Mysterious Caravans and Mc Donalds

 Been burning through my McDonald's Monopoly wins and have reached the stage where I'm down to basically chips. I've an apple pie to redeem and some stuff that involves money off that I'll never pay enough to actually use. But chips I can do. So when I do redeem it all they had were "carrot sticks". Getting these for a laugh,  I find that its a small bag of baby carrots that you can get frozen and have had many times. Does anyone sane get these? I mean its you regular frozen baby carrots you can get in a big bag, raw, not cooked. and the worse, having to eat these within two hours of defrosting.

Anyway your scheduled book is the Mysterious Caravan or the Hardys in Morocco, a nice little mystery about them on holiday in Jamaica and them suffering in a storm which turns up a mysterious mask from a shipwreck. A nice sop to diversity is William, a Jamaican guy who likes his roots and culture and is learning Swahili. 

A few lines were changed in this for the UK but not much else. Like I say its not a bad story and whoever wrote it, definitely liked their big words. 

You can read the UK version here and the US original here. 

Pokemon Clover

 We now have this for MGBA on 3DS. After seeing comments on this about humour on Bluesky, thought it would be fun to run through this and see how it compares to a regular Pokemon game.

And, uh... Yeah this rules. 

Never really been to V/ and my only 4chan visit was to B/ which was like having a migraine, some 10 years back. But, god, I've been exposed to so much meme culture and green  texts over the years on twitter, I feel like I've some veteran by osmosis. 

You start out with getting your pokedex and starter from Professor Stump an old cunt with a pegleg. Choosing from Ejacsam, Grasshole or Arabomb. We of course chose Arabomb, and gradually assembled a team from there. Highlights so far:

Getting Goatse man from trading. Hilarious and of course entirely on point.

The Jews running the whole Pokemart enterprise when of course it should be just jeets. 

Darude Sandstorm playing through my first gym leader badge fight.

Oh and the names. Squirrap and Mennopaws have to be my favourites so far. But seeing as there is a Mount Moot and a nice reference to pool's closed there too, I wonder what else I'm gonna find.

Oh and if you want to know, my character is named Anon.  

A Fool

 Been musing over the line from Spam LS (Psalms) the fool says in his heart that there is no god. It makes me wonder who the fool actually is, here. Because isn't it the height of foolishness to believe in something that has no basis of existence, and continue to believe in its existence in the hope that when you die you will go to the good place and not the bad place. 

Looking on Wiki about the line it seems that the fool is someone who disagrees with god, and therefore can do no right. Maybe so, but I think it a trifle foolish that accepting at ones word of a good afterlife based on one mans sacrifice alone. No matter what you have done in life, blameless or evil. Accept Jesus and you're in, regardless of whether you're an axe murderer or paragon of virtue. 

When it comes to religion I would rather be a fool than a sheep.

 

Program(me) for Destruction

 85th book in the series and I have some serious questions to put to whoever wrote this. 

For those unaware, this mystery revolves around the boys taking a case from an Arthur Stockard, owner of the CompuCar company (a sort of proto Tesla) which has a futuristic Voice activated car which is the target of sabotage. They are gifted a car to test and it eventually turns out that it, and the CompuCar factory is the target of a computer virus attack rendering everything a mess

Maybe I've seen too many Danooct1 videos on classic viruses but I'm pretty sure that the main criminal live coding a virus in his own self contained area of CompuCars car factory, in order to infect some master disks linked to (I'm guessing) the net or more likely a series of bulletin boards is not so efficient.  You would have a virus riddled disk and then infect a PC in order to then infect those disks. Oh and did I say he's keeping both Hardy boys and Arthur under control with a revolver.

Another nice touch is the whole car OS being run from a floppy in the boot. Frank checks it out on their PC and finds the virus which is  pretty risky, I'm guess he's going to reinstall DOS if it all goes tits up. 

Apart from that the main difference is like this post in the title and that we used to spell floppies "discs".

I like that we used to spell a computer program as programme. Its got a nice dual edge to it like a timetable for destruction, whereas the US version is just program.

Anyway you can read both here and here.