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MAGFest 12

the mindlab

Dan “Danimal Cannon” Behrens brought the band Critical Hit to the attention of my corner of the Internet (at www.TheShizz.org). Critical Hit is a list of physically attractive musicians who play covers of game music as arranged by someone who doesn’t play in the band. This isn’t yet the part that disturbs me. The fact that their covers are plastic and only 1 member of the “band” plays at a given concert is a little but not overly unnerving. What bothers me is that Danimal’s revelation that my last decade of regularly packing myself in a small room with a bunch of sweaty nerds to listen to guitars wail to Castlevania now makes me marketable demographic.

eustache
OK. “World Winds” disturbs me a great deal too.
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Shatsucon ’13

the mindlab

This past weekend, I reconvened with some of my Shizz friends for a birthday get-together in Massachusetts (Shatsu = Sherv, the birthday boy, + Mastunami, the person who hosted). At some point early on, we spontaneously decided that we would try to beat as many games as possible during the weekend, on both emulators and original hardware.

Here’s the final spreadsheet of the over 50 games beaten.

You can see my contributions as “Ken Oh”. You’ll notice me manning my favorites, such as Rygar and Zelda 2 (the latter on original hardware, meaning I lost a couple of hours to glitching). Some of the more epic achievements were Gremlins 2, Batman, Astyanax, Castlevania III, Castlevania: Dracula X, and Street Fighter 2 (on an actual arcade cabinet, with difficulty on the DIP switch put to max). Orb-3D also requires special mention for endurance. It’s a shame that no one made it through to see the end with me, as it took me until 6:30AM to finish it. I had to leave the end screen on for the others to make note of when they woke up a few hours after that.

MAGFest XI

writings, , , ,

On the first weekend of the year, I surrounded myself with thousands of sweaty nerds at MAGfest XI. I should have done a write-up about MAG much sooner than this, as my first time attending came just 15 days after the inaugural post of Protozoic, back in late 2004.

BIT BRIGADE
Bit Brigade, which plays rock renditions of video games while one of the band members plays completely through the game. Above they’re finishing up Contra. Photo by “GlamGoreMuffin”

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Bugs

the mindlab

Dear Dr. William Grogan:

Hello, how are you, we have new news, we now have the pleasure to dedicate a new species named Downeshelea grogani, for your super work Ceratopogonidae of the world, with many happy to honor your important work in the biting midges systematic as you were the creator of the genus.

Mis mejores deseos.

Herón Huerta. Ok

A new species and new records of Downeshelea Wirth & Grogan in Neotropical Mexico (Diptera: Ceratopogonidae)

Translation: There is yet another bug that shares my last name.