Ashes to Ashes, Dust To... Anyone? No?

You know what I hate? Writing these rants when I have absolutely nothing to say. Especially when it takes up valuable Sonic the Hedgehog-playing time.

Yes, that's right. Sonic the Hedgehog. Remember Sonic? He's back, in GameCube form.

Admittedly, there's something unnerving and down-right wrong about playing a Sega game on a Nintendo machine, something that makes me feel evil and dirty and traitorous. These are two companies who spent my childhood warring against each other and pitting student against student in the schoolyard.

"You have a Nintendo? All 8-bits? Oooh. Aren't you cool! I've got 16-fucking-bits!"

"Yeh, well I've got a Super Nintendo System. It's so much better."

"What, better Duck Hunt?"

But, at the end of the day, the upper middle class, popular kids had the Nintendo and we wannabe cool kids, we geeks-in-training were the Sega fans. We knew we had the better games and the better game play, but at the end of the day, Sega came out with Dreamcast and that was the end of the Dream. The Nintendos and Sonys won, and oh were we bitter.

And now, Nintendo owns Sega and I'm playing the games that I loved and fought for. That bastard plumber has fucked my favorite hedgehog.

You might have noticed that this is a different rain effect than the one I was using at the end of last year. This is because the old rain effect used a lot of different colours, which make the strips a lot bigger, filesize-wise. So I said "I'll make a new rain effect. One that still looks like rain, but doesn't kill the bandwidth!"
So I made a rain effect that looks recognisably like rain. And uses slightly less bandwidth than the other rain effect did, but not much. Another thing that saved quite a bit of filesize on this one is the way that I used a plain dark grey-blue background rather than the old standby, the cloud effect. Clouds look very nice and all, even on a low number of colours, but they still eat up a fair chunk of filespace. And the thing about clouds is, you don't usually see them that clearly when it's actually raining, since there's rather a lot of water in the air at the time. When it's about to rain you see big, grey, dark clouds. During the storm, not so much.

That's a pretty poorly maintained graveyard, you'll notice. The grass is long and overgrown, even near the fresh grave. The trees are also growing a little close to the graves, too. But then again, Mark was no a rich man, and ended up in a crappy cemetary in the middle of nowhere.

If anyone asks, he was buried instead of cremated because of his life-long fear that crematoriums secretly just cooked the deceased and then sold the bodies to hot dog companies. This fear did not stop Mark from eating some 32,000 hot dogs during the course of his life. And some onions.