Sad to see you go. I always saw you as something of a kindred spirit, and one with a sense of humor to help me laugh at the frustrating trolls. At least I'll probably see you comment at some places.

I'll be hanging around in limbo for a while longer, myself.

If it turns out to be someone messed up in that way, my sympathies will return. That's definitely one other problem with our culture that needs to be fixed.

Normally, I'm sympathetic to the victims of silly quackery, since there's a culture of indoctrination and rationalization for all sorts of silliness that can be hard to escape if you're not equipped with proper bullshit-detecting modes of thought. As Don says, there's a history propping up a lot of crazy ideas and the authoritarian culture surrounding them.

In this case, however, I'm not feeling nearly as generous as I usually am. If we were talking about a treatment like this for some life-threatening illness or horribly debilitating chronic condition, I might be able to understand extreme desperation with some stretching. But we're talking about people doing this for a cosmetic change. That's a hard sell for my sympathies.

Ah, good olde anecdotalism. It worked for establishing the popularity of bloodletting, radioactive tonics, and countless electric gizmos of the early 1900's. Back then, you could market any crazy idea and sell it as a medical marvel. Same thing with food and rat-based additives. Your guinea pigs paid you to test your product in uncontrolled, unblinded, unverifiable trials of n=1 that simply assume all humans have perfect, godlike self-perception abilities. Dead men tell no negative testimonials, and the people who survived with negative experiences were indoctrinated to blame themselves for a lack of faith, not to question the treatment. And then they moved on to the next placebo with slightly more desperation. Quack doctors acted in a paternalistic manner, handing down edicts, and patients were largely unable to determine the difference between real medical research and authoritarian assertions.

Alties (and Ayn Rand fans) really pine for those simpler days, when there were no organized watchdogs to demand scientific tests for safety and efficacy. Oh, wait, thanks to DSHEA, the herbal and dietary supplement industry are currently living in the early 1900's, given special immunities to regulation. It's easy to make money if customers are allowed to fool themselves by purely subjective measures.

I'm glad I live in and demand modernity: Medical tests that strive for objectivity, a humble, honest view of my humanity (and how, as a human, I can fool myself), and a worldwide spread of organizations willing to grind the truth out of each other using logic and high standards of evidence.

I'm not willing to give that up because random people on the internet tell me to.

I wouldn't say Ninja Gaiden is that bad. The only thing I have against it is the "Nintendo Hard" difficulty. If they adjusted stuff like the blind jumps and enemy respawns (kill an enemy once, and he stays gone), I'd see it as a decent game instead of an insane challenge for the hard core nostalgics.

Castlevania II, however, ugh. Just plain terrible. Trying to experiment with a quasi-RPG format was something that could have been interesting, but the result was just plain horrible. It's like they weren't even trying, especially with bad translation. The worst thing is the holy water. You have to bomb every floor to make sure it's real, and every wall to see if it breaks away.

I did like the original Metroid, but objectively, I wouldn't put a very high rating on it. I mostly think of it for the historical value and to pat myself on the back for being able to beat it under the two hour limit... With a map.

Super Metroid, though, definitely deserves major props for all the polish they put on the series. I did like the Prime trilogy, but I still think Super Metroid is what the series should seek to emulate. Take Super Metroid and add the atmosphere from the scans of Prime, and I'm sold.

---On a relevant note, I remember a long time ago, a terrible, terrible Family Circus cartoon (yes, I realize that's redundant) that featured three panes: Kid reading a book with thought balloon imagination. Kid listening to the radio with thought balloon imagination. Kid watching TV with an empty thought balloon. Because, apparently, they think observation is a completely passive process, and no one ever tries to predict what's going to happen next, speculates on why a character just made a face-heel turn, or what real world political or social struggle the story is relating to.

Wow. What an asshat. When I was a kid, When I was a kid, I heard of extreme nutbars who said NES and Game Boy were imagination-stealing devices of the Devil. Why, when they were kids, they watched television!

And the generation before them said kids have no imagination because they have television while they had to listen to the radio! Without pictures!

And the generation before them most likely said the radio kids had no imagination because they had to read BOOKS!

And lots of generations back, there were probably oral traditionalists complaining about how kids these days have no imagination because they read the same books as each other. You don't get illustrations or exact repeats with oral tradition!

--- As for old school games, the way I see it: 90%+ of ALL videogames of ALL eras are crap. Those of us who grew up with NES just remember the diamonds in the rough. In a couple decades, everyone will talk about how Minecraft, Zelda: Skyward Sword, and so on were the real classics, compared to the licensed crap of the future.

For every Legend of Zelda or Mega Man 2, there were several Deadly Towers and American Gladiators. Just ask the Angry Video Game Nerd.

Looks like "pair of docs" is the answer.

And here I was hoping there was some guy out there in tights fighting robots with logic bombs.

I remember that story Don mentions about the lawsuit, and I had a little fun with defending trolls on Skeptico, when he brought up the CR report that provoked the SLAPP attempt by Sharper.

Funny thing I've heard: One dissatisfied customer complained about a film of gunk forming on his walls over long term use. There's no reason to think dirt and such is uniformly positively or negatively charged, so he hypothesized that while the Ionic Breeze attracted some particles of opposite charge, it repelled those with a like charge, pushing them toward the walls.

Well, I'm late to the post, but I certainly understand the feeling. I'm slowly getting more blogging in with just a few posts a months, so I know how you can lose the time and/or energy.

As for the 'community' aspect, I'm on similar ground. If I met up with Randi or PZ, I'd shake their hand and briefly gush about how they influenced me, but I wouldn't want that association to go under the risk of becoming a self-serving pile of group-think. I can be blog-buddies with other skeptics without some overarching idea of a community. If someone calling themselves a skeptic says something insane, I don't want anyone to think they're obligated to pull punches in the name of group cohesion when criticizing that insanity.