loose ends

My blogging is a well-oiled machine, and individual posts get attention weeks, months and sometimes years in advance of actually being published. I have hundreds of unpublished fragmentary missives lined up, but the forest-fire-smokey-heat-wave-newborn-care nexus I've arrived at has resulted in, bizarrely, my taking time off from my full time employment to find I have a steep drop in the workflow of my hobby here. Can't I square aside 15 minutes daily? Not necessarily...

So sorry to fans of my "textmode video game art" series -- it will be resuming at some point, already populated with armies of blocky entries, I just need a bit of time to recover and roll with the bumps, expected and surprise, that life has dealt me. I've looked into taking on a guest poster, the recipient of my redundant video gameing materials, in the interest of his mounting and reporting on a parallel retro game party series in the retro-game-loving town of Portland, OR. We'll see if he can't help bridge some of my extraordinary gaps. In the meantime, my brain continues fixating on games non-stop regardless of whether I'm able to exorcise the urges here or not, so here are two recent ludic reminiscences from recent days.

My toddler daughter had us baffled when she dumped her blocks out on the floor and proudly proclaimed that she'd laid out a new level for Mario to traverse. Uhh, sure. Then the light went on over my head: so as to spare us from the ravages of Pac-Man World 2 (itself saving us the ravages of endless rounds of classic Pac-Man), featuring her first video game protagonist idol, I shuffled her along to Mario and his greater array of options. We landed on Super Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube, and though this game does primarily feature charming 3-D landscapes in whimsical Mario style, it also boasts pocket-dimension pachinko puzzle levels that look something like this:

Basically, a clear indication that our family play time should perhaps be scaled back a little. (I've been considering shuffling Sunshine aside in favour of Kirby's Epic Yarn for the Wii as our primary selection for "Daddy, I want to watch you play a video game", but I've got to dig it out of a pile of hundreds of discs. 1st-world problems!)

Then, there were the alphabet set of climbing-wall hand-holds at the playground:

She didn't make any connection, but I immediately suffered an attack of GIRP recollections. GIRP, the typing sea-cliff-climbing game from the man who brought you QWOP, the user-unfriendliest track & field game ever envisioned! Go on, try it, you can thank me later. Is it possible that he came up with the idea for the game without having seen the handholds? (Well, possibly: a mind that perverse must be endlessly creative.)

Anyway... slim grist for a blog post, I'll admit, but it beats my radio silence and besides, these connections would have been too wordy to point out in Tweets. (Did I consider ... not pointing them out at all? Please, we don't have this big wide empty Internet to fill with our subdued restraint.) I'll get back on the wagon eventually, this is just a practice post to remind you all that I'm still alive and my brain persists in being absolutely consumed with endless thoughts about video and computer games. See you soon, hopefully!