pitchfork

It's better than sex.

http://pitchfork.com/killscreen/17-everybodys-doing-it-how-playing-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time-as-a-30-year-old-reveals-its-magical-adolescence-of/

I think back now to the day I bought Ocarina of Time 3D. When I came home I felt a surge of excitement; I was finally going to experience this long-cherished title. I held the glistening package in my hand, expectant and ready. Then I saw my live-in girlfriend on the bed, much the same. I set down the plastic Nintendo box. Here was another Low Spot to explore. The mysteries of an imaginary kingdom could wait.

holy

When I was young, my house abutted acres of forest. One area in particular took on an aura of magic. It was called The Low Spot. After raking leaves or scooping dog poop, I would gather this debris in a wheelbarrow and push onward to the end of the woods. There, a dozen paces in, was a natural pit, a recess deep into the ground, capable of swallowing whatever found its way into this damp maw. I would roll toward the edge and tilt the wheelbarrow up, letting the compost tumble and fall into The Low Spot. Every time I came back, the trench seemed even deeper. Maybe it was growing. Maybe I'd be next.

Was his dog Clifford??????

a natural pit. a recess deep within the ground.

Twelve years later, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time released for the Nintendo 64. It was immediately heralded as one of the greatest games yet conceived. Peer Schneider’s review for IGN64 began with this declaration: “The new benchmark for interactive entertainment has arrived.” I remember a friend popping the gold cartridge into his system; I don’t remember much about that same friend for months, so enraptured was he by this new polygonal world. When it released in 1998, I was almost 17. The main conceit, that you were an elfish naïf destined for greatness, an anonymous boy growing into adulthood while slashing monsters and questing for rubies, didn’t resonate with me. Maybe I was too old already, hung up on swatting baseballs for my high school team or trying to look cool while standing in a parking lot. Maybe I wasn’t old enough, not yet matured beyond all that surface grandstanding. Maybe it was all the other stuff resonating in me, the jittery fluids coursing through my endocrine glands. I was more concerned with saying hi to Katie M. in French class than with finding the three Spiritual Stones. I already had two, and damned if I knew how to use them.

THIS IS JUST... NO

. Of course, any game we play (or book we read, or film we watch, etc.) will be flavored by our unique circumstances. But this particular journey, taken at this particular stage of life, seems less accepting of a player’s real-life projections. The first time I see the dark lord Ganondorf, his elongated nose and sharp features remind me of my brother-in-law. A cut scene explaining the creation of the Triforce, the Zelda series’ most important relic, resembles too closely a plot-line from Superman 2. Princess Zelda appears slightly mannish. Had I played Ocarina when it first came out, I doubt any of these distractions would have pierced the game’s fiction.

dude

omg

reading kill scrn kinda gives me some insight into the deep well of rage that whiney and strongo have access to

lol

reading kill scrn kinda gives me some insight into the deep well of rageLOLS that whiney and strongo have access to

As a young teen you lie on your bed, look up at the curved shadow on your ceiling, a tree limb or some other knobby protuberance

oh my god

I think back now to the day I bought Ocarina of Time 3D. When I came home I felt a surge of excitement; I was finally going to experience this long-cherished title. I held the glistening package in my hand, expectant and ready. Then I saw my live-in girlfriend on the bed, much the same. I set down the plastic Nintendo box. Here was another Low Spot to explore. The mysteries of an imaginary kingdom could wait.

OH MY GOD

don't even blame you for missing my post of that because i understand how you must have been sucked in

eye-scrapingly bad xp

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/42/ATribeCalledQuestTheLowEndtheory.jpg

"baby, when you lie on my bed like that you remind me of the compost heap behind my parents' house... so sexy"

can we theorize about "I held the glistening package in my hand, expectant and ready", like what is the idea there

"I want to dump a wheelbarrow of dogshit in you"

don't even blame you for missing my post of that because i understand how you must have been sucked in

haha yeah I was reading the article at that point and boggling

he's gotta realize how ridiculous this is

Of course, any game we play (or book we read, or film we watch, etc.) will be flavored by our unique circumstances.

coincidentally i watched a girlfriend play this exact game for the first time recently and it was fun because environments/situations that i was totally used to and just saw as technical problems w/ known solutions seemed to her like real places with real mystery and danger, like, when she saw giant fire-breathing dinosaurs she hid behind a corner and slowly crept around when they weren't looking instead of just running past them disinterestedly. made me appreciate the game more. which this article discusses! almost, for a second. before it returns to girl/compost-heap metaphors.

I really feel like "unique circumstances" is a euphemism for this dude

About

Jon Irwin writes essays, eats food, plays video games, and loves his niece and nephew. He also teaches Composition and Literature at various colleges in Boston.

He recently took a Staff Writer position with Kill Screen, a videogame + culture company. Other work has been published in LUMINA, Transitions Abroad, Down East, Paracinema, Monkeybicycle.net, GamePro, and Ann Arbor Paper, among other fine periodicals and websites.

In 2008, he was a finalist for the Francis Ford Coppola Journalism Internship. View the stunning video application that lost him the job here.

He is working on his first book, tentatively titled Enough: or, The Manny Diaries, about his year as a male au pair in France.

In 2009, he was selected for the PEN New England Discovery Award in Nonfiction.

Jon Irwin writes essays, eats food, plays video games, and loves his niece and nephew.

http://mlkshk.com/r/6BXL

I held the glistening package in my hand, expectant and ready. Then I saw my live-in girlfriend on the bed, much the same.

Doesn't this also imply the girlfriend was holding her own glistening package?

He is working on his first book, tentatively titled Enough: or, The Manny Diaries, about his year as a male au pair in France.

Me Write Shitty Every Day

http://ediblewrecks.blogspot.com/2008/07/encyclopedia-wine.html

reading kill scrn kinda gives me some insight into the deep well of rage that whiney and strongo have access to

― fart nosie (Lamp), Thursday, September 8, 2011 7:21 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

booming post

Gary Busey said...

Nice job!
July 31, 2008 10:47 PM

"I want to dump a wheelbarrow of dogshit in you"

I am still laughing my ass off at this

what the fuuuuuuuuuck @ this

this is totally making me nostalgic for the original Pitchfork, where every other review they published was as insane as this

as this article has proven, nostalgia can be a dangerous thing

Doesn't this also imply the girlfriend was holding her own glistening package?

First, I thought "are they playing Zelda together in bed?"
Then I thought "I want to dump a wheelbarrow of dogshit in you"

"I want to dump a wheelbarrow of dogshit in you"

I am still laughing my ass off at this

lol me too well done

24 hours later I am still having giggle fits

better giggle fits than giggle shits

plz i rly would like to read the n+1 article if somebody has a pdf :-)

http://nplusonemag.com/54

a couple words in and I'm hyped for this thread

Indie’s self-deception has had consequences for fans as well. One kind of fan, at least originally, was the lower-middle-class white person, frequently a college dropout, who got by on bartending or other menial work and tried to save enough money to move out of his parents’ house. This kind of person got involved in indie rock to acquire cultural capital that he’d otherwise lack. A pretty good example of this kind of indie rock fan is Ryan Schreiber. In the last decade, however, indie rock has classed up, steadily abandoning these lower-class fans (along with the midsized cities they live in) for the young, college-educated white people who now populate America’s major cities and media centers. For these people, indie rock has offered a way to ignore the fact that part of what makes your dead-end internship or bartending job tolerable is the fact that you can leave and go to law school whenever you like. A pretty good example of this kind of indie rock fan is me. In the two years since I graduated from college, I’ve had a pretty good time being “broke” in New York and drinking “cheap” beer with my friends. But sometimes I remind myself that the beer I’m drinking is not actually cheap, and that furthermore I am not actually broke: if I married someone who made the same salary I make, our household income would be slightly above the national median, which is also true of almost every person I spend my free time with. The truth is that I inherited expensive tastes and moved to an expensive city, and sometimes I get cranky about not being able to buy what I want. But when I don’t feel like reminding myself of these things, I can listen to indie music.

I am proud of myself that that is what I was going to initially copy and paste

but I'll do this one instead:

The strangest thing about Pitchfork is that, for all its success, it hasn’t produced a single significant critic in fifteen years.

the article was kind of boring and didn't being anything new to the table for how long it was, the author's kind of a dick for blowing scott's spot up though

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/09/pitchfork_n1.html

i don't know if i'm gonna be able to make it through this

https://twitter.com/#!/RichBeck

false that mark richardson is not a significant critic.