I Beat Animal Crossing!

Well, there's no "real" way to beat Animal Crossing besides paying off your house, and I did that a year ago.

The way I usually consider beating those games is catching every fish (which I did back in December), and every bug.

Well, this past Tuesday I finally caught the final bug: The Scarab Beetle. It's one of the hardest bugs to spawn in the game, and it took me a solid year to try to catch it again. It only spawns on trees during July and August...and only after 11pm. I haven't been able to stay awake long enough to commit myself to try to find one for more than an hour at a time, and thankfully that attempt only took about twenty minutes.

Compare that to the other rare spawn, the Golden Stag. This one also only spawns during July and August, but only on coconut trees. I managed to catch that one a few weeks back, and THAT took about two hours.

As much as Blathers hated it, I was finally done!

And when you catch the last bug, you're sent a recipe for the Golden Net the next day.

And of course you get an achievement for crafting it, and it was the last golden tool I needed.

Thanks to boredom, this was the first Animal Crossing game I got all the golden tools for. The golden axe was way easier to get this time around, you just had to break 100 axes, and that took forever. The golden shovel required you to help Gulliver 30 times. And the pirate version didn't count towards that, and regular Gulliver shows up roughly every week, so this would take you at least half a year to complete. For the watering pail, you needed to get a five star island rating, and this was the first game where I had enough patience to actually try to achieve that. I needed to cut down a lot of trees. You needed to pop twenty balloons to get the golden slingshot, and the recipe showed up in a golden balloon. The golden fishing rod, as I said earlier, required you to catch every fish.

And what now? Just catch bugs in a cool looking net? Guess so.

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The Great Muppet Mural

June is over. Thank God.

This month started with giant nails in my tires.

My mom's, too.

Thanks to some drunken idiot from a party next door that got too loud. Can you blame my parents for wanting them to quiet down? This was at 10:30 at night on a SUNDAY. We all had work the next day. And we got rewarded with nails meant for cement embedded in our tires. I caught one the next morning just laying in front of one of my tires.

I unfortunately didn't catch the other one until it was too late. That was a fun trip to the shop. And it turns out that my other tires were rotting so I had to get THEM replaced, too.

It didn't get much better after that, frankly.

I wanted to talk about other things, like finally completing the Smash Amiibo collection with Isabelle finally showing up after preordering it from Best Buy months ago.

Well, Joker and Hero got announced, but it'll be a while before they're released. Until then, I have them all.

I also wanted to show off two (former) Carvel stands on Long Island.

Marshall's in Massapequa. Right next door to All American, to boot. That place was NOT observing social distancing at all.

And Marvel Ice Cream in Long Beach. Thanos sale, half off!

Some day I'll go inside them. I just happened to pass it the other day.

I also wanted to talk about how I almost bought this cel from A Pup Named Scooby-Doo.

It was pretty cheap but there was a bidding war going on for it so I didn't engage. Such a shame, too, because you don't find a genuine Kennedy pose every day.

Or how I DID buy this production (not cel) drawing of Dick Dastardly and Muttley. It was made for The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera ride at Universal and it was a real trip to find it. I had NEVER seen even a cel from it until now. I had to snatch it.

The paper it was on was bigger than I expected, and the drawing much smaller.

Here's the main ride in its entirety. It looks like the exact shot shows up around three minutes in.

I honestly didn't think there were cels, since most of the ride is CGI. Fun fact: Don Bluth's company handled the animation, and it certainly shows. The CGI doesn't look as cutting edge as it did in 1990, but the animation as a whole held up pretty well.

But today I'd like to show you how June ended for me.

So this odd looking Muppet mural has been in my basement since before my family moved in. And I've lived here for roughly 32 years.

Well, today my family realized that one of the pipes in a room on the other side of the basement was leaking. Don't worry, it wasn't anything too serious, a lot of stuff had to be moved around and the only thing that was wrecked was a package of paper towels.

But my dad yanked out the insulation in the wall under the pipe and discovered that the mural was bigger than we thought.

That is what I assume is Miss Piggy in a carpenter outfit. The colors really pop because I'm pretty sure that this was the first time she's seen the light of day in around 30 years. Gonna admit, this one's gonna haunt me for a while.

I tried to pry open some insulation next to Piggy and found this:

It's kinda hard to make out, but I'm assuming that this is supposed to be Fozzie. For one, it's brown, and he's the only major muppet that isn't represented in this. It's really odd since a stairwell separates the two rooms here, so this must've been painted before it was added. That's odd in itself because the only other way in and out of the basement is through one of those passageways that open up out of the ground.

Like that, really.

And here's proof that I didn't just swipe all of this from Reddit or something, as if my hand in the third picture wasn't proof enough.

So...is my house cursed? Half of my timeline says yes, the other says no.

If I survive, I'll see you all in July.

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Social Distancing!

Well, April sped by in a blink, and frankly...not much has happened. Damn quarantine.

I've still been playing Animal Crossing, still been watching old Simpsons episodes. Still late night eBay buying. (Things I've bought recently haven't arrived in time for writing this entry. Maybe I'll show them off next month)

I keep on keeping on.

BUT yesterday I stumbled upon that AI Meme Generator that's being passed around and I've been having way too much fun with it.

See, it's like a typical meme maker, but all the text is predicted by one of those neural net things and while 90% of these are complete nonsense, you get that 10% that's just absolute gold. And perhaps a little TOO personal for my tastes.

Here now are some of my favorites that I've made.

That's it for me, folks. See y'all in May. If we still have one. Time's been acting weird lately.

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33!

Last week was my 33rd birthday, and out of all 33 of them, this one ranked somewhere near the bottom.

This whole Coronavirus ordeal has messed up everything. Jobs, socializing, trips, going out to eat, general optimism. And I'll be honest, I'm pretty much lacking on all of that right now. Well, I work in the health & beauty aisle of the local supermarket, so my job is as essential as can be right now.

It's just stressful as all hell. Any chance of normalcy I've had, or anyone has had, pretty much vanished overnight.

So what better thing to do to feel better about myself than to cross something off the old bucket list?

Behold! I now own a genuine cel from The Simpsons!

And a certificate of authenticity! It means I'm sane now. It's definitely a better cel than the one Bart bought with Homer's credit card.

You might've remembered that for my last birthday I also bought an animation cel as a gift to myself.

To refresh your memory, this was from Izzy's Quest For Olympic Gold, a legendary piece of lost media that only gets remembered in blog posts like this one.

A better angle of the cel. This was from the episode "Itchy & Scratchyland," specifically the scene where the duo take a break from the violence to announce the opening of the park.

I'm dead certain that it's of this shot, or at least a frame where Scratchy didn't have his tongue out. Regardless, it's interesting to know that the TV frame was a separate layer here.

I bought the cel from @ThatGuy3002 on Twitter. He's most known for his deep dives into scripts of Simpsons episodes, highlighting jokes and scenes either changed or cut from the table draft script to what ultimately made it onscreen; not to mention highlighting his cel collection or his friendship with legendary animator Bil Plympton.

There's no official ranking in Simpsons fandom, but ThatGuy outranks ME. And if you've been around me or this site at all, you know that's definitely saying something. It's weird to know that I know his real name now, but don't worry, you're secret's safe with me.

It currently hangs above my couch, right where my Banana Splits poster used to be.

How much did I pay for it? Well, I really don't want to say. It was possibly the most I've ever payed for anything in my collection thus far. Let's just say that the money I was saving up for East Coast Comic Con (which would've taken place in May again, then got delayed to July before getting called off) went to this instead. I am not to be trusted with money, and my paycheck was definitely good to me this past month. It was this or 70 transcripts of Nightline.

Couple this with my depression returning in full force and not much else to do with my life are a deadly combo.

But what has been warding off my bad moods lately? Honestly, Animal Crossing.

Animal Crossing arrived at my house on the 21st and it couldn't come at a moment too soon. I needed this charming island life simulator. After New Leaf, I was wondering where the series could go from here. Now I know: owning an island that is 100% customizable. Usually you had freedom to put your house somewhere, and plant trees anywhere you want, and maybe build some things.You could change the town theme song to Megalovania, and change your town flag to Greendale's.

But THIS game eventually lets you terraform everything on the island. You can create paths of custom designs, move rivers, even carve out mountains. Also, every tool you use and a slew of other things are craftable. It was only inevitable that it adopted Minecraft and Breath of The Wild's bullshit, but here we are.

There's also an achievement system now, and I'm honestly addicted to it. You get a bonus for just about everything. My favorite is the "oops, you popped a balloon and the gift landed in the water" achievement.

Also, you can visit random islands and there's one populated by tarantulas.

I made it there on Sunday and boy, did that pay off. You have to clear out everything on that island to fully take advantage of it, but when you catch over 30 of them at once and you get paid 8,000 bells for each one, it's a good paycheck.

I wish the economy worked like Animal Crossing. But then again, we'd destroy the ecosystem worse than what we're doing now if we did.

I also think Tarantula Island is more common than I'd thought. The game has only been out for a little over a week and it seems that everyone will laugh at you if you DIDN'T find that island yet.

Well, that's what I've been up to. I hope all is well for you. And if we all get through this, I'l see you in April.

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