Going Retro

Last week, LC and I watched "West Skerra Light", a horror/comedy produced by the BBC for Halloween. The show starts with one of the characters narrating a story to a bunch of kids at some sort of camp fire, during which he accuses them of being "too busy with your Game Boys." To which the child in question asks, "what's a Game Boy?" Which is, of course, both amusing and disturbing for its truth.

The other major task LC and I are involved in, of course, is the process of moving. In the course of which we've taken the opportunity to dig through a lot of our accumulated stuff and are gradually shedding a lot of dross - over the years we (mostly I) have accumulated a whole load of rubbish that should have been disposed of but which has gradually accumulated. So much of the weekend was spent shredding old documents - indeed, it remains an ongoing task, as I had to stop when the recycle bin was full.

In addition to shredding papers, though, we also dug out a couple of boxes of stuff that had been resting under the spare bed. In truth, those boxes had mostly lain untouched since I moved in, having mostly lain untouched in all previous homes. So, as I'm sure you can imagine, it didn't really have much of any value!

Funnily enough, though, it did contain not one but two Game Boy Advance units - both the original design and also the SD redesign - both still in working order, and with a bunch of game cartridges. Cue hours of retro-gaming fun... to be had at some later, more suitable, time.

(That said, I'm not entirely convinced that the GBA counts as "retro-gaming" - it only came out in 2001, which is a mere 15 years ago. That's only ten generations of computing power, meaning that current units are a paltry 1,024 times as powerful... yeah, okay, they're retro...)

The other surprising thing that I found at the weekend was a letter written by my great-grandmother to my parents some two weeks after I was born. Needless to say, that will be being kept.

#61: "Le Petit Prince", by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (a book from The List)