Khaleel Got A Blog

Chad Green, from up the street, brought this over one weekend, back in that interim period where we didn't have enough SNES games to play, so the NES was always hooked up. It was the first RPG I had seen, for I was nine years old. I was enamored with the pitch of the backgrounds, the steady pumping battle music, and the characters - both the gnarly monsters and the party members. The intrigue of the black mage, with the wide brimmed hat, the face in shade but for the two dotted eyes, stayed with me. So much so that, years later in my teens (and probably early 20s, let's be honest here), I would read a webcomic starring those pixel characters, which I don't think I ever enjoyed, except for seeing these little wizards and warriors doin' thangs. Also, Chad Green was a dick and a decade later, his little brother would leave a bag of shitty weed in my basement, which would be pinned on me. Nice try, Greens.  Not even once. Played it on the DS in the 2000s, and found it mostl...

So I'm wrapping up my time with Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, a semi-sequel/gaiden/off-shoot of the seminal SMTIV for the 3DS. I picked it back up on a whim, after buying it on sale for my oft-neglected 3DS at least 5 years ago, and I'm glad I did - mostly. It is more SMTIV, along with a healthy dose of Persona, but with a floater of that demon madness on top. And well, that bears some retrospective. 

For my 35th birthday, locked in the comfy prison of COVID, I requested of my partner and remote friends that we watch a film. For most of COVID, we've taken turns selecting films, and we've watched some trash and some amazing titles. It's been fun, and sad, and depressing, and bewildering, but mostly a fun thing to do with friends you can no longer visit indoors or at a bar or within any proximity. We have a degree of trust in each other, and that trust (when violated) results in some ribbing. Such as, after watching the cult bad movie Things , which is an audio-visual nightmare of a film in that it makes no sense and is legitimately nauseating to watch in terms of its editing and framing (I should...write...about Things ), we all told the selector that we were disappointed in him, that it was a regretful evening. Yet, I have thought of Things  quite a bit since, so maybe there is nothing to regret - the unpleasantness is the point of Things .  Yet, a birthday film choice i...

When I was fourteen, I returned home from school, got my wallet (imagine, not having to carry a wallet everyday, wherever you go) with $45 dollars in, and started walking. I knew the path - up the hill, then right, hop across the two lane exurb highway, then navigate the sidewalk-less stretch to the signal. From there, paved paths under the boughs of old trees - oaks and maples, generic trees - planted alongside rancher houses, which became two floor houses, which grew basements and decks, in-ground pools behind them, sprouting a satellite dish in the right light. This was the route to K-Mart. The K-Mart had been a magical place, but for me, it was part of a binary with Caldor. K-Mart and Caldor, joined by the Chatham Mall , all 200 yards of it - Flickers, the arcade and my sole point of interest; the Dugout, the baseball card shop that carried all sorts of other gacha card packs, in which I lost interest as I began to note the sneer the loitering adults wore; a craft shop; a Mexican ...

 "Why start a blog in 2020?" I hear you asking yourself, as I am asking myself. The reasons are myriad, so I'll provide a stupid explanation and a stupid explanation that might appear smart. The stupid explanation is that I got into a Twitter fight with David Simon, and it made me feel really bad, so I began the process of deleting my tweets, so I began to read my tweets and remember them, and I realized stuff from even 6 months ago was buried in the inconvenient fog of Twitter from three months ago, and I couldn't find all my tweets from the early pandemic or my game reviews, and it made me feel really mad, so I deleted all my Tweets, deleted my account, then re-activated my account within 6 hours, and I declared to myself that I wouldn't get into fights on Twitter, or tweet angrily at GOP representatives, and I would only tweet stupid shit and connect with friends, and I broke that self-declaration within a week, and it made me feel really ambivalent about givin...