01) Scientists warn we’re entering a ‘digital dark age’
“We may [one day] know less about the early 21st century than we do about the early 20th century,” says Rick West, who manages data at Google. “The early 20th century is still largely based on things like paper and film formats that are still accessible to a large extent; whereas, much of what we’re doing now — the things we’re putting into the cloud, our digital content — is born digital. It’s not something that we translated from an analog container into a digital container, but, in fact, it is born, and now increasingly dies, as digital content, without any kind of analog counterpart.”
Computer and data specialists refer to this era of lost data as the “digital dark ages.” Other experts call the 21st century an “informational black hole,” because the digital information we are creating right now may not be readable by machines and software programs of the future. All that data, they worry — our century’s digital history — is at risk of never being recoverable.
…
Kari Kraus, an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park and who helps run a project that rescues and resurrects digital relics, including video games and virtual worlds, knows about bit rot, and its close relative “software rot,” in which old files, games and other data becomes unusable because no format exists to read and reproduce the information.”
01) Waking Up with Sam Harris #129 – An Insider’s View of Medicine (with Dr. Nina Shapiro)
“In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Dr. Nina Shapiro about the practice of medicine. They discuss the unique resiliency of children, the importance of second opinions, bad doctors, how medical training has changed in recent years, medical uncertainty, risk perception, vaccine safety, and other topics.
Dr. Nina Shapiro is the award-winning Director of Pediatric Otolaryngology and a Professor of Head and Neck Surgery at UCLA. She is featured in The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and CNN.com among others. She is a regular on CBS’s The Doctors. She is the author of Hype: A Doctor’s Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice – How to Tell What’s Real and What’s Not.”
01) Canada Vote on Marijuana Paves the Way for Legalization
“OTTAWA — Canada’s Senate passed legislation on Tuesday that will make the country the first major economy to legalize recreational marijuana use.
The bill, which was approved by the House of Commons on Monday, goes next to the governor-general, the representative of Queen Elizabeth, as a formality. Once it is formally approved, the legislation is expected to create a multibillion dollar industry, with Canada joining Uruguay in allowing its citizens on a national level to use marijuana without fear of arrest.”
Today is International BoyLove Day, for the summer solstice of 2018!
Happy IBLD!
What’s Happening in the World?:
It seems like we just don’t get much good to report, these days…though the political unrest promising change on the horizon, does seem…somewhat optimistic…for sweeping much corruption out of government…
Canada has legalized recreational marijuana…That is positive…
…And Our Love Frontier is charging along, as strong as ever!
This is the first time in years:
This is the first time in years, I’ve actually put substantial effort into one of these IBLD posts…something I would have preferred to be doing, all along…
I realized IBLD was approaching fast…I host possibly the only regularly maintained IBLD website on the internet…so, how could I not?…
…And yet, I somehow “lost” a day…thinking the solstice was on the 22nd…and that I’d have an extra 24 hours, to write a few additional things to complete this post…
…Ah, well….
I hope you enjoy the focus of this post…I’m sure Allen Ginsberg isn’t everybody’s cup of tea…but he was an interesting character…
So…let’s take a look back, at one of the most celebrated American BoyLovers…Allen Ginsberg…
01) No More to Say & Nothing to Weep For: An Elegy for Allen Ginsberg (FULL MOVIE)
“Witness the last days of the Beat poet whose works would capture the very essence of the 1960 counter-cultural movement in an informative documentary featuring Allen Ginsberg’s final television interview as well as remarkable deathbed footage shot by underground cinema icon Jonas Mekas. In addition to candid discussions about everything from Ginsberg’s personal life to his literary career, home movie footage of the Howl author as a child and archive footage allow contemporary fans to witness such landmark moments as his 1965 reading at Royal Albert Hall and chanting at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Previously unreleased footage of Ginsberg performing with Paul McCartney is also included, as are interviews with Dick Cavett and William Buckley, and the heartfelt memorial service in which Patti Smith bid her old friend a particularly poignant farewell. In the final sequence, Ginsberg invites filmmaker Mekas to his New York loft as he lies on his deathbed and prepares to embark on the ultimate adventure.”
It is largely accepted, that Allen Ginsberg was a hebephile BoyLover…and he famously spoke at a NAMBLA conference.
First recording of “Howl” read by Allen Ginsberg, 1956:
Howl
By Allen Ginsberg
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Rockland
where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
I’m with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I’m with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I’m with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
01) Waking Up with Sam Harris #128 – Transformations of Mind (with Geoffrey Miller)
“In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Geoffrey Miller about evolutionary psychology. They discuss sexual selection, virtue signaling, social media, public shaming, monogamy and polyamory, taboo topics in science, genetic engineering, gender differences and the “Google memo,” moral psychology, existential risk, AI, and other topics.
Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist best known for his books The Mating Mind (2001), Mating Intelligence (2008), Spent (2009), and Mate (2015). He has a B.A. in Biology and Psychology from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University, and is a tenured associate professor at University of New Mexico. He has over 110 academic publications addressing sexual selection, mate choice, signaling theory, fitness indicators, consumer behavior, marketing, intelligence, creativity, language, art, music, humor, emotions, personality, psychopathology, and behavior genetics. He has also given 180 talks in 15 countries, reviewed papers for over 50 journals, and also worked at NYU Stern Business School, UCLA, and the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and his research has been featured in Nature, Science, The New York Times, The Washington Post, New Scientist, and The Economist, on NPR and BBC radio, and in documentaries on CNN, PBS, Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, and BBC. He has consulted for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, governments, NGOs, advertising agencies, market research companies, and social media companies.
“Two people are standing in the middle of a desert, which once has been the bottom of the largest river of the world; they are looking for water.
They discover a point, being the basis of a line. During the process of their search for water, they are creating the concept of time, whereby lines inherently are being connected with it. Time is getting scarce. Speed. In what way can lines play a role in increasing speed?
Human creature shapes lines. From now on, line structures are subjected to logics and technology, as a base for the creation of his society. Points are being connected to each other, as straight as possible, as a clear conclusion. From now on, lines are guiding human being at an ever increasing velocity. An obsessed striving for rectilinearity, not knowing he is also part of a cycle.
The human being is offered a present in the form of beauty. For the first time, he discovers the curved line, sensual. He is getting aware of the sense of feeling admiration, in order to eventually return to the stream he had been looking for, the stream in its smallest unit, in its most pure form and floating in an endlessness. A drop.
As a point.”
“National Guard troops from eight states will be withheld or recalled from the southern border, the states’ governors announced this week, over mounting objections to the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents there.
The governors of Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia and North Carolina declared that their soldiers would not help to secure the United States’ border with Mexico, adding their names to widening outrage over the policy.
President Trump called in April for the National Guard to be deployed to the border, saying that thousands of troops were needed to stanch illegal crossings, even though they are at a 46-year low. Few governors outside the Southwest immediately embraced the plan.
“Until this policy of separating children from their families has been rescinded, Maryland will not deploy any National Guard resources to the border,” Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, said on Tuesday. “Earlier this morning, I ordered our four crew members & helicopter to immediately return from where they were stationed in New Mexico.
01) Cynthia Nixon Unveils SWEEPING Anti-Corruption Plan
“TYT Politics’ Emma Vigeland breaks down Cynthia Nixon’s anti-corruption plan, which she announced on the same day that a second Andrew Cuomo administration bribery trial began.
01) Fire Pro Wrestling World Info & Discussion – #CUPodcast
“Fire Pro Wrestling World is coming to PS4 and Early Access on Steam – Pat & Ian discuss why they’re excited.”
Fire Pro Wrestling World Review (PC) + A Brief History of Fire Pro – Kim Justice:
Why buy Fire Pro Wrestling World on Steam?:
So…there I was, about six months back…wondering to myself, if they ever made a Zoo Tycoon 3…or if I could at least get a functional version of Zoo Tycoon 2, on Steam…
I have the complete version of the first game [never purchased the second], which I’ve had a hankering to play…but it’s “obsolete” on modern computers…So, I thought maybe I could pick up Zoo Tycoon 2 […3…4…whatever modern version might possibly exist] on the cheap…
As it turns out…this is now a game genre, in it’s own right…and a lot of knock offs have come into being…including online games…
Since this happened about six months back…and I should have written this while I was fresh, in the excitement phase…I forget exactly what I decided to also look for…but, I was kind of dissuaded by the prospect of having to wade through a bunch of cheap knock offs, to figure out what’s good…But, I decided to start snooping around at what was available in Tycoon games, instead…
For some reason, I typed in “Tycoon World”…
…and this peculiarly familiar graphic popped up, in the recommendation list…not directly related to the search, mind you…but I saw it recommended, when looking at games under the search term “world”…
Much to my shock…looking closer at the screen…I saw the words “Fire Pro Wrestling World”…
“Fire Pro Wrestling” is a very old series, which has it’s roots in the pro wrestling title for the original Nintendo Entertainment System…It’s continued on with 2D sprites, and really became a legendary series during the early to mid 90’s…
With only one exception…they never quit using 2D sprites [until now, where they’ve implemented something more 3D in nature]…which may sound insane…until you realize, what all this allowed them to jam pack into a game for actual pro wrestling fans, who love pro wrestling simulation video games…
This series has a bit of a learning curve…but once you get it…you come to realize, there has never been a better pro wrestling video game on the market…ever.
Of course…Fire Pro Wrestling has had a few “false deaths”…Notably with Fire Pro Wrestling Z [the intended finally], back in 2005 or so…followed up by Fire Pro Wrestling R [aka “Returns”…the intended comeback] in 2007…The latter would be the only game in the series, to get a proper North America release, with menus and text in English…and it didn’t manage to recapture the fan base excitement of previous installments [probably because it didn’t add an enormous amount of new content, and still more they’d planned on adding, did not make it in]…A few years later, the main creator behind the series died…and everybody thought Fire Pro Wrestling was totally over, for good…
This is a Japanese series…only released in Japan…With the first three installments that I purchased [G, D and Z], I had to download and print out a books worth of translations put together by the very dedicated North American fan base…
…So…this is a game community, with a level of dedication and love…that you just don’t encounter, with most games…
I’m aware of the Fire Pro Wrestling R release, on the PlayStation 3 network, three or four years back…to gage interest in the game…I didn’t bother purchasing it, because I couldn’t gather that anything of substance had been changed from the original…and I didn’t want to start from scratch, in recreating my own roster of private characters…just to play in the exact same game…
…But then…when I’d spent years believing that we’d never see another game in this series…and after the community enduring false stories about a new FPW game in development, created and spread by a member of the community…after I’d written this series off as totally done…I’d found out, that a new installment had been created and released, entirely without my knowledge…And there it was, on Steam…for something like $30…
After spending an hour or two verifying that it wasn’t a simple rehash of R…this became an instantaneous, “no more questions asked” purchase for me.
I guess they still have to work out some bugs [I’ve not encountered myself, yet]…but, this is an amazing game!
…And it’s also the first time an FPW game exists…which can have easy expansions added, from the developer…It’s even being unofficially modded, by some players…Because it’s finally made it [or returned, technically] to the PC platform…when it was almost entirely a game for game consoles…
…So…this is, potentially, a “living” game…which can evolve…maybe get new game modes…
It can already create a limitless sized roster…with limitless number of groups and stables…limitless number of rings, with graphics you can import into the game…And it’s all tied into the Steam Workshop…so, the amount of downloadable content is staggering…and the ease of sharing your own content…Well…Let’s just say, I intend on sharing a project or two of my own, when I get them completed…Which isn’t something I typically do with the games I play…because my video game creations [IE: Mods] aren’t usually all that great.
I just wish I could openly talk about those projects here, without getting too reckless with my security…But, I’m afraid they’ll be very unique and somewhat obscure…
I’m not really doing this game justice, without describing it…but, I think these videos do a good job of that…And the basis of this post has been stagnating for six months, as I keep putting off writing something for it…even while I want to release the post…
At times…I’ve described FPW as “the world of pro wrestling, on a game disk”…It has a massive amount of moves and holds…an artificial intelligence editor, which is insane in depth…Every style of pro wrestling [power, technical, giant, Mexican, heel, Japan, and a number of others] and fighting [including MMA and kick boxing] is represented in this game…And the game mimics pro wrestling, as a simulator…It’s not some brainless, arcade like game, with the shallow aim of hitting your opponent till they run out of energy…There’s deep strategy behind this game.
I’m leaving it there…
…I don’t normally talk about this type of thing, because…well…it’s the world of “pro wrestling”…which is largely in an embarrassing state, these days…
…And it’s always been really dorky, at any rate…But I was once a tween, who fell in love with it…and stuck with it, into my twenties…
…I adore the Fire Pro Wrestling series…It’s the pinnacle of what is possible, with this type of game genre.
01) Scientists warn we’re entering a ‘digital dark age’
