#DIYSciZone Act of Whimsy: Battlefield Earth transcript #GGC16

As part of the DIY Science Zone fundraising for Geek Girl Con, we set a number of fundraising goals wherein our amateur and professional scientists offer self-torture as incentive. This year I’ll be reprising my demos on randomness and probability, only this time I’ll be doing it in context of Zombie Dice, as a tie-in with the Gaming Zone. This is going to be a ton of fun! And brains. Lots of brains.

DIY Science Zone logo

As part of our $1500 fundraising goal, I agreed to live-tweet Battlefield Earth. Whaaaaaat a stinker. A meandering mess of displays of every baser human instinct, written by that same guy who founded that one religion. You know the one.

A few Mock The Movie stalwarts voluntarily threw themselves on my pyre in solidarity. I am Hashtag-Blessed to find myself among such friends and/or fellow masochists.

Once the fundraiser hits $3000, this year I’ll be doing a twitch stream long-play of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for NES. I haven’t played it in at least fifteen years. I promise I’ll be rusty as hell and will likely die a lot. Hooray! If you want to help get us there, here’s the donation form. We bring science demos to kids on an all-volunteer basis, and the cost helps pay for this zone — without this annual fundraising, we couldn’t continue this excellent annual tradition of getting the kids who visit Geek Girl Con excited about STEM fields!

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#DIYSciZone Act of Whimsy: Battlefield Earth transcript #GGC16
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GGC #DIYSciZone: There's Battletoads in my future. This Sunday.

Thanks to an anonymous and unbelievable donation to Geek Girl Con of $2000 (SERIOUSLY, someone must REALLY hate me!), the $5000 mark has been blown past for fundraising for the DIY Science Zone. Therefore, this Sunday, starting at noon CST, I’ll be playing Battletoads on twitch.tv, beginning to end, no warps, with unlimited lives. Unless it goes over 12 hours, I have work in the morning — in which case I’ll make a save state and continue next weekend.

This is easily one of the hardest video games of the Nintendo era, owing mostly to its punishing memorization sequences, and its brutal one-hit kills (not to mention the inherent imprecision of the NES controller’s directional pad plus-shape design). This was “I Wanna Be The Guy” hard long before there was such a thing.

Here’s how this game is NOT going to go: a cheat-free perfect speedrun.

Instead, it’ll be me failing over and over and over again at this, since I’ve not played past the first level since I was 14-ish.

Oh how I dread and loathe this.

There are more Acts of Whimsy from scientists at the DIY Science Zone at Geek Girl Con, too! If you’d like to donate, try the below button:


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GGC #DIYSciZone: There's Battletoads in my future. This Sunday.