Month: September 2011

When Kotaku started streaming Game Center CX as Retro Game Master, the dam finally broke. I went from “I can watch this series at last” to “complete maniac downloading every fan-subbed episode available” in no time flat, and I haven’t looked back since. Fact of the matter is, there’s a special kind of magic to Shinya Arino’s show, something I went into greater detail about here, and would much rather link than rehash.

Because the point of this post is more the dangerous sickness the show spurred; something that went way beyond simply spending time watching it and forcing it on other people. No, this is a sickness that has wallet-based repercussions. See the evidence below, and if your brain happens to be as vilely corrupted as mine, you can click to enlarge that which you covet so perversely.

It started with the above, Atlantis no Nazo (The Mystery of Atlantis), which I thought would just be cool to get because it was complete, relatively cheap, and featured in one of the early episodes of GCCX. Of course, holding something as rad as a boxed Famicom game can only lead to more trouble, and the floodgates were officially open.

Next in line was Gradius, because, hey, who doesn’t want to play Gradius? Totally justifiable. But then…

What the hell? Seriously? Yeah, I mostly got this one because it was cheap and Akira Toriyama’s art is rad. NO APOLOGIES. NO TURNING BACK.

This one no doubt makes up for any prior errors in judgment. Just look at that sexy cart. That thick manual! Totally makes you want to drain your PayPal account all over the place, doesn’t it?

One thing I haven’t really had a chance to do in my years of living next to New York City is have a classically sleazy NYC theatrical experience. Last night seemed as good a night as any, as I found out last minute (via Steven McVey) about a midnight showing of Norifumi Suzuki’s School of the Holy Beast at the awesome Landmark Sunshine Cinema.

I first read about this ’74 shocka in Patrick Macias‘s Tokyoscope book, and I’ve actually owned a bootleg DVD of it since, I don’t know, 2005? Since this illicit media languished so long on my shelf, I figured I owed it to myself and Suzuki to go see his masterpiece in the theater. An essential quote from Macias’s book sums it up nicely:

“Trashy as it may sound, Suzuki’s film is absolutely gorgeous to gaze upon (an arts center projectionist once swore to me that it was the most beautiful looking film he’s ever shown), many of its shots carefully framed and lit for maximum fearful symmetry.”

But maybe the trailer speaks for itself (NSFW):

The few people here who also frequented my old blog—actually, that probably accounts for roughly 100% of the people who read this—may have been wondering just why I stopped updating the other one. The answer is, unsurprisingly, complete burnout.

It’s as lame an excuse as any, but it’s true. I would wake up, write some articles, do some work on scripts, do whatever else and eventually go to bed to wake up and do it again. Don’t get me wrong, the work is fun, but the last thing I was thinking about after wrapping up a full day of writing was, “Oh, sweet, now I can log onto my blog and write about instruction manuals or… what ever the hell else it is I write about there.” I think I forgot what it was for after a while, and like a lot of things it fell to the wayside. Here’s a picture to break this up just to show you how goddamn good I am at this.

I could always write about my day. It was called “The Joseph Luster Report,” right? Nah, that’s not my thing. I don’t get whatever cathartic release others do from sharing things about themselves, even if that’s kind of what I’m doing now. It’s boring. I want to write about how ruthless it is that Double Dragon opens with a girl getting punched in the gut and slung over some dude’s back, not about how many Five Guys burgers I ate from 2009-2010 (a lot).

Besides, how was I supposed to top such classic posts as 2006’s “The Anatomy of an Instruction Manual”? It would be foolish to even attempt, right? As far as I was concerned, I had “beaten,” or perhaps even “solved,” blogging, just as my friends and I had beaten podcasting by doing the amazing show Robotronic Dynamite (R.I.P.) for a couple years. The village below is the Internet and this is what my collective works have done to it and its peoples.

But no! My job here is not done! And that’s why I started fresh, exemplifying the many toasts made to “new beginnings” over the years. Rather than succumbing to burnout, it’s a lot more fun to embrace it and do something even better than before. That’s what you can expect at subhumanzoids. Something better than before. Perhaps the best thing available to read for free online? Perhaps.

However, if you do want me to close this with something personal, I just drank a large pumpkin spice latte and legit feel like I’m going to barf.

Also posted at the tumblr

Also posted over at the tumblr