The Doom Scroll - The Worst of Social Media, March 2021

Here’s the second installment of a new monthly feature on my blog where I bemoan the state of the world and rant about bad memes. I don’t know how many people actually liked the first Doom Scroll, it got about 12 views. But these are kind of therapeutic so I’m going to keep doing them. If too many people saw these posts I might have to get into a dreaded internet argument, and I wouldn’t want that. So the low view count kinda works for me anyway. I am at peace with my obscurity and eventual oblivion. 

March was quite a month to be on social media. The manufactured culture wars continued, and of course, humanity slid ever closer to oblivion. You might notice more Reddit this time around. That’s because my Facebook feed didn’t update much for the first half of the month. I kept getting stuff that was two or three days old and seeing it over and over again. Could it be Zuckerberg doesn’t like these blogs so he’s keeping me from seeing things? Ha, if only I were that important. The problem seems to have righted itself now though. Anyway, beware of edgy political opinions ahead. Keep in mind a big reason I write these blogs is to have an outlet without participating in online arguments, ‘kay? Also, having a month to work on them gives me time to form the perfect comebacks to things, which I would never be able to do in a real-time argument. But I hate arguing and debating, just so you know. And I don’t consider myself an expert in everything I talk about either. 

Places I’d Rather Be Than My Old Call Center Job #109,853,739

As a palate cleanser, let’s first have a look at the surface of a planet that isn’t facing immediate doom. One that isn’t divided into arbitrary territories called countries that all hate each other. That is unless Elon Musk has his way and space capitalism gets exported there. The Perseverance rover sent back breathtaking views of the surface of Mars in March. This is the surface of what was for the majority of human existence merely a red shiny dot in the sky. What would someone 1,000 years ago think of seeing the surface of another planet? The rover even sent back audio recordings. You can hear the wind on another planet. And yet while this was happening, everyone was whining about Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. Humanity is indeed doomed. Will humanity be able to refrain from destroying itself long enough to terraform Mars and live there? I have my serious doubts. If it does happen, you know you and I aren’t going there. It will be a refuge for the billionaires after they finish making this planet uninhabitable. Best us peasants can hope for is to be taken there as servants.

Shared in the subreddit r/spaceporn. Which isn’t what it sounds like. 

Another “Don’t Make Me Tap the Sign” Meme

I hate American politics. I would much rather think about astronomy and things like that. Higher, loftier thoughts. Or just escapist fantasy, that works too. But, it inevitably affects me and people I care about, so I can’t completely shut it out. I’m not going “back to brunch” like the neo-liberals though. 

“B-b-but, orange man bad!” they might say. Yes, I agree. But he lost. Can we not bring him up anymore? It’s the Fallacy of Relative Privation. “Sure, X is bad, but Y was even worse so we must tolerate X.” I may be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if the reason they failed to impeach Trump was so that they could keep him around as a threat to the left so that they won’t criticize anything Biden and his team does. If he runs again in 2024 it will be another convenient excuse to keep the two-party system going. We’ll be told we have to vote blue because “You don’t want the cheeto man back in the White House, do you?” It’s all a big show. Theater, really. I wonder if it’s scripted and predetermined like pro wrestling sometimes. This is why nothing ever changes or gets better in America. But before the inevitable repeat of 2016 in 2024, can we at least have a couple years where we’re not talking about the orange oompa-loompa man, please? 

It’s not an airport, no need to announce your departure 

It’s 2021, and people are really still fighting over Nintendo vs Sega like it’s 1991? This is just sad. So I am in a Sega Genesis group on Facebook, as it was my game system of choice throughout most of the 1990s. I even have access to every game ever made on it now thanks to my Mega Everdrive. And this schmuck posts this on March 5th. I cropped his name out as a courtesy, since I would want someone to crop my name out too if I said something stupid on the internet that warranted screenshots. (Maybe this whole blog is something stupid I said on the internet.) Not long after this, the group was flooded with pro-Nintendo trolls bashing Sega, who couldn’t find something better to do with their time. I buried the hatchet with the Super Nintendo years ago. I realize that being loyal to a corporation is meaningless, because they certainly don’t care about you, just your money. It’s about as pointless as nationalism, really if you think about it. Both systems had good games. Why restrict yourself to one system? Especially these days, when the rivalry between Sega and Nintendo has been over for 20 years. I have a Retron 2 bootleg game system that plays both NES and SNES games, which I bought after my old NES died. I only have Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Kirby Superstar, and a Super Game Boy cartridge that allows one to play Game Boy games on the TV, but it’s something. I guess there are some in the group who hold onto this immature grudge against the Super Nintendo like they’re still on the playground at Elementary School, this person isn’t entirely wrong about that. One day in about 30-40 years there will be a Nintendo vs Sega fight at a retirement home. People will never give it up. Prideful jerks just ruin everything. Why a grown ass adult would have their pride tied up in a damn game console is beyond me. Then again, is it any stupider than social constructs that people kill each other over, like religion, race and nationalism? In the eyes of the universe, in the cosmic sense, not really.

Who knew a Facebook group about a 30 year old game system could provide such insight into human nature? 

“Where are my grandkids?”

Man, if only I’d stop drinking lattes and eating avocados, I could be a millionaire. Anyway, I actually did have a kid on purpose, unlike many in my generation. I realize my wife and I are extremely fortunate to have a guaranteed roof over our heads. It would be a different story if we were struggling to pay rent and bills with both of us working full time. We probably wouldn’t have had a kid in that case. They’d just be stuck in daycare and most of our paychecks would go toward keeping them there. I’d rather, you know, actually raise my own kid, rather than miss their whole childhood while making a CEO richer. That’s what parents have to do these days. It was never like this before the 20th century. It’s like some people think that they’re immortal and that their kids will never grow up. They may technically know that’s not true, but they believe it deep down because their minds can’t contemplate their own mortality, and live out their finite lives accordingly. Meanwhile they’re wasting their kid’s childhood and the part of their lives where they’re still able-bodied working away at a pointless job. To paraphrase a quote by the Dalai Lama, people live as if they’ll never die, and then die having never lived. Most of my friends my age don’t have kids. I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want kids or can’t have them. Nobody can afford them. They screwed our generation over by feeding us to the student loan sharks. Not to mention the perpetually crappy economy. And the millennials that did have kids, mostly by accident, have to become the “welfare queens” that conservatives whine about. So which is it, have kids and rely on government benefits, or don’t have kids at all? If someone has a say in it, they’ll probably choose the latter. And then the wealthy elites will start to run out of peasants to exploit. Uh oh.

I forget where I found this meme. One of the lefty groups I’m in. 

Did Dennis Nedry do Nothing Wrong?

I was far too young to be reading the Jurassic Park novel when I was ten years old, but it was my favorite book. And the movie was my favorite movie. But until I started working, I never saw things from Nedry’s perspective. Would I have screwed over the companies I worked for at the call centers for a chance to get rich? Hell yes. In a heartbeat. They treated me like an expendable number anyway. Besides, Nedry couldn’t have known he’d be Dilophosaurus food while the park descended into Malcolm’s chaos theory. He was only supposed to be gone a few minutes to deliver the dinosaur DNA and get back to the control room. The power wasn’t supposed to be out long enough for dinosaurs to start escaping. It was just bad luck. In fact, and the book goes into even more detail about this, dinosaurs had already been escaping and breeding long before Nedry did this, even making it to the mainland. So you could argue the disaster was going to happen one way or another anyway. It helps that in the book John Hammond is much more of a villain himself. They toned him down a lot for the movie, because Steven Spielberg didn’t like the idea of an evil rich character. But even movie Hammond deserves the blame for what went wrong at Jurassic Park. He spared too much expense despite claiming not to. 

Shared in Jurassic Park Raptorposting.

What-aboutism and Mental Gymnastics in Azeri Internet Discourse

Oh look, it’s the Fallacy of Relative Privation again. It’s is every Turkish/Azeri nationalist’s favorite fallacy, followed also by the Red Herring Fallacy which gets used in genocide denial. It provides an indispensable golden ticket that justifies every single depraved genocidal act they commit. Either exaggerate or outright invent atrocities committed by Armenia, and suddenly it’s okay for a guy to murder another guy in his sleep with an axe because the murderer was Azeri and his victim Armenian. Even though neither of them had anything to do with any perceived wartime atrocities in the early 1990s because they were kids at the time and weren’t there when it happened. The victim just happened to be on the wrong team. Gives them permission to destroy all the churches and monuments they want as well, which was big news this month. I had to come to accept that any land they were able to ethnically cleanse in Artsakh last year is pretty much doomed, and you might as well forget about them preserving anything Armenian there. It’s gone. Helps soften the blow when more news comes out about about their latest act of destruction. I already mourned all of that back in November. I’m more concerned with people than buildings and such. Have to say though, it makes one grateful that all Turkey does with their abandoned Armenian churches is let them decay and crumble, or turn them into barns, or occasionally mosques if they’re intact enough. That’s still better than either destroying them or making them into “Caucasian Albanian” churches for historical revisionism. 

And yes, Armenians shouldn’t be doing this what-aboutism either, and they can do it sometimes, although I don’t see their hatred institutionalized and made an inseparable part of their national identity the way it is in Azerbaijan. You’d think the Azeri nationalists would at least stop acting like sore losers after ethnically cleansing most of Artsakh, but now they’re sore winners, doubling down on their xenophobic hatred. Azeri nationalism is a cult, it hinges on scapegoating and historical revisionism. I mean, so does most nationalism if you think about it. But while the United States has its own boogeymen, you don’t see the whole country cheering at leaked videos of American soldiers torturing and beheading Afghanis or Syrians, or whatever country we’re bombing this month while the news talks about something else. I remember when evidence of torture at a prison camp did come out during the Iraq war, Americans were appalled, aside from perhaps a few psychopaths. It was a scandal. Admittedly, that was an unusual example; the default reaction by the majority of Americans is to ignore those sorts of things. There’s a reason nobody really talks about the Iraq war anymore. I suppose you could draw a lot of parallels between Azeri nationalists and white supremacists in the United States, but while the US government and media does kind of subtly, low-key cater to these people behind the scenes, especially when Republicans are in office, it’s not quite to the degree that Armenophobia and Turkic supremacy is pushed by the government and media in Azerbaijan. The bigoted fascists don’t need dog whistles in Azerbaijan, it’s all out in the open. 

I’m a recovering nationalist myself, as I’ve written about in this blog before. You can enjoy your own ethnic culture and history without thinking yours is superior and hating other groups of people. Just like you can enjoy both Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. I’m over jingoism and tribalism, and the very concept of nation states. All it’s brought humanity is death. But I’m forced to take a side when ultra-nationalism threatens to morph into genocide. I am against the doctrine of Pan-Turkism and those who push it, not Turks and Azeris themselves. And I understand the Azeri nationalist trolls I see all the time on the internet don’t represent every Azeri, and neither does their petty, hateful dictator of a leader. I respect the Azeris who are able to deprogram from their minds all the hatred and bigotry that they’re force-fed by their government from the moment they’re born. But humans in general are a long way from getting to the point where they can overcome nationalism. Makes me want to go live on Mars.

Found on the r/ArMEMEia subreddit, which like the main r/Armenia subreddit has been terrible for my mental health these past several months. But I can’t bring myself to quit reading them. 

You know what, this calls for another palate cleanser. We need a break from all this depression. Here’s a nice picture I saw in my scrolling. 

That’s Lake Van at the top, Lake Sevan at the bottom, and between them is Mt. Ararat. You don’t see any borders from up that high, now do you? Countries aren’t real. They’re abstract constructs. Flags, national anthems, it’s all fake. Delusions created by an insane species. Humans are like little ants, fighting over ant hills. It’s good to be reminded of that before the news gets me down.

This one was shared on an Armenian group I’m in, from this page:

https://m.facebook.com/pg/Сдам-в-аренду-мысли-1437012379651420/posts/?ref=page_internal&mt_nav=0

Obey. Consume. Stay Asleep.

I love the movie They Live. Take out the sci-fi elements and it’s practically a documentary. In it, a man finds out that rich people are actually aliens enslaving humanity, and finds a pair of sunglasses that decodes their subliminal messages in advertising and media, which when boiled down to one or two words is rather simple; “obey”, “consume”, “no independent thought”, “marry and reproduce”, “submit”. When he looks at cash through them it reads “This Is Your God”. I can’t see or hear an ad myself without thinking it’s trying to get me to consume and obey. Propaganda isn’t just old World War II posters. It is all around us, all the time, and permeates our consciousness to such a degree that it becomes like the air; all around us all the time, but we forget it’s there. 

Now this ad is a pretty insidious one. You might have to click on it to read it. Basically it boils down to “stop asking to raise the minimum wage or we’ll replace you with robots and you’ll starve and die”. You have to wonder who paid for that billboard. Whoever it was should be boycotted. Now if you ask me (I know nobody ever would, but humor me for a moment) one way we could “rehabilitate” capitalism, if such a thing were possible, would be to just go ahead and replace most jobs with robots, and then give people universal basic income, a guaranteed home at least as big as a small apartment, and universal healthcare. Stuff that the presidential candidate Andrew Yang was talking about. Pay for it by cutting the military budget and taxing the obscenely rich. There are more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people. Money is a made-up concept anyway. Our overlords could do this if they wanted to (but they don’t, of course). If people wanted more money than the universal basic income or wanted a nicer home than the one allotted to them by the government, they could choose to get some kind of job, but no one would be forced to choose between wage slavery and death. And no one would have to work 40 hours a week or more. They could do whatever endeavor they would actually want to do. Follow their intellectual pursuits. Enjoy their finite existences. You know, actual freedom, not the fake freedom the US has where how free you are depends on how much money you were born into. The more grueling and mindless jobs would be automated. Jobs that will always require a human touch, like a teacher for example, would have special benefits so that people would still want to do them. This still wouldn’t solve the environmental problems capitalism causes, but it would go a long way towards alleviating the human rights problems. Of course, greedy people won’t let this happen, and I have little hope of it happening any time soon. Wouldn’t want the peasants having too much time on their hands, they might actually start thinking and forming opinions. Instead of freeing us from labor, technology is instead being used to coerce us into doing even more labor, and to control and spy on the masses. But if the masses were having all their needs met, they’d have no reason to riot. Just saying. Replacing jobs with robots and just meeting the needs of the citizens so they don’t need employment to survive makes sense even from the perspective of our oppressive capitalistic overlords. They can even still keep brainwashing us with the media and ads, they could still have complete control. But they’re either too greedy or too sadistic to do this, or both.

 As far as my actual ideal world goes, this idea of “bring on the robots, make employment optional and give people at least the bare minimum needed to survive” would be merely a compromise. It would still be capitalism, you would still have different corporations competing with one another, you would still have consumerism, rich and poor, nation states, property and money. I think all of these concepts need to be either drastically reinvented or abolished altogether, or else humanity is going to kill itself, sooner or later. We live in a society based on trade, when we should have a society based on sharing (isn’t that right....Batman?). Everything is commodified. Land, healthcare, food. You can boil almost all the world’s problems to this. Why don’t the Israelis and Palestinians just share? There, you see, I just solved the Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict too. Why don’t we just share land? Why does it come down to this jingoistic “my people were here longer than yours even if we have to falsify history so the land is all ours and actually your people never existed”, or “face it, you lost the war, the stronger side won, just get over it and accept your oppression and genocide” idiocy? It’s the mindset of trade and ownership that causes such conflicts. It’s the whole reason crime exists.

Not to make sweeping generalizations, but many cultures in the Western Hemisphere prior to European colonialism were based around the concept of sharing rather than trade, and had no concept of land ownership, money, or rigid borders to nation states. It’s not impossible. No other living thing on this planet trades, but they do share. Is it really so evil to think sharing is better than trading? Is sharing lazy, weak or childish? Really examine why it is you think that, if you do. And while you’re at it, examine why you think those adjectives are even a negative thing, whether or not they accurately describe sharing, which I think they don’t. Who wants you to think that those adjectives are negative and accurately describe sharing? Who benefits from it?

There you go, give me the Nobel Peace Prize now, I just solved all the world’s problems, Suren for President 2024.  Eh, I’m just some poor deluded dreamer who’d rather live in the Land of Oz than the real world. An April Fool, if you will. But it doesn’t seem like rocket science. Society formed in the first place due to sharing. Trade divided us. And resulted in things like that monstrous dystopian propaganda poster above.

Found at the A Boring Dystopia subreddit. A fun place to doomscroll. 

There is no escape.

This post caught my eye as I was scrolling Facebook. An interesting piece of absurdist humor. Yes, the pink pony is right, for most people. It costs $2,350 to renounce your US citizenship, and if you don’t do it after leaving the country for good, the US will keep taxing you even though you aren’t living there anymore. I don’t really know what they would do if you just refused to pay and went off the grid, and got lost in the Amazon rainforest or the Gobi desert or something. I’ve heard fleeing the country is a good way to get out of student loans, because really what are they going to do at that point. But the IRS may not give up so easily. Maybe they would extradite you or something. So basically, along with the expenses of actually moving to another country (passport, plane tickets, shipping your stuff over, renting an apartment or buying a home, enough savings to last until you find some source of income), poor people are stuck here, doomed to spend their lives at crappy jobs while barely making ends meet, paying rent on apartments they barely get to spend any time in. And it’s probably no accident either. It’s by design. That’s what I find hilarious when conservatives say “if you don’t like America, I’ll help you pack your bags”. Thanks for the offer. I would leave if I could, but the system has made that impossible. I have this fun idea of getting conservatives to do a crowdfunding campaign where they help pay for willing liberals and leftists to renounce their citizenships and move to another country. At least they would be rid of us, and they could go ahead and have their gun-obsessed corporate owned theocracy unopposed, it’s a win-win. 

Catching Google Translate Being Sexist

Here’s an Armenia-related post that isn’t too depressing...although I suppose it can be if you get upset by sexism. Someone on the Armenia subreddit shared this. Now in the Armenian language, there are no gender pronouns. He/she/it are all the same word, է (eh). So why is it “She is beautiful”, and “she raises the child” and “she sews”, when it could have just as easily been “he” or “it”? Why does “he” have a high income, why is “he” a politician? How’s that for gender stereotypes? At least he cooks and cleans the dishes! 

Note that having a language free of gender pronouns hasn’t exactly translated to a culture free of sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Armenian culture is very conservative overall, although I like to think it is a little bit more tolerant than its immediate neighbors, but not by much. By bringing this up I’m not trying to change Armenian culture from the outside (I understand native Armenians hate when diaspora Armenians try to do that), it is what it is and it will change (or not) on its own time, I’m just stating facts.

Still, none of this excuses Google Translate for being sexist. Was this just random? Or was it programmed this way? You have to wonder.

Oh WWF Attitude Era...

Let’s end on a funny note, shall we? So I guess NBC is starting their own streaming service (sigh, it was better when the only one was Netflix), and they’re putting wrestling on there. I thought WWE already had their own streaming service, but alas. It’s too bad they’re censoring stuff. I mean I’m okay with content warnings, but censorship never sat well with me. I think of the racist gags in old cartoons. Yes they’re awful, but censoring it is whitewashing the history, pretending it never happened. When Warner Bros. put Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry on DVD they had a content warning with Whoopi Goldberg explaining that censoring them is historical whitewashing, and then presented the shorts unedited (although two Tom and Jerry episodes still didn’t make it on DVD, due to blackface gags which I think they could have edited out fairly easily). But anyway, I don’t think wrestling was ever quite as offensive as that. Err, except for maybe that one time. 

But yeah, just wait until that poor intern gets to the part where Mae Young gave birth to a hand. As I recall, it was a storyline involving an 80-something year old woman wrestler having a fling with a much younger wrestler named Mark Henry, whose nickname was “Sexual Chocolate”, and getting pregnant. Things got really weird in the WWF in the late 90s. That poor intern is going to have their work cut out for them going through 1998 to 2001. Nowadays it’s all boring and kid-friendly. The censorship team probably won’t need to censor anything after around 2006 or so. The name change to World Wrestling Entertainment in 2002 kind of signified the end of “kayfabe” as it’s called, because they were no longer presenting themselves as a legitimate wrestling federation, and were admitting it was all just a show. Then WCW went out of business around the same time, which was their only real competition, so they no longer needed to put as much effort into their product. They were still good for a few years after that, but the quality was in decline. Sealing the deal was the Chris Benoit incident in 2007. They needed to make their image squeaky clean after that. I mean it’s good that they’re taking better care of their employees so they don’t get brain damage and go insane like Benoit did, but that’s not an excuse for them to become so boring. In the 1980s they were kid-friendly and did safer stunts too but they were never this boring. I miss the outlandish gimmicks and storylines. Stuff like the original Undertaker gimmick. 

Anyway, hope you enjoyed that emotional roller coaster. Let’s see what memes and posts I collect in April! How much worse will the world be by May, I wonder.

The Mega Everdrive, and the Realization of a Childhood Dream

For years, my Sega Genesis that I’ve had since 1993 just kinda sat there on my shelf. I did play it maybe a couple times a year. But I play my Nintendo Switch a lot more often, and before that my Playstation 3, and before that my Nintendo Wii. It is a relic of my childhood. However, in my online wanderings I began to hear of a device that allows you to hack your Sega Genesis, in a way. And they make them for all the other old cartridge-based game systems. The Everdrive. It allows you to play emulated roms on your actual game system. You can have every single Sega Genesis game on one cartridge. Obviously this is something I could have bought years ago, but you see I’ve been living under a rock for quite some time and only heard of Everdrive sometime last year, you’ll have to excuse me. Now I had experimented with emulation before, so I’m not completely out of the loop. I have played some rom hacks people have made for the Sonic games (some favorites including Kirby and Yoshi in the first two Sonic games, and all three Sonic games with Sally Acorn from the Sonic cartoon who never previously appeared in a video game, the long overdue Knuckles in Sonic 1, and others). I played these on a laptop, but I thought about how amazing it would be to play those on an actual Sega Genesis. So I figured I could buy it, sell my old games, and it would end up paying for itself. I’m not bothered about being a collector really, I just want to be able to play the games when the mood strikes me. I do have a bit of sentimentality wrapped up in my old game cartridges, but in the end they’re just taking up space on my shelf. As long as I still have a way to play the games, it’s all good. It also turned out that one of the games I’ve had since I was a kid, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist, is now worth a lot. Amazon is selling it for $133! And I still have the box and everything. So I would not only break even but make quite a profit by replacing my games with this Everdrive, and I would have access to more games than I had ever dreamed of.

Of course, nothing is ever that easy. I was in for a rather rude awakening when I discovered what it would take to get it to work. I bought the Everdrive, expecting it to already have the games on it, but it turns out you need to purchase a micro SD card and put the games on it yourself.  Makes sense I suppose, from a copyright perspective. Perhaps it was dumb of me to think the games would just be on the thing. I am not that experienced with technology, and previously thought SD cards had gone the way of the floppy disc in favor of USB flash drives. I guess something has now superseded flash drives. These microscopic little micro SD cards hold like 32 gigabytes. I wish I had an mp3 player that took micro SD cards. I’d have a list of songs so long that it wouldn’t repeat itself for months. Tiny little thing though. I mean the original SD cards were tiny enough, did they really need to be even smaller? I better not lose it or let my kid eat it. I probably sound old fashioned. In any event, I made the additional purchase. This entire process could have been made a lot easier, by the way, if they had explained this on the website, and included an instruction manual with the device, but all it came with was just the cartridge. You have to dig the manual up on the internet. Maybe the cartridge could have at least come with a slip of paper with the URL to the manual on it? Or have it written somewhere on the box? Maybe? They expect you to just figure everything out yourself. It took a lot of internet research to find out what to do.

I found out where to get all the game files, which I suppose I will keep hush-hush. Nearly 1,700 games, on one cartridge. And that’s not including the rom hacks, which I’ll discuss later. Something I would never have dreamed possible as a kid. Quite an upgrade from the ten or so games I had before. Getting it to work was a pain though. It felt like you had have a degree in computer programming to get the thing working. I had to download a certain file from the Everdrive website, start a folder called MEGA on the SD card as the “root” of the card, as it’s called, and extract the zip file into that folder, then put all the games into the folder as well but divide it into alphabetical subfolders because the Everdrive can only display so much at once, and even after doing everything by the book I still kept getting an error message when I tried to turn the system on. After digging and digging on the internet I found out I had to reformat my SD card, another fun project, which erased the SD card and undid all the work I had done, then put all the games back on the SD card, remake all the folders and unzip and extract all of the game files before I could play the games (I still have only unzipped the files for the games I intend to play, I’m not unzipping 1,700 files one at a time!)

Once that headache was over though, it was all worth it. I can now play every Sega Genesis game ever, plus the rom hacks. I could replay games I had lost over the years, like World of Illusion with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Primal Rage which I lost in the move to Florida, and games I remember renting from Blockbuster but never owning, like Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure (a surprisingly good platformer that still stands up today; Konami made it and they rarely disappoint). The Everdrive can even save games; not a lot of Sega Genesis games even had save features, but it’s good for RPGs like the Shining Force and Phantasy Star games, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Best get in the habit of pressing the reset button, that’s how you save. The main attraction though are those rom hacks. I already had several Sonic rom hacks on my computer as I mentioned, but after digging around the internet I found more rom hacks. Weird stuff like Ninja Turtles, Beavis and Butthead or Ren and Stimpy in Streets of Rage 2, and quite a few Shining Force hacks. I found a few original games too, like a weird bootleg Super Mario Bros. game that’s only real draw is that it’s a Mario game on a Sega system, but plays like crap. And another weird one where it’s Sonic in a Mario game, but is also really glitchy with bad controls. And of course endless Sonic hacks I hadn’t heard of yet. As much as I love them I kind of think Sonic hacks are a bit overdone, and I wish there were more hacks of other games. But a lot of them are practically brand new, original games. Unique stages and music and even move sets, not to mention characters from later in the series or entirely different games, like the aforementioned Kirby and Yoshi hacks. How can I ever go back to playing the original versions again when there are so many better hacked versions of the Sonic games out there now? No more can I go back to playing a Sonic game without characters that aren’t supposed to be in them.

Sega of Japan may hate you, Princess Sally Acorn, but your fans still love you.

Yes, I didn’t need those game cartridges anymore. And yet, parting with some of them was still difficult. I still plan on keeping a couple of them for old times sakes, but I’m selling the games that might be worth something. I always thought I would only ever sell them out of desperation, like if I really needed the money or else I would starve or be out on the street, but I’m actually kind of glad I’m selling them not because I’m desperate but because I’m choosing to. It’s less sad that way. It turned out that my copy of The Lost World: Jurassic Park still in the cardboard case with an instruction manual was worth over $100 too, which I never knew.

 

Those cheap cardboard cases used towards the end of the Sega Genesis’ run must not have survived in large numbers. I never knew I was sitting on a small gold mine all this time. This money will go towards getting an Everdrive for my Nintendo 64. Then I can sell all of those games to make the money back, and have way more games than ever before. Plus, I’ve heard the N64 Everdrive plays NES games too. That ought to be fun, never thought I’d play Super Mario Bros. 3 with a Nintendo 64 controller. In memory of my collection, here are a few more I sold off, which were still complete:

Kinda sad. I remember getting Pac-Man 2 for Christmas in 1996. When the richer kids already had an N64 or a Playstation. I was obsessed with this game. But, it’s not like you can take it with you to the afterlife. As long as I can still play the games when I want to, these are just taking up space. 

Another casualty in all this is my old RF adapter. It was finally time for an upgrade. After all these years, I finally bought AV cables for my Sega Genesis for much better picture quality. I did the same thing for my VCR a few years ago which greatly improved the picture quality, it was past due for my Genesis. Maybe thirty years from now I’ll finally get an HDMI adapter for my Genesis, eh? But I thought I would take a moment to thank the Sega Genesis RF adapter for its decades of service. Sure it may have produced fuzzy picture quality, but it’s the only RF adapter I ever had that just slid right on and off. No need to rotate the end of it around about fifty times before it is attached tightly enough and then only be able to unscrew it with a pair of pliers to avoid making my fingers bleed trying to get the damn thing off. Or you think you finally screwed it on tightly enough only for it to randomly fall off again. I hated that. Kids these days don’t know the struggle. In fact I might keep it around in case I ever need to screw in a cable again, it even made that job easier because I could attach it to the RF adapter instead of the TV itself. But then again, who needs cable TV these days? Anyway, I don’t understand why all RF adapters couldn’t have been designed this way.  

As for the Mega Everdrive, I wish I could go back and time and give this device to my ten year old self. It would have blown his young impressionable mind. Now to get one for my Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo and NES.

Top 5 Songs of the Month ~ March 2021/Արեգ 4513 ~ Rein, Bleib Modern, Mortal Boy

March is here, and the pandemic is a year old, at least in the US. Tired of it yet? You know at first I relished in the chance to wear a mask in public and have it be socially acceptable, but I’m starting to miss being able to breathe at a grocery store. Not to mention what it’s done to my complexion. Of course, I’m in Florida where aside from mask requirements they act like it’s not even happening. 

February just flew by. The future blog projects I mentioned last month are still on the table (a couple music reviews, the complete list of my Top 3 Songs of the Month going back to 2000, etc.), I just haven’t done them yet. I’ve been focusing on my webcomic for the most part. But I will get around to it. I have another album review to do from someone who was kind enough to send it to me to review. You’ll be seeing that soon.

Here are the songs that have been ringing through my head as of late.

Rein - Off the Grid

I heard this song thanks to a mix by DJ Maus on YouTube, and it was love at first sight...er, hearing! Especially since I too want to get off the grid. “They’ve tried to force me into a mold until I slowly suffocate.” I want to do my art for a living, society wants me to have a crappy full time desk job that chips away at my sanity. It’s relatable. I dream of relinquishing my US citizenship and fleeing the country with my family to start a new life as goat herders in a remote rural village in Armenia. If only. I’m stuck here in the grid, for now. So in any case, this song speaks to me. It has an angry desperation to it, like someone who just can’t take living in this modern post-industrial society.

This song is off their 2020 album Reincarnated, which you can find on Bandcamp.

https://reinofficial.bandcamp.com/album/reincarnated

Bleib Modern - Sleep

This is not the kind of song you get up and dance to. It’s a song that hits close to home for me though. I know, oh goodie, another really depressing song in my top 5, time to mark your bingo cards. Somehow this song just captures how depression feels, better than any other song I’ve heard in a long time. It’s a very powerful song. Great music video by Piper Wave too, which I’ve embedded above. Maybe not an official music video, but a good one. They make music videos for a lot of different bands, usually without their knowledge I think. But I’ve never seen a musician be ungrateful for it when they find the video.

This is off Bleib Modern’s album Afraid to Leave, which released just a few days ago. Lots of great songs on it too by the way. There’s a cassette release too, and you know how I love those if you’ve been following my blog.

https://bleibmodern.bandcamp.com/album/afraid-to-leave-lp

Mortal Boy - Passion Dance

This could be the one. This could be the song that saves you. So the song claims in the lyrics, at least. I don’t know if this song has saved me yet. Keyword there is “yet”. Maybe one day I’ll be in some far-fetched situation where the song will save me. I wouldn’t call this so much of a pep-talk song, something like for example Omnia’s “Free Bird Fly” (with lyrics such as “don’t you know this song is about you”), which is meant to lift you out of your sad mood and motivate you. It keeps a melancholic mood throughout. Perhaps the song aims to save you in another way, which I have yet to discern. Anyway, I have been hearing more of Mortal Boy lately, and I’ve liked what Ive heard. 

This is another music video by Piper Wave. This time the singer of Mortal Boy found out about it and liked the video so much they proclaimed it official in the comments on YouTube, so there you go, it’s the official music video. 

Here is Mortal Boy on Bandcamp:

https://mortalboy.bandcamp.com/music

Grey Gallows - Dissociation 

The Greek post-punk band Grey Gallows is at it again with a brand new album this month, Garden of Lies. This time they collaborated with the singer Cleopatra Kaido, whose feminine vocals add a new flavor to their music that wasn’t present in previous albums.  The track “Dissociation” is my current favorite. Grey Gallows strives to capture that 1980s post-punk sound in their music and that really shows through on this track. It’s kind of a blend of modern and 80s post-punk, because I think the post-punk that’s come out since its resurgence in the 2010s does have kind of a subtle uniqueness to it that the original post-punk didn’t have (I’m no musical theorist so I can’t say exactly why, but I can always tell if something actually was released in the 1980s or recently), and Grey Gallows achieves a sort of balance between them.

I’m still waiting for Grey Gallows to tour with the bands Forever Grey and Into Grey on the Grey Tour. Or Greyfest. Something like that. Any concert promoter reading this should make it happen after the pandemic ends.

https://greygallowsgr.bandcamp.com/album/garden-of-lies

The Parallel Project - Dissolve

For the first time in forever, I discovered a new song I liked on the radio. Thanks to Radio Garden I was listening to the Swedish radio station SDX Synthetic Experience, and this song comes on. And I think to myself, that singer sounds so familiar. Could it be Jennifer Parkin of Ayria? So I used Shazam to find out the name of the song and the band that made it. It wasn’t a long lost Ayria song, but it was sung by Jennifer Parkin. It was a song she did guest vocals on for The Parallel Project in 2004. I knew Parkin had been in another band prior to her solo project Ayria called Epsilon Minus, but I never heard about this. Still, it was just guest vocals. As for The Parallel Project I really had to do some digging. But I found out that this song was off the album Fusion. Not the easiest album to track down either, but eBay and Amazon have it. And of course as you see YouTube has it because they have every song ever recorded. Each of the 14 tracks had a different guest singer. The Parallel Project was a solo effort by Alex Matheu of Tampa, Florida. 

This was a nice little discovery to tide me over until Ayria’s next album. 

Here’s where I found out about it:

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/the-parallel-project/fusion/

The Doom Scroll - The Worst of Social Media, Feb. 2021

 I, like many of you, spend too much time scrolling through Facebook, being subjected to dumb memes and posts, and witnessing society’s gradual slide into total dystopia in realtime, as the feelings of dread mount and each day brings us closer to human extinction. This is known as doomscrolling. Last year was a great year for doing that, but the idiocy continues this year. Rather than blow up people’s feeds by reacting to them all, I had the idea of doing a monthly blog series where I discuss or criticize some of what I see on Facebook, and occasionally Reddit. Just a fun idea, which conveniently also helps me express my opinions while avoiding getting into pointless internet arguments with people in the comments of these posts. Some of these will be humorous while others serious. These will get political at times, so if I say something you disagree with, I do apologize and hope you’ll still like my nonpolitical stuff. If not, meh, oh well.

Post number one:

Sad Proof That Millennials Are Getting Old

Posted by The Ultimate ‘80s Page

Oh dear Gods, I feel like I need dentures after reading this. I was born in 1986, so this is supposed to include me. People my age are finally starting to make these stupid posts. Can’t I just follow a page on Facebook about an era I enjoy without these sort of curmudgeonly “we were the best generation because we drank water from a hose” posts? Where to begin with what’s wrong with this post? Let’s just go down the list:

1. Kids still play in the street today, believe it or not. Us kids born in the 80s still grew up staring at screens like the current generation, and in fact so did the two generations before us too who had TV, and surprise surprise, playgrounds still had kids then and do now. 
2. Video games first came out in the 1970s, so that’s wrong. 
3. First generation to watch cartoons in color? Color TV started in the 1960s, and before that theatrical cartoons had been in color since the 1930s. The early silent short Little Nemo from 1911 was hand-painted in color, if you want to get technical about it. That’s just flat out wrong.
4. And amusement parks have been around for decades, what are they talking about, 80s kids being the first to go to amusement parks? Didn’t Disneyland open in the 1950s? And that wasn’t even the first amusement park ever. At least read Wikipedia for Gods’ sakes before you make such moronic claims.
5. The cassette part is true (maybe the only thing that is true in this whole post), although Gen X probably deserves more credit for pioneering the Walkman because I wasn’t even born yet when it first came out. 
6. More than half of the cartoons listed came out decades before the 1980s. 
7. Seat belts definitely existed when I was a kid and you were an idiot if you didn’t wear them, plus it was illegal. And cars had air bags.
8. A bike without brakes?! What?! When did bikes ever not have brakes? “Back in my day, kids just got concussions and died of brain hemorrhage, by jiminy, and we liked it!” Again, Wikipedia. Bikes have pretty much always had some kind of brake.
9. The first Playstation came out in 1995, when I was nine years old, and someone born in 1980 would have been 15, so we definitely had them. Although I went from Sega Genesis to Nintendo 64.
10. Everything else listed came out in the 1990s and early 2000s, before I was 20 years old. Why are they acting like people born in the 80s were actually born in the 60s? Are they under the impression that the internet and cell phones didn’t exist until 2010?

I guess old people shaking their fists at the kids on their lawn has always existed and will always continue to exist. Sure, we had a “GREAT Time”, until we were all tricked into getting worthless college degrees and had to spend the rest of our lives in debt in a crappy job market as the economy crashes every ten years. But yeah, let’s be salty at all these kids with their smartphones. Even though we had Game Boys.

Anyway, next post: 

“My Sexual Orientation is: the cast of ‘The Mummy’ (1999)”

So for a long time last year, the following image was circulated in meme groups focused on the 1999 film The Mummy. To the point where I was tired of seeing it. Here’s that image:

Yeah, alright. A cute way to say you’re bisexual, nothing wrong with that. But there was always one thing that bothered me about this image, and someone finally addressed it in the following image:

Ha! How dare the original image leave out Beni! So, the cast of The Mummy, you say? You’re attracted to the WHOLE cast? Really? What they actually meant was “The Conventionally Attractive Cast Members of The Mummy”. Of course they didn’t mean that overweight hairy guy in the fez who spits all the time, tries to illicit sexual favors from Evie in exchange for Rick’s life, and gets eaten alive by scarabs. Maybe someone should make one for the cast of “The Mummy” (1932). That movie never gets enough love. “The Mummy” (2017) is rightfully ignored, though. In fact, forget I mentioned it.

This all went down in Imhotep Mummyposting.

A Political Wizard of Oz Meme by Someone who hasn’t Read the Books, or Probably even seen the Movie in Years

This was circulated around a lot in January during Biden’s inauguration, so I’m cheating a little bit, but this was one of the memes that inspired me to start this blog series just due to how cringeworthy it is, but not wanting to argue with people. Now, this is obviously trying to be a pro-Biden meme. But when you consider that Oz is a colorful, magical utopia where you can’t die and there’s no such thing as money, and is far preferable to the dreary, barren prairies of Kansas, you start to see it in a different light. This is accidentally a pro-Trump meme. As a leftist who considers the democrats to be basically center-right, diet-republicans who are only marginally preferable to actual republicans, this makes me groan for completely different reasons than it would for a conservative.

Another interesting point; in the movie, whether or not they play a hero or a villain, they’re all actors who are friends off-camera and get their paychecks from the same corporation. Just like politicians. Maybe this meme DOES make sense. But I’m obviously putting way more thought into this than whoever made this meme.

When Music Wasn’t “In the Cloud”

Hey, remember when, like, things were different before the internet? Yeah, back when you had to blindly drop $15 on a CD you’d never heard before and hope the music was as good as the cover art? Or buy a CD from a band you’ve heard one song you liked from, only for that to be the only good song on the whole album? Can’t say I miss that. Musicians and record labels probably do though. Well, that’s why I support the artists I like on Bandcamp. It’s a double-edged sword for musicians, because now it’s a lot easier for bands to be discovered, but at the expense of actually making money off one’s music. But record stores still exist. The big chain ones are mostly gone, except for FYE which had to diversify to stay in business, but you still have indy stores. Stop acting like they’re Blockbuster Video or something. 

On the other hand, there was a certain thrill you could only get at a record store, when you dug through the alphabetized shelves and discovered they actually had CDs of an obscure band you like. Can’t get that through online shopping. I still occasionally buy CDs at concerts, but if you’re already at the band’s concert you already know you’re going to like the CD you’re buying. It’s not the same. 

Shared in What if phones, but too much. Which is a hilarious group by the way for stuff like this. 

Nikol the Traitor

I would like to introduce non-Armenians to the Armenian side of Facebook, a microcosm in and of itself, and an awful, emotionally-taxing place to spend one’s time since November. A great place to doomscroll. Between Azeri trolls leaving laugh reactions on news stories about tortured POWs and grieving mothers who lost their sons in war, you also have inane stuff like this picture above. I could do this entire blog post with stuff like that. Here’s a small sample. On the left we have war hero Monte Melkonian, who helped Armenia win the war against Azerbaijan in the 1990s, and on the right, current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who of course, signed a surrender which gave Azerbaijan control of most of Artsakh last November. 

Sigghhh....okay. He didn’t have a smile when he did it. In fact he looks like he’s aged ten years since September if you see him now. And Artsakh wasn’t so much given as it was taken. He was forced to sign the surrender. Maybe he could have handled the war better, but he’s not the only one to blame. If I actually lived in Armenia I’d have a more educated opinion on the matter, no doubt. But my opinion, for what little it may be worth coming from the diaspora, is that he doesn’t deserve most of the blame. Maybe just some. But I would direct my anger at Aliyev, Erdogan and Putin (the leaders of Azerbaijan, Turkey, and of course Russia) before Pashinyan. It’s kind of strange to me to be angrier at him than at Armenia’s actual enemies, and passive “allies” who did nothing. Armenia has been a vassal state to Russia for a long time now, but with delusions of grandeur. It is very painful to admit this. Tigran the Great’s Armenian Empire, which was Armenia at its greatest power, was more than two thousand years ago. While taking on Azerbaijan one-on-one militarily wouldn’t have been an issue, once Turkey, Israel and the Syrian mercenaries got involved, there was just no way Armenia was going to win. Sucks not having any real allies, and living between two much larger and richer countries that want to erase yours off the map. Then you had thirty years of corrupt oligarchs sucking the country dry. That didn’t help matters. Point is, you can’t reduce the defeat to one politician being a traitor.

Anyway, stupid posts like these are not helpful. Pashinyan is at worst a naive and incompetent leader, but I wouldn’t call him a traitor. He didn’t sign that surrender with a smile on his face. But, when a country loses a war, the country’s leader becomes the scapegoat. That’s just how it is. If he couldn’t handle that he shouldn’t have become the leader. I don’t envy his position. Still...maybe my cousin would still be alive if he’d found a way to end the war sooner. Maybe we’d still have Shushi. Maybe it’s because he pissed off Russia by being pro-west so they didn’t bother to get involved sooner. Or maybe it would have happened anyway. I can’t put all the blame on him, though. Perhaps there are sides to the story that we will never know.

Quite a month to be talking about this, with Armenia’s own military calling for Pashinyan’s resignation on February 25th. Almost a coup but it fizzled out before anything actually happened. You might have heard about it on the news. Funny how the mainstream media was nowhere to be found when Azerbaijan was beheading Armenians and burning Armenians alive with illegal white phosphorus, but suddenly now they’re interested in Armenia. No one has put forth a better option than Pashinyan though. I would think holding snap elections and letting people decide if they still want him as a leader would solve the problem and shut the opposition up if he wins, but what do I know? 

Anyway, onto more pleasant topics. For you see just like my Facebook feed, these Doom Scroll posts are going to give you mood whiplash. 

Social Media Addiction

“Help me, I’m addicted to Photoshop, LinkedIn and Uber and it’s tearing my life apart!” What are you trying to do, SadietheJedi, spread Covid around even worse? And didn’t you post this on Twitter? Curious. 

I avoid Twitter due to the horror stories I’ve heard, this screenshot is from Facebook, which along with Reddit are my drugs of choice. Does she have a point? Hm. Well, let me stop making fun of this post for a moment and really think about it. I’ll apply it to my life. Before Facebook I was on MySpace, where I got involved with the roleplay community, making fake profiles for fictional characters and having them interact with other role players with fake profiles, like a co-authored fan fiction written in realtime. It’s a time I miss now. I really honed my writing skills there. But I think my addiction was even worse back then. I had to be on all the time or I would miss something in the roleplay or keep people waiting for replies. Facebook isn’t nearly as fun as MySpace was. More often than not it’s kind of depressing. But I can tear myself away from it whenever I need to. I’m not going to miss anything. Before MySpace (prehistoric times) I would spend most of my free time listening to music, playing video games, watching TV or reading books. I still do all those things when I am able. I didn’t go on the internet much back then, but it’s not as if my life was free from electronics and screens. I hung out with friends in-person too, but moreso in college. Before I graduated High School I was even more isolated, only hanging out with friends when I was at school, mostly. The only reason I hang out with friends less often now is because I moved to Florida, making social media the only way I stay in contact with family and friends. I’m with my wife and son most of the time, but beyond that I’m kind of a hermit, and really always have been a bit of a hermit to varying degrees.

The question then is does social media actually make me socialize with people in-person less often, as this post claims? In my case, no, not really. But maybe it’s because I’ve always been this antisocial. It was more the move to Florida that did it. It’s a lot harder to make friends when you’re an adult. My newest friendships are all through social media. I may not be the best example then. 

1984

Ha! This one got a chuckle out of me. Obviously aimed at conservatives who compare not being allowed to be openly racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic on social media to George Orwell’s dystopia, without ever having actually read the book. All our electronic devices are listening to us; our social media is selling our information to advertisers, insurance companies and the government; the majority of us have to submit to low paying jobs and be exploited by greedy tyrannical employers who treat people like expendable numbers with the only alternative being homelessness, starvation and death; our planet is dying thanks to human greed and we’re in the middle of the biggest mass extinction since the death of the dinosaurs; our phones track our every move, and yet not being allowed to be a dick in public is what makes them scream about 1984. What a strange hill to die on in the grand scheme of things.

Shared on i’m begging you please read another book, which is normally a hilarious anti-Harry Potter group, but they also talk about any overrated book. Although in this case maybe we should be begging people to actually read the book they’re talking about. Reading books takes too much brain power for some people.

Classic Rock

Was I not just talking about this on my blog? This is so damn true! What, do they just have a mix CD that they play on shuffle? Even when it comes to AC/DC I’m pretty sure they made more than just the five songs we ever hear. 

Anyway, thank you for taking a break from your own doom scrolling to witness a bit of mine. I’m sure this month I will come across more terrible things to talk about. 

Album Review: Ink Project - Rhythm Spirit

 

After sharing my blog entries in the group Sound and Shadows on Facebook, I was approached to do a music review of an upcoming album. The band is Ink Project, and their new album Blind Rhythm releases today, February 26th. I’m not a professional music reviewer, I just kinda state my opinion. When I go to read professional music reviews I wonder how they come up with so many creative terms. But I will do my best to describe this very unique album. I don’t tend to review music I don’t like, because that would just be mean, so that alone should tell you I liked this album. 

The music itself is very relaxing, almost intoxicating, good to put on if you’re in a mellow mood. It is electronic down-tempo music, that kind of defies genre labels in my opinion. Its smooth electronic beats are accompanied by clean and pure vocals. I especially enjoyed the vocals by Fifi Rong, a Chinese-British singer who has also collaborated with Yello (you may remember their song “Oh Yeah”). She sings on their lead single “The End”, which is the music video above. This being the first track on the album, I do have to wonder why it was first and not at the end of the album, but perhaps there is deeper meaning behind that. The songs flow into one another, making the album a singular entity that is best listened from beginning to end.

From a philosophical standpoint, I really liked the title track “Rhythm Spirit Part 2”, an outro to Part 1 which is really more of a speech than a song, but goes into how human existence is based on rhythm. The moon cycles, the seasons, the tides, etc. There’s a certain rhythm to the universe, which music itself is derived from. Humans find rhythm comforting, perhaps due to the predictability of it.  It provides the album with a thesis, making it not just a random collection of songs but an album with a concept. That’s something you don’t see enough of these days. 

The album consists mainly of nine original tracks , and then a series of remixes of “The End” and “Feeding the Fire”, bringing the total of songs up to 17. 

If you are curious to check this album out you can listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/blindcolour/sets/ink-project-rhythm-spirit

Or buy it here: https://smarturl.it/RhythmSpirit

Fun, Time-Wasting Character Charts

 I have been lurking around in the Fire Emblem community for a couple months now; despite being a fan of the games for many years, for some reason it never occurred to me to seek out its fandom until recently. This may have to do with the fact that before the most recent game, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, became a hit, the fandom was significantly smaller. In any case, I started seeing character charts being shared around such as this: 

This one is for Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, a title for the Nintendo Wii. Having played the game, the chart is mostly accurate. Although, that bald overweight guy under Chaotic Angry ought to be under Chaotic Horny if you ask me, as he is quite lecherous. He is a slave trader who has Reyson, a member of the angel-like Serenes species who you see under Angry Angry (his anger comes from being one of three survivors of a genocide against his species, so it’s very understandable), kidnapped, and then proceeds to fawn over him in a suggestive manner. You get the feeling he has a fetish for the Serenes. Why they gave this gross character the coolest theme in the game I don’t know. This all happens in the prequel to this game, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, by the way. In Radiant Dawn, despite him pretty clearly dying in the previous game, they bring him back with no explanation and he becomes a good guy. That game seems like it was written by completely different people as it ruins the characterizations of a lot of characters from the previous one. I don’t forgive Oliver for being a disgusting, perverted slave-holder, but the game expects you to. 

These have been made for basically all of the Fire Emblem games. But I decided to make one myself, not for Fire Emblem, but for the Oz series. With forty books, the series contains hundreds of characters. Certainly making such a chart would be no problem, right? So I got the template first:

Have fun with this. 

I grabbed an already done chart and erased the Fire Emblem characters in the Comic Draw program I use for my webcomic (follow the shameless plug). Next, I needed to compile a list. This was difficult, especially since there aren’t many “horny” characters in the Oz books. But I managed, by digging up some more obscure ones. Finding corresponding illustrations was usually quite easy thanks to the Oz Fandom Wiki and Project Gutenberg, but challenging at times if they weren’t from one of the public domain books. All are by John R. Neill save for the Wicked Witch of the West, by W.W. Denslow. Here’s the chart, and a list of characters with explanations. 

Pure Pure: Dorothy - Plenty of characters would fit in this category; Ozma, Glinda, Betsy, Ojo, etc. I went with Dorothy due to her prominence in the earlier and more famous Oz books. 

Pure Angry: Queen Ann - Angry at her status as queen of an irrelevant kingdom in Oz, but harmless overall. 

Pure Horny: Tin Woodman - He was horny when he was Nick Chopper, before he became tin. And he’s pure-hearted. 

Pure Stupid: The Scarecrow - He does get smarter over the course of the books, but that brain the Wizard gave him was a total placebo. It gave him confidence, not intelligence. But his lack of intelligence in the early books may just stem from the fact that he was inexperienced, having come to life not long before Dorothy discovered him. He was never as stupid as he thought he was in the first book, but never as smart as he thought he was in the other books.

Pure Chaotic: Scraps - Scraps is unpredictable, but pure-hearted. Her innocence can lead her to be unknowingly mean occasionally, but that’s the chaos. 

Angry Pure: Woozy - He gets inexplicably furious when you say the words krizzle-kroo. But otherwise is calm-tempered and benevolent.

Angry Angry: Ruggedo - This is the former Nome King’s defining character trait. He never gets over losing his Magic Belt, and later his throne, thanks to the meddling of Ozma and her friends. 

Angry Horny: Googly-Goo - A noble from the kingdom of Jinxland who tries to force Princess Gloria to marry him, when she has eyes for the gardener Pon. 

Angry Stupid: Jinjur - Angry over Oz’s patriarchy, she managed to take over Oz with an army of women wielding sewing needles, but had no plan for what to do after taking the throne. Leading to her quick defeat.

Angry Chaotic: Wicked Witch of the West - The most well-known villain of the series. She has all sorts of tricks up her sleeves, so you don’t know what she will do next. She’s also very angry.

Horny Pure: Jo Files - A member of Queen Ann’s army who falls in love with a Rose Princess named Ozga. The romance is rushed and undeveloped, but writing love stories in the Oz series wasn’t Baum’s strong suit. Maybe he had better love stories in his adult novels, I’m not sure. I need to read them.

Horny Angry: Nimmie Amee - Her anger is understandable when both her boyfriends were gradually dismembered and replaced with tin parts, and eventually abandoned her. The Tin Woodman in particular could have sought her out a lot sooner than he did. Her anger is justified.

Horny Horny: Captain Fyter - Nimmie’s other ex-boyfriend. There’s not much more to his character than this, making horny his only real trait.

Horny Stupid: Chopfyt - Nimmie’s current boyfriend, a Frankenstein monster made up of Nick Chopper and Captain Fyter’s discarded body parts. Not much going on in his brain.

Horny Chaotic: Mogodore the Mighty - From Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, this villainous baron first tries to force Princess Shirley Sunshine to marry him, but after he conquers the Emerald City in an embarrassingly low moment for Ozma’s rule (he conquered it while everyone was playing Blind Man’s Bluff and was blindfolded), he decides to force Ozma to marry him instead. Took some serious digging to get that illustration by the way, since his book is still under copyright. You’re welcome. 

Stupid Pure: Jack Pumpkinhead - He often admits to being dim-witted, but that comes with having a pumpkin for a head. He did defeat Mogodore, though. 

Stupid Angry: The Mangaboos - Pictured is Gwig, their sorcerer, but the subterranean Mangaboos are plant people that are hostile to outsiders, and not too bright. This could also apply to any number of Oz’s small kingdoms visited in filler chapters. 

Stupid Horny: Princess Gloria - She’s in love with a gardener named Pon, but is just a damsel in distress. 

Stupid Stupid: Button-Bright - Particularly in his first appearance, where all he ever says is “Don’t know”. Dorothy calls him stupid at one point. He gets wiser in later books. 

Stupid Chaotic: Notta Bit More - A bungling clown from The Cowardly Lion of Oz who refuses to change his strategy in dealing with threats no matter how many times his strategy fails. He’s chaotic in the same way Scraps is. You would have to be chaotic to accidentally stumble upon a nonsense spell that sends one to Oz.

Chaotic Pure: Handy Mandy - A seven-armed goat herder who doesn’t take smack from anyone. Her temper can provoke Oz’s stupid-angry filler kingdoms, but she’s got a heart of gold and ends up saving Oz. 

Chaotic Angry: Mombi - Another wicked witch. Her bitterness may stem from the fact that she never got to become the Wicked Witch of the North. 

Chaotic Horny: Glegg - A creeper from Kabumpo in Oz who wouldn’t take no for an answer when Princess Peg Amy rejected him, so he turned her into a tree. Another victim of Ruth Plumly Thompson’s bloodthirsty version of Ozma, he was actually executed by being made to drink one of his own potions. That illustration of him is hilarious, by the way. 

Chaotic Stupid: The Whimsies - A malicious race of beings with tiny heads that leave little room for brains. The Nome King recruited them to help invade Oz one time. 

Chaotic Chaotic: The First and Foremost - He is actually the most powerful and feared villain in the Oz series, as the most powerful of the Phanfasms, another malicious race that the Nome King recruited for his invasion of Oz. They agreed to join because they like to make people suffer. 

Anyway, that’s the list. Since most Oz books have no romance, the Horny section includes basically any character who ever showed interest in romance at any point. Baum avoided romance most of the time, while Thompson basically told the same love story over and over, and the characters tended to fall under Pure Horny in every case. Notably I couldn’t find anyplace to put The Wizard or the Cowardly Lion. They just don’t seem to fall under any of these categories. There needed to be a cowardly and a shady column for them.