I know many people quit visiting the Smash Brothers Dojo once Brawl actually came out, but I still check it most mornings. It has become such a routine thing for me, just like checking e-mail, that I gotta say I’ll miss Mr. Sakurai’s daily posts and cheerful, sometimes awkward humor. Even so, since Brawl hit the shelves in Japan, the updates haven’t been as intertesting or entertaining as they were five months ago. Today, however, I noticed something a bit strange. The update is another screenshot collection - evidently you’re able to send him screenshots you take in the game. Either that, or these are just collected from the Smash Service submission feature. Anyway, if you scroll all the way down you’ll find this note:

Thanks for all of your submissions!

Please understand that snapshots depicting inappropriate content or containing inappropriate comments will not be eligible for selection.

To this point, I’ve received a great number of screenshots that focus on peeking at the undergarments of certain Brawl combatants. So let me just say it again—shots like these will never be posted to the Dojo or sent out to users via the Smash Service.

Can’t say I’m surprised this has been happening, but I did have a laugh at the fact that he had to make this statement. But then I started looking a little more around the images. For whatever reason, Sakurai decided to separate photos taken by Americans and Japanese and then give each side a link to the others. I clicked to view the Japanese gallery and browsed and then I found this on the bottom of page 3:

I honestly can’t tell if this is just another joke or if it was honestly missed. I have a hard time believing that a man in his position in his type of career would actually be in charge of maintaining the site all by himself. It’s heartwarming to imagine the Dojo as being entirely his own blog, but to assume he does all of the web design, file maintenance, and translations (into five different languages!) himself is a bit farfetched. At any rate, I have saved the above image and I’m prepared to upload it and edit this post in the event that it gets discovered by somebody in charge and is taken down.

Dojo updates will be done on the 14th, which is Monday. It will almost reach its one-year birthday. Although I would imagine perhaps it already has, if you take in the period of time when all we got was a countdown to JAPAN TIME.

Yeah, that was stupid. But it just came to me. Anyway!

I’ve discovered a handy little something called Rockbox, a firmware replacement for mp3 players. Yesterday I took a notion to reorganize the music on my iPod and encountered an impasse when I tried to put some of my .ogg files on it. By default, iPods are only compatible with .mp3 and .aac files (seriously… aac?). I blame Apple, but that’s another story. My Internet searching led me to an interesting solution: replace the default iPod firmware with Rockbox. Firmware is basically a piece of software that is “hard-wired” to a piece of hardware. Your computer’s BIOS menu (which you may or may not have ever seen) is an example of firmware as it is attached to your motherboard. In the case of mp3 players, the firmware is basically the operating system - it is the code that creates and displays the menu, determines how the player responds to button clicks, organizes data, etc. In a nutshell, it’s what you see on the screen. Well, Rockbox is its own firmware that you can load onto any one of a number of various mp3 players. This was the first time i’ve been glad that my iPod Nano is an old 1G (well, maybe the second.. I recall a sense of pride when I noticed how stupid the younger models look.) as when it comes to Nanos, RB only works with 1G (1st Generation). Continue Reading »