BoldFrankensteinMir posted:

If I may, I'd like to share a nice family story. It is very, very cold in Wyoming lately, so cold all the locals are actually grumbling about it which is rare. It's going down to sub zero at night with 80 mph winds several times a week. I am very grateful for the means to keep my family warm in such weather, including, weirdly, an old GameCube I pieced back together with eBay parts!

How does that keep people warm, you might ask? Well, my mom, who loves sci-fi and fantasy, has been gobbling up old console games with my brother and I while we're stuck inside and making the best of extremely limited internet speeds. She doesn't play them, but really likes the stories. So far we've been cruising around old PS3 classics, Fallout/Elder Scrolls and the Arkham series, Half-Life/Portal and Little Big Planet and Infamous and such, games I would probably not have played again (on console at least) but get to show her for the first time. Eventually I asked her which was her favorite, and she was very clear it was Fallout: New Vegas. Not surprising, she grew up reading classic Heinlein and Bradbury and watching Lost in Space and having Conelrad/ Duck and Cover trash dropped on her, which even when she was a kid she knew was BS. And she loves really complicated stories with tactical politics and tons of characters (this is the woman who put Dune and Foundation and Ender's Game into kid me's hands after all) so it makes sense, but none of those were the reason she gave.

'It's nice to pretend you're in the desert when it's so cold out' she says. And that gets me thinking...

Cut to just this week when I finally get the last (counterfeit, but it works so far) piece to make an old Nintendo GameCube work again and run Legend of Zelda: Windwaker! She loves it. Sailing a tropical ocean in a cartoony faerie-tale is the most fun we've had together so far with this experiment, and it really does make you forget about the cold. Plus, drat I had forgotten how tight the design is, it has aged wonderfully (unlike, uh, a lot of the titles on that PlayStation list).

It's a surprising late-hour revival for that broken purple box that's been in a drawer since I first left home 17 years ago this fall. Not something I would have thought to revisit, honestly, but now when we finish a day of work, me writing or drawing or (ugh) moving furniture and her making jewelry or designing websites (my mom is cool), and it's dark and cold already at five pm, she'll say "let's go sailing!" and we'll put an hour into saving Hyrule. And her insights are great- even for 2002 Tetra really is a surprisingly strong rejection of the usual princess trope (I haven't spoiled the secret yet, hee hee). And yeah, Zelda games really do follow Campbell's hero arc very effectively in a way both kids and adults can get behind emotionally. All great stuff, much better than just waiting for spring and staring out at the snow.

I'm probably moving back to town this year but in the meantime, it has been cool as heck revisiting old physical-media favorites with my family while I'm somewhere Steam is laughably unusable. Hoist the sail and man the cannon, we have a tropical sea to explore this winter!

City of Glompton posted:

congrats al

and that was v sweet bfm

hamjobs posted:

Bfm, you are a good son. That warmed my overgrown forest of a heart.

hamjobs posted:

I'm going to get my burg ingredients today for the Burger Buds thread and I'm going to start the process. It's involved and super worth it.

Jolo posted:

Congrats froggy fam!

I keep watching that frog video and trying to decide if the sound effect of the little froggo is dubbed in. When he pops out it sounds like a wet sci fi door opening.

Hogge Wild posted:

Nobnob posted:

As a matter of fact, I did! I not only moved to a whole different city to do whole different new things, met a lot of new nice people that could count as hobbies, I also started doing sports again and even stuck to it as well as watching every movie that runs in cinema these days when I have the time to do so.

In terms of pets I thought I'd do it the chill way and got myself the most chill pets imaginable, being a colony of ants.

Ruddha posted:

Babies grow up and that's okay, it's like, sometimes a great meal is worth a lot of prep, for example. Horses only get more likely to die from a stupid reason as they get older. Oh poor ol' Freckles, thought of ants and died

blaise rascal posted:

I can’t decide if I want to make quinoa burgers for that thread. On the one hand, quinoa is great, but on the other hand, maybe it’s evil? Like maybe it’s starving Peruvians or something?

Figuring this kind of thing out is tough for idiots like me

Farecoal posted:

alnilam giving birth to his child(ren), 2019 colorized

glowing-fish posted:

Did someone ask about South America?

blaise rascal posted:

alnilam I know you are eager to name your newborn but you gotta wait until byob convenes and gives its name recommendations.

now it’s true that byob is slow with its projects, if it ever finishes them at all, so you may need to refer to your baby with a grunt and a head toss for a while. but i am certain the rewards will be worth the wait.

congratulations in any case!

blaise rascal posted:

Sorry, I misspoke about the issue. The way I understand it is that foreigners buying up all the quinoa has driven up the price so the Peruvians can’t easily afford it (but they can still afford Oreos). So they’re not starving - if anything the farmers are making a lot more money than they used to - but it might be contributing to an unhealthy diet. Also I am not sure about how similar Peru’s situation is to Chile’s.

That’s really interesting about the mascot ban, though. And it’s fun to run into a fellow South America fan. I may travel to Brazil in December.

Luvcow posted:

i'd like to nominate the letter "a" as part of the name

alnilam posted:

I read about the quinoa thing back when that was a hot topic, and more recently I read another article saying that while the quinoa market was briefly weird, there was only ever that one article about it that everyone talked about, and nobody ever followed up they just kept talking about a ten year old article, and apparently that was only a short lived shortage and they've all been eating quinoa down there just fine for years now. Idk for sure though because that, too, was just one article.

Brazil and Chile both own, I'd love to travel to more places down in that continent.

glowing-fish posted:

So what I am saying is, you should eat some Trix for dinner, because it is keeping them out of the hands of Chliean children who are at risk for obesity.

glowing-fish posted:

Farecoal posted:

peru and Bolivia are going to have pretty different poverty rates and issues from chile or argentina tho