Fnord Incorporated

peeing out my ass/peeing out my butt

wtf..

you write one little post about reading a good book on the john and suddenly half your site traffic is received from devoted fetishists searching out defecation videos?

I DEMAND A HIGHER CALIBER OF WEB VISITORS! those of you who actively read and participate in communication here aside of course.

as a side note, today i have been alive for 11,154 days.. overall it was a good day. Check out http://www.11154.net/

once you get deeper in to the flash animation on the site, there is a hell of a lot of interesting music on here, smooth stuff based on hip hop, break beats, some stuff that drove me crazy, some that didn’t.

that is all.. oh yeah.. peeing out my ass.. dont ever search that phrase.. you will be sad at how lame the internet is..

image found on sepiamutiny.com

warning: i am going to geek out for a minute or two.

i have a list of my top five favorite video games of all time.

ChronoTrigger (snes)
Final Fantasy III (snes)
Legend of Zelda: A link to the past (snes)
Secret of Mana (snes)
Lufia II (snes)

i pretty much lost interest with most video games once the systems started moving away from cartridges. i cant stand the long load times, i dislike the emphasis on graphics rather than story. if i had my way, i would go back to all games being purely sprite based. there is a decent culture built around this same feeling. i know at least one friend who is in the process of writing and making his own pixel based RPG because he shares the same feelings.

So back story out of the way, a year or so ago, i bought the new release of Final Fantasy VI Advance. This is basically a rerelease of Final Fantasy 3, but with a new cleaned up translation done by Tom Slattery. It is pretty good, but i miss the old Ted Woolsey translation that was done for the Super Nintendo.

I have played this through three or four times since i got it and have had a hell of a lot of fun. recently i got the itch to play again and pulled it out.. in an attempt to get everything accomplished before the catastrophic point of no return mid game, i decided i would take advantage of a walk through. this is something i try to refrain from doing, but sometimes it is easier to reference someone elses work, especially if you have already hammered out a game ahell of a lot of times.

i am now officially glad that i did so. i have not even referenced what i got the walkthrough for yet, mainly because the writing of the introduction is incredibly incredibly enjoyable to read. i decided that i would back it up, post it for access here and throw a snippet of it up for reading.

i know that most people who visit thsi site will not be interested in this, but, as always, tell me it sucks and move along.. there is no reason to try to force you to read it.. you will be missing out though.. seriously..

if you want a great introduction, read the foreword,
for straight up humor, scroll down to the introduction excerpt,
if you want the whole kit n kaboodle, scroll down to the GameFaqs link

Foreword written by Imzogelmo

The year was 1994.
Until that time, humanity seemed a bleak existence — why, the 20th century alone saw the world ravaged by two world wars, a tense period known as the Cold War, and various regional conflicts. Finally, in the latter decades of the century, a new ray of hope emerged — the video game. Instead of fighting and killing one another, now mankind could do sovicariously or, if it was preferred, two could team up and do battle against
a fictional foe.

Like all forms of expression, the video game underwent many reformations (or generations) before the recipe became “just right.” Several genres of game sprang into being: platform games, shoot-em-ups, action/adventures, sports, puzzlers, fighting games, and RPGs. Each type of game appealed to a different
type of player or interest, and all the while advances were being made both in capacity of games’ data and complexity of the hardware used to run it. By the early 1990’s, the types of presentation that would work with a given genre were well-established, and players could afford to specialize in a particular genre without narrowing the field of games too greatly.

That brings us back to 1994, or, as Nintendo called it, “The year of the cartridge.” In that year,  _Final_Fantasy_VI_ was released, and there was much rejoicing. The genre was RPG; the fictional foe was the evil Emperor Gestahl, and later, the pompous nihilist Kefka. Sure, there were other RPGs before it, but none that struck the perfect balance of character similarity vs. diversity, importance of storyline vs. gameplay, and plot linearity vs. non-linearity.

The depth of characters and robustness of the game engine (plus the time investment required to fully explore the nuances of the game) made this one of the highest-rated games in terms of replayability. Furthermore, the vivid graphics and moving musical score made it a complete experience, not just a game.

“But it is just a game!” I hear someone in the back say.

No, it is not just a game. In the fast-paced world where information is old as soon as it can be emailed, a video game generally has a very small window of time that it is considered new or exciting. For the early history of
video games that may not have been so true, but for the entire history of this game, the internet has been a very influential medium for discussion among players. For many fans of the series, this is still the greatest game, in spite of the hype surrounding some of its successors. So no, it is not “just a game” — it is a culture. And like many great cultures, it needs great works to explain, enhance, and record its story.

To document every piece of useful (and no-so-useful) data on a culture — that’s a difficult task. Many approximations have come forward, but always they have had inaccurate, inconsistent, or insufficient information. That is not meant as an insult on previous guides — like I said, it’s difficult. Much information has been uncovered through deliberate playing and replaying of the game, through hacking its internal code and data, and through combined effort of its many fans. This guide seeks to improve upon and surpass all
previous attempts. This guide seeks to be the great work of which I speak.
This guide covers _everything_.

 an excerpt from Djibriel’s Introduction.

The original document was first released in November 2005, and we’re roughly two years down the road now. It may seem weird to some that ’simply ‘adapting the original 1381 kB file took about as long as writing the monstrosity in the first place, but you’d be surprised at how much work it is! Saint Jerome and Ted Woolsey would’ve shared my pain I’m sure, had they not both passed away 16 centuries ago.

At the very start of this document I’d like to mention that none of this would have ever happened if there weren’t so many righteous characters out there who advised my walkthrough to people on the message boards, who e-mailed me just to say they enjoyed the FAQ in one way or another or otherwise made me feel like I didn’t spend all this time just for personal enjoyment… I had a market to work for. Hotels around the globe replaced their Holy Bible with a printed version of the Battle Tactics Walkthrough. Rumors have comely women carry snippets of my guide in their panties to feel sexier and more confident. Like Stephen King and Robert Jordan, I had to struggle to deliver my ultimate work before Death’s ever-fickle hand took me in its grip. Before you, you see the results. The all-inclusive Walkthrough and Battle Tactics Guide for Final Fantasy VI Advance.

But what is this document you’re seeing? Does it really contain everything? Is it some kind of Hitchhiker’s Guide to FF VI Advance? The Encyclopedea CCLV VI Supremea? The Cosmog Sutra, where you’ll learn all about Tantric Gameplay (lasts for hours; winning the battle is NOT the main goal)?

Anyway, thats all i had. it was just well written and continues to be so all the way through the end.

link to the orgininal file on GameFaqs

The Advance Walkthrough and Battle Tactics Guide; WoB
Version 1.2
Djibriel, August 2007
~~~~~~~~~~~
“Read this” graffiti image found via google images in a subdirectory called ~epstein on OFB.net
lots of great images in both places, go check them out if you get the chance

St. Valentine’s day, catholic holiday (holyday), venereal disease… (yes i plan on tying it in)

i am no scholar, so please refrain from making an ass out of yourself in any correction you may choose to point out here. your douche baggery would be monumental

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all about Valentine’s Day

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i guess we should start here with a bit of information about paganism. pagan comes from the latin root paganus. this roughly translates to mean olden country dweller, and is often translated to rustic. from the modern theological perspective, it encompasses all spiritual and culture beliefs that can be easily defined as:

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• folk religion
• belief in multiple gods or entities
• demonstrations of these religions or beliefs

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based on these criteria, Catholicism (and other nonspecific Christian religions) are pagan, though they refuse to believe they fall into this category in the slightest. Christians have nearly always been caustic when it comes to religion differing from itself. originally, Valentine’s day was believed to be a Roman holiday based around Lupercalus/Frebruata Juno celebrations. Frebruata is known as a goddess of fertility and sexuality. Lupercus was associated as the god of the pasture (and supposedly all that resides there in). the feast of Lupercalia occurred in their honor. Catholics, as with many other “pagan” festivals, bastardized it and stripped it of its original context by suppressing its normal practice. tack on a Catholic saint’s name and call it something new. obviously the first few years would be difficult, but enough people integrating changes out of convenience, indifference, or fear. next thing you know *poof! nearly “instant” Christian holiday.

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this is just one belief in its origins. there are several others depending on who you talk to. at some points the theories run parallel to each other and even converge. this general relativity is commonly a sign of core truths in all of the stories, and shows that you could look past a lot of the information and read only the subtext. that all of the theories are correct, and have been slightly embellished over the years, appearing to be separate from each other.

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THE St Valentine is actually an amalgam. he was up to 11 people all of whom had their own days of celebration under Catholicism. back in 1969, this was bunched together and became what it is today. there is a further amalgam in the fact that it is primarily celebrating Valantine of Rome and Valentine of Terni. Significant speculation in the past shows that though all records show them to have died nearly a hundred years apart, they may actually be the same individual and records may be incorrect. as all of the celebrated Valentine,s were killed or cannonized on the same day, it is also speculated that they were ALL the same person, reinterpreted through folklore and misinformation.. so there you go.. 11 saints and a lot of condensing and confusion.we can blame Chaucer (the man who wrote the Canterbury Tales) for the direct modern association of love with the holiday. “for this was on St. Valentine’s day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate”… Chaucer Chaucer Chaucer. thanks. no really. Parliament of Foules is where this quote started. English society began associating lovers with the feast of Valentine because on that day the birds start to fall in love… such a simple thing.. i really wish there was a bit more to it, but from all i have found, there isnt.

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the traditional sending of “Valentines” can be attributed to the custom started of men and women writing love letters to the patron Saint Valentine. Valentine of Rome, being a miracle worker supposedly healed a jailers daughter who lost her sight. after her sight returned, he gave her a letter that was signed “from your Valentine”. whether this is fact or another yarn is up for debate, but the giving of notes to one you care for continues in this manner.

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more likely, this appears to be a replacement for other old pagan ceremonies where names were chosen out of a pot. boys and the girls (whose names they had pulled) were then bound together for the remainder fo the year, details on what their relationships were like are unknown to me. the church tried to take advantage of this tradition by having people choose the names of saints from said pot instead of the names of girls. people who pulled names were to emulate, for the next year, the values that their saint was known for. how bad could that be right? well what if you got stuck with a really really really bad or lame saint? examples:

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• Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of drug traffickers (i dont know that he was cannonized, just that the locals loved him enough to call him a saint and made a church in his honor)
• Ignatius of Antioch, saint of throat ailments
• St Vitus, patron saint of comedians, dancers and epilepsy
• St Zita, saint of lost keys
• Saint Nicholas, (yup, the one and only Santa Claus) patron saint of prostitutes among other more widely known things

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not being Catholic, these may or not be accurate as the interwebs sometimes lies to us, but you get my point here. it could be terrible beyond belief if you pulled the wrong name. it would be worse than pulling the smelly girl’s name in the pagan ceremony.

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now is when we get to the boring part of the holiday’s history.. fast forward a few hundred years. it is the mid 1800’s. Mass greeting cards are first produced out of lace and sold to the public. nothing of interest has happened since then. it is all just the same old story titled “how to make a buck off a holyday” as written by Paimi Monet lace turned to paper, paper turned to un-recycled card-stock. card-stock got crappy cartoon characters and pictures of the BRATZ stenciled on them candy candy candy. expensive gifts and jewelry. bad Zales diamond commercials, red heart shaped mylar balloons that knock you in the head on your bus ride to work, more bad candy. swoony women, heart ache and disappointment, missed expectations and occasionally, a pretty damn good day..

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venereal disease.. i was going to tie this in somehow. oh yeah. HAPPY VD every one.

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humorous image of the Valentine guillotine was found here www.pizzabytheslice.com
best part, and unfortunately they do not mention if it was on purpose, was that many of the amalgam Valentines were beheaded.. i dont know how many, and i do not think that the guillotine was used, but it is still humorous.

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WW2 VD poster was found on nih.gov

Charlie horse

I am sitting at work and notice my left leg has gone to sleep.
I flex my foot and calve, trying to get the pins and needles to subside.
I feel like the poster child for political/corporate immobilization tactics..
~~~~~~~~~~

Kept sitting in one position long enough that the numbness can set in, we find ourselves participating in a plan to consume, passify, justify the unjust, and push buttons/pull levers instead of working a machine designed by someone else, as opposed to one of our own design. Don’t worry, just sit it out. We will have a break soon. In the meantime, we are prompted to entertain ourselves, try to take our minds off the feelings we are experiencing. We all know waiting sucks though… so..

Once the numbness sets in, we are allowed the privilege of a choice:

1. Stay still and hope it gets better/goes away
2. Take steps to get the blood flowing properly again.

It is a catch 22. Either choice leaves us attached to the system. With the first, we could stay sitting, but need to flex, stretch, and reach out a little. Staying immobile will cause squirming or panic. We would become inefficient and lackadaisical. This inefficiency is what prompts us to lean towards option two. It feels natural, it is a reaction.. We can’t help but try to stand up. We even think it is your own idea, as opposed to a subtle Machiavellian tactic.

Standing, our thoughts begin fresh. We think “Hey! This isn’t so bad!”. It is not until 3 steps later, realizing what kind of trouble we are in, we find that we have left our support behind. With nothing nearby to lean on, the leg begins to jelly and can’t bear weight. There is a small throb. The throb felt is not in the leg, but in the dead weight that we used to think was our leg, until it betrayed us by siding with the mollification. It feels nice, this freedom of movement. We want to giggle at how foolish it was to stand up instead of waiting for our break, or letting the blood begin to flow first. The system was, after all, designed with be safest and best intentions in mind.

Experiencing the forgotten wobbly elasticity our bodies have, we immediately want to fall down again. You know what is coming next.

Pins and needles.
Alternate interpretations are welcomed.