Videogames are for Sissies (And So Am I)

Y’all may know I am a devotee of that wonderful, enlightening, ever-developing art form: videogames. Well, Sarah Elmaleh (voice over artist, gamer, life partner) turned me on to the truly epic Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure (Play it. Play it now. Behold the splendor.) Sarah’s got a fab article on Gamer Melodico on just why Sissy and her Sissy Ways are important.

A sample:

When I was 5 I drew picture books, as kids do. Mine featured a lot of princesses, many of them pregnant for some reason, (a fascination that has not stayed with me, though my biological clock is supposed to be vomiting cuckoos right about now.) I also poured mostly tortured hours into my cousins’ NES, murdering wildfowl and enduring cruel sniggers from a snarky-ass hound. It would be several years before I discovered the contemplative and sublimely goofy joys of graphic adventure games.

Read the whole thing here.

Follow Sarah on twitter.

It wasn’t all the pastoral delights that were making Arthur feel so cheery, though. He had just had a wonderful idea about how to cope with the terrible lonely isolation, the nightmares, the failure of all his attempts at horticulture, and the sheer futurelessness and futility of his life here on prehistoric Earth, which was that he would go mad.

Douglas Adams

A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish – but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

- Vladimir Nabokov

Find What the Sailor Has Hidden

This morning I took a break from writing to stand on my roof and admire the New York skyline. I can see all the way from the Bayonne Bridge and the Statue of Liberty up to Central Park. Today, amid a flock of pigeons and an airplane taking off from Newark, there was a cruise ship approaching Manhattan from the south, its smokestack like a red tower constructed overnight between the brownstones to the left and One Hanson Place to the right. It reminded me of this passage from Speak, Memory:

There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady’s bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture- Find What the Sailor Has Hidden- that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.

My New Office!

So, after much planning and labor, Sono and I have completed my New Office. I’m still organizing things, none of my decorations are up, and my room-dividing Chinese screen is on order from Overstock.com. But at last, a space to work! And today was a fantastic kick off with SIX PAGES (and change) in just an hour. It’s been a difficult month, writing-wise, but I guess all I needed was a surface to call my own.