Month: January 2016

Here’s your end-of-week nostalgia fix: DJ 8-Bit Mullet’s chiptune-tastic Bad Dudes: Mega Mash, which takes the soundtrack from the 1988 arcade game Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja and mashes it up with a number of retro musical biscuits, including:

• White Horse by Laid Back
• Magic Man by Heart
• LL Cool J’s Phenomenon
• Michael Jackson’s Bad
• Short Dick Man by Gilette
• White Lines by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five
• “plus a little bit of Nate Dogg, Lady Gaga, Heart, Ace of Base, Daft Punk, and samples from the movie The Wizard.”

It doesn’t matter whether or not you wasted your youth at dances, clubs, and arcades like I did — Bad Dudes: Mega Mash is pure 8-bit awesome. I’ve been beating my head against a particularly frustrating bug in an AppleTV game when I did decided to put it on the background — and I fixed it 15 minutes later. I think it made me smarter! Thanks, DJ 8-bit Mullet!

Scenes from Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja

Bad Dudes is every 1980’s action B-movie reduced to its purest form and turned into a videogame. You’re an Arnie-like character trying to rescue a Ronald Reagan-like character from ninjas. I’m pretty sure I pumped a lot of quarters into this game back in the day, which presents its challenge very plainly and clearly:

With the intro out of the way, you’re unleashed on the mean streets of some random unnamed American city that’s crawling with ninjas…

…and from there, you proceed to kick ass on the freeway…

…the sewers…

…the woods…

…and in the end, the fabulously-costumed Final Boss on a helicopter!

During a particularly dull stretch of the summer of 1992, I pumped a ridiculous number of quarters into Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja, dispatched the Final Boss, and finally rescued President Ronnie. This was my reward:

Hey, if the Japanese can be sold on the idea that KFC is a traditional Christmas dish in the U.S., why can’t they believe that the Stateside reward for a daring rescue is two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun?

For those of you who can’t get enough videogame gameplay in your diet, here’s a playthrough of the arcade game:

Cartoon by Tom Toles for the Washington Post. Click to see the source.

I’m sure they’re a very nice, very good vet, but in my (ahem) circle, we bring up the term “circle of life” whenever eating meat or watching some nature documentary where one animal beats the crap out of and then eats another animal.

It also reminds me of this very sad scene from The Lion King:

The Swiss dating site Blinq has teamed up with ETH Zurich, a University, to build a web application and mobile app that tell you how attractive you are, based on the preferences of Blinq’s users. Apparently, the Swiss are as cuckoo as their clocks, because the app revealed to me that they have NO GODDAMN TASTE WHATSOEVER.

Here’s how a recent photo, taken in St. Pete the day after Christmas, got rated:

“Hmm…”? Let’s try another one. How about the selfie I sent to my wife from the wifi-equipped flight to India in October?

Just “Ok”? That, my friend, is a frickin’ book jacket-worthy author photo. At least it thinks I look young.

On a lark, I tried this photo from the day after Thanksgiving, featuring a “Cleopatra”-style headdress at one of the Busch Gardens gift shops:

Geez. And it thinks that the 1980s-era Stevie Wonder look makes me seem even younger.

I decided to challenge the algorithm with a photo of me demonstrating a duct tape hack for my CPAP mask (I was traveling and had forgotten the straps for the mask at home). Here’s the result:

This one, it liked. Apparently the Swiss are into the Hannibal Lecter/“Dennis Hopper huffing nitrous in Blue Velvet“ (warning: swearing aplenty) look.

Then I found out about how other, less conventional images scored with the software. Here’s Guy Fieri:

Really?

Then there’s how it rated the image below:

And finally, this image of “Lumpy”, Chewbacca’s son from the oh-so-seventies, oh-so-terrible Star Wars Holiday Special:

GOD DAMMIT.

Photo by “jsinfrankenstein”. Click to see the source.

Thank you for being a millennia-old Force-sensitive space pirate bar-owning friend.

Thanks to Alistair Morton for the find!

It’s the first full week of the new year, and many gyms — including the one I go to — are experiencing the annual New Year’s Resolutions Crowd that come air this time. Since I work from home, I go in the middle of the day when things are quiet, but even then, the gym’s been a little busier than usual. I’d hate to see what it’s like after 5:30 for the next few weeks.

Cracked’s new video in their “Honest Ads” series, If Gyms Were Honest, makes a few good points about gyms, and especially gym marketing. However, their assertion that you can get fit anywhere isn’t practical for everyone for many reasons including limited space at home, not wanting to clutter your place with weights and equipment, the benefits of classes when their costs are included in your gym membership fees, and having a place to exercise when the weather makes outdoor exercise impractical. Still, it’s an amusing video that tells the truth about gym marketing and fees:

Here’s a cyclist’s point-of-view video in which he complains about a log that someone left in the middle of the bike path and suddenly realizes that it’s not a log:

The best part of the video isn’t his surprise, but the very Floridian response that follows: “Whatever.” You get used to them after a while.

(I also love his voice. He sounds like Cleveland from Family Guy.)