So not sure what prompted it, but I decided to try and play through Final Fantasy 1, on the original NES, using party setups that are especially difficult.

The game is designed to be played with characters, of varying power and roles. The way to make the game most painful is to only use one character from the outset, and making that character be one of the most weak ones….

… so that’s what I did! First up, is a red mage. He’s a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. He turned out to be fairly simple, as he can do everything just well enough to beat the game.

Below, a white mage. This was much more difficult. He has nearly 0 offensive power for the most difficult stages of the game, and ends up doing 1 damage per round on bosses than have 130 to 180 hp. In the end, I had to upgrade him to a white wizard for the spell FADE, as physical attacks were not enough to kill the last boss, Chaos, who heals himself to full life every 8 to 10 turns.

Screenshots show full info on both characters, as well as all theor compadres dead at level 1.

But then one day… tragedy struck. The camera lost its ability to auto-focus, and was too cheap to have a manual focus. Which meant that virtually all images it took were blurry. So I put the camera away. And let it sit. And it did a good job at that. Until yesterday, I picked it up, and decided to see if its horrible problem still was occurring. It wasn’t!!!!111

So, in honor of this magical self-healing, here’s a picture to celebrate the triumphant return of ericonceaday. It’s also the once-a-day picture for today:

I realize the irony of me being excited about it auto-focusing once again and then putting up a blurry/grainy picture may be too much for some of you to bear, but it also wasn’t meant to take pictures at 3 inches away. Clearer pictures will be forthcoming!!

Oh, and if you didn’t ever see Eric Onceday before, or want to subscribe to the RSS of it:

ericonceaday’s Photostream
RSS Feed of ericonceday’s Photosteam

Without further ado, please follow the following instructions.

1. Begin playing “Youtube Video A.” Ensure that you hear music playing. It is critical to what I might like to call, a “great success.”
2. Scroll down to “Youtube Video B.” The moment you hear the music from Video A singing “na na na na na na na na na na na, na na na na na na na naaaaa”, begin playing Video B. If numbers are more your game, its at 0:17 in the video.
3. Enjoy the 28 seconds of perfect sync between the audio and visual components of your digital hug. Eat that, e-cards.

YouTube Video A

YouTube Video B

FL: What’s up with Henry Earl?

If you ask for a FL, you obviously didn’t watch this video.

Feel free to peruse the above links if you like, I’ll talk about each of the three below:

Guerrilla Gardening: As usual, Wikipedia has the best one-paragraph summary for what this means:

Guerrilla gardening is political gardening, a form of nonviolent direct action, primarily practiced by environmentalists. It is related to land rights, land reform, and permaculture. Activists take over (“squat”) an abandoned piece of land which they do not own to grow crops or plants. Guerrilla gardeners believe in re-considering land ownership in order to reclaim land from perceived neglect or misuse and assign a new purpose to it.

While I’m sure it would be fascinatingly easy to devolve into a political discussion regarding this topic, but as usual, this isn’t my aim.

I’m more surprised to learn that this is the formal name for the practice that Shane Claiborne describes in The Irresistible Revolution for planting flowers in trashed TV’s in abandoned neighborhoods of the poorer areas of Philadelphia. I also wonder what the effects are on a community of this type of action, for the better or worse. Things to think on.

Seed Bombing: This one’s just awesome, and heavily related to the previous topic:

Seed bombing, also known as “Seed Grenades” is a technique of introducing vegetation to arid soils or otherwise inhospitable terrains. A seed bomb is a compressed clod of soil containing live vegetation that may be thrown or dropped onto a terrain to be modified.

How awesome is that. Wonder how hard it is to make a seed bomb. All you’d really need is soil, water, a very hardy plant, and then maybe some sort of biodegradable netting that would encase the “bomb.” My gut tells me (or rather, the place where my gut would be if I had a gut, so perhaps “the place 2 to 3 inches in front of my stomach tells me”) that the Internets most certainly has the answers I would seek on such a topic.

Food Security: This one was listed a related article to Guerrilla Gardening:

Food security describes a situation in which people do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. World-wide around 852 million men, women and children are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty; while up to 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty.

I had never considered there would be such a succinct term to describe this problem. The article goes on to explain some views held by various organizations on how to bring food security to more people, and some potential risks to food security world wide.

Its good idea for us to have reminders such as this of what our brethren worldwide face as a daily reality. How and when and with what means we alleviate such a problem, I have plenty of ideas and few answers.

Oh, and between this blog post and this one, I must be becoming a hippie or liberal or communist or something. Sorry about that. I think I’ll blame it on Josh, as he’s the only hippie liberal communist I know.

FL: Awesome slideshow of 101 odd pictures – Instead of trying to describe this funny link better… look at the following photo. If it makes you giggle, you’ll appreciate this link.

I know I’ve dropped off the face of the earth (read: Internets) in the three main arenas that I was on it, but I’m updating this one and another to let you know that the third has just been spammed with three months of me carrying a camera around in my pants. Even this very moment, it’s receiving its spam, which I bequeathed on it gladly. Here’s the links, if you don’t already have them:

Link on Flickr
RSS for the same – note: Feed is not the one for Flickr, this is for the onceaday set only, which is what you want.
FL: don’t do this.

If you don’t see the problem, here let me help with my trademarked bright pink spraypaint in mspaint:

Wow.

Mad props to d10 for showing me this. If you get weirded out, go tell him about it.

FL: Crocodile Chomps Off Zoo Worker’s Arm