PixlBit

The Soccer Decay Fighter has fenced in a bunch of zombies and caled it a Gonner Farm. He kicks his soccer balls of decay and turns zombies into quivering piles of goo. The remains are gathered with a tractor and used to fertilize a great crop of soccer balls. May his holy foot never tire. 

More gets slowly added to the library as the year progresses. This is 1998 where I was in a band called Jack Diesel and suffering from a hypothyroid condition, which has since healed. I went from 160 lbs to 260 lbs over night. It was possible that my 16 hour work days got the better of me. I switched jobs, but not occupation, and chilled a bit. I met a guy who had a music studio and we shared it for a while. Nothing like trying to record stuff after midnight during the week. It's very quiet, maybe too quiet. I think I liked jam sessions better. Anyway, here are five media selections for your perusal. 

My ace farm isn't the wildly gigantic and sprawling one Mark's is. My ace farm is very densely built and organized with roads. I also go for aethetics and want it to look nice. Like, I built a fountain with some benches and surrounded it with banana trees to make a little park between my crops and a pool of tropical fish. It's got to be photogenic. I have an instinct to do that. I'm an exterior decorator. 

A summer day saw me harvesting my fields in my new tractor. Farm Together is really fun and totally addictive. I ended the game session today by planting a lot of cotton which takes 8 hours to grow. That way they'll be ready when I start in again sometime tomorrow. I'll have to think of even longer growing crops to grow while I'm away from my console during the weekdays. Time never stops and neither does this game. 

I recently get the distinct feeling I'm not all that welcome gaming at my friend's place. Not sure what it is, but the fun is somewhat limited. I may start pulling back from chasing rewards and such, simplifying my gaming and maybe even doing something else. I'm trying to get into this community garden. I've enjoyed making my own food so much, I now want to grow my own food as well. Well, such is life, things change. We'll see what happens. For now, I'm still gaming and mostly enjoying it. Here's what my friend and I did today. 

I'm still building this library of essential media little by little. I have to come up with the list first and that's what this is all about. I'm going year by year, taking about five years a month to complete it all by the end of 2020. I wonder why sometimes, but it's fun and it motivates me to write, if only very casually. 

 A week in the life for me in '96: I delivered pizza for Domino's Pizza 'til 2am five days. I'd watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 til 4am or so. I might then get up early to do a 10-5 shift. Then on my days off, I'd play music in a basement in Philly with a few friends I met at a night school jam session. We started a blues band called Bad Tyming and then a punky rock band called Lemonloaf. When I wasn't jamming with them, I'd be at my friend Mark's place to play video games. We would go to flea markets and pick up cheap games and consoles. We had PCs, Atari 2600, NES, SNES, Genesis, PSOne and N64. I was also getting into various "cures" like health food, accupuncture and vitamins thanks to the influence of my girlfriend. I was 29. 

The gaming I did this weekend after each long day's toil on the Doom Farm.  

All three of these games I played today have one thing in common, nostalgia. Nostalgia for the old west, for 2D platformers with shooting elements and turn-based rpgs with elaborate stories. All the while I am watching my friend Mark play Farm Together, a game like Animal Crossing that I might pick up myself soon. 

These are my favorite five things from '95.