This text is a therapeutic attempt and serves only myself. Whoever is looking for a charming childhood memory or a clever reflection on an aspect of gaming here, please return next Wednesday or Saturday.
For weeks I suffered through an earworm from Encanto’s song Surface Pressure. I would wake up in the night with five-second loops in my head. For days it felt like going insane. Earworms are a genuine problem in my life, but while probably everyone has had a similar experience with melodies, earworms of words or phrases are probably less common.
My wife is often haunted by the name “Mary Stuart” and can’t get it out of her head for days. I do my best not to mention it in her presence, which is not so easy, because Maria Stuart is a great subject to chatter about. I myself am more afflicted with a kind of auto-complete curse. When I hear the words “gotta go…”, I reliably think “Gotta go to war” and then “Gotta God of War”. If I hear “magma”, my brain compulsively wanders to “magma words” (as in “mark my words”). As I said, this is an attempt at therapy. And I am a bit of an oddball.
It can be helpful to talk about these things, to draw them into the light as Link once did with Blind, the thief. So here I am writing about the WordPress login for Wall Jump’s backend. I want any signup form to remember me, data security be damned. That’s why I like to click the “Remember Me” box below the password field. Save my secret data and send it further into the world until the next Panama Papers feat. Julian Assange publish a compromising Wall Jump article under my name, which will make my whole existence collapse like a sloppily built card house. What’s important is that I don’t have to re-enter my unnecessarily complicated and unchangeable password. As the WJ team already asked: No, I don’t use a password manager. I know. As you can see from this text, I don’t really have a grasp of these things.
Unfortunately, my brain doesn’t work very well in other ways either, because every time I check the box, I give in to the false hope that I could skip not only the password entry, but the whole form. Desire is stronger than reason. So i click the box again and again. And with merciless reliability, this sentence pops into my head: Remember me, Alex?!
Eternal Darkness is a badly aged Game Cube game that made a splash back in the day. I played it 20 years ago and haven’t since. Unfortunately, it made excessive use of the cultural technique that is associated with the phrase “Previously on…” and gave a little review of what had happened so far before each chapter. One particular scene was obviously held to be really important and so it was integrated into every single flashback: The ghost of Alexandra Roivas’ grandfather appears to her and asks her if she remembered him. Even then, I jumped through the TV to grab him by his ghostly shirt collar and shake him, “How can I forget you when you remind me of your existence so often?” It is deeply etched in my mind and I will still be muttering that phrase on my deathbed and my relatives will be wondering who Alex is for years after I’m gone.
It is an obvious irony that I will remember Edward Roivas all my life. Slightly less obvious, but even more ironic is that I am an reminded of this curse whenever I want to write about memories of video games.
Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?! Remember me, Alex?!
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