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beevean · 3 years

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How about a top 5 (or 10 if you prefer) best and worst bosses in video games? :D

I’m not very well versed in videogames, but anyway...

WORST

10) Chaos 4 (Sonic Adventure): Not a big fan of bosses who waste so much time - ooh, look at that, trying to hit me with very slow, very telegraphed attacks, and taking more and more time to becomes vulnerable the more the fight progresses. Also not a big fan of Tactical Suicide Bosses (excuse me Chaos, why is your strategy “stay in the water for increasingly amounts of time and then decide to raise my head to breathe”? In this form you’re a fish!). Even less of a fan of bosses that you have to fight three times to complete the game.

9) Sonic and Diablon (Shadow the Hedgehog): They couldn’t have come up with a more boring boss if they tried. Shoot the shield, shoot the cannon, avoid the hand, run away when you hear the word “anti-matter”, kick Sonic in the head, slowly chip at the large energy bar, rinse and repeat. The G.U.N. Fortress version is particularly painful, too, as the arena only offers those piss poor pistols with 10 bullets and minimal damage. And much like Chaos 4, you have to fight this lovely boss three times to get to the Last Story, except you don’t even get a different character with different abilities. Also, poor Sonic, from protagonist of the series reduced to nothing more than a footstep.

8) Collision Chaos boss (Sonic CD): Try to play a boss that relies on wonky pinball physics, that shoots projectiles with the only purpose of changing your already precarious trajectory, in the Bad Future that adds slightly more bumpers to destroy, with the American music (I linked the extended version to properly depict the experience). Pain is real.

7) Egg Pinball (Sonic Advance 3): Surprise! I find this boss worse than the more famous Egg Chaser. Yes, the Egg Chaser is very anxiety-inducing with its bottomless pit and the ball chain sending you into it, but once you learn the pattern of the platforms and that Amy as a partner makes it a joke it’s not that bad. This one, though? Even with Amy/Sonic, which is the only team where your partner is useless but you aren’t, this boss relies too much on luck, expecially by the end when way too many balls are flying across the screen. It’s almost funny, in a “screw you” way, that this is one of the two bosses in the game that can’t be hit by Cheese, in the stage where you finally unlock Cream. Pinball and Sonic don’t mix as well as Sonic Team thinks, apparently.

6) Boost Guardian (Metroid Prime 2, Gamecube): This boss’ strategy isn’t even that bad, it’s just that it hits you like a truck in an environment that is already sipping you of health. If being hit was less punishing, guessing the correct timing to jump over it would be fun. Too overkill for its placement in the game.

5) Mother Brain (Metroid Zero Mission): MB in the original Metroid 1 was... there, with the difficulty of the final boss coming from those stupid Rinkas pushing you into the lava below. In the remake, which otherwise is much easier than the original game, you have to think about the Rinkas, the lava, and MB who shots you fireballs! And if you fall into the lava (and you will spend half of the time in the lava)? She closes her eye and protects her only weak spot, forcing you to wait at the mercy of the Rinkas hitting you all over again. Asshole.

4) Dark Gaia (Sonic Unleashed): Dark Gaia, as a whole, is a stain on an otherwise beautiful game. Setting aside his “character” for a while: this boss is way, WAY too long (the first time I clocked at 11 minutes, like hell I’m trying again), the Gaia Colossus phase is frustrating for how slow it is and for having a nigh-unavoidable attack, the running phase requires pitch-perfect timing otherwise say bye bye to your life, and the Super Sonic phase is essentially “slipping down the shield to run over a bunch of snakes, then QTE up your ass”. Riveting. At least it has some banging music...

3) Egg Saucer (Sonic Advance 2): The bosses in SAd2 are already questionable with their “wind pushing you backwards” physics, but this one flings you enough bullshit to make you ragequit. Whoisthisgit made an excellent video explaining everything that makes this boss such a miserable experience. I am so sorry, Knuckles, that you had to be associated with this tragedy.

2) Antlion Mecha (Sonic 2, Game Gear): So let me get this straight devs, you take a boss that is already a little too had as the first boss in the game, you put it in a console with a much smaller screen, you screw up the slope physics making it just a little too easy to slide into the antlion’s jaws (and of course you don’t have any Rings), and on top of that you make the trajectory of the projectiles random when in the Master System they were consistent? Great game design there, guys :V

1) Spider Guardian (Metroid Prime 2, Gamecube): I was never as close as bestemmiare ogni santo e pure il padre eterno as I was when I was trying to beat this abomination. I love the Ing theme, but FUCK if I wasn’t hating every single sound of it while playing, OH MY GOD I envy the people who played it on the Wii so damn much

BEST

10) Robot Carnival/Storm (Sonic Heroes): Yes! Yes, I do like this boss! I’m probably the only one, I don’t care, I find these fights cathartic, especially with Team Chaotix <3

9) Jet Drill (Sonic 3 & Knuckles): The strategy may be simple, but I love the setup of Eggman destroying an ancient garden just to kill Sonic and I love how it emphasizes how much of a reliable bro Tails is. (let’s just ignore the fact that with Tails alone this boss is a pain...)

8) Doomsday Zone (Sonic 3 & Knuckles): The series had its fair share of Super Sonic bosses, but so far no one has beaten the original. It has excellent music, you can feel the tension as you smartly redirect Eggman’s missiles to him and as you chase him down through space, and Eggman in this game is really ready to do anything to win, I love it

7) Beta mk. II (Sonic Adventure): This is probably the best part of Gamma’s campaign. 90% of it is kindergarten-easy, and then Hot Shelter and the final boss are a sudden, but welcome spike in difficulty. Beta mk. II is a far cry from any other E-series robot you’ve faced, being almost completely invulnerable, hitting you with straight up nukes, and the time is still ticking in the corner. Then you add the context of having to kill your brother, and the deceptively upbeat theme, and it becomes a memorable experience.

6) Cykka (Metroid Prime 2): The first phase is fairly boring, but Adult Cykka is really fun to fight for some reason. Not only it has a cool design, but it’s a fast-paced battle (due to having to use the Grapple Beam to swing from platform to platform) where you have to go ham on the boss at certain points (when it becomes Dark Cykka), my two favorite styles for a boss.

5) Nightmare (Metroid Fusion): A name, a certainty. This boss looks, sounds and attacks in a way that makes you feel confused and powerless. Even at it becomes a game of “climb the stairs, shoot at its ungodly face, jump around to avoid it”, it’s still tense.

4) Ridley (Super Metroid): SM isn’t famous for having great bosses, but they put all of their effort into Ridley and it shows. There’s no strategy here, it’s simply “kill him before he kills you”. At this point you’re pretty much at the peak of your strength, you went through literal Hell to get The Baby back, you’re not going to be stopped by the asshole who killed your parents.

3) Shibusawa Keiji (Yakuza 0): What a beast of a final boss. The first Dragon of Dojima is the perfect foil to Kiryu, having all of his strength and style but none of his compassion, and beating him up to a bloody pulp, especially as you see him become sloppier and sloppier, is so, so cathartic. Also, Two Dragons, what more can I say?

2) Egg Dragoon (Sonic Unleashed): Best boss in the series? I don’t know but it’s surely in the top 10, and it’s ironic that you play as the hated Werehog. Not only it has some delicious music (that generations ruined), but it’s such a fun climax after the hell and a half that is Eggmanland! On one hand, Eggman sounds seriously angry and he is ready to kill Sonic (and if you take too much time, which admittedly is hard if you’re not doing it on purpose, he is positively gleeful while he sends you into a fiery death); on the other, Sonic just rips this giant robot apart like tissue paper, and even if it’s done through QTEs, it looks awesome.

1) Kuze Daisaku (Yakuza 0): I’ll let this say it all. If I had to pick a favorite version, the fifth one was my favorite to fight (by that point you have likely upgraded Kiryu’s abilities to the point of making him a juggernaut), but the second one is iconic for a reason... multiple, in fact. “DIE, YOU LITTLE SHIT!”

Special mention to Majima in Y1, YK and YK2 because he looks really fun, but I have never faced him myself so yeah.

#sonic the hedgehog #metroid #yakuza #sorry for the random italian #not my fault you guys don't have a word for insulting god himself #spinningbuster98

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calpalirwin · 4 years

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Showmance

Summary: Rehearsals get a little messy when you land a role opposite your best friend

A/N: Anon request- Fic where y/n or an oc is in high school with the boys and Ashton and her audition for a play and both get lead roles. Maybe the play is something like Beauty and The Beast or Little Shop so the romance dynamic is strong as hell -Bird.

Content: High school theater. Teenage awkwardness.

Word Count: 1.2k

And away, and away we go!

She slammed the flyer down on the lunch table, a wide grin on her face. “School musical! Who’s auditioning with me?”

The boy with black curls and dark eyes rubbed at the back of his neck. “Soccer practice, sorry.”

“Already playing the music for it,” the blue-eyed blonde shrugged.

“Uh.... videogames!” the other blonde grinned, his green eyes pleading with her not to be mad at him.

Her excited grin fell to a frown as they all turned to the fourth boy. “Aaaaassssshhhh…” she asked, drawing out his name as she leaned forward, batting her eyelashes and pouting her lips.

The hazel-eyed boy sighed, passing a hand through his sandy brown hair. “What play?”

“High School Musical!”

Ashton groaned.

“Pleeeeaaaasssseee?”

“What scene are we auditioning with?”

Her grin was back.

~~~

He lost track of his own feet as he twirled her back to him. “Ash!” she laughed when he stumbled.

“Sorry!” he giggled with her.

“Ash, the audition is tomorrow,” she reminded him, firmly.

“I know. I’m trying okay?”

She smiled softly at him. “Get out of your head, Ash. Stop thinking too much and just let your body move.”

Ashton jumped lightly in place, shaking out his nerves. “Alright,” he nodded.

“Take my hand,” she sang along to the lyricless song as they started over. Their hands interlaced as she rested her free hand on his heart. “Take a breath,” she smiled as she felt his chest move with his breath. “Pull me close,” was the next instruction, and his free hand pressed into the small of her back. “And take one step.”

~~~

“Alright, next up we have Ashton and Y/N,” the drama teacher announced, gesturing to the empty stage.

“Don’t be afraid,” Ashton sang, twirling her towards him. “Afraid to fall.” He kept a secure hold as she dipped gracefully in his arms. “You know I’ll catch you through it all.”

~~~

“Holy shit,” she breathed, her finger hovering next to the first two lines on the cast list.

“Did you get the part?” Ashton asked, peering over her shoulder.

“We both did…” Her eyes were wide and her tone was stunned.

“We got the lead?” he asked, blinking.

“We got the lead!” she screeched, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing his cheek.

Ashton blushed.

~~~

“Well, do your characters kiss?” Calum asked.

Ashton shook his head. “Nah. A few moments where it feels that way, but no.”

“Damn,” Luke muttered with a shake of his head.

Ashton shrugged. “It’s alright. Still gonna be spending a lot of time with her.”

“So, you gonna kiss her?”

“Our characters don’t kiss, Mike.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Why would I kiss her if that’s not in the script?”

“Because you’re in love with her?” the guys supplied.

Ashton scoffed. “What? I’m not in- That’s crazy.”

“So, you’re just gonna keep playing this game of pretending that you’re just friends with her?”

“I’m not pretending anything! I am friends with her!”

“Friends don’t look at friends the way you look at her, mate.”

Ashton sighed, pushing his hands through his hair. “Okay, but just because I like her that way, doesn’t mean she feels the same way.”

“Ash?” Calum piped up.

“Yeah?”

“Why do you think she asked for an audition partner?”

“Because she didn’t want to audition alone?”

“Because she already knew we’d say no. It was a safety thing. She could act like she was asking us in general and would have agreed to any of us. But she knew we’d say no and you would say yes. Which is what she wanted.”

“Okay, but why would she want me for an audition partner? Luke’s the better singer. And you’re the better dancer.”

“Because she loves you too, dumbass. Haven’t you been listening?” Luke asked with an eye roll. “And you call me the idiot…”

“See?” Mike laughed. “Even Luke knows.”

~~~

Ashton reached out to grab her arm as she moved away from him. “Hey, hey. Look at me. Right at me,” he coaxed softly. He swallowed thickly as she whirled back to face him. Even though he knew it was fake, she looked so terrified. “Right at me,” he repeated with a smile. “It’ll be like the first time we sang together. Remember? Like kindergarten.”

A shy smile crossed her lips as she gave a small nod of her head, eyes still locked on his. His tongue poked out to wet his lips. His head leaned down instinctively.

“Ashton, stop ducking your head. We need to see you,” the drama director called out, breaking the moment like glass.

Ashton jumped a step backwards, his cheeks burning. “Right! Sorry!” he chuckled, thoroughly embarrassed.

The drama teacher had already moved on. “Band, mark ‘like kindergarten’ as your cue. Alright. Run the scene again, this time with the song. Light crew, get ready for your cues.”

~~~

“Ready, Ash?” she grinned at him.

Ashton nodded as they jumped in place, wiggling out their nerves. Closing night. And he was going for the unscripted kiss. No one could yell at him not to anymore.

The closer they came to the end of the show, the more nervous Ashton grew. And it had nothing to do with stage fright.

“Congratulations, Wildcat!” she smiled brightly up at him, the red dress dancing with her movements.

“What about your team?” he asked her, breathless, as his heart hammered in his chest. This was it. One more line.

“We won too!” she broke the news.

He was supposed to take her in his arms and spin in a circle. An action just long enough to cue the next line. Instead, he matched her grin, and crushed his lips into hers.

If the audience whooped, he didn’t hear it. All that mattered was the feeling of her fingers tangling in his hair as she kissed him back. Yes!

~~~

“Hey, Ash?”

He turned from where he was standing with Calum, Luke, and Mike. They had been congratulating him on not one, but two jobs well done. He wasn’t sure he’d ever stop grinning. “Hmm?” he asked.

“Can we talk?” She nodded her head in the direction of the empty auditorium.

His heart stopped. “Uh… yeah… Yeah!” he stammered. “I’ll uh…”

Calum’s hand came down on his shoulder. “We’ll catch you later, mate.”

“Yeah. Later,” Ashton agreed, his spinning world crashing to a halt.

“Great job, Y/N,” Calum said, having moved to wrap her in a hug.

“Yeah, you did amazing,” Mike and Luke offered their congratulations to her as well.

“Aw, thanks guys,” she told them, her cheeks turning pink.

“So…” Ashton said, falling into step with her as they walked back inside the theater, the empty stage still lit up.

“So…” she giggled. “That, um… was there a script change?”

“No,” he confessed with a shake of his head.

“Oh.”

“Yeah…”

“Good. So it won’t be weird for me to do this, then.”

Everything that happened next cemented in his memory. His eyebrows pulled together in confusion. His mouth parted to respond. Her lips set a course for his. His eyes widened in surprise as her fingers wove into his hair. His arms pulled her tightly to him.

“Safe to say you like me?” he asked, a cocky grin on his face as they pulled apart.

“How many hints do you need?”

“Which answer gets you to kiss me like that again?”

Tag List

@frontmanash @goeatsomelife @flameraine @cashtonasff5sos @here-for-the-uproars @cxddlyash @1-irwin-94 @sparkling-calm @tea4sykes @youngblood199456 @5-seconds-of-obsession @gosh-im-short @aquarius-hood1996 @talkfastromance4 @itjustkindahappenedreally @philthepegacorn @kikixfandoms

#showmance #ashton irwin #ashton irwin fic #5sos #galcal irwin

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rosemaidenvixen · 4 years

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A Secret’s Worth

Chapter 4: Mary

Ao3

Mary wanted to let out an indignant scoff, but seeing how her mouth was full of nachos she settled for a scowl. Seriously, it had been two days and Dean still hadn’t texted her back. At first she had just been annoyed, now she was straight up mad.

No more playing nice, if Dean wanted her back it was going to cost him a date with pizza and ice cream.

A wry smile broke through her frown.

Of course it wasn’t like she needed Dean, plenty of other boys would give anything to go out with her. Henry, otherwise known as Tight-Jeans Hank, had just asked her to go to the basketball game this week, maybe she should take him up on it, show Dean what he was missing out on.

“I didn’t make the team,”

Mary practically jumped out of her seat. She was so engrossed in her texts that she hadn’t even noticed Darci sitting down across from her.

“What?”

Darci was staring down at the logo stamped into the middle of the table, eyes scrunched and mouth crumpled. It took Mary a few seconds to realize she was holding back tears.

“The cheerleading team, I didn’t make the cut,”

Mary gently slid her phone into her pocket “Sorry...that sucks,”

Heat started to bloom on her face as silence stretched out between the two of them, thick and tacky. Mary never knew what to say in these kinds of situations. She couldn't just tell Darci it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, in her track record saying that never went over well. Bottom line, Mary sucked at making people feel better when they were down. Whatever she tried always seemed to make things worse.

Fortunately both of them were saved when Claire came swooping in and planted herself in the seat beside Darci.

“I’m so sorry,” Claire reached over grasped Darci’s hand with hers “That must be such a let down after all your hard work,”

Darci’s lower lip trembled “I knew they weren’t going to let more than one or two freshman onto the team, but I thought that maybe I was good enough…”

She trailed off as Claire patted the back of her hand “You’re plenty good enough Darci, they probably just didn’t have enough spots available. I’m sure that next year they’ll be glad to have you,”

“Thanks Claire,”

Mary watched as Claire successfully pulled Darci back from the brink of tears, wriggling uncomfortably, wishing she could be half as comforting and sweet as Claire. She didn’t envy her friends for a lot of things, but this was one of them.

She sat up straighter as an idea came to her. Mary might suck at sympathy, but maybe she could help by providing a welcome distraction.

“Yeah, you’ll be on the team for sure next year,” Mary’s eyes twinkled “Maybe by then Claire will have finally asked Jimmy-Jam out,”

The sharp look on Claire’s face made Mary wonder if this had been the right move after all. Then Darci let out a small laugh and she stopped wondering.

She let herself relax a little bit, Claire still looked pissed about her love life being brought up, but Darci was smiling so Mary decided to roll with it.

“Yesterday you went on and on about how today was the day you were finally going to do it, but in the end you chickened out,” she smirked “Again,”

Claire didn’t reply to that but her rapidly pinkening cheeks did all the talking.

Darci giggled, successfully distracted now “Come on Claire, we’ve been hanging out with the boys for weeks, when are you planning on actually telling Jim that you like-like him?”

She let out a deep sigh “Soon, ok, soon,”

“You know Claire, the longer you wait, the more likely it is some other girl snaches him up,”

“What!”

“What Mare means...” Darci said while throwing a knowing look in Mary’s direction “Is if you really like Jim you should just tell him that, get the words out there” she placed a reassuring hand on Claire’s shoulder “And if it makes you feel better, I think that Jim likes you to,”

“You...think so?”

“Better hurry, I saw Valerie eyeing him during social studies,”

If looks could kill Claire would have her dead on the ground “Are you actually invested in my love life or do you just want to watch me suffer?”

“Yes,”

Claire looked back and forth between Mary and Darci’s eager expressions, then buried her face into her hands with a groan “Look, I know you guys are just trying to help. But I really need to figure this out on my own. So can you just...give me some space on this,”

Translation; time to back off now.

“Ok, ok,” Mary said, knowing not to push further “But when you do ask him out, promise we’ll be the first to know?”

Claire nodded “Promise,”

Satisfied, Mary went back to her nachos, Claire and Darci following suit with their own lunches. Based on the clock it wouldn’t be long before Jim and Toby joined them.

Strange how normal a thought that was.

This time last year the idea of having lunch with anyone else besides her besties was unthinkable. Sometimes Mary still couldn’t believe the boys were part of their unofficial ‘group’ now.

She hadn’t had a problem going along with Claire’s county fair idea. Claire had wanted to make Jim happy and Mary wanted to make Claire happy. Just one day out, no harm no foul.

But when Darci had wanted to keep hanging around with the boys after that, Mary hadn’t exactly been thrilled.

Maintaining their hard won social status took a lot of work, and she wasn’t going to jeopardize that, not even for the boy Claire was crushing on. Besides, the three of them had been BFFs since kindergarten, and Mary wasn’t going to let just anyone butt in on that, let alone boys.

Mary didn’t have anything against boys. Actually she liked them quite a bit. Boys could be cool and pretty darn fun to hang around with, but only if a girl kept her distance. Letting a boy get too close was a rookie mistake. Mary had learned that lesson the hard way and there was no way in hell she was letting Claire or Darci get hurt like that.

So yeah, she hadn’t been down with turning this into a thing.

But Darci wanted to hang out with Toby and Jim more and of course Claire had all but jumped to agree. Even if she had put her foot down Mary was outvoted two to one, so she just gritted her teeth and put up with the boys tagging along.

Sitting together at lunch, hanging out after school. Claire even invited them along to videogame Saturday at her house; an event that had been exclusive to the three of them for years!

Mary hadn’t dropped her guard the entire time, always keeping watch for any sign that either Toby or Jim would push their newfound privilege too far.

One toe out of line and she’d kick them to the curb so fast it would leave skid marks.

She’d kept up her hypervigilance for weeks, but nothing had ever come of it. Mary had known boys that would act all nice and then do a 180 the second they had you where they wanted you, but Toby and Jim actually seemed genuinely….nice.

Jim shared his lunch when Darci was down on cash, and offered to bring an extra any time one of them needed it. Toby lent out his geology notes and kept them all from completely flunking a pop quiz. The enitre time she’d known them Jim and Toby had never been anything less than friendly and helpfull. More than that, neither of them ever acted like their good behavior entitled them to...more.

Toby and Jim weren’t just acting nice, they were nice; a little dorky maybe, but nice.

So after weeks of being on edge Mary finally eased up. The boys might not have earned her full trust just yet, but they had gained quite a bit of it, enough for her to call them friends.

And speak of the devil, Toby and Jim chose that moment to show up at their table. She waved in greeting, mouth still full. Toby smiled and waved back “How’s it going guys, oh hey Darci, did you hear about the cheer team yet?”

Darci’s face fell “I didn’t make the cut,”

Jim winced as he slid into his seat “Bummer,”

Toby looked affronted on her behalf “If they were crazy enough to turn you down that’s their loss,”

She managed a weak grin “Thanks guys,”

The conversations died down again as they all started eating in earnest. Not because they didn’t have anything to talk about, but because they didn’t have the time. Lunch period was barely long enough to get a full meal in, especially when you got your lunch from the food truck in the park like they did today. They didn’t have to rush, but they couldn’t exactly take their time either.

Mary was able to multitask by chowing down on her nachos with her left hand and tapping at her phone with her right.

She was finished checking her texts so she moved on to organize her calendar. Planning and coordinating all of their group’s outings took a lot of time and effort, but all four of her friends thanked her on a regular basis and let her know how much they appreciated it.

It might be a lot of hard work, but it really was good to be Queen Bee.

And when she spotted an event planned for that weekend, Mary realized it was a very good thing she decided to check her calendar when all five of them were at lunch together.

“Darc, Claire; how much prep time will you need for your makeup on Saturday?”

Darci perked up instantly “I’ll need half an hour at the very least,”

Claire puzzled over it for a bit longer before answering “Mine should take ten, fifteen minutes tops,”

Mary added a note to the event before turning to Jim and Toby “What about you guys?”

The two just blinked at her, Jim hesitantly raising a hand into the air “Uh, question, why are we talking about makeup?”

“To go with our costumes, duh,”

Toby nervously tapped his fingers against the table “....costumes?

Mary gave both of them a flat, unimpressed stare “For the Halloween Hop on Saturday that we’ve been talking about for weeks. Seriously, do you guys never check Messenger?”

Jim still didn’t look like he was getting it “The Halloween Hop?”

“Yep,” Claire said with a grin “I’m going as a vampire,”

“I’m going as a corpse bride,” Darci added.

Realization dawned on Toby’s face as things clicked into place “Those sound awesomely spooky, what about you Mary?”

“Mermaid,”

“Nice,”

“So wait,” Jim spoke up, still sounding confused “That’s this weekend?”

Her eye roll practically scraped the ceiling “Yeah they’ve had flyers posted for weeks. Now spill, what are you going as and how much time are you going to need to suit up? We need to get there by six,”

Finally she could see the lightbulb going off in Jim’s head as he came up to speed.

Toby let out a sharp gasp “We should go as Freddy Kruger and Jason! I already have a hockey mask, all we need is a hat, glove, and fake machete,”

Mary nodded in approval and looked back down at her phone “Can you guys be ready at Darci’s house at six? Her dad can drive us there and my moms agreed to pick us up. Afterwards they can drop you off at home or…”

She deliberately paused, letting the anticipation build for a few seconds. Seeing as how the boys were a little slow on the uptake Mary might as well relish the big reveal “We can all spend the night at my house, my moms will be home all night and they say it’s fine,”

If Toby grinned any wider he was going to crack his face in half “A sleepover?! Awesomesauce!”

So Jim and Toby were in, good. Tonight Mary would let her moms know so they could exchange numbers with Jim’s mom and Toby’s Nana, then she had to make sure they had enough snacks for all five of--

“Actually…” Jim’s voice derailed her train of thought “I won’t be able to make it,”

Mary frowned “If your mom isn’t cool with the boy-girl thing, just let my moms talk to her, they’ll make her come around,”

Jim chewed on his lower lip, not looking reassured at all “It’s...not that...I can’t do any of it,”

Wait. What?

“You mean you can’t come to the sleepover or the Halloween hop?”

“Nope, sorry,”

She narrowed her eyes “Is it because of your curfew?”

Jim looked down and away “No,”

Translation, it most certainly was. The real question was why she was even surprised at this point.

Mary scowled and set her phone down on the table “Seriously? Come on Jim you always bail early, can’t you ignore your crazy early curfew just this once?”

“If your mom’s worried it’s totally safe,” Darci added helpfully “We’ll be at school with the teachers or at Mary’s house with her moms the whole time,”

Claire leaned closer to him, expression hopeful and pleading “My parents can talk to her, they’re super big on safety, so if they think it’s ok for me to go you know it’s danger free,”

Jim opened his mouth, no doubt to object, but stopped when Toby laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Dr. Lake has nothing to worry about,” Toby smiled up expectantly at him “You’re not a little kid anymore, you need a night out, your mom will understand,”

Jim shut his jaw with a click, biting back whatever rebuttal he’d had. They’d all given him a hard time about the ridiculous hours his mom wanted him home by at some point, but this was the first time all four of them had ganged up about it, leaving absolutely no room for counterarguments.

Mary arched a single eyebrow “So do you think you can convince your mom to let you off the hook for one night?”

He snapped out of his speechlessness “It’s not that!”

“They why?”

“The reason I can’t come is...is…” Jim stammered “...is because my mom and I...are going camping,”

Mary’s jaw dropped “You and your mom are going camping?”

He grinned sheepishly “Yeah, it’s kind of our family thing,”

“In October?!”

Jim’s already brittle smile wavered “Yeah...she’s an ER doctor so her work schedule is weird, she can’t always pick what days off she gets so we have to go camping whenever we can, right Toby?”

Looking majorly disappointed, Toby still nodded in agreement “Yeah, I remember one year her schedule was so packed you guys didn’t go on vacation for six months and then you went to Yosemite for two solid weeks,”

Claire’s face fell “So you guys can’t go on another weekend?”

“Nope, sorry,”

Mary’s eyes narrowed as she fought to keep her mouth from twisting into an ugly snarl. While she didn’t consider herself a troublemaker, Mary had gotten pretty darn good at telling people what they wanted to hear in order to weasel her way out of tight spots, like detention or extra homework. And she could tell that Jim was doing the exact same thing right now.

Jim was lying, there was no camping trip.

But then why couldn’t he go to the Halloween Hop, or the sleepover for that matter, or literally anything?

Was his curfew no exceptions, or was there some other reason he couldn’t go out on Saturday. Maybe he couldn’t bear to sleep away from home? Mary had known some kids like that, but that was when they were all little, there was no way that could be going on with Jim now, could it?

Mary wanted to trust him, she already trusted Jim and Toby more than any other boys their age.

But Jim was lying to her, to all of them.

Her fingers dug into the fabric of her jeans and Jim babbled on about the imaginary camping trip that prevented him from joining them that weekend. She was one bad decision away from reaching across the table and shaking him by the shoulders, demanding actual answers.

Quick as the thought crossed her mind, a hot wave of shame followed.

Stealing the truth wasn’t the right way to go. Mary wanted to know what was going on with Jim, but that didn’t entitle her to his dirty laundry.

She had learned that lesson the same week she met him.

Mary took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down. Jim was a friend, her friend, and she would let him keep his secrets. He could share them in his own time.

“Fine, if you can’t go you can’t go,” Mary said with she hoped was a friendly, not insincere looking, smile “Just let me know when you and your mom are going camping, that way I can plan around it, ok?”

Jim beamed back at her “You betcha,”

#tales of arcadia #Trollhunters #Mary Wang #darci scott #claire nuñez #toby domzalski #jim lake jr #a secret's worth #rmvwrites #fanfic

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marestomars · 5 years

Text

jopper headcanon au (?)

I was talking to mama today, and we were talking about stranger things and about how much we love jopper, and she said: “imagine if hopper were will and johnatan’s real father” and my mind went full blown crazy! i don’t know if the timeline fits, but use your imagination. so, let’s imagine together:

- joyce and hopper got married after he came back from vietnam, because they were in love, wild and young. they had the cuttest wedding in the world, and moved into new york, cause hopper joins the pd.

- jonathan james hopper is born in 1967, and william david hopper in 1971.

- it was a happy marriage, until it wasn’t anymore, and with 2 children, they are distant. there’s so many bills to pay, and baby will won’t let them sleep, and jonathan’s is getting to kindergarten, and it’s so difficult!

- suddenly, her mom gets sick and she decides to leave, back to hawkins with his kids.

- he gets super angry, of course, cause his boys are being taken away from him, and the woman he loves is leaving, but he’s stupid, and young, and he let them go.

- so joyce leaves her home and life behind, takes her two boys to hawkins, and hopper send them money and comes to visit them, a few times a year.

- one day, when will is four, hopper calls, saying he’s getting married again, and gonna be a father again. joyce’s heart’s still broken, even after three years apart, and she can’t say a word.

- hopper marries diane, and sarah is an amazing daughter, so pretty and smart, but with this terminal disease.

- when sarah dies, hop sees his whole life being destroyed again, but this time, he’s not strong enough to be by himself.

- he takes his things and moves back to hawkins, and tries his best to hold up for the boys, but it’s too broken to succeed, and with the booze and pills, pushes them away.

- joyce is so angry with him, for pushing his boys away, and at the same time, she’s so broken for him, and can’t imagine his pain.

- she tries her best to help, but he’s too far gone in his pain, and even if he shows up for birthdays, and gives christmas gifts, he’s no good father, and they all know it.

- everything changes when he comes to work one day, and joyce is desperate in his office. “our boy is missing!” she says, so broken, and he can’t believe his life had more structures to fall apart.

- he starts looking for will like a mad man, and when he gets called by state police, saying there’s a body in the water, he begs to god to not be his boy.

- when he walks into the horowitz house (she got her maiden name back, cause it hurts too much being called mrs hopper) jonathan comes running for his embrace, and they cry together for will.

- that night, hop sleeps in his truck, and joyce cries herself to sleep.

- when hop finds out that will’s body is fake, they go on they’re little journey, and have the most sentimental heart to heart in the car, where he promise to her that if they find will, he’s gonna be a real father, for both boys , like he should have done.

- when they rescue will from the upside down, they cry so much in each others arms, and in the aftershocks of adrenalin, they fuck for the first time in 9 years.

- they don’t talk about it, and he is honest to his words, becoming a present dad for the boys.

- one day, he arrives at joyce’s house, seeming nervous and fidgety, and begs her to go with him.

- he takes her to his granpa’s cabin, and she’s about to call his bullshit when she sees little eleven siting in a couch, dressed in oversized flannels and jeans.

- they both swear to protect the girl, and she’s always sneaking in the middle of the day, to check on el.

- when bob newby calls her out on a date, she says yes, and hopper is bewildered, cause he saw something in her eyes, something that might look like the love she felt for him.

- 8 months later, joyce and bob are still a thing, and his only consolation is that the boys dislike bob, and thinks he’s too boring for their badass mom.

- after that begging of november happens, the whole family is struggling to find some normalcy. owens gives hopper a birth certificate for eleven, but instead of terry ives, it’s joyce’s name on it. the doctor didn’t even asked, he just assumed that she would also be the couple’s daughter, and it’s not a lie. (bob doesn’t die, he’s just in shock after everything, and joyce break up with him, cause she’s feeling guilty for dragging him into the mess)

- during the months of peace between november and july, they all live the best time of they’re lifes.

- jonathan is super shy when he introduces nancy as his girlfriend to his parents, and after a few minutes of awkward conversation, the teenagers leave and hopper is super proud of his boy: “maybe getting the badass girl is a hopper’s trait”, and joyce is flushed with the idea of jim flirting with her.

- hopper teaches all of the kids how to set traps on the woods, how to fish, how to shoot guns (much to joyce chagrin, but she understands that might be necessary, and also takes the lessons), and the kids teaches him and joyce how to play videogames, d&d and they finally understands star wars.

- when that july happens, everything is bad, and murray is yelling at them, and they fuck like rabbits before they come back to hawkins.

- when terminator shows up, and starts beating hopper, joyce thanks all the gods in the world for the shooting lessons she got, cause the fucking russian is almost killing the love of her life, and she fires one clean shot in his back, and then, hop is safe.

- they’re together after it, no questions asked, and 6 weeks later, they’re moving into one bigger house, with four rooms.

i got carried away in my imagination and still have a few things left out!!! if you have more headcanons for this au, i’d like to read 💖

#jopper #headcanon #au #alternative universe #joyce x hopper #joyce byers #jim hopper #stranger things #jonathan byers #will byers

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charonaraccoon · 5 years

Text

Bridges (drabbles/prompts):

The perks of being a race engineer (Max/Daniel)

25. "Don't you try and pin this on me!"

Simon Rennie loves his job. He loves working with a young and motivated team and he loves working under Christian Horner’s watchful and understanding eyes. He loves the dynamics of the sport, the new challenges regarding track alterations or new rules. And he really loves working with Daniel Ricciardo, the ever-motivated, ever-smiling Australian. But sometimes he really hates his job. The deprivations, the traveling, the tiredness. Moreover, he sometimes really hates working with Daniel Ricciardo, when he’s late for appointments. And on top of the huge pile of shit he already has to deal with he has to search for his driver on the Saturday of a race weekend after he already missed the morning meeting at the paddock and it’s only four hours until qualifying starts.

Simon runs a hand through his dark hair and makes a beeline for the driver homes. The chilly morning air makes him shiver and he clings to his coffee cup like a drowning man, a poor, drowning, caffeine-deprived man.

He turns around a corner and is able to avoid a collision with Michael Italiano just in time, spilling coffee over his hand.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he curses. Michael scratches the back of his head awkwardly.

“That’s my bad. I’m sorry, Simon.”

Simon knows he won’t come up with anything nice to say so he sticks with Bambi and simply stays silent, eyeing Daniel’s physiotherapist grumpily.

“Hey, have you seen Daniel? He was supposed to meet me for a run over two hours ago and didn’t show up. The last time that happened I made sure he had a hell of a week, sport-wise.”

Simon sighs and wipes his wet but now at least warm and good smelling hand dry on his jeans.

“I bet he overslept and his phone died or anything. Let’s check his trailer.”

“Wasn’t there a meeting like an hour ago?” Michael asks, irritation mirroring in his green-brown eyes.

“Yep, Christian nearly exploded after Max didn’t show up to his own appointment with him either.”

“Wow, that’s a first. Max missing out on his duties.”

“Yes. It’s going to be an interesting weekend.”

They make their way to where the huge trailers are parked and literally stumble upon Gianpiero Lambiase, who bumps into Simon as they pass by Verstappen’s motorhome.

“Jesus fucking Christ!”, Simon grumbles again, quickly lifting his sacred coffee out of harm’s way.

“Ups, sorry, Simon. Have you guys seen Max?”

“What? Don’t tell me Max is nowhere to be found either?!”

“Haven’t seen him today, no. And what’s that supposed to mean “either”? Where’s Daniel?”

They look at each other in a moment of silent thought and Simon takes a sip from his coffee. Glances are exchanged, opinion wordlessly gathered and plans pondered on.

“Oh, fuck me.”, Michael groans then and takes a deep breath.

I feel you, buddy, is what Simon wants to say but bites back the comment again.

The unlikely trio of them makes their way to Ricciardo’s motorhome.

Michael makes use of his chip card and the automatic door slides open with a soft hydraulic sigh. They are met by complete silence and darkness and stale air. One after the other they enter Daniel’s home for the season and Simon freezes to place in the doorframe, taking in and processing the picture in front of him.

The two red bulls lay in the middle of a self-induced chaos of clothes, videogames, beer bottles and cushions. The TV’s still displaying some flickering main menu of a gory horror game.

Simon’s mouth falls open and he hears Michael huff behind him.

Daniel Ricciardo’s sleeping on his stomach sprawled across the sofa, one hand and one leg dangling over the edges, dressed in nothing more but shorts.

His fingertips rest on Max Verstappen’s naked shoulder, who lays hurled up in a small bundle on the floor, just in his sweatpants, PlayStation controller still in one hand.

They snore in unison.

“That’s it. I quit.”, Gianpiero murmurs and turns around on his heels to leave.

Simon and Michael exchange a quick glance before Simon clears his throat.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!”

They two drivers jolt upright, Max hitting his head on Daniel’s elbow and moaning in pain, while Daniel lets out a strange mixture of a groan and yelp that sounds like a little animal being strangled to death – something the Aussie would deserve, Simon states internally matter-of-factly.

“You two are a disgrace! I’ve been looking for you for HOURS! You missed two appointments, embarrassed the team and are already late for qualifying! I could strangle you and would receive a promotion from Christian for doing so!”

He looks into two pairs of immensely tired oceanic and ebony eyes and sighs.

He can’t shake the impression that the embarrassment of being caught in the act, half-naked, in strange domesticity and possibly hungover is worse than anything he could throw at them in the moment. He wipes his eyes and lifts his hands in a capitulating gesture, before shaking his head.

“Just get the fuck out of here, before I actually do so!”

With that he leaves the two drivers alone with fast spreading redness on their cheeks and necks that matches their team logo surprisingly well.

He hears them muttering.

“Fuck, I can’t believe we fell asleep.” Daniel’s voice is drowsy and raspy. A yawn follows.

“You were the one who wanted to play borderlands so badly!” Daniel then says, Max obviously too tired to form English sentences after just being woken up so abruptly.

“And you came up with resident evil, that wasn’t my fault.” … or maybe not, Simon reckons, leaning against the side of the bus with one leg propped up against the huge tyre.

“Hey, don’t try and pin this on me . You wanted to try the new beer type.”

"It was so warm in here and the alcohol and the game... I can't believe I fell asleep on the damned floor!"

“Oh, my back hurts.” “My neck is so stiff!”

They say that in unison and despite everything it manages to make Simon smile.

Beer bottles clatter, Max laughs hoarsely and Daniel yawns like a dog shuffling down the stairs and into the morning cold.

He shivers and wraps his arms around his upper body now hidden under a huge hoodie.

Max appears behind him, eyes squinted against the brightness and still carmine red.

Daniel ducks his head when he sees Michael’s raised eyebrows, Gianpiero’s clenched jaw and Simon’s crossed arms.

“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”, asks Daniel ruffling his already messy hair.

“Absolutely.”

“I might be pushing my luck but…”, he says then with a grin that’s borderline enthusiastic. “when’s breakfast?”

Gianpiero’s shoulders drop, Michael instantly chases the two drivers across the parking lot, ranting and yelling, and Simon lets out a melodramatic groan.

“I should have become a kindergartener…”

Simon pats his colleague's back comfortingly, handing him his coffee wishing it would be something stronger.

#archive of our own #fanfiction #writing prompt #daniel ricciardo #max verstappen #simon rennie #michael italiano #cuteness #drabble #mystuff

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nothingatallreally · 3 years

Text

obscure memory 2 -

i was in elementary school. i was friends with a little guy. yes, he’s a real guy. we hungout in kindergarten, and particularly liked goofing off during nap time. one day, i was finally able to go to his house. the first thing i remember about his house was that he had a massive train track railroad system thing. it was fairly elaborate. his mom gave us yogos. they were the pink kind. mmm, my favorite. those shits went hard. anyway, he showed me his whole house. they had a nice one. the backyard was cool. we didn’t stay out there much. finally, we went up to his room. he had an absurdly large hot wheels collection. like, this dude had case upon case of hot wheels. not to mention, for some reason, he had a gumball machine that dispensed hot wheels off into a track. it was sick. after showing me his hot wheels, we got on his computer. he had the spy kids 3 videogame. we played that for a bit. then, i had the great idea to download my current favorite videogame onto his computer. it was the sonic heroes DEMO of course. i had only played the demo up to this point. anyway, i had the steps to download burned into my little sonic obsessed brain, and went to work. then, his dad arrived. he for some reason, got really mad about me trying to download sonic heroes and yelled at me. not sure exactly how i got home. that’s all i remember.

#dumb #story

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achylless47 · 3 years

Text

01/29/21 Thoughts

This is the second time I’m writing this little piece of crap because of the supremely crappy internet connection. fuck.

Take two.

I want to die. I really do.

I mean, I can die, I’m far from an immortal being, but It’s just that we don’t get to decide when and where we’ll die from a heart attack the instant we think of the idea. I don’t wanna commit suicide either. I wanna die in peace and leave the world with everyone remembering how saintly I am when I was still alive and not because I’m a youth who “wasted” her life because of “immature” reasons (my life was not lived quite well, actually, so it’s already a waste in the first place. And still, in the end, I still am a people pleaser !) I have my last few wishes before I depart from this world, and that is just one of those. Some might say I’m too young to be this depressed, but let me ask you, were you me when you were young? Did you get to suffer the same consequences as me? Yes, I get it, we all have our own fair share of consequences, and I have mine too, and maybe yours as well. It’s so easy to tell someone to “not be depressed” but when you’re at it, you’ll understand that the rabbit hole of depression is harder to climb than of quicksand, but both still share the same mechanics.

I don’t remember agreeing to live like getting to choose between yes and no like in a videogame or signing a contract with a divine being to give me a life I don’t wanna live. If my memories got erased of the event, and if I did sign something of the sort, I guess there is still much idiocy in me than I’ll ever know. I just hope I’ll never fall for the same scam in this cruel world, especially for a bogus business contract that would make me go broke than I already am. I kinda wish I got caught in the defensive parts of my mother’s uterus and got stuck so I wouldn’t be the victor in the race towards the egg cell. There might have been better options than me, and a billion at that. Well, it’s not like we have a choice, though.

Anyway, I won’t delve much further into how rock bottom feels, and I wish I won’t reach the point in taking my own life again. For now, it’s all just the desire to die. You have nothing to worry about me. Besides, dying won’t change the toxicity of the people I’m bound with. They won’t change even if I erase my own existence from this world. It’s a wasteful sacrifice not worth taking. Remember this, people won’t change after you die, ok?! They might cry on your funeral and drop a few tears on your well-polished deathbed, but THEY WILL NEVER FUCKING CHANGE lmao. You ain’t the person that’ll change the world once you get crucified and die. You’ll just die and get buried in the memories of people. Literally, they won’t even remember you a few years from now and your bones will just be put in a sack along with other nameless people’s bones after your place at the cemetery becomes a casualty of natural disasters.

What can I say, though? I’m completely losing control over my life. Video games are where I dwell most now when I feel so shit. I even feel numb about my life now. I don’t even have the panic monster wreck havoc in me when my I get pass the deadlines set by my professors. I don’t know if I’m completely beyond saving, but I still manage to live my day-to-day life unhealthily. I don’t even know if happiness and motivation exist and if they are just metaphors for the dopamine surge that we feel when we experience various things. I don’t know what to think of. Everyday, I just live for the sake of the little pleasures I feel when I get a “kill” on the video game I’m currently playing. Perhaps, that is what I would say if you’d ask me the reasons why I still wake up everyday and attend class.

Damn. Life is not a video game you can quit when you feel like quitting. And if you’re looking for an undo and restart button, there’s none of it. There’s a lot of things about life that I don’t understand and up until this day I still have a lot of questions. I think we all have. We don’t even get to start a new life when we want to. It just continues without a pause button to push, and time continues to flow without our consent. It’s unstoppable.

Now, what can I do? I’d say... absolutely nothing. I’m no strategist. Even if I consider myself a genius, I’m completely dumbfounded when you ask me my life plans. Yeah. There’s too much uncertainty. I have no idea what I’m gonna do a few years from now, and my mind can’t even generate a visualization of my future, no matter how many times I write it as vivid and descriptively as I can. I just can’t imagine it.

Because I don’t even know what I want.

If only the world was more forgiving, life would be a little bit much easier to manage. But things are complicated, they just seem simple at first glance. I remember my kindergarten years when I was asked to dress up in my dream profession. It was easy for me to say “I wanna be a doctor!” and wear a cute medical robe sewn by my grandma. Now, I really can’t say the same. Things really do change.

I grew up with the mentality that “mistakes define a person”. Up until today, I still subconsciously follow that line and when I feel like I’m gonna commit a mistake, I instantly retreat. I am a hundred percent aware of my perfectionism, though. I still dream of being the perfect person who can do everything. I mean, I was told I was smart since I was young, and maybe that’s true, I’m talented (except in dancing and things like that) and have this innate creativity that not everyone else gets to unlock (the problem is, I don’t use it properly). And however I try, I just can’t become the concept of the perfect me inside my head. I just keep being the person I loathe.

I won’t mind someone saying how I’m the worst person they’ve ever met, because at this point I have a corrupted heart, turbulent emotions and impure soul. I’ll just own it, I’m cool with it. I may be borderline narcissist or a dark empath, but do villains not deserve salvation? I know villains have their very own redemption arc, but not all villains, though...

But now, I just don’t know. My mind is completely blank. I guess, if whatever happens to me, I’ll just accept it as is. In that way, I’ll be able to dodge the gravity of depression and anxiety. I won’t cry over destructive criticisms thrown at me either. I think it’s safe to say that I am a problematic person, and I should accept that fact too. I always think how I’m so bad at being a normal person, because I’m actually not normal. Not at this point. I would even dare to say I need a psychologist and some damn good therapy.

P.S. Well, I could hire a hitman to kill me, but I’m broke and could hardly afford anything.

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dellardragon · 4 years

Text

First Essay

I was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1974, to a middle class couple. They were well meaning. But they weren't a particularly happy one. They would split up when I was 5. My father would ask me if I was happy he was leaving. I answered honestly. I said yes, because I knew the shouting matches that they would get into every few nights would stop...

My early years, at least according my mother, and some dim memories that I still hold from those times, apart from the friction between my parents, were reasonably happy. My mother has recounted that I was relatively easy going as a hatchling. Never complained unless there was something truly wrong. I was apparently very outgoing. Very focused on people. I seemed to be always trying to get them to smile. When we prepared to move to Alexandria, Virginia a year later, many of our neighbors, some who had acted as my sitters when my parents were working, made a point of saying goodbye to me specifically. I was apparently rather popular as hatchlings go...

My experiences at kindergarten were mostly positive. It was run by the Episcopal church my mother went to, after we moved into the DC area. I was diagnosed early with learning disabilities. Therapists that worked with the kindergarten, worked with me, explaining to me as best they could how I was different, and taught me ways to cope. They started physical therapy to help my brain learn to control the body it had a scrambled connection to. They taught me to make sense of the wall of noise, presented to me by my senses. My brain, having to do the hard work of processing the data that normally would have been handled by my malfunctioning brain-stem, became quite burley, as a neurologist would explain to me decades later.

I had an inquisitive mind. I was curious about everything, wanting to know how they worked. I was able to grasp complex concepts that often one needed to be much older to understand. At three years old, as my mother once recounted, I would exclaim the revelation that numbers could go on forever, without end. When I was in second grade, after my mother, at my insistence, read me a high school level book about how nuclear reactors worked, as a bedtime story, would start drawing up and then refining, schematics for a nuclear powered rocket, complete with two reactor cores, radiation shield, and RCS thrusters to spin the vessel to simulate gravity for it's occupants. My IQ would later be measured around 150.

I was understood in kindergarten. I had teachers well versed in learning disabilities, and patient and kind. And I had a mother who had once been an educator herself, who advocated for me passionately. I was happy.

My school career would be less happy.

I was still quite awkward. I would be receiving physical therapy for a further 5 years. When my mother took me to see what would be my first elementary school, I went running across the playground, and before she could catch me, would run straight into a metal link chain that would catch me at neck level, and throw me to the ground. I was unable to stop myself in time.

My first grade teacher would be a Ms. Stein who was every bit as unwilling to understand about my condition as the kindergarten teachers were kind to me. She would help make my first year of schooling an absolute hell.

This was the early years of understanding about learning disabilities. Many teachers, too set in their ways, were unwilling to make accommodation. The Americans With Disabilities Act, that would reserve the right of the federal government, to deny funding to a school that didn't make proper accommodations for disabled students, was still a decade away. Learning disabled students were picked up by smaller buses, on special routes. Some schools housed them in homerooms with students with a variety of disabilities, keeping them out of the general populations as much as possible.

I would have a spelling teacher in fourth grade, who would keep me after class every day, because I couldn't finish my work in time, largely due to the motor coordination issues I had with writing. While my classmates got to watch a mid day movie during the break before lunch, I would be forced to struggle through the rest of it, with the teacher breathing down my neck. I still remember her scowl. Her telling me that learning disabilities didn't exist. That I was just slacking.

The stigma was heavy, and the students noticed. For years I would spend nights cuddled up next to my mother wailing about how I had no friends. How everyone was mean to me. And I didn't understand why...

I began to withdraw. To dread school. To me it was all struggle. All judgment. All punishment for me being different.

It would not be the only horrible thing to happen to me.

When I was 7 I was sexually abused by a neighbor down the road. A mentally challenged teenager. He was 14 but with the mind of a 6 year old, and had no idea what he was doing. But the damage lives with me to this day.

My father had mental problems. He was violent towards me, when he had problems controlling his anger. While I would say that later on we got along well enough, he never really held the place a father would in my life. He tried, but he was too haunted by his own abusive past.

I developed severe OCD when I was 13. My early teen years was spent seeing psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists. I was put on a veritable cornucopia of various SSRIs and other medications, searching for the right medication or combination, to turn down the volume on the screaming thoughts in my head. The ones about how I was dirty, and needed to clean myself endlessly. It would get bad enough that, I would eventually spend 13 hours a day in the bathroom, doing horrible things to myself, trying to get clean. My hair turn blond, from all the hydrogen peroxide I was spraying everywhere, trying to sanitize my home around me. My mother would threaten to get me hospitalized, if I didn't seek help. Thankfully, I was eventually able to find a medication that turns that scream down to a dull roar.

When I was 17, I came to understand that I was Gay. My mother was extremely understanding. While she feared that I would experience further prejudice, she made clear that the only issue she had with it (and she made it clear this was HER issue, and NOT mine),was that she probably could expect no biological grandchildren. She was right about that, alas.

I also developed clinical depression. At one point I was sleeping 14 hours a day, and eating myself into oblivion, because I felt like I had no real future that wasn't filled with just more suffering.

Throughout my life, I would struggle. Find myself the strange one. The one looking in from the outside, not allowed to have a normal life. To be subjected to horrors that my mother could not completely shield me from. And worse, I was smart. I became increasingly aware of how dysfunctional the world was. How arbitrary.

Things have thankfully changed for the better, for me, lately.

I have friends that I have made over the years since I left school. I now have a bit of a social network. After two extremely dysfunctional relationships (after taking a break from such things), I found a partner that I am truly compatible with. Our interests compliment each other wonderfully. He is my best friend, my partner, and my collaborator in geeky projects aplenty. Even with the world ironically seeming to fall off a cliff, just as I'm finally finding my own equilibrium, I have new friends that helped me grow a community, that we found ourselves inheriting. It's a social circle that we all can lean on, for which I am very grateful. It took nearly 4 decades of life, but I feel like I finally have a future. Something to do. Something to look forward to.

I found that I am very unusual combination.

I am a nerd, with interests that until very recently, were considered fringe, and were generally derided in most cases. Not considered dangerous, but definitely childish and unmanly. Videogames, science fiction, fantasy, and being a science and tech geek, were all things that would get you looked at oddly, or dismissed as a dreamer, as if being a dreamer was a bad thing. My experiences have formed what I believe is probably either a unique or at least uncommon viewpoint on the world. I'm not a part of the rat race. I have no career due to my conditions. I have no children, and no plans to have any. I feel that I am too unstable. It would not be good for me to be having to take care of another life, that was entirely dependent on me, when I am not able to really look after myself on more than a very basic level physically. But I'm incredibly bright, which is both a blessing and a curse. I'm good with technology and science, and can grasp the concepts, if not consciously the math. I can make inferences that have proven to be reasonably accurate. And I have time to think. Time to wonder, and to learn. And I have what I hope is a decent writing ability.

And I've stumbled. Alot. I've made some doozies of mistakes in my life, that have humbled me, and hopefully given me some measure of understanding, if only simply "Okay, better not to do THAT again..."

So here I am. I may not be female, or a person of color, but I am still a minority in my own way. I'm gay, an abuse survivor both sexual and physical, a sufferer of mental illness, a person with disabilities, and a person with interests that for the majority of my life were looked down upon, and to this day still carry some stigma. A minority, of a minority, of a minority, of a minority, of a minority.

And I'm getting older. I'm thinking about mortality. About what I will leave behind when I pass off this mortal coil. There will be friends to remember me, but no children to carry on in my stead. Robin Williams once said the wonderful thing about having children is that they are both you, and not you. But that in some way, it's a ticket towards, if not immortality, towards having something of you live on, after you for at least a time. I don't have that...

I want to leave something behind. Something that hopefully can endure after I am gone.

As I said before, I have some decent writing ability, or at least I'm told that I do. It's not the first time I've considered doing this, but lately, with everything that's going on, I figured, what the hell. Best to just get on with it...

They say that nothing really ever disappears on the Internet. That it may become harder to find, but it's always still out there somewhere...

So, after much procrastination, I have decided to start writing. To create essays that give my point of view on what hopefully will be a variety of topics. Some will be on politics, some on philosophy, some on science and physics, some on more geeky topics like fandom and science fiction, videogames, etc.

I will try to post at least 1 thing a week on Facebook, Tumblr, and Furaffinity (yeah, I'm also one of them furries). Hopefully someone will read these and take away something of value. That maybe it will change an opinion, or give an insight or inspiration. Something that can survive me, even if my name and who I was is forgotten. Here's hoping.

And here goes nothing...

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daleisgreat · 4 years

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35 Years of NES - Flashback Special!

It took me 12 minutes to set up this shot of what encapsulates my NES fandom! Please sit down and listen for awhile as I recount my life and times as a NES kid! This October in a couple months will mark the 35th anniversary of the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America so that means it is time for another flashback special where I recount my personal history with the NES. This is the 11th platform that has gotten the flashback special treatment from me in the little over a year I have been doing them and if you want to get caught up with the rest make sure to check out the links at the bottom of this entry! Furthermore, if you are looking for a more traditional anniversary piece chronologically highlighting the history of the system and its top games I have you covered there too. At the bottom of this article I have embedded old podcasts of mine I recently uploaded to YouTube from my personal archives where we highlight the system as a whole on its 25th anniversary ten years ago. I additionally have podcasts from my history of RPG and comic book videogame series highlighting the NES entries from those genres that are all featured at the bottom of this article to keep that NES anniversary train rolling for the rest of the year! Being Introduced to the Power

I will never forget the first impression the NES made on me because it was the first time I ever witnessed and played a videogame! It was the Christmas shopping season of 1988 and I just got home from Kindergarten class to see my older sister playing some electronic contraption that was absolutely foreign to me. My eyes soon gazed upon the TV where a crudely pixelated man in red overalls was running and jumping across the screen to the catchiest of background music jingles that will always stick with me. She soon enough passed along the NES’s vintage rectangular controller to me and within minutes I was hooked as I sunk my teeth into my first videogame, Super Mario Bros.. Our family got the ‘Power Set’ which had the 3-in-1 cart featuring Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet along with the Power Pad and Zapper accessories. I was too little to figure out how to operate the Power Pad at the time and rarely played World Class Track Meet, but the family did get a decent amount of playtime in Duck Hunt and groveled over how we could never shoot that damn dog! We always kept coming back to Super Mario Bros though. I had no idea what I was doing as a five-year-old at that time, but I knew I had to give it my all to get Mario to jump to the top (and over???) of the flagpole at the end of most levels. Eventually I stumbled my way accidentally jumping into hidden blocks that contained SECRETS like extra lives, bonus coin blocks and vines that lead to bonus coin rooms and warp zones! Much like today how I have to explore every nook and cranny in the latest open world sandbox game, Super Mario Bros. planted the seeds for that gaming mindset in me to jump around and explore everything to find whatever secrets Nintendo had in store for good ‘ol Mario.

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The minus world was the ultimate secret in videogames for so many years that it was the #1 secret of the top 100 secrets in the 100th issue of Nintendo Power. It took me about a couple years of trying over and over and taking advantage of all the warp zones and extra live secrets I could, but the original Super Mario Bros. was the first game I ever finished. When I thought I discovered all the secrets in the original Super Mario Bros. a friend or cousin would power it on and showed me all new secrets and tips that blew me away. First it was getting to time a jump just right on a koopa troopa coming down the block stairs so Mario would repeatedly jump on them to get near-infinite lives. Then they showed me the hidden warp zones….and then there was the day after much repeated attempts that my cousin showed me the much talked about ‘minus world’ in the game that perplexed me so much that I lambasted him with questions about said level’s eye-opening odd level design. ‘Why did the level never end? Why is this magical force sucking Mario through the bricks, cousin….IS MARIO A GHOST!?!?’ That tripped me out as a Kindergartner, but not as much as the most sinister-looking baddie in the game, the dastardly Hammer Bros!!!! No I am not talking about the adorably-huggable hammer bros. from Super Mario Bros. 3, I am talking about the spiky-squiggly-shaped monsters that chucked super-sharp-metal-thingies at Mario!!! The original Hammer Bros. petrified five-year-old Dale!!! Just see for yourself below…

Encountering the Hammer Bros. for the first time in a night level only amplified the terror they unleashed! I was terrified of them, but what was especially terrifying was how Nintendo gave them a paint of cuteness by their look in Super Mario Bros. 3 as you can see above on their right. You can almost look walk right up and give them a hug! Bring back the sinister OG hammer bro Nintendo! As much as I loved the original Super Mario Bros., I never got to put a lot of playtime into its sequels. I think they were always rented out at the local video store. I do recall watching my cousin finishing Super Mario Bros. 2 and watching in awe the quality of the ending ‘dream’ cinematic that stirs controversies to this day! I never played much original NES Super Mario Bros. 3 either until I got Super Mario All-Stars where I later played a ton of both of those games, but that is a story for another day. The Joy of Renting and Garage Sale-ing

Speaking of renting though, it was how I played almost all my NES games for the first couple years our family had the NES. I was too young to realize games could be purchased at the store and thought games could only be rented at the video store….at least that is what I think my mom caused me to believe anyways. Looking back I loved those early NES years perusing the local video store and only going by misleading box art on what to rent. There are four specific renting memories stood out from those years around the end of the 1980s. One is playing a ton of the first CastleVania and being perplexed at why the heart pickups did not restore health, second is perishing repeatedly in the original Mega Man right from the start which got me to swore off the franchise for a few decades (more on that later). Another time I freaked out at the video store receiving my copy of Tengen’s RBI Baseball and discovering how their black cartridges differed than the standard NES gray carts, but only to have the video clerk assure me they would work on the NES. Finally, my favorite rental memory was getting gleeful goosebumps as a result of the mesmerizing beats of what is my single favorite NES theme, yes I am talking about the ‘Moon Theme’ of Duck Tales. A theme so powerful it still gives me the shivers to this day.

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Behold the single best NES stage music of all time!! Now listen to it for ten hours straight!!!! I mentioned in previous flashback specials how I grew up with divorced parents. I would visit my dad on the weekends and he would usually be a system a generation behind because he was big on garage sales and people were getting rid of their old systems typically when the next system was hitting. So when the NES was the primary system, I would play Atari 2600 at my dad’s on the weekends. Around the time SNES launched in 1991 was when my dad finally got a NES, and he would have another regular NES game or two every several weeks he found at another garage sale. I recall the first four games he got with his NES: Days of Thunder, Gauntlet II, Ikari Warriors and 10-Yard Fight!

My dad bought whatever he thought was a deal at the time of those garage sales, and the quality of games he brought back varied greatly. His garage sale bargain was how I first played classic hits like the original Legend of Zelda and Maniac Mansion. I was seriously into both of those games even though I struggled to make progress in Zelda because all I had was the packed in map to guide me in the pre-Internet and strategy guide days. I made my own dungeon maps in Zelda, and loved trying to figure out the way to get past its increasingly trickier dungeons and puzzles, but eventually got stuck after the third dungeon and could not deduce the pattern in its version of the ‘Lost Woods’ for the life of me. Maniac Mansion was the first adventure game I was exposed to and was instantly hooked, even with the clunky and censored NES port I was resilient in attempting to figure my way around the lighthearted obstacles of the mansion and trying to hide from its alien residents. Reflecting back on my fandom for Maniac Mansion, it got me confident that if I was aware of the PC gaming scene of the late 80s/early 90s instead of the NES scene that I would see myself being head over heels for the countless adventure games from Sierra and Lucas Arts at the time. There were other times however my dad would come back from a garage sale with not-so-desirable titles like XEXYX, Dash Galaxy and Rocket Ranger, but sometimes his picks were a surprise. I somehow got locked into the addictive nature of the stock market game of Wall Street Kid and played far more of that than I had any right to. My dad eventually got the four player adaptor for the NES and the family tried to do the unthinkable one day and dedicate an afternoon to finishing Gauntlet II. We loved that game, but never had time to finish it in a session because the levels just kept never ending and we presumed it had to end by level 100. So one of my favorite NES memories is when the family gathered determined to finish level 100…which we did, but our bravery was for naught when we were all stunned to see that was not the end of the game. I believe we got to around level 130-ish before we eventually threw up our arms and powered off the NES. How the hell were we suppose to know back then that the levels procedurally generated!?!

Gauntlet II and Ikari Warriors were two of the four games that came with the NES my dad purchased at a garage sale and thus we invested countless hours in both, yet both titles we failed at finishing! My dad, brother and I played far too much Ikari Warriors together. I know it is a sloppily designed game with a lot of glitches and other hiccups, but the setting and atmosphere of Ikari Warriors rode the coattails of the infectious Rambo-hype of the 80s. Ikari Warriors on the NES felt like more of a faithful videogame adaptation of that film than the actual Rambo NES games itself. Ikari Warriors was the next best thing by chucking grenades and wreaking havoc with a tank, especially with a second player in co-op! That game burned through lives to the point of where I expected there to be a cheat code to get more lives because it would hang at the game over screen for a good 10 seconds so eventually I mashed buttons until I memorized that ‘A,B,B,A’ unlocked three more lives! I was super proud of being able to figure out a cheat code on my own! The levels in Ikari Warriors went on forever though, and regardless of having near-infinite lives with that code, we would eventually get bored and/or confused at that awkward fourth stage with the bizarre piping the warriors would get hung up on. Over the years the odd gameplay quirks of Ikari Warriors I look back at fondly I came to discover that everyone else detested as one of the worst NES titles, which I feel is a bit much. If my words cannot do it justice, then James Rolfe captured the highs and lows of Ikari Warriors perfectly in an episode of Angry Videogame Nerd I highly recommend giving a watch by clicking or pressing here. Playing with a Different Sort of Power

Over the years I came to find out that the mega popular Nintendo Power magazine was the go-to source for NES fandom of that era. I am an outlier in this case as I was not aware of the magazine until well into the 16-bit era. I chalk this up to never buying games brand new at the time where most new games on Nintendo platforms came bundled with Nintendo Power subscription inserts which I did not become keen to until getting new GameBoy games in 1993. So where was I to get all my latest NES coverage in the late 80s and early 90s before the Internet and then completely oblivious to the videogame magazine market? Through super cheesy, early 90s videogame-themed TV shows! There was not an official Nintendo Power show, but there was an awesome game show on weekday mornings for a couple years in the early 90s called Video Power that showcased kids playing the latest NES games in various challenges. Nickelodeon had a videogame TV show too, which was another game show called Nick Arcade. They had kids answering trivia and competing in various arcade game and virtual reality-esque challenges. The magazine GamePro also endorsed a TV show at the time and it featured more traditional game coverage and I recall it having an over-the-top host showcasing the latest secrets and tips. If you are not familiar with these shows, they are fun to look back on as they capture the goofy ‘extreme kids’ nature that dominated the early 90s. James Rolfe once again does a nice breakdown video of Nick Arcade and Video Power I will embed below or you can click or press here to check it out. These three shows and the latest gossip with classmates and friends were the only ways I got my news about the latest NES games back then.

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Nick Arcade and Video Power are dissected in the above video and those TV game shows were how I was initially glued into the latest NES games as a kid. NES ‘Rights of Passage’ For those that grew up with the NES, I bet you have a good idea where this is going. Anyone that owned the traditional rectangular NES with the flip cover of doom will know that model of the NES was notorious for only powering up games about half the time. Recess-rumors lead us all to believe that blowing into the cartridges made them work better, and while it usually did I still remember my dad buying cleaning kits at the store and insisting using it to clean the games instead of blowing into them…but I like many other NES-kids were super impatient and instead went with the blowing/jiggling the NES-cartridge ever so gently into place….and sometimes wiggling the cartridge up and down several times before firmly locking the cartridge into place and powering on the system. That was the way I convinced myself to get NES games to power on their first try with a 60% success rate! For younger readers here who are doubting me, I am not kidding. This was a thing….seriously! Click or press here for proof where the GameSpot crew of 2005 detail their near identical NES-troubleshooting demonstrations in their excellent video on the NES!

As the header above alludes to, that was one of several ‘rights of passage’ for all NES-kids of the era. The so-bad-its good animated show, Captain N the Game Master likely was part of your Saturday morning cartoon lineup (yes, I have the DVD set, be on the lookout for a review…eventually). Another one was ‘NES-thumb.’ I love Nintendo’s directional-pad, but on the NES longer play sessions with button-mashy-prone games would result in it leaving a scouring imprint on the thumb for hours! I feel safe to say a majority of NES-kids encountered an awful LJN-published game based off one of their personal favorite licensed properties of the 80s. For me it was the atrocious X-Men title, its agonizingly bad Back to the Future game and most of their WWF games. As much as I loved the Ikari Warriors code described above, the most popular code spread across several NES games was the ‘Konami’ code. Ask any then game player 35+ and they likely would be able to subconsciously spout it off to you instantaneously! John Cena turned the code into his best t-shirt design! Calling Nintendo’s long distance-fee heavy hotline for the latest tips from Nintendo’s endorsed gameplay counselors was another thing that got kids to surprise their parents with $100+ phone bills. The last big hurrah for NES-kids was going to see The Wizard at the end of 1989 to see a few precious minutes of Super Mario Bros. 3 gameplay a couple months before its release! I could go on about The Wizard forever, but that was why I covered it here on my blog last week instead so if you want to know all about the Nintendo adver-film, then click or press here for my entry on it! 8-Bit Sports Fun for Everyone! Talking to other core gamers and listening to many gaming podcasts over the years one irk-ing trend is of most ardent game players shaming sports game fans. I understand why the main EA Sports and 2K Sports games are sim-focused experiences that are not for everyone, but they continue to sell well and have their dedicated fanbase. Back in the 8-bit and most of the 16-bit generation, sports games were simpler pick-up-and-play affairs that worked for almost anyone, especially on the NES with its simpler graphics and only having two primary action buttons. The first sports game I got into on NES was Double Dribble which blew me away with its ‘cinematic’ dunks. Nintendo’s Ice Hockey was a huge favorite of mine and it featured fast, scoring heavy action, and had fights, overtime and shootouts all crammed into a NES cartridge. I thought it was the best hockey game on the NES, and then I discovered the more brutal and up close fights in Konami’s Blades of Steel! There were a deluge of baseball games on the NES and the two I got into the most were the original RBI Baseball and BaseWars. RBI Baseball had the illusion of realistic baseball, but simple enough for anyone to grasp. It had a twee-art style, happy-go-lucky background music to nod along with and was one of the first baseball games to feature real MLB players. BaseWars frigging ruled! Futuristic teams of robots duked it out on the diamond and would engage in battles when attempting a tag out!

For pigskin NES classics, the first one I got into was 10-Yard Fight! It had rather….particular…controls for a launch-era NES football game, but I eventually adapted to it. I know now that Tecmo Bowl and especially its sequel, Tecmo Super Bowl were the cream of the crop of NES football games, but I never got a chance to play them until many years after the fact (and I was still blown away by my friend’s first play he picked against me which was scrambling to the back of his endzone and unleashing a 100-yard touchdown pass!). My own personal top pick is NES Play Action Football, a gridiron game that will forever have a place in my heart! I have everlasting memories of my dad teaming up with me to take on the computer. The passing controls in this game are garbage so we only did running plays, but the players ran absurdly slow…and that was even when factoring in there was a turbo speed button! My dad and I however learned to own that ridiculous control scheme! I would hand off the ball to him and then I would take control of the linemen and block defenders for him as he ever-so-gradually-inched-his-way-across-the-field. I am not embellishing by saying it took a good two whole minutes to traverse about 80 yards. It was completely asinine, but I felt a huge sense of accomplishment with every first down and touchdown my dad and I accomplished with our teamwork! That covers the four major American sports, but there was also a lot of representation from the ESPN Ocho tier of sports games. I loved me some Super Dodge Ball and loved going through its world cup mode. Its adorable oversized character graphics carried over into Nintendo’s soccer game, Nintendo World Cup. Nintendo also delivered two excellent golf titles on the system with the self-titled Golf during the black box launch era of the NES, and a more fleshed out version of that game with a career mode and three courses in NES Open Tournament Golf. Konami’s pair of International Track & Field titles were excellent arcade conversions. Finally, I would be remiss if I was not to give Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out a little love here. I ate up the puzzle pattern boxing gameplay with its distinctive roster of foes for the affable Little Mac. I wish I was not awful at it as I could only get to Bald Bull before my inferior skills met their match.

I invested countless hours into marginally satisfactory NES wrestling games. The cream of the crud pictured above is Wrestlemania Challenge and Tecmo World Wrestling. The wrestling nut in me begrudgingly admits there is not a five star grappler on the NES. All the WWF games range from middling to atrocious. WWF Wrestlemania Challenge I would say was marginally solid because it had functinal enough gameplay, a decent roster with wrestlers not seen in many other games at that time like Rick Rude & Andre the Giant, featured finishing moves and best of all one of the few wrestling games that played AWESOME chiptune renditions of the wrestler's theme music throughout gameplay! Avoid Tag Team Wrestling and M.U.S.C.L.E. at all costs, both of those abysmal wrestling games make all the LJN WWF games seem competently made. Pro Wrestling is good for a launch era game, but it is very limiting all things considered. I had a lot of fun with WCW Wrestling back then, but its unique controls have not aged well. I would have to give Tecmo World Wrestling the nod as my favorite NES wrasslin’ game because of solid controls, Tecmo’s trademark cinematics and its goofy announcer providing nonstop text play-by-play on the bottom of the screen that constantly had my attention.

Some of my favorite driving NES games seen above are Micro Machines on the left and Super Off Road on the right. A Micro Machines game with the same style of core racing mechanics has appeared in almost every console generation since! Super Off Road is probably my favorite four player NES game. Driving and motorsports were another favorite of mine, and the NES was loaded with them! My two favorites were Super Off-Road and Super Sprint. The former because it was a pretty faithful conversion of the arcade game and had four player support my family and friends clocked many hours with. Super Sprint had a similar overhead view of the whole track, but felt like it had more realistic handling, yet still contained many increasingly tough obstacles to overcome. In a strange twist, I later found a couple years ago the developers of Super Off-Road made a F1 style of that game that is also four player compatible in Indy Heat, but it also features pit stops where you can ram over the pit crew! Excitebike was an early childhood rental favorite as I loved going over the ramps and wiping out and randomly assembling a mish-mash of parts of a course in the track editor. I was bummed the NES never got the excellent OutRun from the arcades so I had to suffice with Square’s take on the checkpoint-based driving game, Rad Racer and its sequel a couple years later which were almost, but not quite on par with Sega’s flagship arcade driving game. RC Pro-AM and Micro Machines I am a huge fan of both racing games that feature an overhead camera that locks on and follows the car from a birds-eye view unlike the average behind the car camera perspectives that dominated that era. Collecting for the NES As the 1990s wore on a local video store selling its excess stock and a local game store called Tiger Play were my go to spots for a few years for used videogames. I will never forget lucking into a $2 copy of Tengen’s Tetris at the video store. Eventually eBay opened the floodgates to track down a lot of the NES games I rambled on about above. A regional annual retro game convention, The Midwest Gaming Classic, I attended several times over the past 15 years also attributed to many of my NES games. One year I was ecstatic to get a fan translation of the original Mother game that Nintendo would later officially release on the WiiU as Earthbound Beginnings. I was also ecstatic to get a fan mod updated rosters version of Tecmo Super Bowl. I eventually got a NES-clone system towards the end of 2000s that handled NES games exponentially better than the original Nintendo system and also allowed the ability to play Japanese Famicom games. At MGC I would buy one or two random cheap Famicom games a year to make use of the Famicom slot. I only wound up with several Famicom games, with highlights being Baseball, Tetris and Mighty Final Fight.

The last trip I made out to MGC in 2018 I went in with the goal to finish off my Power Pad game collection and hunt down the last three Power Pad compatible games I did not own to officially have all eight or nine Power Pad games. After perusing the many vendors there I was able to track down the much treasured copies of Athletic World, Eggsplode/Street Cop and Dance Aerobics down, along with a bonus homebrew NES cornhole/bag toss game, Tailgate Party, that also took advantage of the Power Pad. A couple years ago YouTube creator, Pat Contri released his exhaustive Ultimate Nintendo Guide to the NES Library coffee table book/tome that reviewed every single NES game. I read it over the course of a year via a few pages a night before bed. It naturally turned me onto several games I either long forgotten about or completely went over my head and I wound up tracking them down online. That book got me wound up on a NES four player game kick and I have about a dozen four player NES games right now. One night a couple years ago I did a four player NES party night and managed to have a fair amount of fun with some friends going at it in Super Off-Road, Gauntlet II and Super Jeopardy. Right now my preferred way to play NES cartridges is via the Retron 5 system. I know that clone system is a little polarizing because of its emulation software it uses, but I love its performance at playing NES games and other cartridge based systems on my HDTV without the fuzzy graphics and lag that happens when plugging in old composite/RCA cables that came with the NES. I also love that it allows save states and the equivalent of Game Genie cheat codes. A couple years ago I finally got around to playing through SNK’s action-RPG, Crystalis and I would be lying if I said I did not take advantage of save states and a couple of the cheats. Official Nintendo NES Preservation Nintendo has been doing their part, for better and worse, at keeping the NES catalog alive digitally going back to the launch of the Wii in 2006. I picked up several NES games digitally for the Wii at $5 apiece for the Wii’s Virtual Console. I did the exact same thing a few years later for the WiiU and 3DS. The Virtual Console was a handy feature I took advantage of somewhat, but I think it far benefitted younger gamers who were being introduced to those classics for the first time. Nintendo spawned the mini-console craze a few years ago with them debuting the NES Classic, which packed 30 first and third party NES games into a pint sized version of a plug-and-play NES. It featured a solid lineup of games across all genres and was a great bargain considering strong library of games. The emulation quality was leagues better compared to the Virtual Console and the NES Classic feature better implementation of save states and now the ability to rewind gameplay. I brought the NES Classic over to family gatherings and it was a hit all night long.

The NES Classic and NES Channel on the Switch are my two top legitimate recommended ways to digitally dive into the NES library! The best part about the NES Classic was how easy it was to mod and upload your own games to. I know the various RetroPi’s and Mister devices have been capable of this for awhile, but there is something special about the NES Classic’s interface that makes it the preferred way for me to re-experience these NES gems. For a little last minute prep for this article, I loaded up Nintendo’s latest way to experience NES games via the NES Channel on the Switch. Right now it has a little over 50 unique NES (and a small selection of Famicom) games available to play in North America. I dabbled with a few different game for a little over an hour, and finished off my session by playing through the first several stages of Super Mario Bros. again. Nintendo once again stepped up their emulation efforts here by having even better functioning save states and rewind features and now the ability to do online two player. I got my nephew to play with me online and it worked surprisingly well…..other than my fifth grade nephew initially being a little crabby at the graphics being ‘old’ at least. I do not hear many people touting this feature that much and I think it is awesome that Nintendo made this back catalog online and all things considered is part of a great value for $25 a year for Nintendo’s online Switch service.

If those two options do not interest you than there are a ton of other NES games that got re-released as part of collections on many systems over the years. On the current gen alone I would recommend the first Mega Man Legacy Collection that collects the first eight Mega Man games, of which the first six are the NES games. That was how I first experienced Mega Man 2 after the aforementioned boycotting of the brand. Yes, it was after decades of reading testimonials on how Mega Man 2 is one of the all-time greats for the NES I finally played it off that collection a few years ago and loved it. It also allows save states thank goodness, or else I would never be able to conquer that final gauntlet leading up to Dr. Wily! Other recommended collections would include the digital collections Konami released last year rounding up the early entries of the CastleVania and Contra games, both of which have all their NES installments. I highly suggest getting Capcom’s Disney Afternoon Collection that has six of the best licensed NES platformers such as both Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers games. SNK released an excellent 40th anniversary collection last year too which includes several of their NES games including my beloved Ikari Warriors and its two lesser sequels. The Double Dragon and Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle gathers the Double Dragon trilogy, and a ton of Technos favorites like River City Ransom, Super Dodge Ball and nearly a dozen others that until now were exclusive in Japan. For younger readers not familiar with the NES library, these are all recommended ways to legit first experience a healthy chunk of some of the best games of the NES library! The Power Lives On…. I cannot believe it has already been nearly 35 years since the NES first launched in North America. Since it is the system of my childhood, I will always be super nostalgic about it. The NES introduced me to the world of videogames and I have been hooked ever since. My favorite game for it would have to be the original Super Mario Bros., with podium finishes going to The Legend of Zelda and yes, the dastardly Ikari Warriors. Whenever I go into a retro game shop or convention I almost instinctively find myself glomming towards the NES section in hopes of finding some long neglected title to have in my collection even though I constantly remind myself I have every game I want for it. Many thanks for making it through this beast of a read and indulging my lifetime of NES memories and I hope I have either introduced you to some new NES factoids and games here or at least had a fun trip down memory lane with me. If you want to indulge me in more NES retrospectives, but in audio form this time, I have embedded a few podcasts I recently un-vaulted from my archives below.

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Here is the all-encompassing retrospective I did on the NES for its 25th anniversary 10 years ago.

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And here is where we do a deep dive on all the comic book videogames on the NES.

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To wrap it up, here is podcast deep dive on all the RPG games on the NES.

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

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You have not lived the late 80s/early 90s NES fervor without watching a whole episode of Video Power. I present this episode above for your consumption!

Wait a Second, Did I Forget Some Games? Bonus Overtime!!!! I know, I know…I have rambled on forever so that is why I officially concluded this flashback just above. However, if you are somehow, someway still scrolling down and find yourself here I have a few more NES favorites and memories I would love to share so they do not remain on the cutting room floor. First off, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trilogy on the NES I have to get some reflections on! That first game….what a mess of a platformer it turned out to be. I did love its theme music though! TMNT fever was ubiquitous during the NES generation and I was an ardent fan of the shelled heroes like almost all kids my age so I forced myself to put way too much time into it than I should have. Several years ago I revisited it and finally finished it, well after the help of Game Genie cheat codes that is. Even with the cheats that swimming level remains a tumultuous effort to persevere through.

TMNT II: The Arcade Game is exponentially better and is a pretty decent port of the first arcade game. While the graphics are dialed back significantly to run on the NES, that did not stop my friend Matt and I revisiting and romping through this and its sequel several times over the years. TMNT III: The Manhatten Project is a NES exclusive, and featured the same arcade brawling engine as its predecessor, but this one has colorful beach levels with foot soldiers that toss sand at the turtles!! Yes, I have played the NES version of TMNT Tournament Figheters and I will give props to Konami for mustering everything they could out of the NES graphically by late 1993 and making it the only proper 2D fighter on the NES, but it simply does not measure up to its vastly superior SNES counterpart. There are some first party Nintendo games I held off from touching on in the main feature because I have had only minimal experience with them. It is totally on me! There was one more renting memory I refrained from above, and that is dealing with Metroid. Bottom line, it spooked me too much around age six or seven to progress far into it and I remember being irate at going back a screen to see enemies I eliminated moments earlier had respawned again. I need to correct this and revisit it someday. Kirby’s Adventure I briefly played on the NES Classic to briefly try it out before moving on to different games and I never got around getting back to it. That is another NES regret I must rectify as I have played through and enjoyed past Kirby games before! Nintendo’s official licensed version of Tetris is a good playing and looking version of the classic puzzler, but it lacked one key thing the Tengen version had and that is multiplayer! My dad and I played a ton of competitive and co-op multiplayer of Tengen’s Tetris. The Tengen version also had the more Russian-flavored art style that made the visuals pop more. The co-op mode was surprisingly addictive teaming up with my dad to clear a wider, single drop box. I was surprised no other Tetris revisited this idea until it was announced days ago for the upcoming deluxe version of Tetris Effect on Xbox Series X.

Nintendo's Tetris is on the left, Tengen's Tetris is on the right. I love the unique aesthetics and music in both of them, but Tengen's version had an excellent 2-player VS. and co-op modes that made it highly sought after, especially after Nintendo got it banned from stores! The only traditional RPG I put a lot of time into on the NES was the first Dragon Warrior. I rented it, and borrowed it another time from a friend later on and enjoyed the early parts of the game before I ventured out under-leveled and was too young to grasp the concept of grinding to level up in order to properly square off against the tougher foes. I eventually got much farther into it when it was re-released on GameBoy Color. Wait a second, does Zelda II: The Adventure of Link count as an RPG? I have heard for years people argue whether the Zelda series is considered a true RPG and I have always been on the side of classifying them in the action-adventure genre, but Zelda II is incredibly different from all other entries in the series and has leveling up and experience points involved so I would make an exception that Zelda II be considered an RPG. Unfortunately, it was another one that was too brutal for me in my childhood and I never got that far in it. I want to finally wrap this beast up by applauding the preservation market for unearthing several prototypes and lost games that were finished, but never released. Some of the more famous examples of this are Capcom’s California Raisins, a NES version of SimCity and last year the UWC Wrestling title that was canned at the final minute before resurfacing with noticeable roster and gameplay changes as WCW Wrestling. I also want to commend the smaller publisher and indie game scene for finding the resources to release new games on actual physical NES cartridges. They may be unlicensed, but it nevertheless puts a smile on my face to see new NES games being released today! Okay, with that I am finished for real this time! Many thanks again for spending an afternoon powering through this!

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You heard my favorite NES background music earlier with the Duck Tales' 'Moon Theme.' Now behold the worst NES music...no 1942 does not qualify. I am talking about this grinding, ear screeching exuse for music that is the general background stage music for Back to the Future. You are Still Here!? Even after all these videos and links and over 6000 words of my babbling of NES nostalgia? I guess then I have one more story to share since you made it this far. This one is not a moment I am proud of. Sometimes being a NES kid brings out a…..darkness among rival NES kids. I was spending an afternoon at a cousins playing NES games all day. The same one who showed me the Super Mario Bros. 2 ending. The same one who we decided to put on hockey gloves to mimic the fights in Blades of Steel, though thinking back in hindsight I think we got our mimicking of the hockey fight in reverse and we should have had gloves off.

My cousing introduced me to some of my favorite NES sports games like Double Dribble and Blades of Steel. And as you are about to see, it brought out the worst in us! Anyways, this day he was showing me Double Dribble and we played it all afternoon. It impressed the hell out of me by having the national anthem opening and its cinematic dunks! Towards the end of the day we were playing other games when my mom arrived to pick me up. As I was getting ready to leave and my cousin was distracted playing a different game my NES-darkness overtook me and I thought I could ‘borrow’ my cousin’s copy of Double Dribble without asking him. I think I slid another game in Double Dribble’s place where it was on the carpet and I was super slick by flipping it upside down so he would not see the label. Yeah, I only made it out about halfway to my mom��s car outside when he came barreling out and we play-wrestled on the ground for a brief moment until I forked over that copy of Double Dribble. I must have been around eight or nine at the time and one dumb kid to try and pull that off……I should have went for his copy of Super Mario Bros. 2 instead! I am kidding of course, kids do not be like dumb NES-kid Dale and mess with your friend’s games! Extremely not cool, hugging out with a heartfelt apology, now that is cool, no wait, it is emphatically…..Totally Rad!

#videogames #nes #nintendo #mario #zelda #ikari warriors #wall street kid #play action football #power pad #captain n the game master #zapper #nintendo power #video power #nick arcade #mega man

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codename-bewareofthefangirl · 7 years

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GoM + Nijimura + Haizaki + Kagami + Kiyoshi + Takao + Mayuzumi + Hanamiya + Ogiwara childhood headcanons please, thanks!

Hi dear! Sorryfor the wait, I hope you’re fine! Here I am with the headcanons! Since youasked them for many characters, I’ve been general and brief, if you want somemore of them just ask okay?

Have a niceday!

KnB Childhood Headcanons:

Kise Ryouta

-the Angel Child that everybody loves. The parents,the over-doting sisters, the neighbors, the old granny that rune that groceryshop….everyone.

-the sisters used to dress him like a girl. 100% sureof this, and he was more cute than every other little girl. Pink? Not aproblem, he slayed it. Braids, flowers in the hair, animal hairpins? Lookedperfect on him.

-he modeled both for male and female clothing, yeswhen he was still a child.

-the boy that all the girls in kindergarten fought forwhen playing house. He came to hate that game, it was boring and all the girlswhere the same. He knew he was cuter and a better wife than them. (Now, when heremembers how conceited and proud he was about his wife skills, he wants to dighis own grave. It was his sisters’ fault.)

-He was already sharp and definitely too honest, thetypical child that points out everything that adults want to hide or fake isnot there.

-He learnt quickly how to use his good looks and innocentface to have what he wanted. Not always in egoistic or cunning way, he was justhappy when he saw people smiling at him or praising him.

-He had a deep bond with his Grandma, a truetraditional Japanese lady. Strict and elegant but extremely caring.

-He got bored quickly and spent time searching for the“right game”. However, he quite enjoyed drawing (even if he wasn’t good atit)and singing! He loved singing and dancing! He organized little shows for hisfamily where he danced and singed for them, or runaway show, taking them veryseriously.

-He hated playing in the garden and getting dirty.Especially with insects, he was scared of them. Earthworms in particular.

Aomine Daiki

-The Wild Kid. The child that lives in the park or inthe garden, from morning to evening. His parents had to scream and shout everyday to bring him back home and put him in the bath. It was a real fight. Hespent all his holidays at his grandparents’ house in the mountains.

-Every day was an adventure. He loved rolling in themud, catching bugs and cicadas, exploring new places and obviously trying everytype of sports.

-Until he found basketball, then there was only basket.

-He hurt himself one day and the other too, uncaringtowards any potential danger. He got lost in the park or in the wood at least oncea week. The firefighters were in the end used to it and became his friends.

-He had a great sense of “justice”. I like to think ofhim as the child with the hero complex. He fought the evil forces (bullies, abad dog, strict adults…) and helped the weak (grannies, small animals, youngerchildren…)

-He stayed quiet only when Momoi managed to force himto play at her “girly” games. Usually he was the one dragging her into hiscrazy ideas.

-Disinterested in the adults’ world, honest and rough,he respected only the ones who earned it. Teaching him how to be polite was hisparents’ harder task ever. They still shiver at the memory.

MurasakibaraAtsushi

-The Picky Child. Oks, I can’t stop thinking that hewas the typical child who wanted always something different. Especially whentalking about food. He didn’t throw tantrum, but pouted silently and refused tomove/do what he was told for hours. Extremely stubborn. Between him and hisparents, it was a battle of wills.

-Being the last son in a big family, he was slightlyspoiled. By his brothers and his sister mostly, who just found him cute andcheeky when he was little.

-He was quiet, but moody. He had to be the one todecide what to do and when, he didn’t care if others wanted somethingdifferent. He was going to do what he wanted either way.

-He liked playing alone, he especially enjoyedvideogames and watching cartoons. He had a soft spot for a superheroes’ tv-showand knew all the lines of the Purple Hero. He had costume of him and somerelated toys. He was super-fast at coming back home after school to watch it.

-Not patient and bored easily, he spent a lot of timedaydreaming.

-He was gentle only to younger children, especiallygirls. If he was in a good mood, he shared his sweets with them. On the otherhand, he hated playing with the older ones, but luckily, he was big enough toscare them off.

AkashiSeijuurou

-ThePerfect Child. We all know his childhood sucked. He was manipulated to be theperfect being and his entire family, not including the mother, was strict as hellwith him. He spent his days learning and studying in solitude or with histutors.

-He loved spending his free time with his mother, whenhe could. She would read books to him or play in the garden; they also tookcare of flowers together and played cheerful songs at the piano.

-After she died, he would wait for the night to comeand then sneak out of his room. Some nights, he would curl on a big armchair inthe library and read fairy tales or stories of adventures (the ones his motherread to him) by himself. Sometimes, he would go in the garden and take care oftheir precious flower to be sure they were going to grow and bloom. At leastthem.

-he started playing the violin because playing thepiano without his mother brought back too many memories and hurt too much.

-At first he hated horse-riding, because the majorityof animals hated him and escaped as soon as they saw him. Now he’s like a sortof Lion King and animal bows to him. Except dogs. Dogs hate him.

MidorimaShintarou

-The Smart Child. The one that knows too many thingsand reads too much. At first he was very stiff and cold to adults and otherchildren, he preferred to play on his own, but he softened when his sister wasborn.

-He enjoyed mind games: puzzles, enigmas, crosswords…The problems arose when he couldn’t solve one, asked his parents but theydidn’t know too.

-He read a lot, everything he could find. From kitchenmagazines to encyclopedias. His favorites? “Fortune Telling” and “How The StarsShape Your Life”. Yeah.

-Very diligent and obedient, however he couldn’tsuppress his urge to talk. When he heard someone discussing something he hadread about, it didn’t matter who it was but he had to have his word.Embarrassing when he knew more than the adults present.

-His parents were strict with him, but in a normal andcaring way. They are very proud of him and let him know when he needs it.

-Shy with other kids and unable to socialize well,however he seemed to attract the troublesome kids. Maybe because he was veryresponsible and took care of them when they got hurt. He was the kid that othermothers loved because they knew that if he was there their crazy kids weregoing to be okay.

Kuroko Tetsuya

-The Where-Is-My-Child Kid! Usually super quiet,reserved and shy, but when you take your eyes off him he vanishes like a ghost.He was a curious and independent boy that wandered around following hisinstincts and got lost on daily basis.

-His parents tried everything: bright, neon cloths,some bells, a gps tracker…nothing, it took him one second to disappear, even intheir own house. In the end, they decided to put around his neck a card withtheir names and the phone number, just in case.

-Adorable, a little chubby and with always a cute,faint smile on the lips. Sweet and kind, timid yet willing to befriend otherchildren. Girls loved him endlessly and treated him like their little brother.

-I can see him drawing peacefully and reading. Heloved to take naps, everywhere and anywhere.

- Independent, he tried to be the little man his dadwould like him to be. Trying to not cry often and be strong, to do what he havetoo and be responsible. Helping out his mom when she needed, especially withhouse chores.

NijimuraShuuzou

-The Dependable Child. When his parents had to leavesomeone in charge of the house, they would choose Nijimura. Strong, determinedand a born leader, capable to handle things even when he was younger. Like alittle soldier.

-grumpy and hotheaded he often picked up fights withother children, yet everybody loved him for his kind and honest heart. He wasjust a bit scary.

-He was the leader of a group of children at the parkand used to be the arbiter of every argument. Nobody dared to contradict him.

-He would took care both of his older sister and hisyounger brother, like a replacement of his father, when he had to stay inhospital. Very responsible and hard working, however he got stressed andinsecure easily and that’s why he ended up venting it into fights.

-Loved to play outside with other children and henever left out anyone. He also enjoyed from time to time relaxing on his own,watching his cartoons or chatting with his dad.

-He wanted more than anything else to be like his dadand make him proud.

Kagami Taiga

-The Sunshine Boy! A little tornado of smiles, energyand clumsiness. He tended to end up in every type of trouble and he visited thehospital once a month. The nurses loved him.

-He didn’t have a switch off, much to his mother’sdesperation, and he never seemed to be tired. He had to move, play, scream, laugh…endlessly.He slept few hours per night and was extremely loud and boisterous.

-He loved playing outside and had a passion fordangerous and reckless games. He was never alone, always dragging someone withhim.

-He got hurt easily: scratched knees, purple bruises,insects’ stings…He was also very clumsy and uncoordinated.

-Prideful, brave and curious. He liked nature, exceptfor dogs. He hated dogs, they were evil (his mother used to threaten him thatshe was going to buy a dog if he didn’t come home)

-Nothing was more boring than staying at home, readingand drawing. When it rained, for one hour or two, they would keep him quietwith cartoons, but he would soon grow bored and start to pester them to playwith him.

-He was hotheaded, but he rarely got angry or pouty.He complained, yet he regained his smile quickly. And it was quite contagious.

Haizaki Shougo

-The Spoiled Child. He and his brother had eight yearsof difference, so his mother spoiled him endlessly. At least when she was home,being a single mother she had to work very hard to maintain them. Yes, hecherished and respected his mother a lot (at least her).

-He had a superiority complex: he had to be the leaderof the group and the one who decided who could play with him and who not. Girlsweren’t accepted because they were crybabies and too weak.

-He felt like a great boss, going around the park andimposing his power. He said that his brother was the one who taught him how tofight and be brave.

-He had an older brother’s complex: he admired him andpraised him wholeheartedly; he wanted to be tall, strong and fearless like him.

Kyoshi Teppei

-The Golden Heart Boy. The one that deeply cares foreveryone, kind and always ready to help someone out.

-he would spend days and days gardening with hisgrandmother or fishing with his grandfather, quietly but cheerfully. Or,reading stories in the veranda and looking at the clouds. It had been hisgrandad who taught him how to play the harmonica.

-He was the pacemaker at the park, playing the role ofthe big brother to the other children. Actually, some of them began to call him“Onii-chan” for real, especially little girls.

-Making his mom happy was one of his joy. He wouldmade drawings or small jewels with bottle’s cap, glass beads and plastic stringsfor her. Because she was a queen.

Takao Kazunari

-The Mischievous Child. He had done everything. He hadpranked anyone, without a second thought. Most out of curiosity, sometimes as arevenge.

-carefree kid, always ready to get into troublevoluntarily. At first, they used to ground him, but then he would damage morethe house so his parents surrendered and just left him without tv or videogamesfor some days as a punishment.

-He had drawn on the walls of his house, put worms inthe tea cup of the neighbor, scared to death the mailman, scribbled on theteacher’s skirt, hidden in the wood the toy of a child he didn’t like,persuaded a girl she was adopted, sneaked out during the night…His parentsspent their time apologizing to the neighborhood.

-He found girls annoying, petty and boring. Hepreferred playing soccer or hide and seek with other boys.

-He loved animals and was quite good with them. He wasoften followed by strays and his house became a sort of hotel for abandoned animals.

MayuzumiChihiro

-The Lonely Child. He liked to be alone, reading orplaying his games on his own.

-He hated to be dragged to the park or to some partiesby his parents. He usually hid in a corner and pouted for hours.

-He is an only child, so at time he didn’t know how tointeract with other children and was horrible at sharing toys. However, he wasgood with quiet kids who liked to read like him. Or playing videogames. Inthose cases, he would even talk a bit, in whispers, and maybe show a faintsmile.

-He’s still scared of family reunions, especially inbig occasions like Christmas. He was the only child and the center of theattentions. His worst nightmare. He still isn’t able to escape from his aunts’claws.

-The only one he liked was his grandfather, whobrought him in the countryside and would share with him silent afternoons justlooking at the sky or wandering in the woods.

-He liked to wander alone, everywhere and anywhere,absentmindedly. Luckily, he had a good sense of direction.

ShigehiroOgiwara

-The Big Brother. The precious little child that hasonly one mission: being a good big brother. He tried to be independent andstrong just for his little brothers, always trying to be a worth model andbeing able to take care of them. He was the one who took them to thekindergarten and then to school every morning, holding their hands.

-He would often go to the park and play basketballwith his dad.

-bright personality, a bit wild and lively, but verykind. A bit clumsy, he fell easily and it was very cute how hard he tried notto cry every time.

-He ate a lot of food and was always hungry, maybebecause he was moving and playing around a lot. His mother was stunned by that.

HanamiyaMakoto

-The Devil Child. He looked absolutely adorable andcute, and you know why? Because he was enough smart to know that if a child wascute, he was going to have what he asked for. Obviously, he put the façade onwhen he needed too, otherwise he actually didn’t care about others. He liked tobe on his own.

-He was the only child of a single mother and trulycherished her, yet she had to work and he spent a lot of time alone.

-He used to go every afternoon to a small library andspent his time reading. There weren’t many books for children, so he soon beganto read the ones for adults. He liked the story of military tactics,mathematics and physics’ ones and manuals of chess and other games. The oldlady of the library treated him like his own nephew and is one of the fewpeople he truly cares about. He still goes to visit her every week.

-Straying cats loved him and followed him on thestreets.

-He had been banned from three different bars becausewhen he was eight he started playing card games with the old customers, butalways ended up winning the bet at stake. Sometimes he didn’t have to cheat towin, he was just too good.

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noxrynne · 7 years

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idk why my dad keeps inviting me for things like lunch

okay this got really long im sorry, im kinda rambling/ranting into space and it makes me feel better

On one hand, I think my father is trying to reconnect with me. Why, I don’t really know? If I had to guess it’s probably more because of the woman he’s been with, since she likes me and was always really kind to me. Like, she kind of understood that I have a lot of anxiety problems, and when I showed up after being invited for Thanksgiving last year, she immediately asked me what pronouns I wanted to be used with me (I wore full makeup) and what my name was now. (I mean, they both know I’ve been diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, Clinical Depression, etc... ) My dad, on the other hand, never really cared that I had anxiety problems, or depression, or panic attacks/anxiety attacks, and actively discouraged a lot of the ways I coped with it all when I was younger. Like, I had (and still have tbh) this thing where I kinda play with my ears with one hand if I’m feeling nervous, or shy, or flustered (or bored), and I do the knee up and down thing a lot, etc.... When I was like, in kindergarten/second grade he’d yell at me for doing that, citing it as disrespectful (since I did it a lot when we went to church). He’d hit me for it, and any time I cried (like, even when I was a 5 year old) he’d go off on me about crying (the whole “men don’t cry” thing). Like, I had my fingers slammed in a door and instead of help with that, he yelled at me for sobbing b/c of the pain. (Or he’d use the old phrase “If you keep crying, I’ll give you something to cry about” -- that was something he said -a lot- and he usually made good on it, which was why the phrase scared me). He’d flip out over the smallest things. I’m talking to my stuffed animals? I’d get yelled at for it and told to grow up. I’m drawing pictures? They’re garbage and I should quit. I’m writing poetry? “That’s for women,” I want to be a witch for Halloween? “No you’re a warlock, and you’re not wearing the hat” (the hat being 97% of the reason I -wanted- to go as a witch. I was in like... first grade?). I was grounded for playing with Barbies before, and other dolls my sister owned. With him around, playing videogames was like a cardinal sin. So, I did that at friends’ homes (I was close friends with my neighbor, and his dad had like, a SNES/NES/Nintendo 64 system, and I really liked playing Smash Bros 64, Golden Eye (tbh in Golden Eye I just made smiley faces in the walls with the guns, I still do this in Overwatch a lot), I absolutely -loved- Zelda: OoT and so on. Zelda: OoT was a big deal for me in general when I was not just really young, but also like fourth grade during the summer, since the daycare my sister and I were dropped off at had consoles with it and I basically played it to kinda escape a lot. Kinda why I still buy the games and stuff x.x;;; But doing that, in his opinion, was always me wasting my life (Like, when we lived in PA I was in first grade/second grade/third grade). Instead, I needed to be always doing things outside (and when I got hurt, he told me to deal with it and suck it up. In Minnesota, when I was in pre-school/kindergarten we had an apple tree in the backyard I liked to climb a lot, then there were a shitload of bees living in it -- I actually forgot about that until like, I suddenly remembered that. Since, when I was younger, I really liked to climb trees and sit up in the branches and draw away from everyone). I remember like, basically shredding my knees and shins to absolute shit because I was wearing shorts, and somehow managed to basically sled down on my exposed knees on a gravelly hill. My mom was the one to help me with the lacerations, my dad made me sit outside longer. (A neighbor carried me home, and I was incomprehensible and sobbing). They didn’t heal fully until like, three months later (Im actually surprised I didn’t get scarring from it). He locked me in the kitchen once and I wasn’t allowed to leave the table until I ate his fucking sour kraut. I sat there for three hours, and eventually tried to eat it and threw up, which just made him angrier. ( and I remember when I was taken home sick from school in third grade, and I threw up in his car, and grounded me and was going to make me clean it until my mom stepped in -- Mangos or French Toast made me sick, reasons why I can’t eat either really aside from like, mango flavoring in drinks) He was always yelling, always threatening to hit me, calling me names (idk how many times I’ve been called a worthless idiot, a mistake, stupid, etc... whenever I messed something up, or tried to talk about how I felt -- and this is when I was like, just a kid in elementary school). I mean, I was absolutely terrified of him. I was terrified of saying or doing something -wrong- and being insulted, screamed at, or hit because of it. I had, and I do still have, problems with being honest with how I feel to people who matter to me, problems where if I make a mistake I always expect to be dragged for it/insulted and hurt for it, problems where I have a really hard time just letting myself cry, especially in any even minor public setting. When I was little, I thought this was all really normal. That kids were supposed to be scared of their fathers, that all fathers screamed/insulted/hit/punished their kids almost exclusively. Like, even when I had visits with my primary care doctor my parents were often asked to leave the room when I’d be asked questions (the one I was always asked was whether or not I was being physically abused, since the doctor would point out where I had bruising, and as a kid I always said “no” since I thought that if I ever said “yes my dad hits me” that I’d end up punished or hurt in some way after. And again, I just thought what was going on was normal, and that my doctor meant like something more extreme, I guess?). I mostly remember a lot of questions focused on abuse in general, where injuries were pointed out to me and I had to explain how I got them. And the like, I still remember the really long talk with my doctor where he basically pointed to parts of my body and just said “absolutely no one is allowed to touch you in these places, and if they do, you tell me.” I had a lot of doctor visits and they all usually focused on the first part, but that one in particular is like, vividly in my memory. And when my parents got divorced, everyone was like... “I’m so sorry to hear that” and I always felt confused? Like “why are you sorry I don’t want to be around my dad anymore. I’m happy to live with just my mom and my sister far away from him.” And... I don’t know. I guess I’m just like, being nice and hopeful to a fault right now? That he’ll actually come to respect me as a person, as an adult, and try to maintain a healthier relationship with me? I feel like I really don’t owe him anything, and I have every right to say “no” every time. But, I don’t know, maybe I’m feeling like I should just to *try.* I know if I ever did say “no” he’d get offended/angry over it, and there’d be a high chance he’d straight up come to where I live demanding to talk to me, for me to explain why I didn’t want to do whatever, and that I should apologize for it. ngl, when I came out to him and he made fun of me, then never called/texted me for 2years, I felt happier. I preferred it that way. idk, sorry I’m rambling about this in text since I’m like, thinking about it and remembering stuff and kinda wanting to get it down. It helps me to write about it, since I’m not currently in therapy, even though I do want to go back to it. (then again last time I went out to eat with him, he called me selfish, self-centered and that I’d never make anything of myself because my dreams are going to crash and burn absolutely, so that was fun.) I also kinda feel like he’s doing this because he wants to talk to me about me being transgender. I don’t know... like, -how- he’d want to talk about it (either insulting me/tearing me down for it, or if he’d genuinely want to understand me more as a person). idk

#Kit stuff #it's long #involves parents #abuse tw////#please don't reblog this ////////#some of my other personal posts were in the past and i kinda don't like that

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