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Sunday, March 02, 2014

Week 9 - First of Summer

Nearly sixteen years ago, I beat Pokemon Red in a single playthrough. The GameBoy cartridge's battery power was dead which meant that saving wasn't going to work anymore, and I wanted to give the game one last shot. Using a pair of fresh Duracell batteries, I beat the game (capturing Mewtwo included) in a little over ten hours. Suffice to say, it was nowhere near record time but it was my first taste of a speedrun.

Fast forward to two weeks ago, an anonymous person set up one of the most interesting social experiments so far that faintly invokes the infinite monkey theorem. A Twitch channel was set up and hooked to a game of Pokemon Red. Button input was gathered from chat and was translated into ingame commands in an attempt to do the seemingly impossible: complete a single playthrough of the game. Nearly four hundred hours later, Zapdos hit Red's Blastoise with a Thundershock and history was made. While the 650,000-person effort was hardly the first of its kind, this achievement was done in a game that was more chaotic by several orders of magnitude. Bravo, humanity!

Meanwhile, I snagged a copy of the reprint for Gerry Alanguilan's Where Bold Stars Go To Die from Comic Odyssey at the Galleria. I wasn't expecting to get anything else, but they somehow had a few copies of one of his earlier works which I have been trying to find for over a decade - Wasted. While a lot of his work (besides the ones done for DC and Marvel comics) are already dark and geared towards mature audiences, the ones I got took them a notch further. In any case, it was definitely a good score. Hopefully, we get to go to this year's Komikon - I've been meaning to go for the past couple of years or so.

Lastly, it feels like summer's here. We went to our cousin's place in Cavite last weekend for an impromptu gathering and a swim (which turned out to be a quick one). Needless to say, I hate the sun.

Later!

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