A long entry about some nerdy crap
Japan has been pretty nice lately, especially in terms of weather. It's been rainy today, but before that, we had the longest uninterrupted streak of really, really nice days I've seen since getting here. The cherry blossoms have come and mostly gone. This past weekend, a JET friend of mine had a birthday and decided to celebrate by dragging many of us to Kyoto and forcing us to eat a massive, $100 ice cream sundae. (We did not succeed. It was a sundae of remarkable size.) After that we enjoyed the weather and Japan's lack of open container laws by the Kamo river. A young Japanese man with a guitar played Beatles songs for us after being lured over by a "Same glasses! Same glasses!" moment with my Wayfarers.
Classes have started up and I'm getting to know the new English faculty better, so life is getting sane again. They've changed my schedule with Elementary schools to accommodate the new national curriculum for teaching English, but other than that things are mostly the same.
Because I'm a big nerd with no sense of priority or perspective, I've recently taken up Gundam Card Builder - ostensibly a CCG, though in actual practice more of an arcade-based strategy game where your options increase as you accumulate more cards depicting characters and objects from the old Mobile Suit Gundam timeline. There aren't booster packs like Magic: The Gathering and other card games (instead you get a new card at random after each game), and though they are collectible, the cards themselves are largely just a way to incorporate persistence into an arcade game.
But even though it's not a CCG in the classical sense, the format does bring back memories, most of them fairly fond. I played MTG pretty seriously from third through seventh grades. Of course, that meant my first starter deck was from Ice Age and I stopped not too long after the Rath Cycle finished up. (If that sentence meant anything to you at all, congratulations, you're a big nerd too.) When I look at MTG cards nowadays, I can barely comprehend them (and not just because they're in Japanese - the game appears to be pretty popular here to this day) and I'd probably get thrashed by an obese 13-year-old if I tried to play. Thomas and I do still joke about digging up our old decks and playing each other whenever we're both home at the same time, though so far it hasn't happened.
I don't want to think about how much money I sank into MTG back then, but it was almost every bit of disposable income I could muster. I bought a lot of booster packs, starter sets, and separates, not to mention magazines, tie-in comic books, page-a-day calendars, etc. When I fell in with a larger group of players in middle school, I often bought and sold with my classmates, too. I remember secretly swiping at least ten dollars' worth from my folks' pocket change basket over the span of a couple weeks to buy a particular card from an older kid. (Sorry, Mom and Dad. I'll pay you back.) He cussed and the others laughed when I handed him the heavy baggie, but a deal was a deal.
But for all that, I couldn't have spent nearly as much money as time on it. I'd hang out at the comic shop that provided my fix whenever I could get a ride there. I read Scrye and Inquest, and though I never actually played in a regulation tournament, I kept up on which cards were and weren't banned in each class. I mailed cards to artists to get them autographed. Before my family bought a PC, I'd go to the library at least every other day to use the internet. My library internet use statistics would break down something like this:
The very first internet community I was actively involved with was an MTG chatroom. Granted, I was twelve or thirteen at the time, so I don't know if they particularly liked me.
Magic cards were banned in fifth grade, but when I got to middle school my friends and I must have played whenever we had more than five minutes to spare. We'd have sleepovers and end up doing nothing but playing MTG. We'd play by flashlight in tents on Boy Scout trips (the older scouts preferred the Star Wars CCG). I wish I could say that we all stopped because we realized it was a money sink or developed more mature interests or something, but in truth it was mostly a combination of the older kids who played graduating and Pokemon coming out for Game Boy.
Classes have started up and I'm getting to know the new English faculty better, so life is getting sane again. They've changed my schedule with Elementary schools to accommodate the new national curriculum for teaching English, but other than that things are mostly the same.
Because I'm a big nerd with no sense of priority or perspective, I've recently taken up Gundam Card Builder - ostensibly a CCG, though in actual practice more of an arcade-based strategy game where your options increase as you accumulate more cards depicting characters and objects from the old Mobile Suit Gundam timeline. There aren't booster packs like Magic: The Gathering and other card games (instead you get a new card at random after each game), and though they are collectible, the cards themselves are largely just a way to incorporate persistence into an arcade game.
But even though it's not a CCG in the classical sense, the format does bring back memories, most of them fairly fond. I played MTG pretty seriously from third through seventh grades. Of course, that meant my first starter deck was from Ice Age and I stopped not too long after the Rath Cycle finished up. (If that sentence meant anything to you at all, congratulations, you're a big nerd too.) When I look at MTG cards nowadays, I can barely comprehend them (and not just because they're in Japanese - the game appears to be pretty popular here to this day) and I'd probably get thrashed by an obese 13-year-old if I tried to play. Thomas and I do still joke about digging up our old decks and playing each other whenever we're both home at the same time, though so far it hasn't happened.
I don't want to think about how much money I sank into MTG back then, but it was almost every bit of disposable income I could muster. I bought a lot of booster packs, starter sets, and separates, not to mention magazines, tie-in comic books, page-a-day calendars, etc. When I fell in with a larger group of players in middle school, I often bought and sold with my classmates, too. I remember secretly swiping at least ten dollars' worth from my folks' pocket change basket over the span of a couple weeks to buy a particular card from an older kid. (Sorry, Mom and Dad. I'll pay you back.) He cussed and the others laughed when I handed him the heavy baggie, but a deal was a deal.
But for all that, I couldn't have spent nearly as much money as time on it. I'd hang out at the comic shop that provided my fix whenever I could get a ride there. I read Scrye and Inquest, and though I never actually played in a regulation tournament, I kept up on which cards were and weren't banned in each class. I mailed cards to artists to get them autographed. Before my family bought a PC, I'd go to the library at least every other day to use the internet. My library internet use statistics would break down something like this:
The very first internet community I was actively involved with was an MTG chatroom. Granted, I was twelve or thirteen at the time, so I don't know if they particularly liked me.
Magic cards were banned in fifth grade, but when I got to middle school my friends and I must have played whenever we had more than five minutes to spare. We'd have sleepovers and end up doing nothing but playing MTG. We'd play by flashlight in tents on Boy Scout trips (the older scouts preferred the Star Wars CCG). I wish I could say that we all stopped because we realized it was a money sink or developed more mature interests or something, but in truth it was mostly a combination of the older kids who played graduating and Pokemon coming out for Game Boy.