Recommendation

You probably already know about this, since I seem to be one of the last people to clue in. But. You need to play Cave Story. Especially if you liked any of the Metroid games, the early Mega Mans, or the latter-day Castlevanias. It is really good.

I mean it: really good. It has tight control and brilliant level/montser/weapon design, so it plays wonderfully. The design of the game world and characters has the sort of unity of vision that one associates with a Mega Man or a Metroid game. The storytelling is spare and smart. The difficulty curve is relentlessly precise, demanding a steady increase in skill and feeding you exactly the challenges you need to achieve it. (And the positions of the save points are very well thought-out, so that failing a nasty area or a killer gauntlet of enemies never feels soul-crushing.) All told, it is pretty much everything you could ask for from an NES or Genesis game. You need to play it.

(Cave Story is free, it plays on Mac OS and Windows, and the translate-to-English patch tool is easy to use. Just follow the link above and look around.)

Picture!

• Take a picture of yourself right now.
• Don’t change your clothes.
• Don’t fix your hair
• Just take a picture.
• Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.)
• Include these instructions.

The top of the head, she is out to lunch. Also, check out that pout/smirk!

(via quirkybird. And everyone else, because that's how these things work.)

Alternate punchline:

Robert was right: Puget Sound Motorcycles has the good helmet prices.