old records

I tried working on more creative stuff for the site, but I can't quite flex those bones at the present. its hard to fight back the urge to write about random stuff lately, so that's what this is!

i. habits

I plan to do a longer post about the the butterfly effects i've observed throughout my experiences on the internet, so bear with me if you're reading this from the future and this is all familiar to you

For about as long as i've considered myself a G a m e r, i was also fascinated by retro games. What started as me watching videos about Kameo and Sonic quickly spread to AVGN, Nostalgia Critic, Game Grumps, SomeCallMeJohnny, and a long, long list of other random gaming channels. most of that was definitely not something a 10 year old me should have been watching, but hey, we all do stuff behind our parent's backs. Something in that helped spark a deeper love for technology within me that continues to grow even today. I love seeing how we pushed the limitations of the past, why some things worked, why others didn't, and most importantly all the cool stuff that came from all the blood sweat and tears. But young me didn't realize that, she just loved watching the funny man say "WHAT A SHITLOAD OF FUCK!". I devoured as many reviews as I could of games/movies/shows/anime that caught my non-ironic interests, too. Always saying I would play them, but never did. Minus a select few, all of which drastically changed my life for the better.

There are a lot of things I could place blame on for not playing or watching the things I wanted to do. One of the first things I remember 'preventing' me from doing as much as when my Tourette's developed. Things that took myself maybe 30 minutes to do took me maybe 2 hours after i started having tics. Add up all the little assignments and projects a kid has to do and it adds up pretty quick to having no school/life balance. A crossword a day adds up quick when you can't use your pencil because you won't stop punching yourself in the face. The little amount of time I did get on the weekends (if I got that time at all), I'd just put into things I was certain would give me joy instead of risking it on new media. Life was horrible, but bat credit cards and defecating on cartridges made the pain worth bearing for a little while longer.

I'm realizing only now that this was my form of burnount. Even over summer breaks I'd feel too tired to do the things I had wanted to do. All the Final Fantasy's, Zelda's, Sonic's, and many other rando niche games I wanted to play just dusted away. instead I'd watch the stuff by the same YouTubers over and over and over again, sleep, and repeat the next day. That was the way that guaranteed that I'd feel happy and rested. It's a gross pattern that I've never been able to break longterm, be it YouTube or games/movies. I keep thinking the next stage of my life will finally destroy that toxic part of me that I desperately want to be gone. But it never leaves for long. It didn't break over summers, it didn't break after graduations, it didn't break when I left the job that almost killed me, and it still isn't breaking now that I'm finally free from my parents.

I did have a brief hope that the cycle was broken for the first few weeks I moved in here. The first thing I got set up in my apartment was my trusty dusty CRT/VCR TV Combo that I picked up from a dumpster. I finally had that baby all to myself with no interruptions from anybody or anything. Me, myself, my tapes, and my games. I did enjoy some tapes and FFIV (def a classic!), but just as suddenly as I had moved from my parents, the addictions swept back in. The same comforts, funny vids, doomscrolling, and many other things I'd done thousands of times before. I did curb it again for a while after that, completely deleting social media from my phone and only browsing from a PC, but world events going as fast as they are make me feel like I have to keep the apps on there again. I'll have to find a better method to keep in touch with current events that doesn't make me scroll for dozens of minutes on end. What starts with wanting to look up a quick walkthrough on a game turns into a rabbithole about how late-stage capitalism is dooming everybody and there's nothing that can stop the coming collapses of our societies. That's no good! I'm thinking of putting my pomodoro timer right where i keep all my social media apps and try to develop a muscle memory to press/set the timer. I also REALLY need to tidy up my apartment more. Once I find more shelving, it should be pretty easy to KonMari the place up. But there's not much excuse for the rest of it.. It's been over 6 months since I moved here, and it's still not all unpacked

ii. consuming media

But hey, i still managed to consume some cool media. Watched a bunch of tapes over my first couple of weeks living here.

A lot of these... weren't that great actually. I fell asleep during a good chunk of them. some like Wolf (1994) were just that boring! I can't believe a movie that dull could cost so much damn money to make. Granted, a lot of that was probably just for the expensive actors, but still! I saw the cover of the tape thinking there was gunna be some hot sexy wolf stuff happening. I wanted some dude in his 20s-40s doing hot sexy wolf stuff to women (and men?). N o. its an old man doing hot sexy wolf stuff >:( yucky!!!!!!!!!!!!! others i cant even remember the names of. that should tell you enough

I also watched Kuffs. I picked that up purely because it starred young Christian Slater. That lad looked SO HOT back in the Heathers' days... I also admire him greately as an actor though. Watch Mr. Robot please i beg of you its the greatest show ever made i am on my knees BEGGING YOU TO WAT---anyway this movie sucked rocks. It was trying too hard to be cool. Pump Up the Volume this was not...

I got to partake in a lot of the anime tapes i bought too. i picked up a few of these @ Youmacon 2023. Some i need to give another shot because i got distracted by either my phone or got too sleepy. but there were two that stood out to me

i only got to see the first volume, but holy shit, Orphen rules. the dub's got that 90's charm where they don't all have the same funimation voice archetypes. the animation looks lovely. i audibly laughed numerous times at this, which doesn't happen to me much with anime. i couldnt get enough of Cleao and Orphen's quarreling. AND THAT OPENING... I need to bully myself harder into watching it, its a great one, i can tell!

i also watched thru the entirety of the first Mobile Suit Gundam series. no tapes of this one though, i watched this thru a cool program called ani-cli. ran that bad boy on my kali linux laptop, connected those cables to my CRT, and bam! anime paradise... had i known there were compilation movies, i would have watched those instead of the 50+ episode saga that is the first series. i know Gundam has some real good stuff in it, and you can certainly see the seeds of it here. theres some dark shit in this that the gears in my brain hyperfixating again. i wont watch the first series again, too long for my tastes with too little happening for a bunch of episodes, but i will absolutely become a gundam-head in time! can't wait to learn more about that Char dude. Mirai best girl btw, what a sweetheart who knows how to handle her shit <3

At some point, I oughta figure out how to embed/sync my letterboxd over to this site. I really want to make my way through my tape collection + have that progress catalogued. I keep telling myself that this is the weekend I'm gunna log all my tapes into a list, but either im scared off by a spider or other plans take over

I've also been slowly making my way through the leaked beta version of Kameo: Elements of Power. Truly wild that this managed to leak, and even more wild that emulation is now at the point that I can experience it myself (albeit, it often runs very slow even on my beefy gaming PC). It's the closest thing I have to experiencing my childhood favorite game for the first time again. This version of the game was about a year before the final release, which would jump from the original Xbox to the Xbox 360. You would think that this would mostly be an HD upscale, and while that's mostly true, practically all of the dialogue is completely different to the final release. Kameo is practically a different character in this, she's a lot 'girlier' here. A lot of it is thanks to her test voice sounding more ditsy as opposed to her more soft-warriorish one in the release, but there's a lot more dialogue brought up about her appearance or breaking nails and wotnot. Ortho and Mystic (who help her in the story) are mostly the same, except that they're MARRIED to each other this time?! Honestly, the story has loads more charm in the beta than it ever ended up being. How the story ended up was pretty bland until the final cutscene, it was mostly exposition dumps without much character to it. I'm still at the first dungeon of the game, but I'm real excited to see how this version of the story plays out! I plan on writing in more detail on this later, alongside screenshot dumps!

FFXIV Dawntrail has also released. I'm only halfway through the story but this is by far the worst story FFXIV has had. To be honest, I expected this going into it. They finished a decade's long plot where our Warriors of Light literally went to the ends of space-time and killed a God. You can practically stub any enemies toe and they would canonically die- there's nothing we cannot defeat at this point. I just wish they leaned more into the vacation aspect this expansion was advertised to have. I like being a mentor to Tural's next Hokage, but there's a lot off regarding how all the characters act. I don't feel any real bonding between the characters; Wuk Lamat at one point says the party has become like a family to her, but outside of my Warrior of Light they hardly have any moments of bonding with her. No deep campfire chats, no heart to hearts, it's not like the rest of the game at all! The voice acting is especially off-putting (whenever it's even there, its strangely absent in many key scenes that would normally have them), even the actors that have been with the game for years sound plain bad here; so something went wrong with the voice direction here.

That said, whenever I'm not doing fetch quests in the MSQ, I'm having LOADS of fun playing Pictomancer. I previously mained Astrologian, and while that's still my favorite job aesthetically, Picto is just too much fun. It's just so goddamned pretty, and I love doing serious damage to foes. Killing multiple enemies with my hammer with a single button press is IMMENSELY satisfying! It's so rewarding whenever I pull off an insta-cast on my rainbow beam. With the spells that do require time to charge, I can afford to play risky and dash across the map right before a boss attacks a zone. PICTOMANCER IS AMAZING! I've never been in the raiding scene of an MMO before, but I'm hearing such good things about the current raids. Combine that with Picto being as fun as it is, I think I'd have a real blast! I just need to figure out how I'm budgetting that time...

iii. doomerism

Ever since I moved into my new place, there's been this strange sensation brewing in my mind. The last time I felt this free to explore the person I wish to be, the coronapocalypse happened only months later, bringing all of that progress to a screeching halt. I had spoken with my therapist before about these fears of everything crashing down just as I get acquainted with life in the peaks instead of the valleys. I don't have the exact wording written down sadly, but through my more recent therapy sessions I learned my anxieties/overanalyzing were my only resources to protect myself from outcomes that could harm me. After a few months, I thought I was truly in a place where I could begin putting down some of those barriers. This time, I could be happy without historic events directly impacting my life months later. I'd only worry about my incoming quarter-life crisis when that hits, but that's normal. That's expected. I would feel like time's running out when it really isn't. In normal life in normal times, your twenties are still very early-on in life. There's plenty of life left to live, and although it's a rocky period it'll all end up well in the end.

And then July hit. Unfortunately, history feels like it's rhyming again. Christian Nationalism seems all but certain to take over after Biden's dementia was aired live across the globe, then Trump cheating death by a frame-perfect turn of the head. If there's anything to be thankful of, it's that there's more time to brace myself than last time, be it Project 2025 or whatever else the nationalists have in the works. I was lucky enough to be listening in on the right livestreams to know something was up in late January before COVID hit my area in March, but that was still only a month and a half to steel myself for what that would bring. This time, at least I have a few more of these fleeting seasons to live well. But it's already almost over halfway through summer, and I don't think I'm living it well. How can I live this well when I know these are the last seasons I'll live with normalcy, peace, and the freedom to be myself? I don't know how to narrow down the things I want to experience before everything falls apart. How much of this time should I spend preparing? Would preparing even be possible? Would it be a waste of more time? Should I stay and try to protect what I cherish most, or should I find refuge elsewhere? The more time I spend pondering all of this is more time wasted that could be done living the increasingly dimishing bits of life I have left to live to its fullest. All that I am certain about is that I'm running out of it way faster than it's normally supposed to be.

So what do I spend most of that doing? Scrolling, ruminating, and sleeping. Even the stuff I've actually done above is only a small portion of time I've spent compared to the time I waste online or unconscious. I'm so sick of it, it's something I desperately need to break. I'm extremely conscious of the time slipping away and yet I still feel like im wasting it every fucking day.

Speaking of my life's history rhyming; I haven't felt my taste of music expand this much since right before the last pandemic when I discovered The Strokes/Julian Casablancas back in late 2019. Recently, there have been a lot of rando AMVs that feature Russian music, and I really dug the melancholic vibes of them. There's an especially good edit of Evangelion to Андрей Губин - Ночь / Andrey Gubin - Noch (Night). Songs with depressing lyrics with guitar solos that go hard are what keeps my heart pumping blood through my veins!!!

...God why does the term for this aesthetic have to be "russian doomer music"?? why am i getting good music suggestions from fucking doomer wojacks LARPing about dying in a war? are you shitting me? why do my tastes have to be so cringe-looking?! I swear on my life I'm not anti-Ukraine... With that said, I got sick of praying my YouTube algorithm would bless me with another cool AMV and went digging for better songs myself. I begrudgingly clicked on that damn wojack, and was immediately graced with an instant new favorite song: Пластинки (Plastinki / Old Records) by Дурной Вкус (Durnoy Vkus / Bad Taste).

Bad Taste has quickly become one of my favorite bands. I dont have any song that i dislike from them. They give me this feeling I can't quite describe. Even before knowing the translations, I still felt the same emotions that were conveyed through the lyrics. Overwhelming feelings of craving intimacy with another, and longing for better times. I never quite understood how music could unite across languages until listening to them. Judging from the comments on YouTube videos, the lyrics seem to resonate incredibly deeply with many Russians. Those folks keep living through war after war, collapse after collapse, suffering upon more suffering. Any brief glimpse they have of true peace and happiness it gets snuffed out. And for what? More cool land for oligarchs to toy with?

I'm aware this comes off as pretty self-centered and probably naive, but then again, I think anybody who writes a personal blog for the world to see is indulging in some sense of narcissism. I don't know the many intricacies of Russian culture and how things came to be how they are now. From everything that I have seen, all the truly good times their people have is in the past. There are no freedoms to express how they'd like to be in the present. The closest they have to experiencing those time again is to spin the old records of their memories over and over again.

For the rest of this year, at least, I still have those freedoms. I'll try and live in the present as much as I can until that time comes. I'll keep trying to write to this blog, probably cataloguing the cool things I'm knocking off my bucketlist before shit hits the fan. And hey, maybe we'll be the lucky ones to end up in the better side of the timeline where fascism doesn't win, only time will tell. It ain't over til it's over, after all.

--crystola--