On September 14th, 1990, CBS aired, as a prime-time special, the very first episode of Tiny Toon Adventures. That episode was “The Looney Beginning”. Cartoons were never the same since.

Join me in declaring September 14th as “Tiny Toons Day”, the annual day where we celebrate the cartoon that shaped many of our lives all those years before.

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But the question is how to observe the day. So, please feel free to leave your comments on how to outwardly show our appreciation and love for the show!

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I decided to do a Tiny Toon Adventures podcast. It’s nothing special, but when I realized that I have been involved in the TTA fandom for over 30 years, I thought maybe, just maybe, I might have a few things to share! Take a listen!

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So, I venture back into chess, I started checking out chess.com again. It is a place that you can go and play chess online completely free (though to get the most of the website, you really have to pay). After walking down memory line, I thought that I’d share a game for any and all to enjoy (or make fun of), with my own commentary.

The day was December 14th, 2016. I drew black and the name of my opponent was “dabeast_cons”.

Link - https://www.chess.com/game/live/1854031167

1. e4 e5 2. Qh5 g6 3. Qxe5+ Ne7 4. Qxh8 Nbc6 5. Qxh7 d6 6. Qh3 Bxh3 7. d4 Nxd4 8. Be3 Nxc2+ 9. Kd2 Nxa1 10. Bg5 d5 11. exd5 Qxd5+ 12. Kc3 Qxg5 13. Bd3 O-O-O 14. Nf3 Qc5+ 15. Kd2 Qc2+ 16. Ke3 Qxd3+ 17. Kf4 Nd5+ 18. Kg3 Be6 19. Re1 Qf5 20. Re5 Qg4# 0-1

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A completely standard opening that you’ll find the chess world.

This move has been pulled on me so many times on chess.com it seems. And g6 was such a terrible move as well. Better would have Nc6 to protect the pawn. At the moment, the Queen doesn’t have any good attack (3. Qxf7+ Kxf7 and 3. Qxh7 Rxh7 are both just plain bad) so Nc6 shuts down this particular attack.

3. Qxe5+ takes advantage of my bad blunder and get a fork attack on my king. Yeah, it’s easily blocked (with Ne7), but now the tempo is completely against me and I’m down on material.

After loosing my rook, I just wanted to start developing pieces.

This was a move that I would not have expected to see after how my opponent had been playing. They committed a major blunder, for sure, that allowed the board to be shifted more to me. But I also have wandered why they replied so meekly, giving me a pawn as a bonus and not capturing the bishop instead (7. gxh3). Perhaps the blunder threw them off their game really bad.

The move 8. Be3 is a blunder, opening up a major three-way fork. 8. Na3 would have at least protected from the immediate threat.

White had almost no choice, with 9. Kd2 being perhaps the best of the only three moves they could have done. At the very least, it’s a threat the black knight and protecting the bishop, though I admit, I had my eye on the rook no matter what.

Looking back at this game, I keep wondering why white had not captured the bishop I left sitting on h3 all this time. Perhaps here they could have done 10. Kxh3 instead of the somewhat lame-duck threat being presented here.

The move 10. … d5 from myself was a slightly weak threat that still ended up working. I saw that if they took the pawn offering, I could respond and win the recently moved bishop. I am not sure of a better move, except to still capture the lone bishop as mentioned above.

But I realized, that in replaying this game, that I missed checkmate. 12. … Nc6 13. Kxh3 Qd4#

The queen side castle here for me allows me to get my rook into the center of the board.

White does their best move, I would say here, threatening the queen, making me move her or lose her. But I always like to look for checks when I move and try to make the type of check that allows me to really gain advantage, though I missed 14. … Nd5+ for a better combination.

The knight that I left on a1 is providing protection here, with my d-rank rook keeping the bishop from taking my queen as it runs in to check.

Which is better here for white, the move made here (Ke3) or should they have retreated to the back row? I actually can’t make up my mind on the issue, as they both lead to checkmate. Perhaps retreating to the backrow might hold off the checkmate longer, maybe?

I could have had checkmate a move earlier with 17. … Qf5+ 18. Ke3 Nc2+ 19. Ke2 Qd3#.

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A pretty basic game that I really enjoyed playing in the moment. It helped reenforce the idea to hang in there even after you blunder. The early game blunder that I made almost made me quit, but I am thankful that I didn’t. I have often said that the game of chess can come down to who can properly capitalize upon the blunders of the other player.

I hope you enjoyed this game. I will try to post a few more of my games in the future! Please tell me in the comments below what you thought of my game!

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Today, I just signed back up with the United States Chess Federation. I also signed up to play a two-game email correspondence game with someone. I haven't done this in a long time but I have been wanting to.

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I used to play chess quite a bit 20 years ago. I was in a situation where I had plenty of time, so I decided to learn how to play really well at the game. I've been a lifelong fan of chess. I consider myself a competent player these days but I am also so very out of practice.

A long time ago, I played in a four player “tournament” via correspondence and I was tied for the win.1 Am I great? Heck no, but I am pretty decent. I’d say that I am actually in the 600 range in score, but I really don't know. My “current” correspondence score is 1714, but that is only for roughly four games overall and shouldn't be used to say how good I am.

I want to get better and play more, so I am signing up to play more via email correspondence. I’ll chronicle that journey here, or try to when I remember to post something.

Do you play chess? Let me know in the comments below.

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It had been my birthday and my best friend at the time gave me a roll of quarters. I used to go to the comic book store1 on a semi-regular basis at the time and on the next visit soon after this one birthday, I had that roll of quarters burning a hole in my pocket.

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I walked into the comic book store and after looking around a bit, grabbing the few X-Men comics that I was into at the time, I walked up to the register. It was there that I saw something that would end up changing my life. It was a Starter deck of 60 cards of Revised Edition Magic: the Gathering. I believe that at the time it cost just slightly more than the $10 worth of quarters that I had in my pocket and had to ask my mother to help me with the rest of it, but I just had to have it.

I had been reading a magazine called Wizard at this time, as it was the preeminent magazine for comic books, but it did cover over things as well. It had been in an issue of Wizard magazine that I first learned of the existence of this card game. I have been a gamer pretty much all my life, starting with video games, so this card game caught my eye and intrigued me.

I bought it. I didn’t have anything truly valuable in the deck. Even by today’s standards. But it was a start. I never did find anyone to play the game with back where I lived at the time but I did try several times to do so. What’s really funny is that I tried then to get my best friend to play the game, but he wouldn’t… until years later after I had moved away and he moved further north. I guess he didn’t want to play with me. That didn’t stop me from getting more cards however. My mother even bought some for me without me ever asking for them!

I didn’t get to play the officially with the paper cards for years, but I did end up buying the MicroProse PC adaptation. I loved that game and it was through it that I officially learned how to play the game. I would just sit in the deck builder, build decks and play the AI. I rarely played the “core” game that the game included, something that I actually mostly regret now.

I didn’t get to play real life Magic all that much until my family moved over to where we still live today. Here, I finally found others that played the game and I started buying cards like crazy. I was working at a local attraction place at the time, in the redemption center, when I met guys who will just slightly younger (by like a year or two) who were into the game. I played a few games with the guys, but no matter how little I got to play, I was buying cards.

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Then a little while later, I got a job at a local McDonalds, where I met a gentleman that I am going to simply call Donnie. I got to talking to the guy and soon found out that he played the game. He was about four years younger than I, but upon finding out that he played too, we challenged each other to play. We brought cards to work the next day and played a game during our lunch break.

We became fast friends, with M:TG in common, and started getting together to play often, him inviting others to come play occasionally as well. And it was at this time that I really began to take the game seriously. This was the time frame that I started to really buy large amounts of cards. Before this, I’d buy packs, maybe two, three or four at a time. But I would eventually realize that I could buy entire booster boxes. Back then, they cost maybe $75 roughly, it wasn’t that bad.

I will add here that there was no local game store in the area that I live. I live in a small town that’s at least close to an hour away from the closest big city. This made it hard for Donnie and I to find places to play the game outside of his own dwelling. I still lived with my parents at the time, so playing there was out of the question (I was in my early 20s…). We’d play just about anywhere we could find but we also made trips to the city on occasion to find game stores.

But then, Donnie got stupid. Now, I am not here to draw anyone through the mud, so I am only going to talk briefly about this. One day, I get a phone call and headed over to Donnie’s place. That was when I found out that Donnie and another guy decided in a weak moment to steal someone’s M:TG cards. This whole situation ended with Donnie going to jail for a few days2 and soured me almost completely on M:TG.

Just before all of that, I did get into Magic Online, which is an online version of Magic that is still up and running to this day. After that happened with Donnie, if I ever played Magic, it was on Magic Online since my circle of friends pretty much revolved around Donnie. I ended up eventually walking away from even Magic Online. The last cards that I bought before that was Tenth Edition cards, so this would have been around mid-2007.

I took a long break from Magic for a while. But one day I was in the Wal-Mart that was next the place that I working at the time. This was roughly early to mid-2015. I found sets and cards there for sets that had been recently released and I just couldn’t help myself. I started to go crazy again, but by this time, finally, a local game store had finally opened up in my little town and I had someplace that I could go and play at!

But it didn’t last long, only about a year. But during this time, I had attended my very first pre-releases, Friday Night Magic and other events revolving around the game. I had reconnected with Donnie and tried to get him back into the game, but I wasn’t very successful. But I really enjoyed this time playing Magic again. I even got one of the really rare full art non-basic “pain search land” from the Zendikar Expeditions set, which I think was the card Polluted Delta3. I had sold it to someone who bought a booster box for me as a trade.

But I went through some rough stuff in my life at this time, so I couldn’t keep up with Magic anymore and I had to leave it yet again. Strange how life does this to you, right?

Then again in late 2021, I once again found myself getting really into Magic. A new game store had opened up in area that I was living in at the time and when I saw it the first time, I just HAD to stop and in less than three months, I was in there playing mostly board games and trying to get games of Dungeons and Dragons going. But eventually, watching others play Magic got me back into playing and buying. The first set that I got to really buy a lot of was Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and I got to do pre-releases and the such once again and was loving it. But alas, it didn’t get to last.

I had left for two years (actually, it was more like 20 months) and when I returned, I needed a job and I actually did get hired on at the store… for about three weeks. Bad crap happened, I lost the job. But thankfully, I recovered pretty well. That was two years ago this month in fact. I never got back into Magic at that point (I bought a tiny bit and even got to run a single Magic draft that I also had to play in to get it off the ground). I stayed away from the store for close to a year at that point.

Since then, I have stayed away from Magic. Until here recently. I have a coworker at work that has got into the game through his girlfriend and it’s has inspired me to get back into the game. I bought some cards for the new set that just came out and everything. But it also has me wanting to go through all of my old cards and organize them and maybe start recording what I have. Honestly, I am giving serious consideration to beginning to sell some of the cards, but I have a LOT of cards that I have gathered over the years. But we’ll see….

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So I have been working on eric42.com. I have been studying HTML and CSS lightly over the past few months, trying to get myself a bit more up to date about doing websites. A long time ago, I used to do websites for myself. I even owned eric42.com back then at one point in time as well, along with other domain names like terra-online.net. I did the TTA-Fanfic Mirror Site back then, along with various websites, some published, some not published, on various topics. I even started a Final Fantasy VI website once, though I never published it.

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I like doing websites. It’s fun. It was simple back in the day. It still is simple ways, but it can also get very complicated. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is where this gets complicated, honestly. It’s meant to simplify the process of designing websites by allowing multiple websites reference a single style sheet to dictate the design of the pages. Then all you need is to edit a single file to then affect all of the pages that reference that page. But CSS is not a simple thing to learn.

Actually, I take that back, for the most part. It is “simple”. It has a pretty straight-forward syntax that isn't hard, but it gets complex and that’s where it becomes hard for me. There is so much you can do with CSS and thus with that comes a long list of commands and other things to learn.

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But I have been trying to learn what I can. I recently made a website for Tiny Toon Adventures (found at http://eric42.com/tta) and I learned that CSS can be used to modify images and used it to do things to the images on the main TTA page and the Character guide on the page. I love it. I wish I had this stuff 20+ years ago when I was last doing websites!

I am using w3schools as my base for learning CSS. (https://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp) I use them as a quick reference to any and everything and then play with the code using Notepad++ as my “editor”. I’m old school in many way and I just love hand-coding everything. I have done everything that I can to make my own pages something unique. I hope I am succeeding.

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I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about my website, eric42.com.

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But first, a quick history of my time doing websites. I started as a teenage geek just wanting to do something geeky. I can actually remember standing in the entryway of our high school, when I looked at my best friend at the time, a fellow geek like myself, and told him that I wanted to make websites. He just said to go ahead and that I needed to learn HTML.

So, I learned HTML. Actually, while that is true, I honestly just started looking at the “source code” for various basic websites and learned that way. Or in other words, I learned to do it, side-ways as normal. Over time, as I did it this way, I learned what everything meant and did. As per what is normal for me, I did things the harder way.

Over the years, I have made multiple websites. I’ve been a fan of the cartoon, Tiny Toon Adventures as a teenager, so it became a popular topic for me to make a page for. I was a member of the TTA-Fanfiction Mailing List, and I was reading multiple fanfics for the show. It became obvious that I did something more in that direction. I never could come up with an idea for my own fanfic, so I just created the TTA-Fanfic Mirror Site, a “mirror” to the original Mailing List’s archive of fanfics released through the List itself. I just wanted to contribute, and I was learning HTML, so it just seemed a good idea.

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I’ve never looked back. I love making websites. I just end up with very little content for them. Today, I have eric42.com. It’s the second time now that I have had the domain name (I owned it briefly back in the mid-2000s), and I love it. It’s going to stay mine this time.

I’ve brought back the TTA-Fanfiction Mirror Site, though it’s no longer just a “mirror” to the original page, mostly because the original page is long gone, but also because since they don’t do the monthly mailings to release new fanfics, to get “new” fanfics into the Mirror Site I will now have to accept though not released on the Mailing List.

In the effort of bringing back the Mirror Site, I went to AI (oh, I hear the groans already...) and asked it to help me with a new design. What it spat back out to me was something that I fell in love with almost immediately. I took it and used it as a starting point to start relearning HTML, CSS, and anything else that I would need to know today to continue doing websites.

From there, there isn’t much else. I’m a writer, so there is a REALLY OLD story of mine that I am still kinda proud of, though it is very, very rough, called “The Golden Paladin”. I love fantasy fiction, and that story was going to be my start into my own fantasy world. However, I am considering trying to rewrite that old story in order to really flesh it out. I think to think that my writing has improved since I first wrote it.

And now, I have begun to post some of my articles that I wrote for my Messianic substack, starting with a single one that I am very happy with called “Lawlessness”. I’m considering putting some of the other articles on eric42.com. We’ll see.

Anyway, thanks for reading this article. Consider leaving a comment below and let me know what you think of it and my website!

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So, in a moment of weakness, I bought Pokémon: Legends ZA. I’ve been a fan of Pokémon my entire adult life (they released when I was 18 or 19 years old!), and I own most of the regular series games. So, it’s not a stretch to imagine me playing Legends ZA.

However, this game is quite different from the other Pokémon games. Most, if not all, are turn-based. This one is too, for the most part, but it has a more freeform approach to it. Instead of both Pokémon (yours and your opponent) taking a move each round, all you have to do is wait for moves to “recharge”. You can just spam damaging moves, honestly, though that isn’t always the best option for you to do.

I don’t know what to think of the game exactly. It’s still Pokémon, but it is an evolution of the series that I was afraid would be taken. I am also a long time fan of the Final Fantasy series of games… at least of their older stuff. I haven’t played Final Fantasy 12 or 13 (or any of their spin-offs), and for the most part, it’s because of the changes to the battle system they made. No longer are they turn-based strictly. I own and have played a little of Final Fantasy 15 (14 was an MMORPG), and I do not like it’s battle system.

Don’t get me wrong, I am fan of a lot of games that take a more action approach to games. The Legend of Zelda, for instance. (The upcoming Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment game looks beyond excellent!) But when I play a game like Pokémon or Final Fantasy, I am used to turn based RPGs that allow me time to analyze and make up my strategies as needed without being pressured for time. But now, Legends ZA is starting to take that part away from me as a player.

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My first impression of the game is that it seems like a pretty fun game. But I am not really all that into it. Perhaps it’s burnout on the series. Perhaps it is for the reason that I mentioned above. But I am not sure. It is partly because the game holds my hand for way too long. Sure, a little bit of hand holding is expected, more so in a game that is expected to be played by kids…. but this game takes it to a new level.

After Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, where you go anywhere and do anything after only a few minutes into the game, this game has you do things that you may not be yet interested in doing just yet. I love the exploration part of games. This game doesn’t let you explore very much for quite a while.

Overall, the game looks like it’ll have some great content, but I am not sure I am going to end up seeing it all. Its compatibility with Pokémon Home, which comes at the beginning of next year sometime, will also suck. It’ll be “one-way”. Pokémon from the other games (mostly) will be transferable into ZA, but any Pokémon that was in ZA can’t, from that moment on, be transferred into any other previous game. What?

Am I going to keep playing? Yeah, some at least, but I am not sure for how much longer. Legends Arceus was a great game that I enjoyed a lot, but I have barely played it. I am afraid that this one will end up with the same fate.

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I’ve been having stomach troubles. I’ve dealt with stomach trouble for over 20 years now in various forms but here lately, it has become quite worse. It has me a little worried and I am going to eventually get to the doctor and get looked at and maybe solve what is going on with me.

I felt so bad this past Thursday that I ended up missing work. That is something that I honestly can not afford to do. But thankfully, I had already done some overtime and I worked today (that is, Sunday, as this looks to be posted on Tuesday now) so I almost caught back up. But today, it began again, though short lived.

But that’s life. I’ll manage for sure and get back to regular before long, I would imagine.

I have continued to work on and tweek my website, eric42.com, since my last post. I’m trying to figure out some things to post on there.

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But that’s enough for now. Take care!

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Hello, my name is Eric Richardson. I own eric42.com. In fact, I just recently registered the domain name and linked it up to my personal website. Please check it out and tell me what you think!

So, do you want to know more about me? Well, it’s fairly simple. I’m a geek. I’m a gamer. I’m also a Messianic believer (and I have another substack on which I’ve published a few Messianic articles as well). That’s it in a nutshell. Not much is there?

This blog will end up being a place for me to talk about the things that are on my mind. That could be just what I have been up to lately, the games that I am playing or even something that is happening out in the world. I have no idea what I am ever going to talk about, but I know that I want to try to write on here on a regular basis, even if not every day.

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So, a little more than a couple weeks ago, I was in full learn mode for creating websites. I used to do them when I was younger, but the whole process started to get harder and more complex and it outpaced me. Then life happened. But I’ve been wanting to get back into it and learn the more modern approach to making websites. I had never made one that was optimized for mobile platforms.

So I had AI design one for me. Then I used it and a book that I have purchased to start my lessons. The book was “HTML and CSS: The Comprehensive Guide” by Jurgen Wolf. I studied and I have learned a lot. With all of that together, I was able to design and make the new eric42.com website.

I don’t yet really understand every little element, I have to admit. Perhaps I am coming at it all sideways, but I pretty much do understand most of the coding. I get it and I am continuing to learn, so that’s a plus.

But I also then had a distraction happen. I made the decision to check out World of Warcraft Classic. I used to play WoW back in the day, but it’s been roughly 18 years since I last played. I had checked out what everyone calls the “retail” version of the game a few months ago but wasn’t all that impressed. It wasn’t what I had last played back in the day. But, if Classic could bring me back to those days? Then, I decided that I could be down with that. So I paid for a month and started playing. Well, I guess I am sticking around as I have been playing nearly non-stop (except when working of course) for the two weeks since.

I’m playing a Paladin that I have named Alric. Just made level 23 and I am currently for the most part over in the Redridge area questing. It’s a rough area, a lot of the mobs are 20 and 21 elites that are hard to solo. But I am working on it.

Anyway, that’s enough for now. More later. :D

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