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Blue Oyster Cult’s new album is absolutely incredible for a band that haven’t recorded in almost 20 years. “Florida Man” and “The Alchemist” are big stand-outs for me.

I’m playing the Trials of Mana remake right now. Like the original, it’s frustrating at times if you’re not playing an optimized party (i.e. with Kevin and Reisz). I do like that they changed the maps from a series of tiny screens into large areas. It adds a nice exploration element to a game that previously lacked…

I won’t make it a habit.

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Oh, “Hand Banana.” It shouldn’t work, but it does. 

A classic tip for serial fiction writing is that the first place you should always look for new ideas is earlier chapters of the story. 

Well, let’s not get too optimistic until we see whether or not next week’s post gets me banned. (Pauline Bonaparte’s Talk Page has a picture that was apparently Too Sexy For Wikipedia. Will it be too sexy for Kinja? Only time will tell.)

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You hit on a way that SNL has really changed in the past decade. It’s become less of a stepping-stone for upcoming performers, and more of a secure home base. “Lifers” are becoming the rule rather than the exception. 

The AVC has taken a huge beating over the past decade. (These days, I only visit the site once or twice a week. I used to visit it multiple times a day.) But no matter who left, or what ill-advised decisions were imposed by a revolving door of owners, the site has remained a source of excellent writing.

You have to admire Chris Claremont’s gumption, though. After finally agreeing to write an ongoing solo series starring Wolverine, he made it as unlike The Uncanny X-men as he possibly could.

Forget it, Miller. It’s Kinja town. 

I don’t think that the boom of G-rated kid-pandering blockbusters was long enough that Jurassic Park’s role in ending them was all that revolutionary. 1989's Batman was marketed as a family film, and it had characters saying “shit”.

Thankfully, getting the flask in “Return to Zork” is actually fairly easy. You just need to drink an alcoholic with superhuman tolerance under the table. 

I’ve never really bought the idea that the success of Kid A was due to publicity from the Napster leak. Radiohead had built up a sizable following in the 3.5 years since OK Computer came out. OK Computer went platinum in 1998, and The Bends eventually went platinum in 1999. The fanbase was there.

To be fair to the author, Kid A sold a lot faster than OK Computer. And that’s the only metric that a lot of people care about.  

I’m playing 1993's “Return to Zork” right now. It’s an interesting piece of adventure game history. It’s one of the earliest first-person 3D adventure games (predating “Myst” by a few weeks) and it’s pretty clunky as a result. It has a lot of the “gotcha!” surprise deaths, and it also has lots of ways that you can…

I never found that I needed to do any grinding* in FF9 (at least until the very end) so long as I kept my equipment up to date. But that can be a very expensive proposition, considering the synthesis system.

I think the Phoenix Wright games do a great job of explaining why spirit channeling hasn’t had a greater impact on society: it was severely discredited after the DL-6 incident.