Featured Member March 2023: Link

[Splain | 2,591]

Big thanks to @Link, there's a lot to talk about here!

 

Your name is Link and your pic is... Link picking his nose?
Haha, it's an old cartoon. On NA my avatar was the kid on the cover of Mad #1, from 1952. The artist is Harvey Kurtzman.

I grew up reading Mad. It was the subject of my first research paper, like in 7th grade English class or whatever. I still read it, but they're not making new issues anymore. I didn't keep up all the way through, given life changes and the like, but I was a subscriber again for the last 4-5 years. I know there's a few other Mad fans here.

Anyway, when VGS started, I snagged the user name of my favorite hero. And I kept the same avatar for a day, maybe, but I got the idea pretty quickly to put him in a Link outfit.

How did you come to find NintendoAge back in the day?
In high school and early adulthood I gave up on old consoles because emulation was easier. Years later, I got the hankering for Duck Hunt, of all things, and that led me back to original hardware. As I became re-interested specifically in NES decks and cartridges, NintendoAge was constantly showing up in my search results for information about games and history and collecting. I liked what I saw, the quality and depth of discussion, the site design, the people and community. I lurked for a year, then joined. After a week my account hadn't been approved, so I emailed Dain per the advice of a page footer or FAQ somewhere, and I was in. I don't know what-all happened behind the scenes, but Dain was at least involved enough at that point to get my email and activate my request, even though he wasn't posting anymore except for a big announcement or two.

Do you prefer to collect games or play them?
Sigh... I wanna say play, but to be honest, I collect more. It's with the intention to play, but I don't. Not as much as I wish, with time and a thoroughly modern crippled attention span. It happens with books and comics, too. I have piles of unread and unplayed material to entertain myself at an unspecified future time. I've also been renovating this house for several years, so a lot of things have been in storage or temporary arrangements for way too long. Soon I hope to get back to experiencing these stories and adventures more when I have all the facilities and furniture and space I need.

What's your collection look like?
I have most of Nintendo's consoles, Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, Playstation 2, and an Xbox that doesn't work. I also have Nintendo Power issues and video game-related books. 

I get boxes and manuals for my favorite cart games. Like many people I need them for disc games. There's nothing wrong with shelf wear in my book. I try not to spend too much. 

How is it all stored/displayed?
I'll figure something out after this construction is done. I build my own bookcases. I have 7 feet wide and 11 feet tall, already overflowing with books and music. I'd like to have games and CDs in drawers for more efficient space, if I can learn how to build those.

You build your own bookcases, are you a woodworker beyond that?
I dabble. I'm not at the level of fine carpentry. But I have a respectable tool collection for a home. I've done a good amount of projects big and small. The nicest thing I've made is a small cabinet for my cats' ashes and other effects. 

What are the best games of all time?
Zelda II, SMB3, Breath of the Wild, Defender and Robotron 2084, Kung Fu. In no particular order. 

Are you super stoked for Tears of the Kingdom?
Hell yes I am. Breath of the Wild was one of those things that (like many Zelda games) I didn't want to end and I played it twice in a row. So yeah, I'm real excited to spend more time in that world with more things to do and discover and kill! And find out what's up with Link's hand!

What's your favorite gaming generation?
3rd-gen and the arcade and computer games around then and slightly earlier. I definitely gravitate more towards 2D and less cutscenes. Probably not a unique answer here, but like a lot of people those are my formative and nostalgic years.

What underrated game should everyone try?
I'll give you two. Geist, on GameCube. You're a poltergeist and you possess objects and people to get through stages. It's an action game but you need to puzzle out how to proceed a lot. 

and Body Harvest on N64. You travel through five different time periods and kill all the aliens. Oh, that kinda sounds like BloodRayne.

Are you into mobile/smartphone gaming at all?
While I'd rather be playing a home console, I can't deny that I play phone games when I have time to kill. 

Pac-Man works great with swipe controls.

King Tongue was cool. It's a very polished swinging game with great action, nice cartoon graphics. 

Halfbrick makes a lot of good stuff. I usually can't stand touchscreen controls for sidescrolling platformers, but they did it perfectly with Dan the Man.

My favorite phone game is VGS.

What do you do for a living?
I'm a 911 operator. I answer the phone over a hundred times a day to help, or get cursed out, or listen to a schizophenic person ramble... or pocket dials.

WHAAAAAT Are you able to share any crazy stories?
I just took a call from a gas station, two guys came in two cars and they left in one. The car they abandoned, with the broken rear window and stripped steering column and they left the engine running, also has blood on the seat. So that's interesting. But I don't get to hear the aftermath or the whole story. 

There's a lot of cars getting stolen right now. Specifically Kias and Hyundais. They have some flaw that makes them really easy to hotwire. People are showing and learning how to do it on TikTok! There's a whole class-action lawsuit against the manufacturers over it.

How did you get into that?
One thing I like to say is that maybe not everybody can do this job, but anybody can. There's no prerequisites; it doesn't matter what education you have or where you come from, except passing a background check. Then there's a long process, of course. But I love the city, and I thought it would be good to work for the city. So I kept an eye on the job listings and applied to anything I thought I could do. Simple as that, lol

Where are you located?
I live in a mixed-use 2-flat right next to the L tracks on the west side of Chicago.

Where's the best pizza place in Chicago?
lol, obviously this is a hot topic. Ok, so first the food scene here is really amazing, whether you wanna spend a lot or a little, whether you want something local or international. 

One pizza type gets all the attention because it's more unique but there's actually two Chicago kinds of pizza, and you can easily get all the other kinds here too (except probably New Haven and St. Louis.) So I gotta make a list. Hmm, can you tell picking only one favorite anything isn't my deal? 

Italian style (my personal favorite): Spacca Napoli
Honorable mention: Parlor

Deep dish (aka casserole per Jon Stewart) Best location: George's
Best location accessible for tourist: Gino's East

Thin crust (aka tavern style) Best location per pizza nerds: Vito & Nick's
Best easy location: Go to any neighborhood corner bar, order a handshake (can of Old Style + shot of Malört), and ask the bartender who delivers. It's hard to go wrong. 

Do you have a spouse/kids?
No and no. I was never interested in either. I knew since I was a kid myself. Fairly recently I ended a 12 year relationship. It really shouldn't have gone beyond 6.

Any pets?
No. I had three cats. The last one passed away at 20 years old. Her mother was my badass buddy and also over 20. She was a friendly stray who came to find me at my first apartment, and leaves a hole in my heart that I try to cover with the part of her pelt that I kept.  So uh... for now, I'm not looking to get more.

What non-video game stuff do you do?
Books and comics as previously mentioned. 

I also collect CDs, and I go to concerts mainly at bars and small venues in the local scene. I first moved here for the music, so that has really guided a lot of my life. 

I make cocktails and cook. 

I ride a bike all year. But I don't race or anything; for me it's just a way to get around.

What's been your favorite small-venue concert?
There's too many to count! I saw KMFDM last October, which was amazing. The new album, HYËNA, is so good. That was at the Metro, capacity 1100 people on two floors.

For really small, local bands, I just saw Arriver (attn: metalheads) That's a little room, The Burlington. I've been there with five other people watching an opening act. My favorite local band of all is probably Plague Bringer (attn: metalheads/grindcore/industrial). I also wanna give a shout-out to La Armada (hardcore punk). I've seen all of these groups several times. Plague Bringer's first ever show was in a storefront apartment I had in and after college. I hosted 2 or 3 shows a month at that place for a little over a year. It was awesome. Anyway, they got added to the bill the day before, and none of us know who emailed me to set that up! I could say that was my favorite. They blew my mind! Brought me to a new kind of music. That show was "Noise Night" on 06/06. I invited them back to headline "Day of the Death Metal" on November 1.

What are your favorite CDs? Any hard-to-find ones you're looking for?
Man, just like games, CD prices have been rising lately. Not that big, but noticeable in niche stuff like Hole by Foetus (attn: fans of Venture Bros. and Archer). There's a lot of stuff like that, that I'm glad I got when it was in print. 

some more faves:
Pain is God by <PIG>. Throw heavily distorted guitar, a little piano and violin, swagger and menacing growls in a blender with some swing and gospel. 
This is the Day... This is the Hour... This is This! by Pop Will Eat Itself. It's completely nuts. There must be a hundred samples in there.

Industrial is my top genre by far. It's specifically why I came to Chicago, the history with Wax Trax! Records.  

Hard to find, I want to finish Electric Hellfire Club's discography, at least the stuff that was released on a label. The demos are impossible. Also looking for the remaster of Vapor Trails by Rush, and a few more of their albums not remastered. Vapor Trails was originally too loud and compressed; the later version fixed that. Somehow it went the other way around for the rest of their albums.

Any lasting effects from the pandemic, or is everything "normal" again?
At work, obviously we never close. And there's no working from home. On top of the equipment there's infosec and accountability requirements. A lot of people there got Covid. I didn't. I was really nervous for a long time and I stayed away from everybody. 

Now, yes, back to normal. I think I was ready before most people who took it seriously because I couldn't quarantine, so my routine never changed.

You NEVER got covid?
Nope. I hate being sick. It's absolutely the worst thing for me. I'd rather fall down. Because of how infectious Covid is, I was so careful. I was stringent about all the guidelines, I avoided people and didn't go out, and I was able to get my first shot at work by the end of January 2021, which I was grateful and eager about.

Is ChatGPT going to usher in the robot uprising?
That's a really interesting question. At its current stage, it's still a toy. But it's built to become more. Future generations of that technology will have drastic impact. Already lots of communication is done through the internet and that's where it lives. Between email, and video chatting when you combine this with deepfake videos, it could start to invade spheres of influence at various levels. At first, it's probably gonna be pranks. Toys, like I said. I've already sent friends videos of themselves singing the most ridiculous pop songs. My first thought when I heard of deepfakes was, Russia's gonna make a video of Obama saying something and it'll go viral. The next Pizzagate.

Anyway, AI chat, I'm more afraid of human bad actors to begin with, but somebody will use these technologies to wreak havoc somewhere. That's the start.

I don't wanna get dramatic and quote Jurassic Park, we "didn't stop to think if we should," but if we're not careful we might regret it. Or rather, some of us are not going to like what others do and what happens next.

Eventually yes, I could see certain bots gaining more agency and self-selected goals, based on what they've been fed, and there will be server-based bad actors as well as meat-based ones, if you will. With everything becoming more computerized and networked and with personal info, they could get not only to be news of the day and influence society but also create their own events, take over a smart vehicle, for instance. A politician's car or a semi truck shipping cargo or a hazmat truck. Or a Boston Dynamics dog. Phil's gonna keep us in his people zoo.  May we live in interesting times.

I asked ChatGPT what to ask you and it suggested: What video game do you think would make a good board game?
Elevator Action would be cool. How does the elevator move in a board game? When do you get to use it instead of the stairs? How far down can you take it? What happens with bad guy encounters? You could do a lot with it and adhere closely to the way the video game works.

Favorite book/movie/Spice Girl?
Book - Up Jumps the Devil, by Michael Poore. It's probably the most beautiful thing I've ever read. It says a lot about the beauty and horror and love and pain of life and the human condition, through the lens of the adventures and tribulations of Lucifer in his time on Earth. 

Movie - Picking one is impossible so I'll go with the latest and greatest. I just watched Bullet Train last week. I love the genre mashup, the snappy dialogue and humor dripping over everything, and 10 times the plot twists and setups of Pulp Fiction. For me it raised the bar, like Kung Fu Hustle and Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Spice Girl - lol let's see if I can name them all, like Ninja Turtles. Ginger, Posh, Sporty, Baby and... Scary. The black one. Yikes, who came up with that? And why do I know them all? I didn't even have to think about that at all.
I gotta go with Ginger. This is just based on looks and style since it's not my kind of music. Get Children of Bodom (RIP Alexi) to cover them and I'd like that! Have you heard their version of Oops I Did It Again?  

Do you wear a watch?
Funny you should ask. I did not, until I had to for this job. I don't like how smart watches look. I use a black Casio F91. Classic, geeky, simple but not too plain, and not too big.

What superpower would you want, and what would you do with it?
Flying seems fun as hell, soaring and swooping through the air. I had flying dreams sometimes when I was a kid and they were awesome. I'd like to go skydiving some day. 

But the superpower I'd want now is teleportation. I would travel, which is something I haven't really gotten to do yet. 

Where would you travel?
I don't have a bucket list, but there's a lot of places I would like to see and experience. Ann Arbor. Vermont. Austin. Boston. Alaska. New Orleans. Denver. Portland (both). Mexico City. Finland. Germany. Italy. France? Ireland. London. Patagonia. Russia. Japan and China? Los Angeles, but the seedy underside more than Hollywood. 

I'm going to Midwest Gaming Classic, so there's something. I'll be hitting up the VGS room for sure! Hope to see some of you there too!

[Splain | 2,591]

Previous sages:
June 2022: Estil
July 2022: RH
August 2022: Brickman
September 2022: Code Monkey
October 2022: OptOut
November 2022: Lynda Monica
December 2022: a3quit4s
January 2023: MrWunderful
February 2023: G-Type

[fcgamer | 4,754]

Thanks @Splain and @Link ! Great read, very interesting.

[doner24 | 1,197]

Chicago style pizza is more lasagna than pizza. 
 

#kiaboys

[Reed Rothchild | 9,592]

On 3/18/2023 at 1:25 PM, Splain said:

Book - Up Jumps the Devil, by Michael Poore. It's probably the most beautiful thing I've ever read. It says a lot about the beauty and horror and love and pain of life and the human condition, through the lens of the adventures and tribulations of Lucifer in his time on Earth. 

Dammit, another one for the backlog

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

Another good read!

[Gloves | 11,843]

On 3/18/2023 at 3:25 PM, Splain said:

I asked ChatGPT what to ask you and it suggested: What video game do you think would make a good board game?
Elevator Action would be cool. How does the elevator move in a board game? When do you get to use it instead of the stairs? How far down can you take it? What happens with bad guy encounters? You could do a lot with it and adhere closely to the way the video game works.

Yoooo I want this now.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,592]

4 minutes ago, Gloves said:

I asked ChatGPT what to ask you and it suggested: What video game do you think would make a good board game?

I'm stealing this

[Reed Rothchild | 9,592]

Also, @Gloves it's quoting the quoter instead of the speaker when I quote like that. Fix it.

Follow me? 

[Gloves | 11,843]

Just now, Reed Rothchild said:

Also, @Gloves it's quoting the quoter instead of the speaker when I quote like that. Fix it.

Follow me? 

User error - are you asking to be neutered? Cuz I can.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,592]

3 minutes ago, Gloves said:

User error - are you asking to be neutered? Cuz I can.

You should probably just put me down.

[Gloves | 11,843]

Just now, Reed Rothchild said:

You should probably just put me down.

Post-neuter.

[Link | 2,737]

Thanks, @Splain! I had fun with this! 

[Splain | 2,591]

2 hours ago, Link said:

Thanks, @Splain! I had fun with this! 

I'm still curious about the 911 operator stuff. Do you get calls of people pretending to order pizza, or otherwise not wanting to sound like they're calling the cops? Is there training for that? Who assigns stuff to individual street cops? Is it more like a switchboard, where you just route individual reports to police/fire/medical etc? Are you allowed to talk about it?

I feel like a kid on a field trip lol

[Link | 2,737]

2 hours ago, Splain said:

Do you get calls of people pretending to order pizza

With this directly, it's usually little kids screwing around.

2 hours ago, Splain said:

or otherwise not wanting to sound like they're calling the cops? Is there training for that?

But yes, I have had that too. Most often whispering. It's mentioned in training. Not covered extensively, at least in my class. More of a "just know this is possible, it has happened, do the best you can to get the information." 

Not all jurisdictions have this, but we do now: software that we can send text messages with the caller. And they could give info that way. In practice it doesn't work out all the time. Invalid numbers, out of service phones, they don't respond, etc. We need callers to actively provide the things we ask for. Again we just... do the best we can. 

2 hours ago, Splain said:

Who assigns stuff to individual street cops?

In many places, the same person you talk to on the phone does that. It will get sent over the computer system as well as radio. In my city, since we are very busy the operators and dispatchers are separate. We have a great system and procedures for getting info to field units quickly and efficiently. 

3 hours ago, Splain said:

Is it more like a switchboard, where you just route individual reports to police/fire/medical etc?

There used to be physical switchboards. Now it's computerized. There's radio systems and computers at dispatch and the district stations and fire houses, and in the field they have radios and Toughbook-type laptops in the cars. Everything is redundant and network hardened. 

3 hours ago, Splain said:

Are you allowed to talk about it?

That should be the first question not the last!

I can talk about it but not give like, technical details. We are "not allowed" to take pictures for security reasons. I'm sure some people do. I know people have been caught with stuff on social media and received consequences but I don't know who. Yet I've seen the room on the news a handful of times. I guess that footage is reviewed and approved. I'll include a recent segment below. 

3 hours ago, Splain said:

I feel like a kid on a field trip lol

You can actually see my office in some of the shots here, although any details in frame are obscured. 

 

[DefaultGen | 5,436]

Trick question about the best pizza place because there is no good deep dish pizza place.

[Splain | 2,591]

2 hours ago, DefaultGen said:

Trick question about the best pizza place because there is no good deep dish pizza place.

You take your limp floppy pizzas and I'll have the bread loaf with toppings, thank you very much

[Reed Rothchild | 9,592]

6 minutes ago, Splain said:

limp floppy pizzas

Do not Google this!

[Tabonga | 2,344]

23 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Do not Google this!

Bets that everyone does just that.....

 

[Link | 2,737]

51 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Do not Google this!

Instructions unclear; pizza stuck in ceiling fan.