Cartridges: Our Link to the Past

While currently trying to ignore whatever pops up about Aliens: Colonial Marines, I need something to write about. Luckily, something interesting happened this week that hasn't happened for a long time: a friend and I swapped game cartridges.

Yeah, like totally old-school. I brought my copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the the GBA to the office and he brought his copy of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the GBA (the one with the Four Swords multiplayer thing). We traded, identified save files that we didn't want overwritten, and agreed to return them as soon as we had finished. School yard ethics dictate that I name my save file PENIS or something, but still, how long has it been that you and a friend exchanged games? And cartridge games at that?

This single act has made me look over my collection of emulators and roms and think: "Wow. This is the future."

I remember when that cartridge was a key, unlocking a little portable world. I used to guard them with my life, especially if it was a borrowed cartridge, because that meant it was a game that my parents didn't want me to play. I had Tetris and a chess game for the Game Boy (not high on the school yard trade list), so I relied on the good graces of my elementary classmates to take one of my crappy games hostage so I could play their infinitely better TMNT or Mario game.

Now, these games are just zip files on my hard drive. Games that I would have begged to borrow are purely dismissal. I'm having fun playing A Link to the Past on my GameCube GBA player, but I've had that rom on my computer for years, and I've never touched it.

I guess that's the magic of cartridges and nostalgia. Back then, the first thing I did when I borrowed a game was pop it into the old Game Boy and give it a spin.

Mad, Mad Scientist

I wish I were a mad scientist. Is that enough to constitute a blog post? One wishful sentence. Probably not, but that doesn't mean it's any less true.

Part of the problem is that I don't have a laboratory. I have access to a space that could be a lab, but no one has given me permission to clean the space up and transform it. Sad. Like a hermit crab without a soda can.

What would I do in this imaginary laboratory? Research, develop, and build computers, robots, and (oh yeah) hack and modify video game consoles. This seems like a phase I go through: it gets cold and dark out in the world and I desire to take things apart and build something better.

Things have flared up again with the original Xbox. I found a pretty sweet and thorough video about the soft-modding process and swapping out hard drives. The original Xbox has an 8 GB hard drive (which seemed like a lot at the height of its console days) that can be easily upgraded to 320 GB or even 500 GB. Considering that I have 8 GB SD cards spilling out my ears now, upgrading doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Finding the right kind of hard drive might be a challenge. In the video, the guy pulled one out of an old computer. I'm not sure I will be able to do that. The computer stuff is always a little complicated. I've successfully soft-modded a Nintendo Wii and completely bricked a Phat PSP. So, despite some success, I'm always a little nervous about this sort of thing.

I'll have to take inventory of older computers that I have around and see what I've got for hard drives. My biggest problem with this stuff is that if I do it (or attempt it) then I stop messing with it for some time, I'll forget all about it and how I did it.

My Wii is probably my best excursion in this realm because I kept track of everything that I did step-by-step and I have a folder with all the set-up files, channels, emulators, and everything else that I downloaded still on my computer. I also use this modded Wii enough that I remember everything. That's important too.

Fitocracy and My Lifestyle Change

So I joined this site in September of last year thanks to The 404 Show. In the past eight months, Fitocracy has successfully trained me to take the stairs in my office building, so much that I am actually starting to feel guilty about the six to twelve points per day.

This is how I know that the site works: Fitocracy has helped me develop one healthy habit to the point that I no longer think of "walking up the stairs in lieu of the elevator" as a workout or even a habit; now it's just part of going to work.

Fitocracy served as my springboard into healthy living. First it was just noticing what I am doing and what I am not doing. Eight hours a day on my butt in front of a computer screen. That's my job. Seven hours of sleep. That's so I can function. Total 24 hours in a day, minus 15 hours of combined work and sleep, leaves 9 hours of whatever I want. Most of those 9 hours are spent on my butt in front of a computer screen, playing junk and watching junk. A sedentary lifestyle doesn't quite cut it; I'd go with severely sedentary. Maybe even fatally sedentary. Coming to this realization sparked the need for change.

Sometimes change is difficult and sometimes it's easy.

I wasn't always sedentary, fat, overweight, or obese. The Nintendo Wii Fit calls me obese. I was incredibly active and fit in high school; I played soccer in the fall and ran track in the spring. During the winter months I was lifting in the school weight room and over summer break I was conditioning for soccer. I was an athlete. I was fit, toned, and powerful. And I looked "good" in all the pop culture sense.

While conditioning for soccer in the gawd-awful June heat before my senior year, I questioned all of it. We were running sprints, my body ached and burned. Sweat stung in my eyes as I bolted from goal box to goal box. The moment of clarity: none of it made me happy. There was no joy in my actions. I almost quit, right there. The team mentality kept me for the season, but once soccer was over, I was done. I didn't hit the weights in the winter or run track in spring. I chilled, relaxed, and vegged out. I went from high school to college with the same outlook. Freshman fifteen? I was more of a freshman fifty.

Going from active to sedentary was an easy change for me. Because I'm naturally lazy. I'm the DoNothingMan, remember? Discipline helped me perform in high school, athletically and academically. I threw the athletic discipline out the window my senior year and never looked back. Until now, eight years later.

Making the change from sedentary to active looks to be difficult. I'm not going to post my goals up here, just yet. But I have found a number of awesome tools. Fitocracy is joining LoseIt! and Calorie Counter as my tool set to achieve healthier living. LoseIt! serves as my primary food and weight tracking app; it comes loaded with tons export features, perfect for the data junkie like me. The My Fitness Pal Calorie Counter has a very large food library, much larger than LoseIt! (I hate unnecessary punctuation in titles). This calorie counter will supplement LoseIt! and Fitocracy. I'm not starting all this craziness until May.

Which means I am eating Taco Bell tonight and drinking as much Baja Blast Mountain Dew as I can handle until they kick me out.