윤

A mainstay in my 5-disc changer, the one into which I painstakingly keyed so many titles for it to display throughout the early 90’s. Talk about life’s labor lost, I wonder if its onboard memory preserved them, or like my 100% Super Metroid save, they’re all but digital ghosts in broken-down machines, the precarious memories of yet another who is himself fast approaching the same state.

…Until then, however, I’ll accelerate things by eating whatever the fuck I want, including supermarket deli lasagna and Oreo Cakesters, which take me back, too, perhaps not as far, but still to a time when there seemed more ahead than behind. Got me thinking how the Metaverse/San Junipero will recreate ancient treats like these in our minds, because I can’t recall re-experiencing them in dreams, maybe by hijacking the right areas of the brain and simulating the sensations? Could this be done in real-time, say, to disregard information your nerves are sending and fool you into thinking that your dinner smells and tastes like dessert? Might the discrepancy in the fake crunch of the delicious burnt pieces cause bite irregularities or would that be compensated for as well?

One thing I look back at FFXI and can forgive the requisite time sink for was the joy relief when a placeholder would finally give way to the Notorious Monster (my best memories are camping them on the clock, even when the rare visitor to my cubicle would send my USB-adaptered PS2 controller fumbling; the worst, of course, dealing with in-game competition), and I think I relived some of the feeling with shiny hunting in Let’s Go, Eevee! Only though because they’d spawn on-screen and not the traditional reveal after the encounter, which come on, is a Japanese gameplay relic that resists obsolescence like fax machines and ちかん.

You can’t tell from the clip, but I had only a few more seconds until dawn when these night-time spawns would vanish, so saving sightings like this is a godsend. The open world mechanic does require more travel, and tasks to complete the ‘Dex (so much for PoGo transfers) for the charm is a daunting proposition for all but the most dedicated players; haven’t thon’d like this for a while, have I?

健-san says “Headsets are simply annoying”, and I totally agree with him, even for audio. At least in PlayStation Home everything was accessible from the controller, though even there I had to wonder what was the benefit of donning an avatar to participate in real-world simulations. If I wanted to see an exclusive movie clip, couldn’t I just click on a link without any of the lag? Unless they really think it’d be fun to kill 20 rats for the ticket? Were the emphasis on interaction than immersion, then again, I can’t see how that’d surpass what’s long been available to chatters or streamers to boost their presentations with all the hypertext and media the Internet has to offer. Recently I was trying to impress upon our Generation Z/Alpha scion the sheer amount of time we used to spend on voice calls with each other, limitations like busy signals and long distance charges, and the impacts from advances in technology, but despite as much as hemming and hawing may have added to our hours, our connections didn’t rely on emojis or canned memes. One might argue it was a communication golden age, similar to the art of letter-writing that came before, where the value lie in the effort to overcome the struggle to express. Seems to me struggling in VR will instead be to try to get something out of the pinnacle of human achievement.

Not sure about that third one–in fact, I’m sure it’s wrong–because the second took me so long to get right, by the time I got to it I forgot the last of the three words. At the top of the stairs, led by a bikini-clad comely lass with such soft tanned skin, were two arrays of hoses wrapped in plastic, and each was labelled with names like “Strawberry.” Was my job to mate the matching ends and ensure the flow of liquid between them. The “Transhibiscus” connection (itself a corruption from something even more fictitious) kept leaking and required several tries to fasten securely, causing my memory failure afterward.

I had another dream about walking under large trees occupied by a giant bear or crocodile, most likely influenced by that much smaller one we pass on the way back from Ralphs taken up by bees, but my mind was still on that soft, soft skin…

What kept me watching this low-budget no-fanfare new series wasn’t so much the prospect of Lovecraftian horror (which no, doesn’t just mean the spooks are invincible), but my fascination with the main character’s video restoration work. Plus, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which is Lovecraftian. I wish they went somewhere with that, beyond the use of found-footage simply to switch perspective, maybe that’s what they were getting at with playback of all the recordings recreating reality. Why not make that the “other world”—a realm run by a being not unlike the Doom Patrol “Telephone Avatar“—instead of yet another Nexus, or even the surface of a comet, since we now have a good idea what one looks like? Still waiting for the genre smörgåsbord to top John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, however.

Showed the kid a recent (?) video of Jimmy Page, whose “Black Dog” he’d been playing, and he said he looks like Albert Einstein. Who slays.

Another recurring dream I have is coming across stashes of loose change, sometimes on the street, one coin becomes two and more, quarters are followed by larger mint I assume to be half dollars or greater, and there’s always a moment before fully waking when the reality that I can’t bring them with me hasn’t sunk in, that blissful state of delusion when somehow beautiful young women are alright with you and your wife is with them. And I don’t buy the notion that this foretells riches, unless I’m meant to understand that happiness comes in small denominations and is limited to approximately $23.50. This morning’s haul came at an arcade, where at the foot of unmanned retro games I would pick up a quarter or two, occasionally coming across coins smaller than the 10-cent one from Hong Kong I still keep in my wallet and some the size of coasters. I continued my collection upstairs but was stopped by a kid who looked like that pathetic James on Ricky Gervais’ After Life series, which is the case with all its characters, sure, but it’s still good for laughs at their expense. He explained the quarters were left as tips for the repairmen, so I felt obliged to make up for my transgression, but all I had was a single dollar bill and fives, stupid cashless post-COVID economy. It was then that it occurred to me they might have me on video pilfering all those machines, camera technology being ubiqitous nowadays.

I refuse the inevitability of contracting a virus whose spread is aided by selfish unmasked anti-vaxxer pricks and almost worse, people who know better but have accepted it, because they’re “tired.” Like those endless videogames of yore, there’s no tiring in the fight against intruder organisms.
And because I probably won’t retain any details about new dreams while I’m still holding onto this one’s, best.client.ever Wing was at odds with her management and while she argued with them behind a glass-doored meeting room, asked me to pick up her drycleaning, which consisted of a branded jacket and was marked on the tag “Very expensive.” She severed her ties and emerged, dressed in a long frilly coat and high boots, with curls like Japanese ne’er-do-wells from the 90’s. I can’t quite place the look—maybe it was one of the ガングロ-type girls the main character saves in オヤジぃ。—but it attracted immediate suitors whom I had to fend off before she got into my car, though I had no idea where to take her in DC.

I was reunited with old co-worker Laura Armijo, maybe because at the time she lived in Lakewood, where we went this weekend to cash in our Bed Bath & Beyond gift cards before they become worthless, and a roomful of Mark Malinski clones, all armed with automatic weapons, waiting for a signal to start blasting away at each other. Apparently we had the ability to restore our consciousnesses into new bodies, so death was nothing to fear, though I concentrated a few more times as if to upload the latest backup, just in case. All I had to make the best of it was to take her gun and give it a go, but before the activity began I succumbed to my doubts and backed out. I left the arena and took a seat at a student’s desk and played a holographic game on the tabletop with my hand, but Shining Knight whose presence I otherwise took entirely for granted approached and startled me by stabbing me in the gut, smirking as he retreated. For this I gave up sexy Wing?

Miserable start to this anniversary of that heinous revolt: I dreamed Six o’ One Patrick McGoohan and I were on the run and had only a small guardhouse to pass, so I let the champ sneak in and do his thing—only to find that he failed and was being held by a group of ruffians; it was Wild Wild James West who never lost a fight, after all. Their leader approached me with all the swagger his entourage afforded him and effortlessly caught my fist, mocking me. If only I could muster the strength to challenge his grip, but it would take longer than I had left, more confidence in myself to reign in my insecurities. Incompetent leadership at work got to me and my run didn’t make up for it, but by the end of the day I was chuckling at the sodium warning on Taco Bell’s new limited-time Crispy Chicken Wings (seasoned with “Mexican Queso”, for future reference).Napped during lunch and saw a passenger jet whose pilot the news said had successfully regained control of it to land intact; was more of a vertical drop out of the sky onto the runway in the near distance, but it didn’t go perfectly: as I looked closer, the plane’s body began twitching, as if it were going to explode. There were two young girls beside me and I pushed them to take cover from the blast behind a parked American sedan while the building wall kept me safe.