윤

Not much more to add than what’s already been archived on Reddit for the life of the Internet, but personally it pains me to corroborate that the 2-nonenal or 加齢臭 from our decaying heads does indeed serve as flypaper. It must’ve been so obvious while I swatted away and deluded myself into blaming the Mountain Dew.

Streets of Rage has been our thing, the two games (never did get the third; maybe Street Fighter II had by then relegated 2P co-op to lower priority than new controllers) being loud and violent yet playable enough for a toddler to conquer—if only I had Twitched the time he started break-dancing, trying to stand on his head and everything, to the 古代 祐三 boss theme.

I Steamed (look at me incorporating all the modern lingo in a post about a twenty-year-old game) Streets of Rage III and found it far too difficult for us, but did some reading up on it to learn that wasn’t the case with the Japanese version, which also had additional content deemed unsuitable for the US, namely, Ash:

The boy underestimated the solution: either buy the latest monstrosity (from, coincidentally, one of our prospective clients, though their recent sticker-shock at our services makes any discount unreliable), or resort to Game Genie codes.

AABT-AA5L
DJBT-AADN
RYDA-A608
AJDA-AAHA

or

2JAT-BHNR
8ADA-AAG6

How circuitous a journey even the most sedentary of us can partake: I was trying to teach the boy about battery life conservation when I had the novel idea of ensuring he’d never learn by racing the two of his gifted R/C vehicles, only to discover that both worked on the same 27 MHz frequency. I then remembered an old Speed Racer toy (from the マッハ ゴー ゴー ゴー branding, it must’ve been an import, with which I was wont to feed my bachelor emptiness) in an accessible box; but how to introduce this relic from my past to someone whose cars are computer-generated, driven by dogs or transform into robots, and talk? He’ll sit through anything, of course, so I looked up the series online, and there it was, without any confusion as to which service had secured its rights.

One search away was the more sentimental favorite, a pristine fan edit—though regrettably, remastering always seems to dump the original titles—whose saga of heroes and epic battles will probably never be topped, if it hasn’t by now.

Right on schedule, three more episodes of the slick new Sherlock series from the UK. It’s more of the same, really, but then again, that can be the most welcome of comforts, the older you get. (I know there’s something wrong with that statement, but I’m just too lazy to fix it. Did I mean, the better your opinion of the original? Or the worse your memory?) Again, the clever smartphone/human GPS overlays remind me of the BBC’s own pioneering efforts with the Hitchhiker’s Guide so many years ago, but I especially liked Mary Morstan’s sympathetic analysis, that her face would launch a thousand words:

GW2’s vertical trend has alienated me, Arrow’s on hiatus and well, there hasn’t been much of anything else to keep me occupied lately (a slew of 2013 releases on the flight back from Boston, comped because of the delay, and I still watched Man of Steel again), so I took a chance on my first new アニメ since, what, FLCL, with this popular hit whose Fantastic Planet-like premise is undeniably intriguing. And as wonderfully creative the Spiderman gear that’s used to combat the eponymous titans is as well, I’m just not sure it’s capable of a satisfying resolution—see The Walking Dead—and may only be fit to tell the story of much the same characters. Hell of a setting for a videogame, too.

Have I really been listening to their music for 18 years? While “It Doesn’t Matter” and “Morning Lemon” have never left the iTunes rotation, they must’ve changed their menu for me to stop my regular patronage sometime since. But their last release from what, three years ago now, has a lot of the old flavor. If only “Another World” weren’t an isolated track; it’s what killed My Bloody Valentine’s follow-up for me. This guy on the Japan tour film, though, loves it.

The retrofest continues. Last night I completed the Gerber Defenders run after what, 30 years, and today a few episodes of the recently-reissued Johnny Sokko compilation. Like Shout’s ウルトラセブン from last year, video quality is positively barbaric (my early Nineties ジャイアントロボ Laserdisc seemed like a remaster), but it’s excusable this time around, as they got the American dubbed version, which I’ve only seen in my youth as the “Voyage into Space” remix. Man, we would go nuts when that showed up Saturday afternoons.

I haven’t seen anything yet like that artsy Ultraseven episode, but the body count is simply staggering for a children’s show. Closing in on half a century of enlightenment later, I can’t imagine a 10-year-old being revealed as a master spy then getting shot dead in the back by his former masters, outside of maybe SVU.

Who was directing this episode? It starts with a man beating his wife in front of a bunch of kids. There are crazy POV shots, every conversation takes place in darkness, and the final battle plays out like genre samurai film.

And so the invaders from the planet Metron were defeated, and their plan was foiled. A terrible scheme, to exploit man’s trust in his fellow man. But please, don’t worry. This story could only happen in the distant, distant future. Why is that, you ask? Because in today’s world, there is not enough trust to exploit.

Must be all the comics I’ve been reading lately, or the feeling of empowerment from last night’s speed feat, but this morning I was quite the badass, at first offering to protect a young feline stowaway from behind a long curtain hiding bloody bathtubs. “Not even the Thundercats could stop me,” I assured her. Then I was outside, watching said cartoon, wherein John Travolta led a squad of mafia thugs, the lot of them having been pulled through time & space to do the bidding of their evil master (Mumm-Ra?). In addition to the novel amalgamation, I remarked how surprisingly good the animation was, pointing to the detailed light work on their jackets, but my companion was less impressed, replying that she’d seen this one and the villain was someone not so unfamiliar.

A group of us stormed their headquarters, taking a stairway up from a market on the street. The first room upstairs was for a conference, and I marched through, not taking notice of its participants like a determined 이병헌. (Come to think of it, my stride was more 高倉 健 in The Yakuza, wasn’t it?) I finally met with resistance from an Asian bodyguard who shot me once, and as that had no effect, threw shuriken, which I simply removed from where they had lodged in my arm and returned; unfortunately for him, he didn’t possess my inexplicable regenerative superpowers à la Warren Ellis. The next few along the way I tossed out the windows, describing my technique of immediately surmising the situation, noting all possible tools available to me, then acting faster than apparently they could react. When I felt the realism challenged, I decided that maybe I ought to be breaking the glass with a chair or something before throwing their relatively soft bodies through them. The boss was an invalid old man, helplessly sprawled across a bed, and his young wife pleaded for mercy. Their child was a newborn with an affliction that required it be fully wrapped in bandages. I picked up the bundle and held it to my shoulder as if it were my own, and felt compassion.