Andrew.
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g026r.leftblank.org
Andrew.
@g026r.leftblank.org
590 followers 330 following 12K posts
The vibes are out of joint— O cursèd site,
That ever I logged on to poast them right!
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g026r.leftblank.org
Bart sits in the backseat of the Simpson station wagon next to Lisa. He points to an orange baseball cap he is wearing that has a clock & says "Time for Chilli" "Lis, check it out."
January 12, 2026 at 5:40 PM
g026r.leftblank.org
Loons have strikingly red eyes. One of the entries from the state flag design search a few years back turned those eyes into lasers.

And since then the laser loon has shown up everywhere.
A common loon. It has deep red eyes with a small black pupil in the middle. Minnesota state flag design submission F15. aka the laser loon. Saint Paul public library card, featuring a laser loon over the word "READ" Minnesota Historical Society T-shirt, which features a loon whose lasers is burning the society's logo.
January 10, 2026 at 11:30 PM
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#RandomGameSaturday

This is it. One of the best games on the Master System, and the pinnacle of the Wonder Boy series: the 4th entry, Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap.

(Wonder Boy numbering is complicated, OK? And I haven't even gotten into the spin-offs.)
January 10, 2026 at 2:27 PM
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January 9, 2026 at 6:55 PM
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Yes.
January 7, 2026 at 5:11 AM
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Probably 4th best. Though the three best are all just variations on the same logo.
Blue Jays logos through the years. The 1977 & 2012 logos are almost the same, while the 2020 logo is just the 2012 one without the surrounding text & circles. These are easily the best of them.
January 6, 2026 at 6:37 PM
g026r.leftblank.org
Until it became a liability during Me Too, Taibbi's response to criticisms of the Exile book used to be...

...throwing coffee at the interviewer & then following them down the street.
He then fell out of touch, re-emerged a month later, and agreed to meet me for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant. I arrived late, and he was visibly annoyed. There was no boyish smile. “I just don’t see why you’re doing this story,” he said. When I told him that Ames was now living in New York he grew more agitated. I mentioned some of the Exile pieces of his I planned to write about, and he said, “That was covered in the book.” I told him yes, that was true, but the book had been published in 2000, and, frankly, I didn’t think it was very good. “The book wasn’t good?” he said. “No, I didn’t think so,” I said. “My book?” he said. “Yes, the Exile book. I thought it was redundant and discursive and you guys left out a lot of the good stuff you did,” I said. At this, Taibbi’s mouth turned down and his eyes narrowed. “Fuck you,” he snarled, and then picked up his mug from the table, threw his coffee at me, and stormed out. The restaurant was packed with customers, and they all turned to watch as I sat there, stunned, coffee dripping from my face. The waiter arrived with the milkshake Taibbi had ordered. After wiping myself off a bit, I went outside, where Taibbi was putting on his coat, and asked him to calm down and come back into the restaurant. He walked up to me, glaring, beside himself with rage. “Fuck you!” he yelled. “Did you bring me here to insult me? Who are you? What have you ever written? Fuck you!” I tried to talk to him, but gave up when he walked away. I went back inside, paid the bill, left, and began walking up Sixth Avenue. Halfway up the block, I turned around, and Taibbi was behind me. “Are you following me?,” I asked. He walked toward me, raising his arms as though preparing to throttle me or take a swing. “I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you!” he said. “Are you kidding?,” I asked. And at that moment I thought he might be kidding. There was part of me that thought it must have been a prank. I half expected some old Exile accomplice, maybe even Ames, to jump out from behind a tree with a camera. Maybe they’d been setting me up all along. Maybe there was horse sperm in the coffee. But the anger in Taibbi’s eyes was genuine, and, after some more glaring, he fumed off. That was the last I saw of him. Eventually, Taibbi sent lengthy responses to e-mailed lists of questions. “I once considered Mark my best friend,” he wrote. “When I left I never thought I was burning my bridges to The Exile permanently, and being shut out as I have been from all contact with the paper I helped build during these seven years, not even having my letters answered at any time by Mark or anyone else on the paper during that period, this is one of the truly unhappy things that has ever happened in my life. Both The Exile and Mark’s friendship were very important to me, as were the memories of both of those things, and I’ve lost all of that now. That I’m now being accused of not only wanting to harm the paper, but desiring Mark’s maiming or even his death, only deepens my sadness about all of this.” He went on to say that “most people by the time they get old are full of regrets about the things they never got around to doing when they were young, but thanks to the paper I won’t ever have that problem.” But, he concluded, “if you romanticize any of that ugliness, I’m pretty sure you’re missing the point.”
January 6, 2026 at 3:52 PM
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You'd think, given the prevalence of spanking/paddling/whipping in Shuster's fetish art that he was the one who introduced spanking to the Superman strips.

But nope, that seems to have been Siegel & either Wayne Boring or Paul Cassidy. And there's a notable amount of it.
A daily strip from 1939, ending with Superman spanking the female character. Art most likely by either Wayne Boring or Paul Cassidy, with faces and possibly inks by Joe Shuster. The next day's strip, which continues the spanking A Sunday strip from December 21, 1941. A strip from May 20, 1941once again ends with spanking. Script by Shuster, art by some combination of Wayne Boring and/or Paul Cassidy, with Shuster again likely only providing the faces.
January 6, 2026 at 1:50 PM
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There was an entire book and associated website collecting a lot of it.

Unfortunately I don't have a copy, and something about the way they designed the website kept the Wayback Machine version from archiving any of the content.
January 6, 2026 at 1:06 PM
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"Strongly reminiscent" is putting it mildly.
January 6, 2026 at 1:05 PM
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"Jack, just say the Holy Roman Empire. This is taking forever."
January 5, 2026 at 11:39 PM
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#RandomGameSaturday Snake's Revenge

The other week I mentioned that though the NES port of Metal Gear is now considered bad, without it we wouldn't have Metal Gear Solid. And this game is the other part of that story.
January 3, 2026 at 3:58 PM
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Another oddity found while unpacking: a 1968 Pogo for President button.

Being 1968, it's a Vietnam-related slogan: "Up the down escalation!"
December 28, 2025 at 1:32 AM
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As a kid, I was obsessed by the ads for this game in the computer magazines my father would bring home.
December 27, 2025 at 1:33 PM
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#RandomGameSaturday Metal Gear

Yes, I know, this is the bad version of Metal Gear. But it's not like the "good" version got released in North America.

And if it wasn't for the success of this version, then we wouldn't have the Metal Gear series. But that's a story for another game.
December 27, 2025 at 1:32 PM
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You're going to love the Avengers one.

More seriously: the FF cover is a great choice.

But what I really love is that they did this for the licensed comics as well. Only the New Universe comics didn't get the border.
December 27, 2025 at 2:22 AM
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I love whenever this horse shows up in my IG ads, because it has a real "Good lord, what is happening in here?!" expression that always goes so well with everything else in the grid
December 26, 2025 at 2:37 AM
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December 25, 2025 at 4:14 AM
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December 22, 2025 at 5:55 PM
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They got way more out the door than I realized.

In retrospect it feels like a harbinger for the merchandising flood that accompanied TPM.
Several products were released, including a novel, a junior novelization, a comic book series, a video game, a soundtrack, trading cards, role-playing games, posters, model kits, Micro Machines toys, statuettes, vinyl dolls, and a series of action figures and vehicles.
December 21, 2025 at 7:25 PM
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Of course, by the mid '80s even that character had transitioned to the post-apocalyptic Hex, so Westerns were truly dead as a coffin nail.
December 21, 2025 at 4:36 AM
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December 20, 2025 at 8:02 PM
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December 20, 2025 at 6:09 PM
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They'll all say "Assembled in Mexico" on the front label, which is fairly matte, and if you have the instructions they'll be in B&W.

Most of them will also have a molded back label instead of a sticker, but some didn't. (The attached image shows the two backs that I know they used.)
The backs of a pair of North American SNES cartridges. The top one has a sticker with the usual warnings. It is slightly greener than usual, which is common in Majesco games that used stickers, and says "Assembled in Mexico" in the top right. The bottom one has no sticker. Instead the warnings have been molded directly into the plastic, requiring the text to be rearranged to avoid the plastic's injection mark.
December 20, 2025 at 3:35 PM
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#RandomGameSaturday Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose!

Near the end of the SNES's life, Majesco got permission to reprint a number of early 3rd party titles as a budget line.

There's a bunch of cost-cutting visible & they're less desirable, but they play exactly the same as the originals.
December 20, 2025 at 2:46 PM