Category: Otaku

Fish Wizard

There are few corners of this planet over which I hold no influence, but ironically one of those is the biggest corner of them all.

The Big Blue. The Great Green. The Endless Ocean.

It has always been a frustration of mine, but finally I have a remedy! I present… (drumroll)… this:

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Yes indeed my good friends, for the first time in æons I once again sport a watch. But not just any watch, for this is the legendary Fish Master 5000.

Let’s get the basics out of the way quickly: stopwatch, countdown timer, thermometer, alarms, world times and phases and age of the moon. Simple stuff. Oh, and it tells time as well.

But this watch takes timekeeping into a hitherto unexplored dimension in that it gives the wizard that wears it (that would be me): supernatural knowledge of fishes!

Let’s take a closer look at the face:

fishmaster

Look just above the time, just below the center. See those fishes? Well the watch keeps track over a countless amount of incomprehensible (to humans) “fish variables” and distills the necessary information into a four point scale. It then displays the output as a number of fishes on the face of the watch. In the above image, what I shall call ‘fish power‘ is currently at 50%

This fish power is dependent on the location of the wizard wearing the watch, and this can be set by changing the longitude. It is also influenced by the time and age of the moon, as well as (no doubt) other mysteries that (those arch-wizards at) Casio are unprepared to reveal. All this magic in such a tiny package! Steve Jobs would be proud 🙂

The effect of having this device on one’s wrist is to make the world of fish no longer impenetrable to the wearer. As soon as I put on this watch it was as if my eyes had just opened, and I immediately knew everything about fishes.

For instance, a quick glance at my Fisher King 9000 tells me at this very moment, were I in the vicinity of Addis Ababa, I may be heading to the nearest lake with a fishing rod in my hand.

No longer – I could finally say – could any fish hide from me. Never again would I fail to know where (or when) all fish are, anywhere on this great planet of ours. At first, like a child, I reveled in this newfound power. I would swagger around the house bellowing such comments as “Try hiding from me now you scaly little bastards!”, or “I am the God of all fishes!”. But after some time a strange calmness began to descend upon me. I became reflective,  and began to realize that what this device had given me was not dominion, but invitation.

Perhaps – I came to see – my destiny was not to rule the fish. Perhaps my destiny was to join them. At last – I ultimately realized – my world and theirs has finally intersected. At last I have become one with the fishes. Truly I am now a brother to every fish. Into their scaley little hearts I have been welcomed, and all because of the power of this magical device.

For the Fish-a-Tron X-9 is so much more than a timepiece: it is a ticket to a fuller existence – a land where the barrier between man and fish has broken. Where the endless depths of the ocean are no longer a mystery, more a promise.

And where the ancient silent song from sunken R’lyeh has never been clearer…

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Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

It Reviews Itself

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Here’s a quote from a story called Seven Stars, one of the tales including in Kim Newman’s Mysteries Of The Diogenes Club:

“We think the Nazis have the Spear Of Longinus. Combine that with the Jewel Of Seven Stars and they may trump our Ark Of The Covenant. We’d need Excalibur and The Holy Grail to beat that.”

If you’d love to live in a world where the above sentence could be fact, then this is most certainly the book for you.

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On a not-entirely unrelated note: Sherlock was amazing. One portion of my brain flipped for joy at Mark Gatiss’ Mycroft Holmes, if only because I have grown to love Kim Newman’s version of the same character.

And, as a final addendum, I request that my esteemed brother take time out from packaging up my birthday gift and watch (the blu-ray version of) Sherlock ASAP. Then we can discuss whether or not the (astounding) establishing shots of London are some sort of video HDR

Buy Low, Sell High

I have only ever sold two things on eBay. The first was a digital camera (our first ever, a Kodak that took VGA quality images). I recall getting a good price for it considering it was a couple of years old. What about the second thing I sold? Well…

A little over 10 years ago, I walked into a local store called FYE in one of the malls here in Albany. They were in their post-Christmas clearance and I was digging through their goods. Imagine my surprise when I saw they were selling entire, unopened boxes of Japanese Final Fantasy VIII trading cards. Here’s a shot of one of the packs:

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There were discounted to a near-unbelievably level, something like sub-$10 per box (although a part of me wants to say they may have even been only $1 per box). Needless to say, I purchased all three boxes they had – which translated to maybe 75 packs of cards in total.

So I took them all home and tore them all open. The pack was a lie! The contents were almost exclusively ‘official card game’ and not much at all of ‘perfect visual collection’. In essence, this was a real-life version of the Triple Triad card game included in Final Fantasy VIII.

Oh well, they were very cheap, so I didn’t care much. I sorted, extracted as close to a full set as I could, and set aside all of my doubles.

Now here’s where things get weird. Often, with card doubles, I just throw them in a box somewhere and attic them, or even discard them. Recently I’ve been known to give my doubles away (often to my brother). For some reason, back in 2001, I decided to put these doubles on eBay since I had just had some luck selling the camera.

Unfortunately eBay doesn’t save data for ever, so I couldn’t look up the auction as it was, but I do have some information myself. Here is the photo I placed in the auction:

$293.50 in Final Fantasy cards

I know I would have started the sale at $0.00 (since you had to then to avoid a listing fee) and I doubt I set a reserve (again, to avoid a fee). The auction was probably set at the default of seven days. I don’t remember the listing, although I know I stressed that the piles at the back contained many doubles and all the foils contained in the auction were shown at front.

Interest was immediate, and very high. Recall I paid virtually nothing for these cards (maybe $30, maybe $3) and I had already removed a good portion for myself. I truly considered them to be near-worthless. Had they not sold, I certainly would have simply thrown them all away.

So seven days later, when the auction closed with a winning bid of $293.50 I was astounded. I recall skepticism; suspicion it was a fake bid. But it was not, and I eventually got the money in the mail and sent off the cards. I reckon I danced for joy when I cashed that cheque!

These days the cards still hold value, especially since the game is still being played by enthusiasts. A few days ago when I considered this post there was a ‘buy it now’ on the full set of 182 cards on eBay for a (shocking!) $475, but that auction seems to be gone now. My cards are in deep storage somewhere so I have no idea how much of the set I have. But to think they are worth hundreds of dollars? That’s just crazy!