Have you ever done something EarthBoundy?

My real-life experiences with EarthBound usually never leave the realm of music, but those experiences that I have lived have been quirky, odd, and even awesome. When I played EarthBound right after it came out, I was renting it from a local movie store. I must have rented it ten times, players guide and everything. One of the big things that stuck with me was the soundtrack, in addition to that warm fuzzy feeling I got from beating up Skate Punks in colorful Onett.

When I finally bought the game, it was for twenty bucks at a local store. As soon as I was able to play my adventure further than Twoson, I really started digging the soundtrack. That's when I started playing with EarthBound's music. I wasn't much good with music at the time, so my experiements were never that great, but even so, there was a certain feeling of accomplishment I got from being able to play along to the Twoson theme on the guitar.

Skip ahead a few years to that fateful day in April 2001 when I registered at the forums. I was really getting into the music thing at that time, and made three rare EarthBound BTP Remixes. I thought to myself, "How cool would it be to play this for other people. "Unfortunately, none of the remixes were good enough to play for any real people, just hardcore EarthBound fans. I vowed to make good EarthBound music, and over the summer, finished and recorded Trancebound. "Still not good enough," I thought to myself. "The sound quality would make real people shiver. "

My friend and I got on the venue for this big show at a local nightclub. At that time, I was just getting finished with a little known song called "Smiles and Tears (BTP Deep Trance Remix)". This song had commercial potential, but the only way to prove that was to play it for some of the most unforgiving people on the planet: Buffalo ravers. Halfway through our set, after playing hits like Global Sunset (ask SLing about that one), we put on Smiles and Tears. Imagine bajillions of ravers going bonkers over the Sound Stone melody. I stood there with my mouth wide open. "These people are jamming out to EarthBound!" I thought, and it was true.

From that moment, I was able to meld EarthBound and commercially viable music. People I know always ask me about my Sephy and the Sharks recordings, and a few have listened to Trancebound and have said it was good.

My goal is to someday be a successful musician. One of my mini-goals is to someday get in front of a crowd of 50,000, and totally jam out the Pollyanna song, or something like that. Then, 50,000 people oblivious to EarthBound will start flipping out and saying "Rocktastic!" and stuff. Then I'll post a message on the forums and say "Hey guys guess what I did..."

--Sephy

Congratulations on writing a Letter of the Week!

It was originally going to be the "Carpainter Trophy for Literature," but Carpy wanted to confuse me and have this week's letter of the week just be a letter of the week. K. Anyway, that rocks, Sephy. I, personally, think your music is really good. And, you now hold a record and stuff: three letter-of-the-weeks in a row. I would have gone insane if I was a Buffalo raver there: screamin' "WTF IT'S EARTHBOUND!" That would have rocked :D. Now, you will send me this Smiles and Tears remix. . . I waaaant it. . .

Congrats on the branding,
-STARMANDELUXE-

I designed a Duke Nukem 3D mod for a school project that had a (crappy) Onett, Twoson, and Saturn Valley. I also changed an enemy to a Mr. Saturn, and a weapon to the Saturn Gun, and gave it to the Mr. Saturn and made it a regular weapon. The Saturn Gun was the ultimate killing weapon.

Now don't think I didn't do this for myself. Noooo. I took it to my school, and with a little craftiness onmy part, I turned my Gifted class into a big LAN party. We'd play in the mini-lab that's unwatched by the admin that was in the room. We'd play that until the end of the year. The teacher didn't care.

I was kicked off the school system for putting SeekTag on the lab computers. (the ones they care about) The admin thought that SeekTag was killing the network. Although SeekTag does have an evil networking leak, it was probably the LAN party in the room.

In order to not get really in trouble, because Duke Nukem really isn't a 'nice' game you should play in school, even if it is Mr. Saturns, I had to get rid of it. Of course the idiots in there still wanted to play my Duke mod, and the fact that my teacher in there upheld only one rule that year, obey superiors. That meant she wouldn't let me get on the computers to delete it.

I crafted a simple idea to do it. All I had to do was delete the local user files and history (the admin does it anyway) and the game itself. I made floppy "upgrade" disks that "upgraded" the mod so that it'll have more levels that I made. Boy were they stupid, the "upgrade" was actually deleting the above files.

Of course, knowing my luck, something had to go wrong and it did. I deleted too much of the local user files. Racing against time to beat the admin, I quickly devised a plan to chmod and delete the evil recovery files, and hope that it'll load the network default recovery files. It worked in the nick of time. The admin couldn't tell anything had happened in the room. Nothing was out of the ordinary except for the fact that it has been a week since the official wipe of the files, and there hasn't been any activity on the computers. I fabricated a lie about 'fitness days. ' Isn't this a sad story. Why is it sad? I was still banned from the computers for the year from SeekTag, and I STILL had to make the real upgrade I promised the class for a grade.



--ROARFEESH

Well, ROFISH's letter was ALMOST Letter of the Week, but then I decided I needed to suck up to Sephy so he'd send me more l33t tr4x. But that's pretty cool, too. My school is like that, too, except the admin can't speak English and has no idea what he's talking about. He got a Gateway tech to come out and set up the school's network. . . :\

--StarmanDeluxe

This Space Was Carpy's Space. Then He Wrote A Bad Letter. Then He Begged For Forgiveness. So, Here Is His Memorial. We All Love Carpy.

I dressed as Ness for an anime convention this year. For Katsukon I dressed in big shorts, a yellow and blue stipped shirt, sidways hat and I even made a Mr. Saturn out of styraphom and pipe cleaners (he was more recognized than me). To my surprise I was totally recognized all day by TONS of people (and not just as that guy from Super Smash Bros. ) My badge from the convention has NESS for my name. It was great. GO NESS!

--RanmaTom

That's really cool. Who knew there were so many EB fans. . .

--StarmanDeluxe

In 6th grade, some friends of mine and I did an EarthBound game for our English class. Ness, Paula, Jeff, Poo, a Happy Happist, Master Belch, and the Mani Mani statue where the characters. We followed the entire storyline of EarthBound, including every detail possible. On the game itself, we had a picture of every town and some other random things. You go clockwise around the board. Each time you stop, you choose the card that corresponded with the color of the space landed on. We replaced the six on the dice with a Giygas picture. If you got him, you went back 4 spaces. We got a 99% on the project, and won second best game in our grade! It was pretty cool and we got many compliments on our good game. Thanks to Starmen. Net for having the images we used for he game and aiding me in my project!

--Ness3

Dude, that rocks. You SO need to take a picture of that, or make a new board and send it to reid or something. We at SM. net need this game, because it sounds infinitely cool. My props to ya'!

--StarmanDeluxe

In my life, I have done many things in my life involving Earthbound/Mother. The 1st one was when I was in 7th grade, we did autobiographies in my English class so I decided to add video games to my "interests" section. In that section it was about 6 pages long and at east 2 of those pages explained everything about Mother/Earthbound. Another thing I did was also in school when I was in 7th grade. We were doing this test and one of the questions was "Who would you like to see on a coin that has never appeared, explain" And I wrote Miyamoto and Itoi with long explanations. At school though I don't always think about it. I am planning on helping advertise the Mother 3 petition along with advertising Earthbound/Mother, and starmen. net. I also mentioned something about Itoi and Miyamoto in a test. The question was "Who are your top 5 role models, exlain why you like them" it was something like that. Earthbound is the greatest game in the world.

PS. Bebe's Kids sucks

--Alexander Imrah Layko

Thank you for reiterating that Bebe's Kids sucks. We covered that adequately last week. Anyway, I've written stuff like that, too. Yay! Not much to say about this one. . .

--StarmanDeluxe

In the topic, the 'EarthBound-themed school project' hits it dead on. In my 7th grade English class, we were doing a sort of spin-off project, where we all write a story based on an existing one. In this case, we were 'rewriting' Dinotopia, but instead of dinosaurs, there were creatures of our own choosing. In my case, it was various EarthBound characters. Ness was not the main character, but the story took place in the same world, and he was accompanied by a Mr. Saturn through most of it. (It was surprisingly fun having to constantly refer to the player's guide to correctly write Mr. Saturn's dialogue. )The project included many sub-projects, including a salt-dough map of the world (which I now realize was horribly inaccurate when comparing to the map in the Japanese instruction manual), and a paper mache model of one of the characters (in my case Mr. Saturn, and the teacher's response upon viewing it was "*gasp* I LOVE IT!!"). I'm pretty sure I spelled "paper mache" wrong but I don't especially care. Anyway, about 1/3 through the project, the teacher was diagnosed with cancer and needed to stay at the hospital for the rest of the school year to get it treated, leaving us with a substitute for the rest of the year, and no plans to finish the project.

Another one was from elementary school, and was really minor. The theme was "What do you think aliens look like?" and we had to cut it out of paper and draw the features and such. Mine was the li'l UFO (mainly because I wasn't very creative when I was young).

--LousySpy

That sounds like a really cool project! Too bad your teacher got sick. That's really too bad.

--StarmanDeluxe

Well once I wore a frilly pink dress like Paula's. (Watches as his mom, who was actually reading what he was typing, collapses) I WAS KIDDING!!! The Silent Wind of Doom only wears a black ninja outfit with red headband. And I don't use a frying pan, only a katana. And I don't talk to people only when I need help of some sort, I only say WWOOOOOOOOOSSSSHHHH.

Anyway, I usally, with my ten year old cousin, pretend to be EB people and run around shooting each other with PSI Fire. I do the same thing with my friends and Gundam. It's fun and especially fun if your pretending to shoot fire at your annoying, hyper, little cousin.

Matthew is really annoying, but sometimes Liam can be worse. He's only two, and RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT

--The Silent Wind of Doom
(WWWOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSHHHHH)

PS. I'm not afraid of Mistah Death. [Note from StarmanDeluxe: If you were silly and didn't read the rules, you'd have no idea what hae's talking about. Go now, and learn of Mistah Death. ] I'm friends with the Evil Phil- El Dio de Muerte. An I don't fear the Reaper, nor do the wind, the sun, or the rain. We could be like they are come on baby. . . (Sings "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult then falls asleep. His nose hits the enter button while it smashes against the key board, submiting this rantful letter.

Wouldn't Silent Winds of Doom not make any noise at all, much less a big one like "WWWOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSHHHHH?"

--StarmanDeluxe

The one EarthBoundy thing I did was in an English class. I had to write an story for a monthly writing check. Since I'm the only one I know in my entire grade who has EarthBound, I wrote my story based on the EB plot with different character names. Plagiarism?Maybe. But it did get me a 100% on the project. I suppose my teacher would like the game, too, since she wrote, "You're a regular Spielberg!" on it!

--Artemis251

o_O I did the same thing when I was in fourth grade! :O! You must have done it better, though. I got an A-, and no Spielburg-y comments.

--StarmanDeluxe

Last year, I suddenly became obsessed with EarthBound for whatever reason. I thought about it a lot, even during school. In Art class I decided to make clay sculptures of the EarthBound characters. My biggest mistake: using "Crayola-Brand Modeling Clay. "Anyhoo, my Poo sculpture collapsed after 10 minutes and my Ness sculpture took 6 hours before it collapsed. However, I made up my own Shark gang-member with wings on his back called, "The Flying Shark. " and he wouldn't break. When I wasn't watching some other kids kept throwing around like it was some kind of Super Ball. I tried to stop them, but after their 50th throw, the head popped off and hit one of them in the face. A few months ago, I tried to make a Starman Trophy like in Super Smash Bros. Melee out of REAL modeling clay, but I learned later that it had accidentally blown up in the kiln, taking a few other sculptures with it. (Boy where they mad at me my for that one. )Anyways, this summer I will try again using Sculpy Modeling Clay.

Also, I made Radio Advertisements for radio stations in EagleLand. One station was a jazz station with Lucky as the mascot, and the other one was a retro station with the New Age Retro Hippie as their mascot. They look pretty proffesional, too. My teacher was impressed by them.

--Mario's PAL

Crayola sucks. Their crayons break a lot. You should use RoseArt crayons. They're better, and they don't break. Crayola markers aren't all that bad, but RoseArt's markers are better, because they're Rosy. Rosy as in RoseArt. Get it? Hmm? Hahahahahahahaha. . . That's almost as good as SimonBob's "Anti-Cloud" crack.

--StarmanDeluxe

Uh, yeah. All I've done is excessively drawn Mr. Saturns doing different things, or wearing different stuff. I could scan the pages of my sketchbook, if you want. Of course, some of the pages are shared with stick figures.

--TWDX

Yes! You will send me a link, then you will submit them to Fan Art. All your EB art are belong to us.

--StarmanDeluxe

I once ran into a monkey trying to do a teleport.

--Fobbio

I once saw a cow trying to telepathically contact aliens. Cows are working against us. We must destroy the cows.

--StarmanDeluxe

Last year for US History, I was required to create a menu for an ancient Roman restaurant. After my usual fit of grumbling about complicated assignments like that, a friend and I got some ideas together and threw them together, but we didn't finish on time, and we asked if the teacher would let us finish it over the weekend.

As a result of my EB Player's Guide, a scanner, and this crazy desktop publishing program my dad has, we made a menu for a restaurant called "Et Tu Foodus," and it has many pictures scanned in from the player's guide and edited.

We got a 100 on it :D Sooner or later, I _am_ going to scan it in and put it up somewhere for all my fellow Earthbound-people to see.

--Chibi

Why are you making a Roman menu in US History?

--StarmanDeluxe

I got addicted to EarthBound during the summer of 1995, when I rented it from a local video store. That fall, when I was in 7th grade, I wrote an EarthBound-y fanfic for an English class I was in, because I was so obsessed with EarthBound (which I hadn't played for a few months!)

It was an adventure where four unlikely friends met up, each in a kind of EarthBound role -- "Jake" resembled Ness, "Kristin" was Paula, "Alex" was Jeff, and "Ian" was Poo. I think it had something to do with one of the kids ending up in a juvenile detention center for some really petty crime, and everyone rallying to fight the system and get him out. I'm pretty sure the one who was in trouble was Jake/Ness, and he was an orphan and kind of a misguided kid, but a good-hearted one, and in the end he got out and Kristin/Paula's family ended up adopting him to spare him from more foster care. (At the time, I hadn't played through EarthBound, only up through Twoson or so, so I didn't realize any implications of Ness and Paula eventually becoming romantically involved -- Jake and Kristin became brother and sister in my story. )

It was kind of a bad story in hindsight, but man, I wish I could find it, just to read it again! I've been looking for a few years to no avail, though, so I think it's lost, unfortunately. That December, I got EarthBound for Christmas and finally stopped humming the Saturn Valley theme incessantly (which was good, because my brother was starting to get really annoyed with me by this point), and all was well.

Just think: the story that started the PSI322 Interactive Fiction + Fanfic obsession!

--PSI322

I've done stuff like that, too. Unfortunately, SMDX doesn't have an IF + Fanfic obsession. I'e written one Fanfic, and taken part in two IFs, not counting the ones I posted just once in.

--StarmanDeluxe


That be all, folks. Remember, Carpy is cool! *Pockets a $100 dollar bill*