I think my happy place is museum exhibits about video games, but like an actual museum where it’s not people talking and noise like every convention. Just a quiet, chill space with nicely curated exhibits about video games and artifacts and placards that include interesting information and maybe a bench or two to sit among it all for a bit.
Eyy here’s David Lynch describing why I also just eat the same thing every day. Less brain time spent on deciding what to eat! Just chow down on the same tasty vittles and think about more interesting things.
“[The] obsession with the body suggests a connection between horror and pornography, one critics have noted before (Williams 1989b, Clover 1992). The horror film, like pornography, dares not only to violate taboos but to expose the secrets of the flesh, to spill the contents of the body. If pornography is the genre of the wet dream, then horror is the genre of the wet death. They each whet the appetites of their respective and overlapping audiences for more, as video rental receipts and the proliferation of remakes and sequels attest. The link between hard-core pornography and hard-core horror or the gore film is captured in the term “carnography” (Gehr 1990, 58), which uses the carnality of both genres as a bridge.
(…)
These disreputable genres violate taboos by privileging the act of showing the body, by figuring what Clover calls “the ‘opened’ body” (1992, 32). They expose what is normally concealed or encased to reveal the hidden recesses of the body, porn through carnal knowledge and horror through carnage. Porn and horror are obsessed with the transgression of bodily boundaries. Both are concerned with the devouring orifice. But whereas pornography is concerned with the phallic penetration and secretions of sexually coded orifices like the mouth (gaping in ecstasy or pain), vagina, and anus, horror is more concerned with the creation of openings where there were none before.”
— Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing
I’ve been in the mood to play a game just like this. 2D movement, careful and considered locomotion, single screen puzzles with no frustrating resets to far back in the level when a player dies.
It looks and sounds amazing, and I love the environment design. How’d they get those 2D boxes to have depth when it moves across the screen? That’s amazing!
So I live in silicon valley and it’s sort of like living wedged in between various kingdoms, what with Google and Facebook to the north-west and Apple to the south and various other big companies with huge sprawling campuses all around here. Knowing those places shuffle around billions of dollars is kind of nuts (especially in relation to the poverty all around them).
But I’m also aware that I live in the city where Atari got started. I’m not a big Atari person but I know the history and prominence of that company, and since moving to Sunnyvale (just one letter shy of the hell mouth) I’ve kind of poked around to see what vestiges remain of those game companies from the pre-00s. You can look up addresses of the old HQs and warehouses but much of the time you’ll just find some condos and apartment buildings.
But today, prompted by that recent visit to the Computer History Museum, I decided to look up Andy Capp’s tavern, the spot where the first Pong prototype was installed and Atari realized they had a hit. Turns out the tavern is long closed, of course, but the building still stands as a comedy club. I went there once many years ago, before I knew what used to be there and it was literally right up the street from my house.
November 29, 1972: Atari introduces the Pong video arcade. Al Alcorn created it as a programming exercise, but Atari co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney were so impressed with it that they helped manufacture and distribute the finished product to all points across the U.S.A.
Pong would eventually enter the home market during the 1975 holiday season, and so would their competitors who created various Pong clones to take a bite out of Atari’s profits.
📷: Rob Boudon
(WK)
Hey I was just at the museum where they keep the prototype.
