Psst, the Final Fantasy II retrospective from GameSpite Journal 10 was secretly posted as a feature over at 1UP. This lets me assuage my guilt for not contributing to 1UP while out on bereavement without actually having to be genuinely productive. My pragmatism disgusts me, sometimes.
See also:
Shameful, isn’t it?
My grandmother’s passing was unexpected, and it was heartbreaking in its suddenness; I missed seeing her one last time by a matter of hours. I’m still having trouble believing she’s gone, because she’s been an enormous presence in my life since the beginning: Ever more diminutive in stature as her extreme arthritis ravaged her limbs and caused her to shrink from a height that even in her youth never quite reached five feet, but a towering pillar of charity and love not only to her family but to all around her. The truth is, I had planned this trip with the intention of seeing my grandfather for very likely the last time, assuming my grandmother — ever the fighter — would be around for a while longer even as Alzheimer’s takes its toll on my grandfather. I suppose the one upside to her loss is that all the family activity around Grandma’s memorial has helped him cut through the fog of illness and be himself, something all too rare in recent months. Needless to say, I’m soaking up every minute of my time with him, every snatch of conversation we share.
I take a lot of crap from people who think I’m pretentious for having taken to wearing a hat over the past year or so, but those people are cordially invited to to shove off. They don’t know the reasons behind the change, and frankly they don’t deserve to know. The hat here is the one that started it all; Cat found it as we were walking through Nolita while spending Thanksgiving 2010 in New York. She and her brother encouraged me to try it on, even though I figured I’d look like a complete twit in a hat. I put it on despite my misgivings and they both assured me it worked. I checked a mirror and sure enough, it actually looked OK. Later, I saw a photo of myself and realized why it worked: I looked an awful lot like my grandfather.
Grandpa always cut a dapper figure. It’s something of a generational thing, of course, but even after other men his age had abandoned wearing a proper hat and dressing well, he continued to cover his head when he went out, to wear French cuffs, to don slacks. Even after he retired — and really right up until the past few years, where his health has diminished — he continued to dress in a nice shirt and slacks to do nothing more than sit around the house and nap in his favorite chair. When I see myself in a hat (and, subsequently, in dressier clothes to properly match my headwear, because wearing a hat so nice with a screen-printed T-shirt would make me look like a twit), I see him reflected. I remember always being able to tell if he and my grandmother were at church when I arrived late, because his hat would always be sitting by itself atop the coatrack in the entry vestibule.
I was told that Grandpa recently saw my favorite portrait of Cat and me from our wedding, the one in which I’m standing slightly to the back in a suit and the hat, and asked, “Is that a picture of my father?” I gave it a closer look, and I really do look a lot like my great-grandfather in his younger days there. (No doubt Grandpa was also wondering why his father had posed in a suit with a lovely Vietnamese lady in a beautiful dress.) It’s a resemblance that no one ever noticed until I adopted a different mode of dress. It’s a connection that means the world to me — now more than ever.
Yesterday I had to borrow a tie from my grandfather for the memorial, because the ones I’d packed (unaware that I’d be saying my farewells to my grandmother) seemed inappropriately cheery. Not that Grandma would have minded my wearing a colorful tie in her memory, but sometimes it’s OK to step in line with social mores. I selected the one pictured above.
“Does it look OK?” I asked.
“Turn and let me see,” he replied. He looked for a moment and nodded, then told me to keep it after the memorial. I found myself suddenly choked with emotion and thanked him. It’s a great tie. I’ll be wearing it often with the hat Cat gave me, and not just because they look good together. I don’t know how much longer my grandfather will be with us, especially now that the love of his life is gone, but I will always keep a part of him with me in how I present myself.
Hi, everyone. I probably won’t update here much, if at all, for the next week. I’m out of town on a trip I’ve been planning for months with the bittersweet intention of spending time with my two surviving grandparents very likely for the last time. Unfortunately, it turned out to be too late; as I was boarding the plane, I received word that my grandmother had unexpectedly passed away. I’m pretty devastated to have missed her by a matter of hours, and I’m deeply frustrated that I let work obligations repeatedly delay a trip I intended to take months ago.
I have a lot of things to do over the next few days that seem more important than writing about video games and music and watches. You do, too. You need to tell the people you love how important they are to you. Because you never know when you’re going to just barely miss your last chance.
So, I started up a new blog category.
ANYWAY. Remember that e-ink watch I got for Christmas, the one I was super-stoked about and loved madly? Yeah, well, after about a day of wear I discovered that I am incredibly allergic to the metal (ion-plated nickel, I think?) they used for the face and band. My wrist became red and puffy, and it itched for almost a week after I stopped wearing it. Needless to say, this turn of events was kind of disappointing. I really loved that watch.
I’ve never really worn jewelry until the past year or so, when I began wearing watches and a wedding band (which, being tungsten carbide, is not only indestructible but also irritation-free). So I didn’t realize until the past year or so that I seem to have inherited my mother’s hyper-sensitive skin. She can’t wear gold and several other kinds of metals because she breaks out on contact. It’s OK, because I inherited lots of other things from her — my love of reading, my interest in pretentious rock bands of the ’70s, my artistic streak — so I’ll forgive her the less fortunate inheritances, like skin allergies and a lack of height.
I was able to exchange the disastrous watch for another, so I decided to go all-out and find one that was as far removed from a futuristic, metal-banded, e-ink LCD-screened watch I couldn’t wear. I bought instead… an analog watch made of wood.
“Wood?” you say. “They make watches of wood!?” Yes, apparently they do. I discovered the existence of wood watches at the same time as e-ink watches, and they both fascinated me in equal measure. In fact, I put both on the wish list from which my sister-in-law selected the e-ink one. Now that I have it in hand — or on wrist, as the case may be — I like it just as much as the previous watch, because it really is different.
Rather than sporting a funky, abstract face, it uses a simple, old-fashioned analog dial. Where the other watch was thick and very heavy on the wrist, this one is quite thin and incredibly lightweight. And the aesthetic differences should be obvious.
The thing I find most interesting, though, is that there the other watch seemed destined to look worse as it aged due to nicks and scratches on its jet-black surface, this style of watch is said to improve over time. Weathering and exposure to skin oils supposedly “cures” the wood, giving it a richer and more vibrant tone over time. I hope that’s true! I like the idea of a technological device that actually becomes better as it becomes older. Also, the watch’s primary color is similar to the tone of my skin, so a little weathering might add some welcome contrast.
Oh, and it’s different than the e-ink watch in another way, but perhaps the most important one of all: It’s hypoallergenic. Also, it was just slightly less expensive than the other one… enough that the leftover credit netted me a Marillion album I’ve been meaning to pick up for a few years. Flawless victory? Here’s hoping.
The Super Game Boy! I had one of these. Well, not one of these in the photo, because I owned an American Super NES rather than a European model. But it was my gateway to countless Game Boy classics, being that the first portable system I ever owned was a Game Boy Color purchased at its Japanese launch. And when I say “countless” I basically mean “Metroid II” and “Link’s Awakening,” because I was young and foolish and very, very poor, so I couldn’t bring myself to pay money for mere portable games. Still, having access to two such essential games made the accessory worth the price.
And I am still pretty horked off that Nintendo didn’t bother to include Super Game Boy support for the 3DS Virtual Console. It’s always something with those people.
Look out, Ekkusu-san! Launch Octopold is going to shoot you!
I’ve always wanted to play the original concept for X, which apparently featured Zero as some kind of awesome futuristic cop. A robo-cop of sorts, I guess. But my desire to play it isn’t that strong, because after all Mega Man X is quite simply one of the greatest games of all time. I would put it in my top 50 without hesitation. After all, he who hesitates is lost. And who wants to be lost? Not me, that’s for sure.
I do believe that my feelings on Secret of Mana are a matter of public record, so I will simply step aside and let Tomm do the talkin’ for me. I would, however, like to add that the box art continues to be one of the most beautiful images ever created for a video game.
I can’t shake off the pervasive sense of dread and foreboding that’s settled on me over the past week or so — presumably inspired in large part by the nature of the “vacation” I’ll be taking this weekend, but also the culmination of a lot of other factors as well. Rather than complain, though, I’d rather share my poison: Marillion’s “Interior Lulu,” which I listen to when I need to stew in my melancholy for a while. Quite a while, actually.
Sometimes you desperately need to shake off the bad feelings, but sometimes you just need to marinate in them.
I’d say “enjoy,” but that would be missing the point.
Sometimes it takes me a while to get into a band. “A while” these days currently means about 20 years, the duration between my first real bloom of interest in music at the cusp of adolescence and now. Sometimes, it’s a gradual process of learning to appreciate a sound, as with Hawkwind. Sometimes, the verdict remains out, as with Van der Graaf Generator. Sometimes, though, it’s as simple as listening to the right album.
In the case of Camel, a band I finally realized I liked about two years ago, that album was Rain Dances. It’s weird, because there’s no single stand-out track on the album. In fact, a few of the pieces would be utterly grating on their own. But Rain Dances is a release from 1977, crafted in the heyday of AOR radio, and as such it works as a cohesive whole. The discipline of creating albums that exist as albums is largely a lost art these days, outside of acts who make a conscious effort to keep alive (or deconstruct) the olden days. One could argue that albums are an outmoded concept altogether in an era where music exists as 99-cent files and the world’s most popular listening device — the iPhone — isn’t even capable of randomizing music by album.
Sometimes, though, you just have to listen to a set of music in its entirety in the order in which it was published. Rain Dances is one of those. Despite belonging to a bacterial substrain of progressive rock, there’s no theme or narrative linking the tracks of this particular collection. No one is singing stories about (for instance) fascist empires of the future outlawing rock ‘n roll. More than half the tracks are strictly instrumental performances.
No, Rain Dances works because the sounds all fit together. The sonic personality of the album is nestled in a strange delta between the Canterbury festival scene, which gave birth to avant-garde space-jazz-rock acts like Gong and National Health, and mellow ’70s radio rock. An improbable combination to be sure, but one that the band manages to make work for them, at least for this album. The rest of their oeuvre isn’t always quite so cohesive, but here it works. From the laid back guitar and synthesizers of the opening instrumental “First Light” (embedded below) to the borderline-lugubrious “Tell Me” — and even to the light rock grooviness of blatant radio-bait tune “Highways of the Sun” — every second of Rain Dances flows tidily to the next to the point that you lose track of which pieces actually segue into one another and which segues your brain simply filled in for you because it seemed right.
I made the mistake long ago of trying to get a sample of Camel by picking up a two-disc best-of compilation, Echoes. But it didn’t do the trick for me, because it separated a lot of tracks that were meant to be part of a larger whole from their proper context and left them stranded in cold isolation. Sometimes, you just have to hear a work the way Nature intended. I wish I had realized that about two decades sooner.
I stopped at the local bagel shop today looking for cheap eats and saw this monstrosity:
It is a donut. A really, really big donut. See the bagel next to it? And the fork on top? Those are normally proportioned items. The plate is a dinner plate, not a dessert saucer. This is a donut big enough to kill a man… if not with blunt trauma, then definitely with diabetes.
Naturally, I had to have it for myself just for the sheer novelty factor. Hell, I don’t even really like glazed donuts; it was the complete stupidity of the whole thing that lured me. Surprisingly, it’s not bad. I guess I expected pastries to be like fruit and vegetables — the bigger they are, the less flavorful and juicy. That’s silly, I realize. This is fried buttermilk dough covered with sugar. Of course it’s delicious at any size.
My dessert for the day was one-sixth of this monstrosity. With Cat out of town, it may take me a week to work my way through it.
Please watch this space. I may need help if this thing topples over and crushes me beneath its girth.