I do, indeed. (Rocket Knight Adventures was a lot of fun.) There's was a nice package circulating the web back in 2013 called the 6666-in-1 RETRO_LEGENDS ROM Pack, which comprises over 6,000 North American and Japanese titles for the NES, SNES, NeoGeo, GBA, Sega Genesis, Master System, Atari, N64, TurboGrafX, and the ZX Spectrum, as well as 534 popular arcade titles for MAME. I imagine there are larger libraries which incorporate later system today.

I picked up several retro USB game controllers and enjoy kicking back on a Saturday for some head-to-head Marvel vs Capcom or Mario Kart against my wife.

Retroarch supports an insane number of system cores and lets you navigate and load any title via its corresponding core from any device - desktop, Android phone, whatever. The one feature I haven't explored yet is NetPlay so that I can kick the a**es of my friends overseas as well.

The other retro pleasure I partake in is a server I dubbed RetroBox which I loaded with 100 complete tv series archives of my favorite 80s and 90s cartoons and live action shows, including a few I never got around to as a kid, like Batman: The Animated Series. I'm thinking about downloading a few 8-hour commercial archives from the same decades and configuring the server to play through the episode library at random with commercials inserted every 15 minutes or so. The plan would be to port the server's video output to a woody Zenith CRT telvision (you know, with honkin' UHF and VHF knobs), stick it on a 1980s microwave cart and wheel it into the bedroom for Saturday morning cartoons. (Cap'n Crunch sold seperately.)

Thanks, Bat. I've enjoyed a few Let's Plays in the past, but had never heard of this guy before, (nor have I seen a vlog if that is what I'm witnessing). May I speak frankly? I'm hoping you guys can help me understand this phenomenon.

I clicked through Pew... (no, screw it, the name is absurd. Why the hell would anyone adopt such a moniker?) ...I clicked through several of his videos and stomached as many minutes as I could stand in an effort to develop some sort of understanding of why anyone on this planet would watch this a**hat.

Why did he spend eight full minutes exploring the subtle nuances and philosophy of the phrase, "Pen Pineapple Apple Pen?"

I respect a few of the socio-cultural positions he appears to take on various trivial matters, (though I try to frame his arguments in the grander context of social impact, free speech, etc. rather than on the inconsequential happenings of other teenage dolts filming themselves on the web.)

But his humor and language are elementary, his attire and set design are juvenile at best and would end a critical conversation with a potential peer long before he'd had the opportunity to open his mouth.

Please, please pardon my woeful ignorance here - you must understand that I've had conversations with, at most, 7 or 8 persons under the age of 30 "IRL" as they say between 2010 and the present. In my day-to-day routine, I encounter two coworkers (aged 65 or older) and one CEO of 50-odd years. Apart from the briefest of exchanges with the occasional client picking up an order, I really don't ever speak to anyone, so I'm a bit in the dark with regard to what people look like or sound like these days.

Do ladies and gents actually conduct themselves like this Pewdiepie fellow? If so, how do they receive any respect or acknowledgment from those around them?

I ask this genuinely, as I am perplexed by what I've seen this evening.

Ha ha, over 6,000? That's a ton of games! I remember playing Mario Kart on the SNES with my sisters. The AI racers were such cheating assholes, especially Peach. :laughing:

I see that you're a man who takes his saturday morning cartoons very seriously. I can respect that. Every now and then, I'm known to grab a bowl of cereal and throw on TMNT. Just a few months ago, I watched all of Space Adventure Cobra for the hell of it, watching an episode every morning while I ate breakfast.

Is there a reason you don't play games from the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era? Personally, it's my favorite generation.

Tricking ISB into watching Pewdiepie is now my favorite thing.


http://i.imgur.com/iB1ObCG.gif

And to answer your question, no, nobody acts or talks like Pewdiepie. I have a certain place in my heart for his ludicrous antics, but he is reviled by many as an incredibly annoying twat who just puts on an act to entertain dumb 12-year-olds. He does have the highest number of subscribers on all of Youtube though, so take that for what you will.

One of my greatest faults is that I am so quick to dismiss cultures after my "time". (It's called being old.) After the whole living-in-asylums for the majority of the 90s, by the time I got out the world was entirely foreign to me.

Just think - when I went in, there were no cell phones and the web was just graduating from BBS-era dial up. The NES was the only system that mattered, grunge was a new concept, and Comedy Central hadn't been born yet.

When they let me out, mobile phones were the norm, Kurt was dead, and f***ing Friends happened. My experience was quite similar to Brooks' in Shawshank. Thankfully, instead of taking my own life, I just erased the rest of the world around me.

TL;DR I'm a cranky old coot who doesn't understand video games with more than 4 buttons.

Hey, I can kind of understand. Growing up, after a certain point, I pretty much isolated myself from the rest of the world. I hated just about everyone and couldn't relate to them. Since I associated modern culture with the worst times of my life, I just sort of dove into retro things, especially movies and music. I despised the pop hits of my time, and didn't give a shit about Facebook or texting. Just like everyone else in the world, I had shit thrown at me that I had to learn to deal with. Never went to an asylum, though. Can't imagine what that must have been like.

I still tend to listen to retro music and watch older movies, but I like to think that I'm not so lost in yesterday that I'd miss the chance to experience things well worth experiencing, just because of their manufacturing date. Then again, it's our preferences and peculiarities that keep us happy, and who am I to tell someone what ought to make them happy.

tl;dr I'm an old coot too, man. You do whatever makes you happy. But if you ever wanna get into Ps2/Gamecube games and need somes recs, I'm on that shit.

One From the Vault
 

After reading about James Joyce's last words, (deeply saddening), I wanted to revisit his final interview, published in Time Magazine, issue #19, May 9, 1939.

Unfortunately, my copy is archivally framed and I was too much of a dumbass to think to scan the interview pages before encapsulating it forever in its final fate. As I've never really had any interest in magazines, I am not a member of any of the major closed magazine trackers, and their public brethren are overrun with porn zines and offer little in the way of 1930s print.

So, against all my better judgment, I signed up for a one-time access pass to the Vault section of Time Magazine's website for $2.50 and went to work. Whoever was in charge of scanning these archival issues did a terrible job, leaving many pages askew or missing as much as half of the page. And Time doesn't exactly go out of its way to make it easy for users to save any of this content.

For a few minutes, I started logging the image source URLs for the 86-page issue and in about 30-seconds' time I successfully executed a command line script which automatically scraped all of the high-res page scans of the entire issue from the Vault, compiled them in the proper sequence, and exported the resulting file to a PDF.

There were a few hiccups, as I placed a wildcard one branch too early and inadvertently initiated a media scrape of the entire history of Time Magazine.

With the task complete, I took a moment to also extract the interview article's text and export to Google Doc, ODT, plaintext, and epub for optimal accessibility.

Flipping through the entire issue was indeed eye-opening - there was the latest news from Hitler, adverts from Martin Aircraft, "World's Standard of Skyway Supremacy", Camel ads targeting young women, adverts for the Studebaker and the Pontiac Eight, the new technology of aluminum foil, the latest foxtrot hits, and this gem from Monsanto Corporation:

http://i.imgur.com/CX0a7U4l.jpg

Settling in presently to read the interview which set me on this little project.

http://i.imgur.com/nGJg28Pl.jpg

I'm honestly curious about what 1939 thought was everyday Hitler news.