You grew up experiencing the analog world, then were an earlier adopter of the digital world.
Therefore you are forever pining for what was lost of the analog lifestyle, and the lost free Internet. You miss hanging out with your friends on the streets downtown when there was nothing else to do; you also miss when everyone was the webmaster of their own homepage. You’re in a transition generation, the lifestyle equivalent of being an immigrant; you feel like you've been in different lands for so long that you can't fit into any of them anymore.
You started working right before 2008. This permanently shaped how you feel about work. The system is rigged and any impression of stability is a lie. You don't trust anything. Prepper generation.
Content warning: Old woman reminisces at rose-tinted nostalgia.
No First World country would sell us games, so we pirated everything, and took from both sources. I played Rockman, Bare Knuckle, Shiritsu Justice Gakuen and Biohazard before I knew them as Megaman, Streets of Rage, Rival Schools, or Resident Evil. Sometimes I still slip and use the Japanese names when talking to USA people. On the other hand I played Earthbound, Secret of Mana or Fatal Fury before trying Mother, Seiken Densetsu or Garō Densetsu. It seemed quite random which one we’d get first. I played Rockman 3 but Megaman 5.
The Dynavision 4 Radical, a Brazilian Famiclone—an alternative console to play Famicom/NES games. There were many such models. A common feature was to have dual connectors for both the narrower Japanese and wider USA cartridges, like here; both formats were widespread in the country. If your console didn’t have both slots, then you owned and adapter.
After 9 years in Germany I complain about the country all the time, due to a mix of:
Valid grievances about the culture, the weather, the politics;
My own prejudices against any place I live in for too long (I've never lived 9 years in the same place before);
And going native (all Germans complain about Germany all the time.)
In an effort to be less negative I wanted to list the things I like about living here, and do my best to avoid undermining them with qualifiers like “…even though” or “at least…”. My criterion for this is; if I picture myself back to Asia or South America, what would I probably miss?
In the realm of learning the katana, a lot of bullshidō caters to the desire of becoming a master samurai. In kendō proper, the first thing you'll be told is that there has been no samurai since 1876, and there won't ever be. “Samurai” does not mean “badass swordsmaster”; it means a specific caste in an hereditary caste system, and that system was, thankfully, abolished. In kendō circles, the whole “code of the samurai” stuff is kinda cringe if you say it out loud. Kendō people are more likely to know that the Hagakure is itself LARPing by some nerdy blowhard who never saw as much as a scuffle in his historical period, that Eugen Herrigel had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, and so on.
Yet like in all repudiations of “cringe”, that longing still remains. The dude who posts selfies as UrbanSamurai108 wearing purple Shein hakama and tactical katana feels so painful to look at because you recognise the purple hakama inside your ~heart~.
Recently I have taken up kendō (Japanese fencing) again, after a hiatus of… gods. 20 years, give or take.
I'm having a blast. My body remembers the movements much better than I expected, and I find all the screaming while whacking people on the head to be wonderfully therapeutic. Alas, a lot of the equipment is leather-based. I had assumed by now someone would have come up with alternatives as in most sports, but I assumed wrong. Oh well. (This article has talk of leather, and photos of leather parts.)
