This day would not be complete without a second recommendation.

I have to say, poor Steve.  He puts up with a lot.  For instance, me rambling about random children’s books from days of yore that I really liked, but can’t remember the name of.  I described it as, “it’s like, there’s a bunch of mice, and they’re on a boat, and the boat crashes on an island, and they’re there on the island and the only other thing on this island is a big, like, thing, that has big footprints, and it looks very, like, clothy, and eventually they build a giant trap for it and they catch it and it’s like, another mouse that was scared of them, and then they’re like sweet, let’s be friends.”

Do YOU have any idea what the hell I was talking about?  Probably not, but Amazon did.  Thank god for the internet, or nothing in my life would ever get solved.  Has my extremely astute description stumped you?

Another item from my childhood that you should seek to integrate into your life if you haven’t already:  a book called The Island of the Skog.  Excellent read.  And the big thing is extremely cute, as I recall.  Cute in the way that if you have a severely enormous stuffed animal, no matter what it looks like, as long as it is  voluminous, it’s cute.  Seriously, could something called a “skog” not be adorable?  You should buy it, because it costs less than a sandwich.  Think about it: hours of fun and entertainment (the 5 minutes it takes to read it x reading about 1000 times = a lot o’ minutes), or a sandwich.  Choose wisely.

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island

Yesterday I had a major throwback to my childhood: at work, Jeff asked me to sort out an issue with the ROM of SMW2: Yoshi’s Island. This was awesome, because I LOVED this game as a kid. I think this was one of the few games I actually beat, and also one of very few games that was actually “mine” (I received it for Christmas the year it came out, whereas most of my family’s other video games would most closely identify “my older brother’s”). The level in question was 1-7: Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy.

It was funny, because as soon as Jeff mentioned the title, I recalled not the actual level, but the feeling it gave me whenever I played it, which was frustration. We’re going to ignore the potential for innuendo. I highly recommend that you watch the video, whether you have played the game or haven’t. The original title of the level was “Touch Fuzzy, Trip Balls,” but Nintendo eventually decided that was inappropriate.*

Furthermore, a day’s work solved the issue that we were having, which was a weird sort of “jumpy” effect to the way the background coordinated with the foreground, like it was lagging very slightly, due to a GFX bug. The solution, for ROM players and users of ZSNES that want to trip balls with Yoshi, is to go into “options” in the second drop down menu from the left and uncheck “new gfx engine” and when it appears, check “old gfx engine.” Enjoy!

*False.