Dealing With Loss Near the Start of 2025

At some point earlier this year, I was going to write a post called "A Blog Post About My Dog Before She Dies". I was going to write about how cool she is, pretty much. This assumed that by the time I was ready to write and publish it, she would still be alive.

I dragged along with my process of making Figment Area posts, and my dog ran out of vital efficiency roughly situated on that month.

Her name is Shadow, and she was in declining health for a few weeks before dying on March 19.

Those of you who are refined dog enthusiasts will be even more sad when you realize that Shadow is a beautiful blue heeler, a sterling member of the world's greatest dog breed.

Blue heelers are an inherently likeable and eye-lighting dog breed, but Shadow was an extreme individual. She was beautiful on a ridiculous whole new level. "Cute" alone doesn't cut it. Shadow was among the stars. She was also a lot smaller than she could have been, probably half the volume of your more common blue heeler doggies.

I don't know if her size had something to do with how insane to look at she was, but now that I've had her for about 13 years, I think "small enough to fit on a couch four times" was the right size. And fuck did she look good on a couch.

Personally I wouldn't want to own a dog that was not allowed to be on a couch. If I have a dog, I want it to be indoor-accessible and cuddly. Shadow absolutely was.

Shadow was a creature I often used to think of as having "hundreds of faces". A lot of the time there was normal Shadow, who looked fairly good. This was what most people who knew us would have seen of Shadow. I was gifted with the position of actually co-owning Shadow, or at least owning her enough to have the ability to look at her at all times of the day. When she wasn't walking around or running after something, she'd look different, lying down on some comfortable surface and being decorated impeccably.

Here's another one of her many faces that in all time may have come out only once.

A while ago, Shadow got what is called a "Silver Whiskers Assessment", a health checkup for old pets that has a really cute name and sounded to me like exactly what she needed. Test results came back plainly saying "she has a heart condition". I thought she would be fine. More weeks passed, and her health declined, we couldn't find out exactly how, and her life ended.

It really feels like a curse that a dog can be so integral to your reality and form so strong a bond with you, and then turn that all into emotional damage with the fact that she's gone forever. One month you have a handy love quad who is always around, and the next month you find that water freezes at 25° Celsius. It was like a law of physics broke down.

This was made worse by the fact that my cat already died in 2022, meaning that as of March 19 I have no pets.

I may have forgotten to add something that I really wanted to say here. There's a lot about Shadow that you can say.

But there's no need for writing now. I will show you how precious Shadow was with pictures.

Failed Figment Area Blog Posts

Figment Area has been a pretty slow blog for a pretty long time. It started in 2021, skipped posts for a year, had four posts in 2023 before stalling chronically, and has only 13 posts including this one right now. In spite of how much work I've been doing in so many other places since 2021, I kind of wonder why.

One of the big problems that screwed Figment Area over for a while was the whole "separate special from dirty" compulsion that I have. When I work with creative pursuits, inevitably something I build that's really holy/sacred for me has to have an object of neutral quality to separate it from anything lame in some way that would otherwise be touching it. It's like not wanting to read a book about cute pigs after you read a book about forest fires, unless you read a book about picturesque hardwood floors first. The post I made that outlined the rules to Castle Walls - also my first ever blog post detailing how to play a card game I created myself - was considered a special object, and guess when Figment Area's chronic stalling of 2023 happened?

Compulsions and disorders requiring me to set releases apart on this blog has been trouble, and it affects my posting months after I told myself I would stop restricting myself in this way, but this post isn't quite focusing on cases like that. The truth is, this blog's got DRAFTS, and some of them just fell apart regardless of where they were going to be relative to other posts, and it gets ugly. This article covers some of the work-in-progress posts for Figment Area that I still have saved and that will probably never - no matter the tonal archive division - be fixed or made to be properly launched. Let's start with the oldest one.

Through the Eyes of a Disillusioned and Depressed
Twenty-Something in 2023

This post was made impulsively by me in late 2023 at the near-peak of a horrible mental health gauntlet concerned with an overactive thyroid, and I've always realized that the way it's written was a mess. Thank god I don't have an incorrect thyroid anymore, but the haunting memory of that time period remains. As for the post itself, while I think it's somewhat freeing to have plotted my weird self-insert bug monster's ability stats and commiserated about how unfortunate they basically were, there was pretty much nothing usable in there. And the post was about 1,860 words long.

This blog post was about myself, my mental health, the sorry state of the world we live in, and my difficulty with all of it. It's actually much like what I was more successful with on my blog at the end of last year. But one year can make a big difference, and if you were to read all of my written creations from newest to oldest, you would notice the experience getting worse. The unreleased 2023 counterpart to my 2024 post was an unstructured, poorly-phrased pile of my thoughts on reality touching on 2014 being a scary realization of how the world is, the way The Internet used to be more free and enjoyable, climate change, a doubtfully-sourced "Richard Feynman" quote, the passing of the world down from generations to generations, and 9/11. You probably think that sounds like a cool post to read, but I sincerely believe it isn't. Seriously, the post just sucks. It lacks confidence (for good reason) and is poorly-written.

It can be excused, even from the position of a harsh self-critic looking at his own terrible work over a year later, that I wasn't writing about the world and myself properly back then. My brain wasn't working, and I was painfully aware of that.

I hate that blog post and don't - even now - want to read it, but I'll keep it around. I might find it interesting to look back on one day.

On a lighter note, here's a post I couldn't finish about one of the greatest niche picture book author plus illustrators ever.

(Distant Comments on Media) A Shallow Dive Into Colin Thompson

It's somewhat odd to me, at this point, that in spite of thinking about it many a time and putting its concept layout in a side glossary-like page and making it somewhat synonymous mentally with the process of picking Figment Area posts, I have still never published a work on here that uses the label "Distant Comments on Media".

Colin Thompson would have been a great place to start. Of all the authors or illustrators there are, this man is the person I can boast rare fan knowledge of more than I can with any other creator I know, or probably the most out of all Colin Thompson fans too. I've read almost every non-middle-age book he's released, including the weird ones he didn't illustrate and the ridiculous novels that one might want to avoid. I even own copies of both out-of-print Future Eden disaster novels he wrote, after years of infrequent searching. But for some reason the post failed anyway. It was June, 2024, and I couldn't do it.

Those of you who already know Colin Thompson and like reading picture books will doubtless have been really excited seeing his name appear on the screen like that. But for those who don't know, Colin Thompson is an old odd English guy, I believe living in New South Wales right now, who has made tons of books usually aimed at young people, about ten of which are fascinating surreal trips in beautiful fantastical illustrations that have a lot going on in them, such as Ruby and Falling Angels.

These are the crowning series if I am to have a statement when it comes to Colin Thompson. I believe that nothing else he's ever made will quite come close to what these hyper-crowded magical illustration dreamtimes of writing and drawing give to the reader. The way they look is so powerful, I spent years of my rather early pre-adult and adult years basically trying to imitate them.

That last one is an early production picture of an artwork that has advanced more but still isn't finished.

You can use a search engine to look up Colin Thompson's original artworks right now. His 1990's ones, which are hand-drawn, are a source of inspiration to my ones which as you can see pale in comparison.

They influenced my dreams, too. I used to dream about Colin Thompson illustrations that didn't exist, and later I would wake up a little frustrated to find that either A: the canon explanation in my dream is that I was looking at illustrations by some kind of unknown mock-Thompson illustrator or B: the dream had convinced me there was another Colin Thompson book that I would soon have to notice did not actually exist.

But sadly, none of that so far has been able to come out in its own post, probably because I underestimated the sheer depth of the Colin Thompson topic. I haven't even gone over many of his small novels and story collections like The Floods, Pepper Dreams, or Venus the Caterpillar, all three of which honestly are worth covering separately in entire posts. Even though it seems scarily impossible in my mind to be the one to write them.

The actual Colin Thompson post I started writing, at said point in time, before it was declared to be said failure, contained roughly 510 words and a placeholder that was going to be an attempt at drawing my own new mimicry drawing of a Colin Thompson style so that in a non-stealy way I could "show the readers what I meant". This is a more bitter reality now as, after a long uptime, it's now impossible to see those legally-posted wallpapers on Colin Thompson's fully hosted up-to-date site. It's not up to date now because all of the surviving versions are in a Wayback Machine. The true web domain went down.

Colin Thompson's unreal and mysterious worlds actually provide a through-road to my next chapter here, the way I recently tried to make a post about how I, as a game developer, used to imagine the games I'd make that were designed and imagined very differently...

What My Games Would Probably Have Looked Like If I Started Successfully Developing Games Earlier

I've wanted to make video games for practically as long as I've been aware of my existence. Good news! In 2018, I finally succeeded. But I wasn't always confident that I could do it. In fact, for years, I wished I could make a game, but on and off deferred to even try. However, that doesn't mean that I didn't spend a lot of time imagining and drawing them...

None of my original paper drawings of this foggy era in my creative history seem to be in known locations or to have necessarily survived. There are still a couple of remnants visible digitally though in Flash projects - or .FLA's. I was trying to actually make one of them. In my present recall of the days I spent so much time imagining what games I wouldn't actually make, I have mere scraps of it left. There's not much I could do, even with my newfound level of practical skill, to do it right. In 2025 or later I couldn't make accurate and sincere video game adaptations of these former worlds due to my tragic amnesia. In fact when I worked on the original failure post and right now, I can't help but feel like these games wouldn't have been fun. Though, I do still remember the way I spent a long bloody time dreaming of and "planning" a Colin Thompson Fan Game, using my own artwork and Colin Thompson's way of designing spaces to make "his illustrations" playable, which I suppose is still ultimately possible. A Colin Thompson fan game would be beautiful and absorbing if I did it properly, too.

There's not much I can say about this unfinished post now. It only spanned about 280 words and I got about as far as describing the typical main character of these weird fucking ideas before... giving up and screaming, for some reason. This was a violent case of my blog posts that failed. However in another part of the post among all the rambling off, there is discussion of a thing to do with my imagination and creative ventures that could come up later and is interesting: my old imagination and lost ideas in general, specifically: how I can't tap into many of them anymore and how whole dreamworlds basically went extinct or disappeared. Let's hope that if I get to a post about that one day, I can get to the end of it without the sheer challenge of the writing being grating enough to make me flip out. I think it would help matters for me to think very hard about how much text content I can get out of a near-future post idea, running through the paragraphs mentally to detect ahead of time if there's even enough material to get something out of it.

(Distant Comments on Media) Accidentally Forming an Attachment to The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle

Another one.

This writing foray broke my heart. If I follow my best judgement and web browser history, I basically discovered Rocky and Bullwinkle for the first time in 2022, February 20, at which point it shortly became a bedtime mainstay and something pointedly significant to me. So I tried to talk about it, and talk about how in spite of the show's writing being hardly anything to do with why I like it, it became a show that I'm very fond of. And in this writing, I thought about it too hard and got cut off at "I think the art does it for me" when an attempt to praise something I like became hollow and nihilistic. And finding myself hit that point with a show like this one felt very bad.

It's not like I stopped being able to like or watch the show, in fact I've been putting it on my TV quite a lot since April 9 (though I have the Fairy Tales and other secondary shows disabled now), and lots of old cartoon enthusiasts - like real old, this basically happened in the 1960's - are really into The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. I just stopped being able to write persuasive praise on a draft Internet post about it. Though I think if I wanted to I could quite easily make a long and detailed post about all the hilarious animation frame mistakes I found when I watched it about three years ago. It should be repeated that I still watch Rocky and Bullwinkle. I actually watched supposedly all of it before now, too. Possibly to completion.

I still really like its mega-cheap retro cartoon art, which really rocks hard in spite of the cheapness. It just looks cool.

Also the sky is almost always brown... It works but I don't know the reason they had for drawing it that way.

I would say much of the art looks cool on account of the fact that it's old. It was made in an old way. I get enthused at any moment I get to see it do railway stuff. And of course, I absolutely love the storm bumper. The one that plays all the time after this anthology's main segments conclude, where our main characters rise among a bunch of flowers after falling into a split mountain chasm.

So it's a shame that my Rocky and Bullwinkle post couldn't come to be. Though, as you're probably thinking all the way through reading this, these so-called failed posts sure have a lot of published replication that doesn't seem very different in concept now. But I really do believe that writing about what these posts represented like this does not have the same result as with a different world where the original posts actually worked in the first place.

I naturally feel quite hurt when the process of releasing a blog post is cut so short and I don't have anything to gain out of it in the end. I want the blog to update fast and I want my work to... work. I also vainly hope that my blog will have mild fame one day, which seems like it requires lots of content to happen. Mostly I just hate the inconvenience and wasted time, and disappointment that comes with a post failing.

But one failed blog post idea I had, from roughly late 2024, is straight up tragic. It's a post I should have seized sooner, because the very premise of it was always running out of time.

The window of time to make the post, without sacrificing its core concept, completely closed last month. I wasn't decisive. I was perpetually trying to uphold a certain way of releasing posts on time and creating separations, and I took too long. I took too long and now the post can never be made. The post was going to be called "A Blog Post About My Dog Before She Dies".

Why You Should Start To Collect Screws

It's 2025, and this year it is a better time to collect screws than ever before. But why are screws such a hot item to pick up right now?

Today we will go over some of the reasons why screws are a must-get in our current day and age.

Screws can be kept on hand in bulk for all the things around the house that need to be fixed

Let's face it, at some point we all have to face doing a bit of DIY. It's good to get someone else to help, but one day they might get sick. In that scenario, screws are easier to use than you might think and can be applied to a surprising amount of home repair applications, including...

• Fixing a broken-hinged window
• Wood coming off wood
• Ceiling cracks
• Fridge
• The swimming pool
• Put screws in a piece of wood to make it look less ugly
  

 

Screws are the best in the realm of measurement

Measuring materials is so drab and limiting. Or, maybe it isn't, because now we have SCREWS!

Before, rulers and tape measures would be boring and keep you stuck on doing one thing, and not let you decide how much wood or fabric you need to make up a gap. At that point, there is only one correct measured amount to use. The way to go is to screws. Simply place screws alongside your material before you cut it, and count how many screws you lined up. "This block of wood needs to be cut down to five screws!" The useful trick here is that screws come in lots of different sizes, so the unit size is less rigid and you get to decide how big you want your craft to be when you're building. A hole in your fence is 30 centimeters wide? No worries, measuring in screws lets you use virtually any size. Gone are the days of having to conform!

 

Screws are great for making small arts and crafts

Arts and crafts are at a spike at the moment in popularity. With all the options for screws you can pick, why not try to craft a lot of small statues out of ordinary household metal screws? Just make sure you hide them at night, as local populations of marine limpets enjoy getting jealous and stealing them all.

They can help you scratch

At this point in time, itchy skin is a badly-timed distraction from all the crazy world events that require careful attention, and we all remember the times when we had an itch on our backs or some other out of the way place that you just couldn't quite reach. Screws work here because they are pointy. A pointy screw is the right apparatus to use to scratch your itchy skin. They also help with hard-to-reach places. Screws are great at eliminating this problem as even an average length screw provides an extra couple of centimeters to be enough to bridge that space.

 

Metal on screws is reflective

Here's one that has always been useful and always will be. We all have dark houses at night, and trying to walk around when you can't see the way to the button that turns the lights on can be a slog. But recently scientists discovered that screws are made of a metal that likes to reflect lots of light, making your efforts capable of lighting the way around your house at night simply by leaving the screws around, and you don't have to waste any water by turning the lights on.

Now that you know this, why not take hundreds of little yellow screws and leave them lying around pointed upwards in the house so you can see easier?

 

They provide a dark-conversation shutdown

Ever had somebody tell you that somebody or some group of people was screwed? This has increased in regularity a lot in the last ten years. With enough time taken to collect screws, you will now be able to reply "I've got the screws right here!"

 

Screws are the next currency

In the future, our economy is supposed to drift away from two-use cash and move toward poly-use metal asset physical currency. Forget Bitcoin, trading screws is the way of the future. They will have monetary worth, and you will be able to use a wide array of practical aspects of them. Forget that old way where some kinds of cash only had trading worth and a 1 in 2 probability flip to make randomized decisions, you can use dice for that. We will still write the dollar sign $, but it will be better because the S shape in that dollar sign will make it look like it's actually spelling the name of the screw if it had a vertical line crossing it. Have a look: $crews. See how acutely it works? There is no such thing as a sollar.

 

And that's that. With this new knowledge at hand, we can all start collecting screws and make life just that tiny extra bit easier. Now we know that screws are versatile and on their way to becoming an essential part of daily life, and that means you need to set a bunch of protected nature reserve animals on fire. Thank you for reading this helpful article.

The Toaster

You've all seen this appliance before. This inconvenient roast machine. This unimpeccable menace. The lot of us have the same irreconcilable unanswered question about what the numbers mean, the same feeling of loss as their bread gets ruined because this fucking thing imposes a multitude of transparency issues.

It's the toaster.

I hate the toaster. This stupid all-failing tool that somehow everybody has. We all expect our sliced gluten to go in there, stay for a while, and then come out changed, changed properly. But it's not as easy as it should be, as this device seems intent on burning it, and good luck if your bread gets stuck in there. You will not get it out in one piece. And god help you if you try to get the imprisoned wheat slab out but leave it plugged in.

If you think that was bad, try explaining to your kids why against all the nice stories they were told, in spite of all the false positivity, their hash browns are forfeit. Let's be honest. You can't actually put your hash browns in there. This string of poor optimism second-chance experiences almost made me think hash browns were useless, until I discovered actually functional ways to cook them. The toaster does hash browns a disservice.

This common household menace is a menace too common. This simple household fuckup is a fallacy of being called simple. The simple thing about it is that unless you really know what you're doing, you'll simply fuck up your toasting. Except it's not your fault, it's the toaster's. The toaster wants you dead. The toaster will burn your bread, not heat your bread enough before taking its second use to burn your bread, trap and disintegrate your hash browns, dump bundles of old bread dust if you try to get stuff out of it with shaking and gravity, break significantly so that you have to hold the lever down yourself, insult you, and probably burn your house down.

Pass the Pigs - When the Universe Ends

I spent much of my formative years being bored and waiting for it to be time to go home. To go home so I could rest, read books, and pass the time easily, where I would be significantly less bored. I had no visit-enabled friends to speak of, so I was hardly going to another person's house to socialize or ever really have any fun. This will not count the place of peripheral friends of brothers with the Playstation room. As my parents have - for basically all of my conscious life - been divorced, having an actual friend whose house I actually went to frequently to carry the remaining weight would have really helped. Or if I actually recognized the social potential of the owners of the Playstation room. In fact I usually ended up being locked into long-hour waits at buildings lived in by some friend of an immediate family relative. Nobody can tell me I'd have had better spent time if we "just got a babysitter". Believe me, mum looked.

The worst ordeals by far were the times when I had to deal with some temporary but prolonged exposure to unwanted waiting hours because of my dad. Often I'd be driven away to some rural dustbowl with nothing of interest for kilometers around, where I'd stay for hours in whatever car or ute we arrived in and the only thing I could do to pass the time then was play terrible games on a pre-2007 cellphone. No Internet, no Nintendo DS, no money, and for most of the time not even dad. Just me and the most difficulty-twisted primitive phone games with wonkiest 4-bit controls or whatever ever.

If I was at a house instead of some insufferable motorcycle dirt track, often there was a good chance that I could play by myself with access to board games. Whether they were meant to be single-player before I make stuff up or not. That also sucked, and I don't want to go through that again, but there was one "board game" in memory that stayed with me.

Pass the Pigs was a weird game that I looked at for a while, even though I probably knew that in spite of being me, in my shocking situation, I wouldn't dream of playing it no matter if I had a second person to share it with or not. It was a small green box with what I imagine to be a minimal set of contents. It seemed like a pretty miserable thing, where the goal was to toss two tiny plastic pig figurines at the same time and then practically gain points each turn depending on what positions pure luck decided the pigs landed in. Positions being connected to - though possibly not exclusively so, given the old status of my memory - how the plastic pigs landed on each other.

Actually at the time of revision before final publication I suddenly realize that this could be wrong. Maybe that's a really rare position in that drawing, or they're just meant to land on two individual places on the ground. I suddenly discovered in myself that it was probably about what side of their own bodies two separate pigs landed on, like if one landed with its tail down or something. That being said, though I don't remember much of the rules, and I could be remembering something wrong, I still have a fuzzy picture of how the game "worked" in 2025. To this day I have never played it, or the cheap equivalent that apparently exists where you just throw normal dice.

But one rule I saw on the leaf from inside the box stood out, and this rule played its cards so that I would never forget it.

This wasn't just any ordinary rule. It wasn't a rule that you just "follow". It wasn't even a rule that happens. It seemed like more of a philosophical entertainment than something that your ordinary rule-maker would logically decide to take the extra 13 minutes to add, or the extra ink to print. Have a look at this picture and see if you think it happening during standard Pass the Pigs gameplay is likely.

If you would respond to that with "the pigs are never going to land like that when you throw them", then to the best of my long-term memory, you're on to something.

The game rules themselves don't just say that this is impossible. They also provide a ruling for what happens in your game if the pigs land this way, even though they clearly just stated a few seconds ago that it's impossible. It's a directive that you should do something - if you meet a condition that never happens. If we believe everything that the rules say, then they have a rule that can never come into effect. But if it somehow did come into effect, and your physics duped, the rule is as follows:

That's basically how I remember it.

There's something unsettling about this idea. That you do something impossible and then the game tells you that it wants you to stop playing it. They could have just said that this is impossible and told you not to worry about it. Because you don't need to worry about something when you know it objectively won't happen, right?

But they do worry about it. They took the time and the cost of a small amount per unit sold in ink to put that information on the rule sheet for some reason that honestly I still don't know. And I tried to do this entire post from memory without doing any web searches for Pass the Pigs other than to find out whether its title's "the" should be capitalized or not, which considering my plan to go into this without interference went slightly badly. 

Maybe Pass the Pigs publishers of all people were trying to save people from wasting their time and effort, like they're not already bored and should bother to try to get this landing combination. Though the rule does appear to accidentally bring something interesting out of the experience. This odd feeling of unsettling logic about the game and the world that houses it ending.

I believe that since finding this game, I might think about this concept more than once every two years. The Pass the Pigs rule that The Game Ends that comes into effect if you do something that you can't do.

I find it less haunting than some things, and more haunting than a lot of them. I find it more haunting than the 64 ring Tower of Hanoi game where having 64 discs in play mathematically adds up to so many translations that following the rules it would supposedly take more time than there is time left in our universe to complete. I used to boggle my own mind often by trying to imagine the ways of our reality having no universe at all, that is, if there was no reality. No reality being something really creepy to think about when you fully resonate your thought with the concept. I have a brother who apparently used to ponder and experience the same philosophical no-universe thing. But this would be the first time in memory that I ever got creeped out about something like this by a fucking board game...

Speaking of universes, would you have to screw with reality just to make this play in Pass the Pigs happen? Would it be worth it in order to proactively get yourself out of this weak point-keeping game before turn 2? Is the rule sheet even right when it says that this is impossible? What would it actually mean if you got the pigs to do the impossible stack? Does it even make sense to ask that question? Are any questions about this right?

One thing I do know, from the value of thought experiments, is what priorities you should have after doing something that required the laws of reality breaking to occur. Obviously if you did you should give something else your attention. You really shouldn't keep playing Pass the Pigs in pursuit of game score in that scenario. If you land two pigs in that position, and it's because the fundamental rules of reality broke down, you've got bigger problems.

Alert and Afraid, Halfway Through The Dire 20's

It is December, 2024. After doing some fairly simple math, I realized that at this point, by the average person definition where a decade starts when the last digit is "0", we are almost exactly half of the way through this terrible decade in human history called the 2020's.

For a while now, I have been solitarily referring to this decade as The Dire 20's. Because it's certainly dire as all get-out with all the geopolitical fuckery going on, but just in a way that some people don't see because it's insidious and spread out and moves very slowly. I don't think I need to remind anybody about the threats to democracy across the world or climate change, but here it is anyway. And now we have five years almost exactly until people start living in the 2030's.

I was surprised this month to find out that I have records of me coming up with "The Dire 20's" starting considerably earlier than I thought. The record is from August, 2019. Apparently at the time I was also getting a major kick out of exploring a "2020s" tag on social media, obviously to see what people were saying and speculating about the imminent decade of what was, at that point, the future.

Of course, people right now define the start of the 2020's as 2020 AD. Not 2021 AD. There seems to be a prevalent belief that it should be this way because it's "easier" and also that people who try to explain this change to 2021 being the beginning are "pedantic" and "buzz killers". I could object to that, as the lack of a year 0 and most mathematical nerves in my body and an ingrown hatred toward people being basic bitches are raging against this throng internally. I'm a programmer, and I believe in establishing logical systems, even when the system you're establishing is just pertaining to "something fun". But I see why on an instinctual and intuitive level the "2000" and "2020" marking - a zero at the end and all that - speaks to people.

The two digits at the end of "2020" start with 2. It was the first year since 2000 to do that. So people would be drawn to that. It's also a little weird sometimes to think about the "2010's" ending on a year that ends in "20". Also on a bigger scale, if 2001 (instead of 2000) was the start of the 3rd millennium, the 2K area would end around December 3,000, and that "3" on the end of the 3rd millennium would raise some questions, seeing as people were identifying it by THE NUMBER TWO. Plus when decades are defined in the popular way it only affects an inconsistent length of one decade: the first nine years of AD.

My personal preference would probably be to make 2020 the last year of The Dire 10's, as that pandemic was quite the finale and send-off to such a messed up time period. But from this point on in the post I will be using the average definition, the one where 2020 was the start of The Dire 20's.

2020 was actually a pretty good year for me. One of the best in my life, somehow. You might be surprised to read that. My mental health and social situation was just way better than it had been for most of years in all of my history. Things were rough already in The Dire 10's, but somehow an oasis of peace existed in 2020 from where I was situated. For quite some time the whole lockdown thing hardly affected me. But as the years after 2020 progressed, things got worse and worse. Not just in the world and ominous trends, but for me personally.

This post won't be the kind of article where I do heaps of research to provide strictly objective details, or even look many things up. This is simply going to be a long description of what I already know about the world and myself, and my opinions on it, based on what I've learned during my life leading up to this point. Both global happenings and personal experiences will make up this post.

Eight and a bit paragraphs in, let me be frank: this world we live in right now is a fucking nightmare. I want people living in the future who go on The Internet looking at posts both new and old, whether their world is good or not, to know that. I don't want them debating it or doubting it or trying to asterisk it saying "oh but maybe this thing will change your mind a little" - this world in 2024 is fucking scary, and the history of it needs to be told with brutal honesty. There are plenty of others like me. Lots of discontent about my world is to be found among people who live in it, and have seen either first-hand or second-hand what's been going down, especially in Internet memes. But sadly I wonder if history books in a few decades will actually take the time to represent these people, and how bloody important what they had to say was. I particularly like posts to the tune of "Bro wake up it's 2007". My 2007 saw me in a particularly annoying part of my life where I was in a toxic situation frequently and had little freedom or skill - on account of me being a child, which I can not go back to. But boy do I understand the sentiment behind it, in spite of my own personal 2007 life. That meme is a beautiful thing. There's also a nice image of a dog in a chair submerged partly in water that basically says "It's going to be OK, but it's going to be different."

Maybe your life if you read this in 2025 is fine, and you're happy, but that's not what the nightmare is about. It's about future threats that keep expanding until one day your life might not even stand a chance of thriving and being as free as it is today. Democracy is globally being worn down by corporations and corrupt people at the time of this writing, just not in a way that's explicitly obvious. But yes, for some people 2025 life will be tormented by immediate threats, not just things that are on the horizon. Some people in modern and wealthy parts of the world, in 2022 even, were having to deal with some messed up abuses of politics and capitalism. In just two years, I found it getting more scary and more in my face than ever.

Right now, after about two and a half decades of using personal home computers for recreation and productive ventures, I'm having to slowly and painful navigate through a personal exodus of all my files that I've ever kept up till now to a different operating system before everything is forcibly relegated to the cloud. I don't want to go into too many specifics, but I assure you that this has totally uprooted a huge part of my life. The things I have to do not just in the exodus but in the entire rest of the foreseeable future as I continue to use my new computers once I've saved them from hellish exploitations are a gigantic inconvenience.

I don't just use computers because they entertain me and I talk to people I know using The Internet, I use them because that's the only reasonable way I can distribute and make my video games and a lot of mediums' worth of art. Some of my greatest ever achievements exist only as software and data. Yet 2024 has seen me be the most scared of computers that I have ever been, and it's literally my own two computers. That belong to ME. I'm too scared to look videos about computers up, because they'll give me anxiety at this time, and I'm too scared even to look at some gameplay videos that have fun with random grungy graphics and deliberately retrospectively dated OS interface design. Because they'll make me think and worry about all the stuff that's going wrong. That could go wrong.

2023 was when something started to seem wrong with the operating systems to me, and 2023 was the same time that my thyroid just happened to absolutely flamethrower my psyche, making my mental health and fear of the uncertain doom hanging over me so much worse. (But I didn't exactly know I had to go on the hard drive exodus yet.) I used to describe some of my moments in 2023 as "being in my room and looking at the walls around me in sheer disbelief that it keeps going". Having a bad thyroid is nightmarish. I think I'd rather have a heart attack than have to go through that for several months again.

My thyroid is not nearly in the nightmare zone it was in back then, now that I'm most of the way through 2024 - and I have blood test results to prove it - but I will always remember 2023 as the terrifying year in which I felt devastated most of the time and turned for comfort to lots of Ren and Stimpy, of all things. And at this point, 2023 is a really long and undetailed blur. Some happy moments happened, and I could dig up some fond memories, but I can never be in a place like that again. Even if I found out I was remembering something pretty major about the time period wrong. I know how bad it was at its worst, and no month of 2023 was worth those parts of it.

I believe it was around 2021 that I started having my landmark epic dreams about climate change. These would be surreal dreams, and make stuff up, but they would speak to how scary climate change was - and still is - in their frequency and how haunting they were. Some pretty cloudy, fluffy stuff went on, but there was overall a lot of terrain destruction, familiar places being wrecked by high water, and downer endings. I particularly remember places in the North Island that looked highly like I recognized them being at a stage in time after years of sea level rise had destroyed them. Broken roads and ruined cityscapes, with the very water of the coastline being above parts of them. I have also dreamed about things like this in 2023, and last month.

These dreams can be fun to think about. One of the benefits of climate change is that - if you're safe from it - you get to witness some really epic and creepy scenes that have a very unique, apocalyptic atmosphere to them. It is quite a sight to behold. Though I don't particularly enjoy watching wildfires...

Climate change has been a major issue for a long time. Of course it didn't start in 2021, that's just where I found the earliest known record of me having that experience with my dreams and all that. It became obvious to the world I'd say about halfway through the Dire 10's, when natural disasters of an unexpected sort that were too extreme to ignore and good mainstream documentaries about this stuff came out.

Scientists already knew. Carl Sagan knew, and he died a few weeks after my first birthday.

Of course, 2019 and 2020 were particularly scary because at that time Australia had its worst wildfire ever. It turned places in Australia hellish and made the sky a terrifying shade of orange for hours in fucking NEW ZEALAND. Might I remind you, New Zealand and Australia are about three hours of plane ride apart. They're not close together.

It's Summer in my hemisphere right now, and every Winter I dread how much hotter the next Summer likely going to be than last year. I just know, logically, that the heat is going to be worse. Every time a yearly record of global temperatures comes out this decade, it sets the new world record for hot global temperatures.

I've always been a cold weather kind of guy. I hate the fascination with sunny weather and I've always been fond of overcast or "gloomy" weather. But above all I'd much rather the air around me be super cold than super hot.

Be honest about it: isn't it easier to make yourself warmer than it is to cool yourself down? And I don't want to hear about "going for a swim" or "taking your jacket off". You can cover yourself in as many layers of clothing as you want, but once you're naked, there's no removing insulation any more. You can't take your skin off. You can't just shave your body hair off just like that. At that point you have to start resorting to god-awful things like using electric fans if you don't have a heat pump. I have an easier time in Winter because piles of insulating bed and clothing material can increase without limit, especially when I'm trying to go to sleep, as bedtime lately has been a troublesome mess of taking blankets off and having to eventually put them back on. In the middle of this very December, I was struggling with stupid heat onsets at night that made me have to remove blankets and open my door. Other people I knew in my country were too. Even then it would normally be preferable to not open your door at night in Summer. I might decide the door should be open. The wildlife disagrees.

Now you might understand why climate change is slightly but particularly more annoying for somebody like me. Obviously I'm concerned about the whole planet's worth of human beings suffering and possibly dying in the not-very-far future - thousands of people have experienced far worse consequences than me that they are upset about, and they should be taken care of first - but as you can see it's that plus I hate having to deal with overly hot temperatures. So, kind of like an 8,000,000 + 100 scenario. It's coming to New Zealand, too. Even here, the mighty climate safe-zone, had some shocking floods actually quite near to me in 2023. And throughout my life I've dreamed (not literally) of coming into contact with domestic arrivals of snow, which in my whole life I've barely managed to experience once. While writing this, all of a sudden I wonder if I'll get to go to a place where it's snowing before it's too late. New Zealand doesn't have much snow, and in my lifetime it's always been like that. I don't travel easily, and the only other country I've ever been in is Australia. And non-literally it is a cool place...

I don't want to have to defend saying climate change is a real thing. Everybody knows that climate change is a "concept" now, lots of people don't believe it's real, and I'm sick of it. We are facing an existential and biodiversity threat to our whole planet, and people are dragging their feet or being manipulated by oil company cronies into thinking nothing's there because changing the transport and energy system is "too hard". If we were characters in just about any old-school fictional movie, we'd see that "the world is going to be destroyed" and we'd fucking fight it. We'd give a damn about saving people enough to actually fix it. It's beyond stupid. If climate change continues the way it has been from 2020 to 2024 with nothing to counter it, you are going to die. And no I don't mean of old age, I mean quite possibly - depending on your age - of heat exhaustion or starvation, or something worse. I think the future suffering and exposure involved scares me more than the extinction of humanity.

Of course, it's not just climate change. It's not just bad corporations, either, though they are a major driving force behind how screwed up everything is right now. There's also the rise of fascism and corruption in worldwide governments - even in France and fucking Germany, and weirder shit like nuclear threats, the suffering of the very Internet you're reading this on right now, pandemics - which science says we haven't seen the last of - and the horrific development of brain-interface technology. And I haven't even mentioned the multitude of issues with AI, which is a whole can of worms that I don't know if I want to get into here. Though you should know something about AI, regarding what I'll introduce to this article next.

 

This is a screenshot I took from a website run by an organization called Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Put simply, they keep track of world situations and describe them through use of an imaginary "Doomsday Clock" that is closer or further way from midnight depending on how close we are to losing our planet. It's not the kind of clock that keeps ticking perpetually forward, it's a symbol where the hands can somewhat unpredictably move. Or, it was unpredictable before this millennium, at least. "Two minutes" away from midnight means we're really close to everything being catastrophically destroyed. We were there before, in 1953. You know, that whole thing.

At the time, it was exceptionally dicey and the worst it had been. Now we've had 2018 and 2020 see it get worse. It's 90 seconds to midnight in 2024. 90 seconds to midnight is really bad. In fact it's the worst reading this symbolic clock has ever given us. And it just keeps being there, while - ironically - people seem to care much less about it than previous generations apparently did when the threat of nuclear war was upon us in the previous century. It just keeps going, too, like 90 seconds to midnight is just normal now. Also don't forget that mass surveillance and web user data collection is still happening in 2024 and a lot of people seem to think that this absurd breach of human rights is acceptable. It's quite a widespread narrative that an ad will play on some site with a ridiculously-timed relevance to something that the device user said near a microphone recently, making it obviously suspicious.

The article below where I took the screenshot is a "fun read". It describes a bunch of things that have been in effect this decade and says bangers like "ominous trends" and "danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation". It also mentions disruptive technologies, such as AI. That's what I was talking about. AI deserves a mention because it's in the fucking 90 seconds to midnight article by the Bulletin of fucking Atomic Scientists. If this link still works, you can read it yourself over here. If that link doesn't work at the time you read this, then we're probably in a lot of trouble because that link goes to The Internet Archive. I had to. There's currently no permalink. The Bulletin's article system on the official website is designed badly.

More advanced future AI that can become self-aware is scary, but there's also the more immediate and tangible threat of less-powerful generative AI being misused by us, which must be credible because the Atomic freaking Scientists were talking about it. We should trust scientists. It's a field that's not majorly motivated by greed or money like so many are, and to the best of my knowledge the leading driving motivation behind being a scientist is either curiosity or wanting to make the world a better place. Or both.

The Internet has been in trouble for a while now, even back in 2018, or earlier. Before generative AI actually became "good", people were already using some kind of much more inferior text model to mass-ruin web searches for just about anybody who wanted to look up information, with useless and suffocating fake websites written by non-humans.

A few years back there was also a disconnected string of badly-conceived government bills that aimed to "help" The Internet but really just would have destroyed it, if they had gone through. Remember SOPA?

Plus there's the way social media corporation tyrants are currently and have been wrecking what used to be open and well-designed places. I am absolutely disgusted at the amount of WebP images, walls put up around what should be free-to-read web articles, messages popping up to ask you about consenting to their cookies, difficulty getting basic fucking image links, and too many of the social media platforms increasingly telling you that you have to make an account just to view a page that was freely visible ten years ago. And don't even get me started on what happened to Twitter.

What's really messed up, however, is how this year The Internet Archive is in jeopardy. And in this time it has been attacked quite a lot.

On the 31st, as I type about it, the Archive is still online. But right now they're being sued for so much money that if they lose, the website will be burned out of existence. Seriously, we can not afford to lose The Internet Archive. I don't even want to think about how bad it would be. Even if somebody else backed up the Wayback Machine somehow - which hosts a treasure trove of functional history for web pages that are lost everywhere else - there are other important things on Archive.org, and it would still be an absolutely depressing loss. I know, The Internet Archive is "boring", but it's a very good, functional kind of boring. It's not ugly, for one thing, and stuff can be found there if it's something specific that you knew you wanted, and I think I should let researchers who use it speak for themselves. But I don't know how to do that, so I'll just let you know that a lot of people find The Internet Archive to be a critical useful resource for studying and researching for university papers and the like.

And now I'm tired, and would not like to burn through much more of the time I have left in the last day of 2024. The pacing of this article will come to an awkward end. There's bound to be much I missed, but I don't think I mind. I think the passion and the honesty is what counts. I'm no university graduate, and I've never been that good at documenting the world. But I know what's real. I know that Earth has been going through some really messed up shit in the third millennium. There's still hope in my day and age, but I don't know if good humanity will save the future. I'd like to think that climate action and sheer outrage can bring us back to the relative stability people had in the 90's, before I had a consciousness.

I've now seen almost all of the Dire 20's decade's first half, and soon I will start to witness the second half. One day I was at my computer and just kind of decided that I'd fight, and go into 2025 with two swords swinging.

Tonight I want to plant a time capsule.

If the world is totally oppressed and overly-controlling in 2124 AD, and art and being allowed to disagree is ruined, and a climate shockwave has wiped out much of what biodiversity I knew about in my time, and there's no place to live near the equator, and The Internet is just totally fucking ruined and impossible to find most information or history on, and nobody in the working class is allowed to make music, paint controversial art, make video games, play video games, swear, make adult-friendly content, get an income that can pay for essentials like water and cereal without being enslaved, imagine if somebody found this post.

If they, some rando in dystopian 2124, found this post, I want them to have a think about the world they grew up in, and be shocked. I want them to be pissed off, even. I also want them to suddenly become aware that some people in 2024 were a lot smarter than the reader a hundred years later expected or bargained for. You know, just some random Autistic adult, with thousands of others in the world a lot like him, and he reveals that people were surprisingly aware and knew what was up back then. There's a lot of us, even the neurotypical ones. If your Internet doesn't totally suck, you should be able to find a few of these posts. There are some amazing heroic speeches in some of my visited online places. People who saw the world slipping downward into disaster, and foresaw a ruination of the world.

Hello. I hope your world isn't as bad as I'm suggesting it is.

Basic Simulation of an Active Volcano

In this article, I will be going over an illustrated (simplified) demonstration of how a volcano works - an active volcano - using knowledge and information I have gathered over the course of years of experience in my time. Using four easy-to-understand pictures, I will show how you can expect these active volcanoes to eventuate as time goes on. Here we go.

First, there's Year 1. The volcano is there, with a town carefully placed next to it. No visible signs of eruption are there, and the inhabitants of the area are completely safe and trusting in their places.

Time passes. As you can see, there's a town, and a volcano, and time has passed. The volcano shows no sign of beginning to threaten anybody by erupting.

It is now much later. The people of the town continue their daily goings, and the active volcano still shows no sign of bringing any change to the area.

Finally, at the end of our exhibition, the volcano stays the way it is and does not go into an eruption. The people of the town remain unaffected by the presence of this nearby volcano.

Using my expert, first-hand experience, it is ultimately clear that this is the true scientific event cycle of an active volcano. Trust me, I'm from New Zealand. I know about this stuff.

A Lost Memory Uncovered

On the 25th day of last month I discovered - quite by accident - the identity of an old animated TV show that for me was clouded in mystery for many years, one that left me with memories I had yearned to understand.

A long time ago, I gained an incomplete knowledge about this obscure TV show as I saw some amount of moments on it, while being just a kid. Naturally, the starting life amnesia set in hard, and I never registered the name of this thing in all of my life until 2024.

Everything I Knew - Or Thought I Knew - About The Show Back Then

Let's refer to the show as Rabbit T. In Rabbit T, the one character I remembered was an anthro rabbit character - with no known name - in white fur who wore a cyan or teal outfit that I basically remember but can't find in an image search and, if I can be trusted to redraw it properly, appeared to me to look kind of like this:

 

It seemed a little appealing in my memory. The outfit's not "cool", but it did have a strong aesthetic. One that I know I have absolutely failed at drawing the way it deserves to be shown. Naturally I could have also told somebody with questions that there were other protagonists alongside this rabbit. But I didn't remember their species or seeing how they looked. The memories were extremely incomplete. After that, you probably understand why finding this show again took so long.

I also knew that the setting was some kind of old time Victorian England - as best as I can guess with my very limited knowledge of what "Victorian" really was, and that there were villains - though like with every other character I didn't have any recollection of what their appearances were like - and something to do with a chase with the villains and the protagonists running away from them, and the rabbit at some point having a joyous face, maybe because he was so full on cleverly winning a victory over his pursuers when he got away, or because that was just the sort of person he was.

So why did I want to find the show so much again? Well, I think just about any average memory of unknown origin makes the brain that owns it demand an answer. That's one reason. However, there was one final thing I retained from back then - the freaking end credits screen.

It's common for me to feel swayed by pretty music that uses bells, and this is what the ending theme for Rabbit T allegedly had. It also had a still shot of the Victorian England city from above while the credit text cycled through. Text just disappeared and was replaced by other text that appeared. In other words, basically no moving parts.
I think I somehow ruined this for myself, but the problem with the credits is that at this point I don't know if a steam train in the still frame existed in my original memories or not. So let's throw a quantum steam train in there, and sort of pretend like maybe I was swayed by the train while watching the end credits as well but also maybe I didn't know it was there at all.

It's not like I actually liked Rabbit T in any meaningful way. Remember, I could barely recall anything about it. If I found the show again, I probably would still not bother to watch a full episode. But aside from the element of wanting to solve a long-held confounding mystery, it for some reason also had a kind of magical allure to me.

Probably because of the bells.

The First Serious Attempt To Find Rabbit T

In the 11th of June in 2021, I guess I thought about the show pretty hard again, because I reached a point where I really, really tried to find the identity of Rabbit T. Sometimes I'll know about something from my past that's really mysterious like this for a long time but then one day actually give it my attention for the first time since losing touch. Rabbit T came up at some point after several years of inactivity, as I said, where I somehow was not considering that I might actually want to try to find it. These don't always have to happen on the same day I actually go searching.

In that day of 2021 June I went searching all over the place online for everything I associated with the mysterious memory of Rabbit T - which wasn't a large collection - and trawled Wikipedia through a page that was called "List of fictional rabbits and hares". Which, I remind you, did not work. It wasn't 2024 yet. And that page does include anthropomorphic ones.

Strained and defeated, I finished the entire Wikipedia list and several web searches like "anthro rabbit in a green hat" and so forth without anything remotely like what I wanted appearing, and gave up. It must have been very obscure. The show was not going to be found.

An Amazing Encounter of Straight-Up Chance

In some places, you can find "complete" lists of television series cartoons that were made. One day, I was having a rough time that called for a specific kind of cartoon series to watch that I wasn't going to find on the main beaten path where all the usual shows I know about and watch are seen.

I scrolled down one of my frequent alphabetical list haunts, and the recognizable for reasons of no relation to anything name "Saban's" caught my eye.

 
This would be the day, August the 25th in 2024, that I discovered that the name of the cartoon I had unanswered questions about was called Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist. But I didn't know this, or that it was the show containing who this post calls Rabbit T, yet. In fact there was a moment where I didn't even suspect it. I clicked the thing out of curiosity.

I saw the image and was amazed. I didn't know the show I sought had anything to do with Oliver Twist, I don't know much about Oliver Twist, and a mere moment ago I was not expecting to suddenly discover the origin of something that was so deep-in puzzling to my life this day. Again, it's not like I liked the show, but I wanted to know what place I was getting unidentified mental fragments from, even if it didn't have some feeling of allure. It always did have a feeling of allure in the past. It still had some major draw during the next few moments of that reformative day, and I begun to check it out.

What I Know About the Show Now

Somehow, Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist felt a little disappointing, now that I understood what it was for a tangible, real thing at last. I wasn't so absorbed as in another time I may have imagined. I was still excited in the minutes that followed of checking random points in episodes - but not any wiki pages according to my browser, for some reason - but not very absorbed. I didn't take the time to watch a full episode either. It's not really for me. I am just kind of glad I have some critical information now.

The disappointing value of seeing the show in 2024 probably comes from a lack of powerful, exact recognition of things in the show. I couldn't say "seeing this scene took me way back" or "Oh, I remember this guy!" I think a lot of good-feeling memory exploration when you find something from your life during a period a long time ago is good because you see what's in it and you are amazed with how suddenly, overpoweringly familiar it is. I would have liked to have that feeling with Rabbit T but this year I simply did not. Because it was just too different, and I had to accept that the show my brain pictured just did not actually precisely exist.

The first revision I had to concede was the design of the white rabbit. We have a name now, he is called Artful Dodger. He's the one on the left. Yeah I don't recognize the other two upright animal characters even while seeing them now, too. As you can see he actually wears a completely different outfit than the one I drew for this post up there - making the real design wrong in my memory's terms. It's sort of a "shouldn't gripe" change when I think about it, as that suit from my discredited memory wasn't exactly at the cutting edge of looking-super-cool fashion. Not compared to a dark suit and buttoned shirt for his upper body and a top hat, either. He was very different though. His face was coloured wrong, with most of his fur being grey, and it's a bit insulting that the real Artful Dodger cartoon rabbit anthro looks fucking nothing like the Rabbit T namesake of my memories. The most important and only previously-seen character in this quest, unrecognizable.

That's what a lot of things about this show now that I was seeing the real thing are. Unrecognizable. Seeing that, the question might arise of "how am I so sure I found the right show?"

It's quite simple, really. I don't feel very drawn to that conclusion out of feeling - again, it didn't hit me with familiarity the same way memory jackpots usually do - but through logic it's impossible to deny. Because it would take some ridiculous coincidence, so freaking contrived, some serious screwing around for there to be a second show out there that's that similar to Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist and is a more exact match with what I remember. I just don't think our plane of existence would do that, even after some of the stupid things it's done before. There would have to be some ridiculous level of screwing around with unnecessary show production and fictional material management to mislead me that hard. A key word here could be "specific". I simply have no reason not to conclude that my memories have a far range of possibility for being inaccurate and that the reason it's different in 2024 is simply that. My past has to just be adorned with memories that are wrong. As a side note, I don't know how much sway missing episodes could have had in all of this.

There's also much more solid proof that I have the right show in the recognizable nature of the ending screen.

The ending music in the credits was quite a thing of recognition, but past the first run of bells, there wasn't much memory of the show from my childhood left to recognize. The second and only other revision that comes to mind after all this time is that the music in my brain - beautiful though it was - used more bells and had the wrong melody. I swoon over good use of music bells, and before recent weeks the vision of this ending screen and its music was such a feeling...

I know there's some ensemble of villainous characters, and humans are in the show, but it's still vague. Again, I do not care enough to actually watch an episode of the show to find out more. I'm simply glad I no longer have to wonder what went on in my life to create such an odd place.

I also now have a strong indication that Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist was not just based on Oliver Twist, but is actually quite different to the original Oliver Twist, with lots of elements and writing being changed to create a different version of the idea. It'd have to be too if it has "Adventures of" in its freaking title.

As of the day of this writing, I know that the show actually has a large portion of lost media. Episodes 1-29 can be quite easily found, but the show apparently is supposed to have a total of 52 episodes. The information is so lost, probably all we have of the last 23 episodes anywhere is their titles. Entire boxes of episode descriptions, empty and collapsed into a line. We don't even know when the entire list of all episodes - even with the ones that aren't lost - appeared on people's cathode ray tubes. The "Air Date" column of the episode list on Wikipedia says TBA for all of them.

Also, did you know that the list of fictional rabbits and hares on Wikipedia from the 2021 part earlier still doesn't list Artful Dodger from Saban's Oliver Twist cartoon? Yet the list of episodes in the boxes of the SAOOT article containing some amount of not-lost data have episode plot summaries that are quite lengthy. Actually I think the fictional rabbits list may be quite under-detailed against what I expect the great swathe of fiction in the world to contain for rabbit characters.

Finally, an interesting point I have now gained in my knowledge of the show is when it apparently aired. Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist broadcasts went from February 1996 to February 1997. Even though I live in New Zealand and therefore at a young age likely got different shows than English-speakers of this planet's west half at different times, I was born in 1995. 1995, readers.

That's a revelation. When I gained my witnessing moment of this show, how fucking young was I? It's like no wonder my memories of the show got this broken up.

If I Could Win Like This Again

Those of you who have been with this blog since 2022, when it basically began, will remember another mystery that I wanted dearly to solve, as described in the first Figment Area post. The huge destructive red and black being, Wawoo.

I hope I didn't let such readers down by showing them a title that says "A Lost Memory Uncovered" and get their hopes up for a spooky Wakawuwu revelation, only to ease them into a story about a mystery that - compared to the sheer cool creepiness of Wawoo's origin - is practically worthless. Even though Wawoo and the cartoon from this post were both seen in "real cartoons" that contain lost media, I still don't know who Wawoo is, and I don't think I ever will.

But there are other mysteries of old unexplained memories in my life. I'd like to have this kind of victory again. To find the explanation for more of the weird unknown occurrences of my early life. Similar searches and successful answers have happened before, but the successes that come to mind right now have not much wow-factor compared to many of my expectations.

If I could win like this again, could one of the victories feel as incredible as I always imagined? Will all of them die down as a flame in damp branches would like Rabbit T, or will I one day truly have a powerful and lasting moment of amazing recollection? Are there any future answers to my remaining mysteries at all?

I'd like to see the cartoon that created the Wakawuwu mystery again some day, but a good place to start would be the aisles of shelves decorated with pretty dark and light canisters of carbonated liquid flowing upward around central towers of crystal.

(Playing Card Game Rules) How to play Castle Walls

In this post, I will detail how Castle Walls, a playing card game invented by myself, is meant to be played. The idea for this game has been lying around unattended for years, and during and before that time the game's rules have been cemented and uncemented and cemented again. This was done mostly by actually playing the game with friends and family. The rules are about to be set in stone.

The Game

Castle Walls is a card game - similar to certain anime card games, which you've probably played before - where you battle with your opponent to make them run out of Life Cards, at which point you've won.

The game is kind of basic, and relies on luck, but also gets quite nuanced and advanced, starting to be about reading your opponent more than mere luckiness. Even card-counting has a bit of a strategy to it in this game. If you can count cards, don't be afraid to do it in Castle Walls, especially if it's being played competitively.

At the time of this writing, Castle Walls is only designed to be played between 2 players, 1 VS 1.

How to Set Up Castle Walls

To play Castle Walls, you will need a standard deck of playing cards. The ones that have four suits and a bunch of numbers. You know what playing cards are, I will spare you the explanation. That makes this game cost only about $6 to play.

All playing cards - other than weird spares that aren't even a part of playing cards - will be used. All 54 of them. You do not remove either one of The Jokers. The Joker is actually part of a major situational strategic play, which can potentially happen during a playthrough.

Dealing the Cards

This may sound like Captain Obvious, but you need to shuffle the deck first. Believe me, not every game I ever make is necessarily going to do shuffling at the start. Hindbodes will find a way.

There are two places per player where cards go when the dealer is dealing. One is the player's stack of Life Cards, and the other is the player's hand.

First, the dealer puts one card face down in the opponent's life card pile. Then, the dealer does the same for their own life card pile. This repeats until both piles have exactly 6 cards each. Nobody is meant to see which cards they are while the dealing is done. The Life Cards are to be placed in neat stacks.

One of the most important points about the life card pile - and something that everybody eventually notices - is that it effectively removes cards from the playthrough, selecting which cards you don't play with randomly and secretly. In this effect, you don't know how many Jokers are in the game of Castle Walls that you're playing until well into the game. Unless you luckily draw both of them on turn one. Such draws are rare, but they can happen. All face-down life cards remain a secret to both players until they are taken off the stack by combat.

Second, the hands are dealt. Pretty simple, really. The first card goes to the hand of the person who is not the dealer. Like the previous stage, each player gets one card for their hand in turns. So the other player gets one card, then the dealer gets one card, then the cycle repeats. Once both players have three cards for their hand, the rest of the deck is placed face down to the middle-left or middle-right of the playing field, and the game is nearly ready.

When The Game is About to Start

Before the game begins, the players must decide who has their turn first. This can be done with either a round of Paper Scissors Rock, a coin flip, or simply what both players agree on. Then, the game begins.

The Hierarchy of Cards

The level of a card in Castle Walls is very important. Put basically, from highest to lowest, the cards in a list of power levels are:

• Ace
• King
• Queen
• Jack
• 10
• 9
• 8
• 7
• 6
• 5
• 4
• 3
• 2

The Anatomy of The Game's First Turn

Castle Walls is about using cards on the field to "attack" your opponent's field cards, and ultimately your opponent's Life Cards. However, on the first turn of Castle Walls, you can not attack.

Other than the inability to attack, the first turn is very much identical to all other turns. So I will go over the anatomy of all following turns now.

The Anatomy of The Game's Second and All Following Turns

Every turn of Castle Walls, you must draw one card from the deck in the middle, exactly at the start of your turn. If the deck has run out, simply flip the entire graveyard and use that as the new deck. You do not shuffle the deck when you do this. Meta strategies - based on card counting - could certainly emerge from this mechanic. As the creator, I welcome that.

After you draw a card, you may choose to play a card face-up, or face-down. If you already have a card face down, you can place one face-up card on top of it, maximum. There are three places on the field, side-by-side, where you are allowed to place a card. You may not go any further than the three slot limit, meaning at the absolute most your field card count is a total of six (three cards face-down, and one face-up card sitting on top of each face-down card), and having six cards on the field this way is extremely unlikely during regular play.

You are not required to play anything or attack on your turn, you are only required to draw a card and discard any excess cards as ruled by the End Phase.

You are not allowed to place The Joker on the field like the other cards. The Joker is a rare card that has special innate abilities in this game. The nature of that play will be covered later in this article.

On your turn, after you draw a card, you are in what is called the Main Phase. You can only enter the Main Phase once per turn, and only after the instant that you've drawn your card.

In the Main Phase, there are things you can do, and things you can't do.

Things you can do in the Main Phase:

• Play one face-up card OR play one face-down card.
• Use the special straight discard (will be detailed later).
• Use The Joker, if appropriate (will be detailed later).
• Flip one or more of your face-down cards face-up, if there is no card above it. A face-down card can't be flipped if it was put face-down during this same turn.
  

During the Main Phase, you can not attack with a card.

When you want to attack with a card, you may enter the Battle Phase.

In the Battle Phase, you can attack with as many of your face-up cards as you choose, but each of them can only attack once per turn. Once you are in the Battle Phase, you can not return to the Main Phase until you've drawn a card on your next turn. Naturally, face-down cards are not able to attack. Any face-down cards you want to attack with must be flipped face-up first, during the Main Phase. This means you can not flip a card face-up right after attacking.

When your turn is ending, and you've already had your Draw Phase, Main Phase and/or Battle Phase, you observe an End Phase. The only purpose of the End Phase is to siphon off any excess cards that the turn player has. If you have more than six cards in your hand during the End Phase, all you have to do during the End Phase is remove cards from your hand and put them in the graveyard until you have exactly six cards in your hand.

 

Attacking Basics

When you attack with a card, you "nudge" it in the direction of your opponent if the opponent has no cards on the field, or pick it up and point it at the targeted card on the field they do have.

An attack can resolve in many different ways. In this section, we will be focusing on attacks to opposing Life Cards and on what happens when a card attacks another face-up card. All cards that attack are, naturally, face-up. The game would be impossible to balance well otherwise. However, cards that receive an attack may or may not be face down. Face-down cards act as Walls or Traps. See the respective sections for more info on them.

If you attack when your opponent has no cards on the field, it will make your opponent's number of Life Cards decrease by 1. Multiple attacks (logical maximum of 3) can do this in a turn, as long as there are enough offending and unspent cards with which to launch said attacks. For example, if your opponent has no cards on the field when your turn starts and you have three cards on the field at the end of the Main Phase, you have the ability to attack your opponent's Life Cards up to three times.

When a life card is attacked, it is removed from the original pile and placed face-up on a newer, face-up pile. This shows how close your opponent is to losing, and it additionally and importantly reveals which cards were removed from play when the game started. As the game goes on, it gradually becomes more and more clear what sort of cards were absent. Sometimes you will find one or both of the Jokers in the Life Card piles before the game is over.

However, if the opponent has cards on the field, the attack becomes more complex in nature, and has more rules to adhere to. For this section, it will only be face-up cards in a battle that I cover.

One: if a card attacks a face-up card of equal or lower power value, the attacked card is destroyed, and sent to a face-up pile called The Graveyard. The Graveyard is located beside the main deck.

Two: A card can not attack a face-up card that has a higher power value on it.

Attacking Walls

When you attack a face-down card, you don't typically know what will happen. It could be this, or it could be a Trap.

A Wall happens when your card attacks a face-down card (which is then flipped face-up), and the flipped card happens to be of a power equal to or greater than that of the card that attacked it.

When a card on the field attacks a wall, neither card is sent to the graveyard. The turn of whoever attacked will automatically end.

An Ace is the most powerful attacker in the game, and the only thing that can wall an Ace in Castle Walls is another, face-down Ace. This can lead to some scary aggressive strategies. A face-down ace that gets attacked can ultimately, on the next turn, strike back at anything that hits it. If you attack a face-down Ace with your own Ace, you can expect to lose your Ace next turn.

Cards of the power 2 are special because no matter what they attack, if it's face-down it will wall the attacking player. This ends the turn of whoever attacked using the power 2 card, but this play can directly lead to a strategic advantage.

Attacking Traps

When you attack a face-down card, you don't typically know what will happen. It could be this, or it could be a Wall.

A Trap happens when your card attacks a face-down card (which is then flipped face-up), and the flipped card happens to be of a power lower than that of the card that attacked it.

When a trap is flipped, the suit of the card determines where your turn goes next in a fork in the road. The difference here is whether your card attacked a red suit (Diamonds or Hearts) or a black suit (Clubs or Spades). Traps intend to destroy one card on the opposing side of the field, once attacked by that opposing side.

If a trap is activated and it is a red suit, it will immediately and automatically go to the graveyard, while the card that attacked it goes to the graveyard immediately after it.

If a Trap is activated and it is a black suit, the owner of the trap must choose one opposing card on the field that is not the attacker, if there is one, and send that to the graveyard right after sending the Trap to the graveyard.

Special Technique #1: Discarding a Four Straight

During your Main Phase, if you have a consecutive straight in your hand of four cards, you can send all of them to the graveyard to target and destroy one card on your opponent's side of the field, unless it is one of those face-down cards that has a face-up card above it. Any one face-up card can still be sent to the graveyard by this technique. When your straight goes to the graveyard, your straight goes first - before the card it's targeting, in order from highest to lowest power.

Special Technique #2: Discarding The Joker

During your Main Phase, if you have more Life Cards removed from your life card pile than your opponent does, you can discard one Joker from your hand to the graveyard. After this, you must take every single one of your opponent's field cards and add them to your own hand. Then your turn continues as normal.

Final Thoughts

That is pretty much the entirety of the rules for Castle Walls. It is a simple game compared to say, 500 or what-have-you, but it can take a while to explain and has as-of-yet uncharted potential depths. I took a lot of inspiration from a trading card game, but I also did everything I could to make it something of my own creation. No plagiarism is to be found here, unless of course somebody tries to plagiarize me again. Lots of people like to plagiarize me, it's a historic feature of being Hindbodes.