your nostalgia

My parents were from the UK and although I never lived there I was surrounded by the culture growing up. My Mom used to make fish and chips with mushy peas, steak and kidney pie (sometimes she had problems finding beef kidney … people asked her if she had a cat). We went back to England a few times as a child, always at Christmas, and I remember the wonderful atmosphere. They played Christmas carols everywhere, even on the bus. The metro (Tube to Londoners) tunnels were filled with buskers … it was so nice to walk round a corner and find someone playing Jingle Bells or Silent Night. And the food … Christmas pudding with brandy butter, pork pies, mince pies (actually dried fruit pies).

Now my folks are gone. I miss them all the time but I miss them most at Christmas… it’s just not the same here and without them.

When my dad went abroad he used to bring back a huge bag of Basset’s winegums from the duty-free shop for us. During that period I played a lot of Space Quest 3. I used to sit all Saturday on my Atari ST playing and chugging winegums.

So these days when I eat winegums I get nostalgic thinking about that time, and want to play SQ3 again.

Being a kid again.

Half Life, GOTY edition. With the orange box.

Removed by mod

• Home phones
• Former companies and businesses: Muvico Theaters, Blockbuster, and Wannado City
• Gaming on PS1, PS2, PSP, PS3, and Gameboy Advance
• Portable Video players and cd players
• crt tvs and composite video cables
• Cancelation and rebirth of Toonami
• Broweser games and flash game sites: Newgrounds, Neopets, Gaia Online, Maya Pets Mostfungames, Nicktropolis, Poptropica, Adventure Quest, and FusionFall
• Video games: Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Batman, Little Big Planet 1 & 2, MAG, Warhawk Uncharted 2, Infamous, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, Playstation Home, Just Cause 2, Saints Row 2, GTA VCS, GTA IV, GTA V
• Needing a router and modem before 2-1 devices were common.
• The birth and death of windows phones
• Rock Melt web browser
• Introduction of Google Chrome
• Birth and death of Google+
• Kissanime
• Saturday morning cartoons and the death of Saturday morning cartoons
• Former tv channels and programs: Fox Family, ABC Family, Kids’ WB , Discovery Kids, Toon Disney, Jetix, and Toonzai.
• Old series and movies: Cars, Madagascar, WALL-E, Chicken Little, Ben 10, 6Teen, Phil of the Future, Drake & Josh, iCarly, Out of Jimmy’s Head, That’s So Raven, Sister, Sister, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, The Suite Life on Deck, My Name is Earl, Ugly Betty, Ugly Americans, Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, Recess, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Rocko’s Modern Life, CatDog, Sonic X, Ōban Star-Racers, El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, The Mighty B!, Codename: Kids Next Door, Storm Hawks, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Sonic X, Ben 10, Xiaolin Showdown, Winx Club, Danny Phantom, Static Shock, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Sym-Bionic Titan, Yin Yang Yo!, Samurai Jack, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, Rocket Power, All Grown Up!, Loonatics Unleashed, My Life as a Teenage Robot, Mr. Meaty, King of the Hill, Jackie Chan Adventures, Di-Gata Defenders, Cyberchase, Maya & Miguel, ChalkZone, Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Brandy & Mr. Whiskers Dave the Barbarian, Kim Possible, American Dragon: Jake Long, Gargoyles, The Buzz on Maggie, W.I.T.C.H, Totally Spies, The Emperor’s New School, The Replacements, Tron: Uprising, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008 TV series), Star Wars Rebels, The Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Test Generator Rex, Wolverine and the X-men, Iron Man: Armored Adventures, Chowder, Johnny Bravo, Transformers: Animated, Camp Lazlo, My Gym Partner’s a Monkey, Regular Show, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, The Life and Times of Juniper Lee, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, The Secret Saturdays, Dinosaur King, Thundercats, The Batman, Total Drama Island, Viva Piñata, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003 TV series), Chaotic, Bakugan, Beyblade, Invader Zim, Hey Arnold!, Catscratch, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Legend of Korra, The Spectacular Spider-man, The Future Is Wild, Kenny the Shark, Tutenstein, Growing Up Creepie, IGPX Immortal Grand Prix, Bleach, Inuyasha, Prince of Tennis, Code Geass, Fullmetal Alchemist, One Piece, Naruto, Soul Eater, Blood+, Moribito, The Big O, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Eureka Seven, Kekkaishi, FLCL, Blue Exorcist, Deadman Wonderland, Crayon Shin-Chan, Casshern Sins, Cowboy Bebop, Death Note, Durarara!!.

I loved playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Fun times.

Playing Pokémon Red on my Game Boy Color in the school garden.

When the heat finally splits open, and that cool draft swirls through, and I feel fall in the air I’m full of desire to seek comfort.

So many summers ending with new adventures. Each new school year was terrifying, but there was a certain point, about when the weather would start getting cool, when I’d realize the school year was well under way and I was surviving it.

College was like this. Finally unpacked the stuff from the car, said my tearful goodbyes to Mom, and watched with relief as her car disappeared down the road. Then it was just me, alone, on my own. And school starting up. A whole world to learn and master: groceries, homework, any bedtime I wanted, drugs, girls, advanced calculus, lecture halls echoing with more knowledge than I could ever absorb.

Even though Stairway to Heaven mentions June, it is a fall song. Spotify, in all its recommendation engine wisdom, plays it for me only in these first few crisp days of autumn. It knows.

Through its petabytes of statistical inferences, it has teased out the archetypal truth:

As we wind on down the road, our shadow’s taller than our soul. There walks a lady we all know, who shines white light, and wants to show that everything still turns to gold. And if you listen very hard, the tune will come to you at last.

Fall is a time to meditate and sink into memory, to be grateful for the pages already written, and by yearning to be back in the fresh and unwritten ink of those past chapters as they were happening, to develop an appreciation and hunger for our present, which will someday also be buried in the ice of time, but which is just now soft and warm and responsive to our touch.

This is really strange but a few weeks ago I was looking for something to watch and I came across the thumbnail for the Golden Girls.

That thumbnail gave me a huge nostalgia trip and I can’t explain why. The show was never aired in my home country so I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen it as a kid. I watched some clips from it and I felt nothing.

But the moment I look at that thumbnail of the main cast sitting together I feel like I’m at my parents house in my old room as a 6 year old.

Booting up Chrono Cross on the PS2 and just letting it sit on the intro screen so that it would play this intro song/video:

https://youtu.be/180sjeAMKPE?si=xzCgezXqkF546s9h

I miss how makeup was before instagram.

Blowing in NES cartridges in the hope it makes them work.

Realizing that didn’t work very well. Opening the NES. Adjusting the internal connector to press the contacts more firmly. Cutting a pin on an IC (and them maybe pulling it high? I don’t remember) to disable the copy protection pin – one less pin to have connection issues.

…still having to blow in NES cartridges and hoping it somehow makes them work.