I just entered spring year 2 and I’d say things are going well.

I started building sprinklers in the fall but I’m up to 20 now so I should be able to sell quite a few more crops than previous seasons. Also built a few fish smokers which has definitely boosted my fishing income.

No animals other than my cat and the fish in the tank that I put in my bedroom, but I bought a silo during the winter in preparation for raising some animals in year 2. That should make it easier to lean into cooking now that I got the first house upgrade too.

Pretty soon I’m going to marry Penny. I haven’t gotten a ton of progress with other townsfolk yet but I’d like to boost my relationship with Pam because I think she could use a friend if Penny moves out.

That’s actually why Mr T adopted his moniker.

I think about my father being called “boy”, my uncle being called “boy”, my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called “boy”. So I questioned myself: “What does a black man have to do before he’s given respect as a man?” So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T, so the first word out of everybody’s mouth is “Mr.”

They love Madison Square Garden. Every year for New Year’s Eve they play 4 shows there, plus they did a 13 show residency there in 2017 and a 7 show residency in 2023.

Yeah, everyone is saying Red Rocks but they haven’t even played there since 2009. They’ve played at Dicks 45 times since 2009 because they do 3-4 shows every Labor Day weekend.

I’m not sure why everyone is saying Red Rocks. Phish played three shows there in 2009 but they haven’t played there since.

The real answer is that every Labor Day weekend they play 3 to 4 shows at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park outside Denver (except in 2020 when the shows were cancelled).

RIP to a legend

For the last couple decades, Phil was an outspoken advocate for organ donations thanks to a donor named Cody who saved his life. Every concert he would ask people to consider becoming an organ donor. If you’re not already, think about it. As Phil said, you could “save the life of someone you’ll never meet”.

But we would eat Kraft Dinner
Of course we would, we’d just eat more
And buy really expensive ketchups with it
That’s right, all the fanciest-, Dijon ketchup, mm, mm

You can’t kill non-targets, be caught doing anything illegal, or let any bodies get discovered (unless it was an accident kill), but you absolutely can use guns. You can use them on the target, shoot out cameras, use them for distraction or panic shots, blast open locked doors, drop them on the ground to pull an NPC off their route, etc.

The game is a sandbox. They give you a ton of tools and it’s up to you to figure out how to use them. You’re meant to play each level over and over in a variety of ways (as shown by all the mastery challenges) and having all these different tools at your disposal is part of what makes that fun. But if what’s fun for you is to mow everyone down with a shotgun, then go for it. There’s no in-game incentive to try for silent assassin on every run.

I really enjoy watching Hitman competitions on YouTube. You’ll have like one person blowing up propane tanks, one person sniping the targets from across the map, and one person using poison and tasers, with all of them finishing with the top ranking and within seconds of each other. It’s wild to me how many viable ways the game gives you to kill targets and how creative it allows you to be.

Perfect Dark was better but GoldenEye was more influential.

I’m definitely team Perfect Dark but I understand why GoldenEye was more significant in the zeitgeist and features more predominantly in memes.

A

DS1 does have hatch marks on the health bar that make it easier to see health increases.

That was when he took LSD for the first time intentionally. There was one time before that when he absorbed it accidentally.

M

I remember this episode of Parks and Recreation

What sort of eggs are that shape? And why have they never been introduced to the Lilliputians?

The games were released in 1996 in Japan and 1998 in the US. The anime aired in 1997 in Japan and 1999 in the US. So the games still came out before the show in the US.

People say this a lot and I believe it’s based on this quote:

I pop the video in, and wow… Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps… Wow. [I felt like] I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn’t mine anymore… It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone. [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning — different, but every bit as pure.

Many people seem to interpret “that song isn’t mine anymore” to mean “that song is now Cash’s”. But here’s another quote:

Then I got a CD in the post. I listened to it and it was very strange. It was this other person inhabiting my most personal song. I’d known where I was when I wrote it. I know what I was thinking about. I know how I felt. Hearing it was like someone kissing your girlfriend. It felt invasive.

To me, that doesn’t sound like he’s saying it’s Cash’s song now or that Cash’s version is better. It’s more that Cash proved to him that even though this was a deeply personal song about his own life and struggles that he’s not the only one capable of doing it justice. He realized that other talented artists can take that song about him and transform it into a song about them. The song’s not his anymore because it could be anyone’s song.

The player believes that this transformation feature is in Bloodborne but wasn’t ever added to the playable game.

Uhh… What? It was added in the DLC with the Beast’s Embrace rune. Equip that rune and the Beast Claw and voila! You’re now a beast.