Renkon

january 4, 2023

From a 2005 interview with one of my favorite writers of all time, Kurt Vonnegut:

Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope: Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is — we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

In a small town, there are only a handful of buildings that make it over maybe the three-story mark, and in a way, that makes them vastly more interesting in their surroundings than even the most beautifully modernist skyscraper, if you can see them as such. So painfully mundane and yet so striking; there's some sort of lesson here that Vonnegut clearly understood about viewing your daily world with a sense of awe and seeing the beauty that we take for granted.

If I can teach myself one thing in 2023, I hope it's that every trip to buy an envelope, every grain storage tower, every little mundane detail of the world around me looks beautiful to me, no matter how many times I see it.

As much as I've soured on social media over the past couple of years, I still love a good fighting game combo tag. 

The first favorite I found a few years ago was #日めくり即死ぬ - summed up as a 100% damage combo tag. More literally translated, that tag was started by a Japanese player who did an "instant kill of the day."

While the daily nature of the tag has long since stopped, it still gets used by Twitter users that post touch of death combos on the site. I, myself, do not have the skills to produce daily content along these lines, but I do use the tag to catalog the 100% damage combos I post on Twitter.

The end of 2022 was uneventful for me, and I mean that in the good way - I had time off and I relaxed. A highlight of that time, though, was finding the Twitter tag #年忘れ師走のクソコンボ祭り. The best way I could translate this is sort of a "year-end 'kuso' combo festival."

Based on the clips posted in the tag, I'm unclear whether the 'kuso' part refers to the combo itself, the game being played or even both. Still, the tag featured a number of interesting combos from a variety of different games.

I lined up three of my archived clips to show off some massively cheap combos to post on Twitter, and this is now joined together in a short clip video.

Game one: Double Dragon V (SNES). Jimmy Lee can re-dizzy with a jumping heavy punch into crouching heavy punch. The jumping attack must be very deep for the next attack to combo.

Game two: Tatoo Assassins. This unreleased game has a lot of restrictions in place to prevent infinite combos, but these go out of the window once a character enters DANGER mode at low health. Because Karla's ice ball does damage, you can infinitely do it to trap the opponent and whittle their health down.

Game three: Kabuki Klash. This is actually a pretty fun game, and it has an item system that leads to a lot of strange happenings. A combo like this is not practical, and I would say it will never actually happen in a match. Orochimaru's super move will juggle if he takes a trade hit and recoils into a scroll that instantly refills his meter. There is a banana peel item characters can slip on and be open for a juggle hit, and combos with these are a little more practical.

If you enjoy seeing fighting game techniques, I highly recommend giving the tag a view. I was able to see tech exclusive to the Super Nintendo/Famicom version of Fatal Fury Special, "handicam" footage of The King of Fighters combos and other clips from games such as Golden Axe: The Duel, Warzard/Red Earth and Samurai Deeper Kyo. You even get the occasional "oddball" post such as someone posting playable combinations of Magic: The Gathering cards.

Japanese retro gaming Twitter is probably my favorite part of sticking around on the site, currently. As such, I'm holding out hope players return for the festival once this year comes to a close.

I improvised this on the piano, and everything else in the associated album at the end of 2021, for a game jam organised by Code Coven, called the Care Jam. The game was never finished, due to our difficulty in finding programmers.

The game was called Hearten. It was about the exploits of a flame sprite trying to save the sick elder tree at the centre of her forest. We had literally everything else -- story, dialogue, artwork, mechanics concepts, music. This game was intended to be an absolute tearjerker, and this Care Jam kinda ensured it was such. The purpose of the jam was to highlight the plight of carers in various capacities. Many are in the medical profession; some are in social care, some are unpaid carers looking after friends or family, and many of our carers are migrants. As a former asylum seeker myself, this resonated hard with me.

This particular track was going to play during sections where quotes or anecdotes from consenting carers we knew would be added into the game. These would serve as flavour text to the little flame sprite's quest, as she reaches several crossroads and wonders what to do.

If you are a pianist and would like to play along, here is the sheet music that I transcribed for it only today.

A word of caution: It is one of my "easier" scores, but I have a big handspan (major 10th). You may need to consider jumping between notes if that's easier.

I miss them so gosh dang much