GX notes - november, 2000
tuesday 29 november
Alice looks like a truly beautiful game. Surreal vision executed thoroughly, non-zaftig female protagonist, I'm excited to play it.tuesday 21 november
On my way to work I pull off of 17 miles of freeway, past a methadone clinic with long lines and a shuttered salvation army thrift. I pass an iglesia del salvation and lots of potholes. I pull into the parking lot of a warehouse that's now a humming gaming microbrain and put on my colored sunglasses.monday 20 november
Why haven't you updated your web site? s/he asked. my love flows from my fingers through a computer still, but tonight it flows into classic PC game descriptions and reviews on gamers.com - they finally let me have access to the screenshot archive and I've been wasting eveyone's time with too many pictures from my youth playing.tuesday 14 novembersome samples: StarFlight, Ancient Art of War, Leisure Suit Larry. (my handle is "gx-fusty").
Most of the graphics I added were title screens - the big splashy blowout 64 color eyecandy that let you know whichever twisted escape fantasy was taking over your computer. I love to run classic PC games as my screensaver.
Part of what inspired this diving deeper into the Gamers.com games history metabrain database is the new user reviews engine - Shenmue - I'm writing user reviews again now because I can edit them when I'm finished and the system for displaying them and arranging them is more refined. Soon I imagine I'll begin to focus my energies more directly out of my own organs but for now the organ of my employer has my lips.
Breaking up with your girlfriend over chat and keeping open a place in your mind for your dead dad while you're at work trying to finish a star wars in gaming piece and keep up the regular witty repartie is difficult and it's making me a little queasy. I'm wearing blue-colored sunglasses today because two people have told me they will relieve computer-monitor-use eyestrain so I get a lot of jokes and questions. Which is fine except when I'm distracted up to my nuts and I can't figure out whether or how to cry about my gone girl or my dead dad. By the time I get home I'll be too tired to feel.monday 13 novemberI made myself some Postum. That smell/taste takes me back to the pond, and I'm comforted.
The winter darkness makes me antsy earlier in the day. Before I would look up and think about leaving after seven PM. Now it's 5.30 and it's already dark and I'm itchin' to get my chicken noodle soup on.tuesday 7 novemberTomorrow is 17 years anniversary since my dad died. I'm growing up past the sit and stare out a window for a few hours style of commemoration - mostly because it happens on a week day and I'm moving on. But I do try to write something for the occasion each year. I've got a piece in mind this year. But heaven forbid, I think I might want to do some research before writing it. So I'll use tomorrow as the start date. I consider it a "personal holiday."
I wanted to study games. So I wandered where there were no self-appointed professors, waist deep in the acutal practitioners.tuesday 7 novemberNow I wonder if I am too immersed -
a practitioner and less a penintent reflectant. And some days, like today, I wonder who my teachers are at my company. Howard, he exudes teaching. My co-workers, I contort their doings into lessons. I used to have a boss who monitored my work and supported my projects. Now, a new boss, I have more freedom and less learning.
Heck I could be even deeper into this world - I'm still working with journalists who are doing shallow study of the mediasphere and filtering it for "consumers" educating themselves. I came to Gamers.com to study games. Now I know more about games, but I know less of what of what I want to learn.
Plus now if I stop playing games long enough, I begin to feel itchy. Withdrawls a bitch. When I was in grade school and high school, I played a tremendous load of games. I loved it. Looking back, it was mostly drugs that got me out of the house - going to meet friends to get high and do dumb shit.
Walk the beach. Talk about ideas. Sit in cafes. Lay in the sun.
These days I spend more time moving little people-pixels around a screen than I do socializing with my peer group. Maybe this is how my peer group socializes. My eyeballs are glasses, and today they feel half empty.
So drugs are boring and expensive, and I'm too twitchy to meditate. At least now that my girlfriend has left me I can spend more time making web pages and laying on the couch playing the finger piano.
I'm considering another bookbound trip to ireland, or some kind of similar unplugging. Between the grating pro-gun, anti-homosexual, anti-feminine tendencies in my office and Howard and Amy assailing my time in the world of games, I feel like I need to take two steps back on my life. My sprit is wandering, interested in other things. What my spirit? What are you interested in? I'm even considering digging up my old i ching. ravel.
Sadly, these days, it's all about this comic strip (pointed out to me by Howard.friday 3 november
My toilet broke, so I'm working from, and researching toilets before I go out to buy a new one. Toilet Seat Museum.wednesday 1 novemberI've been wanting an "elongated" toilet bowl/seat for some time, to accomodate my length, but according to some plumbers they don't flush so well if you buy a mandatory water conservation unit. Hurm. Plus color costs extra, and it seems that only the real nice toilets allow you to select between splash/flush with a lever - like Swedish Toilets.
Xzibit Interview - I'm fascinated by the intersection of race and entertainment; race and games. People argue about the digital divide, whether all manner of folks are getting involved in the brave new wired-up future. In this case, many hip-hop/rap/urban music stars identify strongly with gaming culture, in a way that most popular young white performers don't seem to bother.
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