Oddtom's page

The Harvest Moon 64 speedrunning community as it exists today was founded by TBJESE and DemoPlaysGames about three years ago. It's not a traditional game with a set goal or endgame, so the categories were somewhat arbitrary. NPC marriage was one of them, and the only one that still exists today. Karen was a primary candidate, because she has a relatively well-known glitch that allows anyone to max out her affection in just a few minutes. It was a classic case of emulator (TBJ) vs. console (Demo). Demo kept with Karen, striving to get the perfect RNG, while TBJ expanded the category, adding a run for each of the five eligible bachelorettes. The board settled down as both got what they agreed were best times in their category, and the game remained quiet until I submitted my first run in August 2017. I was in Seattle at the time, trying to get my foot in the door of one of the software giants. In my spare time, I did anything I could to practice and improve the necessary skills, and

 Stopping by the MD-88 on a Snowy Evening Whose ships these are I think I know. His house is in Atlanta though; He will not see me stopping here To watch their wings fill up with snow. My little tug must think it queer To stop without a bag cart near Between the terminal and gates The darkest evening of the year. The fanbelt squeals, the cabin shakes. The squeak of glove on parking brake The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The night is lonely, dark and deep, But I have cabins left to sweep, And hours to go before I sleep, And hours to go before I sleep.

In addition to the core academic curriculum, my high school also required every student to sign up for some kind of “afternoon activity”. No exceptions. They made it abundantly clear during freshman orientation that if we didn’t choose an afternoon activity, an afternoon activity would be assigned to us, and it would not be something that we enjoyed. There was a collective groan from the entire freshman body. It was kind of annoying, but at least they were allowing us to choose our form of punishment. My immediate choice was soccer, the the fall sport I played every year in middle school. It was what I was most familiar and comfortable with, but I didn’t see it in any of the columns. The list of sports was alphabetical, so I couldn’t even claim to have missed it. I knew where it should be, but it wasn’t there. With my one hope shot down, I sat down with a pen and read through the rest of my choices. I struck down many of them immediately. I’d rather be on toiled scrubbing duty ev

Tennessee circa 2001 My first exposure to video game consoles was a Super Mario Brothers SNES game at our local dentist office, and it was the only reason I ever looked forward to appointments. As simplistic as the game was, it was always a special treat when I got the opportunity to bounce on the heads of some angry anthropomorphic mushrooms. Other than that, video game consoles didn’t play a very significant part of my early childhood. My father bought me a slew of DOS-based educational computer games, but we never owned the Playstation or SNES consoles that everyone at school bragged about. It never occurred to me to ask my parents why this was, but my best guess is that they were trying to shield us from the popular violent first-person shooters of the day, like Doom and Wolfenstein. There was a time when we owned a Sega Saturn and a rather blocky fighting game called Virtua Fighter, but the clunky thing didn’t last very long in the hands of us rowdy kids, and it wasn’t

Signal Mountain, Tennessee circa 2006 I like to complain about how much I hated swimming throughout various stages of my life, but for every bad memory of swimming there are plenty of good memories I would never want to give up. In fact, swimming didn’t really become a burden to me until my high school emphasized competition, sapping what fun I had with it. Before that, it was merely a summer social activity. In those days, when Lindsay was still on the diving team, she, Whitney, and I (and sometimes all Valerie) might spend the entire day playing Mario Party after practice as our swim suits slowly dried. When time for the afternoon practice rolled around, we would still be in our suits and ready to go. During my freshman and sophomore years, I swam with my private high school team during the summers. Even then, though, I took occasional breaks from the much more rigorous stuff my coach lined up for me by swimming at the lazy recreational league practices instead. Someti

It’s kind of funny how we don’t seem to recognize the things we take for granted and the things we don’t realize that we appreciate until they’re taken away from us. For this first memory, I’m going to take you back about as far as I can remember. A long, long time ago in a state far, far away, I lived in a house on the edge of a mountain. The view from our kitchen was spectacular to the little kid that I was, as were many of the strange devices there. The stove had a fantastic button that would raise and lower a metallic heat shield, but I was too young to understand its purpose. The phones were touch dial, and my friends had different tonal songs associated with their phone numbers. Later, an even more fascinating device would be added that would allow us to see who was calling before we even picked up the phone, but lets not get too far ahead of ourselves. Our kitchen had several more fantastic devices with various features, including a rather oversized microwave, but