When speed gets in the blood, one must drive to live.
-Rudolf Caracciola
What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.
-Werner Herzog
I may not look like much, but I’m an expert at trying to be a ninja.
-Darynda Jones, First Grave on the Right
Who controls the past controls the future.
-George Orwell, 1984
Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling…
-Walt Whitman
“Pulvis et umbra sumus.”
(We are but dust and shadow.)
-The Odes of Horace
The problem with people is that they’re only human.
-Bill Watterson
One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed – as those who take to the water change – and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders – destined for him as well – he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too – I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.
-H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth
“If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”
-Louis Armstrong
“Kindness and good nature unite men more effectually and with greater strength than any agreements whatsoever, since thereby the engagements of men’s hearts become stronger than the bond and obligation of words.”
-Thomas More, Utopia
After all, if your arch-nemesis kidnapped your best friend in front of your very eyes and left a ransom note demanding six magical gems in exchange for their life, you’d be inclined to do whatever it takes to get that person back, wouldn’t you?
It is not about “life after death” as such. Rather, it’s a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: “life after ‘life after death’.”
-N.T. Wright
“Is the spring coming?” he said. “What is it like?”…
“It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…”
Let’s continue to ask questions. Let’s keep on being curious. Art gets better for it and so do we.
“Nintendo games are for children and you should be ashamed for playing them as an adult”. Guess what? They don’t care.
Nintendo censorship, a story from my childhood I’ve never told, and playing Castlevania for the first time ever.
Cut from the same cloth as previous Kirby adventures, Epic Yarn is sew good, at least it seams that way to me… but let’s not get a thread of ourselves… is it a “kiddie” game? Quilty as charged.
Friday’s TWRM Radio “Hearth”, a collection of town and city themes for homesickness.
The emptiness of the cave where once his sweet but pilfered potassium-ey treasures lay put a mirror against the howling vacuity of his gorilla longing, and so DK and Diddy embark on a quest fueled by the awesome rage of revenge.
I can assure you with utmost confidence that no magical, fire-breathing dinosaurs were harmed in the making of this video game.
The point of me writing on this game over 25 years after its initial release is not to determine if it’s a good game or not, but rather, to spark discussion on its context in the wider setting of digital play, how its heartfelt story might resonate with players across cultures and generations, what its themes are trying to communicate.
This new series is dedicated in loving affection to the great musical artistry of gaming.
Happy birthday! Here are 10 things I love and 10 things I don’t love about you!
“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock n’ roll.”
-Shigeru Miyamoto
