a rickety bridge of impossible crossing

this one gets a little sad, sorry

manual transmission

I didn't want to shoehorn this into my Breath of Fire thoughts, but I've been thinking: if video game companies like Capcom want to continue monetizing their old games, why not sell officially licensed manual reprints? I'm not paying anyone for a 30-year-old ROM, but if I could pay 5 bucks and get a nice full-color manual reprint of an old game I like, that wouldn't be out of the question. It'd be nice to have a physical booklet I could flip through, and it could be like a memento. It would give back a little physicality to a medium that's gone all-intangible, and disincentivize the bootleg/repro market.

There's clearly a demand for this sort of thing, and no one should be manufacturing physical cartridges or emulation computers,1 but paper is (a) something you can hold, and (b) made entirely out of a renewable resource, so it seems like the least bad option if you want to manfacture goods to monetize video game nostalgia. If they have the original art, maybe they can print a larger version. Maybe include some bonus concept art, or interviews with the designers. Pretend you're selling a fancy special edition of a game in the aughts, except you're not actually selling the game. Or make the book the physical version of the game. You can include a download code on one of those scratch-off cards. In conclusion: books good, plastic bad.

media log

I was keeping logs of media I consume on the wiki, but I've decided I don't want to use the wiki for those kinds of minor updates, it's too much hassle. I'm just going to have a little section for it here. Sorry if it's boring.

I haven't been playing any games besides Breath of Fire, and I haven't had time to make more progress since Sunday.

I've sort of pressed pause on the History of English podcast. It kept my interest in the beginning, but I've gotten up to the episodes about Greek influence on English, and I'm increasingly zoning out. As I critiqued in a fedi post:

I wish the guy who does the history of English podcast would tighten up all the parts where he says "so then the greek word metropolis, which as we've explored, literally translates to 'mother city', became the English word 'metropolis', which we use in much the same sense to describe any large city; and furthermore, 'metropolitan', which has the connotation of one who [blah blah...]"

Yep, I've pieced it together. You can give me the broad strokes, I promise I'm on the same page.

I'm probably being unfair, because the show has been going for ten years and I'm still on the 2012 episodes, so I'm hoping the host has developed... uh... a personality.

I'm not trying to be mean. Nothing against the host or the people who like the show. I'm just identifying what it would take for me, personally, to be able to listen to the show. I had a similar problem when I tried to listen to the History of Byzantium podcast. It's a subject about which I know very little and am interested in learning, but the presentation was so dry and by-the-numbers that I gave up after a few episodes. I'm trying my best to dissociate from my compulsory 40 hours a week of mind-numbing tedium, and I'd really like to enrich myself a little bit in the process, but I need more than "bored high school teacher" levels of energy if I'm going to stay engaged.

I'm sorry. It's not the podcast hosts' fault I have to do this. They're putting in a lot of their time and energy into something free because they want to help people. I'm not upset with them, I'm upset with the situation.

I wish I could get a do-over on school. I'd be so much better at it now. It wouldn't matter how bored the teachers are if I had a curriculum plus ample time to read and study on my own. I would ace all the assignments. What a shame that the "free public education" phase of my life had to coincide with the "ongoing inescapable trauma" phase.

Sorry, didn't mean for this to turn into a downer. That's just where my head has been lately.

mood lightener

I've never had anywhere close to $100,000 in the bank, so I'm seeing no benefit from whatever portion of my taxes go to funding the FDIC program. This is an outrage. Taxation without representation, I say. I should be able to call up my bank and opt out, and in return, every year they'll send me a few of those boxes they use. Those things are super useful, for putting stuff in 🦝


  1. or, and this should hopefully go without saying, funko pops

#media #personal