February 21, 2026
Time to get out your thesaurus!
Got a bit of a weird one for you today. You know about the "Mandela" effect and CERN, right? What I bet you DIDN'T know is there are unexplained changes relating to games
as well!
I first discovered this while I was working on Waluigi RPG. There's a lava-filled room in the opening variant of Bowser's Keep which now has two paratroopas at far opposite
corners. They weren't there in 1996. They even have their own unique, exclusive AI - programmed and set. They fly toward you at an eerie pace, and the best part is they're
too high in the air to even reach you, which makes no sense. For how strained the VRAM is in that game, everything shown on screen NEEDED to be worth its weight.
"Cyan, you simply ran past them as a kid WiThOuT nOtIciNg. ILLUMINATIDECONFIRMED!111|"
Sorry I'm back. Had to take out the trash.
Anyway, I was the 'stare in wonder' type of kid, wanting to know every last detail. Those two koopas would have stood no chance against me. They are even absent from old let's
play footage from earlier Youtube days! By the time you reach the other end of the bridge, they're guaranteed to be in plain sight no matter how fast you run - the
room ain't THAT big. Last but not least, the room isn't even tiled with the correct layer priority to accomodate flying sprites! I had to redo the graphics of the entire lava
bed just to get the koopas to stop glitching out.
So yeah. If you run into them (or see what I did with them in my mod!) you'll know a little extra something.
But wait, you called with your credit card ready! This post actually originated with me wanting to talk about an anomaly from a different game, Torchlight II. This
time, the difference is far easier to spot. Items in Torchlight II often give your character bonuses, and I've always remembered the awkward and hilarious way the devs chose
to write it out on the tooltip. They used the word "confer", instead of grant, add, or even just a simple plus sign. I remember having to look this word up back then,
because my dumb ass didn't know it.
But what if I told you (lol) that if you load up the game today, the word isn't confer at all? No, you idiotfool - it's convey.
1.
"Therefore it does not confer any economic advantage"
2.
"She conveyed the message to me"
For anyone who isn't an INTJ or English teacher, or both, the difference between these two words might be slimmer in today's world of increasingly soupy, homogenized context.
But let's just say it's a step beyond farther versus further. I guess in that (this?) timeline, whoever wrote "convey" mixed them up.
Frankly, this is totally on brand for Torchlight II - the game is loaded with minor inaccuracies. They should have just gone with a simpler word - one they actually fucking
knew. My shotgonne doesn't "explain" me a chance to call forth a meteor from the sky; it GRANTS me that chance.
Oh, and that little project #7 is
Consider this the official announcement. Soon








