Wii this, Wii?

But that name, eh? Awful.

Or at least, that's what I'm saying now. Presumably in six months time I'll be singing its praises, much like how I used to hate the new controller, and democracy. No doubt in six months I'll be saying "Wii love the name!", be the proud owner of a MySpace account, and will have Daz Samson as the number one song on my iTunes playlist.

Count down to the first "bodily function" joke to be made about the pronounciation of the new name... 5... 4... 3...

— PKMN.NET

In a surprise announcement this morning, Nintendo revealed the new name of its forthcoming game system: Wii. "As in 'we'," the official statement adds. For the official announcement, visit the Revolution...err...Wii Web site.

After a brief Flash introduction, the site explains Nintendo's move. "While the code-name 'Revolution' expressed our direction, Wii represents the answer. Wii will break down that wall that separates game players from everybody else. Wii will put people more in touch with their games...and each other."

The site goes on to say that Wii should be easy to remember for people around the world, no matter their language, and that it will avoid abbreviation. The "ii" spelling is intended to represent "both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play." It may also be worth noting that "ii" means "good" in Japanese.

Nintendo sums up the name change with the following comments. "So that's Wii. But now Nintendo needs you. Because, it's really not about you or me. It's about Wii. And together, Wii will change everything."

— Yahoo! Games

We are no longer expecting to see the name 'Revolution' when Nintendo's next-generation console is finally shipped out. Instead, we'll have to resign ourselves to a rather funny name, 'Wii'. Although by the second article they state that it reflects aesthesis, the reviews above give the name a big, fat goose egg.

Nintendo began its life in Osaka as a toy manufacturer in 1962, and in the early 1980s it picked up on the newly popular arcade game industry and started its Donkey Kong games, one of which would star Mario and set off a chain of games that would star the plumber in the Mushroom Kingdom. Donkey Kong was, to say the least, an odd name, yet the name Mario fit a fat plumber very well, as it became easy to match an Italian accent to the persona and later make a movie out of it. So far, so good.

The name targets started to be missed in 2002, when the codename for the GameCube, Dolphin, was chosen. We then had to warm up to the slightly more appropriate name for the unit that is in use today. Then we receive word that 'Revolution' will be the name for the console of theirs that would take on the Xbox 360 and possibly offset the PlayStation 3 for the better. Now, though, it is just a three-letter word, a misconception of good things, gone horribly awry. 'Wii'. It sounds like the earsplitting shrieks of holidaymakers descending a coaster.

Fortunately, though, it's offset by the new controller. It has to be held in two hands, as it consists of a remote and a small joystick, separate but working tandem. It's supposedly to facilitate better handling. But since I haven't held it yet, I can't really criticise it.

PC Rant

I'll flash back to September 2005. TPL is in tatters after the admins have decided that they were incompatible and no amount of work could keep TPL going on. My life is ruined on the outside, and I have yet a month to being unbanned from PKMN.NET. I have nowhere else to turn for solace, aside from the Avianos couple, who were persecuted for helping me. So I decided to run away once again and start over somewhere I could be loved as a person and my sins would not be shown. On 14 September 2005, I joined the Pokémon Community.

As soon as I registered there, I had a host of members coming up to greet me. This, I figured, were people that knew nothing of the TPL turmoil, and I could live safely in this dominion. It was here that I also found that all of the members, some veterans, some newbies, were all one large family with few conflicting issues. The first sign that I received of the community being so tightly knit was that several members had on their signature lists an ode or line dedicated to Mandi Lili Cormier, a member who had been killed in an automobile wreck. Even though I never knew the girl, I would cry when I saw this line anywhere. Even now, my eyes well up.

The evidence of its cohesion is also in the chit-chat threads. Although they boil down to random nonsense — essentially spam, which I usually frown upon — a lot of it enabled me to glimpse into what they were like when they didn't present themselves in a fashionable manner. They were all banterous. They had more fluency in their matter than any other place I had seen. And when the moderators came out for the job, they were very judicious in how justice was administered, although that could be inherent in that many of them are female.

Best of all, they knew nothing of my past at all. They were oblivious to TPL, but as I later learned it was also a victim of SPP's ills. It's unfortunate that it's so, it led me to believe that SPP was a centrist organisation that kept away from everyone else and thought themselves the best just because of their information end. And PKMN.NET was hardly mentioned at all on the Pokémon Community, whereas on SPP it was the butt of many jokes and hisses.

I'm glad to be part of the Community, which is about as neutral as you can get, aside from its expansive affiliation programme. This does not mean that I do not like PKMN.NET — I think it's time I gave a bit of credit to one of the sites I visit on the side.

Memorial

On a walk to the observatory at the northern end of town, I scrambled upstairs to practice for a dissolution of a pact between two friends of mine, but as soon as I came up the flight of stairs I quickly noticed that there were black marks on the floor. I at first dismissed them as dry rot, but when I bent down closer I saw that it was fresh felt-tip ink. The entire schematic turned out to be a memorial to 'Toni Nikki Yoder', supposedly a friend of mine that had been murder.* Scrawled around the box within which her name was written were a verse from some song (evidently a rap) as well as a banzai cry: 'Senseless murder is wrong! 14 years old and gone!'

Combined with the news that one of my classmates had to leave school for excuse of maternity, this made for a nasty shock. I was not new to death; my grandmother passed away in 1999 from cancer of the pancreas. I also was not new to widespread funerals, either; on the Pokémon Community they are honouring a member, Mandi Lili Cormier, who died in a car crash over a year ago, and even after that period of time you will see those words in many signatures on that forum. It seems that ever since I registered on PKMN.NET, tragedy has started to come forward. Not only was I banned for seven months, but now a pregnancy in my school, the death of a nearby student from leukaemia and now the resonance of the murder of someone I knew, have established my stay here as truly calamitous, across the board.

* One of the comments has resulted in a correction here; I had originally thought it to be domestic violence after a sketchy thought of newspaper articles on the subject, but it's really a murder case.

The kid

Yesterday I went to Friendship Park in a hamlet north of Paoli, Pennsylvania, to walk off the air until sundown. Whilst the rest of the family went off for a few rounds of tennis, I resigned to the benches and started playing with my Game Boy Advance. A few minutes in, however, I heard very awkward cries coming down from the swingset and decided to take a look. As I expected, it was a teenager of rather high stature walking along the rim of the mulch and wailing without impetus. With his head down and kicking scraps of mulch back into the hub within, he walked about as other students (presumably) flanked him. Some of the other students would pace back and forth in the area until they gathered to leave.

At first I thought that the kid had been bullying schoolchildren, since the park was small and composed mainly of the tennis court, swingset and a concrete roundabout on a hill. When I finally came closer and was able to study the movement, however, my heart sank. I had been known to pace back and forth in places like this — and I was pulled over by police officers a few times for this — but had forcibly torn the image of my mental illness out of my head. But upon looking at that teenager, I was faced with a harsh reality. That was me. That was the face and meander of the autistic spectrum.

I have a half-brother living with my mother (I live with my father), and his autism has meant financial hardship across the board. Between lawsuits that failed to sway the public school system to arrange for special services for him as well as the cost of hiring babysitters that charged more than median and often left after two weeks, the rest of the family provides very little for the cause at all. They may provide money, but none of them have ever shown enough compassion or have demonstrated sufficient experience with their own children to look after him. And it will be a heartbreaker to see him evolve into something resembling the kid that I saw at the park, just because the family is in its current disarray.

Thankfully, my condition is not as severe as that of him. By the time he reaches seventeen he most likely will not have the capacity to write on a blog or assimilate with teenagers that comprise today's society. And looking at customers that I have seen carry around grown autistic men, some around the age of fifty, he may not be able to produce anything in life. I feel sorry for the kid, seeing as he's in a constricted family environment and I've been afforded enough time with people that are enough well off.

Whoever it was that was walking in the park like that, thank you. I hope someday you'll bring yourself to see me say so.

SPP Letterbomb

Below is the text of the letterbomb I sent to a super moderator on Serebii.net regarding the events in which a friend of mine that I will not name went on a spam rampage there on my order.

Hello.

I have looked at the topics by ________ that you have closed, and in response I want to tell you a few things that you failed to realise about them.

Firstly, ________ is NOT the owner of Pokébeach. She is the owner of ________ (which can be found via her profile), which has aided me in a crusade that I carried out ages ago against PKMN.NET. This crusade resulted in the creation of the PokéLab, in which SPP member FlygonXS was part, having been banned from PKMN.NET for claiming content he posted on the forums were his works rather than copy-pastes from the PKMN.NET archives. She was also the one who helped me recover from this, helped destroy the PokéLab, and eventually helped me to become a valued member not just on PKMN.NET, but also on the Pokémon Community.

I myself was the one who sent her to create those topics, as well as spam up the IRC on the subject, although she had the idea first. I had become appalled by your acceptance of the pornography fan fiction on Shipping Fics and had heard before that this site had an ongoing rivalry against PKMN.NET (which was why I came here in April of last year, shortly after I was banned from PKMN.NET) and was determined to put an end to it. However, I was worried about my position on the matter and had to send a proxy to carry out my deed as well as resign myself to blogging my dislike for this site.

It is due to the fact that no action has been taken to control the anger against PKMN.NET, especially that funnelled by Imperial Dragon due to him being banned and then ruining his reprieve, that I have concluded that it was my mission to either neutralise the rivalry between the two sites or ruin one. I value my membership at both sites for different reasons, and the reasons for remaining here are, by your standards, heavily punishable. I do not hate this site; I hate the standard of moderation, which is the reason why Random resigned and fled to the Pokémon Community and the reason why I have to do something about this all. I also think it is appropriate, however, to give a full account of my actions here and clear up any misconceptions held against my friends, which is why I have been compelled to send this to you.

We do not ask for forgiveness; if this warrants a ban, so be it. We only want to be heard and considered, listened to and debated in a civil manner. You have not allotted us that opportunity before, so we ask that you kindly read this statement and forward this in discussion of the matter.

Yours respectfully,
William Gresham
closed810@hotmail.com