Hello.

Long time no see!

The gamelog has been outdated for a few months now. To tell the truth, I’ve been doing a lot of stuff in the meantime. I moved to a bigger apartment now, got an ol’ tube and a Wii hooked up and might slowly bring some of the other consoles I have stored. My orchid is in full bloom and since it was Fer’s present I choose to regard it as signifier of our relationship. Work’s still going. It’s alright.

I’ve had some other shit going on in the meantime. My ex-landlord screwed me over which caused me great anxiety for a while – dude didn’t want to return my deposit and started making shit up after having ghosted me for weeks. It’s not that much money but I really hate being taken advantage of, and even if I’m better off now I’m extremely paranoid that the same thing could happen once I have to leave the new apartment. Though I can’t do much right now so I’ll let future Anita sort that one out.

That’s for the bad. We’ve also been through Christmas, New Year’s and then Valentine’s.

For Christmas, I went back to my country, which means more arcade-going. This last place was particularly great, the owner was nice, the coin-ops were pretty much my thing (they had Scramble in there, so you know they mean business), and the vibe wasn’t too bad like in my last post’s arcade visit. It looked like one of those old Japanese arcades from the Showa era you see in documentaries, only the smoking uncles were missing. There were also lots of pinball games. I’m not very knowledgeable on those but their selection had both old and new machines. I had never played a modern one before – I was surprised they are still designing and manufacturing those due to them being so expensive and the specialized maintenance they need, but also both disappointed/overwhelmed by them since they had too many screens and stuff like app synchronization and stuff. Too complex for me. I wonder how the true pinball aficionados feel about these? Can’t say I know too many of these, sadly.

Fer got me a Final Fantasy edition WonderSwan Color as his Christmas gift. Haven’t played much with it yet since we were waiting for a new flashcart to be released, only for it to be sold out within minutes. Maybe another time! Really excited about it though. While this can be said about most other consoles, nothing beats playing on a real handheld in contrast with emulation. Fer makes some really good gifts.

New Year’s. Almost slept through it. Last year was great and I’m sure this one will be even better but sometimes you’re just tired, right? Zzzz. Then back to the cold Europe.

Valentine’s! Would be my favourite celebration if everything wasn’t so crowded. I got Fer some Sanrio chocolates and he surprised me with a Yasuomi Umetsu artbook I had told him about some months ago. Since he was here we also needed a very special Valentine’s plan, so after our super cute lunch date we were to this local videogame exhibition which I honestly found out about by pure chance. The makeshift museum wasn’t too big and mixed some other forms of kinda unrelated media such as animation and comic to make it more of an um, let’s say, “geek museum”? Still, I was pleasantly surprised. The flashy, neon-colored 80s were not a thing here at all, and in the 90s the country was very poor and recovering from the fall of communism, so retro games are very hard to come by. From my experience thrifting for older games at the flea markets here, most of them are either imported from western Europe, which I guess not everyone could find back then, or bootleg copies from Russia – my favourite, since they have some really creative covers sometimes and are not all that well-documented (they’re sometimes even dubbed too!). So I was quite amused when they had on display a TV Sport 262. It’s a Pong clone manufactured in the 80s in the Socialist Republic of Romania! I was fascinated by its existence and it made me long for a bigger display on the industry in the Eastern Bloc… There was also an arcade cabinet manufactured in 90s Romania, which consisted of a bootleg PCB before being converted to Neo-Geo.

This exhibition also had an interesting angle that wasn’t present on one of the other “videogame museums” I’ve visited. While small, it felt more like a passionate endeavor made by curators who actually care and not just a nostalgia cashgrab for millennials. They even had a Cassette Vision (and a Jr. model too!), some of the older Nintendo TV-games, more offbeat peripherals such as the SegaScope and a lot of rhythm game paraphernalia. So it makes me happy how, even with the limited resources, they could manage something like this and still cover more ignored areas of the vast history of the medium.

All of this makes me think how there’s also gotta be a lot of people out there with the same interests as me, but I’m just bad at approaching them. Lately I’ve become a bit more of a social recluse after the bad patch I mentioned at the beginning of the entry… I’ve managed to enjoy my hobbies in a somewhat isolated fashion, but I still long to connect with others. But connecting with people is a very hard endeavor for me, and even replying to emails or chats takes me a long time because I feel I have to be very very careful with what I say. I also think most of the stuff I care about is not particularly interesting to most people. This is such a teenager problem to have. But I’ll work on things. This may or may not be related to me not updating the gamelog in a while. ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ

That is all for this entry. I hope it didn’t come off as too personal. And even if it did, GAMERA is Anita☆’s personal webspace. So it’s fine.

Over!