When September Ends

 Hey, September ended and you guys forgot to wake me up!

I hate it when that happens.

It's been quite the September for me. Like, the week after Labor Day I somehow threw out my back while my parents were away on vacation.

Lemme tell you, it wasn't fun feeling like an overturned turtle for half a week, laying on a heating pad for days waiting for your back to stop spasming. And there's nobody home. It sucked.

But as of right now, I'm better! In the time since then, I've been playing Splatoon 3.

It's just as fun and wild as the previous two games, but I have come to a conclusion: I am very rusty at this. I usually tap out after an hour or two, and I'm competing against people who never stopped playing since Splatoon 2 was released five years ago.

This was a match I had last weekend. The other team learned a lesson about inking their base the hard way. If they did, they woulda won. It's a dull part of the game, but someone's gotta do it. And it's usually me, the Aerospray main who's too obsessed with covering all the turf with ink.

And my team won the first Splatfest! But geez, 58% went to Team Gear? No wonder why we kept getting mirror battles. I hope the next Splatfests will be a bit more balanced. But the rule of thumb seems to be if you want to win, you pick Shiver's team. Her team won the demo Splatfest, and this one, so she's 2-0. Big Man will get his chance eventually.

...Oh right, the Queen of England finally died. You know, I was watching the newsfeed like a hawk all day, and ten minutes after I went back to work after a lunch break, I miss the announcement. But it was pretty surreal to see the internet collectively shitpost about it. I honestly hadn't seen Twitter that unified in celebrating over something since that weekend Trump got covid and we all thought he was going to die.

and NY Comic Con is next week, and for the first time since 2019, I'll be there! Pictured above are my badges from the past TEN conventions I'd been to! Well, I skipped last year, and they didn't have one in 2020. But I still managed to snag a set of badges for the cancelled 2020 con. It was the last year Walking Dead was on the badges, and there was much rejoicing. Crunchyroll in all its union busting chicanery is the big sponsor this year, with anime on all the badges! 

I got a 4 day again, and this one's Rise of The Shield Hero. I know that Thursday is Attack on Titan, Friday is Chainsaw Man, Saturday is Spy x Family, Sunday & Sunday Kids has Deku from MHA, Press has 20 years of Naruto/Boruto, and Pro has Mob Psycho 100. They all look so much better than mine.

I fill you all in on the details in next month's post. God willing.

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Behold...Corn!

 Seems that corn is all the rage these past few days. That's fine by me!

But seriously, corn is great. And I had some good corn over the weekend.

The Famous Food Festival was back at the Deer Park Tanger outlets and I ate more good food! And roast corn was no exception. I reiterate my belief that no fair or festival is any good unless there's a booth selling roast corn. This place had at least four booths selling it, but only one was serving it Street Style.

That's a whole lotta dust and gunk on the corn, but trust me it tasted great. I would've went back for more but I had other things I wanted to eat.

Like this spicy tonkatsu ramen from a place that was voted #1 in America by Thrillist. And I can believe it, this one tasted amazing.

It was from this place. The only knock I could give to it was for $13 you'd think they'd give you more than one slice of pork. It was so tender and cooked perfectly, I wish I had more.

And that brings us to the last thing I had: fried chicken parm lasagna. The audacity called out to me, but while it LOOKED good, the taste was another story. It was a bit dry for my liking. But I guess that's what happens when you deep fry pasta and leave it under a heat lamp. It was pretty disappointing, especially considering how much I paid for it.

That's the thing about these food festivals. It's not a buffet, and all these stalls need to make money. Barely anything is cheap and it all adds up, be it your wallet or your stomach.

Now if you'll excuse me, all this corn talk has made me hungry for more corn.

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Happy Birthday George Jetson!

If the memes are to be believed, George Jetson was born in the world somewhere today.

That means flying cars and apartment buildings that can rise above the clouds can't be too far behind! And I should finally find out what a sprocket is.

(personally, I prefer Harvey Birdman's canon that it was set in 2002 rather than 2062)

But enough about that, too many legends have been dying lately!

I mean, just today we lost Bill Russell, Nichelle Nichols, and Pat Carroll!

I don't need to go into what kind of legends Bill Russell and Nichelle Nichols were. They were both trailblazers in their own right.

Pat Carroll was best known for voicing Ursula from The Little Mermaid.

"Poor, Unfortunate Souls" is a classic villain song, that's for sure.

But to me, she'll always be Grandma Arbuckle from the Garfield Christmas and Thanksgiving specials.

And that's on top of losing in the last month: Paul Sorvino, James Caan, Bernard Cribbins, Paul Coker, Jr, David Warner, and Larry Storch.

Paul Coker Jr. was one of MAD Magazine's Usual Gang of Idiots, but he's far more well known for being the character designer behind all of the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials every year. Yes, he even designed my favorites Snow Miser and Heat Miser.

Above is a signed postcard my friend rwmead sent out for me as a Christmas gift, because he knew I eat this stuff up.

David Warner was a character actor best known for being in Tron, Time Bandits, Time After Time, Titanic (lotta T movies), but to me he'll always be The Lobe from Freakazoid.

Posted above is a four minute long parody of the title song from "Hello Dolly" with the Lobe in Barbara Streisand's role from the episode "Dexter's Date." David Warner tries his best to sing, but dammit, you gotta admire the commitment. Why was it in the episode? Simple: because no one told the creators they couldn't do it. And that's why Freakazoid remains one of my favorite shows of all time.

And that leaves us with the great Larry Storch.

I met him back in 2018(!) and he was a real nice guy. He's best known for playing Col. Agarn on F Troop, and for being the reason why anyone says "Judy, Judy, Judy" when impersonating Cary Grant.

But he also had a prolific voice over career in the 60s and 70s.

He was one of the Groovy Goolies, the first voice of The Joker, Professor Whoopee from Tennessee Tuxedo, and Cool Cat, the last major Looney Tunes character from the classic era. As much as you can call the Seven Arts era "classic, that is."

He was also an original Ghost Buster, co-starring his F Troop castmate Forrest Tucker, and Tracy the Gorilla ("trained" by Bob Burns).

They'll all be missed. Sad now.

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June Bugs Me

It's the end of the month, and it's been a pretty rough week. For me, for friends, for the country.

I feel like I'm going crazy and there's no way to stop it.

At least we have weird memes to keep us going.

I got addicted to that weird dall-e AI image generator thing and lemme tell you, I found some solid winners. I think this was my favorite one I made.

This one was my second favorite.

Revel in how much it disturbs you.

This one was the first one to legit scare me, and do you know why? Center picture.

This thing somehow knew enough about My Hero Academia that putting in a vague, yet specific prompt of the main character on trial to include Bakugou. 

I was also surprised that it recognized "Gaben." I made one about Gaben being fat, but you REALLY don't want to see that one.

I'm at least glad it understood Alex Trebek being the true host of Jeopardy. 

Tried to make a recreation of the old Gilbert Gottfried standby of Cesar Romero's obsession with orange wedges and found this monstrosity.

And here's one of the first ones of these I made.

I think this is that Graggle I keep hearing about. I have no idea what that goop at the bottom of that pic is supposed to be, but it ain't a rake.

Green hair Sideshow Bob writing something down, next to what looks more like a ramp than a rake.

I wanna say this looks like Sideshow Bob at a dentist office?

And finally, I just went and found this one. This program is able to pull off inanimate objects much better, but you can still tell it's all fake.

This may not be the future of art, but if anything it's good to see a theoretical mockup of art people like me are too either too shy or too poor to ask an actual artist to draw. And it's all done in relative seconds!

If you want to make your own, you can just go here. There's also the REAL version that only real artists can access right now, and that one's even more convincing, but still fake. God help us all.

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Ramen Time!

Well, my blood re-test came back as "still alive"! The important numbers managed to go down to safe levels (or safe-ish), so that's a win in my book!

I celebrated by going into NYC on Sunday and finally trying out Ichiran Ramen.

It's a NYC location of a popular chain of ramen shops in Japan, and I've been itching to try it for ages but couldn't until now. Mostly due to the long lines it always has.

This time I managed to get there just before it opened at noon, but still had to wait an hour to get in.

A look at the menu. They only serve ONE type of ramen, a tonkotsu (a pork-based broth). But you can customize it any way you want: how salty or garlicky it is, if you want pork, how firm you want the noodles to be, etc. I'm not TOO familiar with ramen, but I liked what I've had over the years. It's noodle soup, it's pretty universal in terms of food standards. I'm also not one for a lot of bells and whistles that you typically find in ramen dishes, so I went rather basic. Just pork, noodles, scallions, and spice.

And here it is! Yes, it smelled and tasted just as good as it looked. It was certainly worth the wait. Next time I'll up the spice level, I can barely feel a level 3. This was just a test run just to see how spicy it really was. See that red sauce? Every dollop is another level, and that's what three looks like. I've seen people order level 10 and it's more sauce than broth at that point.

Either way, make sure you don't get that broth in your eyes, as that happened to me a few times while eating it. I made the mistake of eating the noodles when they were fresh and really hot, which actually burned some of my lower lip. I'll spare you what it looks like, it got kinda gross. But absolutely worth the pain. Again, something to fix for next time.

If there's a negative it's that they only give you two slices of pork with your order, just so you'll buy the refill. Which totally worked on me, because it was really good. The same with getting extra noodles, and I'm really glad that's an option since I got sad once I finished them and still had plenty of soup left over. Yeah, it's not cheap, but this is NYC after all.

Look at me, I'm a regular Naruto or whatever his name was! I only know that he liked ramen and had a really raspy voice, and that he's really popular with people born after 1992. It's tough using chopsticks as a lefty, but I was really impressed with myself with how easy I was able to handle things with it.

As good as this was, I keep hearing that the ones in Japan are even better than this, and I can believe it.

Just watch this video of a guy eating Osaka Ichiran:

I don't like watching people eat...except for the Strictly Dumpling guy. Thanks to the magic of HD cameras, everything he eats also looks amazing. Hell, he's most of the reason I went here in the first place.

The other cool part is that everyone gets their own booth, and you're served through that window there. It's great with people with social anxiety and like eating by themselves like me.

And with that out of the way, some other cool things I saw and did this month:

The new Pokemon TCG set Astral Radiance came out (mostly based on the Legends Arceus game), and I snagged some good hits! I never pulled a black and gold card before, and these two cards came out of the same pack! I bought ten packs from the Pokemon Center site and I got some other nice hits:

Once again I'd say I'm gonna retire from pack opening, but buying more booster boxes is seriously tempting. Thankfully, I haven't given in. Yet.

I also caught the Bob's Burgers movie last week! I haven't been back in a movie theater in ages, but I had to make an exception for the Belchers on the big screen. I loved it, but I might be biased because I love the show. Instead of going "big" by doing big stupid movie tropes like the family goes on a road trip and meet characters we'll never see again, the movie felt more like a 90 minute episode. But it was a GOOD 90 minute episode of Bob's Burgers, with some great songs and fantastic animation. And frankly, that's all I could ever hope for.

Slight spoiler alert, but I really loved that the villain WASN'T some flat character created for the movie, it was somebody already established! They don't give Tina a new love interest that's totally boring, either. They keep it to Jimmy Jr. If you like Bob's Burgers the show, you're gonna like Bob's Burgers the movie.

The Cradle of Aviation Museum had their first Cradle-Con since the covid mess started and I had a good time! But the highlight was their hall of vintage arcade cabinets, which included a working cabinet of Computer Space. It was the very first arcade game, and it was quite primitive and hard to control. Imagine asteroids but harder to control. But at least I can say I finally played it.

They had all the classics, including the Simpsons beat em up game, Moonwalker, Centipede, even more "modern" hits like Marvel vs Capcom 2. They also had every version of Donkey Kong. I've NEVER seen an arcade cabinet of Donkey Kong 3 before. In that one, you play as Stanley the Bugman, trying to spray gas on bugs Donkey Kong keeps throwing at you.

That'll do it for this month. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna get me a New York slice.

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