The New Year’s Celeste race I do with friends happened today. When I sat down to practise this year I decided to just replay the game from the start, redoing all the main levels, getting all the strawberries and crystal hearts again, etc. I fully cleared¹ the A and B sides of chapters one through six and fully cleared the A side of chapter seven and then failed to find the time to do an actual practise runs for the race. Whoops. But I still managed to set a personal best for the race, which surprised me because I felt quite fatigued today during the race and didn’t feel that I was doing my best.

Even so, it was Ruby who came out on top again—managing to come in under the hour mark!—with Caoimhe³, joining for the first time, in second.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	0°59′30.986″	69	1
🥈Caoimhe³	1°02′14.985″	123	1
🥉Caoimhe′	1°07′39.175″	143	0

And of course we also did a pre-run warmup race of Pico-8 Celeste.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	4′50″	26	1
🥈Caoimhe′	5′28″	26	0
🥉Caoimhe³	7′42″	57	1

I am probably going to wind down using Wplace. It was fun to mess around with for a few days, flex my pixel art muscles, see what other people are drawing, see how the canvas evolves, but it’s very much a flash in the pan thing that most people are going to move on again from quickly, myself included. I have dotted down a few more things on the map, this time putting some larger pieces of other people’s art in a few places rather than my own pixel designs.

I put down the Pico-8 logo and a few characters near the Pico Pico Café in Kichijōji, Tokyo. This is a busy area and it has quickly been drawn over again, but all of this is ephemeral.

One of my past brief obsessions was St. Bride’s a strange mock-Victorian girl’s school holiday destination in Ailt an Chorráin, Donegal that in the 1980s promised a total disconnect from modern society and modern technology. They advertised that they had no electricity and did not believe in such things and also published a series of text adventure games for the ZX Spectrum. That is a rabbit to save for a future post, perhaps. I planted a shrunk-down recreation of the title screen of the game The Secret of St. Bride’s in the village where the school was based.

I started using the Blue Marble user script for these which helped with planning out size and position for these larger drawings a lot, as well as speeding up the actual drawing. I dropped a little art of Transy east of Bournemouth. It’s modified from a comic panel but this is the art from this lot that I can probably take the most credit as being “mine”.

I also draw the character select art for Snolf that I originally commissioned from Mars Gainsboro and decided to arbitrary place them on the Isle of Skye Golf Club.

Finally, I also contributed my pixels to my friend Ruby’s big rendition of the art for the P-Model album In a Model Room in Tsukuba, a hotbed for artwork of Susumu Hirasawa. She contributed to helping draw my art a lot as well.

After reading yesterday’s post my friend Ruby reached out to me and told me that she was able to find the shortened Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes one hundred and two, one hundred and three, etc. by searching Nitter instances. Nitter doesn’t really work any more either due to Twitter’s A.P.I.s having been locked down significantly but there are still running instances with archives of a lot of accounts.

After finding some posts that way and then opening them in Twitter itself I could see that was blocked from viewing them due to the posts had been flagged as potentially containing adult material and Twitter wanted to verify my age before I could see them. Another system working well, then. And another way that the internet is being closed off. Presumably this is actually why they didn’t show up in searches for me.

I tried a couple of Nitter-scraping tools to see if I could mass download the videos but I couldn’t get them to work. I had also previously tried to use an Extreme Picture Finder template on the Twitter account too but it couldn’t go past the most recent thousand posts from the account. Not really having any luck with automating this I went to bed but while I was asleep Ruby painstakingly went and manually downloaded every episode she could that I was missing and sent them on to me. Thank you so much, Ruby!

There were a few that none of the Nitter instances she tried seemed to have and don’t seem to be findable on Twitter either. As such I am still missing episodes 121, 188, 215 and Capsule Monsters episodes 5 and 8, but I have most of it now at least.

The show is now living on my Jellyfin server with its own extremely high-effort cover art for it that you can see above.

Update: I managed to find episode 121 and Capsule Monsters episode 5 through Googling the exact phrasing of the posts and I was able to find the post for Capsule Monsters 8 via a Wayback Machine snapshot of Bing Bong’s Twitter profile, but episodes 188 and 215 don’t seem to be indexed on Google or Bing nor visible on any of the Wayback Machine snapshots. There are only a few snapshots on there from the period where he was uploading the episodes, unfortunately.

Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon was a fascinating coda to Sonic Frontiers, a very experimental expansion to a game where Sonic Team was already going outside of their comfort zone to do new things with the series. The world map threw together Only Up!-esque climbing challenges, playable Tails, Amy and Knuckles very different movesets to how they have worked in past, an absurdly fast and powerful dropdash for Sonic in 3D and wildly more difficult combat than the base game. I streamed it to some friends when it came out and one of them remarked “this is the least designed game ever made.” I couldn’t really disagree with her. So much of this is janky and half-broken in various ways and it was incredibly fun. It made me hopeful that Sonic Team was happy to keep experimenting with what worked for the series and keep allowing more player freedom in future games¹.

In keeping with this, while the levels in the base Sonic Frontiers were almost entirely reused from previous games the ones in The Final Horizon were much more experimental, being very clearly thrown together with very basic assets rather than having their own sculpted level geometry but also with much fewer guardrails and much less guided than a normal Sonic level and with new, bespoke mechanics and side missions, some of which required more slow, careful exploration than high-speed platforming.

Early on, while playing one level, 4-D, I noticed an exclamation mark appearing over Sonic’s head in certain locations, accompanied by a beeping. You cans see it at about a 1′18″ in in this video. It would turn red and beep faster as I approached a certain spot. When I saw this the first thing that came to mind was Knuckles’ emerald-hunting missions from the Sonic Adventure games and thought it might be part of one of the level’s optional missions. I actually had a bit of trouble finding the source of the beeping but once I zeroed in on it and finally found it I was greeted to Sonic being blown up into the air by a mine, his hands held down protecting his singed arse. This was a very sudden gear-shift in my head and in my confusion, still processing what I was seeing, I screamed “I’M MARIO BURNT ASS?!”² into my microphone, which caused myself and my friend Ruby who was watching to double over laughing till we couldn’t breath and then Ruby set my display name on the Discord server to Mario Burnt Ass for a month. It was funny.

That’s the story.

Thanks.

talking about picking Saiyan names with friends and I am going with Choka, from artichoke

My friend Ruby said Tus, from lettuce.

happy Piccolo Day

Since New Year’s Eve 2021 some some friends and I have done an annual race of the game Celeste. We all start at the same time and then the first person to get to the summit wins. We track it using the in-game speedrun timer.

2021

I was very into Celeste at the time and won by a pretty wide margin. I don’t have a record of how everyone else did, but I completed the game in just under two hours, with three hundred and six deaths and six strawberries¹.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Caoimhe	1°54′55.047″	306	6

2022

After this two of my friends got into the game very hard. My friend Ruby ended up getting most of the golden berries², something I haven’t even attempted and another friend, who wished to be called The Shadowblade in this post, started getting into Celeste mods. So when the next race happpened on the 8th of January 2022 Ruby took the gold medal from me, beating my time by half an hour while I barely improved. The Shadowblade sadly did not finish and gave up four flags from the summit due to hand pain.

🏃	⏱️
🥇Ruby	1°22′10.918″
🥈Caoimhe	1°51′25.318″
🥉The Shadowblade	D.N.F.

2023:

On the same day the next year myself and Ruby both improved our times, with Ruby coming in first again, a newcomer who I will call D. in second and myself in third. The Shadowblade did not finish again.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	1°08′01.275″
🥈D.	1°21′03.071″
🥉Caoimhe	1°34′46.007″	245	0
🏅The Shadowblade	D.N.F.

2024:

The next race was on the 14th of January 2024 and I managed to take more than twenty minutes off of my time, which was not enough to beat Ruby’s best time, but Ruby did a worse race than the previous year and it was enough for me to win for the second time.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Caoimhe	1°12′40.296″	128	0
🥈Ruby	1°14′53.679″	144	3
🥉The Shadowblade	D.N.F.

We also decided to do a little race of the Pico-8 version of Celeste, which Ruby won.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	5′11″	29	4
🥈Caoimhe	7′50″	57	1

2025

Finally, this year’s one took place on New Year’s Day. Ruby had a clear lead from the start and has gotten very close to the one-hour mark, just three minutes short of it. I came in second, doing a bit worse than last year, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering an hour before the race I posted about how worn down, tired and sore I was. The Shadowblade finished this time, coming in at just over an hour and a half.

We were also joined by our friend Stella who had never played Celeste before but decided to join in on the race. After the rest of us had finished Ruby said if that Stella actually finished she would forfeit her victory to her and shockingly Stella actually did. She finished the game in one sitting in just over ten hours with closing in on four thousand deaths and nine strawberries.

Ruby insists that I should record Stella as the winner, but I am a petty bitch and I never said that I was going to forfeit. If she wants to fine but if I she does I’m saying that makes me the winner.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	1°03′38.846″	75	1
🥈Caoimhe	1°22′37.421″	190	0
🥉The Shadowblade	1°31′51.536″	275	0
🏅Stella	10°06′38.428″	3839	9

2026

Maybe next year we will come in under the one-hour mark?

They all suck shit and they’re all the same, basically.

My friend Ruby on the Friday the 13th movies, one of which she streams every Friday the 13th.

There are thirteen theatrical movies based off The Ring, you know, the one with the tape that kills you and the girl who crawls out of the television. Caoimhe and Ruby go deeper into the well into parts of the series that most people don’t know exist in this unofficial fan podcast.

There are thirteen theatrical movies based off The Ring, you know, the one with the tape that kills you and the girl who crawls out of the television. Caoimhe and Ruby go deeper into the well into parts of the series that most people don’t know exist in this unofficial fan podcast.