The first time I visited Japan was in 1998, and at that time all I saw were sit-down cabinets like the Sega Astro City, Taito Egret, Namco Cyberlead, etc. So, I was unaware that game centers here in Japan once had standing cabinets like America did until talking with my Japanese friend. He said that he would play Atari’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the ’80s. Atari had some successes in Japan back in the ’80s, especially Gauntlet and Marble Madness. And going back further, Breakout obviously made quite an impression in Japan, giving birth to the “block kuzushi” genre with Arkanoid being the most exemplary title. Dang, if only I could travel back in time, or at least Quantum Leap into my childhood self and relive those memories…
I get a lot of comments on the buttons covering my backpack. I appreciate it when somebody has something to say about a button they’ve identified as something they know and like so that I can have a meaningful interaction with somebody, but if they are a boring person and just commenting on the amount of buttons only because they noticed that I have a lot of buttons and that most people don’t have a lot of buttons on their backpacks then they’re just wasting my time as I’m not usually interested in interacting with normies since it depletes my Energon cubes or something.
A very long time ago, my cousin Bethany gave me a button that simply says, “Everything I need to know about life I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.” I think this was back in college. It just slowly increased from there. Many of the buttons I’ve purchased on my own, but several were given to me, particularly by people who were kind enough to just want to add to the collection. Over time, I’ve lost some buttons, unfortunately. I won’t show them all, but here are some I’m particularly fond of.
This is a button for Mugen Senshi Valis by Tokuma Soft for the Nintendo Famicom. While I don’t care for this Famicom port, I do like the PC Engine a lot and the Megadrive version somewhat.
These buttons are for a game called Pac-Man. Perhaps you have heard of it.
Here is Mai and her fabulous tits from King of Fighters 2001.
A few years back, Village Vanguard stores at shopping malls had plenty of Sega Megadrive merchandise. There were these blindboxed enamel pins. Here are Puyo Puyo, Tant-R (a spin-off from Bonanza Bros), Sonic the Hedgehog, and Bare Knuckle II (aka Streets of Rage II for the NA Genesis). I’ve never played Tant-R before, so I sent this pin to my friend Brian. That’s what friends are for: pushing stuff you don’t want onto others.
Here is Reimu from Touhou Project and Lum from Urusei Yatsura. Reimu was given to me by a former coworker named Eddie several years ago. I think the color may have faded a bit? Not sure. If you don’t know who Lum is, I hate you and I’ll never be your best friend.
More King of Fighters: Here are pixelated Athena and King buttons.
My friend Lou gave me these enamel pins: the Vic Viper from Gradius and Oopa Oopa from Fantasy Zone. He found these at specialty pop-up stores in Tokyo, I do believe.
Anyhow, I have many other buttons and pins on here: Uglydolls, Peanuts, Rilakkuma, Blue Impulse, Darius Burst, Star Trek, the Flatwoods Monster, Tamiya, Hasegawa, and other pins. If you don’t know what any of these are and just want to comment that I have lots of buttons because you’re a normie and find it weird that others aren’t normal like you, then don’t talk to me by saying, “Boy, you have a lot of buttons on your backpack, bleh” because that drains my energy. So shut up.
The recent ruling against Alex Jones was complete BS. I don’t care if he said that Bigfoot was the shooter at Sandy Hook. He should be allowed to say what he wants, and to doubt what he wants to doubt. But he never once told anyone to harass the supposed “parents.” How were these parents even located? Well, several of them are listed as ACTORS on the IMDB, so that’s a start. But Jones never told his viewers to threaten them. In fact, all I ever heard him say was that Sandy Hook was real and spent years backpeddling away from an obvious farce. Strike 1 was Jones backing away from the obvious hoax that was Sandy Hook. Strike 2 was him apologizing and groveling to James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Pizza, and defending the man’s integrity. Anyone who has spent more than 2 minutes looking at the disgusting pictures Alefantis posted to his “Jimmy Comet” Instagram channel will see that he is a raving pedophile. Strike 3 was when Jones came up with that Fort Hood Muslim “Zack” and passing him off practically as Q Lite and ultimately told his viewers that Q was fake after he’d said that he’d gone “golfing” with Q etc. Yet here we are in October 2022, and Trump and his team are going overboard with the Q messaging, even playing a well-known Q-related song at all his rallies.
The guy in the picture above, Robby Parker, is the one who awakened me to the hoax. My mom died in February 2012, just 10 months prior. I couldn’t even mention her name without choking up and crying. She died before she was 70. If my daughter had been shot to death with all of her classmates, I wouldn’t be able to even speak at all. Yet on CNN, Robbie Parker can be seen grinning and laughing while coming out of the building, and then when he sees the cameras are already rolling, he works himself into character, starts telling the cameras (minus the tears) that his daughter had just been murdered the day before.
These people are all smiles when talking about their child who had just been shot to death.
Yeah, these people sure do not seem too disturbed that their kid was killed, either. By the way, this is David Wheeler and his wife, both listed on the IMDB as actors. Pretty poor actors if they can’t even pretend like their kid had just been riddled with bullets.
Their child was murdered by a poor Photoshop job too.
The right side of his neck is a perfectly straight line. His bangs have been manipulated. Almost as though it’s a real person who is being digitally altered to disguise his true identity.
“Adam Lanza” also surprisingly has an uncanny resemblance to David Hogg. Since Hogg’s father is FBI, it wouldn’t be too big of a stretch, and the ages are close enough.
This is “Carlee Soto.” A sinister grin as she pretends to cry. No tears. I could go on.
Sorry, but I don’t buy it. If there really were kids killed at an empty school somewhere, those people are actors and not the real parents, and those pictures of him were manipulated. No deaths were reported to the social security office, and at least one family put up a charity website for their child before the shooting even took place. The FBI crime database for the year 2012 lists ZERO deaths from murder for Newtown, Connecticut. Whether or not those were manipulated photos of David Hogg, that is not my hill to die on. I just know that everything about Sandy Hook I have seen are fake, from that bizarre coroner (who also laughed inappropriately) to Gene Rosen changing his story constantly, to the so-called parents smiling on TV, I could not find a single tear in anyone’s eyes in any of their appearances on TV or in pictures at the funerals, etc.
Oh boo hoo hoo! My name is Gene Rosen and I’m crying so hard that my tear ducts have completely malfunctioned. The reason why I can’t keep my stories straight is because I’m just too sad ‘n stuff!
My verdict: Sandy Hook is fake and gay, and Alex Jones is most likely playing a part in this. He plays the part of a voodoo doll, and they stick pins in him to try to scare everyone away from free speech. He gets close to the truth, then backs off. As much as I have appreciated and enjoyed his antics over the years with his nerd references and cosplay, he is controlled opposition. He hates Q because he wants to be the gatekeeper of all things “conspiracy.” He brings people to his show, while Q brought people together to research, learn, and share in a massive collection of information.
Here is David Wheeler doubling as an FBI sniper, holding his rifle by the magazine like a total asshole.
What a dipshit.
Obama is the biggest phony of them all, along with his “wife” and rented kids.
Many reviews I’ve seen of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water comment on how the middle of the series containing the episodes of the gang stranded on the island is “boring” and “pointless.” Yes, this stretch of episodes is a bit of a lull in terms of action and the main plot, but I disagree. These episodes contain character development, zany action bordering on Looney Tunes, and of course Jean and Nadia kiss for the first time. Perhaps the most memorable from these episodes is the whole “white island dress” motif for Nadia when she made a makeshift one piece dress to be sexy and use her femininity to appeal to Jean after she realizes how much he cares for her. On the island, she really starts to fall in love with Jean and she flirts with him, and makes an effort to attract him with this dress. But the allure of this white dress seems to be lost somehow to English audiences as it doesn’t seem to be commented on much or have such pictures posted on image boards. Actually, doing a Brave image search for “Nadia anime white island dress” shows most of the relevant hits from my Tumblr page. But doing a similar search in Japanese can produce plenty of results, one of which is this one. I found it at this page: https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/4019389
Several garage kits have been devoted to Nadia and her white island dress (I happen to own two resin and one sofubi kits of the subject). So if anyone tells you that the middle of the show when they’re on the island is boring, just remind them of Nadia’s skimpy island dress. This image exemplifies why this island dress is so popular in Japan. Here is a translation of the image above.
TOP: なでぃあ島編のカーテンワンピース：ナディアさんはいろいろとヤバイ!! / Nadia’s island white one-piece dress made from a curtain: Nadia-san is wild in many ways!
LEFT: <「言って！似合うて」”Tell me! Do you think this looks good on me?”> <Her compulsion is cute!> <無防備にもほどがあるとこがとてもGood!! /It’s so good she’s uninhibited!> (This is referring to how she is mostly uncovered while wearing this dress.)
RIGHT TOP PIC: <「おねがーい！なんか妙に甘えてくる!! /“I’m especially pampered!”> (That doesn’t really translate well into English, but it must be my lack of Japanese level.) おっぱいぜんぶ見えちゃうよ!?わざとなの!? というトコもGood! / Her entire breasts can be seen? Is this on purpose!? This point is also good!
RIGHT BOTTOM PIC: <パリーン！/ CRASH!> <-ジャンのメガネがゆれる音 / This is the sound of Jean’s eyeglasses popping out! <いきなりのたくし上げ攻撃！/Sudden pull-up attack!> <ヤバイ！/ WHOAH!> <ナディアはいったい何を考えて生きているのでしょうか？/ What is Nadia thinking?> If you recall, this is when Nadia hikes her dress up to show Jean the allergic reaction to something on her legs she’s had on the island.
Furthermore, unlike as depicted in this picture, in the show when she is wearing this white dress, she’s actually going commando (called nopan in Japanese slang —“no panties”) as she made this dress to wear while laundering her regular outfit. This nopan status is conveyed in the two resin garage kits of Nadia in her island dress that I own.
Here’s the Solvalou fighter, your ship in the game.
The Andor Genesis, the boss ships you fight against. Sort of looks like the top part of a Cylon Base Star.
Speaking of Battlestar Galactica, the Terrazi looks like a Cylon Raider.
This Jara is sort of TIE Fighter shaped.
The Kapi has a sort of Millennium Falcon shape to it.
I can’t say this Grobda tank really looks like anything, except maybe a cross from the Galileo Shuttle from Star Trek and the land rover from Battlestar Galactica.
The port of Xevious on the Atari 7800 is what I put the most time into, when I was in junior high. I remember how thrilled I was when I bombed the Andor Genesis with a one bomb kill. I’ll have to give it a try on my 7800 emulator for RetroPie again sometime to refresh my memory. IIRC, it wasn’t a bad port and it even had the hidden flags you can reveal by bombing secret areas on the screen.
I started working on this old 1:100 scale Regult Heavy Missle Carrier plamo by Arii yesterday. Hasegawa is releasing 1:72 versions of Regults, with the standard and the light missile variant. I’m sure next year they will make this heavy missile variant too. I’m sure they will have a 1:72 Glaug officer’s pod eventually too. Back in the day, Arii made a 1:72 Glaug while Imai made a 1:100 one. Bandai has repopped the Imai molds, but the larger Arii kit is a thing of the past and must go for a lot of money.
In 1982, I saw the trailers for the movie on TV and wanted to see the movie so badly. My sister was 3 years older than me and had decided that since the movie was about computers, it would be too complex and I wouldn’t understand it. Yet she hadn’t seen it either, so how would she know? Older sibling syndrome, I guess.
It wasn’t until later when Tron came to the Disney Channel that I finally got to see it. It was a celebration of early ’80s video game culture. Fantastic. Recently I did a search for Tron stuff on Pinterest and wanted to post some of the cooler images I found.
I’ve never seen this poster image before. Super neat.
Jean “Moebius” Giraud did a lot of the designs for Tron. His graphic novel, The Long Tomorrow, was a visual inspiration for Blade Runner.
More Moebius art.
And speaking of Blade Runner, Syd Mead also did design work for Tron, with these black & white illustrations.
I’ve never seen this poster with Flynn, either. Perhaps this is fan art?
This poster for the “Space Paranoids” arcade game featured in the movie. It’s amusing since arcade games back then did NOT look like that, unless it was supposed to be a laserdisc game. There is no way we had FPS-style games like that back then!
But we did get an actual Tron arcade game by Bally Midway in 1984.
The design of this arcade cabinet is simply captivating, complete with the blacklights and lighted joystick. While it was cool, I really enjoyed the Discs of Tron game far better.
This was a step-in, environmental cabinet. It really blew me a way the first time I saw it.
Too bad Disney is more preoccupied with sexualizing children and wrecking Marvel and Star Wars to make anything cool anymore. At least a good sequel was made before Disney went down the crapper, although that movie and its spin-off cartoon weren’t enough to sustain interest in Tron. As for me, 40 years later, Tron remains dear to me.
Here is my DVD signed by Bruce Boxleitner. I only talked to him briefly, but I could tell he is BASED.
