Video Gay-eems

I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole clearly marked “Atlantic Fleet” and I’ve only now come up for air and realized that I’ve been neglecting my posse. I’m not nearly as dedicated to simple acts of kindness as this fellow:

I mean. Damn. Man got some ‘coons going there.

Anyway, this will be, in addition to “the year of the covid and the election”— wait for it — “the year of Atlantic Fleet.”

I loves me some Atlantic Fleet, and I will shout my love from the rooftops. Even an endorsement from the brownshirts over at combatace cannot dampen my enthusiasm. I always imagined what it would be like to play in a bathtub the size of the Atlantic Ocean with toy ships and blow them to Hell.

Yeah baby.

It seems that large chunks of life somehow get clipped from the arts, and the media, and from culture in general. People on TV seldom watch TV (it used to be that they NEVER watched TV but that changed… slowly) and they certainly don’t devote a portion of their lives to video games.

Or rather… to one video game… for a time.

I know for a fact that I’m not the only one. How may of us had a “Summer of Unreal” or a “Year of Living Diablo?” How many of us remember a time in our lives, as sweet as a year in Tuscany or Paris or Bangkok, when we spent our time devoted to our (then) true love– Jane’s F-15 or Microprose’s Falcon 4.0?

I owe a part of my recovery from booze to a little game called Pirates! I know that for every man, boy or manboy, was a time, and what a time, when warm summer nights were filled with Minecraft or Rome: Total War.

The idea that we can remember our lives on the basis of what game we were playing is something that doesn’t show up on TV. But it does show up on Youtube, and old-fashioned TV is about as relevant, now, as a button-hook for your shoes.