Nerdosity

Perhaps this summer I have aged backwards and become, once again, a twelve year-old boy. When I was a twelve year-old boy I was a huge nerd, and I am reaching impressive new levels of nerdiness. Ladies and gentlemen, the facts:

• My friend from college has got me getting back into Magic: The Gathering. Gabe dug up my old cards for me, and I have been building decks and realizing how hopelessly outclassed my cards from the mid-nineties are compared to the new stuff. My creatures stand no chance! As much as I love the game, what I really want to do is buy a booster pack, rip into the foil and smell that vacuum-sealed fresh-ink scent all new Magic cards used to have. It is the smell of my young nerdhood.
• I have been babysitting Kaylee at Gabe and Amanda's house, which seems to have a never-ending supply of DiGiornio pizza. DiGiornio pizza is my weakness--once I bake one, it is hard for me not to eat the entire thing. I love it, and I have been eating it almost every day for lunch. Turns out when you eat pizza almost every day, you get really greasy. Greasy hair, greasy skin, lots of zits... and yet I can't help myself. DiGiornio truly is the food of the gods. Soon I will be stuffing it into my head--which will be attached to my ginormous blob of a body by a neck the circumference of a five gallon bucket--while I drink Mountain Dew and play World of Warcraft.
• I'm not at WoW yet (nor will I ever be), but I am enjoying the hell out of Assassin's Creed 2, which, believe it or not, is better than the first one (Holtmeier take note). I play it on Gabe's PS3 when the young ward is sleeping or willing to entertain herself. There's even more great stabby action, and I'm learning a ton about renaissance Italy. It's pretty cool when I can play a video game and nerd out over architecture, art, medieval politics, etc.
• That same friend who got me back into Magic is exposing me to a bunch of really solid electronica (cheers, Lindsey). I highly recommend Discovery, Jonsi, Passion Pit, and especially Miike Snow. I know electronica isn't really nerdy--it's rather hip at the moment, as far as I can tell--but I can't shake my old techno and electronica stereotypes: ravers, comp-sci students, weird skinny guys who do modtracking and never leave their rooms. Well, the music is damn good anyway.
• Up until this morning, I have had no car for a while, which means most of my social interactions have been through texting, gchat, and Facebook. Ugh.
• I am reading a book about John Romero and John Carmack, the two guys who designed and programmed Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. It's a fascinating book full of lots of cool details about how video game development worked in the nineties.

Well, that's about it. There are other, non-nerdy ways I'm spending my time, too: taking Kaylee on walks, playing catch with dogs, listening to the Avett Brothers (awesome, Kate!), other stuff. More updates soon!

Fun Spot is the Spot for Fun

I'm so sorry that this is so late. I visited Funspot two Sundays ago, and I'm just now getting to blog about it. Life and school have both been kind of kicking my ass, but right now I'm just too burnt out to do serious writing, so I'm blogging instead.

Laconia, NH is a weird little tourist spot on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, full of water slides, rock walls, and minigolf courses. It also has Funspot, the largest arcade in the world. No kidding. The largest arcade in the world is in some little shitty rundown lakeside resort town in New Hampshire. Who knew? It's got around 250 arcade games. It's several stories. It's huge, and it's my own little nerd heaven.

But Funspot isn't just full of games, it's full of old games. It's home to the American Classic Arcade Museum, a group dedicated to preserving old machines from the 70s and 80s. It is also the setting for the second half of the fantastic documentary King of Kong, a film about two men (one from Redmond, WA!) vying for the top score in Donkey Kong--if you haven't seen this, you have to. It's amazing.

We spent hours at Funspot and I feel like I barely scratched the surface. There are so many more games I want to play, and some I want to beat (looking at you TMNT and Simpsons). Here are some pics.

Did I mention they have a bar with cheap Stella Artois?

Ashley playing Donkey Kong on the machine that set the world record.

NERD HEAVEN.

Gabe used to talk about this game all the time. Finally played it in the arcades. I have to say, the laserdisc technology is pretty impressive for the early '80s, but the game itself sucks.

This is Computer Space, the world's first arcade game. Sadly, it was being repaired.

This game was also shut down for repairs. If anybody can tell me what it is about just by looking at the cabinet, I will give you fifty dollars.

Fall Traditions

Every fall, as Halloween approaches, my teeth begin to ache and I salivate more than usual. It's time for candy corn.


I gorge myself on this stuff every October. It's a new thing. I never touched it as a kid, not even in high school or early college. But then when I lived with Seamus and Ashley, in the fall of '06, I got really sick and spent a week on the couch, playing Final Fantasy XII, watching movies, sweating, dying, and eating nothing but candy corn and loaves of french bread. Ever since then, candy corn is fall comfort food. I bought a tub at Hannaford's yesterday.

I also need to accompany it with a video game, so I started back in on Link to the Past. What a fantastic game. I played it until I could eat no more candy corn and felt guilty about not doing homework, then I stopped. Also, if you haven't noticed by now, my secret goal here at thisisnolongertheroadtrip is to write about video games until I have driven everybody I know into a state of coma-like boredom.

Ashley and I also bought a scented candle, which is SOP for me in autumn as well. It's my favorite season. School is really, really time-consuming, so I haven't had a lot of time to get out and do things that are actually fun/worth writing about. Ashley and I did, however, buy our plane tickets home. We're getting out of here on the 11th of December and spending almost six weeks in Washington! Get ready Bellingham, friends who still live in the area, and Gabe and Amanda and Kaylee. I also got a second job, working as an online tutor for Smarthinking. I'm going through their training program right now and getting pretty excited about it. I'll have students again, sort of! I really miss teaching, and this will bring a bit of it back to me. The training manual is full of funny composition neologisms. I am an e-structor who focuses on HOCs before I focus on LOCs when I am writing an asynchronous tutorial. They also won't me to know that "although you can't see your students, you can still touch them."

I will, however, refrain from touching them.

My Obsessive Nerdery

I've been thinking a lot about old video games recently. Yesterday I watched my friend Patrick breeze through Super Mario Brothers like he had just beaten it yesterday. He knew every secret, every warp, every hidden block—like it was encoded into his genes. Nathan fared almost as well. They trash talked while they played. Patrick, from Alabama, would stand up and yell “BOOM!” every time he pulled off a difficult maneuver.

Nothing makes me feel more at home than playing a Mario game with somebody. This is what I'm into right now: how junk entertainment like NES games from the 80s can worm its way into our brains and hearts, into our art and music. They can become something bigger than computer code on a dusty gray chipboard. If I were still taking theory classes at WWU, I would be preparing to write a paper on how vintage video games affect discourse and aesthetics. Since I'm in an MFA, I'm brainstorming ways to slip this stuff into fiction without it coming off as indulgent, nerd-elitist, or overly referential. It's hard, but, to me at least, it's important.

So it turns out Ashley and I are both dripping with Nostalgia. In that spirit, here's the transcript from one of my favorite scenes in Mad Men, when Don Draper sells the idea of the slide carousel to Kodak.

Nostalgia.
It’s delicate, but potent…
Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound.
It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.
This device… isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine.
It goes backwards, forwards.
It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.
It’s not called the Wheel.
It’s called the Carousel.
It lets us travel the way a child travels.
Around and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

Bring on the emo comments, Chelsea!

Another Quick Update

• On Saturday night, Ashley and I went to the beginning of the year MFA program party. Lots of cool people here, but Ashley was the only person there from the MA. Matt and Patrick, who hosted the party in their tiny second-story apartment, were gracious hosts and quite entertaining. Matt is from Seattle and he, Ash and I commiserated about the sorry state of mountains and coffee in this state. As much as I love Ashley, it's been just her and me for more than a month--it's nice to talk to new people.

• Ever since I got accepted here I've had that kind of stereotypical MFA thought in my head. "Everybody else is going to be working on a novel. I've got to start one, got to get one going." After an aborted attempt this summer, I stumbled on a story to tell completely by accident on the second day of classes. It could lead nowhere, or it could be my thesis. Right now I'm having fun planning out parts of it in my head.

• I got a job! I'm working at the Office of Conduct and Mediation, keeping my fingers crossed that the raise they hinted at in the interviews will happen sooner rather than later, and that I can pull in some more hours than what I've started with. I start tomorrow. Basically I'm the principal's office: I keep track of academic sanctions, make sure people who got busted for drinking on-campus end up in the drug and alcohol awareness classes, possibly mediate low-level student disputes, that kind of thing.

• It's easy to lose an hour or two to Legend of Zelda. I've forgotten what an addictive little game it is. It's so good I'm thinking of playing through the SNES sequel next, although I should really be writing instead of gaming. And yes, Holtmeier, that's how I roll.

Gold cartridge, yo.

What I'm enjoying right now

• Mad Men. This incredibly-written series has almost succeeded in washing the bad taste of Lost out of my mouth. It's clever, it's stylish, it doesn't sanitize early 1960s America (all the characters smoke copiously and cringe-worthy sexism abounds), and it treats its characters and structure in a way I'm used to seeing in literary fiction, not television. Very interesting, and I highly recommend you check it out.

Don Draper, where have you been all my life?

• Good old Gatsby. I'm rereading parts of The Great Gatsby for my novel craft class, and I'm falling once again into Fitzgerald's beautiful prose. Most writers, when going for that concise expression of deep truths in poetic prose, come off as pretentious. Fitzgerald just comes off as mind-stompingly awesome.

"Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!"

• Old School video games. I spent a few Wii points on Mega Man 9, which is a contemporary game (released late in 2008) designed to look like it's a twenty year-old NES game. Twenty-four colors, primitive music, two-button controls, and sprite flicker if too much is happening on the screen; it's like it popped out of a time warp from 1987, and I love it. It is also, like the old Mega Man games, so hard I sometimes want to throw my Wiimote across the room. Mega Man 9, and some conversations with Brett about the games he's been playing have got me itching to pull out my NES games. I think the original Zelda might be next.

This blog post has been brought to you by The Old School.

Fleet Foxes

Tropical storm Danny is passing by New Hampshire, and bringing with it quite a bit of rain. It started yesterday evening and it's still going--feels like home. I'm sitting in my newly cleaned apartment, looking at the rain fill up the parking lot and soak the deck, listening to Fleet Foxes.



For those who don't know, Fleet Foxes is from Seattle, and I can think of no better soundtrack to a cold, dark, rainy Northwest day. It almost feels like Bellingham here, but I know the rain will quit and we'll be back to our regular humid hell. Oh well, here's another Fleet Foxes song.



Nerd bonus: The Fleet Foxes sound is partly inspired by Robin Pecknold's memories of old Final Fantasy music. A man after my own heart.

Some random bits

These are some things that have been on my mind lately.

• The tallest mountain in New Hampshire is Mount Washington, at 6,288 feet. Occasionally I see cars with bumper stickers that say “This car climbed Mt. Washington!” I'm not sure if New Hampshirites intend these bumper stickers to be ironic, but to a Washingtonian, they're pretty funny. The very fact that you can drive your car to the top of the “mountain” pretty much negates your bragging rights. I need to make friends with some locals and see if they really think Mount Washington is all that.

• We finally have a bed! Hooray!

• The heat and humidity here are horrendous. Today I watched a local weather report on mute. The weatherman was pointing to his humidity scale, which ranged from “Negligible,” up through “Some humidity” and “High humidity,” to “Oppressive” (70% and above). He was pointing at oppressive. Walking outside or onto my balcony is like walking into a sauna.

• The other day, on the way down to Boston, I saw a new Volkswagen Beetle that was the exact shade of cheesy orange as the Gold Chocobos from Final Fantasy VII. The color brought memories of that video game, which I haven't played all the way through since I was in high school, flooding back. Other Final Fantasy fans? I'll bet you remember this? Eh? Eh? Matt? Eh?
  

Yep, that's the color right there.

Things are slowing down a bit. Ashley and I are watching a lot of Lost, and when we're all caught up I'll share my thoughts. I've been skirting my exercise routine, doing job interviews, and surfing craigslist for furniture and employment. I'll keep you posted if anything exciting happens.