Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

I grew up without video games. Not computer games, which I played on mainframes and personal computers, and even programmed a couple on my ZX81. I especially liked Rogue and Colossal Cave, and eventually Nethack once I got a PC. But I never had a console. A couple friends had Ataris or Colecovisions, and a couple more had single-game handhelds, all of which I got to play on a couple times, but that was it.

The third generation NES, Master System, and the like didn’t come out till I was at university. Game Boy and Game Gear, grad school. PlayStation, Xbox, GameCube passed me by as a young professional scraping by. I sometimes played on my PC, mostly puzzle games or text adventures, and later my phone, a bit more.

Until Eaglet.

They started young, on a kiddy tablet—first lots of children’s games, then through those on to Roblox and Minecraft. And I followed—on my phone, then on a tablet, playing together and separately. I’ve not followed them onto a gaming PC,* but when they got a Switch, a couple years ago, I’ve been able to borrow it sometimes and heartily enjoyed it. Though, okay, only long enough to play through exactly one game, Kirby and the Forgotten Land.

But through that, I’ve gotten into retro gaming, especially old Nintendo games, especially from the Game Boy Advance era.

This was facilitated by Delta being released in the App Store. Great fun, but using a d-pad or especially a thumb-stick on a touch-screen is … sub optimal. So two weeks ago, I bought myself a cheap handheld, the PowKiddy RPG30. Handles GBA games beautifully, as well as PS1, plus many N64.

I’ve almost finished the main story of Pokémon LeafGreen—the colorized version of the first game, Pokémon Blue. And I’m looking forward to playing through the rest of the Pokémon main-line games, in order. Maybe not both of the paired games, nor both an original and a remake, but one from each iteration.

So yeah, a new hobby.


* Speaking of which, they just purchased and installed its first major upgrade, a better GPU. Used, but still quite usable.

---L.

Subject quote from The Shame of Life, Butthole Surfers.

Reading, reading, reading. A little bit, anyway:

In poetryland, finished Tales of a Wayside Inn by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Well-handled all around, and I've seen several individual tales in anthologies over the years (and of course "Paul Revere's Ride" is a recitation classic), but the frame story arcs into … nothing. It just kind of shivers away in a burst of farewells. This might be why it's not read as a whole very much any more.

And then read Corilolanus by William Shakespeare, another reread of something last (though only once) read in my teens There is much here relevant to contemporary politics, though presented through the filter of an apparent virulent antidemocrat.

Over in prosestead, finished Hydriotaphia: Urne-Burial and started the other half of the book, The Garden of Cyrus. Also, am ¾ through The Art of Fugue by Joseph Kerman, a set of essays on various Bach fugues.

And in interactive fiction (IFstan), reread the classic, and very short, Pick up the Phone booth and Die by Rob Noyes, and read Bronze by Emily Short, a beautifully written and evocative retelling of Beauty and the Beast, in which you are Belle returning to the castle.

---L.

Subject quote from "Amazing," Beth Sorrentino.