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July 26th, 2005
02:39 pm
Andy: what's your address? I can't send you the games until you tell me!
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July 21st, 2005
07:45 pm - See anything you want?
Suggest a price, or something.
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PS2
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Crazy Taxi
Culdcept
Dark Cloud 2
DDR Max
DDR Max 2
Disgaea
Eyetoy Play (plus camera)
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy X-2
Gitaroo Man
Guilty Gear Isuka
Guilty Gear X2
Ico
La Pucelle Tacctics
Lego Star Wars (SOLD)
Mega Man Anniversity Collection (SOLD)
Metal Gear Solid 2
Phantom Brave
Ribbit King
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga
Stella Deus
Suikoden 3
Taiko Drum Master (plus drum)
Tekken 5
Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution
Way of the Samurai
Wild Arms 3
Yanya Caballista: City Skater
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PS2 (JPN)
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Beatmania IIDX 5th Mix
Beatmania IIDX 7th Mix
Beatmania IIDX 8th Mix
DDR Extreme
Gran Turismo 4
Taiko no Tatsujin
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GameCube
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Animal Crossing
Donkey Konga (plus two controllers)
F-Zero GX
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Legend of Zelda Four Swords Adventure
Mario Golf Toadstool Tour
Mario Party 5
Mario Party 6
Mario Power Tennis
Metal Gear Solid: the Twin Snakes
Metroid Prime
P.N.03
Pac-Man World 2 + Pac-Man VS.
Soul Calibur 2
SSX 3
Viewtiful Joe
Wario Ware Mega Party Games
ps. It's my birthday next week. w00t!
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July 6th, 2005
11:16 pm
I'm thinking of selling all my videogames. Somebody advise, please.
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June 28th, 2005
12:16 pm
Well, wow. I haven't done this in a while.
with good reason, too. I don't really have anything to say. Oh, wait: Andy (Cabbage-head), if you're reading this (and why would you be), dude. We have to get in touch again. Call me or something.
somebody post something awesome, please.
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December 8th, 2004
11:52 pm
oh hell foreign languages are hard. I grabbed a Japanese copy of Norwegian Wood today on the basis that it's pretty easy, linguistically, and I've read it in English so it's not too unfamiliar. Yeah, that helped. It took me about half an hour to read the first page. It, uh, done got read, though.
that's really all I wanted to say about that.
It just seems like a good thing to be posting when nothing's really going on. No great excitements, no... well, no terrible fears, either. Course, that means I don't have too much to say, but that's the way the wheel spins.
I'm watching my girlfriend play through final fantasy ten, these days, and having a surprising amount of fun with it. It's weird--RPG plots tend to be less than completely engrossing when you play them, and that's when you have puzzles and fights to keep you paying attention. Watching a game be played, though, is an entirely different experience. It's a weird cross between a game and a movie. It's not interactive, at least not for the person watching, but you know it is, and when you yell Don't go in the door! you've got at least a chance of being listened to. At the same time, though, hell. In a movie, if you scream at the characters to not make the mistakes you know they're about to make, you're imagining that they'll be able to make something of their better choices. You're free to believe that since there's no chance of it happening. With a game, though--and this is true when you're playing, but somehow you notice it more when you're not--if you don't do what you're supposed to, nothing else can happen. Even if you know, completely, that when you walk through the door you're going to get captured, you can't walk away from it. What would happen then?
The Neon Monk took a Warp Zone Too Far...
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December 2nd, 2004
09:17 pm
So, uh, yeah. that. In any case, I'm not dead.
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November 30th, 2004
01:27 am - red hot
Well, it's happened again. I'm up much later than I'd like to be, and instead of sleeping, I'm wide-eyed and terrified, for no particular reason, that I'm about to die. This happens once every couple of weeks or so: I'll drink a little too much caffeine, or something, and then my body will tic in some vague metabolic way--some momentary weird feeling in my stomach--and suddenly my adrenaline is pounding and I'm convinced that whatever I just felt was the onset of, well, death. I don't know what to make of it. A panic attack, I guess. I know my mother gets them. Times like this, even my own heartbeat terrifies me. Every time I hear it, or can feel it, I can imagine a moment of NOT feeling it. That first moment, when your stomach flips and you realize something's wrong, and then there's nothing left.
Is this what it means, for a warrior to constantly imagine himself as dead? Is this a wall to break through? The zen master's iron ball: you can't swallow it but you can't spit it out either.
I hate the shit I write here, I really do. You have no idea.
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November 1st, 2004
10:33 am - yume mita
I dreamed last night. Fueled by japanese coffee and hacking fervor, I dreamed the line "... if a truly free 108 had really existed."
but our princess is in another castle!
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October 31st, 2004
July 19th, 2004
10:44 pm
For various and somewhat convoluted reasons--these will come, later, when I want to write and don't have homework--I just reread Tim's Videogame Endings article. Reading it, reading him ask "what the hell is that? really?" about Mario 3's ending, I was siezed with a thought and a dream: I can 1up Tim, here! maybe.
No maybe: I know what the hell is up with that. really.
Mario 3 is a dramatisation of Super Mario Brothers. It is the Mushroom Kingdom's Hollywood version of its own history. It is Super Mario Brothers: The Movie: The Game before : The Movie ever existed.
Consider: The game opens with a curtain rising. This is the introductory cinematic, and as much of one as we ever got on the NES, anyway. The game ends (as it would have to) with the lowering of that curtain, the action completed. The plot is, as we would expect, roughly the same. Mario progresses through seven worlds, completing apparently useless tasks that, nevertheless, have to be completed for his mission to succeed. Finally, with Bowser and the Princess looming, he must traverse the final, and strikingly different, 8th world to rescue Peach.
Now picture the studio executive, sweat dripping from his red-spotted brow: Hmm. Eight worlds, you say? Same thing each time? and he never suspected the Princess Was In Another Castle? Hell. What will audiences think of that? Tell you what- Oh, yeah, get this: Bowser. No. Bowser's SONS, they're... attacking the castles. Yeah! And Mario's got to stop them. But, and here's the plot twist that'll really get 'em, all that was just a DIVERSION for Bowser to kidnap the Princess! And in the final act, Mario's got to dive back in to rescue the love of his life! In a WORLD GONE MAD! And we'll throw in that "princess in another castle" thing to get a laugh from the kids, ok fine.
Seriously. The worlds are all different because who the hell wants to pay ten dollars to see the hero do the same thing eight times? Bowser's kids are there because you can only play dodge-the-axe-and-run-under-the-turtle so many times. The king has been transformed? As above, an excuse for the eight-times and the fooled-you-there plot of the first hour. Everything's bigger, louder, and more explodey.
Tim. Tel me why I'm wrong, or get Miyamoto to tell you I'm right.
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July 13th, 2004
11:47 pm - Hat trick
So yeah, wow. I still don't have anything useful to say, but I primarily don't have anything useful to say for my Japanese composition. That leaves, uh, this! I'm supposed to write a page or so (not particularly odious) about the best gift I've ever received or given. The hell? I don't have a clue.
Oh. OH. OOOH!
Playstation108! I can have a customer testimonial in my composition! Tim, read this and say something, anything, IN JAPANESE! and I will put it in my essay and give it to my teacher. onegaishimasu! Challenge factor: due in 9 hours.
... That there promise might have been a mistake, isn't it.
Still.
ps. rieux, who are you?
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July 12th, 2004
10:52 pm
so, uh, yeah. still lazy.
BUT. I know this shows up on some of your "friends" pages, and some of you (who are cogs in the government machine, and live in providence) haven't updated, or commented, or nothin. Hmmph. That makes baby Jesus cry.
In the meantime, another exciting tidbit from my life:
um.
er.
ah.
SO! I was pleased to discover the other day that while I may or may not still have friends, I definitely still have enemies.
Livejournal SO COMPLETELY like OMG! needs an Enemies page.
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July 9th, 2004
02:39 pm - saaa
Well, I'd post now, but I'm too lazy, or something.
Suffice it to say that apparently I have a kansai accent.
Yes.
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June 29th, 2004
11:31 pm - a promise reneged
There are things in the world that make me want to tell stories. Hearing a friend talk about threatening to sue her landlord--that makes me want to say something, somehow, about how unbearably stupid that is. Without telling her, directly, that it's stupidly unbearable. When I watch a film about a writer, telling stories, believing so firmly in his own despair that he thinks it is what makes his stories powerful, well. That makes me want to say something, to someone, about sadness not being what we think it is.
BUT: these are not stories, and there are not stories to tell these things. Because, in the end, a story is just a discussion of things, a telling of some events and certain people. If there is a message behind it, then the events are not happenings and the people are not us; if there isn't... With a story, we can always disagree. There is always another choice that we are free to make. No matter how a teller wraps his hero in fate and consequence, there is a choice: this choice removes us from the thing told.
This, too, is a story I want to tell. A story of other choices made, of consequence cut through. This is no story to tell, though, and how could it be? Characters cannot walk off the page. There are people I know who, at the conclusion of a movie, ask: "what do you think happens next? What will she do next?" I can never answer these questions. So far as there are answers, the characters are only characters; so far as they are real, who's to say what happens next? There's too much we don't know. We want the princess and her prince to live happily ever after, and we know they will, because he's good, and strong, and noble, and she's beautiful, and true, and good. But gold is discovered in another kingdom, and inflation ruins our family, and then-- but then we're in another story, and still not the real world. There's a story, even a fairy tale, for everything, but there's no way to get here from there.
My story:
I ate a curry donut yesterday. Today, I have homework still, and I want to go to sleep.
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June 19th, 2004
09:20 am - another unfamiliar ceiling
Today is a very good day to wake up in an unfamiliar apartment. I'm waking up before nine, now, despite staying up late; and that's a good thing, or it will be later this summer. Waking up at 8:30, then, and wandering to the bathroom to put in my contacts, I realized: this is a bright apartment--or it would be if the weather insisted. Today, though, is that sort of undetermined overcast that I associate with lakes and beach houses. It's weather that seems like it just woke up on its own and doesn't really know, or care, where it's going today.
Today is also a very good day to be pleased with technology. I write this, now, at an unfamiliar kitchen table on my very familiar laptop, with a wireless signal that may or may not belong to someone in this apartment. It's open, though, so it all belong to me now. When I slept through the "providence" bus terminal (located some two miles from anything resembling the city itself), it took only two cell phones and an inflatable crab to get Andy to where I was.
A beautiful moment: sitting in some public square, by a statue, reading Giant Robot and waiting; hearing my phone ring and looking up to see Andy about twenty feet away; shouting BOO and meeting a friend, at night, in a different city, with plans only two hours old.
And to make those plans, to get on the bus, to fall asleep and miss the only place the bus went took only a computer and a subway and a twenty dollar bill.
But now, here, in this perfect-for-waking-up-with-nothing-to-do apartment. The walls of this kitchen, and the bedroom whose floor I enjoyed last night, are bright yellow: a canary yellow that's only a couple of shades from the County Time powdered lemonade can next to the shot glass on the table. There are pictures of food, some lablled ("parchment blueberry and passionfruit muffins."), stuck to the walls; there's a power cord, pathetically unattached, hanging next to the phone outlet (...incompatibility...). It's hard to sit in this chair comfortably because it slopes right at a ten degree angle. There's a shower going, although I know it's my friend, and strangers sleeping on couches in the next room.
My god, I need more of this!
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12:15 am
OMG I"M TOTALLY POSTING THIS FROM PROVDENCE RIGHT NOW!!!!11!
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June 18th, 2004
08:20 pm
going to providence so hard it'll make your head spin...
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June 15th, 2004
07:37 pm - walking in like a gunman
I have been challenged: -- or, I feel I have been challenged: I will write an entry about my day, today, trying to be as direct and non-cryptic as possible. I will write an entry, perhaps, that means something to someone else-- for you, not just to you.
My job: I am, if you want to be a dick about it, a janitor. I help run a student cleaning organization. For one month after the school year ends, we clean all the dorms, first for alumni, then for summer school students and other university guests. I am one of the "captains"--this month, I lead teams of anywhere between five and twenty other students in making and unmaking beds (often with very little use in between, it seems.)
And I do this at Harvard. The beating heart of America's cultural ego, a place that throbs with enough self-importance to strip a cow to the bones in just twelve seconds. That might be something else. I'm not quite sure...
This isn't working. There's no story here, nothing to say. I don't have one tell-all anecdote that will encapsulate what's wrong with these (us?) kids. I only have a three-week slog of better ideas, sarcastic eagerness, and rolled eyes. It would make me sad, I think, if I thought about what it meant about our society. As it is, it makes me mad, I know, because of what it means about my role here. These aren't my peers. One boy told me, straight-faced and earnest, that in all of the places he'd worked, all the different jobs he'd done, his suggestions just seemed to work "... perfectly". It makes me feel good about the man I'm becoming that I laughed in his face, and better that he didn't seem to notice.
He just drove by, long-haired and californian, talking on his cell-phone, somehow, I think, about to whine.
And I sneak toward metaphor. Here's something concrete: I went to Ittyo, last night, my favorite restaurant, and not only because I can't say it without thinking "eat, j0!" I went last night, for the first time in weeks, and found a framed mirror on the wall (of a stall that seats fifteen) and new tiling on the floor. There was a white man behind the counter, though I suspect he was only the property owner or something. The guy working there was wearing those pants with flowers and vegetables on them that they sell, as far as I can tell, only to restaurants in malls that want to maintain a sense of plebian irony as they turn yuppie. It made me sad, I think.
I went back for lunch today, though, anyway. I hoped to find my friend there, but he wasn't working (temporary fantasy that he's been fired as part of a "cleaner image"). I recognized my other sort-of friend the cook, and the girl that I think has started to recognize me and actually let me order (accidentally) in Japanese. That's good.
So, I'm happy now, at least with my noodles.
Other concretions (secretions, accretions, deletions?):
Neuro Fuzzy, my tiny rice-filled god, served my a bowl of rice yesterday that was sixty-five hours old, and still delicious.
Fulfilling a plan I've harbored for weeks, I'm writing this outside, after a nine-hour day
I bought a rocking new hat yesterday. Please don't ask me where.
People I don't know keep reading my posts . I would like to know them.
Unfortunately, I can barely keep in touch with old friends online.
Things change.
Doug: how will I go about seeing you this summer on or about my birthday, july twenty-seventh? I will share a drink with you.
But now, a hamburger!
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June 14th, 2004
10:49 pm - current mood
you know who you are: EAT SOMETHING!
you don't know who you are: hmmph.
... too much work ...
another year and the same situation with something different to say. Now they won't fire me but I almost wish they would. There are things that I'm sick of here and there are days when I wish, very hard, that some of this furious purpose would dissipate. It hasn't, yet, and maybe it won't... I realized the other day that the part of me that thought of itself as so adult was not so, yet. I think our generation has made ourselves parents of ourselves, in some small way, and it keeps us children.
Not that that helps. I miss the roof I missed two days ago.
A promise to my friends, to break this tired rambling:
There are those of you with whom I must keep in touch, or lose something more simple than friendships: I will write this, twice a week, to you; I will comment daily.
You will read this, and respond.
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May 19th, 2004
05:29 pm - shikenjigoku
So, updating and nobody to tell me to, this time, kickin it solo:
... well, mostly this is so when Doug checks why some weird fucker friends him he knows which weird fucker it is: it's me.
How are you gentleman.
If the eerily familiar nickname and the email address didn't tip you off, well, it should have. I'm eating goldfish, now, in case that helps. I don't know which way you're driving or when, but if you happen to hit Boston I'm here all week and tickets are still available. Or, really, all summer and I'll be bored off my gourd.
And in other news, Captain Sauerkraut never parried my last attack, which means I have no choice but to declare myself the victor. Hope you saved, punk.
also:
Rice cooker GET! and what does that tell us? All your rice are belong to Neuro Fuzzy!
... I have to grade like a motherfucker on fire.
on. Fire.
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