IRL – Page 14

In the air tonight

Sense memories. We all have them. Or at least I’m assuming we all have them. Little moments when something innocuous -a smell or a feeling, perhaps- brings back a very specific memory. Being such a nostalgic person, I tend to get them all the time. But never quite in the same frequency as I do in December.

It’s not often big or particularly affecting memories that are triggered, either. It’s usually just little things. When I’m sitting around and I feel a rush of cold air from somebody coming into the house, for example, I’m brought back immediately to my early teenage years. I can picture myself in the basement of my parents’ house, playing video games on the little TV designated for video games, while the main TV played on the background, filling the room with the sounds of sitcom Christmas episodes.

Then my parents come in. If they were doing normal shopping, they just bring in their purchases (probably groceries) as usual. If they were doing Christmas shopping, my mother will come in first and announce that everybody had better stay where they are and away from the door (usually followed by me running straight towards the door, for the sake of being a nuisance). A few moments later, the cold air from the outside will make its way down to me. I never thought that little chill would leave such a defined mark on me, but it did. It’s funny how humans work.

While the SNES was hooked up to that little video games TV for many years, it’s always the N64 in my memory, and usually I’ve got a rented game in there. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko and Winback are the ones that figure most prominently into this memory (placing it in 1999), but Super Mario 64 shares a similar mindspace. In fact, this very memory recalls when I beat it for the very first time. Perhaps that’s just another reason why it remains my favourite video game of all time.

If you hadn’t connected the dots yet, it is this very memory that led to the Year of Nintendo 64. In a fit of irony, I didn’t play any of the games mentioned above this year. Okay, I did play the DS port of Super Mario 64, but it’s got a whole different feel to it. Not nearly as nostalgic as the original. Gex didn’t make the cut because I bought the Playstation version of Enter the Gecko on my PSP a couple years ago and found out that it didn’t age terribly well. Winback… I do really want to play Winback again, but it’s so ingrained in that one part of my memory that I don’t think I could appreciate it in any other setting.

Anyway, that’s more or less all that I wanted to share today. Hooray for posts about weird things going on in my head! I often write these posts and then wonder if even a single other person in the world would have a damn clue what I’m talking about. I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Oh yeah, and that was about the most Christmassy thing that going to be happening on TE this year. So have yourselves a merry little Christmas, or a happy little whatever else you might be celebrating. Have a good time, is what I’m saying.

No-blogging-vember

Absolutely nothing interesting has happened in my life over the last few weeks. It’s been the absolute steadiest stream of “the usual” that I’ve ever experienced. The first couple weeks of November are also apparently the new Birthday Season, but there isn’t a lot to be said about low-key family parties and nights spent at Pizza Hut with the in-laws.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like it this way. The less excitement there is, and the more time I have to just lay around and devote myself to my hobbies, the better. A boring life suits me perfectly, but it doesn’t make for good blogging.

Oh, but I did make this papercraft Shovel Knight! That’s pretty cool!

Note to the curious: papercraft is not a hobby intended for the chubby-fingered. Or the impatient. I won’t lie, Paper Knight took a little over two hours to make. Probably would have been easier if I’d used small craft-sized scissors. Oh well! He ain’t perfect, but I still love him. He brightens up my desk more than all of my other childish baubles combined.

The end of freedom (for 2014)

Well, that’s it. My last week of vacation for this year is over. It’s really depressing, knowing that I’ve got at least three and a half months left before I get any more time off. And even then, I won’t be taking any vacation time until March at the very earliest, so it’s more like six months. On the brighter side, since next month marks my five-year anniversary with my current employer, I will be awarded with a fourth week of paid vacation next year. Hooray! Life is wonderful!

So you’re probably thinking that I must have done something really special for my final week of vacation, what with it also having been my birthday and all. And you’d be so horribly wrong. Don’t you know me at all? I spent most of the time off playing video games and watching Netflix. It’s just what I do, as an introvert with no ambition or motivation whatsoever.

On sleep and moving pictures

Back at work today after another week of vacation. This one was an especially grueling return, as I unintentionally developed a habit of staying up until 3 AM and sleeping until around 11 during my time off. This is not good, as someone who normally sleeps from 11 PM to 6 AM. Needless to say, I had a rather difficult time staying awake at work today. By noon I’d downed three cappuccinos, which is one more than I usually drink during the span of an entire workday.

Why was I staying up so late, you ask. Mostly because of computer games. See, I don’t have a clock in my basement, and if my phone is too close to my PC, it causes a weird disruption in the speakers, which then emit some really annoying staticy beeping noises. So all I have to tell time is the computer clock. Which is covered up while playing games in fulllscreen. When I don’t have any plans, I tend to not worry about time as much, and so I’d often end up playing a game until I started feeling tired, and when I close the game and check the clock: oh my goodness! It’s three in the morning! I didn’t realize I’d been playing for so long.

And that’s why it’s better to play console games.

Or something like that. The point is, that I wasted another week of vacation. But that’s pretty much all I intend to do with them anyway. It’s not like I have any money to go away with, so I just enjoy loafing around at home for a week. Makes me happy, at least.

I did watch the first two Gamera movies, though. I own the 11-movie set (which is only missing the 2006 reboot), and so far so good. They’re pretty short too, running an average time of about 80 minutes. That’s actually a good thing, as you really don’t want a lot of padding in your kaiju films. Basically you just need a set-up, the villain monster doing its thing, and then the good monster showing up for a beat-down. It’s a good time to be had by all, as long as you can see the beauty of two guys swiping at each other while wearing goofy rubber suits.

It’s pretty reasonably priced on Amazon, so if you’ve got a thing for classic kaiju flicks, it’s quite a bargain. And really, how can you not love Gamera? Godzilla is the king of the monsters, sure, but Gamera is so innately lovable. Maybe it’s just because I’ve got a thing for turtles.

I also watched a lot more TV than usual, finishing off the episodes of Portlandia offered by Netflix, and the first two seasons of Seinfeld. The latter is well-known, and still one of my all-time favourite TV shows. Portlandia you may not have heard of. It’s a sketch comedy show that pokes fun mostly at hipsters, but also other wackos like overzealous feminists and hippies. It’s usually pretty funny, and occasionally even hilarious. Definitely a good watch.

I guess that’s about it. I could go into greater detail about my video game adventures, but that’s what the Monthend Wrap-Up is for.Now I’m just going to struggle through the next month of work while I eagerly anticipate my next and final week of vacation time.

Vacation time and a new baby

Last week was my first week-long vacation since September, and man, when you wait that long between vacations, it feels good to be off for so long. Especially when you don’t do anything with that week besides catching up on your video games and Netflix backlogs. Many years ago, a vacation week would have been put to good use with comic drawing and writing for this blog, but I didn’t even think about touching my PC until Saturday night. To say that I accomplished nothing of value would be an understatement.

Actually, I did mow my lawn and tidied up my basement a little, so I suppose that technically I did get a few things done. Though I likely would have done those on a not-vacation week anyway. And I spent a few mornings sitting out in the sun with a book, so there’s an activity that I guess isn’t a complete waste of time. Why reading is considered a more legitimate hobby than any other type of media consumption is a mystery to me.

Oh, also I began recording a new set of Pop-Tarts Reviews, so you can look forward to those at some undetermined point in the future.

The big news of the week is that my entertainment unit is now home to a Playstation 3. Heresy, I know! But it came at the low, low price of $9, as my brother had recently moved up to an Xbox One, and all I had to do to adopt his PS3 was to buy a new power cable for it. The poor thing had been living between the bed of his truck and my parents’ shed for the last few months, so I’m happy to be able to give it a loving home.

Alas, now that I’ve got the thing, it seems like there are far fewer exclusive titles for it that interest me than I had thought. Currently the only games that I have on it are Tokyo Jungle, which I love with all of my heart, and a handful of PSOne Classics that I’d previously purchased on my PSP. Literally the only other games for it that I really want are Valkyria Chronicles and Drakengard 3. It’s pretty likely that I’ll be buying the HD Kingdom Hearts collections at some point, and probably Tales of Symphonia Chronicles, but I wouldn’t place those as sure bets.

I’m trying to resist the HD port of Shadow of the Colossus, but I think we all know that it is my destiny to buy it and play it over and over forever. It’s funny how a game that I didn’t like very much at first has become one of my all-time favourite video games. Favourite PS2 game, at the very least.

When a stone’s not a stone

WARNING: The following post concerns icky body stuff. Maybe skip it if you can’t handle that kind of stuff.

Sometimes weird stuff happens in our bodies. Actually, weird stuff happens in our bodies all the time, but plenty of it goes completely unnoticed. One of the weird things that is totally noticeable is the mysterious tonsillolith.

Colloquially known as tonsil stones, tonsilloliths are gooey little bits that pop into your mouth from time to time (in fact, I referred to them as “bits” before I actually looked them up). I never thought much about them until recently, when I watched an episode of Game Grumps where Arin hacked one up and Danny freaked right out at it, having never seen one before.

Maybe you’ve never seen one before either. If you haven’t, you’re either really lucky, or you’ve had your tonsils removed. See, a tonsil stone is a buildup of calcium and bacteria and other bits of stuff that collects in your tonsil cavities. They’re white/yellow chunks, and are generally pretty tiny. Despite being called stones, tonsilloliths are actually very soft and sticky. On occasion, they’ll fall out, possibly because of a cough or other throat-rattling activity. They’re fairly common, although since many people have tonsillectomies, they’re not quite common knowledge.

I used to have tiny little ones show up in my mouth all the time. Despite being known for having an awful smell, I never smelled or tasted anything when they showed up. Mostly I’d just spit ’em out and think nothing of it. And then they stopped. I didn’t even notice that I wasn’t getting them anymore until one day when I just randomly thought about it. don’t know what spurred the thought in my mind, but I shrugged, realized that I hadn’t seen one in what felt like years, and moved on with my life. I hadn’t made any major changes in my diet or lifestyle, so I have no idea why they went away.

Over the last few months, I’ve been getting them again. Just like when they stopped, I haven’t made any changes in my life, so I have no idea what brought them back. But now, they’re back with a vengeance, being bigger than ever before, clinging just on the edge of my tonsil cavities for hours before falling out, and carrying a noticeable (though faint) odor. Someone suggested that my mouth is dirty and gross, but my oral hygeine regiment is more thorough than ever, so I know that’s not the case. Unless my Listerine is actually causing them, as they started showing up again around the time I started using mouthwash daily.

Like I said, they’re really lingering just inside my tonsils now, and they’re quite annoying to feel sticking around back there. I’ve taken to poking stuff in there to scoop them out, and I’m actually starting to get really good at it, so much so that I’m able to pry open the tonsil cavity and fish out the deeper ones. All this poking around in the back of my throat has also dulled my gag reflex, which is kinda neat, but ultimately useless because I only like girls.

So what’s the point of this story? Nothing, really. Partly to educate (a lot of people don’t know tonsil stones exist), and partly just to keep a short log of my battles against tonsilloliths. I have an upcoming physical, so I’m going to ask my doctor if there’s a way to prevent the little buggers, but the internet hasn’t offered much on that front, so I’m fully prepared for the possibility of having to live with them forever. It’s a very minor inconvenience, but one I’d like to nip in the bud if I can.

Filler time: Articles for grown-ups

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me: I’m a child living an adult’s life. I appreciate a lot of things that people my age aren’t supposed to, if advertising and demographics have anything to say about it. Marketing is all a big load of crap, anyway.

I guess the point is that I don’t have any ideas in my head at the moment, and I don’t have the gumption to type up the weekly Dark Souls entry. Wait, no, that’s what I wasn’t supposed to say. I’m supposed to make it seem like I’m doing something inspired.

Anyway, I type about a lot of goofy things that are emblematic of childhood. Cartoons, Nintendo games, candy. If you scroll up from the bottom of the article list, you’ll see that it takes a long time to get to anything very grown-uppy. Or at least, that’s my interpretation of it. So that’s why today, I’m going to link you to a small selection of old articles that stand out as somewhat more mature among the sea of childish crap that I’ve written.

28 Days Later (2003) – The first movie I ever reviewed, and it’s a scaaary one. Probably because it’s one of the first (if not the actual first) movies with fast zombies. So it turns a kind of slow, tense staple into something much more fierce and immediately frightening. Please note that I have not watched this movie since then.

Catherine (2011) – Undoubtedly a truly mature game, as it deals with many very grown-up themes. Also there are boobies and monsters, but the heart of the game is literally about growing up, accepting responsibility, and figuring out what you want to do with your life.

Chicken Wings (2005) – Chicken wings are undoubtedly a fun finger food, which is pretty child-like, However, wings are most prominent where? Bars, that’s where. Kids don’t go to bars. They’re also one of the staple foods of sports-watching, or so I’ve been told, and sports-watching is a pretty grown-up kind of thing.

Mate1.com Hates You (2006) – To date, still the most popular thing I’ve ever published, if fan e-mails are anything to go by. Mate1.com, if you’re not already aware, is an online dating website. Those are most definitely not for children. It’s not really for anybody, as far as this article is concerned.

Remembering the Cottage (2007) – Yeah, it’s an article entirely about childhood memories, but that in and of itself makes it kinda grown-up, right? I mean, kids don’t reminisce. You have to be old and at least a little world-weary before you really understand nostalgia. Some might say that I’m not old enough to say something like that, but I respectfully have no comment.

True Crime: Streets of LA (2003) – The first video game that I wrote about that earned an M rating from the ESRB. I guess that’s all I really have to say about that. I haven’t written about a lot of games that feature non-laser guns.

To Read an E

I got this thing the other day. But I suppose that isn’t the beginning of the story…

I’ve been buying Humble Bundles here and there, and since I’m very interested in the promos, I’ve agreed to let them send me emails about new Bundles and other related stuff. It was a couple months ago that I got an ad for Story Bundle, which is a similar idea, but they sell bunched of e-books instead of video games.

Anyway, the Story Bundle advertised was the third bundle of video game-related books. I wasn’t too interested, even though it included the entire run of Ray Barnholt’s Scroll magazine, which I really wanted, but would rather have the actual magaznies than epubs of. However, one word caught my eye and convinced me to drop the twelve bucks or whatever: Earthbound.

Yep, they sold me with a book about Earthbound. How was I supposed to resist that? You can present me with basically any piece about Earthbound and I’d gleefully read it. I just love the way that everybody seems to have a different story to tell about it. Anyway, I read that book right away on my phone, since I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. It was a painful experience, trying to read a novel on such a tiny screen. It was then that I decided it was finally time to pick up an eReader.

I kind of forgot about that mission for a while though.

Last weekend, the wife and I were killing some time in Chapters before a movie, and I noted that there was a big kiosk covered in eReaders. We talked about it and looked at them for a while, and decided to think about it and make our decision after looking around the rest of the store. I hung out in the comics section while she browsed, and when we reconvened, we selected the Kobo Arc 7HD.

This, I should note, is not really an eReader. It’s a straight-up tablet that’s very transparently masquerading as an eReader. See, I originally wanted to go cheap, but then we decided we wanted a colour screen, and from there it wasn’t a much more expensive leap to this bad girl. She was on sale too, so if there was ever a time to make a spontaneous technology purchase, that was it.

I never really wanted a tablet, but I couldn’t be happier with my purchase. I’m still not very familiar with the Android OS, but I’m getting there, and it’s been fun to learn how to use a new device. I’ve discovered that I really love reading on it, which I didn’t think I would. I love the feel and smell of a book, but the tablet is just so comfortable and light. I really had no idea how little I would miss flipping pages.

It’s also become my second favourite way to browse the internet. It loses out to the Wii U gamepad because I prefer browsing with a stylus to a finger, but it’s certainly more convenient, since the startup time is quite literally two seconds.

The only thing I dislike about this tablet is that it doesn’t have an SD card slot. Not that that’s really a huge issue, because I’ve been living with an iPhone for four and a half years now, but I may have shopped around a little more if I’d even thought about that beforehand. Also, I bought the thing to read books, not for games or music or movies. Sure, it can do those things, but I don’t see myself using it for them often, if at all.

Phlegm and stuff

I’ve been suffering from a rather debilitating bout with a common cold for almost a week now. It’s been nothing but snot and stuffiness for me lately, and also it’s a Man Cold so it’s much worse than a cold really should be.

The “upside” to this whole business is that I took Monday and Tuesday afternoon off work to recover. I don’t like taking sick days, and I always feel guilty about them, but they do have a sort of weird appeal to them. Maybe it’s because of all the fake sick days I took in school (which I don’t feel bad about in the least), but a sick day to me is a day where I can do anything at all and not feel like I’ve frittered away a day off.

I know that maybe that’s hard to understand, but I can’t really explain it any clearer. It’s weird, and I’m weird. We all know this, so let’s just move on.

While I was feeling like a horrible pile of yuck, Monday was a pretty great day. I slept in, watched cartoons with breakfast, and drank litres upon litres of hot lemon tea. I also watched a couple movies, which is not something that I’d ever currently do with my free time. At least, not without a handheld video game dividing my attention.

In an effort to pare down my Netflix queue a little, the first movie I watched was Devil’s Pass. Unlike video games, I don’t usually read movie reviews before I watch them. If I had, I might have assumed that Devil’s Pass was garbage and skipped it. I thought it was alright, though. It’s a found footage movie, which is already something I’m not a fan of, but I’ve seen a lot worse than this one. The movie’s plot boils down to a group of stupid college kids who go out on an expedition into some Russian mountain range, where nine hikers mysteriously died in the 50s. The fun part is that the movie’s lore actually happened. Read up on it here. I love when I get a fun little history lesson mixed into my movies, so I found that part of the flick really appealing.

The less fun part is pretty much the rest of the movie. The kids are dumb (obvi), the actors aren’t great, the special effects are amateurish, and the whole found footage business is handled as stupidly as usual. Also the story ends up being really awful and totally winds in on itself in a way that makes the idea that anyone actually found the footage literally impossible. Huge plot hole there. So huge that I have no idea how it wasn’t addressed at all.

Also, since you don’t how who/what the antagonist is until the last 15 minutes, you’re constantly wondering just how supernatural it’s going to end up being. At one point in the film, a couple of bodies scurry past in the background while the characters ramble on, and I thought that it was a dead giveaway that the bad guys would be abominable snowmen. This was not the case. So if you’ve been eyeing up Devil’s Pass on Netflix or whatever and hoping that it’s a movie with yetis in it, it’s not. That was probably my biggest disappointment.

The other movie I watched was Guillermo del Toro’s classic monster movie, Mimic. I’d never seen it before, but the promise of a movie about giant man-eating bugs was more than enough to interest me. The fact that it’s a movie about giant man-eating bugs that has no reservations about murdering children on-screen? Well that’s something that I just have to watch.

Mimic was awesome, and that’s coming from someone who only half-watched it because for the first half of the movie I was engaged in a Google search for pictures of Gemma Atkinson‘s boobs (she was in Devil’s Pass).

Anyway, it was a pretty typical monster-slasher, but that’s exactly the kind of movie I love to watch, so how could I complain? It had a pretty lead, really cool bug monsters, and a sassy black cop. What else do people even want from a movie? No, I’m serious. I don’t understand why you’d want to watch anything that doesn’t have at least one of those elements. Or Muppets.

Tuesday afternoon, on the other hand, was a huge bust. I basically just went home early and slept the rest of the day’s working hours away. I might have felt at my worst that day, since I got up and tried to soldier my way through a work day instead of just getting the rest I needed. The good news is that all the extra rest I got that afternoon seems to have worked a small miracle and I’m feeling so much better than I did yesterday. Still like crap, but functional crap, at least.

Or maybe it’s because I started shotgunning Buckely’s that night. I guess that could have made a difference too.

Also I played a lot of Doom on my Xbox over the last few days. It’s… Just as great as I remember it being. Modern FPS games really are just crap when you put them side-to-side with the classics.

Trouble a-brewin’

So I got this message in my e-mail inbox a couple days ago:

ROCKY SNOW POPS.

Hello:
I need you to REMOVE this site immediately!!!
This is effecting my business and I will be forced to take legal action.
http://www.torrentialequilibrium.net/art0070.html
times have changed….everyone seeks internet today
and to get negative feedback from retailers is not acceptable.

I expect a response back immediately.

So yeah. That happened.

I did reply with a sternly-worded message about how I’m in the clear and that criticism is just something people have to deal with. Also I made fun of the broken English, but in a semi-professional way. I’m not entirely sure that this isn’t some weird new kind of spam, but we’ll all just have to wait and see if I get a response back.

I don’t get e-mails regarding TE and/or its content very often, but when I do, they’re always wildly entertaining. Or you could flip that W for the less hyperbolized version.