This user is from Illinois.

This user lives in or hails from Chicagoland.

This user helped promote Sega Saturn to featured article status.

This user helped promote Dreamcast to good article status.

This user helped promote Sonic Lost World to good article status.

This user helped promote Super Monkey Ball (video game) to good article status.

I hope to make valid contributions to Wikipedia on those topics I know something about. Please ignore anything I did prior to the fall of 2013. My best work to date can be seen on Dreamcast.

This user is left-handed.

Politically, despite my long history of railing against "radical leftists" and Chomskyites, I think it's fair to say that I've recently been converted 99% of the way to Progressivism by the likes of Scott Alexander (although I am no more inclined to favorably perceive the kinds of signalling games incentivized by technologically advanced and wealthy societies). Certainly, nobody likes a loser, and conservatism is a loser in the sense that it is poorly adapted to the realities of the modern world. Conservatism could not roll back Progressivism without defeating progress itself.

		The Video Game Barnstar
		For your incredible research and editing at Sega Saturn, which I am sure will reach FA status soon. Indrian (talk) 18:11, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

		The Sega Task Force Barnstar
		For your absolutely awesome work at Sega Saturn, one of the task force's most important articles.
		this WikiAward was given to TheTimesAreAChanging by Red Phoenix let's talk... on 01:44, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

"TTAAC's Greatest Hits" include:

• Debunking the standard narrative that the Sega Saturn was originally designed around a single SH-1 CPU prior to Sony's famous January 1994 PlayStation tech demo (see also "Proof that the Saturn was always designed around the SH-2 and vice-versa," and note that Indrian—who I have admired since 2012, when I first became aware of his work exposing the innumerable propaganda hoaxes of the infamous Jagged85—persuasively argues that Sega doubled down on the Saturn's 2D proficiency by adding the VDP2 and some additional RAM to the system);
• Exposing numerous examples of Hamas propaganda during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war (see, e.g., government salaries, causes—although the question of when Hamas started firing is purely academic since even extreme Hamas apologist Nishidani's own sources openly admit Hamas was no longer enforcing the ceasefire on other groups—targets, power plant, shields, Nishidani can't do math);
• After sufficient nudging from Guccisamsclub—a Leftie that not infrequently gets the better of our exchanges—concluding that estimates of 500,000-650,000 deaths during the 1979-1980 famine in Cambodia are highly exaggerated;
• Questioning the veracity of Jerry Robinson's claims regarding the creation of the Joker, which have been widely repeated despite the contrary testimony of undisputed co-creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger;
• Defending the traditionalist account of the North Vietnamese land reform "bloodbath";
• Revisiting Sega Genesis sales figures;
• Refuting allegations that the CIA helped the Iraqi Ba'th Party seize power for the first time in February 1963 (see also here and here);
• And discrediting the Iranian "Grand Bargain" panacea supposedly neglected by the George W. Bush administration.
• Of lesser interest: Sorting out arcane discrepancies regarding Sega's financial losses during the fiscal years 1998 to 2000 (the figures in the second link are extremely valuable for quantifying the dramatic collapse in Saturn sales outside Japan following the U.S. launch of the Nintendo 64 in late 1996); nailing down Saturn launch titles.
• I have also uncovered my fair share of fake quotes (e.g., [1], [2], [3]) and sockpuppets (e.g., [4], [5], [6]). And one more hoax debunked for good measure.
• Beyond the GAs and FA listed above, I am the lead author of the "Reception" section of Sonic R, and wrote pretty much everything in Iraq–United States relations covering the period 1958 to 1975.

While I can be accused of many things, good and ill, the one accusation I would resent is any implication that I haven't looked at both sides of the issues above. When I was a self-styled radical anti-American Leftist, I very much wanted to believe the allegations contained in Roger Morris's editorials in The New York Times and elsewhere on the subject of CIA support for the Iraqi Ba'th, but I couldn't help but notice that (on certain issues, not everything) Morris was obviously lying. (Or do you think that I used to read Information Clearing House and watch The Real News because I was always on the Right?) In the same way, like everyone else, for years I never questioned the orthodox narrative that Robinson created the Joker, until one day I read a blog that gave several very persuasive reasons to believe Kane's account—and, while my initial reaction was of course something along the lines of "Bob Kane was a horrible man who cheated poor Bill Finger, therefore he contributed nothing and everything he said is prima facie a lie," the seeds of doubt had nevertheless been planted. Certainly, I never thought much of Sega when I was reared on Nintendo consoles: I was happy to watch the Angry Video Game Nerd lambaste Sega's add-ons for the Genesis using the crudest and most vitriolic language, and to say things like "Sega was all style and no substance, so it's no mystery why they failed: Nintendo FTW!" But then I read Steve Kent's "Sometimes the Best," and it suggested that a rather different judgement is in order regarding Sega's place in the gaming pantheon. So I kept digging, and sure enough not only did sources like Sheath's (admittedly highly partisan) Game Pilgrimage website force me to reexamine my assumptions, but also tended to present arguments on their behalf that I found more compelling than the simplistic summaries presented in retrospectives by the contemporary gaming press. Most jarring of all was the realization that reading primary sources—not just old magazines that might be hard to track down if they're not on Archive.org, but, say, all of IGN Dreamcast's news and reviews, which are still online and can be perused at your pleasure—could be so shocking that these sources seemed to provide a glimpse into another world: In this case, a world in which Sega was not always universally depicted as little more than a punchline, or known only for "crappy Sonic games." None of this is to say that everything I had previously thought about Sega was wrong; the issue is one of emphasis and nuance. The victors write the history books, but it turns out that there's a whole lot more to the story.