So I recently contracted the nostalgia virus, and it had me asking: "Why don't I reinstall Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 for a little bit?" They are games we played to death with around 6000 hours playtime. TF2 has left a mark on us personally from the communities in them, and the experiences in playing competitively. That's in the past though, nostalgia trips have always left that feeling of unsatisfied yearning. Usually people are willing to leave things there, assigning the mismatch between feelings past and present to those rose-tinted glasses of memory, but this time I felt like there were more tangible reasons to be explored, and I think I've found out why. Both games have changed plenty over their lifespans. Dota has had so many gameplay changes over the years that a lot of it I forget while playing as someone who thought that adding talents 9 years ago was a bit too much. It's still Dota though. You wait for queue to pop, there's a smurf in the g...
Spoilers for Norco (2022) I moved around a lot as a kid- home becoming wherever I was in the moment with my family and my stuff. My father’s job, that being a service-member in the United States Army, meant we moved. The longest I’ve lived in a place was seven years- living on the island of Oʻahu during the end of the second G.W. Bush administration and through half or so of the first Obama administration. The second longest was Georgia, though that was between two places- Columbus (again for my father’s work) and Atlanta, for school. Georgia State University. I still have dreams about being there, having moved away three years ago. My mental health went into serious decline, I had two psych ward stays, and decided that living with my parents in Missouri would be a more stable living environment then college dorms. I justify it to myself, then. I don’t tend to go back to places I previously lived, they live on in my head as some sort of memory, trapped in a dreamlike state, but I ...