I spent three or four months working on that NES repair guide and it's sister article about aftermarket 72-pin connectors. It was an insane amount of work and I couldn't have done it without the support and encouragement of my wife. In fact, it wouldn't even exist without her. You see, I was convinced that I had nothing to add on the subject but she insisted that I put what I know out there.

So now I have -and there it is- so what's next? Well, I never really stopped writing in that time and have a few pieces ready to go. My main hurdle is simply building the pages for them. There's nothing difficult about that, but I want to fully solidify the article format before releasing anything else. At least, a more consistent skeleton in which to build every article around.

I'd also like to change the front page format somewhat but I'm not sure to what degree. I've got something in the works that I'm probably going to scrap because it's not working.

The next article you see will be about the sun. After that, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe. I get around, you know? I'm also working on a piece about alien invasion movies.

There's a ton of crap I write that never sees the light of day. I've tried to write several Trump roast articles over the last two years and they never really pan out. In fact, having just looked through my folder, I probably have enough stuff to release weekly for the next couple of months. The only problem with them is that I don't consider what I'm saying in them to be particularly interesting.If you really want to hear my take on AI Slop or that Propaniacs episode of King of the Hill I've got good news for you: I'm sure they'll be released eventually.

I'd like to start by stating that the previous death related blog titles were supposed to be a running gag that concluded with something like "[insert plea for death here]. I didn't continue because I felt as thought addressing the midterms was more important and wasn't sure i'd have time to post again prior to November 3rd.

The internet has been a place for people to congregate since geez-- I'm not even sure. I began joining forums around 2008 after watching them for years. The comraderie that I felt in that era was like nothing I'd ever felt from technology before. Over time, people left those for platforms like Discord and Reddit. Both of which I refuse to utilize because of the invasive practices they employ.

I used Discord until sometime close to when I started this website. So 2024--ish? I don't actually know. My only regret is not informing my close friends about it. I do miss them though. We'd mostly moved on to voice calls and streams after a certain point. I'll never forget those conversations but I refuse to use corporate internet services of any kind for the sake of my own personal privacy.

I never used Reddit much because I despise the posting style found there. I would mention 4chan but I haven't browsed there in over a decade. I hear they just claimed victory over some evil British something or other. Good for them.

I know people read this site. I sometimes receive e-mails from readers correcting me or expressing appreciation. Whenever I'd go particularly hard on some rightwing figure I'd even get death threats. Those were entertaining and reminded me of the old internet from when I was in high school. Once I changed my contact button to read "CONTACT/DEATH THREATS" or whatever it is, nobody even threatened me again which is disappointing.

There is no community on the internet anymore unless you count people shouting over one another as such. Social Media websites are a cancer on humanity, forums are dead, and Discord wants a picture of your ID for some contrived reason. It's up to you if you wanna live with that but I'll pass, thank you.

So then, who do I talk to? Well, my loved ones, co-workers, and friends! I feel the same level of community in life that I used to feel on the internet. While I certainly miss my discord friends, I don't see them e-mailing me and they know where I am. Sometimes I get so many texts from so many people I get blown out. Mind you that isn't to brag so much as to say: life goes on.

I'm not interested in living my life waiting for the internet to do things. I've built my own space here and I'm happy that people see it and sometimes even engage with it. I never thought that online communication would be so significantly hampered, but I guess it can't be helped either.

I tried Blue Sky for several months and discovered that I dislike it. All the of the political posts were making me angry. The contents-- specifically, not the act of posting. I can't surround myself with such negativity and expect anything other than complete disdain to emerge.

I think most of my hope for anything-- including the internet-- rides on the results of next weeks midterms. If our current governement isn't completely defanged, I may lose all hope for the planet. That's a story for if we get there, though. Supposing things go as they should, the internet will probably be fine. If you think about it, the corporate internet acts as something of a containment zone for people who wouldn't be using the internet anyway were it not for smartphones. When you look at it like that, things feel a little bit less lonely.

The midterms are kicking off and hopefully the Republicans don't try to rig it anymore than they already have. I don't know about you but these past two years have more or less ensured that I'll never vote Republican again. That doesn't say much because I haven't voted for a republican in over a decade but the point still stands. I never thought I'd live to see a president worse than Trump 1 or Biden but here we are.

My wife and I bring in nearly $100,000 per year-- why in the FUCK are we still struggling? Gas is $5/gallon and food is outrageously priced. Not only that, but utility bills have skyrocketed under Trump's administration. Don't even get me started on all of this LLM bullshit. I'm fucking done.

Worse, my parents, aunts and uncles are struggling even more than we are. None of this is right, and that doesn't even begin to cover the absolutely heinous foreign and domestic policy with regards to maintaining this glorious country's dignity.

Get out there and vote like your life depends on it. Your quality of life certainly does. All the Republicans have at this point are SJW-tier nonsense arguments against trans people. Trans people have nothing to do with anything and aren't hurting anyone so shut the fuck up and address actual problems. Republicans don't want to help anyone but themselves and their donors at our expense. Don't get me wrong, the Democrats are similar, but at least they have a decent economic record. Living in my state has largely shielded my family from a majority of the truly awful consequences of this administrations economic failures. I don't know how long that will hold.

Tetris DS is just too damn easy! I want my NES themed tetris games to challenge me, not coddle me like a baby. My highest score in endless marathon is 4.5 million points? What the fuck is that shit? I was somewhere around level 169 when I decided I was sick of it and let myself lose so that I could play Mega Man ZX. You gotta understand something here: Tetris DS is NOT the golden child many claim it to be. In fact!-- I'd go so far as to say it's kind of lame.

It's all good in the hood. I just watched a bootleg upload of Buddy on Youtube. It's a great movie, and no-- I wasn't bootlegging it on purpose. My wife found it in her fyp thing. What do they call that? Please pay money to watch that movie. It's great.

Something that I absolutely cannot abide by is this ridiculously unfortunate Tetris DS situation. Remember when the Nintendo DS was new?? I do, and it kicked ass, man. Clickity Clack goes the keyboard as I could discuss the early DS days for day. I didn't get my own until 2010.

Anywho, I think I'm going to watch Too Many Cooks. I have no idea what that is, but my wife says it's pretty good. Oh! And may I brag for a moment about how all four of the cats are sitting on this bed or or otherwise in this room? As I typed that last sentence, one of the cats jumped down. I'm not going to edit this thing to reflect that and I stand by my declaration despite it's inaccuracy by the time I finished the sentence.

I think it was eighteen months ago that I wrote about how shit-tier ChatGPT was/is. In that article, I tried to get it to hack Dragon Warrior on the NES. I consider the final result to be a souless, vaguely amusing travesty.

I remember speculating about whether or not LLM generated ROM hacks would ever be a thing. I don't follow the community very closely right now because I don't care anymore. It was only after a friend at work mentioned something that I decided to check, and yep, people are slop-coding ROM hacks. Nothing about them are original, but they definitely exist. My favorite is Zero in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. He controls exactly as he does in Mega Man Zero but it's Aria of Sorrow. Pretty neat, in a hollow, depressing kind of way.

Let me give you an example of what I mean: say I'm creating a movie and in that movie, I need a car to explode. I could go two routes: I can use CGI to animate a car exploding, or, I can hire a pyrotechnics expert and film the result of his endevor. Which would you rather see? I think most would find more joy in the later. Haven't you seen Terminator 2? Would a helicopter flying under an overpass be at all interesting if it were CGI? Of course not. For the same reason, I'm not impressed by these crossover hacks because nobody did anything.

Other similar groups are using LLMs to blow Sony out of the water. They're hacking PS5, installing hShop like things on it, and just generally making life at Sony a living hell. I don't have a problem with this usage of LLMs. I've always considered them to be a weapon. Up until now, it was a weapon utilized by big tech against the working class. Now, the working class is turning it against them. This leveling of the playing field is refreshing. I don't know what'll come of it, but I think Sony deserves every bit it.

The only time I've pirated current-gen games is when Sony forced me to. Back in 2009, I hacked my PSP. In doing so, my PSN downloads were stripped from me. Using my newly hacked PSP, I took them back since I had already paid for them. You can't just take peoples stuff because you don't like what someone is doing with hardware they own. Sorry, no sympathy here. I hope you LLM dudes utterly destroy Sony.

Despite my hopes, I still don't respect these LLM bros. In my life, the ones that I know never question anything. They just kind of go along with whatever anyone tells them without thinking about it at all. It's hard to respect people like that. Whenever they give an opinion, I wonder who fed it to them and why.

That doesn't mean I think they're bad people. In fact, both of the people I'm thinking of are wonderful. They simply follow a different thought process than myself. I'm very skeptical of any advice they give, but I'll trust them to follow the rules. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's the only way I can properly articulate it.

I doubt any of this will become the status quo. ROM hacking isn't going anywhere, but once the novelty wears off, we'll be stuck with people releasing bug riddled garbage like they always have. As for Sony, they're fucking done. It's going to be a tremendously slow downfall, but they're done. Nobody is going to pay $1000 for a Playstation 6 that doesn't have a disk drive or games that people feel they own. Not in a good economy, and especially not in this economy.

Valve and Nintendo's platforms both complement each other well. They're not in competition. I wonder what'll happen? I'm sure Nintendo will get complacent at some point and I'll be talking about them in the same way talking about Sony right now. I don't know about Valve. As long as GabeN's around and they remain off of the stock market, I think they're trustworthy.

Anyway, I'm niether anti nor pro AI. I'm anti-corporation. It is our duty as people to keep them in check. If we have to put the fear of God into them using LLMs, so be it. After all, the LLMs' creators stole from all of us to build them. We might as well harness it for good.

The chaos continues as I wait for a heating element for my drying while being inundated with signs that I should do laundry. So far, my solution has held, but I have no idea how long these conditions will hold. Supposing nothing changes, we're going to run out of food in thirteen days. The carrier pigeons I sent north haven't returned with a reply. I pray for the safety of the reciepients.

We watched Signs with Mel Gibson last night. What a movie, right? Alien Invasion movies are always fun, and they seem to function in pairs. At least, the ones I've seen. I don't seek them out so I could be very, very wrong. Independence Day and Mars Attacks! are both very similar structurally. Then you have Signs and War of the Worlds. Those two focus solely on one family's attempt to survive the invasion. War of the Worlds and Independence Day both try to be huge blockbuster hits. Independence Day succeeded for sure, but I don't know if the same can be said for War of the Worlds. Then, you have Mars Attacks! and Signs. Neither seems interested in going for awards, are extremely campy, and feature casts consisting of bigshots.

I don't know. I think I want to review all of these movies. Spoilers: Mars Attacks! is my favorite. I relate to the aliens and they're more or less doing what I'd do if I had an army and that kind of technology at my disposal.

Today sucked massive ass. The only good part of it was taking my wife to get her septum and belly button pierced. After it was over, we ate Del Taco. I had six snack tacos while she Flamin' Hot Nacho Fries. We both found how red all of it was to be disturbing.

On the way back home, I could see that there was a traffic accident ahead. I turned around and backtracked a bit to avoid it. On my way back home via the new route, traffic had stopped due to that very same accident. Turns out, I could have gotten through rather quickly via the first route we had taken.

After returning home, I realized my dryer is busted. It's been busted, but it's especially busted now and I'm not sure what's up. It's a 1980's era kenmore with a ridiculously simple heating circuit. It's basically just a set of thermostats, a ceramic fuse, and a heating element. I replaced every component aside from the heating element and it's still getting too hot. As I type this, I'm sitting next to it manually cycling the heat on and off because the damn thing wont do it itself. I'm not sure I'm willing to buy a new one just yet. Also, don't worry. The heating element gets cut off of power long before the damn thing catches fire.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I can afford a new one, but I don't want to go that route if I can avoid it. I like the knobs, sounds, and lack of printed circuit boards or ICs. The less of those I have in various appliances, the better.

I had already planned for a friend of mine to come by and learn how to repair electronics. He shows up, and we get started. I train people with NES consoles because they're simple and 95% of the stuff you learn when fixing these machines transfers over to anything else.

This console was all kinds of fucked that I wasn't aware of. It had wavy lines all over the video output and the 72-pin had been wrecked by a Game Genie. Not only that, but somehow the CPU just died halfway through testing. I've never seen anything like it before. Whenever that happens, it's because I definitively fucked something up. I don't know what I did in this case. It just fucking died.

I grabbed a new CPU and spare pin connector before beginning to show him exactly how we were going to repair this thing: We're gonna recap the alps board, replace the 7805, socket and replace the CPU, and finally clean and install the 72-pin connector. I wanted to make sure the CPU had actually failed though. In hindsight, it really doesn't matter. I became so caught up on probing the god damn thing that we never even got started. There's nothing to probe anyway without a working pin connector. At least, as far as Nintendo's own repair manual is concerned. Usually I don't bother, but I was genuinely curious.

Anyway, I'm buying several famicoms for parts now because I'm down to two spare PPUs and only one spare CPU. Of course, that's IF the CPU is actually dead in that console. I don't actually know yet and wont until I can put it in my test console.

Anywho, I'd really like to go to sleep but I need laundry done for tomorrow so I'm up with this damn dryer. Oh well.

Life is like a coke freestyle machine. Sometimes, you get to make a choice, but occasionally, you just get sewage.

I wanted this site to be more... structured. I feel like I wasn't able to distinguish between articles, updates, and blog posts. Updates became a section for blog posts about utter nonsense, politics, and various other ramblings. I don't want that. After this update, I'm pretty sure the front page is going to change to. I don't know to what yet, but it's definitely going to be more than "Here's the newest thing". That'll still be there, but it'll be better cause there'll be more pictures. Everyone loves pictures!

The way this page works will be simple: I'll let it fill up, and when it's too big, I'll create an archive akin to the post archive. Remember when that wasn't a blog? Well, it isn't anymore!

Tomorrow, I'm driving 120 miles round trip to arrange for my cat to be spayed. Then, I'm doing it next week to actually get it done. That's expensive and I'm blessed to be able to afford it. I've been employed by the same company for nearly a decade. They treat me well. I'm a lucky guy in a lot of ways, but I don't let it get to my head. I feel like the entire world knows more than I do. Even in fields where I know I'm probably the best.

Something I blow complete ass at is HTML and CSS, so at least there's that. It's been two years, and I'm finally feeling like I get the basics. I made this page intentionally sparse because I like sparse looking websites. Modern pages are sparse, but somehow still manage to look terrible. I think it's the incessant of white backgrounds.

I've been playing Pikmin quite a bit in my free time. I tend to finish Pikmin 1 over and over again. I enjoy it over Pikmin 2 and especially Pikmin 3, which I kind of hate. It's so disappointing that Nintendo thought charging was a decent alternative to swarming. I want my weird little combat horn back.