Crazy people assignments

 Assignment 362: When you see a cop pulling someone over, unbuckle your seatbelt, send a bunch of texts on your phone and swerve between lanes.

Assignment 359: Name your first child "Colon".

Assignment 360: Start up a metal or country band called the "Splendidly Caparisoned Steeds". Hit the bar circuit just to watch drunks pronounce it.

Assignment 361: Fill a bunch of baby pumpkins with colored talcum powder and flour soaked in food coloring and hire an army of people to lay siege to the walls of Disneyland. If anyone asks you to explain, show them a picture of your weiner.

Assignment 358: Things to do at Lucasfilm Ranch: Tear apart all the wood paneling in search of a hidden cassette tape.

Sneak into the building by standing by the mailbox and having someone else ring the doorbell.

Check for a hidden front door key under the welcome mat.

Locate the microwave and put a hamster inside.

Call George Lucas a tuna head.

Try to crawl under the front porch and play with the pool faucet.

Pester the staff with questions about a hidden nuclear reactor.

Shatter the windows with ultrasonic frequencies.

Try to distract security by hiring people to distract them or engaging them with protracted debates over the phone.

Try to impress George Lucas with tinny recordings of the Loom video game.

Assignment 352: Urine is completely sterile. You can drink it. Try some.

Assignment 353: Whenever you see a basketball hoop, slam a basketball through it as hard as you can, no matter if it's the one with the expensive glass backboard at the YMCA or a kid's tiny plastic thing that can barely withstand the force of an excited three year old, let alone a full grown adult, with the gracefulness of a bull elephant.

Assignment 354: Put thousands of dollars into a complicated safety mechanism and comfortable state of the art cabin for a prototype time machine based on questionable scientific frameworks and theories found in science fiction novels.

Assignment 355: Give your child a script to read to debt collectors. Make the child act like you, making them say adult things about the better business bureau and suing for harassment. Remember, you're not just skipping a debt because you don't feel like paying it, you're teaching teaching future generations to skip a debt because they don't want to pay it.

Assignment 356: On a day when the power goes out , sit in front of your computer and try to hammer out a 100,000 word novel on a black screen, then act upset when the printer refuses to cooperate. When the power comes back on, also act upset that none of your work saved. Call tech support and Microsoft to complain about the situation.

Assignment 357: If some old babysitter of yours keeps reminding you that they "remember you when you were in diapers" shut them up by putting on some depends and an adult baby costume and parading in front of them at some inopportune moment. Casually remark that you "remember what they were talking about now."

Even more crazy assignments

 Assignment 380: Whenever you see a pair of people of any sex hanging out together a lot, insist on describing the two as "an item."

Assignment 381: Expect more from movie and TV stars. If they play a doctor on TV, come to them with the flu, Val Kilmer before the fire department. After a burglary, call the cast of CSI, and inform Bill Murray about your haunted house.

Assignment 382: Blow a vuvuzala during a symphony performance.

Assignment 375: Give your baby the noble name of "Pulled pork".

Assignment 367: From now on, always refer to genitalia as your "f***ing apparatus."

Assignment 368: Make every effort to put your face on the cover of Auto Trader. Joe Dirt can do it, why can't you?

Assignment 369: Create a motorcycle for toddlers that has a highway speed of 80 MPH.

Assignment 370: Open a restaurant called "pampers" and serve the hamburgers and fries wrapped in diapers. After all, that overpowering floral scent will make everyone hungry. Bonus if the diapers are used.

Assignment 371: While giving a sermon at church, pantomime a play by play of the football game going on at the same time, but never verbalize it. Keep going with the Sermon on the Mount, pretending your nonverbal tics are not spelling out Pittsburgh 2 Green Bay 4. If necessary, use a radio earpiece.

Assignment 364: Eliminate the phrase "you too" from your vocabulary. Replace with "YouTube."

Assignment 365: Make a collections company that only calls people on their birthdays.

Assignment 366: Send random strangers handmade "billing statements" written in crayola crayons and multicolored pencils. Call it "the happy card" and make all the math, business transactions and account numbers seem genuine.

Assignment 367: Build a giant castle out of Fern Gulley and Avatar videos, DVDs and soundtracks.

Things they don't tell you about Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

*You aren't supposed to follow Princess Ruto when she swims up up and away from you once you know how to play the flute by the Triforce symbol.  That's it.
*Lighting those torches by the waterfall in Zora's ice cavern doesn't do anything.
*You can cut past Zelda when the castle is collapsing, but you still have to kill two skeletons and a zombie really fast.
*The zombie is near the exit.  You can't use the sun song to stun it.
*You can't buy the shield in Dodongo's cave or buy the kid's blue and red vests once you have the adult versions.  Maybe not even before then.
*A video walkthrough of the game is sometimes better than a strategy guide, especially at a boss fight.
*Enemies allow a fair amount of time for aiming arrows.
*Bongo Bongo: You cannot shoot his fist, only his open hands.  Nothing can stop the fist.
*Octopus can only be hurt from the rear.  Stun from the front.
*Princess Ruto can teleport.  She can't be lost forever or killed inside that big organic maze thing.

Men's Rm.413 Janitor Supply Key/SCP Foundation Master Key

**Seeking Greenlights** Yes
**Page Type** SCP Article
**Elevator Pitch**
Several doors in the Foundation cannot be unlocked.  Everyone searches for the Master Key to open them, but always end up grabbing the key to the 3 North Restroom 413 Broom Closet by mistake.  It's said to "Jump into their hand."
**Central Narrative**
*Agents have been terminated for misplacing keys to special equipment lockers, vaults and storage rooms.  When given the `Replacement Key', these agents often receive the Foundation Master Key, but it invariably ends up being replaced with the Broom Closet Key.
*Bad things keep happening due to unopenable doors.  People die, prisoners starve, nonlethal and lethal weaponry cannot be accessed.  Agents have to work around the problem.
*Maintenance workers cannot unlock the broom closet due to the irregular shape of the found Master Key.  Complicated rituals allow them to use the key elsewhere, with disastrous results.
*An agent obsessively records the search for the missing key and ends up demoted then fired in the process.
**Hook/Attention Grabber**
An easily contained harmless object keeps getting swapped with an object that can't be contained.  Instead of granting superpowers, it's a major handicap.

Maniac Mansion Mania Episode 76: Klaus's Revenge

I translated the German walkthrough into English with Google Translate, but it didn't help very much.  I figured out most of the stuff by trial and error, after I tried to do what the walkthrough said.  The interface is not very intuitive, so I think this walkthrough will do a better job helping you complete the game.

1.  The opening is somewhat easy to figure out.  You "use" brute force on the bucket in the dark screen to remove the bucket, then grab the book of 101 pranks.  Leave the screen, and you go home and clean up.
2.  This is the first place I got stuck at.  You can't do very much at all except open the backpack, take out the items, and place them all on the desk.  You'll hear a ringing phone then, so "use brute force" on the desk to open the drawer and "look" to pull out a cel phone.  This leads you to your next cinematic.
3.  Now you can read the book of pranks.  It's important to read this, not only to figure out the pranks, but also to access areas on the map.  Your first prank:  Disgusting pizza.  Most of the doors are locked, but you can talk to Hoagie.  Hoagie doesn't do anything but stare through a hole into the girl's room.
4.  Another counterintuitive item:  Clicking on the bottom of the screen in the school hallway makes Klaus go further down the hallway.  You'll see Wendy and Emilia here.  Talk to them both, read the poster, and then talk to them again.  Emilia is okay with dating you, but you have to get Wendy away from the bulletin board.  Go further down the hallway.
5.  Here's the staff room.  Use brute force to open the staff room door.  The next room has nothing but a key and a camera.  The key's on the bulletin board.  You open a cabinet and look in a box to find the camera.  You never get to open the door.
6.  The room next door has the principal.  Talk to him until you get a work order.
7.  Go back out to the main hallway, take the stairs up.  You can never go into the basement or attic.  On the second floor, you meet Michael, who doesn't want to talk to you right now.  Go up the hallway, and you see classrooms.  Click the bottom of the screen, and there's Dave and Sandy.  Talk to Dave about his presidency.  Go right past the trophy case, and you come to the nurse's station and Dr. Tears.  Have a chat with Dr. Tears, and you get a locker combination.
8.  Go back downstairs, open the third locker just by choosing "open" on it.  Nothing of use here except the whiteout.  You don't get to use the yarn.
9.  Use the whiteout on the work order.  Take it upstairs to the nurse's station.  Nurse Edna gets super excited and leaves the room, allowing you to open the medicine cabinet and take Viagra.  The desk doesn't open.  Go back out, talk to Laverne about the saw.
10.  Go downstairs to the principal's office.  He jumps out the window.  Take his book and work order, open the top drawer in the dresser and you get a key.
11.  Go back upstairs to where Dave is.  Open the trophy case with the key, take the ball bat.  You can also try taking the Oscar for laughs.
12.  Leave the school, go to S-Mart.  You can't go upstairs or ring those doorbells.
13.  Look at the phone, stand next to the shelves and "use phone".  Again, counterintuitive.  Dial the number from the lady's phone, and grab the boots.  That's all you can steal from her.  You can watch TV to see Indiana Jones and the Last Jihad.
14.  Go outside and left one screen.  Talk to Ahmed, call him friend or something so he tries to get the pizza, then use brute force on him to get three dollars.  He disappears.
15.  Talk to Jeff, saying you're picking up Ahmed's pizza.  Also ask about advertising for him.  He says he wants pills.  You have to "pick up" the pill bottle he gives you and then "use" it on the Viagra.
16.  Give Jeff the Viagra.  You get coupons.
17.  Give the coupons to Dave at school.  You'll get a rake.
18.  Talk to Michael about photographing something unsightly.  He says something about censorship, and you can tell him "here's your camera".  He will tell you that Hoagie has pictures of his butt as a business card.  That's all you can get out of him.
19.  Go to Hoagie and ask about the band and an autograph.  You get a butt picture.
20.  Put the butt picture on the bulletin board so Wendy and Emilia dissapear.
21.  On the first floor, Syd is looking for drumsticks.  Don't waste your time trying to find them or attempt beating him up.  Just close his locker and he'll run off to Nurse Edna.
22.  Talk to Laverne and you get a saw.  The scene in the nurse's room is amusing.
23.  Go outside the school and to the right.  Use the pizza in the garbage dumpster.
24.  Use the ink pen on the work order.  Stick it under the door marked with a T on the first floor, then go into the cafeteria and talk to the guy behind the spit guard about his popcorn wagon.  He disappears after the explosion.
25.  Switch the dirty pizza with the pizza on the table.  Well, so much for that prank.
26.  Don't bother with the red herring, it's a red herring.
27.  On the second floor, enter the hallway and use the bulletin board key on the door on the bottom left.  You'll see a mouse.
28.  This isn't easy to figure out.  You want to wait until the mouse is looking in the direction you want it to go, then "look at desk" immediately.  The mouse will run in the direction it's facing.  Keep doing this from desk to desk until it runs into the mouse hole, and don't worry, it freezes in place while you're marching up to look for it.  Just make sure you aren't selecting "go to" at the time.  At the mouse hole, you "look" and receive the window handle.
29.  Use the window handle to open the window, then go back to S-Mart.
30.  Buy balloons by "pick up balloons".  They cost exactly $3, convenient since you took that from Ahmed.
31.  Read the prank book, then go to Hoagie's bathroom.  "Use" the tap, not the sink itself, then use the balloons with the tap.  They'll go into the bucket.
32.  Go out the newly opened classroom window.  "Use bucket" on the ground you're standing on, not "below".  The plants are useless, by the way.
33.  Look below and you'll see Bernard.
34.  "Use bucket" and watch the cinematic.
35.  Another failed prank.  Grab the bucket and go right to return home.
36.  Go to Bernard's house and watch the cinematic.
37.  Read the prank book again.  Open your cel phone, but the battery in the boot, and drop it in the lake.
38.  Hit the tree with the ball bat to get sticks.
39.  Talk with Clouseau.
40.  Pick up the shovel.  When Clouseau catches you, tell him you stole a rake.
41.  Go right to the police picnic.  Talk with them.
42.  Go right, talk with the guy, beat him up.  You'll get a sign.  Climb the mountain so you can see the beehive.
43.  Return to the house Cluseau is standing next to.  Use the sign with the shovel.  Look in the trash and you'll get a string.
44.  Use the string on the contraption you made, use it on the rock next to the house.
45.  Test your catapault with the bucket.
46.  Go right and tell the police Clouseau is a flasher.  Steal their picnic.  Go left and the cops carry him away.
47.  Talk with the ranger in the house about his fake window and the bees.  Give him the saw.  You'll get a bug stunning spray.
48.  Climb the mountain, spray the bugs, get them down with the ball bat or something.
49.  Use the beehive on the catapault.
50.  Another misfiring prank.  Read the prank book.
51.  Go left until you see Bernard sleeping next to a tree.  Set the basket next to him.
52.  Go back to the policemen.  Talk to them, maybe go back to Bernard and see the cinematic.  Foiled again!
53.  Go to the screen where you beat up the guy and got the sign.  Read the prank book, dig a hole, then go to the lake.
54.  Fill the bucket with water, take it to the hole you made.  
55.  Drop in your electrified eels, cover it with sticks, then "pick up" the grass and lay it on top.
56.  Set the book from the principal's desk on the trap.  Use the shovel to get rid of the dirt.
57.  Bernard ignores the trap.  This is another thing that had me scratching my head.  Klaus mentions getting "better nerd bait", but you actually can't find any anywhere in the game.  All you really have to do is grab the textbook and fall into your own trap like a dumbass.
58.  Getting fed up now.  March up the hill, use ball bat on cave opening, and watch the ending.
I saw a few "Easter eggs" posted by someone else at the site:
Boys toilet: open and close the right cubicle quite often.
Girls' toilet: enter as often as possible.
After Emilia has eaten the gross pizza, go back to the cafeteria.
S-Mart: Take and use chainsaw several times.
S-Mart: try out all the phone numbers on your mobile phone that can be found in the original MM poster.
Nature reserve: use the showcase key with the moon or death star

Kian and Enu

Debates about Kian in Dreamfall Chapters are very heated.  I'm not going to retread old ground, except to say that if you're going to have a game where you can make choices to affect relationships with different characters, why not choose his sexual preference too?
I thought maybe kissing Anna would allow a different option, but no, he's definitely gay.  I wasn't fond of Anna, and thought she couldn't be trusted because she's a magical, but a Google search explained this doesn't change anything.
Magicals are like elves.  They can be thousands of years old and look like kids.  That makes the relationships in this game a little confusing.
I'm saying this because I thought Kian had a definite chance with the youthful Enu.  She DID seem smitten with him.  
By the same token, I didn't understand the scene where he had to choose whether or not to torture the Azadi.  I couldn't tell for sure if the magical was a kid or thousands of years old until Kian's friends chastised him for going easy on the guy.  I wondered if the 100 year old nymph (I assumed, anyway) actually liked the Azadi soldier.  You don't get that much information on their relationship, other than what others say about it, which makes it morally ambiguous.  You surprise them in the act, so of course it looks bad.
This reminds me of another morally ambiguous choice in the Rockstar Games Batman game.  With everything in silhouette, you were given several different options that didn't look great, all of them looking like you'd kill the guy.  I saw a picture of a chair with something sticking out of it, then stared in shock as Batman slams the guy down on a rusty piece of rebar.  How was I supposed to know that's what he was going to do?
Also, while on the topic of choice and interactivity, the tower at the end of the game has all these computers all over the place, on every scaffold, but you never can do anything with them.  It seems like a waste of rendering, programming and memory space not to have some kind of interactivity with them.  All kinds of characters show up on the platforms around the computers.  Certainly someone could stand at one and call to the other guy to input the virus, or you could have a timer in which you have to type in the numbers real fast.  Maybe all of this had to do with deadlines.

Read All About It

(Incomplete short story)

No one can explain why episodes of the Ratatat television show change every time you watch them, or how two people can watch the same exact episode and come away with a completely different story.

Take Episode 1:  `Dead in the Water' for example.  When I watched it for the first time on the Afoot Network, Detective Ratatat proved that the victim had been drowned in a bathtub and later deposited into the mansion swimming pool to make it look like an accident.

Yesterday, when I watched `Dead in the Water', the criminal added an extra step to his scheme:  Pumping swimming pool water into the dead victim's lungs, to hide traces of soap, and add chlorine.  This time Ratatat caught the killer with the evidence of unusual bruising.  My buddy online said their `Dead in the Water' involved the killer injecting Mr. Cruz's system with sedatives to make the drowning easier.

(This section of text is missing, probably accidentally thrown away.  The narrator is the son of the show's producer, and he's just been to a reading of the Will).

"I don't understand this," my wife said as I unlocked the door to the mansion.  "How are you getting an inheritance if your dad keeps making these shows on his app?"

I could only shrug.  "He's been missing for over five years.  No communications.  The police abandoned the search."

Sharon massaged the head of the stone owl on the railing.  "Yeah, but the program..."

"They look like they were all made in 1972.  You ever seen pictures of Johnny Carson's film archive?  Some guy in South Africa probably has a vault full of old film reels he splices together in different ways to make it look new...You saw Rebel One, right?  They animated two dead people in that movie."

"Yeah, but they didn't look right.  You could tell it was CGI."

"Technology keeps improving."

I pushed the giant ornately carved doors inward, staring at a foyer with a marble staircase.  

Sharon flipped a light switch, and the chandelier came on...for a second before popping out.  She wiped her grimy hands on her jeans.  "Guess the maid quit."

I clicked the flashlight icon on my phone so we could see.

The taxidermy owl that served as the centerpiece on the foyer table appeared to be molting.  

A dog toy squeaked under Sharon's heel.  "You never told me what happened to the dog."

I wandered toward the den.  "Which one?  He's had at least ten Basset hounds.  Every time one gets too old or sick to appear on the show, it ends up in his house."

"Where are his pets now?"

"I dunno.  I think Aunt Julie took them.  I'm shocked as hell that I even got the mansion."

The sofas wore dust covers, but the moment I walked past them, the fireplace flared to life, a pair of candelabras sparking and lighting up around a framed painting of dad and his dogs.

"Motion sensors.  Your father had a flair for the dramatic."

I rolled my eyes.  "I know."

"This wasn't an accident, Mister Wardlaw, this was a cold blooded murder, and you did it!"  my dad's voice barked.  

I nearly jumped out of my skin before I noticed the flat panel TV glowing between the bookshelves.

My wife marched up to the TV, watching the preview clips.  "`Death On the Books'...That's...Episode Three, right?"

I rubbed my forehead, frowning at the long opening sequence.  Woman in an old timey negligee making a call on a rotary phone.  Man in a leisure suit pouring himself bourbon on the rocks, quarreling with her about publishing rights.  "Probably.  With Featherstone, though, the question, though, the question always is—"

"I know, I know," Sharon groaned.  "Which episode Three."  She clicked buttons on a `Decoding Featherstone' app.  "She's not wearing a bra in this version.  That means her husband is going to kill her with a glass jewelry box and try to make it look like she drowned in the bathtub."

I squinted at the screen for confirmation of a nipple sighting.  "You got all that from a missing bra?"

Sharon pointed at her phone.  "It's got a flowchart.  If the wife has a bra on, she also has a gun in her garter belt, and she ends up plugging him before he can raise a hand to her.  He also would have been drinking Scotch."

"I...seem to remember hearing about one where he floats facedown in a pool and she makes it look like a mob hit."

"Yeah..."

We both stared as the man opened a sleeping pill, pouring it into a glass of wine with a dramatic flourish.

"Is that in the flowchart?"

Sharon slowly shook her head.  "She's not supposed to be in a negligee when that happens...Featherstone's going to have a hard time proving this was a murder."

"They always make some trifling mistake."

"True..."

I turned the TV sideways, checking the ports.

"Whatcha looking for?"

"Afoot is a steaming video service.  Nobody told me anything about dad's internet provider.  I thought someone disconnected all that during the police search."

"No afoot, no Featherstone TV show."  Sharon agreed.  "You think it's piggybacking off of us?"

I found only an antenna cable on the TV.  "What the hell?"

Wire connected to a spaceship shaped antenna next to the ceiling.

I pulled the object down, but the picture didn't weaken any.

"What's that, a UFO?"

"It's jut a digital receiver from Walmart."

"Nothing inside?  Like a hotspot or something?"

I got a screwdriver out of my car and dismantled the whole thing, but only found the usual plastic shell.  Didn't affect the signal any either.

"Gotta be a strong hotspot around here somewhere.  Maybe it's broadcasting like a radio station."

"I'm surprised the FCC hasn't got wind of this."

"The property's too big.  I don't think the neighbors would pick up anything.  You didn't see any actual towers on the outside, did you?"

"No..."  She opened the wifi menu on her phone.  "Wow, Readallaboutit82 has solid bars all the way up.  There has got to be a router or something nearby."

The two of us split up, following the router signal in a large scale game of hot and cold.

"Freezing," I called from the upper floor landing.

"Warm...hot..."  I followed my wife into an industrial kitchen, past a mini bistro to a sliding patio door.

The signal led us outside, into a garden of disfigured topiary animals.  After playing the hot/cold game for another five minutes, we arrived at a low stone building.

"What do you think this is?"

"Maybe a maintenance shed, or maybe the groundskeeper stays here.  Guess it makes sense.  They'd have to stay somewhere."

I knocked on the door.

"I doubt anyone's going to open.  The place hasn't been dusted, and all these hedge animals have gone to seed."

"Someone's using the wifi.  Maybe they're just lazy."

I tried the knob, and the door swung inward, revealing a laboratory filled with scientific equipment.

Sharon leaned in, staring at the beakers and retorts and loaded bookshelves.  "Doctor Frankenstein, I presume?"

A panel on the wall slid open, and an oversized computer monitor with glowing cartoon eyes rolled out on a conveyor belt.  A robotic voice barked, "System activated.  Awaiting input."