Once My Looks Go, I've Got Nothing

         I awaken with a simple desire: to pick up where I left off in Final Fantasy III . I am finally getting around to playing the game, two years after its initial release, in the fallow period before I get my Nintendo 64 for Christmas. I am borrowing my friend's copy, as well as a gargantuan strategy guide he has downloaded from the primordial internet that is approximately the size of the FBI's file on the John F. Kennedy assassination. These few late autumn days off from school give me the precious time I need to take on this adventure that some say lasts upwards of a hundred hours. I have spent the last several wandering back and forth through a small patch of forest fighting dinosaurs.      I'm still adjusting to my environment. Just a few months ago, my family moved on up from our mobile home of ten years to a two-story townhouse on the other side of the city. Though I'm still rather annoyed that we never went back to retrieve the rest of my belongings as

Sometimes, on an overcast day, when the sun's luminous silhouette struggles mightily to break through the murky clouds and the wind whispers its vague lullaby, I think of my friend and hope that, wherever he may be, he is happy... *** With the recent success of the Pok é mon Go mobile game-such a phenomenon that it has popularized that most base and shameful of activities: walking -the original 151 Pocket Monsters have reentered the popular consciousness with a vengeance. Because of this vengeful reentry, my thoughts of late have turned to my own personal experience with the Pok é mon games of yore, and the untold tragedy of a fallen friend. I first heard of these games through a 1996 issue of Nintendo Power , which at the time was quite fond of  dangling the carrot of Japanese games before ravenous American audiences that would never get to play them. How I longed for Secret of Mana 2 or RPG Maker to hit these shores! Pocket Monsters , while cool-looking, had the air of so

Ah, Nintendo. I cannot overstate the importance of Nintendo to Young Me. Nintendo was the almighty, the most important thing in the world, and I mean this quite literally. Food, love, oxygen...mere impotent sparklers in the face of the massive celestial body that was Nintendo. If you'd like evidence of this, please observe my recently unearthed copy of the rather oddly-named Nintendo Calendar: The Power Game 1993 Calendar . It was the physical manifestation of Nintendo's pixelated tendrils snaking into every single day of the year. I'm rather annoyed that the numbering scheme for the dates ALMOST but not quite matches up with next year (damn leap year, screwing everything up), so I can't put it up on the wall in 2016. But in life, much like in video games, you win some, you lose some, you trade some in to the store in exchange for newer ones. Some numbered stray observations: 1. "The Power Game"? What the hell is that? Sounds like a USA Network origina

     If things had gone the way I'd hoped, I might have been working on a sitcom pilot for NBC right now. Needless to say (although I'm saying it anyway), that didn't quite happen. But hey, let me tell you about it anyway.      As you may be aware, I was once a fixture on local public access television as part of a comedy show called Steel & Marsilio . In fact, I once wrote a needlessly exhaustive history of the program on this very site . Since then, I've mostly moved into other mediums to water my creative lotus, but every once in a while, my former co-host Garrett Steel and I will put together a video or skit or something, and somewhere deep down I still have a love for producing televised media. Therefore, when Garrett brought it to my attention that none other than NBC (America's Network, or so I hear) was running a competition in which they were looking for fresh new ideas for comedy shows, we were all-in. We figured we at least owed ourselves a shot a