Psycho Wand, My Beloved [part1]
Part 1 | Part 2
Chapter I: David and Blair in Medias Res
“The afterimages of beam sabers and fire magic burned upon his retinas like the user interface burned upon the phosphor of his television set.”
David twisted the doorknob so delicately that one would think him a ghost on the greatest haunt of his unlife and – leaving no ectoplasm#1 behind – nudged the door with maximum softness to avoid its creak-point. He mentally cursed his lack of proper diet and exercise as he slid his pudgy body through the small gap between the frame and the door while telling himself that he was only slightly heavier than the average American,#2 and this exorcized the constant nag of exercise. Upon crossing the event horizon of the bedroom, he kept the doorknob at full twist to avoid the click of the bolt as he shut the door behind him. He decided to skip his nighttime routine – which he had skipped for months now – and crept through total darkness with mouselike meekness and, picturing the bedroom in his mousy mind’s eye, navigated around the dresser and the laundry basket and the bookshelf as he made his way to the bed. He then slipped quietly under the covers so as to not disturb Briar Rose Blair,#3 who slept beauty on her side. David performed this routine every night for his own sake, because if Blair awoke to find her husband of six years coming to bed only four hours before work on a Thursday, her teeth would drip venom like that of an adder intent on swallowing the mouse whole.
It was Autumn of the third year of the third millennium.#4 David had been performing these mousy maneuvers on Blair for eight months now, coinciding with the purchase of a pre-owned video-game console now wired into the transparent Secureview cathode-ray tube#5 so selfishly hogged in the corner of their spare bedroom. The spare bedroom was to be their first child’s nursery until David came home with the Sega Dreamcast#6 and told Blair to get back on the pill#7 and proclaimed the spare bedroom as his new office with an enthusiasm rarely seen on his mousy face; this was despite having no domestic clerical work to speak of.
The Dreamcast was Bill’s idea, David’s friend from work: “hey man – you should check out this game, it’s called Phantasy Star Online and it’s on the Dreamcast and we can play together through a dial-up connection and it’s, like, the future of gaming!” David took Bill up on this offer of digital dalliance and, ever since, has been transported to the alien planet of Ragol every afternoon from the comfort of his own cave zone.#8 From the moment David got home from his job as a debt collector, he would sit in front of Ragol’s dreamy glow until those hazy hours when darkness and daylight blend together. He would play Phantasy Star Online with Bill – who just started listening to psychedelic rock, bought himself a nice pair of circular glasses, and suddenly preferred to be called “William”#9 – drink beer and sometimes call William on the phone after long play-sessions only to yell “Whassup!”#10 before hanging up, which made for a good laugh the next day at work.
*while neglecting all worldly responsibilities, you may be charged telephone and provider fees
To Blair, the Dreamcast was an obsession that consumed her husband’s entire being; David stopped spending time with her; he stopped falling asleep with her; he stopped being intimate with her; he stopped cleaning up after himself; he stopped taking out the trash; he stopped feeding the cats; he would forget to pay the bills; he would forget to clean the litter box; he would forget to take showers, comb his hair, brush his teeth; he would forget to change his underwear for weeks on end; and his office became a garbage island overflowing with half-eaten food and crusty tissues that Blair was afraid to ask the origins of because deep down she already knew the answer.
To Blair, David loved the Dreamcast more than he loved her.
To David, the Dreamcast was, “Blair-Bear, I’ve been working a job I hate all day to provide for us, don’t I deserve to have some fun when I get home? And besides, you watch TV all day – how is that any different?” And Blair-Bear would retort, “Am I not any fun?” But this would only sour David’s mood, “Stop gaslighting me; I didn’t say that – you are so controlling sometimes!” And after a tense moment of silence and fidgeting, David would caveat, “We can watch TV or something tomorrow, I promise.” Then he would shuffle away to his office and shut the door slightly louder than normal as if relaying some sort of hint.
But this promise was never fulfilled. Blair was left watching new episodes of Friends#11 on NBC alone while David was exclaiming, laughing, and making beer runs to the kitchen between gaming sessions. David was having the time of his life while Blair was just kind of there in the background. These moments of noisy solitude only amplified Blair’s despair and her thoughts would drift; she considered the man just a room over; she considered the time they made love on the couch while 10 Things I Hate About You#12 played in the background, and she considered how that same man now only makes love to his hand and wipes himself down with tissues and leaves those tissues on the office floor then immediately handles his controller with those same barely-cleaned-sperm-hands; she considered how the Dreamcast controller had seen more action than she had in over eight months; and that, if she were not on the pill, she could likely get pregnant simply by touching the thing; but most importantly, she considered the fact that she was not attracted to David anymore; she was just spiteful and ashamed to be less interesting than pixels on a screen but too afraid to vocalize these truths as the resulting meltdown would utterly change her life and be too much to bear.
In the darkness of the bedroom, David could see the alien life of Ragol moving about as if locked in battle with his own eyeball floaters.#13 The afterimages of beam sabers and fire magic burned upon his retinas like the user interface burned upon the phosphor of his television set. He lay bedbound for over an hour, unable to sleep, thinking about the Dragon he had slain on Ultimate difficulty for the thirtieth time and how it failed to drop the Heavenly/TP#14 module – again. He started to hear blackbirds chirping and noticed a dim glow break through the top of the blackout curtains on the window perpendicular to the bed. He felt his back drenched in sweat, as the air conditioning unit was acting up and he had not yet called the repairman as the phone line was always tied up transferring bytes of Phantasy Star Online back and forth from his modest three-bedroom home to Sega’s data centers. He could feel his bladder welling up with beer and, as to dam the flow, crossed his legs and turned on his side, but he must have turned too hard because the next thing he heard ran a shiver down his spine resulting in a new yellow stain on his weeks-old underwear.
“David – what time is it?”
David pretended to be asleep, but Blair was keen on his tricks; she had been fooled by this before. “I know you’re up.” She turned to the green glow of the digital clock on her bedside table and her eyes rolled like bowling balls into the back of her skull. “It’s four, and you have work in two hours. Did you just come to bed – again?”
David turned to the sound of Blair’s voice and contrived the most groggy of whispers: “I just woke up, Blair-Bear. I had a bad dream.” Blair-Bear only grunted and closed her eyes. David was unsure if his lie penetrated her sleepy judgment, but he did see this as the perfect opportunity to relieve himself so he tiptoed to the bathroom and, overestimating his aim in the dark, urinated all over the toilet seat before returning to bed.
After David counted forty-eight chirps of a blackbird, Morpheus#15 finally took him.
Chapter II: David’s Dream
“… u dont even have a PSYCHO WAND?”
David dreamed of the dragon, the serpent, and the robot. He dreamed of the planet Ragol with its verdant forests, volcanic caves, mines of scattered light, and ruins of gloom. He dreamed of the salty beaches of Gal Da Val and the virtual reality of facsimilized spaceships and temples with skyboxes within skyboxes and dreams within dreams.
He dreamed of Phantasy Star Online.
David dreamed of his first time turning on the Dreamcast; the bouncy-ball and the swirl. He dreamed of the full-motion-video introduction of Phantasy Star Online, amazed by the graphical fidelity of it all: the planet Ragol fading into view, the eclipse of shadow both literal and metaphorical, the warp sigil that flashed in the void of space like a summoning circle conjuring starships. The mystery hooked him from the beginning: the vanished refugees, the principal’s missing daughter, the lush planet inhabited by mutated-bipedal-landsharks and oversized-birds-of-gold and bee-spitting-testicle-pitchers and digital-death-dragons and centipede-skull-serpents and very-out-of-control-robots. And despite IGN’s official review proclaiming Phantasy Star Online’s story as “meager” and “non-existent,”#16 the intrigue was more-than-enough to consume David’s burgeoning gamer brain, which had only witnessed Madden and Mario until this point.
David dreamed of character creation. The FOnewm#17 class immediately caught his eye; to David, they appeared as magical techno elves from the future: default with brown hair, oversized plaid berets, dapper jackets that poofed bell-bottom at the coattails, and high-heels that belied their short stature. David was not the most creative sort, so he adjusted the character to look as close to himself as possible. He changed the elf’s hairstyle to long and blonde with a part down the middle because Blair had always said that one of the reasons she was attracted to him was because he looked like Kurt Cobain#18 with a mouse for a mother and, remembering the poster of Nirvana that Blair had tacked up in her old room at her parents’ house – the one with Kurt wearing large sunglasses and a trapper hat – he made sure to add permanent dark sunglasses as a finishing touch. He then adjusted the elf’s clothing to his favorite color – green. As unimaginative as David may have been, he was under no illusions about the girth of his waist and adjusted the elf to match his rotund figure. The end result was that of a portly elf with vibrant but very-greasy-looking yellow hair and a perpetual smirk as if pretending to have something very clever to say but really being empty inside and hiding it all behind a pair of cheap dollar store sunnies.
*character creation in utero
David’s dream continued in linear sequence. He logged into the online lobby and spoke to the space-nurse-receptionist at the blurry counter. The nurse gave him two options: “Create Team” or “Join Team,” and he selected the second option then pulled out the coffee-stained notecard William had given him at work the day prior, which had the group name – “Debt Collectors Inc” – and the password – “password” – written in barely legible handwriting. He pressed the red A-button on the white-hulking-mass and the screen went black for a moment before the electron guns in the ray tube fired tunnels of color as the game loaded the polygonal planet that was to become David’s new home.
The dream flashed memories of both Phantasy Star Online and Briar Rose Blair like a child’s kineograph#19 at twenty-times speed. It started in the lush forests of Ragol, where David was slaughtered by Boomas#20 while learning to control his character and where – using a well-timed zonde#21 – he landed the finishing blow on his first Dragon and heard the dopamine-releasing jingle when that same dragon dropped a rare item, and that jingle felt better than any orgasm he had experienced since marriage. The dream then shifted to Blair and David’s first date at a faux-sixties diner. Blair was wearing a baroque dress with band patches sewn all over it: Bauhaus, Clan of Xymox, Alien Sex Fiend, Nirvana, Joy Division, and The Cure. She insisted that she was not-like-the-other-girls. David told her, between sucking milkshake through a shared straw, that she was his Athena and that he would never fall in love with another girl and that they would be together forever and that she was the prettiest-girl-in-the-world in a spooky-death-princess sort-of-way. And then the vision faded once more. After flipping many switches and unlocking many doors and vanquishing many monsters, David found himself in the Ruins of Dark Falz.#22 The difficulty increased and he was forced to learn to become like a cannon made of glass by firing magic from a distance while William’s big-blade-wielding robot slashed through shadowy legions commanded by Chaos Sorcerer generals flanked by Dimenian foot soldiers.#23 And this section of David’s dream excited him very much.
The dream showed David as a snake eating its bottom half, repeating the same missions to earn money for more items and more techniques and more weapons and more jingles. Only minutes passed in dream-time, but in reality: it took David over two-hundred hours of game-time, two-months of real-time, and three-hundred cans of beer to complete Phantasy Star Online on Normal difficulty. And when David finally vanquished the evil that befell Ragol, he learned that his adventure was not yet over; bigger numbers, stronger weapons, and even-more-potent dopamine jingles were calling to him on Hard and Very Hard and Ultimate modes. And David didn’t want William getting further than him otherwise he would never hear the end of it at work and, although David claimed to be nonplussed by competition, the digital maze that was Phantasy Star Online brought something primal out of him, like that of a mouse trapped in a cheese maze with only one other mouse and the maze had a clearly visible exit sign that flashed just-turn-the-game-off but David would never turn the game off because there was just-something-about-that-jingle.
Sega had opened Pandora’s box by releasing the first online console role-playing game,#24 and inside the box was a mischievous little kid pressing all the buttons in the brainstem elevator. The dream knew this but David did not.
The dream zoomed out to Blair, who sat lonely on the living-room two-person couch while the afternoon soaps#25 dulled her senses and David’s neglect murdered the smile on her face. She became addicted to the skunk weed#26 that she purchased from the foreign man who lived across the street; she believed his name was “Gerard” or “Jared” or something, and he was tan and exotic and single; she thought about him sometimes while alone in bed when David was mashing away at his buttons, but she was loyal and would never betray David’s trust; but at the same time, she thought David may have been betraying her own trust with the Dreamcast and this thought eased the guilty byproduct of her fiddly-digit fantasies.
David’s dream was simultaneously straightforward and cryptic and vivid and lurid and awful. Morpheus was showing David something important – a portent; but David only saw the polygonal beauty of Phantasy Star Online.
Morpheus, becoming impatient with David’s lack of revelatory comprehension, decided to show David his ragnarok#27 and his archnemesis: xXMetaMarkXx; also known as: Meta or MetaMark or simply Mark. William met MetaMark on the online forum “pso-world.com”#28 and they became close friends. MetaMark – in William’s estimation – was a Phantasy Star Online prodigy; he had three max level#29 characters and was working on a fourth, and his main#30 was a FOnewm just like David’s. Mark knew nearly everything about the game and was not shy about it. He was callous and curt and condescending, and no one knew his real age because he would abruptly log out whenever someone asked him.
The dream recounted the events of David’s psychic ragnarok: the first time he played with MetaMark; David rushed into the Ruins and immediately used a thunder spell on a floating-jellyfish-with-claws,#31 but the abomination was immune to thunder and wrapped itself around David and sucked him to death. MetaMark could have revived David but, instead, just walked up to David’s corpse and typed three letters, “LOL.” David’s eyes burned with liquid embarrassment and his stomach dropped like an elevator with its cord cut by a cartoon villain. When David respawned#32 in the city, he was met with a supercilious volley of hateful text signed xXMetaMarkXx; and William, who was sitting in front of his television screen watching this scene unfold, said nothing, as if he were a bystander casually watching an innocent man being beaten and robbed, too afraid to intervene lest he become the next target but too full of curious bloodlust to turn away.
*psychic ragnarok in the dream within a dream
xXMetaMarkXx: how can u play FOnewn but not know monster immunities???
xXMetaMarkXx: ur character must come with an extra chromosome#33 lol
xXMetaMarkXx: why is ur damage so low? r u feeding ur MAG#34 dumbass?
xXMetaMarkXx: how did u even get to level 150?? did u buy ur account?
xXMetaMarkXx: why r u still using a striker rod? that is pure garbage tier behavior lawl#35
xXMetaMarkXx: u dont even have a PSYCHO WAND?
xXMetaMarkXx: fucking n00b#36
David stared slack-jaw at his television screen. Even in dreams, he had no words. His sheltered middle-class upbringing and whirly-bird parents did not prepare him for this level of vitriolic judgment. In lieu of defending himself, he bent over to the Dreamcast and sunk the power button in what amounted to something within the same spectrum of a rage-quit#37 – a shame-quit.
With the Dreamcast silent and the horror locked away behind the screen, he swiveled his chair to face his personal computer and dialed into AOL#38 and navigated to Yahoo#39 and immediately typed “HOW DO I FIND THE PSYCHO WAND?” in all caps#40 and hit enter. All the while, he mumbled like a man with a bad case of the padded-room-blues talking to spirits that only he could see:
“We’ll see who’s got the higher damage. You fraud. I have a job and a wife and responsibilities and an actual life but once I get my Psycho Wand I’ll be the best damn techno mage on the server, you fucking nerd.”
David rarely vocalized curses.
A persistent buzz faded into David’s dream as this moment played out. The buzzing, to David, sounded like the words “Psycho Wand,” and his dream-self flicked the dreamy-scroll-wheel of the dreamy-mouse as his eyes scanned for the digital-dream-gold that was to be the answer to what he felt was the most important question he had ever asked in his entire life: “HOW DO I FIND THE PSYCHO WAND?”
The buzzing continued as David’s dream-scrolling became more aggressive and the words repeated in his mind: Psycho Wand. Psycho Wand. Psycho Wand. Psycho Wand. How do I find the Psycho Wand. The Psycho Wand. The Psycho Wand. Psycho Wand. Psycho Wand. Psycho Wand. Psycho. Psycho. Psycho. Wand. Wand. Wand.
David suddenly jolted awake and screamed, “Psycho Wand!” There was a great lake of sweat pooled beneath him and he was panting like a dog left in a car during the hottest day of the year. His scream must have been contagious, as it shocked Blair into a scream of her own; her scream was one of unspecified terror, and she quickly sat up, turned the side-table lamp on, and spoke with a frantic urgency, “What’s wrong, David? Did someone break in? What’s going on? Are the cats ok? Is your mom alright? Is there a fire?”
David silenced the alarm clock before turning to Blair with the most solemn look she had ever seen on his face. He wiped the sweat from his brow and spoke in a contrived pitch twofold lower than normal as if he were some sort of tragic hero, “It was just another bad dream is all, Blair-Bear.”
“Just another bad dream.”
If David’s dream was intended to be a warning, it had the opposite effect. David now saw himself as an anime#41 hero whose family had been slaughtered by a wicked-but-beautiful villain with flowing-white hair. He was full of purpose and hell-bent on revenge and he whispered softly to himself, “Psycho Wand, my beloved. I will find you.”
Blair tilted her head and blinked hard, “What did you just say?”
“Oh – uh, nothing.”
Footnotes:
#1. “Ectoplasm” is a fictitious substance often cited in computer games as residue from ghosts or spiritual somethings. Ectoplasm is typically dropped as spoils when defeating supernatural beings, and used for crafting or sold outright to an NPC-vendor. The word originally referred to the viscous layer around the cytoplasm in amoeboid cells, but has since been co-opted by psychic mediums as supernatural-stuff. Helen Duncan, a psychic medium popular in the 1920s, conducted seances in which she proclaimed legitimacy by spitting ectoplasm from her mouth; the “ectoplasm” was actually an elaborate cloth construction.
#2. Americans are fat and our diets are awful, and considering this is so ubiquitous: I’m not sure that I need a source on this one, but for the sake of thoroughness: “Results from the 1999-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), using measured heights and weights, indicate that an estimated 65 percent of U.S. adults are either overweight or obese.” Source.
#3. This is me trying to be clever. Blair’s name is not “Briar Rose Blair.” In the 1959 Disney film Sleeping Beauty, the titular sleeping beauty is renamed by faeries from “Aurora” to “Briar Rose” in order to hide her identity from the wicked Maleficent.
#4. This is a long winded way of saying, “August 2003.” I don’t like putting actual numbers in formal writing – this is a weird hang-up of mine; probably not a good thing.
#5. The RCA Secureview 13″ Color TV Model S13801CL CRT television sets were manufactured by RCA (originally the Radio Corporation of America) for use in prisons. They are entirely see-through so that prison inmates can’t hide drugs or weapons within the TV’s guts. Most units have a prison cell number and block number engraved on the chassis. They are sold as collectors items now, but some made their rounds through gaming communities during the early 2000s. Although they look very cool, these sets aren’t great for playing video games; they only have a coaxial connection and this results in poor colors, increased input lag, and a phenomenon that I dub “CRT sparklies” which are warbling lines and microdots in the image.
#6. The Dreamcast was like a colorful firework erupting in the night sky during an off-month when there were no celebrations to be had: fleeting, ephemeral, dream-like, all-that-jazz. It was released in Japan on November 27, 1998, in North America on September 9, 1999, and in the EU on October 14, 1999. Due to poor adoption and low sales, production of the Dreamcast was discontinued roughly two years later on March 31, 2001. This is all right here on Wikipedia.
#7. In the summer of 1957, Margaret Sanger and Gregory Pincus sought FDA approval for the first oral contraceptive dubbed “Enovid.” The FDA approved the use of Enovid for “treatment of severe menstrual disorders” and required the label to carry the warning: “Enovid will prevent ovulation.” By late 1959, half-a-million women were taking Enovid as a contraceptive. After extensive trials, in 1960, the FDA approved Enovid as a birth control pill. And by 1965, “the pill” was the most popular form of birth control in the United States. Enovid contained far more hormones than necessary to prevent pregnancy; 10,000 micrograms of progestin and 150 micrograms of estrogen, which carried with it high risk of cardiac arrest and stroke. It took researchers more than a decade to recognize the side effects and even longer to learn that lower doses were just as effective for preventing pregnancy; this did not help the women whose hearts had already exploded, however. The source for this can be found here. Blair, being a thirty-year-old woman living in 2003, uses a Progestogen-only pill – also known as a “POP” or “mini pill.” David, in his boundless aloofness, does not know the brand that his wife uses, but this omniscient narrator does: Cerzette.
#8. “Cave Zone” is a song released by Robert Pollard on his 2009 solo record, “The Crawling Distance.” It’s a standard two-chord rock number with a repeated verse of “cave zone, someone take me home to my cave zone.” The Michigan Daily got it right when they wrote, “By the end of the song, all that is clear is that Pollard immensely enjoys yelling the words, ‘cave zone.'” The song can be found here. “Cave Zone” is very much about “man caves” and wanting to be alone. It is said that all men need a “cave zone,” but there’s no science proving this out and it’s likely just a bullshit justification for the endless pursuit of juvenile interests and mid-life crises. The song itself was released years after the setting of this story, but nonetheless, it inspired the use of the phrase and, despite its repetitiveness: I quite like the song, Michigan Daily be damned.
#9. This is a jab at myself. I often wear John Lennon style circular glasses and have been listening to a lot of psychedelic pop-rock lately; although, not of the 60s-variety, but of the Robyn Hitchcock variety; the song “One Long Pair of Eyes” is nice and poignant if you want a starting point. This footnote may seem gratuitous, self-indulgent, entirely unnecessary, and maybe even a little look-how-cool-and-varied-my-music-tastes-are; and while that’s partially true, it primarily serves to document the music that influenced me while writing this piece. Primarily Robyn Hitchcock, but also Momus – and Deerhunter.
#10. ‘Whassup?’ was a commercial campaign for Budweiser beer that aired from 1999 to 2002. The first commercial aired during Monday Night Football on December 20, 1999. ‘Whassup?’ was a mind-virus in the early 2000s, with kids imitating the famous beer-inspired phrase ad nauseam – even I was infected, and the sickness was never cured because I find myself repeating this phrase every once in a blue moon. Considering their willingness to target and infect children with beer propaganda, ‘Whassup?’ goes to show that American beer companies know no shame and that America’s beer culture was, and continues to be, completely unhinged. See the commercial that spawned at least a few alcoholics here. Note that David and Bill only drink Bud.
#11. The ninth season of the American sitcom Friends aired on NBC from September 26, 2002, to May 15, 2003. I was more of a Seinfeld person, although I can appreciate the nostalgia induced by Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, and Ross’s very first-world problems. My sister used to play Friends VHS tapes on repeat when going to bed; when I was a kid, I would sometimes get scared at night and sneak off to her bedroom, as the presence of another person helped me sleep; Friends was often playing on those nights. I especially remember the two-parter in which Ross and a woman from the UK get married – or something. Maybe my sister had only a few tapes to choose from, or picked favorites to fall asleep too.
#12. 10 Things I Hate About You is a romantic comedy targeted toward the teen demographic. In essence, it’s William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” retold with a ‘90s high school backdrop. It features a young Heath Ledger as leading man and Julia Stiles as “the shrew” to be “tamed.” But who’s really being tamed? That’s the gist. It’s a charming film full of witty dialog, excellent performances, and great music. Also another of my sister’s favorite VHS tapes to play when falling asleep.
#13. Eyeball floaters are strands, clouds, or dots in vision that float one layer removed from perceived reality. The scientific explanation for eyeball-floaters is that they are caused by changes or deterioration in the vitreous jelly attached to the retina of the eye; it follows that eyeball floaters become more common as one ages.
#14. Phantasy Star Online has multiple difficulty levels: Normal, Hard, Very Hard, and Ultimate. On top of the enemies dealing more damage and being harder to kill, each difficulty has a specific level requirement and entirely new item drop table. The Heavenly/TP module has a 1/40 chance of dropping from the first boss (“Dragon”) on Ultimate. The module boosts TP by 100 and is useful for Force-type characters who require TP to use TECHs (magic) as their primary form of damage. Considering David has defeated the Dragon on Ultimate 30 times now, he is statistically about 10 attempts away from getting his Heavenly/TP module.
#15. Morpheus is a god associated with sleep and dreams in Greco-Roman mythology. Morpheus is mentioned only once in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an epic poem written in 8 CE. This means that Neil Gaiman has done more for the character, with his graphic novel series The Sandman, than any Greco-Roman poet.
#16. This is a sneaky way of inserting review content into a piece that is very much not geared toward review content. “The story behind Phantasy Star Online is shockingly non-existent … If Sonic Team had to give us a meager story for Phantasy Star Online, you know they had to balance it out with a wealth of gameplay.” Source.
#17. Classes in PSO are split between three main categories: Hunters, Rangers, and Forces. Hunters are physical close-range fighters specializing in swords, spears, and daggers; Rangers are long-range attackers who use all manner of artillery; and Forces are magic casters who specialize in wands, rods, and magic of all the standard computer game elements (fire, ice, thunder, etc). Among the three categories, there are multiple choices with strengths and weaknesses corresponding to what one might consider “race”; Humans are, as you might guess, human; CASTs are robot-people; and Newmans are elves (if we had to relate it to Tolkienisms).
#18. Kurt Cobain is the lead singer of Nirvana. A handsome blonde youth who looked as if he always needed a shower in the most gorgeous way possible. He was at the forefront of the “grunge” rock subgenre whether he liked it or not – and he didn’t like it; he committed suicide by gunshot at the age of 27. Nirvana is one of the most popular bands of all time; to say that Kurt’s suicide propelled this popularity would be unfair, as Kurt Cobain – while not classically trained in guitar or singing by any means – had a natural ear for melody and could throw a hook easier than Mike Tyson. My favorite song by Nirvana is “About a Girl.”
#19. “Kineograph” is just a fancy word for “flip-book,” like something you used to make in grade school – or, at least, like something I used to make in grade school. A flip-book typically refers to a sequence of images drawn on different pieces of paper glued or stapled together in sequence; when flipped at the edge, the image comes alive. It’s a simple form of animation, but this simplicity is the root of literally all animation; image after image after image after image, etc.
#20. Boomas are monstrous bipedal shrews or bears or moles or something with long arms and sharp claws. Their eyes glow red and demonic. They bumble toward you in packs and can easily surround new players. They recover quickly from attacks so they function as a teacher of sorts – teaching new players how to time their attacks properly. Killing a Booma is a Phantasy Star Online initiation ritual that all hunters must complete if they wish to progress.
#21. Zonde is the tier 1 thunder TECH in Phantasy Star Online. Like the Megaten (Shin Megami Tensei) series; Sega was not satisfied with naming their magic conventional names; instead we have: Zonde for thunder, Foie for fire, Barta for ice, Resta for healing, Grants for light, and Megid for dark.
#22. The Ruins is the final stage of Episode 1 in Phantasy Star Online. It’s damp and dark with only some glowy pillars and pathways to light the way. Monsters found in the ruins have a more demonic aesthetic than those found outside of the Ruins. Monsters found outside the Ruins appear to be corrupted wildlife while the monsters in the Ruins appear like the corrupters of that wildlife. The boss of the Ruins is Dark Falz, who happens to be the main antagonist of the entire Phantasy Star series going as far back as Phantasy Star for Master System. Dark Falz is an avatar of The Profound Darkness, a primeval force within the Phantasy Star universe.
#23. Chaos Sorcerers are robed wizards that levitate about the Ruins of Ragol. They drop the mystical Psycho Wand – but only on Very Hard. They carry a staff of pure plasma and are usually surrounded by Dimenians which are similar to the bumbling Booma but with plasma swords for arms and exposed teeth-like rib cages.
#24. Phantasy Star Online was the first console MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game). MMORPGs existed before this, but the genre was reserved for PC gaming until PSO released in December 2000. And although the Jaguar was the first console that supported ‘online’ play – you could direct dial and play games with a modem attachment – it wasn’t until 1999 with the release of the Dreamcast that any video game console had legitimate online play baked in that wasn’t a pain to configure; players plugged a telephone jack into the back of the console and dialed in, which would – like making an outbound call – clog the phone line and make receiving calls on that line impossible. If someone happened to call a line that was connected to the internet, they’d only hear a busy signal.
#25. Soap operas exist in a dimension three levels removed from normal television programming. A lot of people watch soap operas, but almost no one admits to it. There is an intricate web of romantic dalliances, crimes of passion, white-collar criminality, and borderline-incestuous-and-maybe-supernatural-and-definitely-extramarital love affairs going on in soap operas that rival the likes of The X-Files, Lost, Law and Order, Sex and the City, and even Twin Peaks. That’s right: there are Lynchian levels of weird shit going on in soap operas every Monday through Friday between the times of 12pm and 3pm. There are two types of people who watch soap operas: 1) the person who enjoys the drama and compares the characters’ antics to their own lives, trying to find solace in the thought, “Hey, my life isn’t so bad – see?” and 2) the person who imagines themselves in Sarah or John’s shoes as they engage in sketchy-sex-stuff, such as sleeping with their step-sister or “accidentally” sleeping with their own mom/dad. Many boring marriages were saved by the sexual misadventures of Sarah and John fooling around behind their lovers’ backs on the cathode-ray tube while the kids were on the seesaws at the schoolyard, vicariously. Blair watched the following soaps in 2003: The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, All My Children, One Life to Live, As the World Turns, Guiding Light, and Passions. (All of them, this was all of them; she watched all of them.)
#26. “Skunk weed” is the colloquial street name for a number of very potent and very pungent strains of marijuana; hybrids of sativa and indica; known for their high THC content. Skunk strains typically contain 60% sativa and 40% indica, which produces a full-body high and only a light head high. Side note: Smoking weed makes me think about that one time in high school when I threw a rock at a passing car, causing it to skid into a stop sign, and how I was never caught for doing so; and how the police might still be looking for the culprit and could be zeroing in on my home address any minute now and then I start thinking about ways to leave this earth. It goes without saying: I don’t smoke weed anymore. Well, that’s a lie: I’ve smoked since then; a puff here and there. Last time I smoked I started thinking about how much of a fraud I am and how I can’t write and how my entire life is a luck-out and how one day someone is going to pull the plug on it all and, well, I just don’t like smoking weed that much. I’m not good for it.
#27. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok is the prophesied burning of the worlds in which many Norse gods perish. After the world is burned, sunken underwater, and entirely cleansed, two human survivors – Lif and Lifthrasir – repopulate the world. Ragnarok is similar to Biblical revelation in that it’s a great catastrophe that brings about some sort of change – be that positive or negative.
#28. pso-world.com is a Phantasy Star fansite that has existed since at least January 2001 if we go by the earliest forum post titled “Article: Community Center Officially Under Development!” which was posted on January 8th, 2001. The website covers every Phantasy Star game and contains guides, drop tables, concept art, forums, and much more. I’ve had a few accounts on the site; my earliest account was created on Dec 31, 2009, under the username “wintermute0“; the origin of the name is from the novel Neuromancer, where Wintermute is an artificial intelligence and central character of the novel. I read Neuromancer at least six times in high school; I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, not only because it spawned the cyberpunk genre (and I was a massive contrarian that always needed to read “the first thing” so I could brag about it) but because it’s just so well written: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” I used the “Wintermute” pseudonym online for over ten years before switching to “buru” which was a nickname given to me by friends and “we don’t choose our nicknames” so, theoretically, it’s more pure – or something.
#29. The max level in Phantasy Star Online Ver.1 was 100; when Phantasy Star Online Ver.2 was released – which is the version played by David – the max level was increased to 200. Ver.2 also added new episodes, new stages, new weapons, new items, etc.
#30. A “main” is a player’s main character in a computer game. If someone has 20 different high-level characters, there’s always one that they will continue to come back to and play the most: this is their “main.”
#31. The monster described here is called a “Bulclaw”; they are four claws attached to another enemy called a Bulk. The Bulclaw latches onto its target and sucks its life away. They are not entirely immune to thunder, just highly resistant to it – but for the sake of funnies: they’re immune for the purposes of this story. 100% accuracy to source material is overrated.
#32. When you die in Phantasy Star Online, your character is revived in the city section of Pioneer 2 (a massive starship that functions as the mission-hub, lobby, and NPC vendor area of the game. Note that Pioneer 2 was the name of a United States space-probe designed to probe lunar and cislunar space which was launched on November 8th, 1958; the probe burned up in Earth’s atmosphere minutes after launch). After respawning, you can simply go back into the mission portal and continue with your mission. The main drawback is that you have to walk back to where you died, which can be time-consuming – unless you’re playing with friends, in which case they can put up a telepipe which you can use to instantly teleport to them. In rare cases, some missions will fail if you die or there may be a time limit which makes dying detrimental to success.
#33. Casual jokes at the expense of the mentally handicapped were ever-present in the early 2000s online landscape. This hasn’t changed much depending on which online gaming community you’re part of. Due to the transparent polarities of human nature, a person’s willingness to engage in this type of “comedy” in the present age is a strong indicator of their ideological leanings.
#34. MAGs are the main source of min-max (“optimizing your character to perfection”) psychosis in Phantasy Star Online – if your MAG isn’t built properly, your character is not properly optimized, and to some, this is very important; to others (me), it’s just a computer game and you need to chill out. MAGs are small mechanized creatures that float over your character’s shoulder. You can feed them spare items (3 at a time) to increase their stats which transfers to your character once the MAG is equipped. MAGs function as the main way to customize your character’s build, in that you can have a MAG that is boosted with POW (power, if you couldn’t figure that out) to significantly increase melee capabilities, or you can have a MAG geared more toward magic or defense or a mixture.
#35. “LAWL” was an ephemeral early 2000s online slang term that has since fallen out of fashion. “LAWL” is an onomatopoeia of the abbreviation “LOL” (“laugh out loud”) as it refers to the sound of vocalizing “LOL” in the real number domain (real life).
#36. “n00b” is a stylized way of calling someone a newbie – or a new player of a computer game; typically used as an insult targeting seasoned players who play like they are still new to the game. The zeros in “n00b” are an appropriation of “leet speak,” which is an informal online language that substitutes letters with numerals or special characters that resemble the letter’s appearance.
#37. Per Urban Dictionary, “To angrily abandon something that has become insanely frustrating. It can be a video game, a job, you name it. It’s almost always very violent (stuff gets broken, curse words are spoken), and implies very extreme anger issues. Or it could simply be a nice person finally reaching their breaking point.”
#38. AOL (or America Online) was most millennials’ first online service. It revolutionized connecting to the internet in the mid ‘90s to early 2000s by allowing easy access to the internet through an intuitive interface. You would use a phone line to connect, and the dial-in noise was like the death screams of a half-sentient robot being crushed by a scrap-metal compactor; this noise holds the honor of being the easiest way to elicit a nostalgia response from anyone who grew up in the late ‘90s to early 2000s. AOL would send hundreds of software installer CDs via mail to the point that you could make a living selling them for scrap. I knew some people that would take these CDs and make collages or wall art with them; I saw many walls just covered in these CDs. Abusing the CDs was a teenage rite of passage and very punk rock in 1999. Everyone born in the ‘90s remembers the three-box screen when dialing into the internet via AOL via a phone line; those little yellow people moving from one box to another, and the yellow-people-celebration on the image of the little Earth when they finally connected in the last box. That little yellow guy was iconic; partially because of the main AOL service, but also due to AOL Instant Messenger which consumed not only my life but everyone’s that I knew. I communicated with my middle-school and high-school girlfriends more through AOL Instant Messenger than spoken-word real-life. Many of my deepest desires and rawest emotions were expressed in that small-white-box-with-the-blue-outline-and-the-buddy-icons. This is probably similar to how the current adolescent generation communicates, only with different services (Snapchat, Discord, etc.).
#39. Yahoo! was a popular search service in the ‘90s – 00s before Google took over. Yahoo! also released a chat platform – similar to AOL Instant Messenger – with a robust chat room feature. As a kid, I spent a lot of time in Yahoo! Messenger “roleplay” chatrooms typing up embarrassing paragraph-style-roleplaying passages with random strangers online; things like: “Edge walks into the tavern with a mean look on his face. He swipes his long blue and red hair out of his eyes before casting a glance over to the bar. The tavern’s lantern light glints off the huge sword on his back. Edge surveyed the room for a moment before he walked to the bar and sat near the pretty girl at the far end. He signals to the bartender, who approaches quickly out of pure fear due to Edge’s coolly intimidating presence. Edge smirks at the girl then at the bartender, ‘one glass of milk, and another for the lady, on me.’ Edge pauses, “actually, make that strawberry milk for the lady.” (This is copy/pasted from my article on Cowboy Bebop's OST by SEATBELTS.)
#40. Typing in “all caps” indicates pure rage or pure irony, and sometimes it’s very hard to tell the difference online. In that way, typing in “all caps” can be a decent way to confuse your opponents. It is often said that “CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL” and sometimes this is true, other times: not so much. It really depends on the context.
#41. If you’re reading this, you likely know what anime is. According to Wikipedia, “Anime is hand-drawn and computer-generated animation originating from Japan.” It’s funny to call anime “Japanese cartoons” – and this way of describing anime makes some people very upset – but it’s not entirely accurate; “cartoon” implies childishness, or being targeted toward children; and while much of it is indeed aimed at children, there are very serious and dark anime which should never be watched by children; a classic example of this would be Akira (1988), the scene in which Tetsuo (spoiler) crushes his girlfriend with his overgrown bodily organ mess still haunts my dreams.
(Originally published on 4/28/2024)
*David finds great comfort in the magical techno elf pinned to his cubicle wall
*David dreams once more
*the Holy Grail; the Psycho Wand
*you could not be connected to the server
*eyeball-window-skeleton-hand-tree dynamic with The Boy and The Father and The Gundam
*the cockpit of The Gundam
*Char and his crimson Z’gok