April Showers. Of Pictures.

It's April 30th, and you know what that means!

It's Al "Grandpa Munster" Lewis's birthday! He was born on this day in 1923! I never got to meet the guy, but I did find this autographed picture at a con a few years back.

What's happened to me since we last spoke? Well, I'm still around, still trying to get the good health numbers up, and the bad numbers down. It's honestly refreshing to not feel constant heartburn, or thinking my heart was ready to explode at any given moment despite my vitals feeling normal.

I think I've been starting to get the hang over this "finally eating healthier" thing. What I need to do is start exercising on a regular basis, but if you know me any way, you'd know that's probably not gonna happen.

I clean up well, don't I? Don't get used to this getup, it was for a wedding. And not just any wedding, my first one outside of the family, and even THEN I was only ten years old.

I had a great time! Good food, good people, even good dancing.

Did I mention the party favors were burgers from All American?! For those not in the know, it's a fast food stand on Long Island that loads of people swear by, myself included. I had no idea this was even an option, this certainly set a high bar for weddings this point forward.

In case you were wondering just how long my friends had their wedding pushed back, DJ (who passed in 2019) was supposed to be the best man. But he was certainly there in spirit, I think wherever he is, he was watching us all having a good time.

But before I bum myself out again, I'm proud to announce that the DJ Schiulaz Memorial Scholarship, which I helped start, has reached its $25,000 goal! We had five years to raise that money, and we pulled it off in less than ten months! It's amazing news all around.

What sucks is that the school immediately raised the goal to $30,000, I really wanted to see that 100%. But if you'd like to contribute to meet this new goal, just go to this link: https://www.justgiving.com/campaign/DJSchiulaz10MemorialScholarship

There's lots more I want to talk about, like the sudden losses of Gilbert Gottfried and Neal Adams, but it's late and I'm tired, so I'll just post some mementos in my collection:

I never got to meet the great Gilbert Gottfried, but I did listen to his podcast for the past eight years, and that's more or less the next best thing. You feel like you got to know the guy, which might explain why this celebrity death hit me pretty harder than usual. The Amazing Colossal Podcast was one of five I regularly listen to, and I'm pretty sad that it'll never be the same again.

I'd ask why he had to leave us, but I know what he would've said: because Chico needed the money.

I snagged this pic off of eBay. I don't know if this is a genuine Gilbert, but the guy who listed it swore it was, so that's what I'm going with.

I never got a picture with Neal Adams, but I did sneak this picture OF him back in 2017. Being a legendary comic artist, he was a NYCC staple and a few years ago I finally mustered up the courage to go up to his booth. He's got a reputation for being pretty grumpy, but if you're aware of what he went through in his career, he had a very justifiable reason to be one.

He was more than happy to sign this print of the infamous "Speedy is a junkie" cover for me. I think he was glad that I wasn't one of those weirdos that only went up to him to sign a stack of comics. No, I'm just a shy nerd that gets intimidated easily. Knowing that he'll never do so again, I probably should have gotten him to sign ONE, but I like having these prints.

That'll do it for this month. See you in May!

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Thirty-Five

 It's March 31st!

It's the day Ron Swanson had 91 meetings scheduled because April didn't think that date existed. Ahh, mid 00's comedy.

But in any case, last week was my 35th trip around the sun, and I still don't quite know what to make of that.

Getting random pains, gotta lower the triglyceride level, feeling the existential dread that you wasted your twenties and you still haven't started a family, let alone moved out of the house. That...this is all there is to it. Yep, the mid thirties has it all.

But I have Kirby. We all still have Kirby!

I picked up Kirby & The Forgotten Land last week, and I'm just gonna say it, it's one of the all time best Kirby games. They manage to translate Kirby's world, and especially his powers, to three dimensions incredibly well. The ability evolutions are a great mechanic as well, each new upgrade is mostly a power-up, but there's drawbacks, too. The upgrades that hit harder move slower, or the ones that move faster are harder to control. You know the deal.

It's weird to think that this might be one of the few Kirby games without the Stone ability. Certain Mouthful modes pretty much replace it, like you can inhale stairs or a car, and you can plow through almost anything. It's all incredibly cute, and of course frustrating on the harder missions. The game itself goes by pretty quickly, but there's big levels to make up for it. And unless you're really good or lucky, getting 100% completion mainly involved replaying levels until you rescue all the Waddle Dees.

I haven't beaten the game yet as of this writing, but I just KNOW that new little critter buddy is an evil nightmare beast. They've done that twist a few times, it's pretty inevitable.

Also, hidden HAL room in the third level of the first world!

Also, Batman '66 returned to MeTV and the world got a little better. It started right at the beginning, introducing the Batusi to the world.

Frank Gorshin's Riddler was the first villain of the show, and he remains the best actor to fill the ? suit. Until then, The Riddler was a D-tier villain in the comics until Frank Gorshin's cackling, boundless energy brought him to life. It's a completely ridiculous outfit, but he manages to make it work.

I just posted this one because I wasn't expecting the funniest line in the episode. Sixties slang was strange.

See you all in April, folks. I'll still be here, sitting on the couch and contemplating existence.

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We're 14!

 Yesterday was February 27th, which means it was the blog's birthday! The fourteenth to be exact!

...Yeah, there's not a lot of fun things revolving around 14. That's the age blogs stop being cute and get acne. I don't miss those days.

I will, however, share some cool stuff that happened in the past month!

My new setup is here! For many many years I had these old cabinets that served as my TV entertainment center/place to store all my crap and since I got the walls and the floor redone in my room, I was due for a change here, too. We ordered this back in NOVEMBER and it finally showed up two weeks ago. There's so much more room for activities now! I'm due to upgrade the tv, it's comically small by these standards.

My cat could not get enough of the New Thing and of course had to try to explore every nook and cranny. Thankfully she only did it the first day I had it. She's lucky she's cute or else I would've been bothered by it.

It's been furnished a bit since then but I'm nowhere near done yet. I've been busy lately, but it's rather nice to actually organize my DVD collection for once.

I finally got a new futon mattress this past Saturday, too! I honestly forgot what it was like to be comfy on a couch. I'm loving it. It's gonna redefine how we think about sitting on things.

The Brilliant Stars set of the Pokemon TCG was finally released and the ETB I bought off the Pokemon Center site finally showed up. This set has FIVE Charizards, and I managed to pull two of them out of this box. And frankly, they're the two best looking ones. That alt art Charizard V might be one of my favorite cards of all time. It's a really nice looking card. 'Zard cards usually go for big bucks, and I managed to pull one of the heavyweights on the first try. I might as well retire from collecting these...for now. Again.

I'll be back. Eventually. But for now, I'm gonna admire this one.

NEW POKEMON!!

Gen 9, Scarlet and Violet, were announced yesterday and with them three new starter Pokemon. I was asleep when the announcement video went live so when I first saw these, I thought these were the fakest of fakemons I'd ever seen. You usually see stuff like Duck Wearing a Hat (Quaxly) and Chili Dino (Fuecoco) in the pages of Deviantart, not in an official promo video from the Pokemon Company.

I mean, you still do, just not in this capacity. Within an hour, the internet fell in love with all of them, especially Sprigatito, the weed grass cat.

Much like the Sword & Shield starters, this is yet another rare generation where I like all three of them. It call comes down to the final evolutions for me to decide who I'll ultimately go with. Judging by the the tuft on Quaxly's head, and that the new region is most likely based on Spain, it might evolve into a Matador and give us a water/fighting type. We haven't had one of those types in a while, plus fire/fighting and even grass/fighting are played out by now, but I wouldn't put it past Game Freak to zig when we're expecting to them to zag for once.

In either case, it's coming in "Late 2022," which means sometime in November. It just seems like yesterday that we just got Sword and Shield, and that was in 2019.

And this brings us to our last update, I picked up Pokemon Legends Arceus and I have been absolutely absorbed by it. It's a spinoff that finally makes the Pokemon world an open world one (or close to one as possible), where the emphasis is now on exploring and surveying Pokemon by catching them rather than battling other trainers and stopping some existential threat by doing so.

Well, there's still battles and the existential threat, but it's just so much fun. In Sword & Shield, there was a large Wild Area where Pokemon roamed around in the overworld and you could kind of explore it. If you were like me and had been wanting an entire game based around that concept, this game delivers in spades. Sure, the areas are a little sparse and there's only a fraction of all Pokemon available (only about 225 out of many hundreds), but there's more than enough sidequests and Pokedex filling to keep you occupied for a while. It takes place in an ancient version of the Sinnoh region, so it a Pokemon appeared in the Diamond & Pearl games, it's in this one. I won't spoil how they manage to include ones like Porygon, Magnemite, the fossil Pokemon or even the legendaries, but it's all explained in due time. It all seems to be a test run for a main series game, and if the teaser for Scarlet & Violet is any indication, we might be getting it sooner than we think. 

But the main attraction is shiny hunting. With a limited pool of Pokemon to choose from, and filling out Pokedex entries make shinies more likely to spawn, it's pretty stupidly easy to find them in this game. Every once in a while, you'll find outbreaks, where multiple of the same type spawn at once. That in and of itself causes a better opportunity to find a shiny. Or was, up until yesterday's update. 

You see, if you didn't find a shiny in the first spawn, you could reset the game, leave the area it's in and come back to it, you'd get a whole new chance to find a shiny. Repeat until you get one. That doesn't happen anymore, and it might've killed the streaming community for this game after a month. It was to be expected. The game's been out for less than a month and I've seen people with boxes and boxes of shinies. Safe to say, the process was pretty broken and it was nice while it lasted.

But that didn't stop me from finding my own! That Gible above came from the first time I succeeded in finding an outbreak shiny, and that took about seven tries.

Here's the rest of the ones I have: 

The Yanma I found last night out of the blue (ha), and the Sudowoodo and Aipom were also random encounters. The rest were all outbreaks. Geodude I got on the first try, while everyone else took quite a few before I found them.

I even managed to get two in one outbreak! And here I thought that was a myth.

All in all, not bad for 14, don't you think? Happy birthday, blog. I still believe in you.

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Snow!!

 Man, I can't believe I almost missed National Gorilla Suit Day again.

But that pales in comparison to the big news of the past few days:

Snow! And lots of it. For most of the week the forecast was somewhere between two and twenty(?!) inches, and what showed up was...this.

The area got at least two feet, and with all the wind, there were snowbanks that reached even higher.

Some of these drifts went up to my STOMACH. This took my dad and I a few hours just to dig out THIS. Sunday was spent digging out the cars.

My car was in there somewhere. I'm still amazed I was able to dig a path all the way out there. I guess I'm lucky that the snow was mostly powder. It sucks for making snowballs and snowpeople, but great for shoveling.

It's been a hell of a long time since snow reached these heights. One side was completely clear, while my car was buried in snow on this side.

Long Island (especially the part I'm in) doesn't get snow like this too often. I look at those Timehop memories, and the last REAL blizzard we had was in 2016. I've lived almost 35 years and this was the first time I saw the neighbor cars completely buried in snow. And those aren't sensible cars like what I have, that's an SUV family, with a driveway on an incline if you want to truly fathom how much snow is there.

My family is done with snow. I'd have to agree with them for once. I think Virginia is looking nice this time of year.

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Goodbye 2021

Well, another year will finally be behind us, and after today, Sealab 2021 will have officially taken place in the past.

Everyone going crazy after a year of isolation? Talk about predicting the future.

I had this whole post thought out about what I've done this year, and show off what I got for Christmas, then I saw the terrible news.

Betty White passing just 17 days before her 100th birthday was just an extra twist of the knife. She was America's Grandma! She couldn't go now! I'm glad that the Betty White Renaissance was a decade ago and we all got to tell her how much we all loved her since then. She didn't need a People Magazine spread to tell her that.

In her 90(!!) years in showbiz, she was in everything and knew everybody! She would've been a legend for just her role in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but she was also one of the best parts of The Golden Girls, Hot in Cleveland, and, well, just everything she did!

I don't need to tell you she was on The Simpsons.

This all reminds me of the great June Foray, who also died incredibly close to her 100th birthday. In both cases, I'm gonna call it "close enough." They made it to 100 in our hearts.

That's on top of losing the great John Madden earlier in the week.

If there was anyone that embodied "football," it was John Madden. Playing it, coaching it, inspiring video games about it, being a commentator on it, he did it all.

What I'll miss most is Frank Caliendo's amazing impression of him.

And with that out of the way, the monthly listicle can begin!

Christmas gifts! Not seen: Lots of gift cards, plus the Smokin Al's barbeque sauce I get every year. The big gifts were the blu ray player and the new Pokemon game. I played Pearl when gen 4 first came around fourteen years ago (it's been that long?!), so I've been itching to jump into Diamond. I haven't been able to play much of it so far, you can thank work for that, but I've been liking it so far.

I also finally entered the 21st century with a blu ray player! Just in time for physical media to die out! Now I need to get some blu rays, they're pretty cheap these days.

And you know you're celebrating Christmas in your thirties when you're excited to get socks. I really needed those socks. They're comfy.

Something else I did this month: I played some pinball! A few months back, a pinball arcade opened up in the local mall, and I finally got around to spending an hour in there.

There were some pretty old cabinets in there, and this was the oldest one I got to play. They were pretty unforgiving in terms of difficulty, but they gave you five balls per shot as opposed to the three you usually get these days.

What got me in the door in the first place was their Simpsons arcade machine! I remember playing it back in the day, but again, pretty unforgiving. It's full of elements that make no sense now, like how most of the villains were pretty generic and SMITHERS of all people was the main bad guy who had to fight to rescue Maggie.

I played as Marge, with her...trademark vacuum cleaner. But she was the long reacher of the four characters, much like Donatello on his own machines.

I was wondering how this place could stay in business...

...until I found out it wasn't. Today was the last day, and I found out too late that these great machines were going off to parts unknown. That space is gonna be pretty big for the store that's replacing it, so I hope that most of these machines find good homes if they don't stay behind.

I don't want to end this post, and this year on a bummer, so here's a picture of my cat!

Ain't she cute?

And here she is looking at the tree. We've got some good ornaments up this year.

Thanks to a bidding war on eBay, I finally have a Snow Miser ornament to go with the Heat Miser. I paid a little...too much for it, but it was worth it for a picture like this.

Happy New Year everyone! Let's make 2022 better than what came before!

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