nostalgia

As 2023 starts to roll around, I’ve done lots of self-reflection on myself. A lot of it has to do at a milestone point of my life, the winter of 2016. A lot of good and bad things happened that year; and while there was that swirling torrent of negative things that were going on, there were a few bright lights that made me look ahead and see something beyond that.

Mostly I looked at how my life could’ve gone different, and actually did have a ton of regrets with a lot of things. But, I found myself still coming back and thinking about those few positives that happened in that season.

Why am I mentioning this seven years later?

I think that’s exactly it; just time passing by, and still trying to sort out where I want to go in the future. And then you look back at happened, remember some things and wonder what’s going to happen to all of that. Moreso, what’s happening to all the things in my head that I don’t share with people.

To just preface, I don’t go around and say “I’m going to make this for people online to see!” I do keep quite a lot of things to myself, either for my own enjoyment or to share in person. But when 7+ years go by and you’ve not shared these things with a single soul, I do step back and wonder if there’s any value of those experiences to put in the public space. A lot of the time they do get censored and filtered to leave the interesting bits, protect privacy, etc.

I think that cycle does have to do with me aging and reflecting, for sure. Maybe that’s musings for another day; but today, I’m here to actually share something from that databank of memories.

Your late Christmas 2022 present is what my space was, several tunes and some munchies from the period.

This is also the first time I’m doing “read this blog entry to these tunes”. I listened to this on loop a few times while writing most of it, with some other stuff later in the actual post when that got repetitive. So feel free to have this play in the background as you read.

Consider this my holiday gift to you for 2022.

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I only found out today that Pier 1 closed all their physical locations. This hit me quite hard; I know I didn’t really purchase stuff from them, but it was a place I loved to stroll, explore and just basically browse. It was one of the top 5 places I’d go to when back at ETSU, short of Starbucks, the mall and and Books A Million.

As a matter of fact, Pier 1 in Johnson City was in the same plaza. I’d just park one spot and walk to both.

Usually I’d go there Saturday evenings, when I got bored at home or wanted to stretch my legs. Sometimes on a Sunday; but usually Saturday. I was frequenting the store almost every week in 2012, especially after I moved back to ETSU in the fall.

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Around December of 2007, I was browsing Big Lots when I found a clearance CD of Sid Meier’s: Civilization 3. I had seen this game in action a year earlier, loving how the game played and never had gotten the chance to own it for myself. For $3, it was a bargain.

About two months later, I found the Gold edition in Target for $20. Nice cardboard box, 3 CD’s, even a manual. This had two expansion packs and even a map editor, something that my original game didn’t have.

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Over the ages, people have followed toy trends, always wanting certain ones, or brands, or the hottest thing that was out that season. I remember in 2001, the biggest thing was scooters. Call of Duty 4 was the biggest thing when I was at Walters State. I don’t remember a lot of the other store rushes, though.

One was a big thing back when I was about 9 was collecting Hess trucks. My family had never gotten any period, but a cousin or two would get one every year. Each were released every year as sort of a collector’s edition, having a different frame and even a date stamp. May of them were play-quality, having features such as lights and rubber tires.

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I came away with a lot of things from my ETSU experience. Some of these were negative and things I battle to this day, and a few were good things that has immensely helped me or changed my outlook on life. This is one of the latter.

As shut-in as it sounded, I never was aware or had the concept of a computer running more than one monitor. All the time in Walters State’s PC labs or my own computers, I’ve always seen one PC tower to one monitor. It didn’t help that there was only one display port on the back, either.When I had gotten my “last” Millenium project back in 2007, I was introduced to more than one display port on a computer; the DVI port. Still I only had one monitor to use with this. It wasn’t like I was curious to plug in two monitors like I would’ve done five years from that date.

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Gaming was quite a different experience for me compared to some people. Not having really touched a console except for an occasional bout of SNES at a cousin’s house, any gaming (if any) was done on PC.

It was only about 2004 that I was allowed my first personal computer. Before that, my “gaming” machine was an old IBM 300PL desktop, running 512MB of RAM and had a 550mhZ Pentium III processor. Sat in the “label room” at my family business at the time, an empty spot where a commercial label printer was set up (hence the name). Said computer ran the machine.

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I see a lot of people that I see around me, trying to grab old videogame systems for cheap then turn a huge profit on them, or people who swooning how good 8-bit graphics are and downputting most 3D games. I never did and don’t get the hype about those old games; and it isn’t a generation gap, it I wasn’t brought up playing these games.

My parents greatly frowned upon most if not all forms of gaming. Computer games heavily as they owned computers (I didn’t own my first system till I was 16 or 17). Video game systems so much more. All my cousins had SNES or NES systems. Gameboys, even.

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