Forth thought: did you find the hidden spider???

Well. A year ago I was living with my dad, because he’s a broken down old man, and needs help. But he refused help on so many occasions. I’d have to work all the time, to the point where I was never home. But dad wouldn’t clean his house. He wouldn’t do anything for himself. Eventually it went from “wouldn’t” to “couldn’t”. I’d be gone from 16-18 hours a day, get home, go to sleep, wake up, do it again, 6 days a week. He’s completely retired, and could have cleaned after himself at any time. He didn’t. Then he suffered health issues. Now he couldn’t even stand.

I’d come home sometimes and find him on the bathroom floor.

He wouldn’t let me hire a maid. He wouldn’t let me hire an assistant. He wouldn’t accept any help. And the house suffered. It got bad. Real bad. One year I started noticing mice. And then one day I saw a rat. The house was literally rotting, and I could only do so much on 1 day off a week.

What nobody knew was that I had been suffering physically. I thought it was just me getting older. I’m overweight, but I’ve always been a very mobile big man. But now I was getting winded going up stairs. I figured “I’m getting older. It’s normal.”

With me never being home I was eating a lot of fast food. I ballooned up real big real fast. I figured “I have a shitty diet. Of coarse I’m getting fatter. It’s normal.”

Then I’d get tired doing simple things. I figured “Well, I’m fat now. Fat people get winded. It’s normal.”

Then one Christmas I’m at my sisters house, and I’m getting real tired doing nothing.

I figured “I’ve been pushing myself to the limit to pay for dad, and pay for me. My body wants rest. It’s normal.”

Then my other sister said “You don’t look good. You need to go to a doctor.”

And the thing is, my sister can be a bit of a drama queen. I figured “it’s fine”.

Then 3 months later, I pulled my back. My body finally broke down. So I go to the hospital, and the woman says the same thing my sister did. That I looked pale. Which I figured was normal since I’m never in the sun. I wear hoodies in the summer to avoid sun exposure. Being pale was normal, I thought.

The nurse says “Well, I’d like to take a blood sample”. In my own mind I’m rolling my eyes, like “yeah, sure, knock yourself out. Waste your own time”. Although outwardly I just said “ok”, and wasn’t sarcastic. Just internally was I dismissive.

She comes back an hour later, and asks how I got into the hospital that day. I said “I took 2 buses, and walked across the street.”

She said “No you didn’t.” And NOW I’m getting maybe a bit more frustrated outwardly, because how are you going to tell ME how I got here???

I said “Yeah. I did. Do you want to see my bus pass?”

And she says “Well, based on your blood sample, you have a blood count of 4.7. To put that in perspective, a male of your age has between 15-18. Essentially, you’re so low on blood, that you should have passed out and died at any time long before you hot here. Doing ANY physically active activity.”

Then she asked me what I do for a living, and I said “I push wheelchairs. Usually two at a time.”

And she said there’s no way my blood just dropped that low recently without a major incident. That I must have been losing blood slowly, over weeks, months, or maybe years. She said that at any point with the way I was working myself, I could have passed out and died at any time doing that.

She hooked me up to a bag of blood. Then took a blood test. She said “we’re going to hook you into a second bag.” Then after that, another blood test. THIRD bag of blood. Another blood test. She said I was still very very low on blood, but they weren’t allowed to put any more in me. So I was going to have to stay the night.

Stay the night, in the morning, different nurse, 2 more bags of blood. STILL very low. So now we’re doing every test they have to figure out why I’m so low on blood.

I end up staying for 4 days in the hospital. I don’t have news. They don’t have news. They’re running every test they got.

Then finally, on the 5th day, a doctor comes in and tells me I have cancer. I walked in for what I assumed would be a back patch, and a doctors note to miss work, and come to find out a strained back was the least of my worries. Now I’m getting hooked up to chemo, being told I’d be out of work for 6-12 months.

I’m living in a house filled with rats, with a leaking roof, a father who I sometimes find on the floor at home but I can’t pick him up, stretching myself beyond my limits, being superman for everyone, and all of this has lead to me getting cancer.

And now I have no job, because you can’t be going through cancer, AND still pushing heavy people.

I remember being doped up on surgury drugs and thinking “I have no idea what I’m going to do…”

And I’m not the type to ask for help. I’m the type to help others. Others don’t help me, I help others!

And as I sat there in the hospital bed, doped out of my mind, I thought “How?”

And I couldn’t answer the question of “how do I provide help for my dad?” I don’t know if it was the drugs, or reality crashing down, but I had this scary moment where for the first time in my life things weren’t just bad…they were a disaster.

And thats when I realized I can’t help dad with or without financial help. You can’t help those who want no help. Just as I had scoffed at needing a doctor, he was scoffing at me trying to pay for a roof replacement, and foundational repairs, and extermination services. He won’t let me help.

He won’t let me help. I can’t help him. I can’t put into words how that hit me like a brick wall. The feeling of trying to be the hero, and being powerless to help.

I just laid there, watching the office on TBS, and not absorbing any of it.

The next day, I called my sister to tell her the bad news. By this point the drugs had worn off, and I was more alert. When I told her, she said without a moments notice, and without hesitation, she said "We’re going to pay for you to move out. We’re going to pay your rent. We’re going to pay everything.

It was in that moment I realized, I could do the unhealthy thing, and be stubborn. Or I could go with it, start a new chapter of my life, and accept the help.

I did that. Took a year off work. My 2 sisters and mom split paying my rent for a year. Had major surgery to cut the cancer out. Sat at home for a year.

And now, I’m back to work.

So nice things from the state for covering insurance for me.

Nice things from the state to let me get on food stamps while I had no job.

Nice things from the medical staff from many different nurses and doctors, and everybody else.

Nice things from my family to remove me from a situation that gave me cancer.

Nice things from my boss to hold my position (unpaid) for a year so I didn’t need to find a new job.

Nice things from pretty much all around.

And this is why I keep the attitude of “if you help everyone, that aura will rub off, and the world will be a better place”. I don’t believe in karma per se, but I do believe in people noticing you doing good for those around you.

I know states are legal, but most are “legal in private areas”. Such as, you can smoke at home, but not in public.

You SURE it was legal to smoke at the park?

…you just gonna leave it like that? Just not explain what it was she did? So we’re just leaving everyone in the dark??? Oh. Ok. Cool. Cool. We didn’t need to know anyways…

Man, seeing the title, I thought this was going to turn into an old timey racist joke. You know the kind:

So a Canadian and a Polish walk into a florist shop…

I don’t know what the punchline was going to be, but I figured it was either going to be the kind of funny where you feel bad for laughing, or a disasterous hateful post. Either way, I thought it was going to be like a car crash. You can’t NOT look, ya know?

Hope things will be back to peaceful for you soon

Literally the hour she flies back to Florida.

I only ever played WCW/NWO World Tour

That’s the first of the US released Aki games! It went in order of release:

WCW/NWO World tour

WCW/NWO Revenge

WWF Wrestlemania 2000

WWF No Mercy (considered to this day to be the greatest wrestling game of all time).

I only mentioned them because I had fond memories of couch co-op with my friends. It’s one of those games that started with a starting point (the one you played), and each new game they added more and more content to the new game, while keeping everything from the old game.

I was just hoping with your son getting that appriciation for anticipating a new game, that you could start him with the first game, and end with the 4th.

But it’s one of those games that new people tend to struggle with, due to not holding your hand at ALL. It was just assumed you knew what you were doing…and the fighting system is sooooo complex, yet simple once you “get it”.

Short tap A, weak grapple. Long hold A, strong grapple.

Same with B and punches.

You CAN try to just so strong punches, and strong grapples, but if your opponent hasn’t been weakened they’re likely to reverse. They MIGHT still reverse a weak punch or grapple too, but they need much more precise button timing. The worse they’re beaten up, the harder it is to reverse. And eventually you might land a strong punch or grapple. You can taunt to raise your spirit meter. Your spirit meter also raises as you do well in a match, or lower if you do worse.

Throw your opponent down and do a short taunt before he gets up to stop your taunt, and you get an instant small boost in spirit. Do a long uninterupted taunt, and get a big boost in spirit.

But if you attempt a taunt, you leave yourself open to an easy attack against you, and if that happens you lose spirit proportional to what you were attempting to gain.

Its a very balanced game where every action has an appropriate reaction. It’s up to you to time those actions, and choose what you think you can get away with.

It’s such a weird game that an experienced player vs a rookie will result in an unfun lopsided match. But evenly matched players might have 1 match last an hour.

Nothing. Next week my sister gets into town, and she’s the definition of what a Karen is. I used to think some of her behaviors were depression based, or mental illness, but she proved over this past year that she just gets off on creating drama, and watching others suffer because of her drama.

A good example is, we went out to dinner a year ago. She picked the resteraunt, because nobody else cared where we eat. When she realized she wasn’t going to get any blowback from that, she decided to order the fish. She at no point asked what type of fish. She never asked when it was caught, or how it was served. She did nothing of the sort.

So she gets her fish, and then complains that it was a previously frozen fish, and cooked from a frozen state. It was December. We live in Cleveland, which other than a Lake, is right on the border of Canada. In DECEMBER.

My sister then begins berating the server who brought her the fish, saying she’s not doing her job, and she should be embarassed to serve frozen fish. To be clear, the fish wasn’t served to her frozen. It had just been frozen at one point prior to serving it to her. BECAUSE IT’S FUCKING DECEMBER, AND NOBODY CATCHES FISH IN LAKE ERIE IN DECEMBER!!! They catch the fish in the spring, and summer, maybe even the fall. Before the lake freezes. They freeze the excess, and serve it if you order it. That’s just how life works.

She’s yelling and screaming, demanding the server take it back, and prepare her something worthy instead.

Meanwhile, our entire family is just heads in their hands embarassed by her behavior.

After being told that she can have them prepare something else instead, but she’ll still be charged for the fish, she became enraged, threw a $100 bill on the table and said “I’M NOT TAKING THIS!!!” and left. The rest of us had just gotten our meals. She expected us to storm out with her. We did not. We sat there, watched her get into her car, and watched her drive off. Then we appologized for her behavior.

When she came into my apartment, I had spent weeks deep cleaning it just so I wouldn’t have to hear her run her mouth. She found a few specks of dirt on the counter, and drippings on a drip tray inside my convection oven. She has not, to this day, shut the fuck up about it. She even sent my other sister to drop things off with me, and told my other sister “Take pictures of inside his apartment! I want to see if he’s cleaning it”. My sister told me what she was told to do, and said “I’m not doing that. If she wants to come see it, she can come up here herself.”

That was 3 weeks ago, and so now she IS flying up to see for herself. Tomorrow I’m scheduling a colonoscopy for the day she’s in town. Just to have an excuse to tell her I’m busy.

Somewhere I have the SNES cart for chrono trigger with the price label of $10, if its not faded.

I bought it in the mid-90s. You have to remember that before Final Fantasy 7, RPGs in America were NOT popular. People always cite the poor marketing of Earthbound as the reason it failed. I always say it’s because it released in 1995, at a higher price than most SNES games, at a time when RPG popularity was at an all time low. If it had released in 1997, and at a standard price, it may have done gangbusters.

Even Super Mario RPG wasn’t a hit at first, but then picked up sales as the months went on.

The guy selling Chrono Trigger at a games/music/video resale shop said “I’m surprised you’re buying this game. You sure you don’t want to play it a bit first? Save you the hassle of returning it later”. He meant well, but I actually did mean to buy it.

I also bought earthbound, with book, for $10 from the same place. It always smelled like weed in there. Mostly because the employees would smoke weed, pick out cds they wanted to hear over the stores speaker system, and then play video games stoned out of their minds.

Then they got bought out, and now it’s a corporate run store. Same resale model, but SUUUUPER corporate. You cannot fimd deals, and they give you gamestop prices for your trade-ins.

They didn’t even used to have reciepts. They would just stamp the price sticker with a stamp that they adjusted the date on. And they weren’t super strict on dates either. If your sticker said you bought it 19 days ago instead of 14 days ago, they’d usually be like “aw man, it’s cool.” As long as it wasn’t some bullshit like 3 months. Basically as long as you weren’t trying to game the system.

One time I went to a grocery store that sells closeouts. One of todays items was a huge stack of game boy games. $5 each, but it was the same game. So I buy one, and I take it there. I explain the situation. I say “hey, will I get the same price in resale each copy?” He says yes. So I traded in my copy for $15. Then took that money, bought 2 more copys (tax), traded those in for $30, took that money, bought 5 more copies, traded those in, and then went and bought 2 more copies traded those in, and bought a brand new game boy advance from them. I took $6 and essentially turned it into a brand new GBA which had only been released a few months prior.

I miss that store. It technically still exists, but I miss the spirit of what that store used to be.

This is a nice story. I like this. My parents would occasionally buy me games, but it was mostly once or twice a year, and they never got excited for my excitement. They would just complain that all I do is play video games. Meanwhile all dad did was watch sports, and all mom did was watch news.

But somehow I’M an asshole 7 year old for not playing outside, and being glued to the tv all day! I’m ranting, but yes, 40 year old me is still pissed at my parents.

Getting back on track, I think it’s adorable how you not only engage with your kid, and teach him the value of earning things. And participate with your kid.

Makes me wonder if you were a fan of the aki wrestling games on N64. There’s a definate depth to those games that you don’t find in todays wrestling games. AEW tried…but I feel like their third game they might start getting it right. For reference, they’ve only made 1 game, and it took 4 years to make.

Oh, I haven’t bought ANY of them. I dislike the whole genre as a whole. Never played a Halo a day in my life. Last the only 2 shooters I ever played were Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. Both on N64. Neither of which is anything I described.

I generally stay away from things like online play. I don’t have PS+ or Nintendo Online, and I’ve never owned an XBox of any kind.

That doesn’t mean however that I don’t see that this is the direction the industry headed 20 years ago, and hasn’t looked back. They keep making call of duty, and all these other shooters because that’s what people buy. OTHER people make it popular, not me.

Well now that I know that I’m supposed to look for one, I found him! It took a while, but I finally found him!

I need more context. Why did they not have it?

Aw man…I was hoping this made my SNES flat, so that I could place my drinks on top.

You called?

Nintendo downvoted you.

people need to hold their leaders accountable for their blunders.

Unless you’re an American president. In which case your own supreme court has ruled you can do no wrong.

Removed by mod

The US can’t commit to more than a year. Even a year we might break that promise. You gotta remember, we have an election in November. If trump wins, there’s no telling what bullshit he might do. He might even just nuke Ukraine.

You gotta remember, half of the USA is on russia’s side.

Still pissed they cancelled GLOW