, the text moves both too quickly and too slowly at the same time.


He's called King Kale in the American version.


Destroyda becomes Vegetron.






They probably meant Sakura


And they've been transposed from feudal Japan to outer space.


It seems like each character plays the same exact way.


Putting on a space suit gives you an extra hit.


I think I'm ducking here.


Oh no! It's Mac Tonight!


You have to make a high jump to get into the portal. To do that, you hold the B button to start running in place but not so long that you end up doing a spin attack.


17 minutes later, although some of that time was spent screenshotting the intro movie.


You can spell things with J A and S but I have no idea how that mechanic works.


You can also turn into a giant mechanical frog.


The music is rather good.


The first boss spends most of his time moving around the arena. Just jump on him four times and he'll explode into a Mega Man death but with smiley faces. Bosses kill you in one hit even when you have a space suit and I don't know if that's intentional or some sort of programming mistake and I think that little green alien has something to do with those letters you've collected.


You rescue the king.


And he gives you a hint... about pipes. Unlike Mario 3, his hints are actually relevant for the next level. I'm still not over the fact that the king of the 6th world is the one to tell you about the Magic Whistle and it's ambiguous enough to sound like it's in Water Land and not in stage 1-3. Or the fact that they kept Goomba's Japanese name.







Those guys hop out of pits in order to knock you out of the air.


If you jump on that guy, you'll only get to a platform.


You have to do wall climbing. Jumping off the walls is incredibly fickle. You have to hold the direction towards the wall while climbing it and when you jump off, you have to change direction in midair.


27 minutes later. I may have taken a short break.


They all say "Thanks, earthling. You've done well." No idea why I screenshotted every one of them.


The fire planet is in fact a giant Bomb from Final Fantasy.


Good thing there's a stage select code. You know, in case I forgot to take a screenshot of the fire planet.


This, amazingly, is the one I kept. After this is a rather annoying elevator segment.


Instead of jumping on the boss, you have to jump on the buttons to make him take damage but you have to do it really quickly.


And we've rescued the nutcracker.


Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3720 to 1.


This level is an autoscroller and a pretty fast one at that, with small platforms that drift away from each other. It doesn’t help that the start key only pauses if you’re holding it down. And I don’t know if that’s a dick move by the creator or a game bug or an emulation bug.


And in here we run into Ghostface.
Note: this game in fact predates Scream.


And Cthulhu.


And, uh, I don't know what those are.


Oh, boy, a portal maze!


it’s a jumping puzzle. In a maze. I hate both of those things. I can not jumping puzzle. A maze with a time limit. A jumping puzzle with required precision.


12 minutes later…


Thankfully, the boss is easy as piss. A portal appears, moves around a lot, and spits out Cthulhu, who spits out some acid or whatever.


The pattern on his body and face looks like the pattern on the level introduction screen.


That's no moon, that's a Lego knockoff.


That guy looks like a Mega Man enemy.


Even the clouds are rectangles. Strong Mad was wrong when he said that Cubeland is not a real place.
The enemies detach their heads from their bodies.


You can throw boomerangs or star bombs at those traps.


He hits the ground with his hammer, some blocks fly out of the ground, and then you stunlock him into oblivion.


I ended up in front of the king of the robots.


I like the aesthetics of this place.


Not the ice physics, though.


The pirates take two hits. One smashes them into the ground and their heads waddle about, and the next one removes them from the game.


It's another autoscroller but it's not as hard as the first one.




Conveyor belts are annoying.


Oh no! It's time for the hardest boss in the game!


He's so hard, in fact, that I couldn't beat him legitimately.


To get past him, I had to use the stage select code.


Just kidding!


There was no boss fight.




This planet is so polluted that you can walk on the clouds.


They're still using propellor planes.


Looks like a walrus.


It looks like you have enough height to get over this platform, but you don't.
It really does look like I have enough height to make it. You can’t jump and turn in midair and make it and you can’t land on the cloud either. You can’t run up the ramp.


Nine minutes later.


There's a Gravity Man upside down gimmick here.


If you ignore a few rather annoying jumping puzzles, this is actually a pretty good game.


Destroyda is the hardest boss in the game but that's not saying much. You can't stand on the pipe things. You have to dash jump when he comes down, and that's a question of timing, but you probably won't get hurt if you're on the sides of the screen.


I can't tell if it's Fu Manchu or a Stormtrooper riding a giant smiling Octorok.


Four hits later, you get the ending. Yay!


















That isn't a typo, I just hit the screenshot button prematurely.


I don't know what a Data Man does or what his power that Mega Man gets from him is.


I assume this is the music composer.