Happy Linksgiving

This is not the part where I beg you for money. This is the part here I celebrate free entertainment for Thanksgiving.
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To start: I am thankful for my new life, even if I haven't quite broken it in yet.

I moved across the state and started my new job on October 26th, exactly two years after quitting a job that made me miserable. It paid over twice as much as my new job does, but my new job makes me feel good at the end of the day, so screw it. I'm thankful that I can choose happiness over money.

I'm spending this Thanksgiving weekend 300 miles away from my family, because I don't really want to spend the $65 on gas money and the 13 hours (plus traffic) driving, just to see the people I spent the majority of the past two years butting heads with, even as they let me take up a spare bedroom in their house. I'm thankful that my family kept me from living on the street during that time, but even more so, I'm thankful for my independence.

You know what was really great for entertainment when I didn't have money to go out to bars, or wherever else 30-somethings are supposed to go to socialize and meet new people?

Twitch.
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It's the kind of thing I would struggle to explain to a stranger. "How did I spend my time when I wasn't working short-term temp assignments and looking for full-time work? I watched complete strangers play video games! And I was kinda antagonistic in chat, but... you know... not mean. Just, like, playfully giving people shit to make them laugh. So, like, my name was Implied... oh, yeah... so Kappa's this emoticon that means, like..."

Let's be honest: this whole community's pretty deep down the nerd rabbit hole.

And yet, for better or worse, this whole community was a surprisingly big chunk of my social life for the past year. I had some laughs, watched people of all skill levels play 20-year-old games, kept up with other people also going through transitional periods of their lives, encouraged people, was encouraged by people...

I'm thankful for Twitch. I'm thankful for Twitch because it's been giving me entertainment since August 2014 for fucking free. I'm thankful for free entertainment because free entertainment is totally in my budget. I will be ecstatic when I get settled enough to have the spending money to go meet people face-to-face and establish myself as a part of my new community, but for now, there's Twitch.

So while I'm not really very established in my new station in life, and I'm not having a fancy turkey dinner or going anywhere special, I'm going to make the most of my first Thanksgiving weekend enjoying my freedom by offering as much free entertainment as I can.

I'm certainly not going to turn down donations, mind you. I'm just not going to make a big production of begging for money and setting donation goals and creating elaborate Twitch alerts. I've got a budget. I'll live. If you do donate, tell me in chat so I can thank you. If you don't donate, tell me in chat so I can congratulate you on making the most of free entertainment, because free entertainment is awesome.

But more importantly, this weekend... is about Zelda.
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So, Retro Achievements.

Retro Achievements is a site where you can grab emulators that add achievements for NES, SNES, Genesis, TurboGrafix-16, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and GBA games, as long as users have submitted achievements for them. I'm using a clean profile at http://retroachievements.org/KappaOnTwitch to earn all the weekend's achievements, so we'll see how many achievements I can earn from scratch.

At this point, the planned order is:
The Legend of Zelda
Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

Considering every one of these games involves clearing the boss fights without taking damage, there will be a lot of resetting. This is probably more than a weekend's worth of achievement farming. If I do manage to finish all of them (with the possible exception of ring collecting in the Oracle games), I may opt to add more games to the list, but we'll cross that bridge if we come to it.

(we won't)

Happy Linksgiving!