In 2024 it was popular to resprite the original 1985 Peach from Super Mario Bros. I have been playing some NES games lately (Kate likes Dizzy and Big Nose), so I decided to give respriting a shot. Obviously it's better to look at the original:

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I've been using the junk PC for a while now, and it's nice. Just to go through the specs: Win7 Ultimate SP1 x64; AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2 GHz; 8 GB RAM; GeForce GT 710 (pls don't be jealous); Among the other games, I've added Stronghold, Warcraft 3(+FT), Plants vs Zombies, Factorio, Nancy Drew - Shadow at the Water's Edge (nonograms and bentos are the best). I have also remembered that I used to have two "games", but more like learning programs, in the '00s for French. I remembered a few things from them, like 3d glossy plastic-looking buttons, puddles of paint to represent the colours, a man saying "bleu foncé" and the option to get a bronze, silver or gold medal with a certificate at the end. I had some mixed blurry memories of the two games and it was difficult to find them. They turned out to be both from Eurotalk. They are beginner level learning apps, but they capture the charm of that era quite well, so I do recommend them if you are even slightly interested in French. They also exist for other languages though. Let me know in the guestbook if you also had this program In the meantime, I have installed Cyberpunk on my main PC and it runs surprisingly well on a server Linux PC.

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Turns out you don't have to be popular to receive tons of spam messages in your guestbook from bots - over the last few hours alone I have received over 20. So I have implemented a couple of ways to stop them, one of which you might experience yourself - a simple math question - we all know clankers can't math, right? Other measures won't affect real people. On a brighter note, I have assembled the junk PC I was writing about below - it's running a Phenom II and Win7, and it's awesome - I have been piling old games onto the SDD, so far I've got L4D, Metro 2033, the first 2 Stalkers, Borderlands, HL2, HoMMIII, Stronghold, Syberia, Assassin's Creed 2, Skyrim, Vice City, San Andreas, LotR BfME2, LotR Conquest (hell yeah!), Spider-Man 2, the first three Harry Potter games, No One Lives Forever 2, American McGee's Alice and NFS Underground 2. So far I was unable to make LEGO Stunt Rally work - it runs, but the cars don't. I have had some problems running Prototype - it crashes as it loads a saved game, but otherwise runs. I'll try to debug as much as possible. Voodoo isn't always the solution.

I have managed to get a retro PC together, but there are 2 main issues with it currently - the HDD is very slow, and XP (even with the latest community driven updates) is too outdated to be realistically useful for gaming. Hence, I will do 2 things - first, I will install XP on an SSD and check the responsiveness of the system; second, I will likely just install a version of Windows 7 on the SSD. I was focusing on XP for nostalgia, which I have somewhat satisfied using the system again, and for Lego Stunt Rally, for which I have found an alternative loader that supposedly works on newer Windows versions

I have been thinking about playing the good old games again. I should clarify that my childhood/adolescence gaming era was in the '00s - '10s, so that's what I feel most nostalgic about. I used to have an NES clone with cartridges, but here I'm talking about PC games specifically. I should also say that my favourite games were mostly not the ones that are generally popular. I had a lot of games that were based on movies and cartoons - like Madagascar, the Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter games, or the second Shrek - and some random ones, the demos of which I had got with the local monthly gaming magazine - like Giants: Citizen Kabuto or No One Lives Forever 2. I also remember random games - like Lego Stunt Rally and Creatures: Village - that I had bought from the local CD store. A lot of these games don't run on modern PCs unless you voodoo them into running through emulators, VMs, graphics cards sims &c. And that kind of voodooing leads to bugs, animations are too fast because CPUs are faster now, and in general it takes some of the magic away. So, I have found my old motherboard with Phenom II still in it, along with the cooler and RAM. I have an old Internet card and a graphics card from that time, which supports DirectX 9 (sorry, didn't meant to flex on you). Basically, I only need a hard drive, a power unit and a case to shove it all into, and I get a somewhat 'retro' PC for Windows XP. I also have an old VGA LCD display, which would also be nice to use for the build. I think I also have an internal CD drive somewhere, I know I have an external one and an external floppy drive. Anyway, I'll let that thought cook in my brain for a bit, purely because that setup needs space in the flat, and I'm not sure I want to allocate it just yet. I'll let it simmer

Sometimes, maybe twice a year, I find myself reminiscing about the 'good old days' of playing mc together with friends. I feel like S1 was the season of setting everything up, getting the server management right, enjoying the first encounters with new people and learning about them. This was the classic. I remember specifically being in touch with Adobo, and his Nebula mini-game. S2 was what I would call the golden age. We knew what we were doing, we invested time into the game like crazy and the outcome was fun and honestly impressive. The double island - the shops and the VKD. The library and the court, the seasonal districts, the beautiful Nether hub! I would call S3 the silver age. Glorious, fresh, somewhat bolder than the previous seasons. Everyone was so close together, and the bases were so ambitious. Remember fights in the colosseum? And the Nehther hub roof! And Erin's... whatever it was =P S4 was a flop because it was pre-planned. Planning was fun, but building a copy of the plan is kinda boring. Still there was creativity and the sence of community, but it left people tired. Yet, the Five Koalas pub was something that is still stuck in my head. S5 was the revival that was so needed. Fresh mind, hands itching to fight bosses, build bases, prank each other and hunt for advancements. The industrisal districts with the usual farms neighbouring half-tick-dropping-id-forcing stasis chambers and chunk loaders, the ice boat race, the Noir Tar, the treasure hunts, Fil's crazy terraforming and finally getting a legit HDWGH advancement and Kate finally joining us by the end - are all vividly colouring this season in my head. Hopefully at some point we all get to be both in control of our time and willing to come together again for the sixth time.

I strongly associate the old winrar interface with the game Heroes of Might and Magic III. It was one of the first games I ever played. I went to a neighbouring city to my cousin's family once, and he had a pc. And one of the games there was HoMMIII, and I remember playing the tutorial and being captivated by the art style and the overall classic fantasy aesthetics. I forgot all about the game for some years untif later stumbling across it and playing again. But that's not the point. The point is that the old winrar button icons carry ther same level of fantasyness to me. You have a stack of old clearly magical books, a pair of binoculars, a FREAKING WIZARD HOW CLEARLY CAN SUMMON JINNS, and olf cursed bottle of bug, and an elvish shield! This is HoMM and you can't convince me otherwise.

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I started playing in about April 2012. I don't really remember it that well, but what I do remember is always hearing about this weird new game about blocks, and seeing tributes to it in other games, or even then - lots of knock-offs. And in that cloud of vague awareness I stumbled upon a new let's play series over on youtube - the Call of the Creeper it was called. It was a series of short-ish ~10-15min videos in which eligorko was walking the viewers throough minecraft's shiny new pre-release version of 1.2.5. I was captivated and, now knowing a few tips and tricks, I downloaded minecraft and started playing. I don't remember how I got to play minecraft - was there a free version of the game? a demo? Did I get a cracked launcher? I think i distinctly remember it being the original, but, nontheless, I did have a mojang account and I remember having to play a free version for a while. I remember that in my first world I was afraid items wouldn't be saved in chests if I die for some reason, so I had blocks of iron and gold placed in the world. I thought torches would eventually burn out or be put out by the rain. When I saw villagesr I thought they were players, but I couldnt use chat, so I confirmed their NPCness via sign communication - or, the lack thereof. My first house was the obligatory one-layer dirt pyramid. I remember the excitement of finding friends on X's plotworld and later sharing a 10+ year journey with them. I remember when they added ocean monuments and guardians, and they seemed scary I remember how fun was truing to fing the first totems and how cool I felt having a couple. And shulker boxes! Imagine, both on the same update! I started watching Hermitcraft from season 5 and I watched most of season 4 retrospectively from false's perspective - and there are a lot of memories related to that. We were playing on our server, inspired by Hermitcraft, and somehow some of the things we did were repeated on Hermitcraft as well - crazy coincidences! I also remember when microsoft bought minecraft and everyone got a cape - which was both cool, because it was a new thing on your character (as most of us couldn't attend minecons). It was also a little lame, because everyone now had the same cape. Yet, it started cape-hunting, I tried to recieve all capes that I could. The 2 that I'm missing are the pride cape, which they made unavalable in my country, and the cherry bloccom cape, which would be nice to have, although I doubt I would ever wear it. New baby villagers are meh. I like the old ones - just small adult models - it's so indie and it's so minecraft. A corporation wouldn't have made baby villagers just smaller adults, they would have made them chibi and cute. But an indie dev would absolutely have just size:0.5ed them. It's so funny and precious, and they have got rid of it.

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Season 5 of Koaland has ended on the New Year's Eve, and, since there was little activity in the community, I took the opportunity to just use the server to play together with Kate. Unfortunately, while setting up the new version I had forgotten to enforce whitelist and the world got destroyed. However we didn't give up, double-checked the settings and started playing again, and... it's been fun!

"Descend, beast. I have climbed the eucalyptus spine of the world to demand your name," I shouted into the canopy, branches tearing at my resolve. The wind was still. The leaves whispered. Then he blinked — slow, deliberate. His eyes were galaxies trapped in fur. "I was old when your kind still dreamt of fire," He murmured. "You cannot bear the weight of my name." "Try me," I said, drawing the blade carved from the bone of the First Dropbear. He yawned. "You are made of hunger," he said, "and I am the forest that does not feed." He stretched, ancient joints creaking like glaciers shifting beneath soil. Bark split open on trees all around us, revealing pulsing veins of silver sap. "You carry a blade," he said, "but not the silence to wield it." I stepped forward. The forest recoiled, branches drawing back like breath held too long. "Name yourself," I demanded, though my voice faltered beneath the weight of his gaze. "Let the heavens hear it and tremble." He tilted his head. A single leaf spiraled down between us, slow as a falling verdict. "I am the god who sleeps with one eye open," he said, "and dreams in tongues your soul cannot hold." I raised the blade. It hummed with old fury, bone remembering blood. "Then teach me the language of gods." He laughed — a low, creaking sound, like a tree breaking under the moon’s gaze. "Very well," Koalandir whispered, stepping closer, voice now inside my head, behind my thoughts. "But know this: once spoken, a god’s name cannot be forgotten. It will rot inside you. It will root." The eucalyptus groaned. The sky split — not with thunder, but with something softer. More final. He leaned in. And he began to spell it. The sound wasn’t a sound. It was the memory of thunder before lightning. It was the crack of seedpods splitting open in a firestorm. The vowels tasted of sap and ash. The consonants bled into my teeth. Each syllable dug into my skull like roots into loam. I dropped the blade. He did not blink. "You asked for the name," he said, "not the meaning." My knees buckled. The forest shifted. The leaves no longer whispered—they chanted, quietly, in the same rhythm as my heartbeat. A rhythm not mine anymore. "What—" I tried to say. My mouth did not cooperate. "You are soil now," he said gently. "You will bear my fruit." The ground swallowed my feet. Bark bloomed along my arms. I felt the photosynthesis begin — slow, hungry, eternal. "Your hunger brought you here," Koalandir said, curling back into the canopy, his outline vanishing in dappled green and shadow. "Now be still. Grow. Watch." I screamed, but it came out in leaves.

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