Mega Man 2 Quilt

life, Nintendo, Pixel Art, Uncategorized
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The Mega Man 2 Quilt Project.

In 201X, a Mega Man fan on reddit posted photos of an amazing hand-made quilt, using the Stage Select screen from Mega Man 2.

For years I wished that I could make such a quilt.

In 2023, I asked my friend Melissa if she could help me with the project, and she agreed.

Months of planning, shopping for fabric, measuring and cutting, and sewing ensued for many Sundays.

I replicated the art from the game at 1 inch per pixel, resulting in a 96×96 inch quilt. It was a fun project, and I learned a lot.

I couldn’t have done it without Melissa’s help!

QUILT, Mega Man! For everlasting peace!

– Dr. Light –

Inspiration

The original inspiration, this was posted to Reddit in 2016 and went viral on social media; I eventually found out about it and was amazed. What a cool project.

Whoever made it did such a good job, I became obsessed wanting to make one of my own! I hope mine turns out as good…

Long-time readers of my Facebook may remember a few years ago, I bought a ripoff of this quilt from some shitty e-commerce popup store who had stolen this original image to mis-represent their product, and shipped me the “Wish version” of the quilt, which was just a printed fabric version done in a cheap poly-cotton blend.

I wasn’t happy about it and got a refund through PayPal buyer protection, thankfully. But it didn’t quench my desire to have the real thing someday, somehow…

But it would be years before I could put the project together. Then, last summer, I asked Melissa, who is very crafty, if she knew how to make a quilt, and talked to her about the project, and she said she’d help.

Melissa is awesome. She is very generous with her time and I can’t thank her enough for sticking through the project and seeing it to the end.

Design

To ensure the colors were correct, I took a screen shot of the stage select screen using an emulator…

… and then grabbed the portraits of the eight Robot Masters and arranged them.

Actual dimensions: 96×96 pixels. Each Robot Master’s images is 32×32.

Based on the dimensions of Queen and King size bed comforters, I set each pixel to be one inch.

This thing’s going to be 8 feet by 8 feet when it’s done! That’s huge!

Laying it out, pixel by pixel

Looking closely at the original project photo from reddit, it looks like they cut out each and every pixel for their quilt as an individual square.

I didn’t take that approach. I thought that would be a lot of fabric waste, thread waste, and so much more labor that it would take forever, so I figured it would be best to economize. I don’t know whether that was the best decision, but it’s what I did.

To reduce the amount of cutting and sewing, I combined pixels wherever possible, grouping square areas of the same color at 2×2, 3×3, 4×4, and 5×5 inches.

I hoped that using different square sizes would create an interesting kind of patchwork appearance. But mainly I was just trying to be efficient.

Manually going through the image and deciding how to group the squares together was a meticulous and time-consuming process, taking many hours spread over several evenings, but helped to conserve both fabric and labor.

Once I had the squares blocked out, I had to count them all — accurately — so that I could calculate how much fabric would be needed.

Design sheet for Bubble Man
Air Man design sheet
Quick Man design sheet
Heat Man design sheet
Dr. Wiley design sheet
Wood Man design sheet
Metal Man design sheet
Flash Man design sheet
Crash Man design sheet

Materials

The fabric, before cutting

Picking the right fabric was SUPER important. Absolutely critical. I wanted 100% cotton fabric, and it was important to get the colors right. I am amazed at how close to the actual screen colors I was able to get with the fabric.

It took a few weeks of shopping and hunting online to find all the right stuff. I think I spent about a month shopping at different stores, if not longer. In the end we found everything in local fabric stores: JoAnn Fabrics and Pins and Needles in Middleburg Heights, OH.

The process of selecting the colors from thousands of bolts of fabric was painstaking.

I probably spent a good 6-8 hours standing in store aisles, just looking at different hues and shades, comparing, testing them against each other, and comparing them to the image on my cell phone screen, to make sure I was getting the closest match that I could find.

Being obsessive about getting the colors right was the only way I could have been happy with the final product.

Melissa was awesome and super patient, and I guess it’s a good thing she has a similar love for crafting that I do. She gets it, and I really appreciate that about her.

I took only very slight license with color. The main difference being that the light and dark red colors (most prominent in Quick Man and Metal Man) look a bit more purple/maroon/magenta in the screen capture.

But I think that going with a truer red was definitely the way to go. These colors not only look right, they look very good together. The color gamut of an NTSC tv set isn’t 32-bit RGB color anyway, so even the emulator is taking license to some degree. These colors are as true as they can be.

Some of the panels, pre-assembly, bagged… “in kit form.”

I think we took 4-5 weeks of Sunday afternoons just to measure and cut all the fabric.

In total there are 4613 squares of various sizes comprising just the top side of the quilt. If we went with all 1×1″ squares, it would have been 9216 squares, so my design layout cut that down by almost 50%.

This meant much less cutting and much less sewing, much less thread, and much less fabric needed since there will be much less seams than if we had made it out of 1×1 squares for the entire thing.

After cutting all the fabric, we counted out the squares for each section, and put them together in ziplock bags. These “kits” helped Melissa keep the project organized by putting all the squares she needed to assemble one section together in one bag.

Quick Man, Air Man, Heat Man, and Wood Man kits.

Bubble Man is the Top-Left section, so we did him first. This is how it looked once completed. This was the first section, so I was really excited to see it. The colors look really good!

– B – Get Equipped With Bubble Lead
Melissa opted to work on the center section next. Dr. W. for some reason.
Dr. W in process.

Progress was slow at first, but we seemed to pick up speed as we made progress. I’m sure we were figuring out how to work more efficiently and as we gained experience, we got faster. Bubble Man took two Sunday sessions, and after the 3rd Sunday we were only halfway done with Dr. W. 

Looks like all that effort I put into selecting the colors paid off.
Dr. Wily completed. The blue is so close to the color on the TV screen. I think this is going to turn out really great! 

Melissa surprised me by completing this section during the week, so when we started on Sunday #4, we already had two sections done, and ready to start on the third. 

Melissa picked Heat Man for the 3rd section to work on. This was how much we had completed after Sunday #4.
The Heat Man Design sheet (printed)
Heat Man completed. I think he’s supposed to look like he’s about to blow a fireball out of his mouth, or something.

– H –

Get Equipped With
Atomic Fire 

The Squares that will become Air Man.
Air Man progress…
Air Man halfway completed.
Air Man at the end of the 5th Sunday session.

We would have completed this sooner, but we kept getting knocked off of the moving platforms by the Lightning Lords…

Message from Dr. Melissa. Air Man completed! She worked all evening on Sunday #5. Get your weapons ready!

– A –

Get Equipped With
Air Shooter. 

Back planning

Meanwhile, I still had to come up with a design for the bottom side of the quilt.

I could have just gone with a simple, solid color bottom, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do another large image paying homage to the Blue Bomber.

I decided to do this jumping Mega Man sprite. It was hard to decide which keyframe to go with, but in the end I thought this one seemed like the most victorious and happy. That’s the spirit I wanted to capture.

This image scaled up to 96×96 inches pretty well if I used a scale factor of 3 inches per pixel. With almost all of the squares being 3×3″, assembly is greatly simplified.

Back to the top

When we get to work on the bottom half, I expect it will take much less time to complete. 

Quick Man progress. Sewing Sunday #6.

Melissa has gotten quicker at sewing, too. I think most if not all of this progress was made in just one afternoon. it looks to me like her skill with getting the seams to be straight and the seams to align has improved, too.

I spent this afternoon cutting out hundreds of squares that will make the back. I laid out, drew, and cut something over 400 squares, by myself, in under 4 hours. That’s much faster than I was doing it when we started.

It’s so cool to see our skills improving with experience! 

Quick Man with his design sheet.

I don’t remember how many Sundays of cutting we put in on the project, or how many Shopping Sundays. I do know that we were sourcing material for the project in August – September, and by October we were into cutting.

Then we took a long break because it wasn’t convenient to get together during Nov-Dec due to holidays and what not. So how much time has this project taken so far? I’m not sure. But at least 6 Sundays of sewing for 4-6 hours, times two of us working together, plus whatever time Melissa has been putting in on it on her own, plus the time I spent on my own time to create the design docs and laying out and counting squares…. it’s a LOT of hours! 

Quick Man, completed.

Melissa finished it during the week and surprised me when I stopped by the next Sunday. Well, I wasn’t all that surprised. She’s been making great progress on the sewing during the week. We’re getting a section completed every 1-2 weeks.

-Q-
Get Equipped with
Quick Boomerang. 

Wood Man. This was how much we had finished after a Sunday afternoon. Wood Man has a lot of 1″x1″ squares, so a lot of sewing, making for slower progress. 

Wood Man, completed.

Melissa needed a Sunday to herself, but when we got together the following Sunday, she had completed Wood Man.

-W-
Get Equipped With
Wood Shield

Flash Man, about 1/2 completed after a Sunday afternoon’s worth of work. The progress with this one was pretty fast.
Flash Man completed.

-F-
Get Equipped With
Time Stopper

Get Your Weapons Ready!

Crash Man completed.

-C-
Get Equipped With
Crash Bombs

Get Your Weapons Ready!

Look how good Crash Man turned out!
Metal Man, completed.

Melissa had to take time away from the project in Summer, so nothing happened from about July until October.

But then…

Melissa surprised me by sending me photos of the completed quilt! She has done it! Beaten all 9 Robot Masters and added their powers to the MM2 Quilt!

-M-
Get Equipped With
Metal Blade

Top side, assembled.

Melissa finished assembly of the top half and bottom half on her own. Without cutting and counting and sorting squares, she didn’t think there was much for me to do, so she took it on all by herself to complete the rest of the work once I had cut and counted all the kits.

I would have liked to watch her sewing technique, because there’s a lot of skill involved in using a sewing machine, especially doing it effectively. It’s something I would have liked to learn more of at a younger age.

This thing is HUGE. It’s hard to appreciate just how big it is, being that it is a 96 x 96 pixel image. Keep in mind, each pixel in the original image has been blown up to 1×1″. For scale, at the top and bottom of this photo, those are COUCHES.

The bottom side

I didn’t get to see any of the progress of the bottom side coming together. A little sad, but the surprise of seeing it suddenly completed makes up for it.

Now… the only thing that remains to be done is to join the top and bottom, with some batting between them, and my mission will be completed.

Quilt, Mega Man! For Everlasting Peace!

Reflections

Compare/contrast. The original that inspired my project.

Their light blue is a lot more saturated and cyan-aquamarine; ours is more sky blue. We also went with a more contrasty pair of colors for the flesh tones, with the darker being a lot more red than what the other project used.

The inspiration quilt from reddit

Both are beautiful, and I’m very impressed that ours turned out every bit as well as the original. I think we did it justice!

The quilt by Melissa and Me.

I think their light blue works better for the Air Man and Dr. Wily and Flash Man panels, where it is used for a highlight or two-tone paint job effect; the lighter blue that I went with, I think works better on the reflections on Metal Man’s helmet crest and the reflections on the glass visor on Crash Man and Flash Man’s helmets.

I like the greens that I picked a bit better than what the original quilt used. And I think I like my yellow slightly better as well. We both opted for more reddish colors than are in the NES palette for Quick Man and Metal Man, who are a bit more magenta and purple-y. But despite how the screen capture from the emulator may look, I think that what the two quilts picked for reds are truer to the intent of the game designers and truer to how I remembered and envisioned the characters in my mind.

More than anything, I’m blown away at how well all the colors work together in the image. They were really chosen with great care. I went back and forth with 4-5 and even more candidates, eyeballing them, comparing them to each other and to the reference image that I had on my cell phone, to ensure that everything was as close to perfect as I could find within the limitations of what the fabric stores had in stock. It’s perhaps the easiest to take for granted part of the project, but the color picking was absolutely critical and extremely successful.

I think the color picking and the sewing were equally important in contributing to the end result, and I couldn’t be happier with both.

The reference image, built from screen capture obtained from the Mesen NES emulator on digital RGB output.

Looking at the original colors screen-captured from emulation, I think our “wood grain” matches the contrast in the NES, and their light blue is a better match for the NES.

Of course there IS no true color. Every NES displayed on a NTSC (or PAL, in Europe) CRT TV, which used analog signals and the color rendered on every screen was slightly different due to differences in both calibration and manufacturing. So there’s really no “true” color when it comes to NES palette and NES graphics.

What you get in emulation is usually very accurate in terms of how we remember we perceived the color, but of course it’s digital signal, and usually displayed in RGB color on an LED or LCD screen. Very, very similar to what we saw on our TV sets in the 80s. And yet, in reality, quite different.

Finishing The Quilt

With the top and bottom halves assembled, we had all we needed to take on the final level: assembly of the finished quilt with batting and top stitching.

I wanted to use 100% natural wool for the batting, because I think wool is the best fiber. I went with Hobbs Heirloom Premium Wool batting. This was my choice primarily because it was available in the right dimensions to work with my 96×96 quilt without the need to overlap two pieces, but it’s also a well regarded maker.

Melissa wasn’t able to do the top-stitching to complete final assembly, as this requires special equipment that she does not have. Through my local sewing and fabric store, I connected with a quilter who had the necessary gear, a lady named Etta. I met with Etta and discussed the project and showed her the pieces we had assembled, and after looking at different topstitch patterns in her book, I eventually found one that I liked. I left everything with her and waited several weeks for her to complete the work.

I felt it was important to use a stitch pattern that didn’t rely on a grid of right angles that would not be aligned to the grid size of the pixels in the image on the quilt. This was important in order to hide very slight errors in the size of individual pixels due to being stitched together with slight variance in how much of an edge there was at the seams between all the little pixel-sized squares of fabric. So I had initially picked a stitch pattern that used a wobbly, undulating pattern that went back and forth along the length of the entire quilt before doubling back each way.

The next time I heard from Etta, it was her notifying me that my project was the next to go in her production schedule. She had taken a practice run with the stitch pattern that I had selected, and was concerned that it would not work well, because it has a tendency to bunch the fabric in one direction but not in the opposite direction, and this would lead to the finished dimensions compressing one way, making the result a squished square. I looked some more and found another stitch pattern that I thought would work well, and she agreed.

The pattern I ended up going with was an interlocking diamond pattern that I found on a quilting website, mycreativestitches.com.

The final assembly was completed 1/21/2025. Etta sent me a photo of the finished quilt, ready to be picked up. It looks even better than I hoped it would! I am very impressed with the quality of the work that my quilting partners put into this project, and grateful for their contributions. I can’t thank them enough for everything they’ve done. It is spectacular and something that I’m genuinely proud to have had a hand in creating — even if most of the really skilled work wasn’t me.

MESSAGE FROM DR. ETTA! QUILT-1 COMPLETED! GET YOUR WEAPONS READY!

Delivery Day

1/25/2025.

I just got back from picking up my finished quilt from Etta at Pins and Needles.

This has been in some ways a journey of a lifetime for me. I have always loved blankets. When I was a baby, I was given a blanket that had Winnie The Pooh characters printed on it, which I loved. I was very attached to it through my entire life, and used it all the time, and when it came time for me to go away to college, I intended to take it with me, but my mom, fearing that I would be made fun of, sewed a cover over it. I still have that blanket, but it’s too small to be of much use to me these days, and too delicate, so it’s been put away in a linen closet and is kind of retired. But I still love it, and I think one of the things that is important about me is that the love I have for things that I do love is enduring and ageless. Maybe that baby blanket had something to do with that.

Anyway, Etta was fantastic. She did an amazing job with the final assembly, and even though the store was busier than I had ever seen it, and she was preparing to teach a class at 1pm, she took time to go over everything with me, and was generous with her time and her knowledge, and filled me with the feeling that she understood how important the project was to me, how much I had put into it, and how much of an honor it was for her to take part in that process. She took it out when I showed up at her work station, and unfolded it for me and showed me the results of her work.

She mentioned that this quilt turned out very well, and that it was because of the work that we had done prior to coming to her, which her work serves to show off. Etta’s philosophy is that it’s not about her top stitching, it’s about the fabric and the work done to put the pieces together, and the stitching shouldn’t detract from that or call attention to itself, only enhance the pieces and present them in their best light. Etta is wonderful and worth every penny I paid her, and then some.

She also said that the quilt I brought her tested her limits. Because of its size, and the thickness of the double batting that I had provided to her, it went right up to the limit of what her equipment was capable of handling, and provided a challenge to her skills. She said that just getting the batting to relax and uncrease from being stuffed into its packaging for so long took three days. She had to hang the batting and let it unfurl and relax, and used water spray to get the wrinkles out.

She pointed out a few spots on the quilt that would need a bit of repair, and recommended using a technique called ladder stitch to reinforce a couple of the seams. She said that these spots were due to the sewing bing too close to the edge of the fabric where the seam was sewn. I don’t know the technique but I will study it and learn it and apply it to these repairs and hopefully I will do OK with it, although it is a bit intimidating. I think I will try to practice on some scrap fabric or something until I’m confident that I can do it myself.

Etta had some other advice if I do another project in the future. First, she said she recommended starching the fabric before cutting and sewing. Starching will cause the fabric to act more like paper. It will cut easier, lie flatter, and be less wrinkled, all of which means that cutting and sewing the squares will be easier, and result in more precise, accurate measurements which will be reflected in the final results.

She also recommended using a higher stitch count when working on joining smaller pieces, such as the many 1″x1″ squares that made up the quilt. Smaller stitches should hold these pieces together better, as they kind of loop together and create a stronger chain of thread. She did say that Melissa did a very good job of keeping everything square, which can be really challenging when working with such small pieces of fabric, especially on a piece of such a large finished dimensions. And if it wasn’t for that, there wouldn’t have been much that she could have done to save it. So the results being as good as they are is a testament to the work we put into it, and we should be proud of ourselves. Which, I assured her, we are. For her first time working on any quilting project, Melissa did outstanding.

She also recommended using a darker grey thread than I had picked for the sewing of the fabric pieces; she went with a darker grey for the top stitching, while I had gone with a lighter shade, more of a middle grey, which she thinks stands out in contrast more against the darker colored parts. While her dark stitching does show more on the lighter parts of the fabric, more of the quilt is darker shades, and on the whole you want to pick the thread that will blend in with most of the quilt. Which makes sense.

Etta said that when washing, I could machine wash it, but I should use cold water and dry it by air drying in a dryer, not using heat. Or I can line dry it.

So that’s pretty much the end of the story. The epilogue will be learning to ladder stitch and hunting over both sides of the quilt, looking for spots that need some reinforcement, and stitching them up so that hopefully the quilt will be strong and last many years.

End

It made me SO unbelievably happy to take on the project and work on it. And SO thankful for the help I had in getting to come together.

Every day that I worked on it, every little bit of progress had me vibrating with joy and excitement. I was bouncing.

Yes. It is such a nice thing to have something and care about it and work on it and watch it develop over time and then finally be completed.

End.

Yars Rising trailer looks “Dread”-fully Metroidvaniac

Atari
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Atari dropped a trailer for a new game in the Yars’ Revenge series, Yars Rising.

Quite a departure from OG Yars, but maybe in a good way

The game seems to be primarily in the Metroidvania genre, with a heavy Metroid: Dread influence.

It looks competent, yet uninspired.

Had Atari been ready to launch the VCS with this in 2017, the year Metroid: Dread released, that would have been something, wouldn’t it?

But as it is, it feels like Atari cribbed Nintendo/MercurySteam and created a “me too” game that recycles the original Yars Revenge, to create a “me-too-vania”.

If the mechanics, level design, and boss battles are on par with Metroid Dread, it’d be worth money and worth a play, I suppose. But something about this feels a bit too “on the nose”, like it’s really little more than a re-skinning of Dread, with all the soul and originality sucked out of it, and the wireframe of what’s left painted in with bits of Yars “lore”.

I feel like it’s a bit sad, because if Atari could put all this effort into a project and have it turn out reasonably good, then they’re firing on nearly all cylinders; they just need to have that spark of originality and innovation.

That’s what the games that original Yars Revenge creator Howard Scott Warshaw created for Atari back in the day always did with the games he created. HSW’s games on the original Atari 2600 innovated, pushed limits, and advanced notions of what a video game could be.

So with that in mind, it’s a little bit sad to see his creation, Yars Revenge, being recycled on what looks like a generic Metroid: Dread clone that will genuinely surprise me if it does bring something new to the table.

The main character of Yars Rising is a woman (like Samus), and has a lot of “attitude”, quipping wisecracks and sounding annoyed at the things she must go through all in a day’s work for a hero such as herself. I think the character model is well done, attractive without being too sexualized, and the voice acting is pretty good. Yet somehow the whole feels a bit forced, and falls a bit flat.

The graphical style of the platform engine feels almost entirely derivative of Metroid: Dread, and while I loved the graphics in Metroid Dread, here it all feels a bit too “seen before.” I’ll be honest, I’m not expecting that much out of Atari’s new releases. I’m happy to ignore what they release if it’s not my thing. It’d be great to see Atari release something that puts them on par with where Nintendo was at… 7 years ago… but I’m not exactly expecting that. I’ll be happy to be surprised, though. I’m open to being surprised by Yars Rising, but not expecting it.

It’s only a 2 minute trailer, so I am not going to speculate too much on the game. There are a few clips showing classic Yars Revenge style gameplay sequences among the clips of Metroid: Dread ripoff fare, but how this is integrated into the whole isn’t really clear. It seems they are min-games that you access through kiosks that you find in the main game.

Overall what we see looks competently executed, just not exactly all that original or innovative. Considering that Metroid Dread came out in 2017, it would have been so much more interesting if this had been a launch title for the Atari VCS.

Romhacking.net announces shutdown

Console Gaming, Indie Gaming
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The website Romhacking.net announced that after 20 years they are shutting down operations.

This is, without exaggeration, probably the worst video gaming news that I’ve read in the last 20 years.

The good news is that they have turned over the content of the website to the Internet Archive, where it will continue to be available for download, hopefully forever.

This development apparently is not driven by copyright or trademark infringement issues resulting in a takedown of content. The site has always been conscientious about not hosting copyrighted content; only patch files were available for download; the patches have to be applied to a ROM file, which itself may introduce legal gray areas, but it’s generally been considered legal to have ROMs that you have ripped yourself, as a backup, from media which you own. Still, the site had to be very careful with how it presented its materials, and with what submissions it accepted for hosting, lest it run afoul of litigious copyright holders.

The maintainer of the website, Nightcrawler, stated in their post that they had tried to find a successor to take on the role of maintaining the site, and were unable to. Apparently there were candidates in talks with Nightcrawler, but things fell through in an apparently nasty way that recalls toxic internet culture. Nightcrawler also mentions that over the past few years operating the site has seen a shift from human operators to bots, and that dealing with bots is a chore.

I’m not clear what the ultimate impact of this will be. But it seems bad. At the very least new romhack projects will have to find a new place to go, and those looking for them will have a harder time finding them. The old content should (hopefully) be safe in good hands at Internet Archive, but the living community of users who made the scene happen is going to be disrupted by this, and that can’t be a good thing.

Romhacking.net was like a digital mecca for video game remixers. The quality of many projects was first rate, as good or even better than many original releases that they derived from. It wasn’t just a site where you could find, seemingly without limit, unauthorized sequels, but also fan translations of games that were never officially released in English, and improvements that provided bug-fixes and “quality of life” improvements to clunky interfaces. All of which were passion projects by and for the fans and gamers who loved the original works and wanted to see them preserved and improved upon and presented in their best possible format. Rom hacking and emulation go hand in hand to preserving video game history, often in spite of the objections of the industry.

Leap Year reviewed

games, Indie Gaming, reviews
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I’ve spent about 30-45 minutes in Leap Year so far, and it’s one of the stranger platformer games I’ve played.

The game’s tagline, A clumsy platformer, clues you into what to expect. The jump mechanic is unique among platformers, in that your default jump is generally fatal to yourself. Fall height is what does it; and you can only safely fall one grid-height, approximately the height of your own body, without injury.

But your standard jump height is two grid squares, making it deadly most of the time if you try to jump without a good bit of planning first. You can’t control your jump height by a light press or brief press of the button. You always get the same jump no matter how you try to press the button.

So this forces creativity. A normal jump on level ground will take you up two squares, and drop you fatally onto the ground. So you can work around that by jumping up to a higher platform, one or two squares above your starting level, and thereby avoid falling too far. Or you can jump under a low ceiling, which prevents you from going too high, and thus land safely on the same level you started from. There are perhaps a few other ways to survive falling, if you can figure it out. But I don’t want to give away too much and spoil the puzzle aspect. Figuring it out for yourself is definitely where the fun is found.

The goal of the game is to collect numbers which correspond to the dates of the month of February, 2024, which is a leap year, so there are 29 altogether…. er, I think — I’ve only managed to get through the first 15 so far. Each date is a checkpoint, which you’ll respawn from if you die. You can expect to die a lot, because most stuff you’re thinking is easy and second nature in a jumping platform game is fatal in Leap Year.

The levels provide a solution for getting safely through, and it’s a puzzle to work out for yourself how. So this is pretty clearly a puzzle-platformer. It’s fairly non-violent, despite tripping and dying constantly, and failure is never much of a setback as long as you’ve touched a checkpoint recently you won’t have to repeat much.

The game does require a bit of planning and thinking through your actions, if only because you have to carefully consider how the rules work in this game, since they’re so counter-intuitive to how most platforming games work.

I found that the level design is a bit obtuse and obfuscated — there are walls and platforms that you can move through, but the game doesn’t make it obvious. You can discover these things readily enough through experimentation, but there’s little in the way of clues or signposts. Only the bare minimum is explained: arrow keys to move left/right, space to jump, you figure out how jumping kills you, and what the rules are for surviving. About halfway through, the game throws another mechanic at you: shift will allow you to bounce safely from a normally fatal jump height, and rebound to a taller than usual height than you can jump… but only under certain circumstances, which I’ve yet to completely figure out. So sometimes you can do the bounce move, and other times you can’t, and I haven’t figured out why, and I’m not sure if that’s because I’m a dummy, or because the game design has an issue, or perhaps because figuring it out is the game, and it’s meant to be a mysterious puzzle that I have to discover through trial and error until I experience gestalt.

I’m currently stuck trying to figure out how to get to the 16th. I seem to recall seeing the 16 flag once, early on in the game, and it seemed that it was out of sequence, skipping a lot of the earlier numbers, so I tried to get it but I couldn’t, and I’m not sure if that’s because I wasn’t meant to, or because I just didn’t understand the rules for how to move and solve the platform puzzles well enough to be able to do it. So I went a different way and ended up getting all the rest of the numbers in order, and now I’ve gotten the 15th and the map sort of looped around and I’m back in an area where I’ve been already, only I’m not quite sure how to get back, or where exactly I need to go to find the 16.

So I may need to start over and play through again, noting more carefully where I saw that 16. Or maybe I’ll figure it out eventually.

So what other tricks will this game offer me? I don’t really know, but it’s been pretty fun so far. A bit frustrating, and so unlike most platformers that I’m used to that I bet it will be a game that a lot of platformer players dislike. It can be frustrating in ways that won’t feel fair to players approaching it with the expectations of the platformers that they’re used to. It’s counter-intuitive, clumsy, and a bit clunky. But that said, it tells you straight up that it’s a clumsy platformer, so you can’t say they didn’t warn you, and if you play with an open mind and with the understanding that this is a platformer that is trying to explore the space that is enabled by subverting the usual expectations of the genre, then you may come to appreciate its subtleties.

The graphics are charming, crude abstract stick figures, clumsily hand-drawn, as though doodles, and if you enjoy children’s art, you’ll find it delightful. The background music is relaxing and pleasant to listen to, although I’m not at all sure how to describe it.

Leap Year is a bravely contrarian platformer that subverts expectations, but if you’re looking for something deliberately different, and you understand the design language well enough to know the difference between a poor designer who, ignorant of the conventional rules of platformer design, just creates something sloppy, unplanned, and poor quality, and a master designer breaking the rules deliberately in order to achieve something unexpected, then you may just enjoy this game for what it is meant to be.

Leap Year by Daniel Linssen released on Steam

games, Indie Gaming
Comments

I first encountered Daniel Linssen through Ludum Dare more than 10 years ago. He was using GameMaker and created a wonderful platformer called Javel-ein. Linssen has gone on to make many other games, all of which are amazing. He has quite a knack for design and for coming up with interesting and novel play mechanics. I love everything he’s created.

His latest release, Leap Year, just came out on Steam, and without having played it yet, I can’t give it a review, but I can without reservation give it a recommendation. For just $5, it is guaranteed to be worth your time and money. Go check it out.

On the state of general web search AI in 2024

internet
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I thought I would try asking Bing’s AI for help in finding a good bathroom sink.

A huge problem with the search is that the manufacturers and/or retailers don’t provide consistent, accurate, complete data on dimensions.

If you’re lucky, there’s an drafting diagram showing precisely all the relevant dimensions from top, side, and front. This is wonderful, but rare.

More often, if there is a diagram, it omits the dimension I’m trying to determine, which is the inner bowl depth. It’s difficult to get a good measurement by hand because it’s a curved surface. Plus even if you’re in a store and they happen to have it in stock, it’ll either be on a display, on a shelf too high to reach, and they won’t let you go up a ladder, or it’ll be in a box, and you can’t really open it, although I suppose you could whip out a box cutter and just do it like a barbarian. Or you could buy it, take it home, look at it, and return it, which is also a hassle.

Often if there is a “depth” measurement reported, they are giving you the overall depth, from the top of the rim of the sink, to the bottom of the drain, which is an outside depth.

Why am I the only one who cares about this dimension?

You can chat with someone on the website, and they don’t know. They’re sitting on a computer at their home or in an office somewhere, they don’t have physical access to the product either. They’re polite, but helpless, really. All they can do is search for you and read the same info you can read. And a lot of the time they are not good at reading comprehension and miss the criteria you give them. And in any case they are not so motivated to search as exhaustively as you would be as a customer who will be living with the thing for the next 50 years.

A lot of the time web chat on ecommerce sites is timed, because humans cost money and they are trying to maximize value for shareholders by minimizing costs and maximizing productivity as measured by conversations completed, rather than by customers highly satisfied, and so will disconnect while you’re in the middle of a conversation. Instead of having a button to end the chat, it’ll just drop you when it decides you’ve been idle for too long. This is the most aggravating thing, because then you usually have to start all over and go through the same thing with a different associate who can’t just look up your previous chat because all the sessions are disconnected from each other, and it’s like you’re a new person to them.

Another aggravation with human chat is that sometimes they are required to follow a formal style that is supposed to come off as polite, but really just gets in the way of having a productive conversation.

THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING [STORE] I AM [NAME] AND IT WILL BE MY PLEASURE TO ASSIST YOU TODAY. WE VALUE YOUR LOYALTY! WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?

I am looking for a [lengthy criteria]

I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A [repeats what I just said] AND IT WILL BE MY DELIGHT TO HELP YOU CHOOSE A [PRODUCT TYPE] THAT MEETS YOUR NEEDS! WOULD IT BE OK IF I TAKE 1-3 MINUTES TO FIND PRODUCTS?

Well yeah, that’s kinda what I just asked you to do, homes. Can’t you just get to it without all the ceremony?

CERTAINLY! PLEASE KNOW THAT WE ARE DOING OUR BEST TO ASSIST CUSTOMERS AND THAT DUE TO HIGH VOLUME THERE MAY BE DELAYS AND INTERRUPTIONS BUT IF YOU NEED TO TALK TO SOMEONE BY PHONE YOU CAN CALL [800 number] AT ANY TIME TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO IS ON A BAD CONNECTION AND MAYBE HAS A HARD TO UNDERSTAND FOREIGN ACCENT AND IS JUST AS USELESS AS I AM ALTHOUGH I AM TRYING MY BEST AND AM VERY HAPPY TO BE DOING WHAT I CAN.

So sometimes you can get something useful out of them, but mostly it’s like they can look at the same webpage that you can, and see the same information on it, and not be able to provide any more information or insight than that, because it’s the first time they ever looked at it themselves and they don’t know anything more about it than a random person off the street.

In the old days, a very long time ago, you’d walk into a store and there’d be some semi-retired guy who worked in the trades and they had like 35 years of experience installing the things and could tell you how to do it blindfolded, and they’d know every product like they were on the design team, like Marissa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny knows cars, and they’d tell you the exact model number of the perfect thing that is exactly what you want, and know the exact location of it on the shelf, and they’d be the salt of the earth and feel like your favorite uncle and best friend and a guy who really cares all rolled into one, and he’d look just like Earnest Borgnine, and would actually be him 7/10 of the time. And he could crack a joke, talk about baseball, juggle and make balloon animals, and he knew a guy with a pony and could come to your son’s birthday if you gave him $50.

But I digress.

Maybe that’s not so much a back in the day thing, but it’s the sort of thing that you might have seen depicted in a dramatic film about shopping for hardware, where things happened as some script writer idealized. We get confused so easily by reality and artistic representations of an ideal reality, it’s hard to keep them straight in our heads sometimes.

AI is in much the same boat, with respect to what information is generally available online, but I thought it might be quicker, and better at sorting and filtering.

But actually, AI is much worse than a human. Of course, Bing’s AI is searching the general internet, and not an inventory catalog on a specific ecommerce site. The best Bing seems to be able to do is a hodgepodge of various sinks that are of all different types, and do not match the criteria closely.

In Star Trek, the ship computer is really good. It’s what we think of as the kind of AI we’d like to have.

Kirk: “Computer: Give me a listing of all bathroom sinks, drop-in, white, ceramic, measuring no more than 20in wide by 17in front-to-back, oval or rectangular, sorted by inner bowl depth.”

**60s mainframe noises** COMPUTING

THE ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION IS THE [MAKE] [MODEL] [SKU] [PRICE] IT HAS THE FOLLOWING DIMENSIONS [BLAH BLAH BLAH] WOULD YOU LIKE THE MATTER FABRICATOR TO CREATE ONE FOR YOU NOW AND INSTANTLY TRANSPORT IT TO YOUR VANITY CABINET IN THE COMMODE IN YOUR QUARTERS?”

Kirk: Yes. But first tell me the last digit of Pi.

But we don’t have that yet.

I’d even settle for:

SELECT * FROM SINKS WHERE AVAILABLE = “TRUE” AND INSTALLATION_TYPE = “DROP-IN” AND MATERIAL = “CERAMIC” AND COLOR LIKE “WHITE” AND WIDTH <= “20 in” AND LENGTH <= “17 in” ORDER BY BASIN_INNER_DEPTH DESC.

But there’s no global database of building materials like that, that I’m aware of.

So we have do do it the hard way. Or just settle for a sub-optimal solution, or a solution where the optimalization is unknown and unknowable.

Boulderdash by Andrew Davie

Atari, Console Gaming
Comments

Boulderdash was a classic early 80s videogame. I remember seeing advertisements for it, but I don’t think I ever had a chance to play it. It was available on many platforms, and for some reason I think it was more popular on personal computers of the day (DOS, Apple ][, Commodore, Atari, Amiga) than it was on consoles.

Andrew Davie is a programming legend in the Atari homebrew scene. For the past year-plus, he has been developing a Boulderdash remake on the Atari 2600 that is incredible. It runs on a stock system, no special hardware mods needed, thanks to an ARM chip in the cartridge. That ARM chip is a significant power boost to the processing capabilities of the system, so really the console is just relaying controller input to the computer inside the cartridge, which uses the VCS’s Television Interface Adapter (TIA) chip to draw to the screen. The results are far beyond the normal capabilities of the 1977-vintage hardware. And the program does things that you have to see to believe. If you run this game next to a 2k launch title like Combat or Slot Racers, you wouldn’t believe that it’s running on the same exact hardware. It’s a 32kb ROM, as compared to the 2kb or 4kb of most Atari 2600 games.

Davie has announced through his website that he has obtained permission from the owners of the Boulderdash IP to release just 100 individually serialized copies of the game ROM will be produced, and they are not redistributable — this means that one may not legally obtain the ROM from anyone other than Andrew Davie, who is giving them away for free, but only for 100 lucky Atari fans. This is a must-have for an Atari collector.

It’s my hope that the Demo will be followed up by a full version of the game, hopefully in unlimited quantities. Nothing has been announced formally, but the “demo” label implies that there should be more to come. But it’s possible that the Demo may be all that he will be authorized to release.

The graphics are higher resolution than the 2600 is normally capable of displaying, very detailed, more objects on the screen, more colors, it has music, animation, parallax scrolling, asymmetrical playfields, everything that you would not expect to be possible with the stock Atari 2600 hardware. It’s literally incredible.

Atari acquires Intellivision brand

Atari, Console Gaming
Comments

Atari SA announced that it has purchased the Intellivision brand and “certain games”.

What is Atari getting exactly?

  • One less competitor
  • The Intellivision trademark and brand
  • The incomplete, unreleased Amico platform
  • The Intellivision game library consisting of some 200-ish titles.

It looks like Atari intend to bring the Amico console to market. That’s a surprising decision, considering that they are now supporting the Atari VCS and Atari 2600+ systems. It might have made more sense for Atari to put Amico titles on the VCS rather than try to launch another console. Adding another misbegotten console to their lineup will not benefit the company — it will only serve to divide up the already tiny Atari customer base and increase the companies expenses in supporting another console that doesn’t have enough customers. Considering that Atari is just barely supporting the VCS, it seems crazy for them to split their customer base by resurrecting the Amico from the dead and trying to complete the promise made by Intellivision more than five years ago.

I think it makes sense to buy the Intellivision brand and IP, if it can be had for a bargain basement price. I’m not aware of which games Atari will now own, but whatever they are, having the rights to use those titles, characters and other IPs would be an opportunity for Atari. But what games are they? What unique game titles did Mattel produce for Intellivision back in the day, that would still hold value for nostalgic retrogamers today? I can’t think of too many. B-17 Bomber, Astrosmash, Shark! Shark! …that’s about it, really. And that’s… not much. Most Intellivision titles had generic-sounding names like “Football” or “Sea Battle” and none of them produced anything like a trademarkable, charismatic mascot to carry the brand.

Meifumado kickstarter resurfaces back from dead, releasing this summer?!

Indie Gaming
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In 2022, I backed a project on Kickstarter for a video game called Meifumado. I donated $20, the cheapest level to get a copy of the game when it was finished. It looked promising. The graphics were pixel art, very detailed and it looked great. The combat animation reminded me of Shank, mixed with a bit of Samurai Champloo.

Immediately after they reached goal and the fundraising period ended, the developers apparently disappeared from the face of the earth, and it seemed like everyone had been had to the tune of some $48,000. People were pissed.

Today, developer OldBit resurfaced and posted a rambling, long-overdue update on the project page. The post is visible to backers only, so the short of it is that OldBit is located in Belarus, and was affected by the embargo on Russia and its allies in the days following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in March of 2022.

It’s odd to me that these events are linked, because man did it feel like Meifumado was a lot longer time ago than just two years ago. Apparently, Kickstarter doesn’t offer service to Belarus, and so to even get listed on Kickstarter in the first place, they had to partner with an intermediary in another country. Then they couldn’t get the funding transferred as expected after the embargo went into effect.

And… it took two years to provide this update? People were asking questions, for months, with nothing but silence, and they couldn’t respond for two years? Seems really weak. OldBit admits that they should have come forward to let backers know what was going on much earlier, and apologizes for it. I can’t say that the apology resonates with me, because there just isn’t any excuse after so long with no update. My confidence in OldBit was shattered, and I wrote off the $20 as a lost cause and forgot about the project.

However… OldBit says that they are close to having the project completed now, and will be releasing in the summer (it’s almost June, so that’s going to be rather soon if it indeed happens, but I’m not holding my breath; I’ll believe it when I believe it.)

If it does come out, and I get my copy for my $20, then I’m satisfied, and it’s certainly not any later than most of the other projects I’ve backed on Kickstarter, GoFundMe, or IndieGoGo. So from that standpoint, the only real difference between this project and most of the others the complete dead silence from the developers. And if that’s all it is, hey, whatever, right? Results matter, and if they do deliver the game they promised, it’s an unexpected nice thing. Like seeing someone you thought was dead, alive and well.

It’ll be anybody’s guess if the game is as good as the kickstarter pitch video made it look. But if it is, it’ll be something special.

Eulogy for a suicide

life
Comments

How many years ago was it? A lifetime, I guess.

There used to be a little hacker conference that happened once a year in Cleveland, Ohio, called Notacon.

The first time I heard about it was the second year it was held, and so I attended. I was just starting out in my IT career, and very interested in the subject matter due to a life long enjoyment of playing around with computers.

Sadly, I didn’t come away from the event impressed. It was very amateurish and low budget and seemed like something that some kids would try to pull off before they were ready, trying to imitate adults doing something for real. They had bedsheets for projection screens, none of the talks were happening at the times or in the rooms where the printed schedules had them. It was a pretty sorry event, kind of a clusterfuck.

Well, it was at that. But I shouldn’t have been so negative. I should have seen the potential.

Fast forward a few more years.

I think it was 2009. A guy I knew from the internet, who went by the name Aestetix, I enjoyed his livejournal and reading his thoughts on stuff, was coming into town and needed a ride from the airport. He was speaking at Notacon, which I think was in its 7th year (6th, I went and checked). He said he’d get anyone who helped him out into the conference as his +1. So I volunteered to do it. I wanted to meet this guy and I wasn’t necessarily all that interested in Notacon because of the impression I’d taken away form it. But I figured I’d give it another shot. After all, if they were still doing it four years later, they must have gotten better at putting it on.

I had a great time at Notacon 6. The event had grown up. I met some really interesting people. They were friendly, smart, tech geeks like me, except smarter and geekier and cooler and more friendly. They were better than me in every way, just about. I made friends, I was accepted. Aestetix took me around and introduced me to a bunch of people he was friends with, people associated with 2600, the hacker scene, the demo scene, the info sec scene. 2600 was something I’d read about and heard about for years. I got to meet some actual legendary people: Emmanuel Goldstein, Jason Scott, Dave Kennedy from TrustedSec, Dan Kaminsky, Adrian “Irongeek” Crenshaw, James Myrcurial Arlen, Jameson Lundy, Desirae Gillis, int80, Danyelle Davis, Mark W. Schumann, Joe Peacock, Sigflup, and Notacon’s organizers Froggy and Tyger.

And a young cartoonist named Ed Piskor.

Ed Piskor is dead. He committed suicide. I learned about it just a short time ago.

Apparently after some allegations emerged of some kind of sexual inappropriateness which I don’t know the details of, Ed posted a suicide note on Facebook and then took his life. I’m grateful not to know the details of that, either.

Ed’s suicide note claims that he was guilty of being stupid, innocent of the more serious things that were apparently alleged (and mostly only alluded to in the note), and that he was choosing to end his life not because he was guilty of what he’d been accused of, because of shame and because he felt that he couldn’t get his life or reputation back after what had come out.

So… I guess I didn’t know him all that well. But I knew his work. And I thought he was a bright and talented man, and I liked him. He was a familiar face on my Facebook feed and on my YouTube recommendations, and in that sense, I felt like I knew him. But I really didn’t.

I first met him when I attended his talk at Notacon 6, where he talked about drawing his first comic, Wizzywig, about a young hacker. I thought it was really well written, and a decent amalgamation based on the lives of several real-world hackers whom I’ve heard of and read about.

Ed was nervous to be talking in front of a group of people, and it showed. He was very young and new in the industry. I talked to him afterward and bought copies of his books that he had for sale. He was so reverent of the subject matter. He said he just hoped that he got it right, and he admitted that his biggest fear was that the people he was trying to tell a story about wouldn’t accept what he had done, mashing up their biographies. He was afraid that others would say that he screwed up the depiction, didn’t get it right.

I don’t know that I was ever inside the world of hackers enough to be able to say this with any genuine authority, but I told him not to worry about that, that from what I could see, he did justice to the subject, and captured the spirit of the times and the culture of hacking in the 80s and 90s very well.

Ed inked a portrait of me, in his own style, on the inside of one of the issues of Wizzywig that I bought from him. I had long hair, round glasses, and was wearing a hoodie, as was my style at the time. I followed him on Facebook, and we occasionally commented on each other’s stuff.

I watched Ed’s career take off. After Wizzywig, he wrote a series called Hip Hop Family Tree, which was maybe his best work. He told the story of the hip hop music scene, and drew the book in a style that “sampled” and “remixed” the art style of Marvel Comics artists of the 70s and 80s, particularly Jack “King” Kirby, creating homages to classic comic book panels and covers, replacing them with hip hop luminaries. It was thorough and deep and really well done. It won awards and brought him fame and I guess maybe a little fortune. It was wonderful to see him taking his talents to where they could lead. His art had improved to a whole new level, and you could see the absolute love and, I’ll say it again, reverence, for the subject matter — both the music and the medium of comics.

At this point Ed had come into his own, so to speak, and had developed a public persona that was a bit bolder and more confident than the rookie artist I had met a few years prior. I suspect that he was aware that he was presenting himself to the public, and chose to make himself entertaining. He adopted a kind of standard uniform, wearing Pittsburgh Pirates jerseys and hats, nerdy horn rimmed glasses or sometimes sunglasses, and usually something paying homage to his favorite hip hop and rap act, especially Public Enemy. I’m not sure how “real” this version of Ed was, but it was the version of himself that he seemed to inhabit when he was putting himself out in public. I suspect that it was an amped up version of who he wanted to be when he wasn’t feeling shy or nervous.

Ed went on to do a re-telling of the entire history of the X-Men, called X-Men: Grand Design. This was a hugely ambitious project, intended to organize, streamline, and re-tell the convoluted history of something like 40 years of X-Men stories. It was the kind of project a kid who grew up reading X-Men comics might dream about doing. Well, he pitched it to Marvel, and they took him up on it. Rather bold. But it showed how much cachet he had earned with the accolades he had received from Hip Hop Family Tree. Ed’s career was hot.

As such it was a bigger project than I’m really capable of judging. I read some X-Men comics in my day, but the amount of material there — decades and decades of multiple ongoing books, made it a daunting project to read, let alone write and draw. Chris Claremont, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, and yeah some of the more classic books, reprints from Stan Lee’s time writing the book in the 60s. X-Men were some of the hottest comics for decades and attracted all of the top artist and writing talent. Ed took that material, consolidated and streamlined it, and re-told it, tightening the continuity, and paring it down to what he felt was its essence. It might have been a bit more ambitious than anyone could have handled. I think he was trying to do for X-Men what he’d done for Hip Hop, but I’m not sure it was quite as successful.

Next, Ed went into horror and gore comics, and produced a loving homage to them with his Red Room series. Ed had some connections to underground comics, having been something of a prodigee of Harvey Pekar, and having a kind of lineal connection to R. Crumb through him. And this pedigree gave Ed a bona fide street cred connection to non-Code adult comics which, by their very nature, were controversial and touched on adult topics, from sex to politics to drugs to racism, and were independent rather than subscribing to any particular orthodoxy or ideology. Underground comic books were not about super-powered heroes fighting crime and saving the world. They were about all kinds of things. Mainly they were a medium for the artist to express themselves and their opinions and philosophies on life.

And part of that underground comics scene was devoted to extreme gore and horror themes, stuff that the government had tried to crack down on, and whose resulting crackdown caused mainstream comics to be considered kiddie fare for decades after… until a generation of kids raised on comics grew up and started writing “dark, gritty, real” comics in the late 80s and 90s. Characters like Batman: the Dark Knight, Wolverine, and the Punisher offered a “mature audiences” take on the spandex tights superhero books that kids of the 60s and 70s grew up with. But even then, the non-code books from the independent small presses that constituted the underground were something far and away different. And Ed had an obvious, obsessive fascination with these taboo books and the topics they explored.

Now, Ed’s Red Room work one was not one that appealed to me for its subject matter — I was never into gore or horror movies when I was a kid. And these were especially, gratuitously sick books. He posted panels of his work in progress to Facebook regularly, and I was always surprised that Facebook didn’t take them down for violating Community Standards on violence, nudity, you name it. This was a story about a serial murderer who would imprison and torture victims, vivisecting them for a sick sexual thrill, with basically nothing left to the imagination.

I admit I kindof started to wonder about Ed around this time, and considered reaching out to him and asking him what could possess him to create that stuff, but I didn’t know how to, and not have him just outright reject my attempt at outreach, and tell me to fuck off. After all, he was already committed to the project, and it wasn’t like he could turn back from it by the time I had heard about it. But man the shit he was drawing was twisted, almost inspired in how extreme it was. He was really pushing extreme gore to a level I’d never seen before, and despite not liking the genre, I had seen my share of it. I think, though, that Ed was drawing on a rich history of material from the underground comics that I’d occasionally seen at shops and conventions, as well as slasher films, true crime books, real life serial killers, and that sort of thing. I knew kids in my school days who were into slasher movies, and I figured this was just one of those things that some people were into, but not me, and so I left it at that.

Ed did a YouTube channel with another comics artist, Jim Rugg, called Cartoonist Kayfabe. Wherein they would talk about comics and promote the medium by looking back at its history. They discussed their favorite books and influences, and reviewed newly published material, and occasionally they would have on guests from the industry, names such as Sergio Aragonés and Rob Liefeld. They were always so respectful of the craft of drawing comics, but they could also point out examples of where an artist swung and missed, too. It was usually a 20 to 30 minute video podcast, sometimes going up to an hour or more, just depending on what they had to talk about and how much they got into it. I liked seeing what they were up to each week, and appreciated that what they were doing was helping to promote the art and the industry they were in, it seemed like such a positive thing.

So “shocked” doesn’t begin to describe how I felt when I read the news that Ed had died. I am still processing this news, and writing this is part of that process. I do not have any insider knowledge about what happened, or what lead up to his decision to commit suicide. It’s been many years, well over a decade since I spoke to Ed in person. I am nonetheless terribly saddened to learn that his light has left the world. And I haven’t yet come to grips with what darkness must have hastened its departure.

To read what little he put into the suicide note about it, it sounds like from his perspective he was misunderstood and misrepresented by his accusers. I am not privy to what it was that they perceived, exactly, but I can well appreciate how they might have received him if he was trying to be flirtatious with someone and said things that came off as creepy. From what I’ve read about it, what Ed was accused of was inappropriately attempting to groom a fan and aspiring artist was 17 at the time — Ed would have been in his late 30s when this happened. So, yeah, that’s legitimately creepy, I’d say. Sure, age of consent laws wouldn’t make it a crime, and in another century it would have been pretty “normal” for age differences like this, but this is now, and just because it’s not criminal doesn’t make it inappropriate. Apparently Ed had used his fame/success and connections to big names in his industry to try to add to his allure to these women. And, I guess there’s more to it than that. But a lot of i is starting to get taken down as I write this, so I’m not sure I can find out all the details.

Maybe that’s for the best; maybe it’s none of my business. But at least for a short time this was all coming out in public.

But be that as it may, some women (at least two, but it sounds like maybe there were more) came out and shared their stories, and it blew up. Ed’s career imploded. He lost a book deal, an art show deal, and his partnership with Jim Rugg, all in quick succession. And for a guy who probably loved comics for his entire life going back to his earliest memories, and had devoted his entire life to becoming the artist he had become, to see that all fall apart in a matter of days or weeks, I’m sure was too much for him. It must have felt like his life had already ended. And so with nothing else left, he must have felt that there was nothing left for him.

Sometimes guys can be creepy, and they have no bad intentions behind their botched or unwelcome attempts at approaching someone for a little romance or a sexy fling. And then, some guys are genuinely bad people who end up being womanizers or even rapists or serial killers.

I don’t know the other side of it, and I probably won’t ever unless I go digging for it, and I don’t think that it’s something I want to do. I really hope that wasn’t who Ed was. I really hope no one is really like that. But I know that in this world, there are people who are like that. Ed drew some sick shit in his Red Room comics, and he could be prone to some pretty juvenile humor, and a lot of it could be inappropriate. So I find it plausible he could be a creep, or at the very least come off as creepy.

So I can imagine… I just don’t know what to imagine.

Anyway, my imagination isn’t really relevant in this story. The facts are what matter. I don’t have them.

I am here to record a sense of loss for the man I met when I was still young, whose work I knew, and whose career I followed, and counted myself a fan of.

I’m not here to defend what Ed may have done. And I’m not here to pass judgement on him; I will leave that to those who know what he did, as they are entitled to do.

For them, I am sorry for whatever happened to them, for whatever Ed might have done. It is terrible and disturbing to think about, especially not knowing exactly what it was.

And for Ed, I am sorry that it was something that he felt merited taking his own life.