Nov 14

It’s Shameless Promotion Time!

I’m excited! This is because I can now officially really start promoting the Speed Demos Archive Charity Marathon! I’ve mentioned it before, but I can finally give you most of the details both relating to me specifically and the marathon in general.

The theme is “Classic Video Games” focusing on the NES, SNES and Genesis. The complete schedule as it currently stands is available here. It’s not quite final (Despite Mike’s claims), but there won’t be any huge changes from here until the marathon. The marathon starts at 6PM EST on New Year’s Day, January 1st, and goes until about 12:30AM EST on Monday, January 4th. All of my actual running occurs in the first 24 hours, ending with Marble Madness. The other four games I’ll be running are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Battletoads, Rygar and Kung Fu (Not in that order). Interestingly, three of the five games will be race affairs–Kung Fu will be a 3-way race between myself, Daniel “Kareshi” Brown, and Freddy “Frezy_Man” Andersson (Who holds the current SDA run, Marble Madness is going to be a 2-player game with Andrew Gardikis (Who has the current SDA run) controlling the 2-player marble, and Battletoads will be a semi-reprise of Pianotoads, with the added element of another competitor in Pablo “DJ Mike Haggar” Bert (Who…actually doesn’t have the current SDA run in the format we’ll be competing in, although he does have the warpless run of the game).

“But Emptyeye!”, you’re saying, “Where can I watch this marathon?” Well, that’s easy–during the marathon, you can watch on the SDA main page, located at http://www.speeddemosarchive.com. You’ll actually see two camera angles–one focused on the TV running the game being played at the moment, and the second focused on the people commentating on the run. There will also be a chat powered by UStream. You can watch everything and follow along with the chat just by going to the SDA page when it’s time, but you’ll need to register a UStream account to actually participate in the chat.

“But Emptyeye!”, I hear you from the other side of my computer, “Why the heck would you do this?” How about for a good cause? As you watch, there will be a place where you can donate to charity, specifically CARE. CARE are an international charity dedicated to fighting poverty, especially (though not exclusively) as it relates to women. More specifically, rather than just throwing money at people as a quick fix, they try to eradicate the root causes of poverty in the third world–systemic discrimination, corrupt governments, social conflicts, etc. It’s a great cause, and it’s international too, which was important to SDA given the contingent of speedrunners who aren’t from the U.S.

So if you’re not doing anything over New Year’s Weekend, head over to SDA and check out some high-quality speedrunning on some of your favorite games of yesteryear.

-EE

Oct 29

I Should Update More Frequently

I keep saying that. It continues to be true.

  • Final Fantasy V is still going. I’ve also occasionally been playing Rock Band 2 again, though oddly, not a whole lot of The Beatles Rock Band. My FC count continues to slowly increase, though I’ve lost count of exactly how many I have on Expert Vocals, other than “Between 150 and 200”.
  • I’ve also been working on my runs for the SDA Charity Marathon. Rygar is going pretty well, and…that’s about it. Everything else I still have from minor to major concerns about. I’ll keep practicing, though, and hopefully everything will work out.

Other than that, not a lot has been happening here since the last post. I’m still alive, which is always good.

Oct 18

An Overdue Status Update

It’s definitely been awhile since my last update, for a variety of reasons. Over the last week, I had to deal with the death of my aunt, which put a halt to any practicing for the SDA Charity Marathon taking place at MAGFest. Hopefully, with things getting back to something resembling normal (I’ll be going back to work) tomorrow, I’ll be able to get back to practice on that too.

Games-wise, I’ve been playing something that I finally decided to start after owning it for almost three years: Final Fantasy V Advance. My main reason for finally picking it up and starting through it was what I had heard about the Job System: Namely, it’s possible to utterly break the game (IE Make it really easy) if you know what you’re doing with it. To a degree, that’s definitely true–a little thought and you’ll be dealing massive damage to normal enemies and bosses alike. A bit more thought and you can probably utterly destroy everything without breaking a sweat.

(No FFV hints/spoilers please)

Here’s something to cheer you up: A brief collection of some of M. Bison’s best moments in the Street Fighter movie. Note that Raul Julia’s portrayal of M. Bison is pretty much the only reason to watch the movie; he’s obviously having a great time portraying a video game villain, in contrast to everyone else who are trying their damndest to make an honest-to-goodness movie.

Here’s another funny video for you: A prank on the set of Stargate SG-1. In this particular scene, Colonel Jack O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson and Captain Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) are stuck on a glacier, chipping away at the ice. Col. O’Neill remarks that he’s not sure how they’re going to get out of the situation. Captain Carter’s response is…not quite what O’Neill expects.

Lastly, check out the Let’s Play videos of HCBailly, especially if you like RPGs at all.

Oct 03

MAGFest is 3 Months Away…woo!

With a little less than 3 months before MAGFest, I’ve been putting serious work of late into my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles skills. I’ve been practicing the other games I’ll be playing at MAGFest, too, of course, but this one in particular is a game I volunteered to speedrun without a lot of experience on it. It also has a reputation for being Battletoads-level hard…a reputation which is totally deserved in my opinion.

You can get an idea of the basic gameplay of the game from the linked video above, but in brief, you have two views–bird’s eye, and side-scrolling, plus a random swimming level (AKA “That (*&*&(^&% Dam” to most who played the game in their youth). Most of the game, especially later on, takes place in the side-scrolling views.

One of the flaws in the game is this: Your four turtles each have their own life meter, and losing a turtle sends you back to the beginning of whatever side-scrolling area you were in at the time of the death, with any surviving turtles retaining whatever health they had at the time (Which ups the challenge considerably). Losing all four Turtles is a Game Over, and you have two continues.

What’s so bad about this? Well, besides the limited continues, each Turtle has their signature weapon. The theory, I think, was that each Turtle would have their strengths and weaknesses and require use in various situations. In practice, though, the strengths and weaknesses balance out to “Keep Donatello alive at any cost and use him 90% of the time or more, switch to Leonardo in emergencies, and use Raphael and Michaelangelo [sic] exclusively in the swimming level”. Losing Donny is tantamount to losing that credit–especially in the last level, you’re not getting anywhere without him. And with only three credits, that’s not a good thing at all. In fact, Donatello’s sheer power in this game is probably what made him my favorite Ninja Turtle as I got more into the franchise (Though the fact that he was the brainy one of the group didn’t hurt either).

And of course, there are the various “What the *^%%*&^ how did Konami ever expect anyone to beat this?!” sections of the game. The first, and most well-known, is the swimming section, which involves you dealing with electrical currents and two types of killer seaweed to disarm 8 bombs before they go off (And give an instant Game Over). Get through that and you’re faced with a massive overworld section in Area 3, a mazelike area that was always where I got hung up in the game as a youth. But the hardest part of the game is, without a doubt, the final section of the final level. Area 6 introduces soldiers with rocket packs and, as Dr. Evil would say, “Frickin’ laser beams!”, and the last section of the level throws them at you in huge numbers and cramped quarters. They’re without a doubt the toughest non-boss enemy in the game, taking at least three hits (Even with Don, who can generally wipe everything else in the game out with one or at most two hits), and only requiring 4 or 5 to knock a Turtle from full health down to nothing. The one saving grace about them is that they’re actually pretty passive for the most part, and will usually just fly over your head if you duck down (Exception: When the hallway narrows for the first time, there’s a non-zero chance that one of a pair will fly low and crash into you even if you’re ducking. If that happens, you’re in trouble), at which point you can run like heck to try and scroll them off the screen before they give chase. So a lot of my time has been spent trying to work out how best to get through that final gauntlet. Surprisingly, actually engaging a single pair of the laser soldiers in combat (The third pair when the hallway narrows for the first time, just before it narrows again) seems to have the highest success rate; trying to run from that particular pair tends to lead to me not being able to scroll it off-screen quickly enough, which gets me surrounded in a really narrow hallway, at which point I may as well just kill off all four Turtles and continue.

But I’m getting better at it.

Sep 26

Just A Reminder

That Cornshaq and company are in the midst of the Stars of Dreamland Kirby marathon, playing through as many Kirby games as they can in 48 hours to raise money for the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter. So if you like Kirby, animals, or both, check it out and consider making a donation if you can.

Sep 15

On Survival

Though I don’t talk about it a whole lot from post to post–it is in the About Emptyeye page–I’m currently in remission from T-Cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma (I’m still about two months away from officially being able to call myself a “Cancer Survivor”, though if it hasn’t come back by now, knock on wood, it’s unlikely to). One of the things I occasionally struggle with from a psychological standpoint is “Why did I get through it?”, particularly when celebrities are brought down from various cancers before their time, with Patrick Swayze being the most recent one.

Somewhat strangely, I first became conscious of this after I had been in remission for nearly two years with the death of John “Earthquake” Tenta. I think that part of this was that John was a regular poster to the WrestleCrap forums before his passing (Despite being a pro wrestler himself–indeed, despite working a couple of the gimmicks that got inducted into WrestleCrap’s pages!–John very much loved the site and its administrator). Now, John Tenta was a huge man both figuratively and literally (He would note that his was a “natural” strength, meaning he stayed away from the steroids–“performance-enhancing drugs”, we’d call them today–that are so prevalent in pro wrestling (Whether anyone admits it or not)), and he had himself beaten cancer once. So when he relapsed, myself, and most of the WrestleCrap regulars, were certain that he could do it again. Even as his health declined, and one of the people caring for him made a post to the effect of “John isn’t doing too well” with the implication that he may not be long for this Earth, I remember thinking, “But…I got through cancer, and I’m some scrawny 22-year-old (At the time). Surely John Tenta, the mighty Earthquake, can beat it too…”

Of course, ultimately, he couldn’t. Which is not to say anything bad about John, nor indeed anyone else that succumbed to the disease. As Lance Armstrong noted in “It’s Not About the Bike“, cancer doesn’t discriminate, and it doesn’t care who you are or what your attitude is. As he put it, some of the most cheerful, hopeful, optimistic people die of the disease, while some of the most bitter and miserable people survive it (And believe me, I had some miserable moments going through treatment).

I’m not sure that I’ve ever entirely come to grips with this, honestly.

Sep 07

Video Gaming for Charity

This is another “Look at these cool causes!” post, this time regarding video games and playing them for charities of various sorts. The most famous “group” of this type is probably The Speed Gamers, who have done roughly a dozen marathons of varying lengths for various series, most recently a 72-hour Mega Man marathon. But there are various other groups that either do or will be doing the same thing with other series. One that’s just starting up is Bonus Stage Marathons, who have Cornshaq (One of my favorite Youtube gamers) among their ranks. On September 25th, they’ll be starting a marathon on the Kirby series of games for the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter, so if you like Kirby, make sure to check that out.

The real reason I bring this up, though, is to indulge in some shameless and perhaps premature self-promotion. Over New Year’s weekend, at MAGFest, I’ll be taking part in The Speed Demos Archive Charity Marathon. Its theme is classic games (Admittedly, the definition of “classic” is rather loose in a couple of cases), and I’ll be doing runs of Battletoads (Even when I’m no longer That Battletoads Guy, even on SDA, I’m apparently still That Battletoads Guy. Such is my gift. Such is my curse.), Rygar, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (The even-harder-than-Battletoads-in-my-eyes original NES game), Marble Madness and Kung Fu. All told, that’s roughly an hour and a half of the marathon that I’ll be playing. Not a super long time, truth be told, but Battletoads and TMNT is one of the harder one-two punches in the marathon so far. I’ll have more on this as the time draws nearer.

Aug 29

Post GameUniCon Post

Yeah.

Over the weekend, I traveled to Marlborough, MA for the first-ever GameUniCon, a convention that was being hyped as New England’s largest video gaming convention. I arrived on Thursday night, as I tend to do for these things, picked up my badge, and got ready for the weekend.

On Friday, I realized that this, frankly, was set up unlike any other gaming convention I had been to to this point. Most other conventions have a large Free Play room for general gaming, and tournaments are either held in smaller rooms, or within the larger Free Play room. At GameUniCon, the biggest gaming room could best be summed up as “The Madden and Fighting Game Room”, mostly with the various Super Smash Bros games, though there were some systems running Street Fighter IV as well. There were various smaller Free Play rooms set up throughout the hotel, plus a Rock Band/Guitar Hero room and a Halo room. I also thought that the event was, overall, quite a bit smaller than was hyped, although I have to admit that I didn’t have any interest in what were advertised as the biggest tournaments (Halo, Smash Bros. Brawl).

That said, some of the competition that was there for the various tournaments were definitely top-tier in their respective games. For one, ScoreHero had a huge presence in all of the various rhythm game tourneys, which really shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. I wandered in and out of the Rock Band room throughout Friday, waiting for the Vocals tournament to start. Finally, at about 8PM, it got underway (It was supposed to start at 5PM. This, honestly, is par for the course for convention tournaments in general–my CTCon 08 Addendum has an amusing story of how I missed a tournament when I took this effect into account in my plans…and the tourney miraculously began on time. Ben, who was running the Rock Band room at GameUniCon, noted that he thought they didn’t give him nearly enough time for the Guitar and Drum tournaments earlier in the day [It was the Guitar tourney that ran long in particular, which set everything else back].), with something I didn’t expect–because of a spotty Internet connection, the Rock Band Import songs couldn’t be accessed, making the tourney Rock Band 2 songs only..a major help for me. My first two matches were, to sum up, easy (I won on Down With the Sickness, Cool for Cats, Shackler’s Revenge, and Any Way You Want It, though it took me until the last one to actually 100% something). Unfortunately, then I ran into other ScoreHero denizens (ScoreHero’s official motto is “Graciously Documenting Our Future Arthritis”. Its unofficial motto is “Welcome to ScoreHero. We are all that guy.”)

Match number three was against John “JohnIsADumb” D. We both 100%ed the two songs in the match (Drain You and Go Your Own Way), with him picking a slightly better Overdrive path on Drain You (Leading to a win by about 1200 points on his end), and managing to hit a vocal squeeze on the second activation (Squeezing dates back to early Guitar Hero, and is basically activating your Star Power and/or Overdrive as late as you possibly can to try and “squeeze in” a few more notes/a bit of the next phrase under that precious double scoring.) on Go Your Own Way, beating me by under 300 points on the song (The score was, roughly, 149,900 to 149,600, for an idea of how little 300 points actually is).

My fourth (And last) match was against Cameron “Cam101” Brock. I actually won the first song (Aqualung) by about 6000 points. Then, when my turn to choose the song came, I made what would amount to a tactical error. After considering picking Tangled Up in Blue, I wind up going with The Trees: Vault Edition. Similarly to Drain You in the last match, I lose due to not having the best pathing/squeezing skills (I fell behind on the squeezing aspect; the bad path I picked at the end was just a formality, though it did put me further behind). After two tie-breaker songs picked at random were rejected (Today, for not being difficult enough per the rules, and Aqualung, because we had played it earlier in the match), we settle on…Welcome to the Neighborhood by the Lybians as our tiebreaker song. This is seriously one of the most obscure songs in the game, to the point where I’m not even sure what the general consensus on it is quality-wise (At least people hate Visions…). But it fits, and as Cam said, “Well, a random song is a random song.” I was hoping I could win via the song’s sheer obscurity, but no such luck–apparently the only two people on the planet[1] who ever played the song were Cam and myself, and once again, I get outsqueezed to lose the match and get knocked out of the tournament. This leads to the following conversation:

Me: Let me guess, I finished just short of the money, right?
Ben: …yeah, you tied for fifth.
Me: Awesome! Spectacular!

(The top four places paid out, in case you couldn’t figure it out)

Ultimately, JohnIsADumb wins the tournament, a guy named Tobias comes in second, and Cam, who eliminated me, takes third.

Furthermore, I managed to miss Freezepop play on Friday night. This sucked mainly in that finding out they were headlining the Friday night show was what took me from “This sounds pretty cool, maybe I’ll check it out.” to “I am so going to this.” Although, thinking back on it, my missing the concert was probably for the best….

…because I still had one more tournament to go: Myself (On Vocals), TH3DARKM3TAL (On Bass, and the guy who approached me about forming a band for this tournament in the first place), SeanFTW (On Drums), and Gaara (On Guitar) were signed up for the Rock Band Full Band tournament on Saturday. But first, drama (Amazingly, not related to my scrambling to find a band)! It seems that someone got drunk and tore lights off of the hotel walls on the third floor on Friday night/Saturday morning…and the hotel was threatening to shut the entire convention down if the culprit wasn’t found. This became “We’ll let the convention keep going if the damages are paid and someone takes the blame for it.”, which eventually turned into “Don’t worry about it” as the official word from the convention. As I understand it, the actual culprit was eventually found.

With that, the full-band tournament began, slightly later than expected. Perhaps as karma for my easy first two matches in the Vocals tourney, in the first round of the full band tourney, OHai (Our band name) is immediately paired against (Insert Epic Band Name Here), which consists of, amongst other people, Hellashes (AKA “The first guy to full combo Jordan“)…who is a top-tier drummer in addition to being an insane guitar player, and Tobias, who came in second in the Vocals tourney. Sigh.

We lose on Shackler’s Revenge, then actually win on Everlong primarily to their drummer’s drum kit malfunctioning. There was a bit of controversy here concerning (Insert Epic Band Name Here) and looking up overdrive paths for Everlong after the match had already started. It’s quickly ruled that they can’t do that (Looking up paths is not allowed after the start of the match)…at the time, I thought that the ultimately-agreed-upon definition of “Start of the match” was a bit sketchy (It was decided on “When the first song is officially picked” as opposed to “When the match’s pairings are announced.”), but now realize that, depending on who picks first, there isn’t that much functional difference. In any event, our tiebreaker song was Give It All, which we ultimately lose for an express ticket to the loser’s bracket. This is not starting well.

Our next match thankfully goes better–we win on Battery thanks to some well-timed Unison bonuses (If everyone hits the phrases that give them Overdrive, they get bonus overdrive) that coincided well with when I activated my Overdrive on Vocals, meaning we spent a lot of the song in X8 bonus territory. Carry On Wayward Son was actually the most “fun” song in the tournament for us–our opponents failed out of the song early on, essentially handing the song and the match to us by default. This led to Sean and T.D.M. switching instruments in the middle of the song during a break where vocals are really the only thing going on, and myself getting into the act by singing to a camera that was recording snippets of the tournament as opposed to looking at the screen to find out how well I’m holding the pitches the game wants (I still 100%ed the song). Suffice to say we get through the song (It was ruled that despite our opponents’ failure, we would still have to pass the song to win it), though we could have done much better had we been taking it more seriously.

Match number three also saw us winning both songs, Rob the Prez-o-Dent and Visions. Amusingly, I managed to 100% the former (Mostly talkies, but with some hard singing phrases if you’re not paying attention) and somehow miss a phrase on the latter (Entirely talkies. Even better, I missed on a phrase that has essentially filled itself on literally every other time I’ve played the song). With only six bands entered, this put us into the top 3 and the money, such that it was. Woo-hoo!

Round 4 put us up against the band That’s What She Said for a ticket into the final two. Unfortunately, our run ends here, as we get absolutely crushed on Aqualung to the tune of about a half-million point gap (As Jim Mora would say, “Playoffs?! Don’t talk about….playoffs! A disgraceful performance….In my opinion, that sucked!”), though I do 100% the song, something I didn’t do the night before. That’s What She Said pick Almost Easy, and that seals our fate, as we lose by 100K or so. Adding some measure of insult to injury, That’s What She Said’s singer was…Cam Brock, making this the second tourney he had eliminated me from. Oh well.

The finals would pit That’s What She Said against (Insert Epic Band Name Here), so at least we could say we lost to the top 2 bands, however the finals played out. After the latter win on their pick of Panic Attack, an amusing conversation follows, that went roughly:
TWSS: Okay, we pick Get Clean.
(IEBNH): Okay, but we like just played that.
TWSS: We don’t pick Get Clean anymore.
*Laughter in the room*

That’s What She Said ultimately select Peace Sells as their song choice, but it doesn’t matter, as (Insert Epic Band Name Here) win that and the tournament.

In the end, our third-place payment comes out to $9 each, or $1 per person less than our entry fee. But officially, darnit, I got paid for playing Rock Band, which is pretty cool. All in all, I knew going in the caliber of competition I’d be facing in both the Vocals and Full Band tournaments, and I gave a good account of myself, proving that I’m at least in the same league as them–despite my lack of pathing/squeezing skills, I 100%ed all of the songs I lost in the Vocals tournament, meaning I didn’t give/choke anything away. In fact, while I’m still kicking myself in terms of tactics for not picking Tangled Up in Blue on Cam (I found out later that it was one of three songs in Rock Band 2 he had yet to FC), in terms of actually executing the songs, Almost Easy in the Full Band tournament is really the only one I wish I had done better on, and I don’t know that not making the mistakes I made would have made up the difference by itself. So I’m happy with how I played all weekend, and proved to T.D.M. (Who was the person who initially contacted me and said “Hey let’s get a band together for this thing.”) that he made a solid choice as far as finding a vocalist.

On Saturday night, I happened to check out some of the concerts, being done with my tourney obligations. Jesus Candy (The band of Jamie, who was the main man behind the whole convention and, I believe, the owner of Game Universe, the store behind the con) were great, as was what I saw of Powerglove, and Bang Camaro brought the house down, in spite of not playing Night Lies (I had hoped to see the song done right, as opposed to my butchering of it at CTCon ’09.). Great shows all around. I shouted myself hoarse by the end of it, and it’s my tendency to do this at concerts that probably made it a good thing I didn’t get to see Freezepop on Friday night.

Sunday mainly saw me watch the Guitar Hero: Smash Hits and Guitar Hero: Metallica tournaments. Both were won by the same person, who goes by GuitarHeroDude on Youtube and is an absolutely incredible player (He scored something like 898K on Through the Fire and Flames in the finals. This wasn’t even his best run of the song in the tournament; he hit 920K or so in the semi-finals. He also won the Metallica tournament by 100%ing Battery as the final song).

The ride home was pretty uneventful, thankfully. In all, it was definitely a fun time, and I plan to go next year if a second one is held. Despite what I linked to in the Unofficial ScoreHero Motto, everyone from the site was actually really cool and more than capable of having fun, both in terms of playing the game and just talking to them.

[1]- According to Scorehero, it’s actually been 100%ed by about 300 people just on the XBox 360. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they can all do it consistently, though.

Aug 15

Early Saturday Status Update

So let’s see here.

  • Fresh off of my Connecticon Best Rock Band Vocalist title defense, I’ve been working on my Rock Band imports from the first game in preparation for next weekend’s GameUniCon. This tournament is a bit different than Connecticon’s; for one, it’s strictly score-based–two bands enter, play the same song (Or set of songs), highest score wins–and for another, the allowed pool of songs is significantly smaller, being Rock Band 2 on-disc songs and Rock Band 1 imports only. For a third, some of the absolute top-tier Rock Band talent will be there. As a reference pool for just how good some people are at the game, my having 100%ed all of the Rock Band 2 stuff (And about a third of the Rock Band 1 imports) qualifies me as “Not a liability that the rest of my band will have to overcome” in this world. Yes, there’s actually a level of dedication beyond just 100%ing the game (I’m currently in 144th place on Rock Band 2 Expert Vocals on ScoreHero), especially as it relates to full-band play, where my experience is honestly pretty limited. Still, right now, with the exception of a couple Rock Band 1 songs that I’m simply terrible at, I feel like I’m good enough to at least give the band I’ll be in a solid chance at any given song.
  • I’ve decided to take up jogging, since I’ve regained most of the weight I lost through the first six months or so of 2007 (When I was big into exercising in general). So I went to a local athletic store, and on getting my foot measured, found out that I’ve been wearing shoes that are way too big for me for the past five-plus years of my life. Part of this is that I hadn’t gotten my feet properly measured in a long time. The other part is that my feet are very much like my fingers–short and fat. So in getting a “proper” shoe fit, my toes, especially the big ones, felt somewhat “scrunched” in the sneakers. Still, I imagine I’ll just have to break them in a bit.
  • I’ve been doing design work for the game I had mentioned awhile back, so that project isn’t dead just yet. I’m still working out precisely how to work the inventory system out. This is going to be, by far, the biggest challenge. I’m almost thinking some kind of concealed database and/or data table from which the appropriate stuff would be pulled is the best way to go…which is going to require me learning and/or re-learning about that stuff.

    • I think that’s it for now…
    -EE

Aug 04

Connecticon 2009: Mission Accomplished

And I’m not quite sure how I managed to pull it off.
(WARNING: The word is over-used, but this is seriously an epic-length [About 3900 words according to WordPress] post. It’s behind the cut here so you won’t have to scroll through it all to read the older stuff)
Continue reading