August Rising

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Very exciting times are here. August is within my grasp; everything I want (for a while) is either coming out or happening then. There's my birthday on August 10th, a visit from my college buddy Ronny on the 2nd, Dead Rising on the 8th, Enchanted Arms on the 29th (maybe), and (dun dun dun!) PAX from the 25th to the 29th. With E3 probably cancelled I'm more psyched than ever to be going to the Penny Arcade Expo. Got my plane tickets, hotel reservation (at Jacksonville and Bellevue, Washington), and hopefully the actual tickets to let me into PAX will be coming in the mail.

Things to do while I'm there:

• Shake David Jaffe's hand
• Kick Chris Taylor in the balls
• Hug the guys from Irrational Games
• Meet some MS exec and shake his hand
• Meet some Sony exec and kick him in the balls
• Play with Nintendo's Wii
• Throw a bunch of shirts, posters and stuff into my awesome new backpack (thanks, mom!)
• Get my copy of Attack of the Bacon Robots signed (or not)
• Oh, and the awesomely titled Epic Legends of the Magic Sword Kings (which I should have by then), too.

Yes, it should be a grand old time. My first real vacation as a real working man. And a chance to go back to the airports of my youth, Homeland Security be damned. I miss the smell of airplane grade gasoline, the ambling throng of people to run past, the sanitized smell of the lobbies and the horribly overpriced merchandise in the gift shops. Of course, I wonder how many other people flying from Atlanta to Seattle will also be whipping out Nintendo DSs to suffer through the five hour plane ride? Can't wait. Can't can't can't thank god the summer drought is ending so I can make it until then.

Before that happens I've been cooling my heels with a blast from the past. I now have (again) a Super Nintendo Entertainment System with copies of Final Fantasy II, III, and Secret of Mana. It turns out there's this company that sells wireless SNES controllers (those little dongles that extend out of the controller ports). If it weren't for their extreme hypersensitivity I wouldn't have a single complaint about them. You'll notice (if you go to the site) that the digital pad has been replaced by this circular analog nub. It is, by far, the hardest hardware relearning I've ever had to do. Working with an ergo keyboard is one thing, but that little baby can read your mind. It feels like it can read the blood circulation in my fingers and run off that. I've had to scale back my reflexes like crazy to accommodate the blasted thing.

But I'm having a ton of fun going through Final Fantasy III again. For a while I experienced a kind of disappointment with the title. Although the graphics look fantastic thanks to a Gamecube S-Video connector (which fits perfectly, believe it or not), I had some trouble reliving the carefree gaming of youth. That feeling has faded recently; doing the opera scene again essentially cured me. It's 1995 again and I'm playing this obsessively in my bedroom instead of breaking my legs playing baseball or injuring my spine in a football accident or selling cocaine on the street corner or all the other horrible things I could have been doing at the tender age of thirteen.

I have been itching to do something productive with my time on the weekends. Either a solitary pursuit like reviving my comatose comic series, or something more along the lines of traditional volunteering. My boss never fails to remind me how sweet a life I've got right now; no obligations, no family (nearby), a steady job and a nice apartment as far away from the colleges as possible.

So how better to ruin all that by pursuing a woman or give something back to the community (that I never interact with)? I've been told I need to go back to FSU's campus. Go to the art school and pretend I'm a collector to catch a lady's eye. Stop by the Student Life Building and see if anyone remembers me and... hmm, never got instructions past that. Or maybe just go shopping by major: look for broke Education girls, a pretty Marketing girl, or maybe see if anyone at the IS department isn't a 40 year-old Korean woman.

I'm not holding my breath.