938 Resonating.

Since I’ve been in my old boxes of stuff I’ve been checking to see what games still work. I already knew that most of the pokemon games need their batteries replaced (which I don’t have the right screwdriver for.) but it seems as though Pokemon Yellow still has a valid save file. Not that it really matters, but I could potentially rescue some old pokemon data from the N64 colluseum games. Not that I need to. They’re just as usefull to me there as in the gameboy game. It’s just comforting knowing that the system still works for some reason. XD

I’ve also found that I have doubles of some games. I expect that I picked them up again because I didn’t realize I already had them, or I just inherited them in some way. Every so often someone would wander in to Gamestop and not want to deal with carting back a box of stuff we wouldn’t buy. So they’d just give it to me. Or the stuff would be broken and they’d just tell me to toss it, but of course I just salvaged parts and made working systems out of the usable bits. Generally the games just needed cleaning, or having the leads sanded a little. The Wii download service made some of that stuff redundant too. I always thought it was a shame than you couldn’t send your old games to Nintendo for a credit, or something. I mean I already bought the damn game once. Whatever… In any event I thought I had a spare of most of the old systems, but haven’t come across them yet. Found the box of cords and stuff. I may try to hook up the Atari with NES cables. I know you can get an imperfect signal by doing that, and I could prove the thing was working. I think the power supply is the problem now. I have a replacement someplace, I think. I thought it was in that box, but apparently not. Now that I think of it that one might be with the Dreamcast stuff…

I wonder if anyone ever set up private servers for PSO. I still have all my data for that. In fact, that game is where I started using Crave The Bullet as my net handle. I have no memory of what it was before then. Anyway, that’s why the comic server knows me as Crave rather than just my name. When it asked for a username I entered Crave in without really thinking about it. In retrospect I probably should have just used J.T., or some mutation of my given name. I don’t know if it really matters though. They all mean me.

Part of the reason Thomas is named the way he is is because I used to joke that if I was ever a famous comic guy I would need a douchebag name like J. Scott Campbell. So when I was deciding on a name for Thomas I made it sound like that. My mother suggested Blackwell as his surname and it sounded close enough to Campbell that I went with it. I almsot dropped the Jay right before I made the fisrt page because I thought having the character’s name be so similar to mine would confuse people. Then I was like ‘fuck it, whatever, people will figure it out”. Of course not all of them did, so there has been a certain amount of confusion. Complicated further by my use of Crave for the blog, Deviantart, and FA. The fact of the matter is that the comic is autobiographic in some ways. Which is why I am very hesitant when people want to licesence it, or what have you. My actual personal history is tied to the story by a certain percent and it feels like losing a part of me. Which is crazy on some level, but all we are is a collection of stories about ourselves. If you sell the stories then what?

I suspect the Penny Arcade guys go through similar problems, magnified thousands of times over by success. At this point they’ve monied all the bullshit into the ground, but there has to have been a point where the “are you Gabe & Tycho?” thing must have been super annoying. Money is, of course, the best solution to those sorts of problems. It’s amazing how much noise gets filtered by a bed of 100 dollar bills. As far as me goes, I still have to deal with accusations of Thomas being a self insertion. Which is stupid because of course he is, but the whole damn thing is my voice. What difference does it make? The next character in the hierarchy would just take over the role, which would be Nina, by the way. After that probably Reggie, who people are often surprised to find out I am more like than unlike. If not him then Edward. Wes is actually the character I am least like, or attatched to, and, in spite of his flaws, I still like, and am like, him on some level. It would be different if any of the cast were irredeemable monsters, but they just aren’t.

Even then I’m not sure because even though Vegeta kills literally THOUSANDS of beings at various points in Dragonball Z you still end up liking him. He is a psychotic murderer! There’s no question of that, and yet over the course of the story he is redeemed in some way, and people forget about just how completely evil he is at the start. His arc is completely mental because he goes from psychopath to family man over the course of the story. Sten in Dragon Age is kind of the same way. He kills a bunch of innocents, but by the end of the story he’s basically a hero because he saved more good people then he killed. So, by that logic, if you kill 3 people you should still be able to get away with it if you save a certain number of other people. The exact number hasn’t been determined, and the math makes no sense no matter how you look at it. If you kill 3 people, but save 3 it should cancel out, but it doesn’t. For some reason after you kill a person their value goes up exponentially. Right up until you actually kill someone they are of equale value to any other jackoff, then suddenly there’s a spike when they are gone. What a weird line of thought.

Deep meditation on literature is not always a good thing if it uncovers major flaws in stuff you like.