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Part 1 | Part 2

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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.”

Part 2

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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.

Part 2

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(Originally published on 4/28/2024)

#ComputerGames #PhantasyStarOnline #Fiction #ShortStory

Original Text

Part 1 | Part 2

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Chapter III: Gibson & Associates & Decay

“David swiveled into the glow of his own dimension.”

The glow of six-thirty glew the green of David’s eyes so green that he had to wipe away the radioactivity before the digital clock blinded him completely.

David had thirty minutes to get dressed in his cheap gray suit and khakis, pull his Nirvana hair into a presentable ponytail, grab a bite to eat, kiss Blair goodbye, hop in his black Kia Rio,42 and drive to Gibson & Associates – which was fifteen miles away – where he spent eight hours a day, five days a week cold-calling poor souls from an unknown number and dropping little life bombs on them like you-owe-such-and-such-amount-and-we-can-garnish-your-wages-and-we-can-take-your-firstborn-and-we-can-break-your-kneecaps-and-your-credit-score-is-very-important, but David much preferred dropping little magical bombs on Boomas in Phantasy Star Online instead.

As David stumbled out the front door – already twelve minutes late to work – he turned to Blair for a kiss but she rebuked him. “David, when you get home, don’t forget to leave the phone line open – your mom’s final round of treatment is this afternoon and the hospital is supposed to be calling.” David, somewhat taken aback by the cold shoulder and also wondering why she would tell him this now instead of when he returned home from work, nodded in hurried agreement before rushing out to the Kia. David then fiddled with the ignition and took off down the road, nearly hitting a trash can and a stray dog and a mailbox and a small child due to an imbalance in the humours of sleep and fluster.

David hated his job, but he pushed through because he had eight years’ tenure and he was fit to make sixty thousand per year next raise and he wanted to give Blair a nice place to live; at least, that’s what he used to tell himself. Now, his work was his lifeline to Phantasy Star Online and boozing it up in his ten-by-fifteen office that smelled like yeast infections and rotten hops. David figured that if he lost his job then he would not be able to get another for quite some time: having lied to the recruitment officers when they asked if he had strong knowledge of financial concepts and principles; and if he had proficiency in using accounting software for tracking and managing collections; and if he had the ability to negotiate effectively and maintain professionalism in challenging situations; and he used his now-dying mother as a phony reference. To David, this losing-of-job would result in an inability to purchase tall boys^#43 and pay his phone bill and – most important of all – he would lose his hunter’s license.^#44 And this fear kept David working, but he had a couple grand saved up to keep him going for a few months if something were to happen.

David was forty-six minutes late when he pulled into the parking lot of the raw concrete structure that was a testament to modern American office architecture in that it was as brutalist as his quarterly revenue goals. He let out a tired sigh as he gazed up at the massive crimson-square logo plastered near the words Gibson & Associates and whispered something not unlike a here-we-go-again or the classic just-fucking-kill-me-already.

David stumbled wearily through the double doors into the office and walked by people he considered zombies, ghouls, monsters, and non-playable characters without realizing that he exhibited the very same traits: a crumpled-sheet-with-legs, an assembly-line-missing-its-most-important-parts, something-that-looked-like-a-person-but-with-donut-hole-eyes-and-drool, and he exuded a strong aura of decay; some called this the Deskman Droops or Salesman Sickness or Pencil Pusher Psychosis, but David just called this wanting-to-go-home-and-control-the-magical-techno-elf and he cared little for the judgment of his peers.

David ignored everything and everyone as he sank like syrup into his swivel chair. His cubicle was covered in Phantasy Star Online concept art printed from the Gibson & Associates industrial-strength printer with which he had used at least two-hundred dollars worth of ink cartridges printing magical-techno-elf artwork, and then denied ever doing so to his boss who happened to have a list – in chronological order – of all the files ever printed from that specific printer.

*David finds great comfort in the magical techno elf pinned to his cubicle wall

David’s cubicle was situated perpendicular to William’s, who was hard-at-work talking to someone on the phone and animating every word with his hands as he was prone to do. “Ma’am, with all due respect to your deceased dog: you still owe sixty-eight-thousand-seven-hundred-forty-one dollars in back dues and – ” William paused for a moment as if being interrupted by the brightness from the Excel^#45 sheet upon the screen of his four-by-three stock Dell Dimension^#46 monitor. “Yes, I’m aware that your father just died and you had to pay funeral costs and that you spent two grand on the casket, but ma’am; like I told you last week: cremation was the cheaper option for a woman in your financial situation. It’s not our fault that you are irresponsible with money.” William paused once more and then abruptly stated, “I will give you three more days – or else,” and slammed the phone silent.

Moments later, William’s phone rang – it was the same woman; she wanted to settle the debt.

William turned to David, who was half asleep in his cubicle, and proudly proclaimed: “See David, that’s how it’s done – Ye Ol’ William Hang Up. It literally works every time.”

“Huh – oh right, yeah.” David said, still recovering from the mental boot loop^#47 caused by a psychic blue screen that cited a very complicated error message.

“Something wrong, man? You seem tired lately – how are things with the ol’ lady?” William said in his signature impossible-to-tell-if-being-sarcastic-or-not tone that made most people want to kick him in the balls and then spit on him.

David swiveled into the glow of his own dimension. He decided to ignore William from now on; this decision was made because William failed to defend him from MetaMark’s harassment on Ragol. William and MetaMark would power-level^#48 together and David suspected that they were laughing at him behind his back, and this made him so insecure that he exuded such a powerful aura of contrived confidence that anyone with optic nerves and a cerebellum could see right through it. William was a MetaMark sycophant and, therefore, could not be trusted. William was the enemy. Going forward, David would focus only on becoming stronger. Friends were irrelevant – a distraction. He double-clicked the Internet Explorer^#49 icon on his virtual desktop and started typing furiously into one of the many search toolbars^#50 that consumed his screen real estate:

“HOW DO I FIND THE PSYCHO WAND?”

After an hour of Yahoo searching, David’s eyes grew wide as he found a result on the sixth page; it was a pso-world.com forum thread titled “Psycho Wand Location & Drop Rates.” And like getting a shot of adrenaline, he was now fully awake and totally engaged in reading this very-poorly-written thread: “acording 2 datamined^#51 files, teh best place to solo for psycho wand is ruins stage on very hard & the p wand drops from chaos sorcerers & has 1/1497966^#52 chance to drop.”

The last five words caused David’s stomach to do somersaults, which forced him to cover his mouth to prevent a reflexive bile from bubbling up as if his body and mind and soul knew that those numbers were truly wicked and pure evil. But David swallowed the bile and repeated the words back in his mind: The Chaos Sorcerer has a one in one-million-four-hundred-ninety-seven-thousand-nine-hundred-sixty-six chance to drop the Psycho Wand. He repeated this probability in his mind like a self-help mantra before he removed a small notepad and pen from his satchel and wrote the number down and circled it a heinous number of times before crashing his head into the keyboard from exhaustion.

*David dreams once more

David was system shocked into the waking world by an aggressive tap on his shoulder. He shot his head up and rubbed his eyes while swiveling to face the lego-block-shaped head of his manager, Merenie Wiggins. Merenie stood in a dark suit with massive padded shoulders – her peacocking in a male-dominated business morphed her into one of those same male dominators – and this nearly hid her portly figure. She had almost-literal raccoons under her eyes and a permanent frown made of wrinkles, and this made her look twenty-years older than she actually was. She stunk of sour perfume trying its damnedest to cover up two-packs-a-day. She was fearsome to the meek and a harlequin to the rest. She stood as the perfect representation of the little bombs Gibson & Associates dropped upon unsuspecting debtors who don’t know that they can simply request-to-never-be-called-again-and-hang-up-the-phone.^#53

“Yes, Merenie? I was just uh…” David paused to wipe some drool from the side of his mouth, visibly nervous with QWERTY^#54 branded into his cheek like scarlet lettering that denoted one of the cardinal workplace sins: sleeping-on-the-job.

“Come to my office. And it’s Ms. Wiggins, not Merenie. I’ve told you this before.” Her voice was the deep buzz of a bumblebee after sucking down three balloons.^#55

Ms. Wiggins made her way through the mouse maze of tan cubicles back to her small office in the back of the building. As she was doing this, William turned to David and made a you’re-so-in-trouble face. David only raised his right hand in a fist then used his other hand to imitate a cranking gesture as he slowly cranked up his middle finger. William scoffed with a dismissive wave.

Moments later, David was sitting in a black plastic chair in front of a large wooden desk with multiple segments. Merenie sat behind the desk in a massive faux leather executive office chair. Merenie was very comfortable, David was not; this was intentional. Merenie cleared her throat three times within the span of two minutes of otherwise silence. Being a woman in corporate America, Merenie found great pleasure in making men feel uncomfortable. She was tapping a pen to a white sheet of paper with a long list of text printed in Times New Roman,^#56 some of the words were underlined, many were in bold.

“Do you know why you’re here, David?” She said with a question mark but really it should have been a period because she immediately continued: “It’s because of your performance. You have made no revenue in the last – let’s see here – four months. You have used over two-hundred dollars of ink cartridges on non-work-related prints and –”

David interrupted, “that – that wasn’t me.”

David’s denial caused Merenie’s eyes to narrow with determination as she flipped to another sheet of paper, “FOnewmArt.png, Pioneer2City.jpg, FOnewearlPanties.png, PSOwallpaper6.png – I could go on.” She stopped and glared at David before continuing, “We looked up your browser history, David. You spent a total of seven-hundred-twenty-six hours and forty-seven minutes on the website ‘pso-world.com’ in the last month alone; that is over sixty percent of your work time, David. And your co-workers are complaining about your hygiene; one even described your odor as –” She looked down at her paper once more, “– quote ‘a mixture of expired cheese and decomposing animal corpses and just really, really bad stuff’ unquote, and while I wouldn’t go that far: they have a point. And you have been sleeping at your desk.” David squirmed in his chair; he felt like a lab mouse that was strapped down for electroshock testing and every word that escaped Merenie’s thin lips was another hundred volts. “Frankly, David, your conduct has been unacceptable. And none of this would matter if not for the fact that you make us no money.” She paused and pushed the butt of the pen into the bottom of her lip as if supporting something heavy in her mind.

Merenie began lightly chewing the pen, “Well, do you have anything to say for yourself?”

David looked like the worst magician in the world as he was trying to conjure spells with his fidgeting hands but no magic would come out. After several awkward minutes, he spoke the only words that he could think of:

“Psycho wand.”

David was broken. “The Psycho Wand. I – I just need the Psycho Wand. Merenie, please. Give me another chance. Once I have the Psycho Wand, I’ll do better. All I need is the Psycho Wand then I’ll be able to show William and MetaMark and then I can start doing the cold calls again. Please, Merenie.”

Merenie only shook her head, “You’re fired David. Get out of my office.”

David mumbled to himself on the drive home. His words were like the soft chanting of a monk whose meditative isolation had driven him insane instead of serene. “Money saved up. Can make it for at least three months. Psycho Wand. Just have to cut back on food. No more steaks. Get the Psycho Wand. I’ll switch to off-brand Cheerios. Prepay the mortgage for two months. Ruins on Very Hard. Blair to switch the cat food to a cheaper brand. The Chaos Sorcerers drop the Psycho Wand. MetaMark said LOL. Didn’t revive me. Laughed at me. One-million-four-hundred-ninety-seven-thousand-nine-hundred-sixty-six chance to drop the Psycho Wand. Tell Blair I used vacation time. One-million-four-hundred. Get the Psycho Wand. Ninety-seven-thousand-nine-hundred-sixty-six.”

And when David arrived home, Blair was gone.

Chapter IV: You Could Not Be Connected to the Server

“Please check that your provider settings are correct before connecting. The line was disconnected. PRESS START BUTTON.”

The cats were gone too.

It was the eleventh moon of September, and David had done the math. He had finally calculated the most efficient way to farm^#57 the Psycho Wand. He discovered that the mission titled “Doc’s Secret Plan” contained ten Chaos Sorcerers, and he scribbled it all out on a Pizza Hut napkin; he had been eating nothing but large-pepperoni-with-extra-sauce-and-extra-cheese every night since the incident, and there was no other paper in the house. The napkin was covered in markings only legible to himself and read something like: “10 Chaos Sorcerers divided by 1497966 equals 149796.6, and it takes roughly 11 minutes to complete a single run,^#58 and If I play for 11 hours a day, that’s 660 minutes, which means I can run Doc’s Secret Plan 60 times per day, which means the Psycho Wand has a 2496.61 chance of dropping each day.” David knew in the back of his mind that it could take almost seven years to find the Psycho Wand, but he reasoned this away as he fancied himself luckier than most.

Finding the Psycho Wand was David’s Grail Quest and the Dreamcast controller was his Galahad. Nothing else mattered. He drank nothing but liquified heartburn in a can and developed perpetual alcohol sweats,^#59 and ate nothing but pizza to the point that he earned so many Pizza Hut Pizza Points that he would get a free pizza every four days like clockwork. At max level, the missions were a breeze; he tore through those poor Chaos Sorcerers, and as revenge, they dropped nothing but sweat and blood; literal blood, as David’s left thumb had ripped open from overusing the hard-plastic thumbstick, but he ignored the pain and wrapped it in three Pizza Hut napkins held together with Scotch^#60 tape like some makeshift war bandage. And to prevent boredom, he removed the television set from the living room and placed it in his office, then ran a fifty-foot cable through the house so that he could watch reruns of Star Trek: Enterprise,^#61 which he felt was thematically similar to Phantasy Star Online and this put him in an almost dreamlike state of ultra-science-fiction while he slew Chaos Sorcerers. He could have moved his office television into the living room instead, but there were too many windows, and he was very particular about the lighting; it had to be just right; a soft orange glow had to envelop the room for David to fully appreciate Phantasy Star Online – to feel like he was actually there on Ragol – as this was the glow present the first time he played the game, and the office was the only area in the house that could produce such a mystical glow. This Pavlovian response^#62 went unanalyzed by David as his thoughts were filled only with Psycho Wand.

Every time David logged into Phantasy Star Online during this epoch of ruin, he saw a pop-up labeled “important announcement,” but he never read the context of the message as he skipped through all extraneous details. Nothing would steal precious time away from his Grail Quest.

*the Holy Grail; the Psycho Wand

It was on the sixteenth moon of September that David decided to make a beer run to the nearby 7-Eleven.^#63 Before leaving the house, he turned the Dreamcast off for the first time since the incident, which freed the phone line from Phantasy Star Online’s grasp and, as if the Moirai^#64 themselves intervened: the phone cried out mid-ring as if someone had been calling for hours on end. David panicked for a moment, thinking it was some sort of tornado alarm, but snapped to his senses and picked up the handset. A gruff male voice was on the other line, “Is this David Finch?” David was silent for a moment. The receiver could have been spitting thunder clouds as there was a psychic-storm front moving into the room. David mumbled something in the affirmative. The voice on the other line responded, “We’ve been trying to call you for several days now, Mr. Finch. I don’t know any other way to tell you this, but – your mother has passed away.” David heard the words but refused to process them. His eyes glazed over and his mind filled with Psycho Wand. “After her treatment on August twenty-third, she developed pneumonia. We treated it the best we could but her body was weak from the radiation therapy. She passed away on September second. Her last words were your name, Mr. Finch. Your sister is organizing the funeral and she has been unable to reach you. We would like you to come down to the hospital and –” David interrupted with a sudden “thank you,” then abruptly hung up the phone and stared at the thing for a whole minute as if trying to analyze the contents of its plastic soul. He then grabbed the entire phone base and ripped it out of the wall, taking some drywall along with it. The bringer of bad news would bring no more bad news. There would be no more distractions. He left the house and didn’t notice the tears in his eyes as the Kia’s ignition roared. David returned home twenty minutes later with a thirty-six pack of tall boys. He had two-thousand-seven-hundred-and-ninety-four dollars left in his bank account.

It was the twenty-eighth moon of September and there was something in the stale office air that night; and it wasn’t the god awful stench. David had slain over one-thousand Chaos Sorcerers and eaten at least half of that in pizza to the point that Pizza Hut would no longer grant him Pizza Points. He was on a Pizza Points Freeze according to the very-professionally-worded email complete with pizza imagery below the email signature. He continued ordering pizza regardless. David only had a little over one-million Chaos Sorcerers to go before his beloved Psycho Wand would appear before him – statistically. His Pizza Hut branded thumb bandage had torn open and soaked the Dreamcast controller in blood, but he was on his second-to-last run of the night, and he had no plans of reapplying the bandage. Every time he made a wrong move or was knocked down by an enemy,^#65 he would let out a blood-curdling scream of pure rage but continue on as if being cajoled by some malevolent force. Beer cans were forming a series of intricate pyramids on his desk and he had to pee real bad but ignored it in favor of completing the mission.

And then it happened.

Just as David landed the final blow on the final Chaos Sorcerer of the final run of the night, he heard the noise; the dopamine jingle. The jingle was so potent that he dropped all pretense of being a civilized human being as he pissed his pants into a sopping mess while letting out a howl of joy into the popcorn above.^#66 David, sitting in his own sweat and urine, then maneuvered his magical techno elf to the spinning-red-item-box on the flat-textured floor of the Ruins, and as his character approached it, he saw the words: PSYCHO WAND.^#67

David, upon equipping the Psycho Wand, pushed his face into the television screen and absorbed the image of his character holding the magnificent scepter. The wand was a misnomer, as it was a two-handed staff with three blades of blue plasma jutting out at the tip. The Psycho Wand had the aura of something that the extraterrestrial-equivalent of Lisa Frank^#68 would use to paint alien-night skies. After minutes of analyzing every little pixel in excruciating detail, David wrapped his arms around himself as if making love and rolled over onto his own thumb-blood and piss and sweat. It looked as if the corners of his mouth had been sliced open as he had a gigantic, inhumane smile on his face as he drifted off to sleep.

Morpheus took him once again.

The dream showed David visions of the tabby and the tortoiseshell; it showed Blair as the beautiful-princess-of-death; it showed his mother all serene and motionless surrounded by figures sobbing into their hands. But the Psycho Wand was too powerful. The wand slowly enlarged itself into view like a bad PowerPoint^#69 animation. David saw himself wielding the wand like a god-among-magical-techno-elves, and he used its great power to instantly evaporate facsimiles of Boomas and Chaos Sorcerers and MetaMarks and Williams and Blairs and cats and even his own mother. With the Psycho Wand, David controlled his dreams; and in his dream, he laughed a maniacal laugh.

David resolved himself to find MetaMark and William in-game and show them his newfound glory. He imagined himself finding them, entering their room all mysterious-like, pushing the thumbstick ever so lightly as to produce a Clint Eastwood^#70 swagger, and, upon coming face-to-face with his archnemesis, typing only the three letters of sweet revenge: LOL.

Upon logging in the next morning, David was met with another “important announcement” which he canceled without reading. David then spent all day searching for MetaMark’s group. He scoured every lobby. Every stage. Every zone. He read every group description and even asked random players if they had seen characters matching MetaMark’s description, but it was all for naught. He did his Clint Eastwood walk for strangers and this gave him some satisfaction but it was not enough; he had to find MetaMark, he had to find William; they had to know about his accomplishment; about his Grail Quest; about his Psycho Wand.

David spent twelve hours searching before retiring on the mattress now located on the floor of his office. The mattress was stained the color of algae, and applying any pressure whatsoever caused plumes of dust and visible stink lines to erupt from its innards like a corpse explosion. David didn’t smell a thing as the sounds of Star Trek and blackbirds lulled him to sleep.

On the morning of September thirtieth, David rolled off the decaying mattress into his garbage island and immediately pushed the blood-stained power button of the Dreamcast. The bouncy ball and the swirl played upon the phosphor as the Dreamcast whirred to life. David cracked open a tall boy while waiting for Phantasy Star Online to load. This was his morning routine. He skipped through the splash screens and the introduction video and the title screen and found himself at the front door of his virtual paradise: the login screen.

Going through the motions, he selected ONLINE PLAY then rubbed some crust out of his eyes. An error message appeared: “You could not be connected to the server. Please check that your provider settings are correct before connecting. The line was disconnected. PRESS START BUTTON.”

David rubbed more crust out of his eyes. This happened sometimes; Phantasy Star Online’s login experience was not perfect.

He tried again: “You could not be connected to the server.”

He tried a third time: “You could not be connected to the server.”

*you could not be connected to the server

David had a blank expression on his face as he started mumbling, “Must be a mistake or maintenance or maybe my connection is wonky or maybe the wires got damaged outside or –” David noticed the phone number for the Sega helpline at the bottom of the screen and resolved himself to call. He walked into the living room, hooked the phone up once more, and dialed 1-800-SEGA-ROX. He waited on hold for some time while ambient music played; an eerie, almost-industrial track that sounded as if doomed sea animals were singing alien harmonies over sparse synths.^#71 After minutes of waiting, someone finally picked up with a less-than-enthusiastic “Yeah? Can I help you?”

David responded with an inflection that reflected absolute zero: “Can’t login to Phantasy Star Online. Pretty sure it’s not my connection. Can you look into it or something?”

The Sega representative was quick with an answer: “Uh – didn’t you read the announcement in-game? The servers closed, man. The online was shut down as of today.”^#72

David tightened his grip on the phone. His thumb was bleeding again, and the blood was dripping down the plastic of the receiver into his mouth. He could taste the iron-rich hemoglobin on his trembling bottom lip.

“What do you mean?”

The Sega representative was dumbfounded, “What do you mean by what-do-I-mean? I mean the online servers were shut down. The servers are closed, man. The online is kaput. Sorry, dude – anything else?”

David slammed the phone to death. Another yell. Another tear of the cord from the wall. This time he launched the phone into the drywall on the opposite side of the room which was followed by a loud knock on the front door near the new hole with the phone dangling from it.

David let out another piercing scream. The mouse looked like a wild beast as he opened the front door with an abrupt “Yes? What is it?” And standing before him was a man in a gold-star-adorned cowboy hat wearing full sheriff’s getup with guns and all. The lawman raised an eyebrow at David and the wild beast went mouse once more. “I’m Sheriff Richards. Are you David Finch?” He said with a thick southern-boy accent before David responded with a delayed and very shaky nod. “You’ve been served, buddy.” The Sheriff said before giving David a look as if measuring his existential worth; “Better hope you can afford alimony too,” he added with a chuckle before pushing some papers into David’s hands and then sauntering off to the pickup truck parked in David’s driveway.

David closed the front door and looked down at the papers. He started to read the first line, “Blair Finch. Decree of Divorce.” He stopped reading.

David had no job. He had no wife. He had no friends. His cats were gone. His mother was dead. He had only two-thousand-seven-hundred-and-forty-three dollars left in his bank account and he owed one-hundred times that on his home and half that in credit-card debt and his car still had payments and the air conditioner was still broken and paint was dripping down some of the walls and the house was full of empty beer cans and his mother was dead and his wife had left him and his mother was dead and he had the Psycho Wand but his mother was dead but he had the Psycho Wand.

David started with the insane-monk chants between bouts of giggling, “The Psycho Wand. The Psycho Wand is mine. I have it. The Psycho Wand. It’s mine. I have the Psycho Wand. Psycho Wand. Psycho Wand. Psycho Wand.”

David dropped the divorce papers on the floor. He cracked open a beer from the fridge and drank it in one gulp and then grabbed another before stumbling into the office. He sat down in front of the television set which continued to loop the futuristic synths of the Phantasy Star Online login screen. David navigated to “ONLINE PLAY” and pressed the confirmation button.

“You could not be connected to the server.”

He pressed the button again.

“You could not be connected to the server.”

And again.

“You could not be connected to the server.”

And again.

“You could not be connected to the server.”

And again.

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

“You could not be connected to the server.”

Part 1

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Footnotes:

#42. The 2003 Kia Rio retailed for $9,995, making it one of the cheapest new cars on the market that year. My first car was a Kia Rio, although it was a 2010. Despite KIA’s reputation as poorly manufactured and the fact that they’re commonly referred to as “Korean Industrial Accidents,” my Kia held up for a long time.

#43. A Tall Boy refers to a 16-ounce can of beer, initially introduced by Schlitz in 1954. While Tall Boys can come in larger sizes, such as the 24-ounce cans that debuted in the 1990s, the 16-ounce can remains the original Tall Boy.

#44. Phantasy Star Online had a few versions; the first was free-to-play and referred to as “Version 1”; when Version 2 (Ver2) came along, they added more content and tacked on a subscription fee of $5, this fee was dubbed “The Hunter’s License.”

#45. Microsoft Excel is a powerful spreadsheet editor that has existed since the dawn of time – or something. It has been used to crunch numbers for businesses since at least November 19, 1987. The United States government likely uses Excel to track your location and favorite food. Excel has the signature look like that of an indoor tennis court: white and green with lines all over the place. Those who work with Excel take it about as seriously a semi-pro tennis player, with gaining-more-formula-knowledge being akin to perfecting-your-backhand.

#46. Specifically: the Dell Dimension 2300, released in 2002; it was a popular office computer model due to its affordable price and mid-range processing power, perfect for basic number crunching and file browsing. The tower was almost a perfect rectangle if not for the rounded edges. It came equipped with one CD drive and a gray flap on the front that lifted to reveal USB slots and audio inputs and outputs. The power button was centered on the gray flap above the circular Dell logo, and it had a soft push like that of a robot’s pillow. Almost all Dell Dimension 2300s came with the Windows XP operating system; a few came with Windows ME. This model persisted for what felt like ages; one could find Dell Dimension 2300s (or one of its various sister-cousin models) in offices going as far into the future as 2010.

#47. A reboot loop (or boot loop) happens when a Windows device unexpectedly restarts during its startup process. This behavior signals a critical computer issue. A true boot loop must manifest like a dragon eating itself tail-first.

#48. “Power-leveling” in computer games occurs when a high-level player helps a low-level player complete stages/bosses/levels/whatever that the low-level player would not be able to complete on their own. This results in faster leveling and other benefits. Power-leveling, in this author’s opinion, detracts from the fun of computer games and is closely associated with the min-max-psychosis. A significant aspect of playing a computer game is the journey and the struggle; power-leveling removes this aspect and cheapens the gaming experience.

#49. Internet Explorer was released by Microsoft on August 24, 1995 and it was the worst internet browser ever created. Before Internet Explorer, Netscape dominated the internet browser scene, and as such: Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with new Windows installs to kill Netscape – and they succeeded, eventually. Microsoft can be thanked for putting in motion the chain of events that lead to Firefox – the browser I use to this day (as of 4/28/2024) – as Firefox is the spiritual successor to Netscape, as the Mozilla Organization (creators of Firefox) was created by Netscape in 1998 before its acquisition by AOL.

#50. It was easy to install internet-browser toolbars back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, especially so for Internet Explorer. 2003 was around the time substantial security measures were rolling out to prevent accidentally installing CPU-eating toolbar spyware; you still found PCs infested with this stuff well into 2005 and, in extreme cases: now. Some of the classic spyware bars were MyWebSearch, MySearch, 2020 Search, PowerStrip, Browser Accelerator, DogPile, GoodSearch, Altavista, NetCraft, EarthLinkSearch, NeoPetsSearch, MapStan.net, Teoma, Access One, AimAtSite, Y! Bar, ULTRABAR, AskJeevesOfficialBar, Addresses.com, BadassBuddySearch, Vivisimo, ICQ Search, and SpiderPilot. Several were released by “reputable” companies like AOL, Yahoo, and Google because they wanted a direct feed into your PC usage, and since the internet was still newish: we just let them do it. Nowadays, these “reputable” companies still do it, but they’ve integrated the bars so deeply into our lives that we don’t even notice it – see Google’s monopoly on personal data.

#51. “Data mining” in this context refers to the process of extracting game data, typically from ROM/ISO images or source code, and analyzing the bits and bytes (I’m not technical) to understand the mechanical workings of a game or uncover secrets hidden by the developer. If you find a drop rate table for any role-playing computer game, it was likely obtained through some form of data mining, as drop rates are not usually published by developers, especially for older titles.

#52. This is not a fabricated number; it comes directly from the Psycho Wand drop table on pso-world.com. MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games) have long been notorious for employing this type of predatory gameplay design. In the case of Phantasy Star Online, which features only a few stages with some variation in missions, the absurd drop rates serve a very specific purpose: game-time multipliers and, less so, facilitators for in-game trading markets. Additional predatory practices in MMOs include: creating vast game worlds where traversing by foot takes hours while offering very limited fast-travel options (as seen in early Final Fantasy XI, Everquest, and World of Warcraft), requiring significant time investments for leveling up (spanning days or weeks at higher levels; this applies to almost all MMOS), and implementing penalties such as player deleveling upon death (Final Fantasy XI and Everquest, again). This wouldn’t be too bad if not for the fact that the publisher is charging you for the experience. Each example subtly prolongs the time players spend in-game, resulting in more monthly payments to the publisher/developer/whatever. The greatest MMORPGs blind you to the fact that they are stealing your time and money via tedious gameplay mechanics by making you feel totally immersed in a world that’s better than your own. The continuous-money-flow aspect incentivizes developers to build robust worlds and formulate fun ways to keep your attention, but it also incentivizes dirty tricks like: hours-to-get-anywhere, drop-rates-that-statistically-take-decades, years-to-hit-max-level, and deleveling-upon-death.

#53. Per the US Federal Government Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, “If a consumer notifies a debt collector in writing that the consumer refuses to pay a debt or that the consumer wishes the debt collector to cease further communication with the consumer, the debt collector shall not communicate further with the consumer with respect to such debt …” Source.

#54. The QWERTY keyboard, pronounced as KWEHR-tee, stands as the prevailing typewriter and computer keyboard layout utilized in regions employing a Latin-based alphabet. The term “QWERTY” comes from the initial arrangement of letters on the keyboard’s upper row, encompassing the first six characters: QWERTY. If the letters are raised they could – potentially – leave an imprint on one’s cheek if pressed against them for a long enough period of time.

#55. This barely makes sense and was definitely inspired by weird Robyn Hitchcock imagery like “I’m the man with the lightbulb head, I turn myself on in the dark.” The idea is that Merenie tries to sound intimidating like a bumblebee’s deep buzz, but her femininity (like helium) causes her voice to register higher than she would like. Helium changes the sound of your voice because it is much lighter than air and has a different density, so when you speak the sound waves travel through this helium-corrupted space and resonate differently in your vocal tract. There are some dangers associated with sucking helium; the main one is dizziness or passing out due to oxygen deprivation since the helium replaces the oxygen in your lungs.

#56. Times New Roman is a serif typeface commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931. It was commonly used in formal documents during the early 2000s, including print, essays, and email. Times New Roman is stoic and cold, akin to receiving a termination letter with all-the-reasons-you-suck listed out in excruciating detail, followed by a “sincerely” at the bottom that you can’t tell if sarcastic or just part of the default-signature template. Calibri largely replaced Times New Roman after its creation by Lucas de Groot in 2007. Calibri possesses a roundness to its structure that exudes a more playful and fun aesthetic; however, this playfulness is a ruse designed to lull you into a sense of comfort before hitting you with some really terrible news, such as you-are-never-allowed-to-see-your-kids-again-and-your-wife-is-suing-you-for-fifty-grand, with a “thanks” right before the lawyer’s name.

#57. “Farming” in this context refers to repeatedly completing the same task in a computer game in order to obtain some sort of beneficial result. This ties into MMORPGs sucking your time away like a chrono demon by requiring you to kill the same monster over and over again so that it will drop a specific item. Phantasy Star Online is one of the most heinous chrono demons in existence.

#58. A “run” is computer gamer lingo for completing a stage a single time. Used commonly in the following context, “let’s do a few more runs of X” or “I’m down for one more run” or “I hate running this mission because the enemies are too annoying.”

#59. Alcohol Sweats happen when the body is dependent on alcohol but has not ingested any for a certain period of time. Depending on the degree of dependency, these sweats can emerge minutes to hours after the last drink. People experiencing this may suffer from dehydration, flushed skin, insomnia, and persistent headaches, even while consuming alcohol. And while a “nasty odor” isn’t a direct byproduct of Alcohol Sweats, it often accompanies this condition if the afflicted is not careful about their hygiene. My old friend from high school suffers from this condition and you can smell him through six walls made of pure lead even after spraying the strongest of odor-fighting aerosols.

#60. Scotch is a brand of tape developed by a company called 3M. It’s not some random name someone came up with for clear, thin tape that you find in offices or schools – it’s a brand name with a trademark and a rights-reserved and everything. I didn’t know this until doing research for this piece.

#61. Star Trek: Enterprise aired from September 26, 2001, to May 13, 2005. It follows the adventures of the crew of the first starship “Enterprise,” commanded by Jonathan Archer. The show has been met with a lukewarm response by the Star Trek community, but I quite enjoyed my time binging it in full nearly ten years ago. The season finale is questionable, however, and divisive among fans.

#62. My personal belief is that nostalgia is some sort of complex Pavlovian response – also known as “classical conditioning” – which is a behavioral procedure in which a biological stimulus is paired with a neutral stimulus: a dog drools at food, a bell rings every time the dog sees food, repeat this process, and the dog now drools at the bell because it associates the bell with food. In our story’s example, there was a soft orange glow illuminating the office the first time David played Phantasy Star Online; as such, he insists on that lighting being present every time he plays Phantasy Star Online. This insistence is to replicate the original feeling of playing the game, even though the “original feeling” is long dead, only returning as a shade of its former self; forever fading fast. If David happened to walk into a similar room with a soft orange glow, he would instantly think of Phantasy Star Online; and vice versa: if he played Phantasy Star Online, he would think of the soft orange glow and want it to be present. It’s not quite the same, but it’s similar enough to be you-might-on-to-something material – maybe.

#63. 7-Eleven is a convenience store franchise found all over the United States. The first 7-Eleven popped up in 1927. It’s famous for its human-baby-sized mega-gulp Slurpees and fountain drinks that may or may not cause cardiac arrest upon the final sip; as such, drinking an entire mega-gulp is like playing dice with the fates: alea iacta est. Sometimes the fountain drink machines will mismix the solution or run-out-of-syrup and spit out poison-death-water instead of Sprite or Coke or whatever; this is especially dangerous with Sprite because you can’t tell if it’s poison-death-water until you take a sip; however, if you observe the Sprite pour closely, you’ll notice less bubblies or carbonation, which is usually a decent indicator of poison-death-water (it took years of practice to figure this out). My friend once got a mega-gulp of poison-death-water and, upon taking a sip in the parking lot, immediately threw the cup at the 7-Eleven window. I turned to him like I was looking at Charles Manson, and he said only one word: “Run.” We ran.

#64. In Greek mythology, the Moirai (also known as the Fates) were the personification of destiny. Three sisters: Clotho, who spun the thread of life; Lachesis, who determined the length of the thread; and Atropos, who cut the thread; birth, life, and death. The Moirai were popularized in Disney’s 1997 film Hercules, where – in addition to cutting strings – they passed around a loose eyeball used to see into the past, present, and future.

#65. Phantasy Star Online features a haptic feedback system in the form of literal in-real-life shaking due to how frustrating the combat system can be. This frustration stems from one single aspect: a single hit will knock down most characters (depending on their DEF stat), and the get-back-up animation takes 3 whole seconds (I counted). While this may not seem like much in text, it feels 100x longer in-game, and it adds up quickly. The rage grows with each knockdown. Mechanically, this is one of the aspects of Phantasy Star Online that I feel most critical of. Sega, for some reason, thought it was appropriate to take the player out of the action for 3 whole seconds – removing control from the player entirely; this is antithetical to game design, especially when it can result in a stun-lock when being surrounded by attacking monsters. Developers can include ways to make games tough without taking control away from the player; I’ve seen it done.

#66. “Popcorn ceiling” is a ceiling with a bumpy or rough surface that looks similar to popcorn or cottage cheese. It’s made by spraying a mixture of paint and tiny particles of polystyrene onto the ceiling, and if the home was built prior to 1979, it was likely mixed with asbestos, which can cause mesothelioma and lung cancer. Popcorn ceilings were originally favored between the ‘80s to early 2000s because they covered up flaws and made the room quieter; however, they have since fallen out of fashion. The first thing most modern homeowners do when they buy an older home nowadays is say, “We have to get rid of the popcorn ceiling.”

#67. In actuality, the Psycho Wand would drop as a ???-Rod that would then need to be appraised by the TECHER in the Pioneer 2 shopping center, but this entire process would be anticlimactic to the story, so I made the executive decision to manipulate the truth a bit here, and I’m not ashamed of doing so. This is when the sunglasses lower from the top of the screen and land on my face and the words “deal with it” flash at the bottom.

#68. If you grew up in the ‘90s or early 2000s, you likely know who Lisa Frank is. Her artwork was all over kids’ lunch boxes, trapper keepers, and binders during that period. Her artwork typically features animals swimming in seas of rainbows or floating through the clouds of what-has-to-be alien planets. It’s all very psychedelic. What you may not know, however, is that Lisa Frank may or may not make the artwork herself; as it’s all branded “Lisa Frank Incorporated,” and Lisa Frank herself is never specifically cited as the artist. Lisa Frank is a businesswoman, first and foremost, and is mysterious and secretive and has done only a few interviews, and in at least one video interview (with Urban Outfitters in 2012 per Wikipedia), she requested to have her face blurred out. This mysteriousness is likely driven by a desire to stay out of the public eye, which is a wise decision – but it makes her all-the-more interesting.

#69. PowerPoint (or: “Microsoft PowerPoint”) is a presentation-creation program originally created for Macintosh computers but later purchased for $14 million by Microsoft in 1987. PowerPoint originally utilized an intuitive UI that allowed users to create “slide-based” presentations intended to be shared on a large screen. PowerPoint was known for its ridiculous “WordArt” that utilized Lisa Frank-like coloring, polygonal word shapes, odd shadowing, and super-deformed lettering; in later versions, you could apply animation to certain presentation elements, such as: zooming, slide-ins, twirl-ins, fade-ins, and much more. PowerPoint has become increasingly more difficult with the continued addition of new features that no one asked for and is a great modern example of “feature bloat”; regardless of all that, PowerPoint has monopolized the presentation-tool market and continues to be the #1 tool used in the corporate world. Nowadays, PowerPoint presentations (also known as “decks” in corporate hell) serve as a great way to pretend-like-you-really-know-what-you’re-doing when you’re really just wasting everyone’s time with stuff that no one cares about; these presentations are then emailed to the meeting audience as an attachment with a brief recap in the body of the email; the PowerPoint is then saved in some folder within a folder and subsequently never opened, and then forgotten about; and in this way, PowerPoint decks are to corporate goons as Pokemon cards are to the annoying rich kid that you knew in middle school.

#70. Born May 31, 1930; starring in over 60 films; Clint Eastwood often played characters who would walk slowly into tense situations – usually saloons – and quickdraw everyone in the place at the first sign of danger. He was known for his rugged stoicism, gruff manner of speaking, chiseled jaw, and dirt-handsome face. He usually portrayed anti-heroes or ex-bad-guys forced back into a life of violence due to some heinous event outside of his own control. “I don’t kill people no more – OK, I’ll do it again just this once.” Eastwood is best known for his roles in Western films, particularly The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), in which he wore his infinitely-copied outfit: a vest covered in a brown poncho tossed over his shoulder and a brown cowboy hat. He popularized the cultural meme of “Go ahead, make my day,” which is uttered by people of all ages even today.

#71. The Sega helpline used music from Echo the Dolphin as their hold music back in the ‘90s and early 2000s. I know this because I was a kid who frequently called the Sega helpline back then. The specific track used was “The Marble Sea” from Ecco the Dolphin Sega CD. The track can be found here. This song is what I envisioned playing in the ambiance during the rest of this chapter, so if you’re able to play it while reading: please do – starting now. Play it on a faint, low hum so that it’s not overbearing; so that it’s just kinda there in the background, setting the mood. (A side note, the 1-800-SEGA-ROX thing was made up, I don’t remember the actual number and I couldn’t find it online.)

#72. The official North American Phantasy Star Online Dreamcast servers were shut down on September 30, 2003. Note that the Dreamcast was discontinued roughly two years earlier on March 31, 2001. This means new bytes for PSO were being written for 913 days after the final Dreamcast was manufactured.

Part 1

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(Originally published on 4/28/2024)

#ComputerGames #PhantasyStarOnline #Fiction #ShortStory

It was October 2001, and a twelve-year-old boy, after incessant pestering, had just received the newest giant-robot game for the PlayStation 2 as an early Christmas gift from his mother. This annoyed The Boy’s father, who never saw eye-to-eye with his ex-wife and preferred his son to stay focused on the three S’s: school, sports, and socializing; so it follows that The Boy lived two lives, switching back and forth monthly between his mother and father’s house. It was always autumnal during these split-custody blues.

Nearly ten months prior, in December 2000, Bandai released its first game for the PlayStation 2, Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo. The game is largely a retelling of the first half of the classic 1979 anime Mobile Suit Gundam. It follows the crew of the White Base – a military vessel of the Earth Federation – in their nigh-hopeless battle against the Principality of Zeon, a nation of space-Nazis that will do anything to achieve their fascist goals, notably: dropping populated space colonies on Earth thereby killing millions. Bright Noa, captain of the White Base, chances upon a special boy named Amuro Ray, who happens to be a natural when it comes to piloting the Earth Federation’s new experimental giant robot: The Gundam. These events kick off Amuro’s coming-of-age story as he finds himself in a tough-love father-son relationship with Bright Noa and develops a sibling-like rivalry with a Zeon commander as equally talented as he is effortlessly cool and mysterious and handsome and blonde: Char Aznable.

Childhood is wanting to be Char; adulthood is wanting to be Char, also. Which brings us to The Boy; and, of course, The Boy in this story wanted to be Char, but he was more of an Amuro-type: geeky, angsty, obsessive. The Boy’s father was most certainly a Bright Noa-type, both in his disciplinary approach, which leaned heavily towards mild forms of corporal punishment, and in his no-nonsense haircut. And the father just purchased a new home, which he treated like his own White Base.

The new White Base was as tall as a Gundam made of bricks with four exact ninety-degree angles, wearing a pyramid like a paper hat with such perfect folds that it must have been crafted by an origami master who knew all the ancient tricks but lacked any creativity whatsoever. The front door was mathematically placed in the precise middle of the home and was surrounded by exactly nine windows; this made the house appear as some sort of eldritch wall-of-eyes and simply walking by the place evoked an intense feeling of being-watched. The house had a modest front yard dotted with thin maples and, during these autumnal months, the lack of chlorophyll caused the decaying leaves to float down from the hormonal trees and blanket the yard in death both fragrant and fugacious. When the breeze came, the naked trees appeared like skeletal fingers casting curses upon the very land they sprouted from. This eyeball-window-skeleton-hand-tree dynamic caused the local kids to describe the home as a haunted painting of some long-dead person whose eyes actually followed you instead of fake followed you; The Boy just described the home as prison.

For reference, the original Gundam stood eighteen meters tall or fifty-nine feet high or ten-people-standing-on-each-other’s-shoulders, and weighed sixty metric tons or one-hundred-twenty-thousand pounds or half of a blue whale, which aligned closely with a standard-three-story-middle-class home built in the eighties but renovated and sold in the turn of the new millennium; the same type of home The Boy found himself living in every-other month after both his mom and dad and the child therapist told him that it was not his fault and that mommy and daddy just don’t love each other anymore and that, on the bright side, he might have two Christmases from now on.

*eyeball-window-skeleton-hand-tree dynamic with The Boy and The Father and The Gundam

The Boy’s father saw the new home as his own White Base to lead his family into a better life, only with a four-thousand-dollar-a-month price tag; but to The Boy, the new home meant sitting on a hardwood chair with approximately zero lumbar support at the kitchen table all afternoon because he had to finish his homework before he could do anything else and he didn’t know how to do the assignments because he didn’t pay attention in class and he was too ashamed to ask for help so he would only sit there doodling pictures of giant robots in the margins of his worksheets between poking small holes in the fruit placed in the decorative bowl at the middle of the glass table at which he sat for hours. And this infuriated The Boy’s father, who made The Boy sit there until the work was done and then went behind The Boy to check his accuracy, and if it was not correct – which it rarely ever was – he would make The Boy do it all over again. It was tough love for the greater good of the White Base; some real Bright Noa Stuff was going on in that kitchen with the glass table and the uncomfortable chairs. The Father, like all fathers, wanted his son to have a better life than he did – he didn’t want his son stuck in a dead-end sales job at forty, like he was – and this meant perfect grades and sports three days a week and absolutely no distractions.

Directly below The Boy’s cramp-inducing chair, in the basement, was the PlayStation 2; it was hooked up to a television set about the size of a Jackson Pollock canvas, which painted pictures of giant robots upon The Boy’s adolescent brain. Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo was down there in the basement, snapped into the disc tray like the neurons that snapped robots into The Boy’s mind at all hours of the day. The Boy had Gundams on the brain while he was in the classroom staring at the circle that ticked time in slow motion; during every breezy autumn Sunday when raking leaves into piles that were then tossed into metal garbage cans to be burned days later; when he was in the field during recess just-kind-of-wandering-around-looking-at-stuff while the other kids played kickball; during the basketball practices when The Father would desperately encourage him to put-in-even-the-smallest-amount-of-effort; and definitely during that time he was in the outfield when the pop fly crashed into his head like a small meteorite rendering him unconscious for several minutes; and especially while he was wide-eyed in bed, staring into darkness because the child-therapist-prescribed ADHD medication gave him robot-inspired bouts of insomnia.

Every night during these split-custody blues, The Boy would slink out of his bedroom, tiptoe down two flights of stairs, and plop himself on the couch in the basement, where he covered himself in the glow of Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo. There, The Boy would control The Gundam: a glistening white 18-meter-tall Minovsky-Ultracompact Fusion Reactor-powered robot with a state-of-the-art rocket-thruster backpack module that provided a maximum speed of 165 km/h, sporting an incredible 5700 meter sensor range, and boasting a swift 180-degree turning time of 1.1 seconds. It was armed with two gatling guns mounted in its kabuto-shaped head, alongside handheld armaments including a beam rifle, a 380mm hyper bazooka, something resembling a riot shield, and two beam sabers.

The Boy’s wishes were only one pink flash of a beam saber away from being fulfilled. He felt powerful, clever, needed, and completely understood when he climbed into the cockpit of that virtual Gundam. His real father didn’t get it, but Bright Noa did. Bright Noa pushed The Boy to be the best damn Gundam pilot there ever was, while his real father only pushed him to be a healthy, productive member of society – something as far from the mind of a twelve-year-old boy as Mercury is from Mars.

The Gundam, with its shogun-like presence, demanded respect, much like the controls of the game, which – being Bandai’s first game for the PlayStation 2 and their first three-dimensional game ever – were clunky, archaic, obtuse, and reminiscent of an airplane cockpit with lots of unlabeled buttons and switches. Considering the PlayStation 2 DualShock controller with its two analog sticks, d-pad, four face buttons – ECKS, OH, TRIANGLE, SQUARE – two right triggers, two left triggers, start and select, and two secret buttons in the clicking-in of either analog stick, one would assume that The Gundam is moved with the left analog stick while the right analog stick controls the camera, but this is not the case; instead, up and down on the d-pad move The Gundam forward and backward while left and right turn The Gundam left and right; the word “turn” is important here; note that the word is not “move” or “strafe,” because the left and right triggers strafe The Gundam left and right instead. As such, if one wanted to move The Gundam in a diagonal direction, they would need to hold both up on the d-pad and either the left or the right trigger. If one wanted to turn The Gundam 360 degrees, they would need to hold left or right on the d-pad for ten whole seconds while the robot awkwardly stomped around in a circle, which left the clumsy metal giant wide open to enemy attack. This resulted in something akin to piloting a bipedal tank with a Tonka-truck controller.

In Bandai’s three-dimensional naivety, they had accidentally created a control scheme that mirrored what it may actually feel like to control The Gundam: clunky, archaic, obtuse; as if the PlayStation 2 controller was an actual Gundam cockpit. Every button on the DualShock was utilized in some way. The difficulty of the controls made pulling off even basic feats feel like mastering advanced Taekwondo techniques.

Amuro may have read the manual before jumping into the cockpit of The Gundam, but The Boy did not. At first, The Boy was hopelessly wrecked by Zeon mobile suits, but as the nights passed and the homework piled up, he became more dexterous and more dangerous, and soon he was controlling The Gundam like a seasoned veteran. The Gundam became an extension of The Boy, and whenever The Boy successfully slashed through an enemy robot with a well-timed dash attack or boosted out of the way of oncoming bazooka fire, he felt immensely satisfied in a way that The Father’s three S’s could never provide.

*the cockpit of The Gundam

On the seventh night of basement slinking, The Boy had reached the last story-mode mission. The story mode included a meager nine missions, covering the first twenty-nine episodes of the anime, and culminated in a final showdown with Char Aznable at the Earth Federation military base of Jaburo. The final mission consisted of a sortie with several mobile suits before Char entered the fray; and as the game lacked ways to repair The Gundam mid-sortie, The Boy had to carefully eliminate each mobile suit without taking damage. Otherwise, he would have no health left for the showdown with Char, who piloted a deadly amphibious mobile suit painted red – the Z’Gok Commander Type – equipped with sharp claws that could be pointed into metal-piercing spikes or splayed like a starfish to reveal devastating laser cannons. Throughout the first half of the mission, the regiment of Zeon mobile suits – mostly Zakus of green coloring and shoulder pads that looked like something a post-apocalyptic biker gang would require their members to wear (spikes and all) – would extract a great toll on The Gundam’s armor. When Char appeared, The Boy would be easily defeated. It didn’t help that the stagger animation of The Gundam was such that it was far too easy to get caught in an endless loop of laser-beam stagger locks; this stun-lock effect drove The Boy to the edge of madness.

After multiple failed attempts at defeating Char, The Boy lost all pretense of being twelve-years-old and needing-to-be-quiet: he howled as if he was the one getting hurt instead of the facsimilized samurai robot behind the phosphor. Each time The Boy failed the mission, he had to start over from the beginning; this improved his ability to complete the first-half of the sortie – battling over ten Zakus while not getting hit a single time – but ultimately resulted in CONTINUE? when Char locked The Boy in another laser-loop lock of death.

The Boy’s howling traveled through the home’s ductwork and echoed out of the ventilation shafts, alerting The Father, who was reading a Civil War novel in the spare bedroom, as he was prone to do every night. The Father promptly got out of bed, discovered The Boy’s empty room, and made his way down the many flights of stairs into the basement. His fists clenched in paternal frustration as he considered all the ways he would discipline his son. Bright Noa would often slap Amuro right on the face, but The Father preferred the buttocks as it was more socially acceptable. He mentally prepared himself to deliver this proper spanking, preemptively erecting mental bulwarks to deal with The Boy’s inevitable tears.

It was at this time that The Boy really wanted to be Char Aznable. He placed the DualShock on the coffee table in front of him, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath; he imagined that the air he was inhaling was actually the comet trail left by the Red Comet himself. Now serene – and very stubborn – The Boy picked up the controller and became one with The Gundam; he precisely maneuvered his way through the military base of Jaburo, slicing through Zakus as if he were practicing iaijutsu in a bamboo forest. The Boy had mastered the first half of the mission, but it was still not enough. When Char showed up in his crimson robot, The Boy was abruptly snapped back to reality with another CONTINUE? But The Boy was nonplussed. In his channeling of fictitious masked anti-heroes, he had become zen with calm determination, and it showed on his smiling face, all aglow with Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo.

*Char and his crimson Z’gok

The Father silently stood behind the basement couch for minutes, watching his son. At first, The Father was angry; after all, The Boy was sneaking downstairs, breaking the household rules, and it was clear that he had been doing this for a while, as he lacked the nervousness typically associated with burgeoning troublemakers. The Father had tried his damnedest to make The Boy a better version of himself; he had visions of his son becoming a star athlete: tennis and basketball and football and baseball. He even coached The Boy’s sports teams himself. But The Boy was clumsy, uninterested, and unhappy with everything that was thrust upon him. The Father had forgotten what The Boy’s smile looked like during these split-custody blues.

The Boy, now beaming with a huge smile on his face as he edged closer to victory, reloaded the mission once more full of confidence and verve. The screen went black for several seconds while the PlayStation 2 whirred and read the disc; and just as the screen went black, The Boy caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure in the reflection of the television’s leaded glass. The Boy’s stomach dropped and an audible gulp could be heard as he turned to face his father.

But The Father lacked his typical scowl; instead, there was a single hot tear rolling down his cheek. In the reflection of the television screen, The Father had seen his son’s smile for the first time since the divorce, and suddenly, everything made sense. He wiped the tear from his face and sat on the couch next to The Boy.

The Boy trembled in fear. He thought he was surely going to be punished for this transgression and had already started formulating some sort of lie in his head about how this was the first time he had ever come down here and how he might have sleepwalked or how he heard something weird and had to investigate; but The Father, as if reading The Boy’s mind, let out a light chuckle before placing his large hand on his son’s shoulder.

“What are you playing, son?”

The Boy, amidst a sea of stuttering, uttered something that sounded like the word Gundam being fired from a machine gun.

“Mind if I try?”

The Boy responded by staring at his father through dilated pupils swirling with confusion and faint computer-game photons. Then, suddenly, something clicked. The Boy’s lips curved like a rainbow turning upside as he relinquished control of the DualShock controller. The Father eyed the boomerang-like device in his hands, twisted and turned it, and then pressed all the wrong buttons, causing the television screen to go wild with menus and laser beams. This only caused The Boy’s smile to widen – and this smile was like a golden contagion, as The Father could not help but smile himself.

The Boy laughed a cherub’s laugh, placed his hand on his father’s, and spoke without a single stutter,

“No, Dad, not that way. Here, let me show you.”

---

(Originally published on 7/7/2024)

#ComputerGames #MobileSuitGundamJourneyToJaburo #Autobiographical #ShortStory

The deer had to be grazing only fifteen yards away for I could see the tranquility in its eyes. It was a doe; no antlers. With silence and slow, I lifted the butt of Dad’s ancient lever-action rifle to my jawline and held breath while my index finger crept around the grip of the wood and quietly inched toward the trigger guard; trembling. I winked my left eye shut as my right focused into scope, and I could see the beast’s tranquility even clearer now. It wasn’t grazing; it was standing, perusing nature, and it bat lashes as it slowly lowered its slender head toward a solitary leaf on a sapling; nipping it most delicately off the hardwood. The scope revealed the doe’s spiky velvet, an uncommon trait; perfect for my induction ceremony. Dad would be very proud.

I first learned of Counter-Strike within the pages of a PC gaming magazine in Autumn Y2K; it was depicted as a realistic first-person shooter with a focus on multiplayer and teamwork. And although derived from Valve’s Half-Life, it lacked the science fiction aspects that attracted the taped-glasses demographic and appealed more to my audience: southern boys who dreamed of monster trucks and machine guns and mounted deer heads. I wanted Counter-Strike more than anything; especially after my friends at school started playing, but my Dad didn’t see the appeal and wanted me to focus on the three G’s: girls, grades, and guns – and football. But we made a compromise: if I made all B’s in school that year, he would buy me a Dell PC and a copy of Counter-Strike. Needless to say, I studied real hard, and I got those B’s.

As I watched the doe chew leaves from the hardwood, I thought about what Dad told me years ago: “the best way to kill a deer is to shoot ’em while they’re standin’ with one side of their body facin’ ya; that way, ya aim true an’ make every shot count. Ya gotta be quick but silent an’ steady as a rock; that’s the key to bringin’ home the bag, son.” He would say while chewing tobacco as naturally as the doe chewed leaves, “this ‘ere is called a broadside shot an’ it’s the quickest way to kill a deer, son – ya know, they’re still livin’ animals and we don’t want ‘em sufferin’ too bad.”

Counter-Strike is a simple premise wrapped in layers of deep first-person-shooter mechanics; two sides – terrorists and counter-terrorists – firefight across everyday terrain with objectives such as bomb defusal and hostage rescue. The game oozes realism, as each gun is derived from a real world model and handles as one would expect; holding down left-click to rapid-fire – or ‘spraying’ – decreases your accuracy, while firing in short bursts – or ‘tapping’ – keeps your aim steady; holding the ctrl-key to crouch increases precision even further which mirrors the real world firing technique of kneeling with your rear knee placed on the ground and your other leg supporting the elbow of your forward arm. All weapons benefit from these precision mechanics, but the AWP benefits most; the AWP is a sniper rifle that kills in one shot – the drawback being that it requires a reload after being fired.

When I used the AWP – which was always – I pictured my opponent as deer and recalled what Dad told me about the broadside shot, and this advice carried me to Counter-Strike stardom. I became so proficient with the AWP that my friends called me “The AWP King” and I joined local tournaments full of confidence and verve.

Mesmerized – I continued to peer through the looking glass. The doe basked in stray beams piercing the canopy layer, only breaking posture to pluck leaves off the hardwood. My thoughts veered to the ancient rifle that trembled lightly in my hands, passed down from grandfather to father to son in The Ritual of the Hunt. I wondered to myself; did Dad tremble too? Did he hesitate before shooting his first deer? Why was I hesitating at all? To stop the trembling, I took a note from Counter-Strike and held the crtl-key to crouch; my right knee crunched into dry leaves as my left supported my forward arm while I readjusted the ancient rifle. I winked and peered through the looking glass once more, but this time the doe’s magnified eyes were staring back at me.

For our first local tournament, we faced a team composed of kids from our middle school. The winners of the tournament would win brand new gaming PCs. It was hosted at a local LAN Gaming Center called the Arena; a dark warehouse overflowing with computers jam-packed with the most popular computer games of 2001. The ambiance was shadow and fluorescent, like that of a jellyfish in the darkest recesses of the oceans. The Arena was the natural habitat of stoners, outcasts, and those who played Everquest and Doom; a place where both hardcore nerds and potential school shooters mingled freely as there was a surprising amount of overlap in their interests. My team pushed through this unholy union and started discussing strategies for the upcoming digital gunfights when the opposing team walked in; their leader was wheelchair-bound with thick glasses, greasy hair, and a band-tee for a group I had never heard of. My teammate Ryan – an older boy who had been held back several grades and expelled for attacking other students at least twice – pointed at the kid in the wheelchair and called him the f-slur of the homosexual variety and we laughed like a wicked pack of hyenas gyred around a human baby. An Arena employee heard this slur-slinging and gave us a warning, but we shrugged it off because we talked like this all the time – it made us feel superior when someone got offended.

*ancient violence consumes the LAN tournament

The tournament was not going well. The other team seemed to read our minds; we would go B and they would go A; we would go A and they would go B; we would try to camp at spawn but they would flashbang us into confusion and clean up in the aftermath; we would try to rush early but they would anticipate this and trap us in a pincer formation. And to top it off, the disabled boy was far more skilled with the AWP than I – his trigger finger was always seconds faster than mine. We lost the tournament and we were embarrassed, but we masked this embarrassment with the foulest language possible. We slung slurs like bullets at a drunken bar fight in a Wild West saloon.

The slur-slinging culminated in whirlwind-heat-and-flash as Ryan stood up and accused the disabled boy of cheating. I turned to face the altercation, but before I could do anything, Ryan grabbed the disabled boy by his long hair and was screaming slurs at him. Ryan then pulled the disabled boy’s hair with such force that it tornadoed him onto the floor and left a clump of bloody mess in Ryan’s clenched fist. He then started kicking the disabled boy in the gut, “this is what you get for cheating, you gimp fa—!” he shouted on repeat.

Horrified, I leapt in and grabbed Ryan from behind, but he was much stronger than myself and pushed me to the floor. Four Arena employees then jumped in and dragged Ryan off the disabled boy, who was moaning meekly between invocations of “mom” gurgled in spittle and hemoglobin.

The police were called, and an ambulance showed up just as the disabled boy’s mom arrived to pick up her mangled son. There was an exodus as the boy was wheeled out on a stretcher, mumbling incoherently. I watched as the mom hurried to her son’s side with tears swelling in her eyes. She turned to Ryan, who was being escorted by two police officers, and instead of screaming obscenities at him, she started to sob uncontrollably. I knew then that, even though Ryan had attacked the boy, I was just as much at fault as he was. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but I had dehumanized that boy into a stretcher.

The doe was unmoving, as if stunned by the glare of an ancient violence. I lifted my vision to catch a glimpse of her beyond the glass, but there was no illusion; she stared in confusion, as if asking a single question – “why?” I shifted my vision to the glass once more, expanding her forehead into a perfect target just when two small fawns emerged from the nearby brush. The fawns obscured my view as they nuzzled into their mother, but the doe remained resolute in her questioning. The fawns, noticing their mother’s focus, turned to me, and then they too stood resolute – questioning my ancient violence.

I thought to myself: “Three heads to hang on the wall. Dad would be proud.” But as I looked into the eyes of the fawn, I remembered the boy at the Arena. And as I looked at the doe, I remembered the mother sobbing. I remembered the violence, and just as I remembered this ancient violence, the fawns nuzzled their mother’s velvet head and she nuzzled back, and then they turned with a skip and trotted slowly into the wood, as if there was nothing to be afraid of – as if I was one with nature itself.

My finger eased off the ancient trigger of the ancient rifle, and I slung the ancient violence over my shoulder as I walked back to camp.

---

(Originally published 4/8/2024)

#ComputerGames #CounterStrike #Fiction #Ethics #ShortStory

I remember it as if it were last night. My cat – a strapping lad of gray shorthair named Digit – jumped through the open ground-floor apartment window onto my lap while I was sitting on the couch playing computer games with my roommate. The window was open not only to allow Digit free passage outside but also to filter the tobacco smoke that stained our lungs and jaundiced the light-colored walls. My roommate and I had Dreamcast controllers in hand and lit cigarettes dangling from our mouths and subtle glowers on our faces as we sat brand-new-to-adulthood and transfixed by the massive widescreen firing off psychedelic lightshows. The blues of hadoukens and the purples of reppukens flashed about inside puffs of cigarette smoke like ball lightning within the clouds of an alien planet. And although the room was loud, there was silence between us, for we were engaged in the digital-equivalent of a samurai honor duel and we were both great pretenders; pretending like we were engaged in just another friendly game of Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast; when, in reality, there was an intense clash of personalities playing out between the sounds of button mashing and pixelated fighters yelling the names of their ridiculous special-attacks and Satoshi Ise’s electro-infused drum-and-bass stage music.

Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 was originally developed and released by Capcom in August 2000 for the arcades; it was later released on Dreamcast in North America on November 8th, 2000. The origin story – the myth – is that the magazine Arcadia featured a cover with both The King of Fighters ‘98 and Street Fighter Alpha 3 titles a little too close together and readers misread this thinking it was “KOF vs. SF”; when this imaginary game didn’t manifest, fans of both series went unhinged with hate mail and thus: Capcom vs. SNK was born – or something. And while it wasn’t the first crossover between Capcom and SNK, it was the first to reach a wide audience outside of Japan, as the previous title – SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium – was only released for the Neo Geo Pocket Color; a handheld console that was poorly adopted in the West where Street Fighter and Pokemon infected the minds of young computer gamers like brain-eating amoebas. An updated version of this game, Capcom vs. SNK Pro, was released a year later – and the concept was so popular that it would eventually spawn a sequel, Capcom vs. SNK 2, which built upon the hip-hop back-alley beat-down eclecticism of Millennium Fight 2000 and further reinforced Capcom and SNK as the premier 2D-fighting game developers.

My roommate and I were on our centesimal round of Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 and I had not won a single match. I played Iori and Sakura; he played Ken and Yuri. I must have smoked half-a-pack of cigarettes because I was getting my ass handed to me on a very dirty ashtray. I persisted in total silence with a look of unbothered determination on my face; this faux-stoicism belied the fact that I was a raging storm inside. I could have stopped playing; I could have called it quits after the nth loss; but something like pride compelled me to keep going, and as I kept going, my playing got worse and the hole grew deeper until it was quickly approaching Hell. My roommate’s faux-stoicism was much simpler; with every knock-out: his confidence grew and his gamer-cred multiplied, and he would always have this over me because computer games were very serious back then and he dared not speak a word lest the fisticuffs escape the television-set and stain the shag carpet with blood. The digital-equivalent of the samurai honor duel was about to end in seppuku.

Capcom vs. SNK was revolutionary as it combined characters from rival developers and introduced the lesser-known SNK fighting games to a wider western audience initially put off by SNK’s realistic-yet-very-anime art style, especially when compared to Capcom’s more western-palatable cartoon-like aesthetics. Both art styles exist in this game, with characters drawn in either style depending on which “groove” was selected before character-selection. The crossover makes perfect sense as SNK’s fighting games were directly inspired by Capcom; SNK’s Fatal Fury: King of Fighters was designed by Takashi Nishiyama, the director of Street Fighter, and was envisioned as a spiritual successor to that game. The two companies often parodied each other; Dan from Street Fighter, a parody of Ryo from SNK’s Art of Fighting, who himself was a homage to Capcom’s Ryu. And while Dan may not be in Millennium Fight 2000, the game does include a roster of over 20 characters from each series. As with most 2D fighters, the controls are obtuse to newbies but intuitive to those familiar with the genre; players are encouraged to use an arcade stick or learn to slide their thumb in circles, half circles, and quarter circles on very-small-directional-pads to execute special-attacks. Both series use this input method so there’s nothing to learn coming from one or the other; thus, combining Capcom and SNK characters into a single game was a no-brainer.

*Iori rushes Ken in the digital equivalent of a samurai honor duel

Patience and practice of the key fundamentals are important with all 2D-fighting games and this is especially true for Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000; its 4-button control scheme, lack of true combos, and smaller skill list compared to the series it pulled from, make mastering the key fundamentals – footsies, blocking, looking for openings, and punishing – extremely important. You could master all a character’s inputs, learn all their moves and perform them perfectly, but if you didn’t time these moves correctly or space them out properly, you would fail every time. For example, Iori Yagami – my main character of choice in most SNK titles – has a super-special-attack called “Ura 108 Shiki: Ya Sakazuki” which can stun and heavily damage the opponent, but it’s blockable so throwing it out in a battle without respect to the opponent’s actions will result in the opponent blocking the attack and punishing you. In fact, one could bait these types of attacks and punish them with a simple low kick, and entire matches could be won doing this.

Even the most fancy quarter-circle-back-half-circle-forward-punch special-attack won’t save you if the opponent sees it coming

And that was why I failed to win a single match that dark night on that alien planet. I knew the cool moves but I didn’t know how to properly use them. I would fire a burning projectile, but my roommate would jump-kick over it. I would use a rush-down attack but my opponent would only block and punish me with a low-kick. I was bound for the floor. I realized what was happening early on but I couldn’t adapt to it because I was too focused on quarter-circle back and quarter-circle forward and getting those flashy special-attack kills. My roommate patiently punished every attack with normal punches and kicks while I was performing complicated inputs for cool-points from the gamer gods who never answered my prayers.

Several hours passed in silence. We both had to work in the morning and at a certain point it became too irresponsible to continue getting my ass beat. I said something like, “I have to get some sleep” and my roommate nodded and we went our separate ways without another word between us. We both knew what happened.

When the door closed behind him, only the miasma of angst and an embarrassed man-child were left behind. I stood silently as the Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 title screen flashed before my eyes, and my hands were trembling, feeling a wail building up inside me. My failures replayed over and over again in my head; over fifty rounds and no wins; my opponent didn’t perform a single special attack but still managed to defeat me. And all my quarter-circle forwards and half-circle backs only resulted in a full-blown quarter-circle meltdown. The Dreamcast controller I was holding dropped to the floor, and I fell to my knees with my face buried in my hands. As I was doing this, my roommate walked in to grab the lighter he left on the couch but, upon seeing my crumpled form, immediately turned around and left the room.

We never played Capcom vs. SNK again.

---

(Originally published on 4/8/2024)

#ComputerGames #Autobiographical #CapcomVsSNK #ShortStory

Listen to the audio version here.

---

I: Et in Arcadia Ego

“The passing of time, and all of its crimes, is making me sad again.” – Rubber Ring by The Smiths, Louder Than Bombs (1987)^#1

I.I: Summer in Arcadia

Betwixt red maple and palm sat Arcadian youth transfixed by dancing light.

Two boys sat on a small bed and another on the floor nearby. They were crammed in a tiny porch remodeled into a makeshift bedroom; the walls were windows and a sliding glass door revealed the living room while a patio door revealed the backyard and anything even resembling glass was covered by thick blackout curtains. The sun set, but the room was kept aglow by the epileptic flashing of a gray Magnavox cathode-ray tube actively working hypnotism upon the boys. Wires sprawled across the room like laser trip-mines while sounds of fiction and war – consecutive booming, warp and whoosh, ringing shrapnel, and screaming, both human and extraterrestrial – were occasionally drowned out by the uncontrollable laughter and expletive-ridden taunting of Arcadian youth.

All was well because school was out forever, and the extra-large thin-crust pepperoni pizza had just arrived. The boys had just torn into a new case of Diet Cherry Coke, and the only thing that mattered in that tiny pocket of the universe was dual-wielding pop and Xbox controllers, and, of course, the score in the Halo 2 deathmatch playing out on split-screens reflected in the eyes of Arcadian youth.

When the blue splashed into view and the guitar rang out like an engine’s rev before a Slash solo,^#2 every teenage trouble melted away like ice on a warm summer day and the boys were transfixed and true. The boys would then proceed to argue over who received the prestigious title of player-one; a luxury typically afforded to the home team, which bestowed the advantage of a larger screen-slice for the cutthroat deathmatches so seriously considered by these Arcadian youth.

Lockout was the go-to fan-favorite map: a blue-gray maze of open steel pathways mysteriously suspended midair. Lockout devolved into a race of who-gets-the-shotgun-and-sword-first, culminating in one player dominating the match by camping the central gravity-lift for easy kills – a tactic the boys called “hoarding the power weapons,” which was ridiculed severely, yet the lust for winning was so strong that they continued to do it despite the shame.

Ivory Tower was another popular choice, a tropical multi-leveled indoor jungle park with plenty of places to play hide-and-seek; the game-mode of choice was something the boys called “GoldenEye,” in which shields would be disabled and only magnums could be used; this resulted in a one-shot-instant-kill playstyle that relied on reaction-time and skill rather than hoarding power weapons. GoldenEye was very serious business often used to settle insipid disputes and one of the boys would usually end up stomping home in a huff afterwards.

Every flaw; every virtue; every vulnerability; every strength; every weakness – all would be revealed when dancing light reflected in the eyes of Arcadian youth.

*Lockout on the cathode-ray tube.

When the last slice of pizza was eaten and the bodies stopped respawning, and the boys got bored, they sneaked out of the backyard gate and walked to the neighborhood pool – which had closed hours ago. They swam chaotic before the neighbors called the police for noise ordinance violations, and when the police arrived, all they found were unused towels and a green shirt adorned with the words “The Smiths” – the only evidence left behind at the scene of the crime of Arcadian youth.

This was summer break in Arcadia between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. This was before cigarettes, before drugs, before alcohol, before nine-to-five, and before bills.

This was my time in Arcadia – my golden years.

I.II: The Arcadian Tribunal

Miles was a local youth of Arcadia and he was exalted.

Miles, also known as TauntButton, was younger than your not-so-humble narrator by only months. He lived three yards behind my grandma’s Arcadian summer-home. We met when I was ten years old; I ventured to the fishing pond behind grandma’s house and there he was sitting on a big rock with his tackle box: fishing.^#3 I asked if he wanted to play Super Smash Bros. and it was instant kinship.

Miles was of average height and had hair like a sifting pan full of gold with most of the dirt filtered out. His favorite song was “Helicopter” by Bloc Party.^#4 He was the most popular boy within a fifty-mile radius and seemed to be friends with the entire county and then-some. Lithe and handsome, Miles was built like a triathlon wonderkin. He could run up a tree without his hands and dunk a basketball with such force that the ball would burst at the seams. Late at night, when we played cops-and-robbers with the other neighborhood youth, Miles would hide in tall trees and never be found; I would lambaste this behavior, but he kept doing it out of pure contrarianism. He was charming and defiant in his own way. He had type-2 diabetes – the doctors said it was genetic – and he would prick himself with an insulin pen every few hours to charge up like a Sangheili energy shield; we would joke that he was shooting up heroin and this was peak comedy when sneaking-the-joke on those not-in-the-know.

Miles had a keen interest in computer games, but his parents were strict on the when-and-what; his mom wouldn’t let him play Super Smash Bros. because she believed it gave him nightmares; so he used my grandma’s house as a safe haven from his parents’ prying eyes. Miles’ parents would go on to claim that I corrupted him with rebellion and computer games, but our relationship was much deeper than that. I was different from his neighborhood friends, who were more interested in sports tournaments and fishing, and I was exotic by virtue of being a cynical nerd full of computer-game-and-anime knowledge. I had just enough charm to be intriguing instead of creepy.

Miles was practical, outdoorsy, and naive but very curious. I was isolated, reclusive, cynical, and a know-it-all-while-knowing-very-little. Miles and I were opposite and magnetic, but we had one thing in common: we were contrary to the core, very competitive, and, most importantly, we were obsessed with each other.

*Arcadian fishing pond.

The third of the Arcadian Tribunal was Matt, also known as SupaSmallSlice.

Matt’s house shared a yard with my grandma’s summer home, a fact unknown until Miles and I stumbled upon him at the pond; he was fishing by himself, and – just like Miles – I asked him if he wanted to play computer games and it was instant kinship.

Matt was different; he was far less youthful than the rest of us, being four years older. Matt’s old age combined with his adamantine meekness gelled into a predatory aura that neither Miles nor myself picked up on immediately. Our youthful naivety paid off because Matt’s predatory aura never materialized into anything other than a very tall, slightly awkward-looking older boy just sort of standing there silently waiting for you to tell him what to do. Being alone with Matt was like playing host to a forever-bored-and-undecided person that would not leave because they were too coy to speak up; this was the primary reason I strived never to be alone with him.

Matt was the ultimate third wheel, someone for Miles and I to direct our adolescent rage and mockery toward. Whenever we wanted a third player in a computer game, we would get his attention by throwing rocks at his upstairs windows because we were scared of his father – a short, bulging man with a toad-like face that possessed the charisma of a goblin – opening the front door and killing us. Miles and I would secretly team up against Matt in Halo 2, and if Matt noticed, his meekness prevented him from telling us. If the tables turned and Miles or Myself teamed up with Matt: it was a good sign that some deeply extrasensory interpersonal angst was bubbling up in Arcadia.

Miles and I were unfair and cruel to Matt; we never treated him with the respect he deserved, something I regret because we were Matt’s only friends. Matt introduced us to Japanese Role-Playing Games, starting with Final Fantasy VIII, which threw us down a path of geekdom that we still travel to this day. Matt was always nice and polite and would do anything we asked of him; drive us to Wendy’s late at night or to the computer game store or the movie theater. Matt was forever eager to please, and perhaps this was due to the eldritch weirdness which prevented him from making friends his own age.

To these Arcadian youth, Matt was a sideshow, a freak, a weirdo; but he was our friend. And after years of friendship, my aunt – who eventually moved into my grandma’s home – would frequently ask Matt to babysit her teenage son.

And that completed the Arcadian Tribunal: Miles, Matt, and Myself.

But there was a fourth Arcadian youth, my aunt’s teenage son; my cousin.

Jake.

II: Et in Arcadia Insciens

“Drowning here in summer’s cauldron.” – Summer’s Cauldron by XTC, Skylarking (1986)^#5

II.I: Jake, Pongo, and Perdita

His life up until this point had been Pongo and Perdita, and when it flashed before his eyes he remained instinctual and unawares.

Every Tuesday night betwixt red maple and palm, Matt babysat Jake at my grandma’s Arcadian summer home. My aunt had just divorced and moved in with my grandma, bringing along her son, Jake; and since I only lived there during summers and Jake was now a permanent resident, my room was given to Jake, and I was moved to the porch. The porch had recently been remodeled into a makeshift bedroom, now covered in blackout curtains and the epileptic flashing of a Magnavox cathode-ray tube and the sounds of The Smiths’ “Louder Than Bombs” and occasionally John Mayer’s “Room for Squares” and The Strokes’ “Is This It?”

My aunt didn’t trust me to watch Jake, so she chose Matt instead – the older and more outwardly mature of the Arcadian Tribunal – and he was paid handsomely for his services. Miles and I sat in front of the Magnavox transfixed by dancing light while Matt was off making sure Jake wasn’t hurting himself with kitchen utensils or breaking glass on his head or smearing feces on the walls or urinating in grandma’s bed or wandering outside into oncoming traffic or removing his dirty diaper before hiding it somewhere that wouldn’t be discovered until weeks after it had permanently stunkified the house – which was already stunkified and only getting more stunkified by the day. The sounds of clapping, screaming, banging on the walls, and door slamming were cacophonous during these babysitting sessions as Jake made it clear he did not like being away from his mama.

The doctors said Jake was autistic; they said he had always been this way, but his mom insisted otherwise: “He was a normal baby before the vaccines – he was even saying words like ‘mama’ and ‘dada’ before those damn shots.”

Explaining Jake through vaccine conspiracy was easier to process than the truth, and in the end: it doesn’t even matter.^#6 Jake was Jake; he yelled, moaned, clapped, and enjoyed watching Disney films – and only Disney films – on repeat. There was nothing behind his eyes except complacency and primal rage in cycles, and if you handed him an Xbox controller, he would likely swing it – hard – into your face before clapping loudly and wandering off. Jake couldn’t speak a word, yet he was older than me by a year, incredibly handsome with a distinct pudginess to his face, blue-eyes-to-die-for, and dark waves of hair. Jake was the apple of many eyes – until he started screaming and taking his diaper off.

Jake was Arcadian and kin but impossible to connect with. The thought often crossed my mind: in an alternate universe, Jake would have been hoarding power weapons with us on Lockout, but instead: One Hundred and One Dalmatians one hundred and one times and counting.

*Pongo, Perdita, and pups transfixed by dancing light.

Jake lived in Arcadia unawares – but, maybe, we all did.

One thing was certain: this was it for Jake – all he would ever know. I accepted this about Jake; Miles accepted it; Matt accepted it. This acceptance brought us closer together. We were comfortable being around someone who smeared feces on walls; acceptance of this mental handicap was the measure-of-a-man in our Arcadia. The Arcadian Tribunal protected Jake; we loved Jake and he was exalted. And if Jake was too much for a person to handle: that person had a ways to go before they were allowed into our Arcadia – they were not even willing to step through the front door to begin with.

And on the topic of front doors …

II.II: Diaper Pyre

Jake would often open the front door and wander around lost in Arcadia, and because of this: his mom installed a second door ahead of the front door. The second door’s knob was installed backward, the locking mechanism was on the outside facing the elements, preventing Jake from unlocking the door from the inside and thus escaping into the Arcadian wilds. The Trick Door – as we would come to call it – would require some arm-contortionism to lock from the outside after you had already entered the home but before the door fully closed; this was followed by a quick twist on the doorknob from the inside to make sure it locked properly. This Trick Door Lock Procedure was a crucial courtesy when entering the home; a life-or-death version of taking your shoes off.

One warm Arcadian summer night, my aunt and grandma left the house – dancing – and Matt was babysitting Jake. Miles and I were tagging along, playing Halo 2, until Jake started slapping himself on the legs and moaning as a wet gurgling emanated from his lower half.

This was a portent; the warm summer night was about to become much warmer.

Jake had diarrhea – bad diarrhea – and it would not stop. Jake was flowing foul for what seemed like forever; diaper after diaper after diaper of filth. We started to panic as the three of us repeatedly exited the front door to dispose of diapers in the garbage and the trash cans were nearing maximum capacity and the smell – my god, the smell.

The Arcadian Tribunal was defeated – we didn’t know what to do.

Fifteen years old and full of foolish ideas: I suggested we burn the diapers in the backyard. This idea was met with great fanfare; like most jaded millennials, we had pyromaniacal urges that were waiting to be fulfilled, and this was the perfect excuse to fulfill them. We secured a lighter and some gasoline from the backyard and this was how we started down the path of flame.

We piled the dung-drenched Depends^#7 atop stray wood, poured gasoline all over, and tossed a burning piece of paper onto the uncontained pile of incredibly stupid ideas. The diapers burst into flames like the flared farts of a burning man. Stool flavored shit smoke escaped the confines of the backyard and spread a putridity so potent that it was a pox upon the entire neighborhood.

*Jackals and grunts huddle around bonfire of questionable origin.

The diapers burned in effigy to our intoxicating Arcadian innocence but, like youth, they didn’t burn for long; the gasoline and wood did most of the burning, and we quickly learned that diapers are mostly fireproof – most of the fecal matter burned away, the absorbent turned to mush, and the outer material had charred to black. We ended up exactly where we started, only now with a big ball of rancid goop.

Crickets and crackling were the only sounds penetrating the now-much-warmer Arcadian summer night.

Until Miles spoke up: “Where’s Jake?”

II.III: Wandering Around Lost

There was a boy drowning in emotions beyond his understanding; water filled his lungs while he flailed wildly in the ankle-deep waters of a kiddie pool.

I could see a nervous smile forming on Matt’s face – it dawned on him that he had defaulted on babysitting duties in pursuit of pyromania and he was visibly distraught behind his eldritch weirdness. “I’ll go check on him,” Matt said as he stood from his chair and made a beeline for the patio door.

My mind was preoccupied with figuring out how to explain the rat-king of warm diaper goop to my grandma and aunt, but also with Miles’ simple question repeating in my mind. And due to a certain incident involving girls in middle school, I had developed a sixth sense for calamity that was often way-off-the-mark,^#8 but I was feeling it now and it felt like bullseye. The gastrointestinal black hole, reminiscent of a trust-fall with someone you wouldn’t trust at all, grew as I watched Miles prod charred fecal matter with a stick. The feeling of doom grew so strong that I stood up and followed Matt into the house to check on Jake myself.

As I entered the back porch, Halo 2 was idling on the campaign section we had left idle in favor of pyrotechnics and a soldier kept repeating, “At this rate, we’re never gonna win this war!” and this transfixed me briefly until Matt approached me with a look of Holy Terror painted across his face. He said two words: “Jake’s gone.”

My transfixation broken – “What do you mean, he’s gone?”

Matt’s timbre trembled in barely-contained panic, “The door’s unlocked. I checked everywhere.”

My aunt’s worst fear was becoming reality; Jake was wandering around lost in the Arcadian wilds. My eyes grew wide at the very thought, “Who was the last to go out the front door?” My teenage brain instantly jumped to the blame-game as to proactively deflect punishment from myself when my aunt arrived home and realized her son was missing.

Then Miles walked in – looking smooth as always – only to see us standing there arguing about who left the door unlocked. “What’s up?” Miles said, only to be met with the faces of the might-as-well-be-dead. “Jake’s gone, isn’t he?” He said without a shred of fear in his voice, “well he couldn’t have made it far, let’s go look for him.”

My aunt and grandma wouldn’t get home for another hour, so maybe we could fix this before anyone noticed – maybe we could find Jake ourselves.

We wouldn’t bother to check the neighborhood pool because it was locked at eight o’clock and would require Jake to climb over a fence to get in – something he couldn’t do. And it was doubtful that Jake would get hit by a car, as it was late and there weren’t many cars out at this time of night. The worst possibility was that Jake fell into the pond and drowned, but the pond was shallow, and if he had fallen in, we should be able to drag him out before he hurt himself – if the neighborhood crocodile didn’t get to him first.

We decided to take a three-pronged approach. Miles would check the fishing pond; if Jake fell in, Miles was the most well equipped to get him out. Matt would rev up his Toyota Celica and drive every side-street and cul-de-sac; if Jake was wandering the roads, Matt would find him. I would go through a side-path near the house that led to a playground; Jake loved going there so maybe he wandered there instinctively.

*Night; Arbiter searches the Arcadian fishing pond; clubhouse and pool seen in the distance.

But it was hopeless – each path was a dead end, and Jake was nowhere to be found.

The Arcadian Tribunal came full circle and regrouped betwixt red maple and palm; defeated and dejected. The soldier on the Magnavox repeated the words, “At this rate, we’re never gonna win this war!” before I forcefully silenced him by kicking the power button on the Xbox – the games were over, and my aunt would be home any minute now, and then my life would be over too. I would be banished from Arcadia forever.

Matt suggested we call the police. The police would illuminate Arcadia with flashlights and find the missing boy within minutes but then our paradise would crumble and the game would truly be over.

As if living in a ‘90s slasher-film, I decided for us: we would not be calling the police, at least not yet. “I’m going to check the pool,” I said after a round of thoughtful pacing – my words were deflated and blue but belayed a sense of seriousness that was rare in these parts of Arcadia.

“Matt, stay here – if they get home before us, try to keep them distracted; say Jake’s asleep in his room or something.” I said as I scoured for a flashlight in a nearby cabinet. Matt’s eldritch awkwardness would deflect any suspicion as it made him impossible to read even when lying, and he was immediately amiable – as always.

“Miles, come with me; I’m going to need you to jump the fence and unlock the gate.” Miles was contrary as usual, “What’s the point? The gate’s locked – no way Jake could climb that fence.” I found the flashlight then glared at him with a graveness he had never seen from me before, and as I made my way toward the patio door, Miles followed suit without a word.

Spontaneously, the plan had taken form, and I strode out of the backyard with a feigned confidence so convincing that I appeared like the leader of an Arcadian Battle Regiment or: The Arcadian Youth League.

Miles and I had to travel through four yards, around the rim of the fishing pond, and over a fence to get to the clubhouse pool. I flicked on my flashlight as we crept through the verdant alley between my grandma’s house and Matt’s house. A black cat ran from one bush to the next. It looked like Chips, my grandma’s rescue, but I couldn’t be sure. Through our creeping, we made it beyond the second yard, but the third house had an open yard with a dog pacing back and forth. I took a gamble and bolted across the edge. The yard was on the border of the fishing pond, and I was so focused on not falling into the water that my foot snagged a root, and my flashlight went flying into the air, and my face went headfirst into the dog’s dominion.

Miles yelled something out as he caught up with me and grabbed at my shirt, but it was too late; the dog had arrived. There was no barking, no snarling, only wetness on my cheek followed by a thick layer of slobber. The dog was licking my face and wagging their tail. I got to my knees and cupped the dog’s head in my hands; it looked like a Golden Retriever in the summer moonlight, and I pet the dog’s head before nudging them away. The dog sauntered off into a nearby shadow and returned with something thick in their mouth – a bone? No, it was my flashlight; the glass was broken, and the switch was in the off position, but it still turned on when flicked, albeit with the flashlight equivalent of a whimper: a flicker. I pointed the cone of light at the dog – a Golden Retriever, confirmed – and then to Miles, who was standing there with a blank look on his face: “Are you the dog whisperer or something?”

*Jake’s home in Arcadia.

We took the incident with the dog as a sign of good fortune and crept with newfound confidence through the final yard. We made it to the clubhouse and walked toward the pool courtyard gate. I felt a nudge on my leg and looked down; it was the dog. They followed us. I patted the dog on the head and gave them a “Good dog” and then placed my hand on the top of the gate. “Alright, Miles, go ahead and –” I paused as the gate slowly opened with just a gentle touch.

Miles and I looked at each other, our eyes widening in revelation. Someone forgot to lock the gate – just like we forgot to lock the Trick Door.

All three of us rushed into the poolside courtyard and looked around frantically. I circled the edge of the pool, shining my flashlight into the water, but there was nothing except pennies and pool toys. Then the dog raised their wet nose to the sky and sniffed with purpose before bolting off into a corner of the courtyard consumed by dense shadow.

Miles and I followed the dog with purpose. The flashlight was dimming but still caused shadows to shiver and flee with some hesitation. Once we got close enough, we saw the dog standing on the edge of a kiddie pool, extending their head over the water as if signaling at something with their nose. I pointed my flashlight beyond the dog’s snout, and that’s when I saw it.

Jake’s body; floating; eyes closed and moonward. He was naked, and a diaper was floating near his head. The leaked contents of the diaper contaminated the waters around him. There was a gloom in the gravity so powerful that it stopped the Earth’s rotation.

The dog whimpered. Miles was staring at the frozen Earth beneath him. There were no words. He slowly removed his phone from his pocket and handed it to me – “you do it.” Neither of us knew CPR, so it was the only option. I nodded solemnly and started dialing the three numbers we had been avoiding this whole time.

But just then, there was a cough. I stopped dialing and looked over to Miles. “Are you fucking with me?” I glowered. But no, there was another cough, the sound of disturbed waters, and a moan like the moan of a boy obsessed with Pongo and Perdita. I swung the flashlight toward the kiddie pool, and there he was in all his naked glory.

He clapped loudly while walking circles in the ankle-deep waters of the kiddie pool, and his manhood swung wild like the wind. Jake was alive. Miles and I turned to each other, both stupefied, and we started laughing louder than we had ever laughed before.

When the laughter stopped, I grabbed Jake’s wrist and led him out of the courtyard. Before exiting through the gate, Miles turned to me and said, “hey, where did that dog go?”

The dog was gone, and as we returned home through the yards of Arcadia, the Golden Retriever was nowhere to be found.

III. Mea Aurea Annos

“The only thing true is nothing can last.” – My Golden Years by The Lemon Twigs, A Dream Is All We Know (2024)^#9

Betwixt red maple and palm sits a man in his thirties transfixed by dancing light.

When I decided to replay Halo 2 in January of 2024, it was because I wanted to prove to Miles – and my younger self – that I could beat the game on Legendary difficulty – something I was never able to do during My Time in Arcadia. And when the marine in Chapter 1 said, “standard formation – little bastards up front, big ones in back”,^#10 I knew I was in for a ride, and for a moment, I was fifteen again.

I soon found out that Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty is an ouroboros affair of trial-and-error and pure rage. Every encounter is death, and every respawn only takes you a centimeter closer to victory. If it had bonfires, character builds, and a third-person perspective, it would be Dark Souls – just far more frustrating and tedious and just not fun at all. Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty is only two weapons – the Plasma Pistol and the Battle Rifle – because everything else is a pea-shooter that doesn’t do sufficient shield damage; without the Plasma Pistol, every enemy turns into a minute-long bullet-sponge demonspawn that actively casts hair-loss magic on the player through the monitor; and since the Plasma Pistol can’t actually kill anything, the Battle Rifle has to be on swap to finish the job. Halo 2 on Legendary is why male-pattern baldness exists. Halo 2 on Legendary is why I pray for early onset Alzheimer’s so I can forget about all the time I wasted charging up Plasma Pistols and game-overing to grunts because every enemy has perfect aim and the jackals – my god – the jackals.

Alzheimer’s – that’s a strange thing, isn’t it? Just forgetting. Arcadia, lost…

If I were a masochist, I would consider Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty to be the greatest computer game of all time.

I did complete Halo 2 on Legendary, but I had no fun doing it – so why did I actually do it?

The truth is: when I decided to replay Halo 2 in January of 2024, it was because I wanted to be on the porch-turned-bedroom in front of the Magnavox. I wanted to hear my autistic cousin clapping and groaning behind the sounds of warp and whoosh. I wanted Miles and Matt to walk through my office door and sit down next to me as if no time had passed at all. I wanted to see the fishing pond through the eyes of fifteen-years-old. I wanted to return to Arcadia – my golden years.

It’s not just me – I see it everywhere. The computer game community, especially, is full of people just like me, obsessed with their youth – ignoring the present.

Nostalgia trespasses our minds like children with flashlights; highlighting the good, leaving the bad covered in shadow. So many of my preferences are formed from nostalgia’s sweet embrace, and I can point to the exact moment that I am trying to recreate each time. The existence of this essay is evidence of the fact that I am obsessed with the past; I could have written about my daughter, or my son, or my wife, but no – it’s not nostalgic enough yet. They say midlife crisis kicks in between the ages of forty and sixty, but it feels like I have a midlife crisis every day. And every time I try to recreate these treasured experiences, the magic becomes less potent – the feeling slips further away, and the thing is a little more bastardized than it once was.

My childhood is wandering around lost, and I am in the dark with a dying flashlight looking for Jake.

*Master Chief overlooks fading Arcadia.

Miles went to college for mechanical engineering. He works in an automobile factory now. Occasionally, I still play computer games with him online, and we talk on Discord. He’s still into anime and computer games – maybe because of my influence. We live multiple states apart, and our friendship isn’t nearly as strong, but every time we talk, one of the stories in this essay inevitably comes up. I went to his wedding back in 2018. I don’t think his wife has ever liked me.

Matt moved back in with his parents; the same house in the same room with the same window we used to throw rocks at. Matt hasn’t changed much, if anything: his weirdness is even more eldritch than ever before. He’s gone from ultra-fit to mirroring his father to somewhere in-between, and he’s still as meek as ever. It seems like I’m still his only friend, as every time I visit my grandma’s house, he’s up there in his room. I’m not scared of his dad anymore. I walk right in and go upstairs, and there’s Matt: sitting in front of a few computer monitors playing old episodes of Quantum Leap while peculiar new-age music plays softly in the background and incense form a thick smoke throughout the room. It’s all very Lovecraftian, but my aunt still trusts him enough to let him drive my grandma to her ballroom dancing every Tuesday night.

My grandma can’t drive anymore – she has Alzheimer’s disease now.

And Jake, he still lives in Arcadia unawares. Clapping, moaning, taking his diaper off, and watching Pongo and Perdita. But one day, he too will change just like the rest of us. The doctors say his condition will only get worse – he’ll start forgetting; one day, he won’t even know who his mama is. But that’s not so different from everyone else – is it? Alzheimer’s: Arcadia just slipping away.

Some say the only thing true is nothing can last; everything fades away and nothing is forever. If the only thing true is nothing can last – then maybe we should treat every year like our golden years; maybe we should live in the moment.

This essay exists not only to wallow in nostalgia, but also to chronicle my life – in case I forget.

This essay will function as a Golden Retriever in the dark.

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Footnotes:

#1. https://youtu.be/GG1ZYByvfqQ #2. https://youtu.be/4bMoHIllZOc #3. https://howdoyouspell.cool/forrest/tactics-ogre-reborn-ruminations-on-resentment-regret-and-retribution #4. https://youtu.be/2R6S5CJWlco #5. https://youtu.be/3DRUnkkjkds #6. https://youtu.be/eVTXPUF4Oz4 #7. https://www.depend.com/en-us/incontinence-products/protection-with-tabs #8. https://howdoyouspell.cool/forrest/no-disc-1998-seatbelts #9. https://youtu.be/jnylB5ylyw4 #10. https://halo.bungie.org/misc/h2dialogue/marines/cairo_littlebastards.mp3

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(Originally published on 2/11/2024)

#ComputerGames #Autobiographical #Halo2 #ShortStory