HereComesTom

So...Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle really ARE in Pony Life!

Well, after $500, weeks of waiting, and 90 sweaty minutes of assembly-work done on an empty stomach, I finally have my Ms. Pacman arcade machine!  I picked it because it had yellow trim, four games that I didn't already have on my 40th anniversary Pacman arcade cabinet, and was a sit-down machine...

And it turns out either I'm terrible at those games, or those games are terrible in comparison.  I mean, if you play Galaxian after getting used to Galaga, it feels awful---simpler enemy movements, a much less forgiving hitbox for your ship, fewer projectiles on the screen at once...!  And you'd think I was a moron from watching how I play Dig Dig 2!

Hopefully, I'll get better as time goes on!

I have to say that I had a very strange and slightly disturbing experience, but at least I got to be the hero of the story this time!

Here's what happened:  my brother got a request out of the blue from someone on Facebook, a girl with a pretty and nerdy photo, asking to start a relationship with him.  No one he'd ever met or heard of before, but he is more or less in the market for a girlfriend, so he was interested.

If this sounds suspicious to you, I'll spoil the ending and say you're spot-on.  The ending isn't really the interesting part of the story, anyway:  how I got there is the interesting part!

My brother told me about all this over dinner (it was just this afternoon that he was first contacted), so I got out my phone and looked up "hangouts app" on google, and about the third or fourth suggestion was "hangouts app scam". 

Huh.  Why am I not surprised?

So I tapped "hangouts app scam" on Google and, lo and behold: THE very first page that Google listed was a Federal Trade Commission web page, warning people about scams where someone starts a relationship, keeps it going for a while, and then asks for money.  The FTC's page also suggested I do a "reverse image search" on the person's image to see if they just downloaded a photo of a pretty girl off the internet and then used that photo to pretend to be her.

Well, my brother was busy after dinner (not with anything having to do with her, either, thank goodness), so I took it upon myself to learn about this would-be suitor.  It'll come as no surprise to you that the photo came from Twitter from someone with a completely different name...advertising the kinds of images that I wouldn't talk about on THIS site.

Again:  why am I not surprised by any of this?

It gets more interesting:  I had a school friend on facebook who I noticed was also friends with her.  I decided to warn him about her and let him know what happened to my brother---and it turns out she had talked with my school friend, earlier this very afternoon, with the exact same request:  start a relationship---just out of the blue, start a relationship!

So...she's either a two-timing lowlife, or a scam artist.  ...Or conceivably both:  it's not like those are mutually exclusive categories!

...It's just a little disturbing that things like this can happen to those who're close to me.  But there is a lesson to be learned from it all:  vigilance, using your head, and reading relevant government notices about scams can save your bacon, as well as the bacon of your kith and kin!

Bought a whole bunch of candy.  Spent half an hour putting it into little ziplock bags, so it'd be easy to give it to kids with little risk of the virus getting anywhere.

...Not a single trick-or-treater showed up.  :/

Well, I finally fixed my Wii yesterday---the reason I couldn't play my Virtual Console games was, for some reason, a bad disk drive that I bought on ebay.  When I bought another that was actually good, things finally worked! 

And I can even play Wii disc games and gamecube games on it again!

I decided to celebrate by playing some Super Mario Galaxy!  And I have to say:  I don't think any Super Mario title has come close to the gameplay creativity that SMG had to offer; just adding a point-and-click interface to the system opened up HUGE possibilities for new control and new capabilities!

Ugh...you forget how stressful and exhausting moving can be!  Making sure all your stuff is accounted for, going back and forth between the old place and the new, carrying stuff up and down stairs, figuring out truck rentals, cleaning clutter out of the old place so you can actually move the furniture, having no idea why the new place has so many coaxial cables that come out of the wall (one in the bathroom?? really?!?!) but still aren't connected to the cable TV lines so you can't use them to hook up your router...!

And then you STILL need to manage to have time for food, sleep, your job, laundry, and Animal Crossing on top of all of that!

Time for another item from my List of Things Hasbro Won't Let a Brony Do in a Fangame:

5) I may not base the guards of any castle in Equestria or beyond on the playable characters in Castle Crashers.

Also, fun fact:  the spell checker didn't like the word "brony" and recommended "crony" as an alternative

Debate Symposium closed?  I haven't been in there for years, but from the sound of things, that's a good thing...!

You know...I never knew that religious or political things aren't supposed to be in status updates until I rad Jeric's post.  I need to keep up to date on the forum's rules!

I just saw a story online that disturbed me:  a genius programmer with an anxiety disorder basically fled to the woods to live alone like a crazy survivalist and then seemed to die due to an injury:

https://www.wired.com/story/strange-life-mysterious-death-of-virtuoso-coder/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

What hits close to home about it is that I'm a programmer and I have an anxiety disorder...!

Well, THAT was stressful and disappointing...

My brother's box spring and mattress were crawling with bedbugs a week ago.  So we put them inside a GIANT plastic bag that is sold with a kind of a poison air-freshener...the idea is that you get the mattress and box spring in the bag, get the bag airtight with the poison air-freshener inside it, and let it sit for seven days.  After the seven days, the bedbugs inside are supposed to be dead, and even their eggs should be destroyed.

...You can tell from the word "supposed" that it's not true.

We dragged the mattress outside, opened the bag, and found there were lots and lots of live bedbugs still in the bag.

What's really crazy about it is that, now that we've gotten it outside and opened the bags...we can't bring that thing back inside; we'd recontaminate the house!  And I just know someone in our HOA is going to complain about it.  I called the HOA first to explain the situation---and sprayed the siding that the whole thing is leaning on with a spray that (I hope) will keep them from crawling back in through the walls.

I'm a bit worried that getting rid of it will be a doozy; no one really wants to get near bedbugs, and I know firsthand why :/

I sure hope I get some feedback on this base-project soon; I've been working on this project for a while, and I just got done with my first draft of Celestia's tail-animation!

I like to give two toys a year to Toys for Tots: one for a boy and one for a girl. I picked a Rainbow Power Fluttershy plushy for the girl this year

Just got my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.  My arm's only a little sore, but I'm getting a lot more tired than I usually get in the evening.

I don't know how or if the vaccine will affect me; it could be something to do with my sinuses instead.  Either way, I plan to take it easy tonight!

I just saw the first two episodes of Pony Life, and...well, I thought Princess Probz wasn't very good, while Best of the Worst was actually pretty decent.

Princess Probz suffered from pacing problems and didn't feel like it had much of a conflict, and it almost entirely focused on Pinkie's zaniness, messyness, and clumsiness for slapstick comedy.  (But Pinkie wasn't clumsy or messy much in FiM, was she?)

Best of the Worst felt like it was better paced, with a decent opening that established RD's personality and motivations, and the episode had an actual plot and conflict to it.  It had some slapstick, but that wasn't bad, and didn't feel like it broke any characterizations from FiM.

I wasn't too keen on the overly-simplistic visuals that either episode showed; they made Ponyville look like it was made mostly of edibles with the occasional bite taken out of them.  With a lake of pink lemonade right next to Sugarcube Corner, no less.  (Was it even close to water in FiM?)

Also, because of the fast pacing, the characters don't get much characterization in Pony Life; it's like they're relying on FiM to tell us what their personalities are---and then they have changes to them, e.g. Pinkie being clumsy and messy, all of a sudden.  If it's not in continuity with FiM (and if you go by Ponyville's layout, then it's not), then the show should really be able to stand on its own without relying on another series to tell us what we need to know about the characters.

--

On the whole, I don't know how optimistic I should be about the Pony Life series in general.  I get the feeling that it's going to be mixed overall, and probably there'll be plenty of bronies saying "It's mixed at best".  But I'm planning to keep watching and following the new series, at least for the time being.

Makes me wonder what's going on in the Season 10 comic books...

I've been sitting on these for years---I think it's high time I started posting the List of Things Hasbro Won't Let a Brony Do in a Fangame:

1)  When naming OCs for the Canterlot Royal Guard, the following names are off-limits:  Cannon Fodder, Red Shirt, Brown Pants.

You think this is a better avatar icon? In retrospect, I do.

Ugh.  I wouldn't wish bedbugs on anyone!

We have them in my condo.  The main nest seems like it was in my brother's box spring; we've got it in a couple of giant plastic bags, with a poisonous air-freshener-thingy inside that, after a week of being sealed in there, should kill the live bugs as well as the eggs.

On top of that, I set off four different bed bug bombs (foggers?) in four different rooms...and I'm still finding live bed bugs, even in one of the rooms that had the bed bug bombs in them.
 

I guess there is no one silver bullet vs. bed bugs.  You just gotta keep spraying the edges of the room until they no longer come back... :/

Just put out some wood, hardwood, softwood, iron, stone, clay, bamboo, and tree branches---they're over on the west side of the island, in the grassy area that's kind of northwest of the store.  Dodo code is still DW9JL if you're interested; IIRC the nook store needs some of those materials to open.

Happy new year!  I'd not planned on being awake at midnight, but...that's how it happened; I'd wanted to get some work done since I was inadvertently and unexpectedly behind, and then I saw that midnight was close, so...I just stayed up!

Well, I just tried Rikifive's Bookhorse game, and it took me a while to get the hang of it.  I'm probably going to post a Let's Play of it soon!

It's depressing...I'm a conservative, and I had some questions about transgenderism, but...it feels like there's just no safe place for a conservative to discuss that subject!  It's like I can't even bring up what conservative media has led me to believe about it so far, not even to give someone a chance to give me evidence that it just isn't true...

I've got friends who're on the other side of the fence, and some part of me would like to join them, but...it's not enough that I have friends who hold a belief; I need some proof of it to make that leap!

Welp, a friend of mine hasn't had a chance to get his computer fixed, and all throughout this pandemic, he hasn't been able to play League of Legends with me.

I scored a nice HP Paviliion gaming laptop during the black friday sales, and between gift cards for Best Buy that I'd been saving up and the black friday savings, it was less than $260 out of pocket for me

...But since that friend of mine needs a computer, I'm lending my new toy to him.  I sure hope he gets his computer replaced or fixed soon!

Yet another one from the List of Things Hasbro Won't Let a Brony Do in a MLP Fangame:

4)  No matter how common they are in real-life horsemanship, or how funny their high-pitched voices would be, I may not have geldings in the game.

I sure hope that's not too off-color...!

Well...what an interesting situation...

First piece of context:  Back in 2020, I struggled to get my hands on a Centipede arcade1up cabinet for my man-cave.  I finally got a Centipede 4-in-1 Partycade, but then something went horribly wrong:  the screen went completely white every time I turned it on, and stayed that way.  Couldn't play any of the games on it!  So I contacted the arcade1up support team, and they gave me a replacement.

Second piece of context:  Realizing that buying arcade1up cabinets one at a time wasn't the most economical way of getting games in my man-cave, I decided to invest in an AtGames Legends Ultimate Arcade, which has 300 games on it.  As it happens, said Legends Ultimate Arcade has all four of the games that the Centipede 4-in-1 Partycade has on it, and it's currently on its way.

Third piece of context:  I just discovered my Centipede 4-in-1 Partycade once again had the white screen of death.  And I'm not sure it's still under warranty; it may or may not be.  I'll find out soon; I've contacted the arcade1up support team again.

So...all-in-all, an interesting situation:  do I ask for a refund?  Do I ask for a replacement when I'm already going to get all the games that're on that Partycade, and then some?  Do they even HAVE any replacements?  Is it even under warranty?  It'll be a close call if it is.

I'm not even sure what I feel about this.  If it's not under warranty anymore, then there's nothing to be done---unless it's something as simple that I can fix myself, like some wires not being connected or something.  In which case I might as well crack it open, since I'll have nothing to lose by attempting to fix it.

I don't know if you're still keeping an eye on the forum, but I hope you are---we're looking forward to the new series coming out soon!