Ticking away the moments that make up the dull day

There is a trend, in what I suppose I would call the 'new media' landscape, of beginning a sentence with the word "So". Be it Youtube, Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, or wheresoever one might be inclined upon spewing what constitutes a thought into the preceptive field of another. Why is that? Verbal crutch? An implication of casuality as to preemptively defend oneself from appearing to give a squirt of piss, lest they be challenged? Or is it a signifier of sheepishness? Lacking the confidence to jump directly into the thrust of an idea? I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's the sort of thing you begin to notice and will bother you for the rest of your life.

Anywho. Been a minute, eh?

Once upon a time, there was more than one post on this blog. Can't for the life of me remember how many, but I know for certain there was an embarassingly poorly written review of Duke Nukem 3D Megaton Edition from when that came out. I also can't really remember when I decided to glass the entire thing. Probably for the best. I don't intend to spend any amount of time waxing poetic about what's come between 2011 and now in my life, other than to say I had an inspiration to write, thought about posting it on Tumblr, thought better of it, remembered that I had a blogspot account, tried going to Blogspot, was redirected to Google, and had a hell of a time figuring out how to find my way back to this damn thing. But I'm here now, and I put a new banner up. Good lord, look at this old one;

Terrible indeed. Just a bunch of shit I thought was cool slapped around Impact font text. I had a motif going with the multicoloured D20's between a couple different pages I was running at the time, which I only remember because the Tumblr I use as a depository for my art still has one of them. Look at me, said I wasn't going to wax poetic and then went right to it. Moving on.

THE THING I WANTED TO WRITE ABOUT:

Illustration titled "The Commander Keens", originally found on DeviantART, is a band logo from untold years ago and cannot relocate the source of. Sincere apologies to the artist.

Back in 2019, Bethesda Softworks, riding high off the success of DOOM 4, and the rebooted Wolfenstein series, announced a new Commander Keen. Shock and awe! Except, it was a shovelware iphone game with graphics suited to a children's flash animated web series. Boo and hiss! Didn't take long for a sizable amount of backlash to head their way. Hard to verify now, but I recall the announcement trailer had something akin to a 1-1000 like/dislike ratio on YouTube. Fans of the original games voicing their distaste, or the uninitiated voicing their lack of interest? In either case, after that fateful E3 there was never another word from Bethesda about it. The 'GoKeen.com' URL from the trailer redirects you wholly unceremoniously to the Bethesda homepage, and it's fairly clear that they'd rather we all simply forget about it. That being the case, why mention it at all? It was four years ago, after all.

Well, that's just it. That was four years ago. Ne'er a mention of the series made again outside a few references in DOOM 5. They went on to shit out Mighty DOOM, a shovelware mobile game based on DOOM which, with two recent blockbuster titles under it's storied belt, can weather the hit to its reputation. But nothing for ol' Billy Blaze. A character who, one could convincingly argue, was the Mario of DOS, languishes in obscurity, and I just don't get why. Clearly they have the means to produce something with the character, they intended to do so, and one can assume from the reaction they got from the mobile game announcement that there has to be some kind of audience with some kind of expectations for what that should look like. Neo-3D Realms at the very least produced Rad Rogers as something of a spirtual sequel to that early 90s DOS platforming genre. It was kinda shit, but so is everything else they've made. If Nintendo can put out four New Super Mario Bros titles, one would think that the guys raking in money off six trillion Skyrim re-releases might see their way to knocking out a sidescrolling action game. Wishful thinking, I guess.

That's about all I got at the moment. Maybe I'll make a habit of writing here. Maybe not. If, for some godforsaken reason, you've managed to stumble your way onto this post and know who I am, or don't know who I am for that matter, I have a proper website now. Well, a dot com, at least. Had it for the better part of a decade, actually. You can find it, and by extension, me, at https://www.KaijuTurtle.com . It's basically a directory of links to profiles I have on other sites. Going back to that notion of habitually posting here, perhaps I will add a link to this page in time. Wouldn't that be novel?

In the meantime, Keep your stick on the ice.