Link's Awakening

A Link to the 90s

Recently in my internet wanderings, I chanced upon a rare buried treasure--the sort that used to pop up regularly before the death of the web. The following piece of archived video only runs three minutes, but in that short time it captures the look and mood of Nintendo headquarters in…
September 1, 20216 Comments
Video Gambling

Video Gambling

If you're familiar with the refined generational theory discussed on this and other counterculture blogs, you know that Generation Y is clearly differentiated from the Millennials by the latter's gullibility and loathing of the past in contrast to the former's tractability and morbid nostalgia. Of all the pop culture stories…
August 25, 202118 Comments
Lecter Skinsuit

Ignore the Skinsuits

A major hurdle to understanding our new era that most people struggle to surmount is the shift from an economic frame to a moral frame. Everyone currently living in the West was raised under a Left vs Right paradigm with roots in the eighteenth century. Especially in its American expression,…
July 27, 202127 Comments
Post-PopCult

The Post-Pop Cult Age

Almost everyone reading this grew up under a largely monolithic American pop culture. Whether it's Baby Boomers' love of the Beatles or the multigenerational Star Wars fandom that originated with Gen X, anyone who came of age in the past several decades could easily navigate the pop landscape by several…
July 23, 202114 Comments
It's Dangerous to Go Alone

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

80s parents stereotypically trashed video games as brain-rotting wastes of time. But the best games of that time did contain nuggets of wisdom, one of the foremost being "It's dangerous to go alone!" A notorious game mechanic of 2D era adventure games involved starting the main character without the main…
July 13, 20212 Comments
FF VII Remaster

Defusing the Pop Bomb

Rivers of ink have been spilled in our corner of the counterculture scene about Cultural Ground Zero. For the uninitiated, that's a shorthand description of the abrupt decline that struck Western entertainment right around 1997. The movie moguls, rock gods, and video game wizards who'd spent the 80s and 90s…
June 11, 202115 Comments
Final Fantasy IV Rydia

A Storytelling Triumph

During last night's Retro-spective stream, my cohosts Dorrinal and Catholic Lancer mentioned how much of a storytelling triumph Final Fantasy IV is. It's said of many classic works in counterculture circles, but FFIV is the kind of game you couldn't get made today. The plot features multiple redemption arcs, public…
June 3, 2021

Final Fantasy IV Retro-Spective

  A quick reminder to all my readers that my new live stream series, Final Fantasy IV Retro-Spective premiers tonight on Geek Gab's channel at 10:00 PM Central. We'll be playing through the JRPG classic on the original SNES hardware. That means all kinds of fun glitches to exploit, so…
May 20, 2021

Shadowrun (1993)

We've documented Gen Y's vices in copious detail these past few years. But if Gen Y has one virtue, it's a knack for remembering what the Pop Cult would prefer stayed memory holed. For example, the AAA video game publishers really don't want you thinking about pre-Ground Zero 2D video…
May 20, 2021

Cursed Consoles

Despite their bleeding edge trappings, video games have come into their own as a mature technology. The video game industry is now older than most of the people reading this post. Like theater and movies, video gaming has amassed its own body of insider lore. This secret history runs the…
May 20, 2021