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Well, I picked up EarthBound again. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a famously quirky SNES RPG from 1994. Unusual compared to other RPGs, it’s set in the ’90s, in what very much looks like small-town America. It has a lot of quirky humor, meta references, and is generally pretty goofy. I mean, your main character is a 13-year-old kid, and he starts out with a “cracked bat” as a weapon, so that’s amusing already. I tried playing it for the first time years ago, and stalled out a little ways into the game. It’s particularly inscrutable, even as SNES RPGs go, and the inventory limitations are rather frustrating as well. But I think this time will stick. I’m enjoying it, taking my time, exploring, and just kind of immersing myself in the world in general. And it’s delightful. The music is really nice. It’s cute and colorful and fun. Bonus: at one point you have the unique pleasure of a little boss rush of the whole local police force, including the chief! That was satisfying.

CWs: food, ponderings on mortality, death, physical health, mental health, pet health

Well, our very chill book club on Discord decided on reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to start it up again after a long hiatus. I read it slower than I expected, but finished it last night. I hadn’t read it since undergrad, so it was definitely a different experience 20+ years later. IIRC, I read it when I was barely learning anything about Classics, so I didn’t pick up on a lot of things (the references to Paracelsus, for example, but I guess he’s more of an alchemist or occultist than anything). The book has some really stunningly beautiful imagery; Shelley does a wonderful job with describing travel and landscapes. I also had no idea that a stretch of the Thames is called the Isis, apparently out of a mistaken etymology; Shelley references that and it did not make sense at all to me until I looked it up. Also, you’ll find some more archaic definitions used, such as “to devote” meaning “to curse” (< Lat. devovere, “to curse, execrate” vs. the more common meaning “to vow, devote; promise solemnly, vow”), so that was interesting. Context helped with that.

I was reading something recently on Mastodon and the post was talking about how websites and webdesign used to be all about intrinsic motivation (creativity, inspiration, etc.) rather than extrinsic (money, side hustle, &c.). And I definitely feel like something’s been lost over time, but some people are trying to reclaim and restore that past ethos.

I’m writing this on a very snowy day, reminiscent of one of the areas in the game I’m about to discuss. I wrote a little blurb elsewhere on here awhile ago (I can’t remember if it was in a post on RPGs, or retro videogames, &c.), but thought this deserved its own entry. Rarely is this far from my mind. I’m talking about a videogame called Ihatovo Monogatari, or Stories of Ihatovo. It came out in 1993 on the Super Famicom (Super Nintendo elsewhere), but never received a release outside of Japan. In 2017/18, I discovered video game fan translations, and started looking for any and all I could find, especially on the NES and SNES. And believe me, I found quite a few over the years. There are some real gems which never made it to the US, and while that’s really sad, I’m happy translators graciously made them playable for English-speaking audiences. I had played the fabled Radical Dreamers fan translation in ~2005, and loved it, but that was really a one-off; I only sought it out because of the Chrono Cross connection, and didn’t look into any other games until, as I mentioned, many years later.

CWs: holidays, physical & mental health, finances, work, food, oblique politics, religion

CWs: mental health, holidays