PiNe – Pangaea

Buying Gift Cards for the Discounts

Grocery stores chains like Giant Eagle and Kroger like to give discounts on fuel when you buy gift cards. If they have gift cards for places I’m already going to anyway, I use them as much as possible. I even buy GameStop gift cards that I take to GameStop to buy gift cards for other places, earning points twice. Gift cards have their own problems but save money when you can by buying them for yourself.

The real reason for this post was to show off this wall of Fuelperks discounts I just got. Half of that gift card balance was spent before I even left the Giant Eagle parking lot.

Source: the receipt from my Giant Eagle visit just now, scanned with my printer

Stan Freberg – St. George And The Dragonet

From 1951, this is St. George and the Dragonet. It’s a parody of the then-new TV show Dragnet…with a dragon. We salute you, Stan Freberg!

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT3QYb7AN6k via Anime Hell via MisterKleenhead

Shattered Skies – The End and the Rebirth

Hello from Tumblr! I’ve been thinking, and I realize that my WordPress blog posts are basically Tumblr posts anyway. I might as well make it a Tumblr blog because I lose almost nothing. I plan to re-make all of my WordPress posts as proper Tumblr posts, properly reblogging the Tumblr stuff this time to comply with the posters’ wishes. For instance, my post for PiNe’s illustrations will become reblogs of every image when possible. Once I learn to Tumblr properly and get my theme and cross-posts working correctly, this is going to be good.

Source: Shattered Skies via Google Play Music radio

Wintergatan – Marble Machine

TwistedSifter just keeps finding awesome stuff I want to share. If you like my posts, you ought to subscribe to TwistedSifter too. How else would I have found out about Swedish electronic folk band Wintergatan and their one-man band contraption? 2000 marbles play a catchy loop on the machine’s built-in vibraphone, bass guitar, and drum set.

Source: Wintergatan and Wintergatan via TwistedSifter

sh/f Super Fireball Battle

Now that I’ve got all my WordPress posts on Tumblr, what should I do with it? How about I introduce a tool-assisted video Sonic Hurricane debuted at Evo2k10? Evenly matched projectiles and beams clash like it’s Dragon Ball Z. This video got me into Shinichi Osawa’s album The One and the soundtrack to DoDonPachi Resurrection Black Label.

Source: Sonic Hurricane via RSS feed nearly eight years ago

Shuey's Perfect Clear Study (Phase 2 - Sparta!)

A clean matrix is a happy matrix. In multiplayer Tetris, if you can perfectly clear all the blocks from your screen, it sends your opponent half a screen of garbage. Tetris art guru Shuey shows us that it’s possible to perfect clear with your first ten tetriminos every time. With clever usage of twists, the hold piece, and strategy, you can do it too!

Source: Shuey via Hard Drop via King of Stackers’s Discord chat

Street Fighter IV Ultras Without Cinematics

In Street Fighter IV, Ultra Combo animations actually move characters awkwardly around the arena, but those transitions are covered up with camera angle changes. This video removes all of that camera work and reveals what happens just outside the frame and between cuts. Gen, Guy, Yun, and Rolento all have Ultras that teleport all over the stage. The wallslams you see aren’t anywhere near near the actual walls of the stage so that the victim isn’t in stuck a bad corner situation after the combo is over.

Source: USF4 Ultras w/o Cinematic Camera, Full Stage View, no HUD (v2) – YouTube via VGJUNK and Shoryuken

Did You Know Gaming? – Star Fox

(The original post on my Wordpress blog had five Did You Know Gaming? entries in the same post. When porting to Tumblr, I decided to give each reblog its own post since that's the way Tumblr seems to work. I might change this later.)

Source: Finally, YouTube.

The new episode is up! Star Fox - Did You Know Gaming? - Featuring Egoraptor!

Artist Alley Arcade Stick

I’ve always wanted to put some one-of-a-kind hand-drawn art in my Qanba Q4RAF, so at last weekend’s Ohayocon, I brought a blank template and and asked a couple of the artists there to draw their original characters. The team of Iota Soul knocked it out of the park with Killer Bee on the left side. Kuroitenshi added her D&D fighter on the right side and gave me some crucial advice on how to complete the design from there. I drew some Vewlix lines at the top, put it in the stick, and changed all the buttons out to black and white to complete the hand-drawn sketch look.

This replaces my previous art on that stick, which is all about Kohaku from Melty Blood, a series of really nice doujin fighting games that never made it out of Japan.

(What follows is the mouseover text for all seven images, edited slightly because they’re plain text on Tumblr now.)

So many photos on this blog lately. Maybe I should have made a Tumblr instead. Problem is, hitstun.tumblr.com is already taken. Some jerk registered my name, posted once, and abandoned it. (Four years later, I checked and hitstun.tumblr.com was available again, so I snatched it up and moved this post there.)

For this post, I'm actually doing the Facebook cross-post as a photo upload instead of a link post. Since it's a photo, I get to tag Killer Bee and Fighter to include links to their creators. (Closest I can do on Tumblr is a link to Kuroitenshi’s fighter.)

Here's a scan of the finished design that is now in the arcade stick. Click the image for the full 300dpi version.

I retired the Melty Blood stick art last night at Fight Night at Donatos on OSU campus. I played Melty Blood for the first time in months.

For some reason, Wordpress is having trouble with my full size designs. Click the photo for the 300dpi version.

Also, here’s the template I printed out for Ohayocon. Click the template below for the 300dpi version, and it will print at just the right size for the Qanba Q4RAF.

You'll want to actually click this for the 300dpi version that fits the Qanba Q4RAF. If you’ve got an Eightarc Fusion, just remove the Start button. (Not sure if Tumblr corrupts the DPI settings on these images, but just make sure it’s 300dpi before you start working with it.)

Sources: A white and red Qanba Q4RAF, buttons, and bubble top from Video Games New York, replacement plexiglass from Focus Attack (out of production), Iota Soul, Kuroitenshi, Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code PC version, Zerochan, and the Qanba thread at Shoryuken

Introvert Signal

Sinfest is a web comic veteran with new newspaper-style comics almost every day since 2000. It's up to 4787 strips, or almost four 8-Bit Theaters. Sinfest covers topics that come up a lot on Facebook, so I'm sure you'll like it.

Maybe I’ll use one of the more religiously- or socially-challenging ones later. You know, standard Facebook fare.

Oh cool, you're reading the full blog post now. Here's a GIF I wanted to post, but I can't find who this is or where it came from.

UPDATE: After four and a half years, I've found the source! This comes from the 78th All Japan Costume Grand Prix from 2007, where this earned 3rd place.

Source: Sinfest and yjiefcs.gif via Us Vs Th3m