Perhaps

It’s gotten worse over the years, don’t worry ;)

My top recommended movie right now is Freddy Got Fingered

It was the end of 9th grade, so I was 15 or 16. I read it immediately after To Kill a Mockingbird, which did not make it look good in comparison 😂

It’s been quite a while since I’ve read it, so this may not be a fair assessment. But, I fucking hated The Catcher in the Rye. I wasn’t even required to read it for school or anything, I just did. Perhaps I just found Holden to be insufferable. I think that was the point, but it did not make it a particularly enjoyable or insightful read at all, save for the overwhelming supertext of DO NOT BE LIKE THIS GUY. The part where he hires a prostitute and just cries in front of her really stuck in my mind. That was when it really sunk in for me that someone read this book and decided that Holden’s views were so accurate that he had to go shoot John Lennon with a gun for being phony. Almost unbelievable.

It felt that way, too. Never really looked into it, but that’s the feeling I had at the time. I should also clarify that all that I said verbatim was, “The Cosmic Joke,” with no elaboration. It was quite humorous at the time.

I was tripping shrooms with someone, and at one point I just looked at her and said, “The Cosmic Joke,” which was an entirely new term to me but we somehow both got it immediately and laughed about that all night. I have no idea what exactly The Joke is, perhaps the tumultuousness of life. I do know that The Joke is on us, and we have the choice to laugh along with it.

He only pulled out enough to devastate the Gulf.

You know how you can see pinned restaurants with their name and a fork and knife icon? Businesses can pay to show their full logo and get priority in search results/what shows first on the map as you zoom in.

Yes. It’s hard to make out the map with all the pinned ads sometimes, and I’ve had multiple times this year where it has taken me to the wrong place. Every time that happens, I boot up Organic Maps and get right to my destination.

Oh man, Obra Dinn for sure. Nothing quite replicates that moment when all the pieces start to fit together. The game took me about 6 hours, I believe. Four hours were spent furiously trying to solve the puzzles, but the last two hours were a wonderful cascade of clues falling into place until I had a complete record of the ship’s crew and passengers. Masterpiece.

Fallout: New Vegas. I still find new stuff in it to this day, don’t get me wrong. But to be able to get lost in the Mojave with no idea of the stakes at play all over again would be an absolute delight.

For music, Facelift by Alice in Chains is one of the most underrated albums of all time. If I could go back to popping that CD in the stereo, not knowing what I’m in for and realizing that I’m listening to an Appetite for Destruction-level album. I wore that original CD out. :)

Finally, I know what the phone call does! Maybe I’ve been too hard on Roger Rabbit NES…

By the time I got around to playing it, the number was deprecated and I definitely wasn’t figuring out how to actually beat it! I guess I just assumed it gated me from the end, when it was probably some other esoteric thing.

The name and the intro really put in the work to get you excited for some high-octane action.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit on NES. Ghostbusters was more disappointing, but I’ve at least kinda figured out how to play it over my lifetime. WFRR I’m clueless on. I think it’s some kind of point and click, but I’m not really sure. There’s a part where you have to call a real life telephone number to progress.

Pretty accurate depictions of what it feels like to play these games.

The opponent never moves.

It was either Super Mario Bros. on NES or Excitebike. Unfortunately followed shortly thereafter by Ghostbusters and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Mind you, the NES was a good bit before my time, and I was playing a hand-me-down. I count myself lucky to have had the same experience many kids in the 80s had on Christmas Day when the NES hit North America. Even with all the gizmos now, the NES and N64 really capture me in a way that I’m not sure they would had I grown up with a PS2 like everyone else.