Yakuza Papers: observations on video games and film

 1.27 Infinite Wealth: Day 1 A few days ago it occurred to me that, if it was a teenage pitcher, Infinite Wealth would be about six and a half feet tall, 220 lbs, with smooth mechanics and a fastball that rested at, uh, whatever is real damn fast for a teenage fastball; they would have had a couple relatives make the majors and their dad would be a college pitching coach, or something.  You don’t start designing the plaque for Cooperstown. You don’t even fit him for the big league jersey. NOTHING is guaranteed. It is still probably more likely that the kid will be out of baseball in five years than on an all-star team. BUT if you wanted to imagine the perfect pitcher, that’s about where you’d start.  After one day with Infinite Wealth, the kid is getting TommyJohn surgery.  On some level, nothing has changed. The things we liked, the build, the lineage, are all still there; they could still win 300 games*** But this is NOT the start we had been hoping for *** assumin...

 These apology posts are weird, on a blog that is read by no one. Who exactly am I sorry to? Who could I have conceivably let down? The project is a journal, a personal inventory, at the beginning; a documentation of a relationship between a subject (me) and some fairly specific aspects of culture and art. But, really, it is just the stuff I have to say, even if I’m not saying it to anyone. Right now, what I have to say is this:  A longstanding belief of mine, to the point that it could be a theme of this blog if I had organized the blog differently, is that RGG are the significant successors to the post-modern novel and that post modern novels provide important context for understanding the background and significance of the RGG games.  Briefly: The open world format offers a solution to the clutter and confusion of the post-modern novel, whose subject is a reality that is so complex that it can only be described with multiple narratives. RGG takes advantage of this, to ...

 IMENSE spoilers for Gomorra the Series I suspect that there are more of these than I am aware. I am sure that stuff in the Marvel and Star Wars Universes count; probably you could find one in Faulkner, if you really wanted to keep score.  The relevant category is “works that cover an event/time period that had already been covered by a different work in the franchise-narrative, and ends with a re-connection with the main narrative” and the two that I am interested in are “Like a Dragon: Gaiden” by the RGG guys and “The Immortal” film spin off from the TV show Gomorrah. This strikes me as, even if I am missing a bunch, a pretty unusual narrative choice to make, and the Yakuza games and Gomorra are my two favorite things about this century, with no obvious competitors besides the 2004 Detroit Pistons and some Takeshi Kitano movies.  And, for bonus points, both “Gaiden” and “The Immortal” center on a protagonist type character that the narrative was trying to move away from...

 The entire situation can get fucked, for this reason: I’m from outside of Princeton NJ-- home of not just the University, but also the Institute for Advanced Study (Einstein spent his latter years there) and a handful other players in the education biz, of various sorts -- and spent the end of the ‘90s in two high schools that took academics seriously, in one of the only places on the planet, probably, where taking academics seriously was even a thing. Among the students being told to take academics seriously I am pretty sure that I was the only one who ever considered it-- which speaks to flaws in my character and intelligence too shameful to dwell on.  Anyway, informing all this being told to take academics seriously was a story-- told lacking a single proper noun-- about a student who fucked up the citations on an important paper out of laziness and fatigue-driven incompetence. But, because of  academic integrity  fucking up the citations was actually a FORM OF T...