윤

It’s been too long a day, so the details are all gone, like the one where 할머니 was a surprisingly able rider, even on the old 1100, though she didn’t quite make her last running start and let the bike fall on its side ahead of her. I was a single man again, a prisoner in a two-room ground floor home in a community very much like Patrick McGoohan’s with a curfew announced over a loudspeaker in the evening. I wasn’t so much making a break for it, but I did want to take a walk, so I ditched the surveillance when the opportunity arose behind noisy neighbors.

Saw a preview for it on the Afro-centric “Bounce” digital channel, which must be how Kurt Russell showed up as the CEO of a high-end business whose first action with visiting Andy Hsu was to take him to his clothing shop and make new recommendations for his wardrobe. The proprietor produced them all from under his counter, such garish colors and textures, knit pantsuits and things, that I snuck off, but was cornered by another of his employees, who reminded me of Brent Spiner’s daughter in the episode of Criminal Intent I saw last night. We watched together from above as a huge ballroom became densely packed with dancers, then joined by giants, who grew increasingly larger, though it was apparent that they were Carnival-like puppets, all resembling Christopher Lee’s Saruman. I began slipping off the balcony and somehow grabbed hold of one of their long robes with her help, and we escaped through the crowds.

Eight points of light in the darkness that’s otherwise been enveloping my interest in anything lately. Sure, Community’s fifth season has been delivering (though with a weird alternate-universe vibe), the 7’s running again and GW2 is still, um, free, but that feeling of anticipation has long seemed missing in this age of instant gratification, of slick storytelling and easy answers, even if all the Lovecraftian dread amounted to a hallucination that gave the killer a jump on the hero. But apart from the formulaic finish, this was truly the anti-Sherlock.

The story progress so far: porting the game onto the Sub-Etha Internet causes not only the inevitable server connection issues, but lags the interface so that it always thinks you’ve pressed enter a second time, and advances the tiny window twice with each command, requiring you to scroll back constantly to make sure you’ve fully mined the last major paragraph. I can only hope there’s a vibrant community of text-adventure fan-fic’ers who still make the most of this lost art, because my experiment with it was humbling, to say the least: it doesn’t make sense to allow the player to snooze out of bed, not to the same response.

Been a while since this dream, and work’s killed any desire to write, even about True Detective, but the word was explained to me by a comely teacher to mean drooping on one side of a face (which I take it is an actual symptom of Bell’s palsy), illustrated by an image of affected Psyduck.