The main signal delivery mechanisms for 8-bit and 16-bit consoles was the RF adapter. This turned video and audio information into a radio frequency modulated signal. It worked on pretty much any tv that could tune itself to channel 3 (or 4) and delivered a fuzzy, yet usable signal that replaced the evening news with Yo Noid! or whatever.

Most of these consoles did have better output options available, but those were for fancier TVs. The RF unit is what came standard until the onset of the 32-bit generation. The Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation both came with Yellow/Red/White RCA cables, which were pretty common on newer tvs.

But most people did not run out and replace all their old tvs and if you didn’t have the right input, it wasn’t as easy to get a replacement cable as it is now. Now you hit a button, a series of human rights violations occur and BAM! a new cable is dropped on your doorstep. Back then you had to not only explain the difference between RF and RCA to an unwitting parent, you had to get them to drive you to the store and hope they had the thing in stock.

So my PS1 was a strictly RCA affair, which was fine when I had it at my house, but less so on weekends with my dad. Though the weekends should have been prime video game time for me, the only tv with RCA inputs was in the living room, where my stepmother would enjoy a steady stream of pirated pay-per-view movies. If there was a particularly boring film, she would sometimes take a little nap and I had to drop whatever I was doing to savor a few brief moments of Tekken 2. But the more likely situation was I would just stay up until three or four in the morning, waiting for everyone to go to sleep so I could finally switch the tv from an endless loop of Titanic to playing Mortal Kombat Trilogy until the sun came up.

And so, I became a night person.

Out of the thirteen or so jobs I’ve had, only three have been first shift and I hated every fucking minute of them. I probably still would have hated them if I started later in the afternoon, but the lack of sleep wasn’t helping. Once I had a third shift job that turned into a second shift job without warning, so I just keep coming in at my regular third shift time until someone finally stopped me six months later. My current job is actually supposed to be a 9 to 5, but after a week of that, I was like “I think I’m going to start coming in at noon”. Everyone just went with it.

My preference for the dark hours seemed to cause some amount of consternation amongst my family, who were apparently unaware that their disapproval only makes the juice sweeter. My father used to constantly try to reason me into getting up earlier. I specifically remember when I was having issues limping a grey Volvo 240 through the lenient Connecticut emissions process. In talking to him on the phone, his advice was “get a good night’s rest, get up early, make some calls, get some prices.” Turns out you can sleep until noon and accomplish the same thing, because all the morning people are already in bed by 3pm or something.

I do wonder what my life would be like if I were born a few years later, when video input options were less of an issue. There are 3 screens in my eye line right now and with little to no effort, I could be playing a game of Mortal Kombat on each one of them. Would I be the same person if a good portion of my teen years weren’t spent waiting for an adult to pass out in front of the living room tv? Maybe, maybe not. But have I also mentioned that I hate the sun?

The Headline When You Die

Do you ever wonder what the headline will be when you die? Most of the time, the answer is “there won’t be one”, but I don’t think it’s something you can control or predict.

I’ve done some questionable things in my day. One of my favorite pastimes used to be making giant KISS-like pyro flames using a small campfire, an old candle and a cup of water taped to a broomstick. I also once took a cheap, non-flying, glorified sparkler “firework” I bought from Wal-Mart and taped it to a model rocket engine I also bought from Wal-Mart and flew it in a state park. It was a glorious ascent and an impressively loud explosion upon landing.

(I dug out some video of one of the candle fires. I assure you that I always checked the Smokey The Bear fire safety sign before ignition)

My initial numbers on the home unit were almost frighteningly low, but soon I was getting the best lung function numbers I’d ever seen. Shockingly, impossibly high numbers. I actually wrote about it here. This machine evolved my technique from a normal breath to a kind of death metal growl to more of a haunted house whine. After all these years, I had finally bested my enemy, the PFT machine.

Turns out the machine had swindled me.

I could never replicate the numbers I was getting in a clinical setting. There are going to be discrepancies between a professional machine and a handheld one that links to an app that no one can really nail UI scaling on, but the gulf was too wide to write off as manufacturing discrepancies. The handheld machine sabotaged me by rewarding behaviors that the professional machine hates.

The handheld home version loves it when you take a deep breath, stop to collect your thoughts and then make a noise similar to the library ghost from Ghostbusters. The hospital machine and the people that run it are less enthused by this. After three years of piss poor numbers, I finally figured out the thing the hospital machine wants: big breath in and an immediate exhale, no pause. Which is probably how I used to do it before the home version got into my head, I don’t remember. You’re also not supposed to make an actual noise, as that gets your throat in the way of your breath, but I still think I can find a way to make it work, just to say I did. We’ll find out in three months!

The home machine “works” in that you have to understand it’s numbers are a lie but they can be compared to each other in order to tell if my lung function is going up or down. But right now I think it’s too dangerous for me to use because I treat it like setting a Donkey Kong score and I’ll do whatever it takes to make the number go up.

Machine vs Man 2: Now It’s Trying to Piss Me Off

What’s the maddest you’ve ever been at an inanimate object? I suppose I should start by asking if you’ve ever actually been mad at an inanimate object, but it’s so thoroughly ingrained in my dna that I can’t imagine anyone saying “no, an object has never made me mad” and I’m unwilling to reckon with the fact that anyone could say such a thing.

Analog technology always seemed to break in a way that felt “haunted” to me, like there was literally a ghost in the machine. This probably comes down to the age at which I was dealing with these things and my lack of basic mechanical knowledge at the time. We used to have a VCR who’s diet consisted mostly of my favorite video cassettes. Chewed them up by the goddamn truckload. But it never did it while I had it opened up. And for some reason taking a cotton swap and some alcohol to the top of the drum seemed to fix it for a bit, even though that has roughly as much effect as blowing into a Nintendo cartridge. Maybe the thing really was haunted and the ghost liked alcohol.

Digital technology feels like it breaks in a willful way, like it’s trying to test you. Again, I’m projecting here, but when a VCR ate a tape, you could see the tape crumble and kind of understand how this could happen. When a computer won’t run a program it’s run every day for it’s entire fucking life, it feels personal.

I bought a Steam Deck and love it, but not enough to keep me from buying a competing device last week so that they can battle for my affection with the loser being sentenced to a 7 day auction on eBay. The Asus ROG Ally is a tremendously powerful handheld PC that also holds the title for “Inanimate object that made me the most angry.”

As an early adopter, I expected some trials and the Steam Deck had some issues when it first came out too. But the Ally uses Windows 11 and sometimes it feels like a cruel joke. The whole selling point is that you can use it to play Microsoft Game Pass games, but I couldn’t even install them for a full day. It just kept telling me I needed to install Gaming Services, even though I’d done it 5 fucking times. I did some digging on the internet–tough since this was during the Reddit blackout–and ran some command line business. Nothing. Came real close to writing “Credit my account” on the back of my receipt, taping it to the Ally and whipping it through the Best Buy window at 3am.

Instead, I went to bed, which was probably smarter, but not as satisfying.

The next day, I came at it again, determined to figure out how to download at least one game before I brought this thing back. So I turned it on and…it worked. I didn’t have to do anything. Even the fingerprint scanner worked now, which I didn’t expect. There hadn’t been any updates or anything, it just worked. This was somehow more infuriating than if it was still broken, but not enough that I’ve returned it…yet.

Things I Like

I’d like to take a moment here to talk about Katatonia’s “Last Fair Deal Gone Down”, one of the greatest albums released in my lifetime. It came out in 2001 and even though it was the first Katatonia album I heard, I specifically bought it because there was a big uproar about how they changed their sound and I love it when bands change their sound. 22 years later, I am not joking when I say the songwriting team of guitarist Anders Nystrom and vocalist Jonas Renske are the Lennon/McCartney of my generation.

I have listened to this album hundreds if not thousands of times over the last few decades and I still find myself going “listen to that fucking chord! Who does that?!” multiple times. I celebrate the whole catalog but they were cooking with that special shit on this one. If you’ve never heard it, just check out “Teargas”

I work from home and I’m pretty busy at the beginning of the month, so I was running late on the dog’s 4pm walk. She was very excited when I got the leash out. Less so when it turned out her walk was from the door to the road then right back to the door.

I felt it before I smelt it. Not quite a tightness in my chest, but more of a tiredness, as if my lungs had found a way to do crunches without alerting the rest of my body. Like the world’s worst detective, I connected the haze on the horizon, the red sun and the smell of someone burning the world’s largest Wicker Man with the various “air gonna be bad!” headlines I’d seen over the last week and determined the air was indeed bad.

Turns out I was actually the world’s second worst detective.

The next day, an anonymized family member stopped by to print something and we bullshitted a bit as the Brother printer everyone has fired up. I was explaining that I felt bad because I couldn’t take Lila out for a walk and this person said “Oh really? It’s not that hot out.” I explained that “no, the air smells like burning”. This was news to them. They were incredulous that smoke from Canada would even make it this far and they didn’t notice anything on their walk, but resolved to sniff the air when they went back out.

As noted above, the fucking sun was red.

A younger me, probably would have made a big deal out of this, especially since this family member holds the world record for cigarettes smoked in front of me, but in my middle age, I’m content to write about it here. If anything, I’m envious, because it must be nice to be so thoroughly unaffected by what’s happening around you.

An Awe Inspiring Piece of Mail

I won’t say that my co-pays are out of control, but they’re getting there. I’m on the hook for $4k a year, which is above what the average US employee paid in 2022, but I’ve seen worse. However, I’d love to spend that money on literally anything other than drugs, so I applied for assistance through a charitable foundation.

I’m not going to name them here, because I still need them to send me some checks, but I’ve mentioned the deal before: I applied and qualified for a $15,000 grant, which would essentially make most of my financial issues disappear. Of course, I don’t just get a check for $15,000, I have to submit receipts from my prescriptions. And even then I don’t get the full $4,000, they’ll only reimburse medications from companies that have contributed to the fund, so at the end of the day, assuming everything gets approved, I’ll probably clear just over a grand. Still, I’ll take it!

I will, of course, get it slowly. I have paid medical bills very slowly in the past and let me tell you they don’t take kindly to that shit. Funny how their attitude changes when the payee becomes the payer.

So in a rare show of optimism, I was very excited when I received an envelope from this mysterious foundation last week. Thinking it was a check, I excitedly ripped it open. What I found inside was truly awe inspiring.

It was a solicitation for a donation.

This is a company that I got in contact with because medical costs were juicing my grapes a little too hard. In the course of that process, they got both my address AND my adjusted gross income. Taking a look at the sum total of this information and deciding “maybe it’s time this guy gives a little back” is truly awe inspiring, especially since it’s been about 40 days since I asked them to send me a $120 rebate for drugs that my insurance was billed $43,500 for. It’s very possible that we’re just going to keep sending each other “give me money” messages until the wildfire smoke finally takes me out, which they probably think is a tremendous business model, but I believe my death would drop the stock price of at least 3 of their contributing companies, so maybe their math is off on that one.

Speaking of Asking for Money

I’ve been reluctant to mention this for a few different reasons, but I have been chosen as one of CT’s Finest by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. It’s “an event honoring Connecticut’s best and brightest outstanding professionals” which is very funny to me because an astounding portion of my work is done while I’m wearing a bootleg Tiamat “Clouds” shirt and the line between casual and business attire for me is “sleeves”. Also, I give myself 4:1 odds that I’ll need a GoFundMe at some point, so I don’t want to run the well dry before that.

In any case, I’m supposed to raise $2,000 for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, so I’m going to put a link here in case you feel like using it.

Things I Like

I bought the new In the Line of Duty boxset for “Yes, Madam!”—this is a Cynthia Rothrock household—but holy shit was Royal Warriors incredible. I’m fairly new to Hong Kong action, so it’s very surprising to me that filmmakers are more likely to “go there’ with story beats that most American films back away from. Main characters die and don’t pull a surprise resurrection like LL Cool J at the end of Halloween H20. They’re fucking dead and it affects the rest of the movie. In that spirit, the final act of Royal Warriors contains one of the very best revenge schemes I’ve ever seen. The villain is ice fucking cold for that one. Highly recommended.

I only mention this because after about a year of trolling eBay, I finally found a reasonably priced pair of Ray Ban Outdoorsman II Aviator glasses. That’s the model that David Hasselhoff wore for many an episode of Baywatch, so I’ve been hoping to get a pair to join my bootleg Terminator 2 sunglasses in the “glasses that look like the ones the guy wore on that thing I watch” collection.

I got the larger lensed version which is great because again, I have a head similar to lovable 90s video game caveman Bonk. So with the good news out of the way, it’s time to tell you that the temple arms don’t quite clear my ears, making the balance on my greasy nose very precarious.

These are a vintage pair of glasses that I’m roughly 75% sure aren’t bootleg, so I rolled the dice and ordered some official replacement arms at an obscene price to see if I can get these things to fit my damn head. I do not know if newly manufactured arms fit frames made under the previous corporate owner, but sometimes half the fun of buying stuff is trying to get it to work. I like a little adventure, even when it ends in a real Ship of Theseus situation happening on the bridge of my nose.

The Lies We Get to Believe

As I get older, I find it’s easier to believe one’s lies about oneself, because they can no longer be tested. The years go on and the letters “v”, “n”, and twin “e”s run rampant on all the “I could do” sentences floating in my mind, turning them into a graveyard of “I could’ve done”s. Even my most low level dreams and goals—say doing a two week tour as a live session player with a random legacy band—are being assaulted by v, n, e and e as we speak, as I slowly become too old to be an interesting choice should a member of Danger Danger take ill in the northeast United States. It’s okay, had I been paying attention when I was younger I could’ve started a guitar based YouTube channel where my thousands of followers would launch me straight from my bedroom to the Former Members section of the BulletBoys’ Wikipedia page, though my name probably still wouldn’t be in blue text.

Of course, the most interesting “what if?” Is to wonder what would happen if I didn’t have Cystic Fibrosis. Would the chip on my shoulder that has rocketed me straight into a midrange data administration job still exist? Would I still have one of every Swamp Thing figure ever made?

The closest thing I have to an answer to those two questions is a half-brother roughly 10.5 years younger than me. He has a lot more money, but a lot fewer Swamp Things.

Honestly, I’d rather have the Swamp Things.

Things I Like

Nothing says “summer” to me like Street Fighter. Many of my summer childhood memories involve me doing things—camping, going to the beach, being outside in general—that I was forced to do instead of playing Street Fighter II. Though to extend some credit to the well meaning adults in my life, camping probably made the many hours I spent playing Street Fighter even sweeter.

Street Fighter 6 came out last Friday and I’m the adult now, so I played a lot more of it this weekend than I probably should have. The thing is, none of my friends were ever really all that interested in fighting games, so I spent a lot of time playing against the CPU. Street Fighter 6 has a full fledged single player adventure mode that lets you build a truly terrifying custom avatar—a thing I love— and randomly uppercut passerby on the street—a thing I didn’t know I would love, but boy I sure do. The standard arcade mode is pretty good too, though it’s dangerous for me to play, because the idea that I might be good at kicking things someday is slowly worming around in my head and things like this make it seem like a great idea to take up martial arts at 40.

Though I suppose if I injure myself trying to kick through a board, I can pass the time by wandering around Metro City as an impossibly greasy and ill-proportioned divorced dad, uppercutting anyone who looks at me wrong. Truly an age of wonders.