Several unfocused half-baked blog posts in one

I’ve developed a minor addiction to Magic: The Gathering over the course of freshman year in college. Magic is a game more well-known for being played by insular packs of alpha nerds at your local high school cafeteria, but it is also patronized by alpha hipsters looking for a nostalgic kick. I’m friends with some of the latter. So I harmlessly bought a collection of cards on ebay, 800 cards of crap for about $20 shipped. Since then I’ve had compulsive Magic urges, like other people crave for sugary pastries or the smell of a new car. There’s a place called Jeanne’s in Bremerton that carries them, at the Perry Avenue Mall. It is indeed located on Perry Avenue. It is not a mall. Strip-mall maybe. Shopping mall not. But really, strip malls have more interesting stores on the whole than their suburban/urban mall counterparts. Where else can one buy grooming materials for their pets and by-the-pound Chinese food withing jogging distance of their parked Subaru? So Jeanne’s is a warm place with a medium-high ceilings and thinly-carpeted floors. It is either dimly lit or the group of Yu-Gi-Oh players there sucked the remaining light out of the room like so many supermassive black holes. The signs on the outside say that the store also sells used uniforms and other clothing items, which takes up most of the floor space. An elderly woman runs the place, I assume she is the Jeanne’s of namesake. There are sports cards in a few cases and occupying about a third of the wall space. I assume this is what Jeanne of Jeanne’s intended to sell when she determined there would be trading cards at the store. She certainly seemed nonplussed when her younger male coworker had to explain what set of Yu-Gi-Oh cards was coming down the pipe next. She seemed to wince a little at the coarse nerd-talk going on at the playing tables but happily indulged me as I looked through the playing cards. It was hard not to feel a bit of pity when talking to her and observing her body language. I made it as quick of a trip as I could. Sadly I’ll probably return to Jeanne’s a few more times before it is all said and done.

I started Etrian Odyssey II for the DS recently, because the best thing to do in a cramped summer schedule with limited free time is to play a deliberately slow and archaic Japanese RPG based on even more deliberately slow and archaic 1980’s American RPG mechanics. The character classes feel more balanced as a whole, at least from what I can tell from the skill list and what little I’ve played. There is something very relaxing about playing an RPG, especially on a handheld. I’ve always believed that the genre did well as a therapeutic tool for exasperated teenagers and students and businessmen looking for a combination of escapism and logical number-crunching. Point is: EO2 seems to beat out its predecessor at the moment for making the earlier sections of the game less needlessly frustrating and more instantly rewarding, instead of spending the first five hours of play getting nearly-killed by butterflies, rabbits, rats, and pissed off deer.

My dad was trying to figure out why he enjoyed and tolerated the violence in some films (Robocop, The Crow), while hating it in others (300, Sin City), and I BS’d these conclusions. 1. My father has a soft spot for 80’s ultraviolence, not to be confused with post-911 ultraviolence. 2. It’s Frank Miller, who tends not so much to create violent situations and violent actions as he does violent characters, who make the violence harder to digest and less emotionally impacting. That’s purely speculation though.

So yes, maybe something more substantial in the near future.