Welcome to Earf!

How well do you remember 1996? Some of you weren’t even born yet. Call waiting was still a thing. Cel phones were prohibitively expensive and we were all pretty sure they’d give you brain cancer. The only people who had ‘em were **** dealers and corporate execs, and most of the dealers were sticking with pagers. Computers were running either DOS, Windows 95, Windows 3.1 or MacOS 7. The internet was in its infancy, still something of a frontier made up of text pages and peer to peer communication, the only way to send or receive data bigger than a letter was FTP, and most people used AOL over dial-up, so it was sometimes faster to just mail someone a floppy disk. Which we still used back then. USB had just been introduced as a protocol in January and we wouldn’t see the first flash drives for another two years. No one ever considered the idea of needing a gigabyte of space for anything.

Fuck, Wikipedia wouldn’t even exist for another five years. Google was two years away, Amazon wasn’t active yet. Mark Zuckerberg was a nerdy 12 year old who was probably getting his lunch money stolen. Apple made Macintosh, iAnything wouldn’t be around for another too years with the iMac. The first smartphone had only hit the market in March and was a clunky piece of crap that was Frankensteined out of a PDA and a cel phone literally hooked together. We used the Encyclopedia Brittanica for research. Books. Made from paper.

The top grossing movie of the year would be Independence Day, which wouldn’t be released for another month subjective time for me. While the previous year’s Six Degrees of Separation had shown off Will Smith’s chops as a serious actor, ID4 was what actually allowed him to step out of the goofy typecasting that had followed him previously as he transitioned from nerdy rapper to film. His Capt. Steven Hiller is the action hero of the film alongside Jeff Goldblum’s David Levinson, Super Nerd. It inaugurated the Age of the Geek in pop culture by resolving a conflict not with bullets but a PowerBook. It also marked the end of Will Smith’s television career, with his six season sitcom ending that same year.

At least that’s how history plays out on the books and the internet. I remember going to see Independence Day at the Grand Theater in Elizabeth Pennsylvania. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Jeff Goldblum play Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman play Bill Pullman, Randy Quaid play a fucking lunatic (ie. Randy Quaid)… and Don Cheadle deliver the line “Welcome to Earth!” as he punched an alien in the face. In the role of Capt. Steven Hiller.

I know that’s not the casting of the movie, just as I know that it was Michael Cera who played Scott Pilgrim, not Jesse Eisenberg. That doesn’t stop me from remembering things differently and knowing that my memories are real.

I can’t explain it. It could just be lingering LSD in my system. I could be recalling alternate timelines… the multiverse theory and all that quantum entanglement bullshit. I could be just plain crazy. I told you I might not be a reliable narrator. Still, none of that would start for me for another month or so, even though yesterday I saw a Time magazine with a brand new interview from Betty White talking about how she wished she’d died before turning 100.

But you want to hear about The Game, although I suppose all of this has bearing on that too. We’ll stick a pin in this for now and I’ll steer myself back to the narrative.

After they carted off Handjob, I sat down with the two collages. On a slightly closer examination, the first one didn’t depict a Chinese menu, but instead simply designed in the style of one. It was a list… or perhaps a free form poem, headed by the word “Manifesto” followed by an optical illusion of three hares joined at the ears. There was definitely a Lepus theme going on here.

You play, you never tell
Find the doors, portals, points, and well
You play, you never tell
Step through the gates of life and hell
You play, you never tell
The wardens watch, and guard us well
You play, and pray you never tell

I don’t think I need to tell you that my interest was piqued by this, but if that weren’t enough the other page with the graffiti and book page each also held cryptic missives, respectively.

Pray you never meet a Warden's eyes
Or with such takers fraternize
For once they see you, recognize
Your game is up; your world, it dies

And

You'll see the Warden's only once. You'll see them if you tell anyone about the game. You'll see them if you betray the spirit of the game. You'll see the Wardens only once.

So yeah. My interest was definitely piqued. Cryptic warnings. The inference of some sort of game. The ominous “Wardens”. Not quite 21 year old me couldn’t resist.

See I’ve been a game nut all my life. My family has long refused to play Trivial Pursuit with me, I answer Jeopardy quest before the host finishes reading them (I ran neck and neck with Ken Jennings throughout his run). I memorize tabletop RPG rulebooks and I’ve been obsessed with video games since my dad brought home an Atari 2600.

I’ve played a little bit of everything over the years, on every console, as well as the computer and even the old arcade cabinet machines. For me it’s always been about pattern recognition and puzzles, so it should come as little surprise that the Atari had very little to interest me. The patterns were simple to recognize, took very little time to memorize, and eventually the only stumbling block to playing infinitely was the speed with which my hands could move. 12 year old me would walk into an arcade and play Berzerk for an hour on one quarter. I still twitch every time I see a smiley face. Fucking Evil Otto.

Ask anyone which video game has the best all time graphics and you’ll hear a plethora of differing opinions ranging from some of the cell shaded stuff to the photorealistic uncanny valley games that are being released on the current systems. This opinions are all categorically wrong. The best graphics in a video game were released in 1983 on two separate cabinets in arcades. Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. Dragon’s Lair had the insanely high budget of $3 million and was completed from top to bottom in 7 months. Both games are made up of a series of animated QTE cut scenes, and were animated by hand, old school style, by Don Bluth’s studio. If you don’t know who Don Bluth is, go watch The Secret of NIHM and Ferngully. I’ll wait here.

The fact that the game involved randomized cut scenes where you had 5 seconds to enter the correct input made it decidedly more challenging than anything else I’d ever encountered, and it was simply beautiful to look at and play. And compare the graphics of possibly the greatest animator ever to even Red Dead Redemption II and it still comes out on top.

This rant has nothing whatsoever to do with The Game, except to tell you that I’m a giant nerd, I have a kind of spooky memory, I’m good at pattern recognition, and I’m sort of obsessive about puzzles until I can solve them. And Robin Williams rapping in Ferngully is the most awesome thing ever.

And to those who think that Dark Souls is the epitome of challenging gameplay… I beat Battletoads, noob. And I probably fucked your mother while I was high enough to hunt ducks with a rake and tripping my balls off. Yes, you may call me “Daddy”.

Anyway, when presented with the problem that I was facing I had very few options to follow up on.

The Carnegie Library, and I mean THE Carnegie Library, the first one, the OG (or would that be OL) is situated in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, attached to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Both of Andrew Carnegie’s eleventh hour confessions to being a completely bastard held a wealth of knowledge on everything, and I mean everything. The problem is that unless you know what you’re looking for you can easily get lost looking for it. A three story library with damn near a square mile of shelf space and microfiche storage about the size of a shopping mall anchor store holds a shit ton of information. Yes, shit ton is the technical term. I should know, I used to date a librarian.

The local occult scene might lead me to something, but it might just as easily lead me to a basketful of herring of the red variety.

And finally there was that frontier, the internet, or more specifically IRC. IRC, or internet relay chat (or as we referred to it internet relay chaos) was the precursor to chat rooms. I was hesitant to go that route, but it was the easiest to access at that time. So when I got back to the two bedroom third story walk-up I shared with an ever changing number of sort-of roommates and found the communal 386 unoccupied, I opted for the route of least resistance.

WhysperMuse: Anyone know what Egyptian goddesses, Alice in Wonderland, and Jefferson Airplane all have in common?

The response was almost immediate.

BigWig: Rabbits. Email address?