You know what’s pretty great? I appear to be the internet’s foremost expert in Dick Turtle surprise bags, having been the only human in history to ever photograph and document them. At least, that’s what a cursory Google search and a couple of Reddit threads suggest. I’m willing to accept that as irrefutable proof. I need to be the internet’s foremost expert on something.
That said, I did this “research” a while ago because I received a shocking email from a “fan” who had not only read my second Dick Turtle article, but also decided to complete the Dick Turtle colouring challenge that I had issued those many years ago. …Well, “complete” might be a bit of an exaggeration. Dick Turtle remains mostly uncoloured, but this is the first submission that I’ve ever received, so it’s the best by default.
Now that I’ve received a submission, I’ll honour my promise and use this post as a gallery for any other coloured Dick Turtle pictures that people send in. Considering that it took just shy of 17 years to get a single, partially-completed submission, I don’t anticipate that I’ll ever have to edit this post. Prove me wrong, children. Prove me wrong!
I entertain no delusions that people actually watch the content that I post to YouTube. It’s been entirely for my own amusement from the start, and I maintain that mentality to this very day. However!
Apparently, over the last month(ish), people have watched more than an entire work day of my “content”. That’s… something!
And, yeah, the views are “high”, but most of them are just robots who watch for three seconds or less. Or so I assume. They could very well be real people who watch for three seconds or less!
Anyway, I guess my point is: thank you, whoever is actually watching my videos. Seeing that watch time number go up makes me feel all the warm fuzzies. I can only hope that you don’t feel as if your time was wasted.
I also hope that for some reason you read my blog, so that you can appreciate my appreciation of you.
With these words, I have published 2,000 WordPress posts.
Well, it would be more than 2,000 if you counted all the articles that I haven’t moved over from the Angelfire site yet. And I have 28 partially-written things still sitting in draft form, some of which are actually done and I don’t know why they were never published. But whatever!
I wish I had something more exciting prepared, or, anything prepared. But honestly I didn’t even realize this milestone was coming up. Here’s a link to a random article I wrote in 2004 that I have a strong sentimental attachment to, and I even think it’s actually kind of funny. At least, it made me laugh when I was re-reading it after a couple drinks the other night.
Anyways! Congratulations to me, I guess, for having voided so many of my inconsequential thoughts onto the internet.
Please note that December of this year will mark TE’s 20th anniversary. If I stop writing until 2023, that’s 100 posts per year (8.3333333333 per month). Sounds kind of appealing…
I’ll do something better for 3,000. (No promises.)
Got another quick one today. There’s this space above my bed, and I’ve been meaning to fill it with something for years now. I just don’t know what it is that should go there. I was hoping that at some point, I’d have a flash of inspiration, or see the perfect thing whilst shopping for something else.
Alas! Four and a half years later and I have still not been wowed enough by anything to have hung it above my bed. The wall remains empty and cold.
Well, the buggiest game that I played in 2020, anyhow. It was actually released last year. And I have no intention of ever playing Cyberpunk 2077.
A Knight’s Quest is a game that I’d had on my Switch wishlist for a while, since it looked like a fairly decent Zelda-like. I bought it in June when it went on sale for a decent price, but then didn’t play it until December, due to an overloaded SD card. I can’t say I feel overly strongly about this in either direction. It’s perfectly fine. Kind of like what you would get if you wished for a GameCube-styled game that mashed up a Zelda knockoff and Mario knockoff.
But this isn’t a review. Oh, certainly not! This, my friends, is simply a round-up of every bug and glitch that I’ve experienced while playing this game. Let’s start!
Right off the hop – you can control Rusty (the main character) during the first cutscene after the intro sequence. While an in-engine scene is showing Rusty waking up on a beach after being washed ashore, you can mash buttons to have the actual player character version of him run and jump and swing his sword. If you’re lucky, you might actually run him into the camera’s view. I’m seeing double – four Rustys!
Not long after you “gain control” of Rusty, you’ll probably wade into the water and learn that he can’t swim. Like in Zelda games, he’s supposed to void out and respawn on the most recent solid ground that he stood on. Except one time when I jumped off the pier into what I thought was shallow water: Rusty drowned and voided out, only to respawn… in the water. where he drowned and voided out again. And again. And again. And probably would have continued to do so forever, until I paused the game and quite out to the main menu. It’s worth noting that the game only auto-saves, and only when you move between areas. Don’t take any unnecessary risks, kids!
Sometimes if you have Rusty jump onto a weird surface, like the back of a bench, he won’t be able to find his footing and get stuck hovering over it in his falling pose. If you can’t move him off the object somehow (which is surprisingly likely), he’ll simply die and void out after a while, as if he had fallen out of bounds. Today’s lesson: don’t try to stand on the backs of any park benches. They’re apparently quite deadly.
Remember how I said that manual saves are not an option, and the game only auto-saves when transitioning between two areas? Well sometimes, if you’re really lucky, the game will just crash in that transition instead of, you know, loading the map and saving. Hope you didn’t just come from exploring one of the bigger maps!
You can buy or find pickaxes to mine specific rocks in the environment to gather valuable ores. Nothing new, this is video games in 2020, after all. What is new about it, is that sometimes when you mine a rock, you get nothing for your trouble but a pickae is still removed from your inventory. These rocks are supposed to give you exactly one ore per visit to that map, then respawn once you leave and return, so it’s not as if you just didn’t find an ore that time. No, sometimes the game is just bugged and steals a pickaxe (or five) from you.
Occasionally, you’ll be walking along, and Rusty will sort of randomly float up slightly off the ground, as if there’s some invisible geometry below him. It also counts as unstable ground, so if you can’t wiggle him back to solid footing fast enough… see note 3.
Taking damage in battle will very rarely cause certain unfortunate “status effects” like: Not being able to use magic while holding the block button. Rusty becomes entirely unresponsive until he gets hit again. Rusty goes into T-pose and can’t do anything but hover around a bit until he gets hit again.
If Rusty ever takes damage from anything while airborne, be it an enemy attack or an environmental hazard, he’ll go into a ragdoll mode and flop to the ground. Several things can go wrong at this point. The funniest one is when the ragdoll physics mess up and Rusty goes flying into space as if he took a hit from a Skyrim giant. The more frustrating one is when Rusty flops to the ground and becomes completely unresponsive until he gets hit again – and if there’s nothing around to hit him… hopefully the last auto-save wasn’t too far back.
At one point, textures on some environmental objects disappeared, leaving said objects covered in a grey checkerboard pattern. Fun!
I don’t know if it could be considered a bug, but one of the boss fights is so poorly designed and frustrating that I can’t imagine it was made that way intentionally. Either somebody missed something during QA, or Sky9 Games just didn’t give a damn that it’s an awful experience.
This should, by no means, be considered a complete list. I’m sure that there are plenty of other bugs that I either didn’t encounter or weren’t significant enough to remember/write down. And to be fair, most of the bugs that I did encounter were mere annoyances at worst. It was only the game crashing coupled with the inability to save manually that really gave me a lot of anxiety. I was super lucky that it only happened (twice) while passing through areas. If it had happened after, say, completing a dungeon? Probably would have chucked the game in the bin right then and there.
But that didn’t happen and I played A Knight’s Quest all the way through to the end. Hooray!
Living in a tiny condo with very limited storage space, I’ve had to scale back pretty significantly on how many holiday decorations I have. I’m down to one big plastic tub each for both Halloween and Xmas – a far cry from the much more plentiful decorations I had when I owned a house.
I don’t know how this really relates at all to my topic for today, but that’s the intro I wrote. It’s somewhat related, but not really enough to be an actually good introduction. I’ll keep it anyway because I’m a crap writer and I want to make sure that people know that.
Anyway! Today’s goal is to root around your living space, find some craftable materials, and make yourself a new holiday decoration. Me, I’ve got a big pile of cardboard, some coloured construction paper, a bag of cotton balls, and a sharpie. What could I possibly be playing at here? It doesn’t at all seem like I’ve pre-planned a very specific project for this blog entry. No, sir.
It’s Cardboard Santa! Golly gee! How incredible!
All goofing aside, I had a lot of fun with this. I haven’t done crafts since grade school, so it was something completely out of my wheelhouse, and it’s fun to do different things once in a while. As long as they don’t require very much in the way of time or financial commitment, of course.
I don’t think that, in the nearly 18 years that I’ve been operating a website, I’ve ever once written about clothing or fashion. At least not in any capacity that relates to me and my fashion sense (or lack thereof). So this is… this is different.
2020 has been a bit of a tire fire, but if there’s one positive thing that I get to take away this year, it’s that 2020 is the year that I discovered skinny jeans.
I had grand plans for the summer of 2020 – namely to record and upload a video to my YouTube channel at least once a week. I failed miserably on only the third week. I’d like to blame technology, but in the end it still really comes down to me.
To explain: The wrench in the works here is that sometimes when I record a video, the file ends up being upside-down once I’ve moved it to my PC. I have no idea why, but it really shouldn’t have been a problem. Shouldn’t. But Camtasia 6 is like the only video editing software in the world that can’t flip a video’s orientation, and that’s the software that I’ve been using forever. My bad for using a far-outdated program, I suppose.
Yep. It’s over. And what a year for blogging it’s been. Or, not blogging. Since I didn’t do almost any until the last few months. I have a handful of year-end-type things to come, and the first is actually provided courtesy of Nintendo.
This year, Nintendo created a fun little widget for their website that shows some basic stats on all the Switch games you’ve played throughout 2019. Or, most of the Switch games, anyway. More on that later. First, let’s have a look-see at the dirt it’s got on me.
Generally speaking, I have no idea how accurate any of these stats really are. 699 hours? Sure, okay. And that includes probably over 150 if you combine the time logged on Fitness Boxing and Ring Fit Adventure, so that makes me feel better about that really big-looking number. Though really, there are roughly 2,920 hours of “free time” in a year (assuming you spend 8 hours a day at work, 8 hours sleeping, and 8 hours free), so spending 24% of it on Nintendo games ain’t so bad. I like when percentages make me feel better about my life choices. (Let’s not consider how many hours PS4 and PC games would add to that tally.)
Moving on, 63 different games played is probably pretty on-the-nose. I could go back over the Monthend Wrap-Ups to put it to the test, but ehhhhh that would be time consuming and I don’t really care. Maybe later.
As for the specific days when I played the most? November 23 is due to Pokémon Shield, no doubt. Easy. I’m actually surprised it wasn’t on launch weekend, to be honest. The days in July and August, though? Those are tougher. In July, I must have spent like a whole day playing Picross S3 or something, because I really don’t know what else it would be. That would also tie in with the individual game rankings. And the date in August I’m pretty sure must have been one of the days I was on vacation and stayed up all night playing Dragon Quest Builders 2. Yeah, there was more than one of those. I really loved DQB2.
So here’s where I really want to pick: the top 5 games played. Fitness Boxing and DQB2 absolutely belong there. Pokémon Shield probably earned its spot as well, even though it came out really late in the year. IGT says I’ve played for just over 63 hours. But I really wonder if Picross S3 and Final Fantasy IX belong. I played a lot of Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate in 2019, and I think that Ring Fit Adventure probably should have cracked the list as well. Heck, I’m pretty sure I spent more time with the Youtube app open after falling asleep than I did playing Picross S3. I adore Picross and all, but it doesn’t take me very long to burn through those games. But maybe the YouTube app wasn’t counted? Who knows!
Anyhow, that’s what Nintendo’s robots picked up on me, and who am I to argue? I’ll have some of my own numbers coming in next month, so stay tuned for that!
I won a new tablet at a social a couple weekends ago, a Samsung Galaxy Tab E Lite. What a mouthful. I really haven’t used it for much yet besides learning that mobile games are still garbage even on a bigger screen.
I’m currently toying with the concept of using it for blogging (I wrote this and the previous post on it), though I’m legitimately surprised at just how bad I am at typing on the thing. I’ve needed to go back and correct at least every second word, often more than once. Maybe it’s because I’ve had a lot lf tkme to get usdd to it, but I dkn’t type nearly as pooorly on my tkny pjkne.
I purposely didn’t correct that last sentence, in hopes of really driving home my point.
I was likewise shocked to learn how terrible this tablet’s camera is. That was what finally got me to do the research and learn that this is a tablet originally released in 2014, so it’s barely newer than my piece of garbage Kobo Arc 7. It came at the right price, but man… I was hoping for a slightly more pronounced upgrade.
Ah, I shouldn’t complain. The thing works, and that alone puts it miles ahead of the Kobo. But I still don’t think I can reasonably use this for blogging.
