The Problem With Cleveland

Cleveland's awesome. I've been here almost two weeks and have another week and a half to go.Today I got out of downtown finally (thanks to Barb), trained over to Ohio City and ate dinner and drank heavily at the Great Lakes Brewery, and had a great time. There's a lot to do here. Sure, the weather sucks -- buried in snow in the winter, drained by heat & humidity in the summer -- but that's to be expected if you're east of the Mississippi.

Cleveland is hip, it's happening, it's got charm, it's got beauty, it's got gravitas, it's got a lot for the young and young-at-heart to do. But by Christ the crosswalks are awful. The goddamn crosswalk sign takes 5 to 7 minutes to change. I'll time it tomorrow for real and report back; but my best guess is 5 to 7 minutes. You're standing there getting old while buses and cars and scooters and fixies fly by. Then you wait some more.

The other day I walked past a dude standing by a crosswalk vending his homemade music CDs.

"Take a listen," he said, offering me a pair of earphones connected to a Discman.

"I've got to get back to work," I said, taking a meaningful glance at my watch.

"Man, this light's going to take forever." I couldn't argue with that, so I listened and ended up purchasing the CD for five dollars. (Barb has since listened to it, and said it's awful. I'm glad I didn't pay what he asked, which was ten bucks.)

Portland is very pedestrian-friendly. Cleveland is not. Otherwise the city wouldn't make the hapless citizenry stand on the curb for eternity in the godawful humidity or homicidal, lake-effect snow.

C'mon, Cleveland, get your shit together.

Holy Effing Ess!

I've finally gotten into The World Ends With You, the game that sold me on the DS. It's by Japanese powerhouse publisher Square Enix (of Final Fantasy fame). It uses the dual screens to unique advantage. It has a compelling, emotionally resonant storyline -- something unusual in games.

Now that I'm into it, all I can say is (earmuffs!) holy fucking shit! The game is good, but the combat is so insanely complex that I'd like to meet the 14-year-old Japanese Ritalin-popping idiot savant who must have designed it. Then I'd like to donkey punch him. (I think -- I'm not sure what a donkey punch is. If it's something pleasurable, I take it back.)

Consider that in combat you play two characters at once. One fights on the touch screen by means of specific motions of the stylus. The one on top fights in a sort of rhythm game where you guide an arrow through a three-prong maze towards a certain symbol. You try to match the symbol at the end of one of the prongs with the same symbol on a card at the top of that screen. Sound confusing? Try playing it and suffer the consequences.

I suppose there must be someone out there, someone born in the nineties, who is really good at this game. I should probably look on YouTube for a video, and stare in awe at someone whose brain revs a helluva lot faster than mine.

It's things like this that make me realize that I'm ... not young anymore.

Experiments in Otaku or, I Think I'm Turning Japanese

So I bought a Nintendo DS. I used the Cleveland trip as justification, but frankly it's just an excuse to wallow in the failure of my Video Game Free 2008. And wallow I have been doing.
How did I decide on a Nintendo over the equally-or-even-more- appealing Sony PSP, you ask? I would love to indulge your curiousity by means of a lengthy explanation!

I have two friends who have a DS. They both are more than willing to lend me games (partially because they're generous people and good friends, partially because the DS -- unlike the PSP -- uses unscratchable cartridges rather than delicate, scratchable, and simply bizarre UMD discs). That means the gaming is cheaper on the DS (which is already $40 cheaper to buy just the device). Plus I felt that a PSP is simply a Playstation 2 shrunk down to handheld size. Wheras the DS is an entirely new system. For instance, the PSP has lots of cool games, but said games are simply ports of PS2 games that work a lot better and in fact are a lot cooler on the PS2. So basically, if you want to play PS2 games, get a PS2. Dude.

And the DS has, uh, Dual Screens. Ever hear of another video game player with two screens? Me neither. And it works. As with the Wii, Nintendo, those clever bastards, decided to just take a flyer on the hardware -- create something unexpectedly new and weird -- and leave it to the software engineers to catch up. And boy-howdy, have they caught up? I reckon they have.

Furthermore, I've been seduced a bit by the whole Japanese otaku thing, no thanks to the embarassingly named website DS Fanboy, which revels in otaku. Very greatly simplified, otaku is Japanese for geek. And were you to talk to a Japense person, they would tell you that otaku is a 100% disparaging word. They are disturbed when Americans such as myself willingly append the work otaku to their descriptions, as I'm doing in this post.

But we're Americans, baby! We make the rules. And you might recall, if you were alive circa 1906, that "geek" was a hideously disparaging term. No one would have willingly described themselves as a "geek" unless they couldn't get work as a madhouse attendant. Now we've got the Geek Squad, geek chic, Harry Knowles, etc. Being a geek is cool... kinda.

I was a bit fearful of purchasing the DS (although not really, because I could turn around and sell it at a minimum loss) because I've never really been into the 2-D gaming. I didn't get really interested in videogames until they got highly proficient at 3-D in 2001 (cf. Serious Sam). But what's cool about the DS is its, for lack of a better word, differentness. I've tried out three games so far and they're all unexpectedly good. Plus, it plays GBA games, of which there are a thousand that are good -- although all of those are old-school 2-D games of the type I might have played on my NES in 1989.

Enough on that. I'd rather be playing Puzzle Quest than writing about it. Let me just leave you with a glimpse at a tiny facet of the multi-faceted gemstone that is otaku:


See what I mean?

The Missing

I'm away from my baby for the first time since her birth: in Cleveland for three and a half weeks to train newly hired service reps for the VA. Cleveland's pretty cool, the extra money is nice, the work is fine -- the only thing missing is my family; especially this beautiful baby!

It's notable how much the missing can really hurt. I saw a fellow traveller here at the hotel step off the elevator carrying a pair of little baby girl shoes and a dart of missing struck my heart. I saw a news story about a local man who allegedly murdered his 2-month-old namesake son and felt a pang of such sorrow... that little baby deserved so much more.

I love my baby girl so much.

Thankfully, we can afford to have Barb and Elizabeth fly out in a week, and stay for the remainder of the trip. Can't wait.

The bachelor thing was fun for a day or two, but the novelty is already wearing off. Frankly, I'm a pretty lame bachelor. I hunker down in my hotel room listening to Built To Spill, drinking beer, and either reading (Lonesome Dove, which is awesome), internetting, or playing video games (see Experiments in Otaku or I Think I'm Turning Japanese, above). Tonight I spent a minute or two looking at the fireworks over Jacobs Field (I'll never call it Progressive Field!), then went back to my beer and my DS.