What is wrong with me.

I first heard about Dead Island a when the trailer initially popped up around Valentine's Day, but I didn't pay much attention because I got the gist of it from headlines on blogs and whatnot. I figured video game + zombies = okay, well then, carry on. rimshot. Today I saw the trailer and it really impressed me by how beautiful it is. I don't even want to play the game because I can only be disappointed by it.*


fuuuuuuuck




Noise and screaming sometimes is the best. Turn this up. Missed them at the Abbey because I was too busy seeing MOTORHEAD



Yesterday I found a VHS tape at the library, it was on the bench where people dump stuff, mostly books, that they don't want anymore. I ingeniously call it The Free Stuff Bench. At one point the library had a system in place, with shelves and everything, but much like the noble dodo it disappeared. The label on the tape has some Japanese on it and "Summer 96" as well. I was... overjoyed is the wrong word for it but it comes pretty close, mainly because I was hoping that it was someone's vacation in japan in 1996. I popped the tape into the VHS player when I got home, rewound it a bit and pressed play about 2 hours (according to the timer on the VCR) and the news was on. Wait, the Japanese news was on. From a cursory view of the news I gathered that there was some kind of heatwave going on. Not too interesting, but wait! The commercials. Oh dear, the commercials. There are a lot of commercials for summer festivals and one for a water park that plays ad nauseum, what it being summer and everything. There's a bunch of wacky commercials but my favorite is the one for the Game Boy Pocket featuring a cast of color coded cool kids and their matching Game Boys. I like to imagine that they are a superhero team, akin to the Power Rangers but with more quests that involve going to the store to get more batteries. I rewound the tape some more and saw some of a audience participation game show. During the first few minutes the host does a monologue and then a horrible man/insect pops out and they wittily banter for a while. Yes, man/insect. It's a guy with a big plastic head that has antennae sticking out, wearing a rigid suit designed to look like a grasshoppers thorax, his arms and legs are in brown tights and he occasionally fiddles with 2 pairs of middle legs. I also watched most of a show about pachinko machines, half of it consisted of a tour of a humongous pachinko parlor complete with karaoke rooms and a restaurant called Fresh Burger, the other half is focused on an Aladdin and the Genie based pachinko machine. I watched almost of this section without fast forwarding any part. There's nothing interesting going on, just lights going off, all sorts of noises, things spinning, and a never ending rain of polished ball bearings bouncing around. What is wrong with me.** According to the timer on the VCR there is six hours of Japanese TV on the tape. I plan to watch it all because hopefully there will be an answer to the questions it has raised: Why would anyone record so much TV? Is it a tape from japan to someone who is homesick? Is it a tape made by someone who wanted a weird but cheap souvenir to take home? Did someone who appear on the news decide to record their 15 seconds of fame? Is it someone who knows the horrible bug man? Questions, all these questions, and no answers! The best thing is that it has brought some wackiness into my other wise dreary life. Ha ha ha.

* Also because survival horror games scare me. A lot. Weird, right?
** Please don't answer that.