Earthbound.

The game itself is a quirky but endearing turn based RPG with enduring graphics and score. The game came with a full strategy guide that was set up like a tour guide to the various locations in the game. It was intended to be a companion piece to the story and fleshed out characters and towns. I was so excited to get it as a kid that I measured the box a video rental place with a tape measure and compared it my Christmas presents to make sure one of the wrapped ones was actually it. I replay it once every 10 years or so.

The game was one of the strong inspirations for Undertale.

I encountered him a long time ago and started watching him in earnest a few years ago. Really sad to see how he was affected by the Asheville floods but happy that he has been so resilient.

As annoyed as I was I laughed when he deployed that one.

In college, my roommate did the following one evening:

• Drank the better part of a case of beer
• Tried to get into a frat party but was rejected for being raucously drunk
• Punched his way through a wooden fence in frathouses’s back yard and ran into the party, breaking his hand in the process
• Kicked in a hall closet door and found a can of black paint, opened it and threw it at a wall 3 feet in front of him
• Got thrown out of the party again, covered in black paint and returned to our apartment
• Woke me up looking like Ken Jeong from Community as a Dark Elf because he was having trouble taking his pants off (his boots were still on)
• Got really mad that I wouldn’t help him so he committed another act of closet violence and ripped all the shelving of his own closet
• Called his ex-girlfriend and played the entirety of Amazed by Lonestar into her voicemail and yelled “Amazed at what a BITCH you are” at the end
• Fell asleep in his clothes which he profoundly soiled with blood, piss, vomit, and black paint.
• Woke up in the early morning to move to his bed, which received the same treatment
• Got up the next day and bought a Condolences for your Loss card which he signed and delivered to me.

He dropped out a few weeks later, joined the military, married his ex, and is apparently a sysadmin now.

One weekend when I was in high school, back when burning CDs was popular, I had a little extra space so I downloaded “Enter Sandman” and threw it as the last track on the CD. My dad asked me to go run an errand on Sunday so naturally I got my new CD and put it in his car’s CD player, listening to the first half of it before I returned.

That Monday, he gets home from work and he storms into my room absolutely furious and with no other context yells “SUCK A CAMEL’S ASS, HUH? REAL NICE!” before slamming the door. I have no idea what he is talking about but I wasn’t about to question my angry father and just stood there in shock. A couple weeks later I add that “Enter Sandman” file to a playlist and only to find it is actually the song “Suck a Caribou’s Ass” by Wesley Willis at a horrendous bitrate so it is super loud. I went to tell him it was an accident, but trying to explain to your dad what Kazaa was and how prevalent mislabeled songs were on there worked as well as explaining Islam to your pet hamster. He was adamant I did it on purpose.

To this day if I bring it up he still gets super annoyed and refuses to believe me.

I bought a cheap barcode scanner and scanned all my books and physical games and put it into a spreadsheet. I gave the spreadsheet to ChatGPT and asked it to populate the titles and ratings, and genre. Allows me to keep them in storage and easily find what I need quickly.