There is no denying that Stranger Things delivers in terms of pop culture nostalgia for every Gen X’er who has ever spent a weekend staying up late, consuming huge amounts of junk food to fuel an hours long campaign in DnD, going to the mall unaccompanied, or just generally hanging out with their small circle of friends while never checking in with parents once except to get a change of clothes, shower, a hot meal, or an advance on their allowance to go and try to beat that high score on Dig Dug at the arcade.
The 80s were a different time of being out of pocket. We didn’t have cell phones or social media or any other ways to get a hold of us except for yelling out the back door, down the street, or calling our friends’ land line phones to tell their parents to send us home. But we usually came home, eventually, and without incident. It’s probably a good thing those ways of contacting us or documenting our childhood adventures hadn’t been invented yet or we would have been grounded until graduation.
Stranger Things takes everything we experienced or felt in the 80s and encapsulates it into an 8-10 hour horror/sci-fi marathon, complete with all the sights, sounds, and bad fashion choices we yearn to have again secretly during our mid-life crises.
I've always wanted to try my hand at abstract art, partly from a place of ignorance and partly from a place of existentialism. The idea that people will actually pay good money (a lot of it) for a painting consisting of a red dot against a black cavass which has some contextual meaning attached baffles me to where I clumsily declare that I can do that and be rich. The other idea is actual expression of some nonverbalized feeling in my body that applies color, light, and shade to a blank slate.
With digital art, that can be realized in a manner. And while I may not have an artistic bone in my body, some do. So, I am sharing a bunch of designs made by a Redbubble shop called AbstractDreamz. It deals exclusively with digital abstract art and has been building a catalog of Tabletop Fantasy RPG mazes/maps that can be put on desk mats, phone cases, stickers, cards, and laptop skins/cases.
While it's not something you would say, put on a shirt, the wall art idea is pretty neat. The applications could be to host your own RPG Tabletop Game party and build your campaign around their designs. The descriptions are somewhat silly but actually create a narrative for you to imagine what monsters may lay in wait inside the various chambers, or what treasures may be waiting for the brave at the center or in some treasure room.
I can't wait to see if they start adding some other genres beside the standard D&D idea. The tabletop industry may have been a Wizards of the Coast, TSR, Dungeons & Dragons, etc. staple from the 70s and 80s. There was even a resurgence of the fantasy RPG games due to Stranger Things a few years back. But to say all Tabletop RPGs are D&D is a horrible statement. There's military, science fiction, superhero, steampunk, and even real life tabletop RPGs.
I am not completely convinced that life isn’t a
simulation. Now, I know that sounds a little bit tin foil hat flat earth
turtles all the down conspiracy theory-ish, but hear me out. Have you ever
looked at someone randomly and thought, “They look pretty familiar”? Not
that you mistook them for someone else, but that they could pass for an
immediate blood relative. I noticed this one day in the last couple of
years. It’s almost as if there is only a limited amount facial feature
types and everyone is a derivative of those types. Growing up, I used to
play a game called Covert Action and part of the game relied on you identifying
bad actors in a plot by watching a building to see if they appeared, then you
bug their car or follow them to a new destination that revealed more of the
plot. After a few cases, you would start to see the same similar features in
the hair or mouth or even shape. It’s like a game of Guess Who?
Remember the gang members in GTA III? Pedestrians in
GTA IV and V? You always saw the same ones walking about. It would
be hard for a video game to have a fully stocked universe of totally random
characters that did not look like any other NPCs. Same goes for
Skyrim. And, of course, No Man’s Sky. Now, with the latest updates
like NEXT and Atlas, we have even more diversity in the universe, but still
there are only so many permutations of creatures and alien NPCs able to be
conjured up in this procedurally generated game. That means you see the
same type of flora and fauna across the planets you visit. And that’s
where I start to lose the thread that life is not a simulation.
I went to school with this particular person and at the
time, he was the only one who looked like him. I would never have
mistaken him for anyone, yet here, 25 years later, every time I see a
particular Senator on television, I immediately think of him. After
Bailey’s maternal grandmother died, we were convinced on more than one occasion,
that a person we saw in the store was, in fact, her. Granted, our grief
probably manifested in some conjuration of similarities between the two, but it
is possible, they shared the same facial features. Same goes for
me. My freshman year of college, there was a student directory of
incoming freshmen and while I wasn’t in it, since I transferred in the Spring,
my doppelganger was. Clear as day, confirmed by more than one
person. Over the years, I’ve been compared to various celebrities, each
vastly different in how they looked at the time I was associated to them, but
still, I was compared to them all the same.
So, if in fact, we are trapped in some simulation, it would
make total sense that there are only so many combinations of possible features
in this world. Now, there are celebrity look-a-likes that could fool
forensic experts but even in those cases, but chances are, they made their
career out of looking like someone by actually having work done to look more
like someone. But there is something to be said out of the idea that
there are 7 people on Earth that look like you. However, chances are, if
there are that many, you probably aren’t too far apart geographically.
After all, given your own facial features, gender, race, etc. to find your doppelganger,
you have to have similar features and while the US is a melting pot of
different ethnicities, you’re probably not going to find a middle aged white
man who looks like you living in Cambodia, unless they are an expatriate.
But let’s delve further. Where I work, I have to park
on the other side of the river, walk two blocks to a light rail station, ride
that two stops, then walk another block and a half before I reach my
destination. In that time, I constantly see the same people at roughly
6:30 in the morning. In fact, I can usually tell if I’m going to miss my
train if I see the same woman walking, with her lit cigarette, past me on
the street or the older woman with dark shades on coming up the escalator
before I reach the platform. And there’s always the same group of
students who pass me coming out of the station, and the same guy with his
duffle bag and black trench coat, waiting for a bus near my building.
Also, there was a time when I was parking in an alternate location, and I
would pass a gentlemen coming from the light rail station wearing a green shirt
with a recycling shape on it. We passed by on several occasions.
And in the afternoon, while standing at the window of my office, I saw him
walking past my building, across the river from our usual passing spot.
It was strange. It was almost as if I were walking through the streets of
Whiterun and passing by Belethor or Brenuin on my way to Breezehome. I
began to suspect that maybe the people, who are always on the same path during
my commute, were NPCs in my simulation… Or even more frightening, I was also an
NPC in someone else’s simulation.
Think about it. I get up and do the same thing every
day, drive the same route, go to the same job… have the same routine, I always
eat the same foods. That’s it.
