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Friday, February 24, 2017

Ep. 56: A Skosh Gauche


Josh and Emily continue their quest to revive "skosh" in the national vernacular in this very introspective episode about time travel, coaxial cables, the distance of childhood, and what you would change if you could go back. Many of the patron testimonials touch on the time travel theme too, so get ready to reflect on the stages of your life and contemplate how your past experiences have made you who are today.

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This episode was made possible by:
Game Track Title Composer(s)
Dossun! Ganseki Battle Battle Unknown
Moto Racer Game Over Raphaël Gesqua
Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal
Our Garbage?!!
Party in the Clouds Jake Kaufman
Chrono Trigger Robo’s Theme Yasunori Mitsuda, Nobuo Uematsu
Rambo Boss Theme (Barricade) Katsuhiro Hayashi
Pokémon Go Walking - Night (Overworld Map) Junichi Masuda

...and listeners like YOU.

5 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Emily,
    I can commiserate with you over your frustration over how far you feel from your younger epoch. What is worse is when epochs become lost for some reason.

    As I've alluded, during my early 20's, I went on a dragon-slaying journey of sorts. The thing took about 5 years, but ended up encompassing about a 7-year chunk, about which I remember only blurry vignettes. During that time, I checked out from society and current events and trends. I've always felt anachronistic in my own age group, behaving both older and younger in many ways. So it's strange to look back and have such a hard time figuring out how so much time has passed. And because the benefits of that journey don't fit into neat metrics like income bracket and University certificate, I sometimes wonder if it was worth it(it was).

    Josh, I love that you mentioned the Virt quote! But I always thought Matsumae's secret embarrassing comment was directed at Kaufman's abilities. Regarding the track, I feel the same way about it as I do his Shovel Knight work: it's good, but relentlessly hyper to the point of being strenuous to listen to.

    Regarding Robo's Theme from Chrono Trigger, am I the only one who's getting the backing music to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up"? I remember thinking that when I heard it on LMH, but I don't remember if Brent or Rob picked up on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ More entertaining than the video is the fact that that voice comes from what looks like a 19-year old kid.

    Josh's Pokémon Go experience, coupled with his lukewarm assessment of the new characters, closely mirrors my experience of Street Fighter II, and fighting games in general. I was at the end of the eighth grade when SFII hit arcades. I put enough money into the coin slots of its various iterations to pay for a full-time term in community college....heck, I spent a few bucks in quarters on Hyper Fighting just a few days ago.

    My friend Darwin and his older brother were probably the two best SFII players in the Portland Metropolitan area. Hanging out with Darwin a lot, I absorbed enough majesty to be pretty formidable with Ken and Ryu, but I didn't have the chops to get more than mediocre with anyone else(as in most things, I was the best of the worst and the worst of the best).

    I hit my peak with Hyper Fighting, but when Super SFII came out, I was too invested in the balance of HF, and didn't have the time or inclination to learn a host of new characters, nor did I have the inclination to keep up with the many new fighting games coming out by that time. Over the past years, I've ducked in and out of the genre that killed arcades--a little VF2 here, a little Tekken 3 there....but none of them takes me to that ecstatic state I reach when I play SF2HF as Ryu.

    This pattern of introduction/love/mastery/disillusionment Josh described is also the basic pattern of how we typically interact with cultural product as we age, especially pop music. Most of us have an introduction period to pop music, which hits its nadir at some point(for Josh, it was the Chili Peppers and Radiohead--for me, it was De La Soul's Bahlune Mind State, Das Efx's Dead Serious, and U2's Achtung Baby), and is followed by a gradual falling away. It usually comes about because "the new music sucks", but it's really because the production styles constantly change to the point where we don't experience the familiar feels we're looking for. So we get off the bus.

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    Replies
    1. I'm so glad I'm not the only one thought of "Never Gonna Give You Up" upon hearing Robo's theme! I recently finished playing through this game for the first time, and every time Robo would come on screen, I would think I just got Rick-rolled.

      Shameless Plug: I wrote about my experience playing Chrono Trigger on my blog, Tales from the Backlog. If anyone's interested in that, you can find my Chrono Trigger wrap-up here: http://talesfrombacklog.blogspot.com/2017/03/chrono-trigger-review.html

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    2. Yasunori Mitsuda is the greatest prankster of our time. He traveled back to 1995 to Rickroll millions of children twelve years before Rickrolling had been invented.

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  3. Party in the Clouds, yeah! That track is so good, like everything by virt. In that track he is totally channeling chiptune-pop-punk band Anamanaguchi, and I love it. It hits me with a wall of nostalgic sound. Get this: I discovered Anamanaguchi back in '06 and they made me feel nostalgic for my childhood NES adventures, then virt makes this track more recently and it makes me feel nostalgic for the first time I heard original chiptune artists like Anamanaguchi (and virt himself!), and it all wraps back around to 8bit NES tunes from my childhood... that's some nostalgia inception, right there! Even without any nostalgic bias, the track still holds up an excellent piece of music.

    Oh, and about the Shy Boo Therapy, that reminds me... Have you guys ever read the Super Mario Adventures comics that were in Nintendo Power back in the day? I got a reprint of them recently so it's fresh in my mind. In one of the chapters the Bros end up cornered by The Big Boo in a ghost house so Mario dons his Doctor outfit (with Luigi as a nurse, no less) and gives it a psychotherapy session that cures its anthrophobia so they can escape. The whole comic is filled with even more wacky golden-age cartoon zaniness and is definitely worth a read!

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