Well, the week has been an ordinarily mundane week, much like my weeks have been for the past few years. Except that I played a fair amount of HALO. Halo was once upon a time due to be released for the mac, when Bungie was bought by Microsoft Games. That caused a fair amount of anti-Bungie bias among the mac community. Not so with me. Sure, I like many people in this world dislike Microsoft just as much as (or more) people dislikes/-d CocaCola. Or IBM for that matter. Any which way, Bungie produced a good batch of Mac only games back in the early 90s, like “Pathways into Darkness” and the brilliant “Marathon” series. Marathon was an early FPS, but with an intriguing story. Now, I tried playing Marathon some months ago, and was appaled by the way it looked, even the last in the series, Marathon Infinity. Still, those Marathon moments was some of the more exiting gaming I’ve ever encountered.
And those moments still reverbate throughout Halo, which in part is some sort of continuation of the mythos suggested at in the Marathon games, a future akin to the one presented in the Alien movies, but not a copy thereof. Corporations, conglomerates, space marines, vastness, cyborgs, space leeches. Any which way, I’m sure most from my parental generation feels that a guy of 36 should not sit at home playing computer games well into the next day. On a working day, to boot. But that I do, at times. Especially now when I have a saucy G5 to play them on. My little brother, Stefan also played Halo a while ago, and it feels kind of strange how having a gaming experience in common can be as exciting as it is. I kept calling him, reflecting upon certain plot turns and conundrums. It was like I was 14 again, gaming on my brother’s C=64. Uncanny shit!
Apart from the, I’ve watched the latest Van Damme movie (In Hell), had a long walk which left my feet warm for 2 days, listened to a lot of music, downloaded Glass/Reggio’s “-Qatsi” trilogy, futzed with a new Linux server (my first), re-read the last 15 issues of “Hate”, bought the fabled jazz book Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, by Nat Shapiro & Nat Hentoff. It was later used as a template for the brilliant punk biography Please Kill Me by “Legs” McNeill and Gillian McCain, insomuch that both books are biographies composed solely by quotes from musicians and scenesters. If the former is anything like the latter, it will surely be the reading experience of the month.
So, well, it’s friday. I haven’t linked this page into the site structure yet. I will go to a movie (Lost in Translation or Big Fish) and a party tomorrow. And on saturday I will be an über-geek once again, by partaking in some role playing, and not of the “adult” kind, either. Woe is me: middleaged kid. Hell with that, as long as it’s fun. Me be homo ludens, shit like that. Too cool for school.