Last night, Nintendo quietly added Mario Paint to Nintendo Switch Online’s catalog of Super Nintendo games. Originally released back in 1992, Mario Paint was a unique SNES title, because although it included a handful of minigames, it was first and foremost a creative tool letting players draw, paint, animate, and even compose music using the 16-bit console.

What also set Mario Paint apart from other SNES games was that it didn’t rely on the console’s standard gamepad. It came bundled with a two-button mouse and a plastic mouse pad that made drawing and navigating the game’s on-screen menus and drag-and-drop interface much easier.

In 1992, creative apps like Photoshop were still in their relative infancy — Photoshop didn’t even have its useful layers feature yet — and for many kids, Mario Paint was their first exposure to using a digital creative tool (and perhaps even a mouse).

Alongside Mario Paint being added to the Switch’s SNES catalog, Nintendo has enabled mouse support for the Switch’s SNES app, which is compatible with games like Mario’s Super Picross and Nobunaga’s Ambition. On the original Switch, players can connect a compatible USB mouse to play Mario Paint, while on the Switch 2 the Joy-Con 2 controller’s mouse functionality can be used.

The company also recently added 19 tracks from Mario Paint to the Nintendo Music mobile app, including the three sample compositions available in the game’s music sequencer.

The closed Tyson beef plant in Emporia can be glimpsed behind a chain link fence. The company announced the closure in December and has since laid off 809 employees who worked there, contributing to conditions that made Emporia, by June 2025, the city with the highest unemployment in Kansas. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

How’s your tap water?

Here in Emporia, we supposedly have the best-tasting water anywhere. I wouldn’t know, because the stuff that comes out of the kitchen faucet seems ordinary enough to me. Maybe I’m spoiled because I’ve been drinking it for 20 years. But judges have given Emporia’s municipal water a couple of gold medals for taste.

There really is a competition to judge tap water, and it’s called the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting. It’s a big enough deal that the Washington Post devoted nine photos and about a million words in February to cover the event, which is held in West Virginia and began as a way to generate tourism in the off-season.

It was a cute piece, breathlessly reporting the event as the Oscars of H20. There are other international water tastings, the story noted, and at those other ones the judges are actually water connoisseurs. At Berkeley Springs, the judges typically come from the travel and media industrial complex.

“The gold medal for tap went to Emporia, Kansas, its second since it began competing,” the story noted. “Berkeley Springs took silver.”

Quite a coincidence that the town that has hosted the competition for 35 years also placed. Chalk it up to home team advantage. No reason to question the integrity of a fun little contest that, frankly, does no harm, generates some positive PR and allows city water workers to take some pride in their jobs. Right?

“Emporia’s water is sourced and treated with state-of-the-art technology and rigorous quality control measures, ensuring it meets and exceeds health and safety standards,” the city said in a press release. “Winning Gold at this prestigious competition is a testament to the dedication of the City of Emporia’s Water Department in delivering clean, refreshing, and top-quality water to the community.”

But recently Emporia has achieved another first, one that won’t be generating glowing press releases anytime soon: It topped the list of cities with the highest unemployment in the state.

The unemployment rate is 5.8%, according to the latest figures from the Kansas Department of Labor. That’s double the 2.9% unemployment KDOL recording for the city this time in April 2024.

What happened?

The massive Tyson Beef Plant closed, with a loss of more than 800 jobs. Tyson announced the closure in December 2024 (here comes Santa Claus) and said it would be effective by Feb. 14 (just in time for Valentine’s Day). Really, who picks these dates?

Tyson said it was shutting down the Emporia plant to improve efficiency. That means it was losing money. The company’s beef unit logged a $291 million loss in fiscal 2024, and because the Emporia plant primarily produced ground beef, it had to go.

The plant was one of the things that made Emporia, well Emporia, kind of like the weirdly sweet smell from the Dolly Madison plant on Industrial Road. Dolly, which employs several hundred, closed in 2012 after strikes and union woes. Hostess, the parent company, went bankrupt. The Dolly bakery was reopened in 2013, following its acquisition by a private equity firm. It still makes Twinkies, but as the Dolly Madison Cake Co.

The smell coming from the beef packing plant, however, was never sweet.

The plant was once owned by Iowa Beef Processors, the nation’s biggest beef packer, before Tyson bought them out in 2001. Cattle were still slaughtered at Emporia then, and a variety of smells emanated from the massive facility nearly the railway tracks on Prairie Street, especially on “blood burning” days. I don’t know if that’s what actually happened, but it sure smelled like it.

Tyson wasn’t the only cause of Emporia’s recent gold in unemployment.

Assorted smaller layoffs contributed. Tyson wasn’t Emporia’s biggest employer, but it was in the top three, after Simmons Pet Food and the local school district.

Emporia’s unemployment stats shot up this summer, as the Tyson closing was fully felt. Unemployment here is now greater than the state average of 3.8% or the national, 4.1%.

I asked the Kansas Department of Labor for the city’s unemployment rate for the last 20 years, and its staff provided a handy spreadsheet. Here are the highlights: The seasonally unadjusted unemployment was 5.3% in June 2005, about the same as the state level. Then the Great Recession hit us hard, and in 2008 we logged 8.4%, double the state average. Then it went back down but spiked at 8.9% in late 2012 and early 2013, after the Dolly plant closed. There followed a gradual decline to 1.6% in November 2021, the lowest in the 20 years. It remained at or under 4% — generally following the state level — from then until January 2025, when it began its current climb.

If you live in Emporia, you don’t need statistics to know the community is in sudden trouble. There is the former Tyson plant, of course, the gates of which have been fenced and padlocked like a scene from “Citizen Kane.” And there are other casualties, such as the United Parcel Service customer center just down the street.

The UPS center was only open from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on weekdays, and parking was problematic. But when I went to drop off a couple of packages there recently, I found the only thing worse than an inconvenient UPS center was none at all. A note taped to the door said the center had closed. The UPS website directed me to an “access point” at a nearby hardware store, where a helpful but harried clerk took my packages. She said the last few months had been a challenge, especially when customers didn’t have prepaid labels.

The UPS store was one of 70 facilities closed in the past few months, including locations in Dodge City and Lawrence. UPS dropped Amazon to boost profits, then sacked 20,000 employees in a massive overhaul.

A small inconvenience for consumers, but a major indicator of tectonic shifts in the economy. Since the pandemic, living in a small town like Emporia has felt not as neighborly and far less secure.

Just a few years ago, our neighborhood on Constitution Street woke up before dawn. All down the block, you could hear the racket of cars and trucks starting, the blare of music from radios or decks, and sometimes a few words of goodbye as people started off to work or school. Now it’s ghostly quiet. The cacophony used to annoy me. Now I miss it.

The guy who does our lawn was among those sacked by recent layoffs. He also has cancer. But he still cuts our grass because he says he feels OK. We’re also talking about some badly needed house painting, which I will pay him for, but I have to go buy the paint. Frankly, I’m dragging my feet on the paint because it is so damned hot out. It was 96 today.

There is a sadness to my friend, and I worry about him.

To be laid off is a trauma that only those who have gone through it can understand. It not only creates an immediate fiscal crisis — really, how many of us are lucky enough to go more than a few weeks without a paycheck? — but is an injury to one’s sense of self.

I know, because I was laid off in 2022.

It was the only time I’ve been fired, and it wasn’t my fault.

Sometimes I imagine actual physical trauma would have been easier to deal with, like a gunshot wound or fracture. I wrote about the runup to the layoffs at my university, and may write again about the aftermath, but not yet.

Being stone cold fired from a job you love — or a job you need — is a special kind of hell. Shortly after it happened to me, I went downtown to one of the older taverns in Emporia and had a bourbon. When the bartender found out what happened, she gave me another, on the house. I got some change and fed some quarters into the pinball machine in the back room. It was the best five bucks I ever spent.

I’m mostly fine now, I think. But it took a while.

The experience made me more sensitive to things I knew about but never took personally. Like how Kansas is ranked among the 10 worst states when it comes to the rights of workers. How losing a job is one of the most unhealthy things that can happen to you and can also damage your family. And how insensitive or downright offensive some officials can be when talking about unemployment statistics.

A case in point is Lyle Butler, interim director of the Emporia Regional Development Association. The RDA is a nine-member board to promote economic growth. In a press release, Butler called the city’s unemployment rate a “small uptick,” as if he were talking about the price of ground beef.

“Kansas and the nation are seeing similar short-term increases in unemployment as the job market adjusts to inflation and seasonal shifts,” Butler said in the statement. “Despite the local uptick, Emporia remains near ‘full employment,’ typically defined as below 5%, which reflects normal workforce movement — not widespread job loss.”

Similar short-term increases? Seasonal shifts? Normal workforce movement?

Apart from the dismissive and defensive tone of Butler’s release — move on, nothing to see here — and his obvious break with economic reality, there’s the question of just how callous the entire statement is. Even if there is some grain of truth beneath all that posturing, imagine for a moment you were one of the 809 individuals laid off from Tyson.

You’re just an uptick, a seasonal fluctuation.

Butler may be a decent guy, but he’s tone deaf.

I hope the RDA manages to help some of the people terminated by Tyson and other employers to find jobs. I hope Butler is ultimately right to be optimistic and that our title as unemployment capital is brief. I hope that Emporia thrives and that our neighborhood will fill back up with students and workers.

But what the unemployed need, other than a job, is empathy. Can’t any city leaders talk about how tough it really is to be laid off? What it’s like to look for a job when you’re young or old or too sick to work or have just lost your confidence through a series of tough breaks?

Emporia needs compassion for those hardest hit by the layoffs. Yes, I know there have been job fairs and other events to help individuals find work. But we also need confident and fact-based leadership, and somebody who understands that a doubling of the city’s unemployment rate in just 14 months affects just about every family in some way, and has been devasting for some. This is a crisis, not a fluctuation.

We’ve endured tougher collective times. National unemployment is estimated to have been 25% in March 1933, during the Great Depression. But that was before most of us were born. Right now, Emporia is experiencing a job slump surpassed in recent memory only by the Great Recession and the Dolly plant closing.

There’s a lot of families worried about how they’re going to cover the rent, buy food, and pay the water bill. Here on Constitution Street, the city utility bill — water, trash, sewer — has gone up 25% in two years, and is now $95.70.

Personally, I’ve never found Emporia’s water to be “refreshing” in ways that other water isn’t. Also, I’ve found the occasional boil advisories annoying and inconsistent with the goal of delivering clean, top-quality water. Right now, there are 10 jugs of bottled water in our kitchen waiting for the next trouble at the water plant.

What we don’t need is somebody handing us a glass of water and telling us it’s wine.

newavengers:

THE MUMMY
1999, dir. Stephen Sommers

Mother of Exiles

The cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—CBS insists it was purely a “financial decision,” the result of declining ad revenue in late night television. Others see it as a different kind of “financial decision,” a decision by Paramount (the parent company of CBS) to sacrifice Colbert so that the American president won’t cancel a lucrative $28-billion merger. Yesterday, David Letterman, the previous host of CBS’ The Late Show, released a 20-minute supercut featuring the many times he took CBS to task over the years. The subtext? He doesn’t seem to buy CBS’s talking points. Nor does Jon Stewart. More direct than Letterman, Stewart gives his own take on why CBS canceled Colbert: “I think the answer is in the fear and pre-compliance that is gripping all of America’s institutions at this very moment, institutions that have chosen not to fight the vengeful and vindictive actions of our pubic-hair-doodling commander-in-chief. This is not the moment to give in. I’m not giving in. I’m not going anywhere.” Note to reader: Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show airs on Comedy Central, which is owned by Paramount.

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Apple TV Plus’ adaptation of Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries has been one of this year’s surprisingly great sci-fi series, and the streamer has plans to keep the story going with a new batch of episodes.

Ahead of Murderbot‘s season 1 finale out July 11th, Apple TV Plus announced today that the show has been renewed for a season 2. In a statement about the renewal, Murderbot co-creators / executive producers Chris and Paul Weitz said they were “so grateful” for how well the series has been received by fans. No concrete details about the new season have been revealed just yet, but Apple TV Plus’ head of programming Matt Cherniss teased that, in addition to following Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) on his next adventure, we can expect to see even more of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

Murderbot‘s renewal is yet another sign of Apple TV Plus’ commitment to becoming a home for solid sci-fi. The streamer just teased the season 3 returns of its Invasion and Foundation series. And after a bit of radio silence, we just got our first (tiny) look at Apple’s take on William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s not yet clear when Murderbot will be back with new episodes. But for folks looking to dig even deeper into the world of Wells’ books, a new novelette titled “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” is slated to go live on Reactor after Murderbot‘s season 1 finale starts streaming.