Category: Memory

Bonus! I just won a few EBay items (and hopefully one more coming this morning) in the form of some old King’s Quest games.

My love for the King’s Quest series (as well as the other Sierra games) knows no bounds. When I was younger, I never owned any of the actual games, just the copies (*gasp*).

I have a found memory of going to the Dixie Mall with the family one summer and stumbling across Police Quest 2. I think I still have the original receipt with it! I wonder how much I paid for it…

I remember countless hours of Marc and I trying to beat Police Quest. One of us would move the guy around with the joystick and the other would type. That was heavy teamwork back in the day.

I just stumbled upon an application called DosBox which emulates the Dos environment. I then installed some old games like Quest for Glory and Leisure Suit Larry and am having the time of my life playing them so far. Some people may think it’s odd that I get a kick out of these old school games, but I love them. It brings back my childhood. When I say countless hours were spent on them, I really do mean countless hours. I remember one summer when we had the Tandy 1000, every morning I would get up and beat King’s Quest because it was such a fast game to beat once you knew how to do everything. I think I timed it so I could go eat lunch after I completed it. I also remember doing the same with Ninja Gaiden II. MAN, I could beat that game with my eyes closed. I tried playing it last year and I was pretty well awful in the game playing department. However, I know that the skill is within me somewhere.

Anyhow, I’ve been looking into the old Sierra games and what they go for on EBay for awhile now and picked these two up for a steal. Heck, one of them even runs off of 5 1/4″ discs! I wouldn’t even be able to play them if I wanted to! In reality, if I ever want to play them, I’ll just download them off the Internet, but I am glad to have a piece of history coming my way. Perhaps I’ll build a shelf for the games…

Years ago, I was the king of comics. I remember every Wednesday going to the corner stores around town (because not all carried the same titles) to track down the newest comic books. I remember there being some cold, cold nights picking up some comic books over at Gizzy’s, and sometimes trekking ALL the way down to the Circle (this was a big trek for me back in the day) and getting back to have my legs frozen solid. Sometimes they wouldn’t even have the comic I wanted and I walked for nothing. I learned early on to bring some music along and I can honestly say that I was one of those people that even before iPods made it big, I had the tunes playing in my ears while I skipped down the street to pick up my new batch of comics.

The Marvel comics were my faves – Spider-Man and X-Men in particular. I never touched upon the DC Comics – Superman, Batman, etc. Something about them didn’t appeal to me.

I have close to 1000 comics to this date and that was from back in the day. I rarely pick up a comic book these days although sometimes I wonder if it would be cool to get back into a series now and then.

The problem with making money off of comic books is that the market is saturated with them nowadays that if you pick up an issue of Spider-Man, chances are, it will never be rare. There will be tens of thousands printed across the world. Nowadays if you want to make money off of comic books, you either sell it when it’s hot (oh, why didn’t I sell New Mutants #87 when I had the chance!) or you have to buy the rare variant cover editions (only 1000 made!!!) to have it make extreme amounts of money.

But let’s think about something for a moment. Curiosity got to me and I looked up random issues that I owned. A few have hit the $15 mark and that’s only because they introduced a major key character in the series that everyone liked. But what about a random issue?

I present to you an example of Uncanny X-Men #288. Nothing special happened in this issue and it falls in line with how much it is listed for at the moment. It is worth $4USD.

Now, here I’m thinking “That isn’t a lot of cash when I think about.” but if you put it into the context of how much I bought it for, that’s where things get interesting. I paid $1.25USD (according to the price on the book, not including taxes) so if were able to get $4 from someone for the issue, I would have made a profit of 3.2 times the price paid for it.

Triple the price, you say? I’ll take that investment.

Now, I would imagine that the odds of me selling the issue for the listed price of $4 may be a little slim, but to be honest, I haven’t checked. I’ve gone to a few comic conventions in town (one is coming up on October 29th in town here if you want to go) and I looked at some comics I owned and they were in the $1 bin. That was pretty sad considering I lost money on these issues.

Do I care that much about the money? Not really. They provided me with an imagination unbeknownst to many, but only to myself. Perhaps this is where I gathered my quirky personality from. Or my good looks. Chances are, both are true.

So, who knows? Perhaps I’ll sell off my collection one day and make some cash from it. But for now, they’re good sitting in my closet waiting for a good read (from some kid who respects comics. I’m not passing them off to some kid who has chocolate on their hands!)

This memory goes out to Aunt Lois who was the coolest aunt around when she brought me to the comic book store in Kitchener every time I visited. The problem with living up North is the fact that when you go to a comic store down south, you’re in there for a minimum of an hour because you’re overwhelmed with the selection. This is definitely not a problem for yours truly, but the adults may become bored waiting in the car for me. Hey, this randomly brought up another memory of us going to Spanish but Dad, Nanny and my sister waited (hey, was Mom there? I don’t recall…she must have been) in the car for an hour in Sudbury while I went into the store. Man, that must have sucked, but that just goes to show how cool family was.) Anyhow, back to Aunt Lois…she never complained one bit when she waited for me at the comic store and that’s a fond memory I have of her. I really don’t know if she had other things to do, or if she waited in the car for me. Hopefully she had other things to do! Anyhow, here’s to Aunt Lois. Thanks for making my trips to see you exciting. Not that visiting you on your own isn’t excitement enough!

I remember the time that I was over at Carol’s and they had I Mother Earth: Scenery and Fish playing (a kickass album) and I didn’t think too much of it. I don’t know what was with me but back in those formative years of the early 90s, I didn’t really care to listen to much that was POPULAR. I think this stemmed from two things – one, I didn’t feel like being part of the mob of people following the same popular bands, two, I wasn’t that popular to begin with and I think I had some weird thought of if I listened to what was popular (or wore clothing which was popular, or read books of what was popular), then I would look like I was TRYING to be integrated into that scene and people (those harmful high school cliques) would point me out of a crowd and yell POSER!

Anyhow, back onto the music (I love how my memory posts go on random tangents encompassing everything I was feeling at the moment) – the last track of the album (Earth, Sky and C) started up and wasn’t too into it until the fateful guitar solo came screaming out of the speakers and I was blown away. Turns out that this was their homage to Carlos Santana, whom I picked up their greatest hits album but never really got into it.

That day changed my musical direction and made me realize that I should give everything a chance. I was automatically dismissing I Mother Earth, Our Lady Peace, all these great bands coming out of the woodwork around the time of the mid-90s because of how I felt about the whole subject of ‘hopping on the train’. This day changed me in many ways in terms of my views towards music and the hundreds of albums along my walls proves that it’s been a long journey. I remember getting into a slew of more music back then. It was mainly the popular stuff on MuchMusic and whatnot – the alternative scene was my scene.

When I hit college, things changed as I had access to something different in the land of music – radio. Sure, some of you are saying “Wha? You didn’t have any radio stations?”. Well, sure we did, but they didn’t have any GOOD radio stations. I think when I left Kapuskasing, it was a country station whereas now it’s a Top 40 station. Hitting up Ottawa, I was introduced to a variety of new rock, but more importantly – OLD rock. Classic Rock. Who were these bands I had only read about but never really listened to: The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Clapton? Even now, I slowly get myself introduced to these bands as I like to saturate myself into them. I don’t like picking up a Greatest Hits album and saying “Alright, that’s what Clapton is all about.”. If I did that, I would not be impressed considering his latest greatest hits album is all his newer mellower stuff.

It’s been a long and winding road in the land of music, but I’m glad that I have an open mind to listen to anything, whether it is heavy metal, jazz, rock, hip-hop (heck, alright, there are a few tunes that are catchy but you won’t see me going all out and solidifying my hip-hop CD collection here. That’s just wrong.), or anything that comes my way. Having an open mind towards anything in life, as well as trusting your friends when they toss an album your way can open up the doors to better places.

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, anyhow, that was just a random memory I had last night when the radio was playing ‘Another Sunday’ by I Mother Earth and then I thought back to the time I was introduced to them.

So today Krista noticed some white gunk in my hair. It was the stuff I put in my hair, but usually it’s fine.

Turns out that last week while golfing, I left my bag in the hot, hot car and the stuff melted into some random paste like substance. It’s not bad, but sometimes there are chunks that just don’t get rubbed into the hair and they stick out like bad dandruff. Doh!

This brought back a memory of me back in Grade Nine science class. Back in Grade Nine, let’s just say I wasn’t the most popular dudes in school (that subsequently happened in Grade Eleven when I was the Ladies Man. To those people who read this blog and are from KDHS, stop laughing now. Carol, I’m looking at you!), so in an effort to be cool I decided to try and style my hair a little to get rid of the cowlicks.

Well…that ended badly when some kid was talking to me and then said “Ryan, what the heck is in your hair?” and then they proceeded to laugh at the fact that there was this giant solidified glob of stuff in the front of my hair. Then everyone else decided to laugh also. Ah, the beauty of high school. I think at that point I said screw it to styling my hair and started growing it out.

Back in 1989, Prince released the greatest song in the world – Batdance! Tim Burton asked Prince to write a slew of songs for the new (well I suppose it was the first at the time) Batman flick that we all love (although I must say I like Batman Begins better).

I remember watching this video of all these Bat’men’ dancing around and wondering why the heck they had things popping out of their chest.

Oh, Ryan, how young you were back in 1989. Little did I know that they definitely were not Batmen.

Thanks to someone on the Wolfshack for putting the memory of Batdance into my head. Now I want to go listen to the song because I just remember it being chaotic.

I was in class yesterday daydreaming…uhh, I mean taking down some notes and a memory popped into my head.

The memory of my Trap-Jaw He-Man action figure.

Let’s talk about memories for a moment…what the heck causes me to remember something like that? I think that s0mehow our brain is in constant scan mode (like a computer’s hard drive) just to make sure everything is in check and then subconsciously we check on how the scan is going and see what memory it’s analyzing at the time.

I like to document these memories as years from now when I can’t remember anything, at least I can come back and read my blog.

When Dad started working he used to have to go on courses down in Orangeville for awhile…I can’t remember the length of time…I would assume a week’s length.

I remember that one time he brought me back a gift…Trap-Jaw! Awesome! I can’t remember if that was my first He-Man figure, or one of many (oh, I had many! Hey, now I’m even remembering how Dad was building me Snake Mountain on Christmas Day. Snake Mountain was the cool fortress with this micro…scrach that, ECHOphone where you could speak into it and it would sound all ominous), but I remember him bringing it back and thinking he was the coolest. Let’s be honest – the way to a kids heart is buying the kid a gift. I also remember wondering if I would get a gift everytime he went away but for the life of me, I can’t remember if I did. Wait a second…I’m pretty sure I got a fishing rod one time when he came back and was disappointed since I wanted another He-Man action figure.

Ahh…kids. You know, that’s the thing about them. They only appreciate things they really want. The stuff they get that’s a surprise, they don’t see the joy in that. They’re saying “Where the heck is my He-Man action figure?!” Ha ha!

I’m sure one day when I have kids it will open up a new chapter in life with my parents where I’ll be asking them stuff about how to take care of the kid, and should I buy them gifts when I come back home from a trip or am I spoiling them, yada yada yada…being a parent must be insanely crazy. You don’t want the kid to grow up in a bad way, so the only thing you can do is learn from your parents experience. For example, I consider myself a good guy (thank you, thank you. I’m very modest you see) so I’m probably going to look upon what my parents did with me while growing up and apply it to my own children.

Heck, for all I know, they didn’t have a clue on how to raise a kid (what new parent does?) and all I was in an experiment.

Anyhow, I know my parents check out this blog every day now so this post is for you. Thanks for bringing me up (and thanks for that Trap-Jaw action figure Dad!)

Now if only my mom didn’t throw out those Thundercats action figures that have grown to be a hot commodity in this world. 😉

I was listening to some Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails this morning (do I even have to tell you who it’s by? One of the most popular albums of 1995, that’s for sure) and it evoked a memory.

I remember back when I was…15, 16 and listening to a LOT of Nine Inch Nails which Erik got me into.

I remember walking to Sonia’s on a fall evening with the wind blowing and the leaves hitting me from all angles. This is perfect weather in my opinion. I remember getting lost in my music all the time back home, just walking for hours around the town. It was great! Maybe that’s where my love of music stemmed from.

While listening to The Downward Spiral that day, I stumbled upon what I consider a trilogy of songs: Big Gun-A Warm Place-Eraser. Not a trilogy in the sense that they all had a common theme, but it was an emotional trilogy.

Big Gun – one of the most visceral songs that I’ve ever heard. Industrial music at its peak. If there was a rating in terms of agressiveness, give this a 10.
A Warm Place – one of the most calm songs I’ve ever heard. The songs are the extreme opposites of one another. I found it odd to have paired it up in such a way. Let’s give this a 1.
Eraser – The middle ground. It starts off calm and builds to (almost) the point that Big Gun was in terms of agressiveness. This songs starts out at 1 and builds to a 9.

I found this to be a very interesting way to play with someone who was listening to these three songs in a row…you pump them SO MUCH from listening to the first track and then crash them back down to serenity. Then you slowly bring everything back up to the level of the rest of the album. I loved it. In fact, my mix CDs of the past had a similar formula. Mix CDs in my opinion are not just something you slap some tracks onto…you have to mold them into the perfect listening compilation.

Anyhow, I remember getting to Sonia’s place and telling everyone in the room what I just experienced and nobody really said much and that was that.

But my key memory of this story is that years later Eric professed that when he heard me talk about NIN in this manner (Eric was the NIN fan of all time), that there was something a lot more to the Palmer you all know (well now you all know, but if you just met me like he did, you wouldn’t have known) and that this intrigued him and started our path towards a great, great friendship.

I always think of that moment in time when I listen to that trilogy of songs.

On another note, in NIN’s next album The Fragile he uses the trilogy of sound once again with No, You Don’t – La Mer – The Great Below. He wasn’t just toying around with some songs…he knew what he was doing all along. Awesome.

That was just one random memory that popped into my head, but I find it amazing how music can evoke memories of the past all the time.