#462

Internet has been colonized and fucked into the ground, its vital natural resources stripped and refashioned into shitty engineering. Just like meatspace. And just like meatspace, even though everything--everything except people and their perishable works, I guess, so you better try hard to like hominids and their fucking antics--yes, though absolutely everything that was once good and beautiful in the life of this planet is currently diminished and dying, there are still ways to have a good day and see some cool stuff, if you're lucky.

I think myself lucky because again, even in this benighted, grasping age, I can go online and just lose about an hour just looking at valid information about things that make sense, like about a specific genus of tarantula, or the longest-running light bulbs in the world (wikipedia rabbit holes) and clicking around to websites about endangered species and materials science newsposts and blogs about information as a self-organizing principle that uses complex phenomena as both vehicle and life cycle--the ark of the covenant, if you will.

Anyway. Glad I'm not so old and broken that I'm not actively down to spend some time following curiousity sparks around the infinite corridors of time.

*

Beat Final Fantasy XII, which was just a regular story until all of a sudden it was full on Final fuckin Fantasy and the tears were streaming down my face as I breathed deeply and irregularly. Wow. I mean it was fucking amazing. Beautiful. Astonishing decision to bury almost all the payoff deep in the third act, all the buildup and rising tension so casual and masked in the long long hours of the grind and tinker. But when that game is ready to reveal its flourish--none are left standing. We all must bow our heads to what is on offer here. To what is being said, and how it came to be spoken.

Put it away in single digits over a hundred hours, about when I just wanted to stop doing endgame side content, which seems good for another twenty hours at least. So that's seven through twelve, with XIII, XII: Revenant Wings, X-2, replaying VII: Dirge of Cerberus (maybe), VII: Crisis Core Reunion, and I through VI on deck. Maybe that chibi version of XV. Oh, maybe Legend and that other one. Should I add the Mana series? I was also thinking about the Dragon Quest series.

However, all that stuff has to wait, because I got and will have to beat The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which is absolutely phenomenal--and I can say the basic reason why very simply. Link is a perfect hero with only one flaw: though he has access to spells and magical items and techniques aplenty in his capacity as the all-rounder of all all-rounders, because of this wonderful, apt-to-the-hand sphericity, Link is not a wizard. He couldn't just be a wizard. However! Princess Zelda has all the conceptual space in the world to be a wizard, ample precedent in fact, and thus, we have--at last--a Zelda game where you get to do a bunch of crazy fucking wizard shit and bonkers magical manipulations that Link can but wistfully dream of.

And even that is sort of in a holding pattern on the way to the second main area part in the quest because the other game I started playing for a palette cleanser after five full Final Fantasy games in a row is Unicorn Overlord which, well. It's absurd is what it is. Keep forgetting to eat, and I'm done wasting time here--gotta go play Unicorn Overlord right goddamn now.

--JL

p.s. for today's Factually Macabre 2024 feel free to consider that real-life grownups expose their own children to grasping pedophiles for secondhand fame and easy money. Well, for the concept of those things. Not even the promise of them.

That's pretty good, right? I don't know if I can come up with much worse. Child soldiers. Internment camps. The kind of cheap, cut-rate, shoe-polish-stinking dirty linoleum corruption that's barely worth remarking upon until its logical cosequences string out to an environmental disaster or a case of mass poisoning, with like enormous blistering lumps growing on the necks of schoolchildren and a whole entire neighborhood of babies with brain damage and dead dogs and cats and tall cancer rates for two decades. That's macabre. 

Oh, you mean like pumpkins and bats and candy-apple shits? Scooby-Doo? I dunno. That stuff's fine if you work for a marketing company that is jointly owned by a holding company whose controlling share is owned by a petroleum giant, and a food conglomerate owned by a company owned by an agricultural conglomerate that owns a separate company that owns about seventy percent of the all the corn grown in North America and, somehow, all the sugar cane on this side of the planet. But that's not what I'm talking about. Unless I am.

p.p.s. We didn't do ghosts today. I am, however, fairly haunted, so there is at least that. Ghosts soon.