Jason Andrew Relva

So, my friend's leaving town, and I'm totally bummed out about it. Back in third grade, my friend Josh moved away. Usually, I'll keep a couple friends around, but Josh was my lone confidant when he left for Wisconsin. I remember sitting in the dining room, eating terrible apple pie ice cream, listening to "J.A.R." by Green Day, and trying not to cry. Unsuccessfully. So I kind of feel like that.

I promised to give her the keys to this, my secret blog, and now I feel a bit agitated. There's an emptiness to writing on this unseen wall, but once I have a confirmed audience of one, it feels exhibitionistic.

Well, it won't be the first time I give someone directions here, but it may be the last. I'm still trying to decide what to do with Neue. Y'know, the name feels kind of pretentious, but I can't bring myself to change it. Maybe I'll write up its origin story.

My Notes from PAX

Post-N'Gai, Post EGM Video Games Journalism

• "If this shirt doesn't stink, I'm not gaming hard enough."
  - That guy's shirt? Drenched in sweat.
• Gus Mastrapa looks like a flattened Alan Moore.
  

• Inexplicable Lil' Jon Noises
• Chris Kohler: "Games journalism needs an old guard"
• Mastrapa: How can journalistic outlets find a non ad-supported product to sell?
• Pat Klepek looks like that one kid from Freaks and Geeks.
• Klepek: "Clicks is juice, fool"
• Karen Chu: "Think more"
  -Web 2.0: now that all this user-created info has been generated, what to do with it? How can you analyze it or make it more useful?

Q&A

• This guy majored in 'Informatics?'
• KChu: "It's easy to write a one-star review and be an asshole"
• Kohler: "You don't have to be the one definitive review."
• Sweaty shirt guy has finally dried out.
• Creepy British Asian guy just announced that he's started a magazine. I kind of hate him, but I admire his shameless self-promotion.
• Really, why should you care about games journalism being taken seriously?
  

Draw Go

Starting later this month, I plan on making this a better blog. Neue has been like my bicycle for most of its life: it gets taken out of the basement once a month, I try it out, then my ass hurts and I forget about it. So there's going to be a regular update schedule (which I haven't figured out yet) as well as some cosmetic and functional changes. I may spin the Diaryland half of this off from the IGN half. I want to use my writing here as a portfolio, but I worry that leaving in the exhausting descriptions of my neuroses will make it hard for me to point at this and say, "Hire me!"

I'm heading to Seattle on Tuesday for the Penny Arcade Expo. I worry I'll feel a bit isolated hitting the nerd prom without a date.

Know The You More

Important lesson! If you're dressing a leg wound with electrical tape, you need to shave first. Otherwise, it won't stick.

The New Monster

My nocturnal agenda's in disarray. I've been getting sleep at long, sloppy intervals, then holding onto my dormancy like a drowning person their last few mouthfuls of oxygen. The work schedule has necessitated far too many 24-hour days, due to shifts stacked too closely for my finicky sleeping habits. As a consequence, I've become unstuck from time. Now, I'm floating from days to nights, and occasionally into that hateful little margin in between.

All the Neutral Mornings

So I've kinda stopped playing the video games. This has become mostly a gaming blog over the past year, a trend that I regret. I still would like to end up a games writer some day, but ... part of me thinks that I'm just pouring more waste into the lake by writing yet another game review.

Jenn Frank and her blog, Infinite Lives - well, I have an uncomfortable affection towards both. She wrote a post, "Dementia, video games, and the end of the beginning." Reading it wasn't really an epiphany, but it evoked something for me.

I used to sit in my basement, for more hours than I can describe without ending up in Hyperbole Heights, playing emulated SNES games on my Pentium 133. In the summer, it was nice and cool in the basement, my refuge from heat, people, and whatever housework I'd get snared into wandering the visible spectrum of my home. Thinking about it now, I get uneasy. There's an instinct in all of us to defend our hobby, but it doesn't seem like it was an awfully healthy way to spend the time.

One day while in my basement, I caught the amalgamated scent of summer in the air, and I felt the foolishness of playing Earthbound for the third time while all these beautiful smells passed me by. So I decided to renounce video games. My memory's pretty vague, but I don't think I lasted a week. It wasn't a noble effort; my end goal was normalcy. I wanted to wash that geek right out of my hair, and I didn't realize how difficult it is to abjure one's identity.

So I've kinda stopped playing the video games. I feel hypocritical for rejoicing.

The White Way

Prototype today. It's become a bit more hassle than its worth, so I'm rushing through it to get its achievement sweetmeats and return it to my local rental outlet.

Why do we (I) come to this point? Once the pretense of entertainment is gone, the pitiful cycle of the videogame hatefuck sets in. If Prototype was, say, a movie on television? I'd change the channel, no remorse.Instead I throw a mini-tantrum, yelling and squirming about, every time the game seems to thwart me. All my worst traits emerge, and I become a part of the inarticulate, angry biomass that clogs the internet.

Mad as a Box of Frogs

Right now, I'm all into Giana Sisters DS, a remake of The Great Giana Sisters. The similarities to Super Mario Bros., and by extension every other platformer from 1986-1995, definitely stand out - and it's all good. The controls are moment-to-moment spot-on, the graphics are beautiful yet crude, and the music is forgettablly catchy, with a little bit of SID twang dropped in. It's utterly disposable, but I love it and I want to marry it in that middle school way that's devoid of any lifetime commitment.

It could be nostalgia. When I play a familiar game and marvel at it, the N-word is always partially formed in my throat. It makes me think of the lazy summer days (like today) spent before I knew the ticking of the clock. Christ, it makes me think of Skunny, Jazz Jackrabbit, and Duke Nukem before he went all sunglasses. Not innocent, not better, but an era where a platformer didn't need to have RPG elements or come from Nintendo.

I'm rambling by now, because I'm talking up a game which I don't like all that much. I've gotta write more, get that voice down.

Sanguine Eden

I went to the county fair today. Saw lots of 4-H exhibits, experienced a pig race, and ate deep-fried Oreos. I tried to stay out of Judgmental City Prick as Observer mode, and mostly did okay. Still, to enter this world where livestock is commonplace - while abiding in an apartment where I can't even have a dog - is weird.

I live in Chicago, and sometimes you can walk two blocks in a direction and feel like you've entered a different city. Today, I went ~75 miles and felt like I was in a different country and decade.