The other day I had some free time, and I started going through all my video games and picking out ones I no longer liked or was sure that I'd never play again. Honestly, it was very hard. I'm a pack rat by nature, and it's incredibly hard to look at a game and admit to myself that I'll never actually play it again. God knows that most of the ones I kept will only continue to collect dust until my girlfriend (or possibly even my mom, she would love to clean my room) gets rid of them, but I ended up with some incredibly large piles. 32 games ended up on the chopping block, and when I mentioned it to my mother, she recommended I hit my Nintendo Power collection next.
While I've stopped getting them over the last couple years, I had subscribed to Nintendo Power magazine for at least ten years, and had a nice collection of really old ones from my uncle. They were eating up a sizeable portion of my closet, and I decided it was time to free up that space. Issues 92 (Shadows of the Empire, and coincidentally, the number of this article) through 198 were lined up neatly on a shelf and were an easy purge. It was just a matter of grabbing a handful and tossing them in the recycling bin. Everything I owned that came before #92 was a little more complicated. These issues were left in a milk crate in the corner of my closet, and due to their poor location, were mostly torn and ripped far past the point of me feeling they were worth keeping. A small stack of these ones is pictured below.
Getting rid of all these magazines was a terribly nostalgic ordeal. The shelf issues were in such pristine condition that I could barely bear to part with them, and looking at just the covers was like a trip backwards through my entire life. In retrospect, it's perhaps a little distressing that I could take any point in my life and define it with an issue of Nintendo Power. Every time I grabbed a new stack, my heartstrings tugged a little harder as I remembered all those games and all the good times I had. I have at least one story (short and trivial though some may be) to go with every issue, but that's not why I'm writing today.
What's truly interesting was the crate pile. Or moreover, what was mixed into the crate pile. Among the torn, raggedy, old relic magazines was all sorts of neat junk that inspired just as much (if not more in some instances) nostalgia as the Nintendo Powers themselves. Old drawings, writing, other kinds of literature, and even a bunch of exclusive promotional junk that came into my possession through my subscription to Nintendo Power. This may be a terribly boring article to most, not unlike my tribute to the cottage (which is yet to receive its due second part), but to me it's a wellspring of memories and cuddly feelings of simpler days gone by. This is my tribute to what basically amounts to a pile of junk.
Jumping Jesus they're green! When did this happen? I know there was purple introduced somewhere down the line, but I've been out of the Peeps loop for a while now. At least they're still dirt cheap. 87 cents for ten, and that's before Easter.
Despite the fact that they were way outside my budget, I went out and bought tickets for No Doubt and Paramore this morning. They're sorta crappy seats, but they were the cheaper ones and still so much more than I should have spent. But you should have seen the way here eyes lit up when she told me that her two favourite bands were coming to town together. There was no way I couldn't get the tickets. Oh well...
I've never waited in line for concert tickets the day they go on sale before, and I don't think I got a very good impression of what it's really like. It could have been the low-profile Ticketmaster location (tucked away in the corner of a drugstore), but there were less than ten people in line. I wasn't the only male, but it was the first time I've been the manliest guy in a crowd. The line me and the guys stood in on Wii day was way more intense than this one. I guess that either nobody cares about No Doubt anymore, or they all just went to different locations. In any case, I'm disappointed. I was expecting at least a little more out of this line.
Oh, and don't tell her about these! They're a surprise!