Vidyagame Collecting

I know this is shocking to hear, but I spend a lot of time playing videogames.

I don’t go out much being a homebody cripple, I never eat out, and I’m a single dude. What I do always have is a baller setup at home to play games. And last year I was due for an upgrade on my gaming PC. Typically I save up cash and I do a new build every 4-5 years. Well, that time came around and I honestly just didn’t have the enthusiasm to do it. My computer is still good enough for my sim racing needs on my 60hz ultrawide, and while I could go for the full-blown 144hz triple monitor / Virtual Reality setup… I’m not a competitive racer. I just like to hot lap and I’m honestly happy with my rig for that.

Gaming wise I just didn’t feel like a new computer would be worth it for the handful of titles I’d be able to maximize. I ended up finding a used Mac Mini for dirt cheap (M1 with 16gb of ram) and for non-gaming purposes, it’s been a fantastic machine. Plenty fast, ultra quiet, efficient, and if you’re as balls deep into the Apple ecosystem as I am… it’s pretty great. Funny how going this route ended up saving me a ton of money.

Soooo after that I had a few grand burning a hole in my pocket. Nearing my “mid-life crisis” as a cripple without a wife or kids, what could I possibly be interested in? Hmmm…


I grew up in the 90’s and had a Sega Genesis while my friend had a Super Nintendo. So I have a lot of nostalgia for that era and ended up getting those systems. After a few months I managed to get most of the games I loved from back then. Some titles are just stupid expensive, I have no intention of ever getting Earthbound, but you can still get a lot of good stuff for reasonable prices. Especially on the Genesis. For Super Nintendo, I actually had custom cases made for my games too. They mimic the cardboard box art, but instead use a durable plastic clamshell case. They look fantastic on my shelf!

While I was pretty much the N64 kid and would consider that my era, I’m self-aware enough to know those games don’t hold up as well. While I had an N64, collecting for that is a bit expensive too, so I ended up getting a PS1 and have picked up a few games that still interest me from that generation. 

After that I got a PS2 (region modified so I can play cheaper Japanese games…) as while I was also a Nintendo guy during that era when I was 13-14, there’s no goddamn way I’m collecting for Gamecube. PS2 is a lot cheaper. I actually missed out on a lot of PS2 games during that time too, so it’s been fun picking up titles occasionally and trying em out.

Oh and during all of this, I also started paying attention to optimizing my retro hardware. Which led me down the CRT rabbit hole. I have three now. Started with just a little desktop television, which I use now in my room on a lazy susan so I can play games in bed too.. I then got a 24” Sony Trinitron that I loved and used as my primary CRT for a year on a retro cart I built… before discovering a 36” Trinitron. The odyssey of getting that thing, bringing it into my house, and finding a piece of furniture that could withstand its weight was insane. I’ll never go through that again… but I have to admit playing retro games on this thing is an experience. Eventually, my brother and I will prolly go our separate ways and when I live alone I’ll likely go the retrotink 4k route as I have no intentions of dragging this beast with me. Hopefully it’ll be cheaper by then.

 

Anyhoo, during the PS3/360 era I was about 17-18. The collecting fever recently exploded on the 360, but I’m happy to have focused on the PS3. Bit cheaper to pick up games for that still and as a bonus I can watch blurays on that setup, which surprisingly comes in handy as in the retro corner I have setup I can watch movies on the little oled panel I have. Of which I got for $150 (!) during an awesome black friday sale. 

Games and movies look incredible on this thing.

I got a Wii too, those things are hella cheap to pick up, and while there’s a MASSIVE amount of shovelware on that system, there are some genuinely good games too if you dig. So while that system is never a big focus of mine, I always keep my eyes open to games for it.

Also, there’s a fantastic homebrew scene on the Wii and with the Gamecube controller ports scratching that Gamecube itch becomes a lot more affordable…

Wii U was one of the systems the nostalgia bug in me initially desired the most. I was all in during the Wii U era and have a lot of great memories. Yeah, that system was a flop for Nintendo, but man there are so many good games. Unfortunately not a LOT of good games. What I have though is pretty much everything I want and they’re all bangers. Only missing a handful of titles I’d like, but they’re just too expensive for me to justify picking up. Xenoblade Chronicles X, WarioWare, and Twilight Princess HD being a few. Fun fact: A lot of its games got ported to the Switch and are virtually identical, but if you have a Wii U it’s WAY cheaper. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze on the Switch is rarely less than $40. On the Wii U? $12-14.

Funny enough right now the PS4 era is at its cheapest. If you wanna start collecting games, go for it! Despite being my least focused on console, I ended up with the second largest library in my collection being the PS4. When titles are only a few bucks.. it’s hard to just pass that up.

When I discovered how cheap PS4 Pro’s are (helps that they lack ultra hd playback that it SHOULD’VE had during its era) I picked up one of those to play my PS4 games at my desk on the same 1080p display I use for my switch. I absolutely LOVE this setup.

I finally got a PS5 last year and I’d argue with folks saying there isn’t enough games to justify it. There’s plenty of great experiences on there and outside of dropping a ton on a weird livingroom gaming PC setup, there’s no better way to game on a 4k television. Although, I am planning to sell my PS5 to my brother and go on a little PS5 hiatus for a few months. Going to pay off a card and be a bit financially responsible for a while before pulling the trigger on that stupid PS5 Pro…

 So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. The videogame collecting bug has bitten me pretty hard. Unfortunately, it seems the gaming industry is aiming to kill physical media, especially by requiring a separate purchase of the disc drive with the PS5 Pro, but even in the worst case scenario where it all goes the way of Steam with digital only releases and the values of all my games plummet… it makes me happy just looking at my games on my shelf. I know that sounds lame, but it brings me back to being a kid at Blockbuster browsing games to rent. 🙂

Speaking of Blockbuster… I made a “KEVBUSTER” case so my brother could borrow Switch games without me worrying about the case. Heh.

-K

HEY! HELLO!! HI!!!

Apologies for going dark on the whole website/comic thing for so long! I just didn’t want to force anything out that I wasn’t happy with and was determined to just take my time getting things sorted so I could continue on better footing. Along with that I was resolving some IRL nonsense and got back into a consistent physical therapy schedule. Last month at my doctor’s visit I ended up being rather dangerously underweight. Every month I’ve been dropping a few pounds and at that appointment I weighed in at 101lbs…. I’m short, yes, but a healthy weight for me is 125-130lbs. Being in pain you tend to forget to eat, when you forget to eat you get tired, and when you’re tired you don’t wanna exercise… which leads to increased pain in my situation. It’s a vicious circle that you gotta fight against, and while it was a rough couple of weeks forcing myself to eat and exercise more, I’m finally starting to see the results. 

After a couple of years, I’m starting to actually walk better too! What was long accepted as my “new normal” after my heart issue, walking like fricken Jack Sparrow, has started to improve with a focus on improving my gait with low impact exercises in the pool. Starting to feel okay again and for the first time in a long time I’m optimistic about improving. As I’m writing this I’m getting ready to go to the gym in a bit. I don’t wanna go, but I know it’s good for me. Ugh.

Anyway as a result of this, I’m able to put in more effort into my comic/website. For the past couple of years, I’ve just used what little strength I had to chip away at comics/art little by little, but now I’m feeling like I can finally take a step forward to fully get things operational here. I worked on a ton of comics at once and focused on getting a more consistent art style between them that I could build upon. Feel pretty good about how they turned out and I feel ready to move forward from here. 

Worked on a bunch of pages simultaneously while jumping between them and periodically updating a document of them all next to each other. It really helped with the writing and making the art more consistent.

Unfortunately, I can’t promise any update schedules beyond this, but I do intend to upload frequently here. At the very least you should see “rambly” posts with little scribbles peppered in, and meanwhile, I’ll try to get a new comic page up when I can. The Driving Nowhere comic is more of a ‘big picture’ pet project that I intend to work on for a while.

Maybe I’ll have 50-page “volumes” that I’ll self-publish eventually… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I actually really like working on multiple comics at once instead of one at a time like before. Lets me sorta walk away and come back to pages with a fresh set of eyes, while also smoothing out the art/writing. I don’t waste time struggling with certain things when I allow myself to work on something else if I ever feel stuck. Usually whatever issue I encounter becomes much easier to solve when I let myself disconnect from it for a bit. I’ll prolly cut down on how many I work on at once, but I can see myself working on four or five at a time from this point forward.

   So… yeah. Forcing myself into a schedule I can’t physically manage would just result in compromised work that I’d regret. Instead of doing that, I’ll just have my rambly posts with scribbles peppered in as regular content, and the comics will be a bonus!

watch me fail at this too and go dark again for a few years..

-K

Crushin

So I randomly ended up watching ‘The Aviator’ again. Found myself in a Wikipedia binge on Howard Hughes and felt like watching the movie. My review: Pretty dang good! Alan Alda is a delight, but I gotta say that Decappytoad fella might just be a pretty okay actor. Funny how indifferent I was to him growing up…

I’m old enough to recall the Leo Fever at my school in the late 90s. One of our classes even watched that bizarre Romeo & Juliet adaption he was in, not that anybody complained. Roll that little TV cart out and you could screen anything to rave reviews if it meant avoiding a math quiz… Thinking back I honestly think our teacher just didn’t feel like teaching that day and rented the movie more for herself. We were nine.

Well anyway, between that movie and Titanic following, Leo Fever was at its peak. As a guy, Titanic is an unpleasant horror flick. So outside of that French girl scene, I didn’t care much for it. At the time I considered Batman & Robin as clearly the superior film

I quickly realized the girls I was starting-to-sorta-be-interested-in damn near WORSHIPPED Leo Decapricorn. I remember them carrying actual physical pictures, likely cut out from magazines (for Gen Z twerps: imagine the internet printed out on dead trees and mailed to your house every month),  and spontaneously squealing in a register that frightened canines when exchanging their treasured images of teen heartthrobs. 


It was certainly a strange thing to witness, but shortly after that ‘The Mummy’ came out and I finally understood where they were coming from…

-K

Threading the Needle of Social Media

…So… I figured… I have opinions. I have this space. I could put my opinions on this space. So instead of cluttering whatever social media platform I use or worse: Ranting about some obscure subject to some poor uninterested soul in person… I can drag my soapbox over here and vomit whatever comes to mind into the cold dark void of the internet.

Yes I know, I’m starting off my rambling here a tad bit controversial, but I’m just as likely to drone on about the history of the spork. I’m treating this space as a sort of ‘junk drawer’ of whatever thoughts come to mind. Feel free to ignore and look at the pretty pictures. I’m also rethinking how I illustrate my comic. As crazy pathetic as it appears from the outside: Driving Nowhere is my focus and it’s important to me that I keep chipping away at this thing…

Anyway back to my soapbox:

Threading the Needle of Social Media

I’m social media neutral, so I generally just ignore whatever drama is going on and go wherever the people are. Me whining about whatever dumb shit some billionaire says solves nothing. I’ll leave when the platform starts to suck. And believe me, I never wanted Twitter to fail. I joined super early (thanks Diggnation for the tip in early 2008 lol) and landed the handle @kevinmoulton. I actually had a few people offer me money for it. 😂

Twitter or “X” has seemingly been infested by bots recently (which is hilariously ironic considering the claims before…) and half the feed basically shoves certain individuals down your throat through an incompetent algorithm that makes hiding/muting irrelevant. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, it’s just obvious that half of the feed Twitter/X spits out is actively pushing controversial figures to rage bait users. And it works. Well. Worked. Until a competitor showed up that appears to do everything better for advertisers and the casual user.

Instagram, for all its faults, has a good algorithm. Your feed eventually settles into just the sorta things you want to see. And yes, that includes products you may be interested in. Now don’t get me wrong.. I’m sure I gave permission to Zuck’s AI to track my sleep and listen to my inner thoughts through 5G microchips snuck into my McNuggets by the deep state collaborator Ronald McDonald already, but if that means I don’t have to see some douchebag rant about qanon despite repeatedly muting/hiding them… okay. Have you tried the Oreo McFlurry, it’s pretty good-… wait what was I talking about…? oh right social media.

Same energy towards Threads as me not wanting to know how hot dogs are made. I’m okay pretending everything is great. I don’t need to know the details about acceptable amounts of rat content per hoagie. Keep it pleasant and I’ll happily play along. Similar to there being other food than just hot dogs, there are other websites than Threads/Twitter/X. I can post whatever the hell I want on my website here… if it’s legal in my country. If you truly are afraid of being ‘silenced’, then you’re either overly paranoid or using social media in a dumbass stockholm syndrome way. 

And yet… at this point, I feel like I’m in social media limbo. I have zero confidence in “X” and only spend about thirty seconds a day to see what’s “trending” before the nausea of what that platform has become sets in. “Threads” is taking a bizarre amount of time to implement essential features like hashtags/trending/search, and the longer they take to do so the less likely they are to take the easiest W in history. If I was an investor at Meta I’d be SCREAMING at them to be faster. All the other alternatives are either crap or too niche for me to bother. Meh.

In a weird way, I’m kind of enjoying the lack of certainty. It’s almost a return to how the internet was before social media. Back when the expectations of a single general platform weren’t really a thing… Suddenly it’s cool to have your own website again! 

If you’re a millennial you already have experience with social media platforms coming and going. I understand this is a new concept to generations before and after us… but I assure you that everything will be okay. 

And if you simply cannot part with that tinfoil hat… get a VPN. Don’t put any one platform/publisher/journalist/pundit/celebrity on a pedestal—even people you like.

Hell, don’t put ME on a pedestal–

–…what am I doing. I can probably make money grifting frightened people desperate for answers from a confident asshole… uhhh. Send me cash and I’ll tell you what to think. You like that? Bitch. The voices in your head are real.

-K