Posts Tagged ‘nostalgia’

From the Typewriters of Babes

By Chief Oddball on August 21st, 2010 at 5:26 pm

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I like to read before going to sleep, because the act of shifting my ever-active brain’s focus from real-life concerns to fantasy ones makes it easier to fall asleep in the first place. Sometimes I read Star Trek novels, sometimes other fiction from my favorite genres (sci-fi, fantasy, suspense, et al), and other times I read old stories that I myself wrote, going as far back as the late 1980s. It may seem self-indulgent, but everybody has their muse, and I tend to think of nostalgia as mine. Whenever I surround myself with things that helped stir my creativity in the past, or even the products of that creativity from years ago, it puts me in a “happy place” and often leads to better creative thinking here in the present.

Almost all of the stories I wrote between 1986 and 1992 were crafted on an IBM PC XT using PFS: First Choice, an old DOS-based word processor with about as corny as name as was possible. (But didn’t it seem like all productivity software had gimmicky names back in the mid-’80s?) As Microsoft has dropped native 16-bit code execution on modern 64-bit versions of Windows, like the one I’m running, First Choice no longer even runs. However, it runs just fine under DOSBox, the best x86 emulator around. Armed with this, I’ve been converting some of my old stories to Word format so that I can read them in this day and age.

There are utility programs that can handle this, although most of them cost money. I’ve found a far simpler solution: First Choice has the ability to save a file in plaintext ASCII format, if you change the filename extension in the save dialog from DOC to ASC. The software itself gives you no idea that this is possible, so if you lost the manual, good luck figuring that out.

To make the documents pleasantly readable, some additional work is necessary. First Choice’s ASCII format, unfortunately, adds hard carriage returns every 80 columns, so with a decent text editor that can do a find and replace on the carriage return character — my favorite is UltraEdit — you can have that problem licked in short order. Then, just copy and paste into Microsoft Word (or your modern word processor of choice) and you’re all set. The only other issue involves styles (boldface, italics, etc.) that you may have applied to your document in First Choice, because the ASCII format drops them. To reapply, you’ll have to review your document within First Choice line-by-line until you see styled text, then apply the same styles in your modern word processor. This is made more irritating by virtue of the fact that First Choice, being a pure text mode application, wasn’t able to show these styles on the text itself, so you have to highlight a block, open the Style menu and see for yourself which style(s) are applied. Bit of a pain, so hopefully you didn’t use styles too much!

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Getting Seasonal

By Chief Oddball on December 2nd, 2009 at 6:29 pm

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Every year it’s the same thing. The same commercialized rush for your shopping dollars, the same rotating playlist of seemingly half a dozen Christmas songs on at least one local radio station, the same daily avalanche of direct mail catalogs and coupons from every company you’ve ever done business with in your life. And for some reason that I cannot explain, I love all of it.

Okay, that may be a bit much. I don’t love the heaps of junk mail, and the incessant retail hullabaloo can get a bit old. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved this time of year — the Christmas “season,” as it were, that seems to officially begin over the long Thanksgiving weekend and doesn’t end until you finally start winding down from your New Year’s festivities. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the increasingly crass and commercialized way that the retail industry treats the holiday season, or any other occasion they can use as an excuse to leverage more money from us. But in the process, it’s also easy to overlook the genuine magic of the season, those almost palpable hints of cheer that creep in when you see all the Christmas lights on your neighbors’ houses, see cars drive by with fake reindeer antlers (I swear, today was the first time I ever thought of a Prius as “cute”) or hear a favorite Christmas carol while walking amongst the shops and restaurants with someone you love.

You could say that I’m being naïve; after all, there’s no real “magic” to this season other than that of the artificial variety, created by the morass of commercial enterprises that claim to govern our daily lives. And it’s hard to feel all that “magical” when you’ve got bills to pay, when you’re out of work, when you have family members fighting on the front lines in the Middle East for an increasingly dubious and unidentifiable cause, or when your own dreams just don’t seem to be coming true despite your best expenditures of money, spirit and time. You could say whatever you like — one way or another, during the month of December I can never help but become intractably giddy.

It’s largely an internal phenomenon — an escape mechanism, dare I say. While you’ll never find me using the holidays as an excuse to stand in a Black Friday sale line at 3:00 in the morning, cavort drunkenly at a local Christmas party or spend myself into a debt-fueled coma, you will find me using them as an excuse to put all the pain, suffering and workaday shit in a drawer somewhere for a month and just be happy. It doesn’t always work — not every day, for that would mean I would have to change my last name to “Stepford” — but it always propels my sense of creativity and inspiration to new heights, and puts me in the mood to go beyond the usual daily routine of work, eat, sleep.

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Classic Post: My First Brush with Evangelion

By Chief Oddball on January 23rd, 2009 at 4:09 pm

Filed under Randomness ··· 4 Comments

The following is a collection of opinions first posted on my original blog, regarding my first complete viewing of Neon Genesis Evangelion. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Evangelion is a Japanese animated series that ran in the mid-’90s. It featured a complex story that dealt with the human condition, existentialism and the end of the world in a futuristic sci-fi setting, which utilized the anime mainstay vehicle of giant weaponized robots while parodying that genre at the same time.

Widely regarded as either one of anime’s greatest works of genius ever, or a hopelessly overwrought piece of animated garbage, Evangelion managed to capture my attention and keep my brain working for hours and hours trying to make sense of it all. If you’re someone who, like me, enjoys overanalyzing works of mind-twisting ambiguity, you too may find it more fascinating than frustrating.

With the renewed interest in Evangelion stemming from the recreation of the series into four feature-length films, I thought it might be an interesting time to revisit not only the series, but also my own thoughts from my first experience of it — and see how the passage of time and the evolution of my own existence has contributed to a different understanding of its mysteries.

As part one of this undertaking, I present the following amalgamation of blog entries from early 2003, written during (and immediately following) my first viewing of Evangelion.

Posted 2/4/2003

Evangelion Publicity Art

During the evenings when my wife works, I enjoy a bit of “dinner theater” — watching a DVD of some sort on my 57″ widescreen TV while I eat. For a while now I’ve been reviewing the entire Star Trek original series, but having exhausted all the episodes I own, I went looking for other options last weekend. For some reason I selected the first volume of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a legendary Japanese animated series that I was introduced to by friends back in high school. I only own the first DVD (four episodes) in the series, as for some reason when I bought it I never really “got into it” enough to buy more. Anime DVDs aren’t cheap, you know.

But then last weekend I watched the entire first disc again — and for some reason, it had a totally different effect on me this time. The story seemed so unbelievably compelling, I felt like getting in the car, going down to the store and buying more DVDs from the series. Maybe I was just in an anime mood, but I was struck somehow by how cool the whole thing was. Normally I’m not much for the giant mech combat that seems to be a hallmark of anime, but this is different.

Not only is it a good story, but I really love all the high-tech user interfaces, warning messages and readouts the series utilizes throughout. And I had forgotten just how good the music in this series is. The voice acting is spot-on, too (and I don’t mean the dub; I wouldn’t watch the dub if you shot my arm off.) Overall, it’s a complete package.

So I decided to complete my collection of Evangelion as rapidly as possible. Normally that would mean buying seven more individual $25-30 DVDs, but the entire TV series is now available in a handsome boxed set. Since I found it on an anime retailer’s website for $103, I’m going to order it. After that, I’ll have to pick up the two cinematic features that were created after the series’ end. But I guess that’s the advantage of taking forever to warm up to something like this — by the time you want it, it’s more highly accessible and usually cheaper.

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Nostalgia

By Chief Oddball on January 9th, 2009 at 12:30 am

Filed under Journal ··· 6 Comments

The weather here in Thailand has been different this week. After nearly two straight weeks of rain, the sun came out, the cool breezes returned, and the wooden doors of our house finally started closing more easily again. I, however, was affected in a way more profound than simply not having to smell mildew in the open-air bathroom anymore. Something about the climate put me in the mood for nostalgia.

Yes, nostalgia. I’ve come to realize that it’s the greatest driving force behind my creativity. It’s why a part of me remains firmly anchored to my past, both good and bad, and why I still enjoy things I enjoyed as a kid or a teenager. I find no shame at all in this; rather, it’s more like a badge of honor. A badge that contributes to my resistance to change, yes; but a badge nonetheless.

When I unearth a piece of my past — like the MP3s I found of those old Star Trek childrens’ records that I borrowed repeatedly from the library — I get all giddy and want to tell somebody. “Look, it’s that old Star Trek album from Peter Pan Records where they had a guy playing Scotty who sounds more Italian than Scottish!” I’ll laugh, waving it around. Then I’ll listen to the godawful thing a whole slew of times. Then I’ll decide to use my knowledge of audio post-production and dub authentic Star Trek sound effects over the cheesy Moog synthesizer noises they used on the actual record. Yep: this is why it’s called Oddball Update, folks.

(Incidentally: The site where I found the Star Trek records also had an MP3 of the “McDonald’s Menu Song” promotional record that was issued as part of a $1,000,000 sweepstakes in 1988. So yes, there are other people who are every bit as weird as I am.)

This creeping nostalgic influence isn’t limited to silly old records from back in the day. Sometimes it applies to games. There are certain cassette tapes, songs and records from days gone by that immediately make me want to create some Wolfenstein levels. Mostly it’s because I remember listening to those recordings when I designed some of my best maps in 1994 and ’95. Still other times, simply watching a certain episode of Star Trek will suddenly remind me of a very specific circumstance, and even make me hungry for certain foods. Season one’s “Dagger of the Mind” makes me want some of my grandma’s home-cooked roast beef and dumplings, since I remember eating that at her house while watching that episode on her Betamax one time. Season three’s “The Empath,” meanwhile, brings to mind a balmy summer day in August, 1995, on which my parents went out for the evening, and I ordered a pizza and ate it while watching that episode. It’s like a Classical Conditioning exercise, or some kind of autonomic response.

Right now, though, the aura of nostalgia that surrounds me is struggling to manifest itself in a form of creative writing. It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the act of writing a story as much as I’m nostalgic for the settings and circumstances that I could write about. Today’s weather reminded me very much of a mild summer day in the Midwest; “back home on the ranch,” as it were, in Michigan. Unlike my current home of Florida, the Midwest is where the grass is green and soft, where driving doesn’t suck, and where there are actual deciduous trees that cast actual shade — but all only for six months out of the year. (See, there’s always a catch.) The mind always seeks what it cannot have, and while I have very little to complain about in my life today, some things I miss include the pleasure of driving on Midwestern roads, and the feel of soft grass beneath you as you eat a picnic lunch under the shade of a big, elderly tree.

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The Long Summer, 10 Years Hence

By Chief Oddball on July 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 am

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It was a couple weeks ago when I first realized that this June marks the ten-year anniversary of my graduation from high school. My high school days were tumultuous to say the least, with my entire four-year stint representing little more than one miserable experience after another — with the exception of occasional successes and shared camaraderie, not unlike those shared by a soldier and his squadmates in the course of a brutal war. When my friends and I finally graduated, it was one of the happiest days of our lives.

Ten years ago, after that graduation ceremony had ended, I embarked on what I fondly dubbed “The Long Summer,” so named because I wasn’t starting college until October. I chose the late-fall starting date because I figured I deserved an extra month or two of relaxation, after the four years of hell I’d just been through. That summer turned out to be everything I had hoped. Looking back, it’s become my Woodstock, my “good old days.” I’ve experienced even more wonderful times since, but you know how it goes — nothing will ever quite recapture 1998 again, when gas was 89 cents a gallon, I had a brand new girlfriend, a brand new Trans Am and a whole calendar of lazy days stretching before me.

(Actually, without much creative license, the preceding description of my heyday could easily pass for that of a guy much older than me!)

In a recent email conversation with my high school buddy Pooch, I remarked that I’d planned to dive into my old Oddball Update archives and post a commemorative entry, featuring some snippets of journal entries I’d written back in those days surrounding our graduation. Unfortunately, my busy schedule kept me from getting around to it, and now the anniversary date (June 7th) is nearly one month past. Despite the belatedness, I thought this opportunity was one too good to pass up, so here we go.

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Archival Content, You Want It?

By Chief Oddball on March 23rd, 2007 at 11:06 am

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Over the last couple days, whilst unable to sleep at one in the morning, I’ve been absently traveling back through the old “Private Oddball” archives from 1994 and onward. “Private Oddball” is the throwaway name I gave to the blog I keep privately on my local machine, which serves as a personal journal of sorts. Obviously, blogs and websites weren’t around in 1994 when I started writing — the whole thing was a collection of Word documents until a few years ago. But as I looked back through the archives, I realized there was a one-year gap. Nothing at all was written during 2002.

It’s been long enough now since 2002 that I started to wonder, what happened during that year? I can’t even recall. That’s when I remembered that 2002 was the year I started keeping my first regular “blog” on the live World Wide Web, originally hosted under a different domain from this one. (In fact, one of that old blog’s designs was the basis of this site’s “Plum Crazy” color scheme.) If I looked back at that content, I reasoned, I’d get a glimpse of what went on in that missing year. But why limit the audience to myself?

So, I’m posing this question of my readership: Anybody want to see the “lost content” from 2002-2003? If so, I can slipstream it into my database here, and true harmony shall be restored. Feel free to post comments with your thoughts, favorite recipes or whatever.

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