Newsletter 2

Gamer’s Corner

        I’ve been playing the new Pokemon game. I skipped the last few because they were so ugly, but I needed to justify my Wii 2 purchase so I bought it. At first glance, this one is pretty ugly too. But compared to what?

It’s hard to say which of these monsters is uglier. It’s even hard to say what they’re supposed to be.

The new one (left) is like a tube worm, but also bird legs or mole claws, or a traffic cone, and also a grumpy Muppet all at the same time. On top of that there are two of them, so they’re like brothers or siamese twins or something. It looks like it was designed to trigger an obscure phobia.

Now take a look at the one on the right again. You probably don’t know what Pokemon this is. You may not even recognize it as a Pokemon at all. But it is.

        The lack of color makes it even harder to identify. It’s crazy to realize the original games were in black-and-white for most gamers. That sounds like a joke a gen-alpher would make, but it’s true. An ancient Casablanca-ass video game that I myself played as a kid. I might as well have been playing I Love Lucy: The Game.

        Unfortunately, the only I Love Lucy video game appears to be this hidden-object Facebook game (now lost media):

        The gaming landscape in 2012 was so dire that this game’s release was reported as major news by Reuters.

This news article also cites “research data obtained by CBS” (this phrasing sounds like Shemar Moore snuck into MeTV labs and stole documents, SWAT-style), which reveals that the I Love Lucy brand suffers a whopping 1% drop in favorability among 25-54 year old females, as compared to 18-54 year old females. What caused these women to turn into such jaded, bitter Lucy-haters?

Did life turn them into Lucy antis? Was there a major world event that affected women born before a certain year?

We may never know.

Here’s my opinion: as you get older, and you have to organize flawless dinner parties to impress your husband’s boss, and stomp grapes with a stout Italian peasant woman, and work in a candy factory assembly line, you find Lucy’s antics less comical and more stressful.

My hope is after age 54, these women can look back again at Lucy with a healthy distance and a sense of wisdom and begin to heal.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Memory Corner (2009)

Despite the summer heat, I left my apartment in this small Japanese city and started walking in a random direction to kill time. Eventually, I found myself at a park with some sort of local zoo at the center. “Zoo” was giving it way too much credit, though. There was no entry gate, and consisted of just three enclosures clustered together. It must have been funded by the measly tax revenue of this town.

The first exhibit was a fenced area with a white and tawny pony. It was mostly upright and seemed to be sleeping, or drunk, or hungover. It stood tilted forward, leaning its head against the fence, like it wasn’t allowed to lay down. This was the best this poor beast could manage while still earning a paycheck from the evil zoo director.

The second enclosure was the most impressive out of the three. It was a large glass aquarium, about 10 feet high by 30 feet across. Nearly a dozen penguins lazily floated on top of the water, some upside-down, which I had never seen before. I thought those ones might be dead, until one sickly bird coughed or sneezed and stirred the others up a bit.

Painted across the back wall of the aquarium was a night scene of a dark, erupting volcano, lined with red lava. There was also a cement platform for the penguins to stand on, which was in direct sunlight and painted black to fit the volcano/apocalypse theme, I guess in case the water got too hot or if they wanted to burn their feet. I hoped that they were happy here, that their species really was from somewhere like the place depicted in the mural behind them–penguins from the Ring of Fire, Krakatoan fairies perhaps–and continued on.

        The last display was just an empty medium-sized cage. It was like a cartoon cage into which a villainous dog-catcher would throw a beloved housepet, such as Marmaduke. Maybe this was the Japanese equivalent of a flea circus. Or maybe it was where the townsfolk were going to toss me before taking me to the wicker man. I didn’t want to stick around any longer. I had killed enough time, and wanted to go home.

Screenshot Roundup

Newsletter 1