Precious Objects

In my review on October 5th, I was kind of all over the place. My realization that I didn't care about the events that had happened earlier in the summer (the vandalism of my car) was important for me, but also very confusing. I couldn't figure out why I didn't care, and tried to blame my lifestyle for the past five years, moving from place to place and never really attaching myself to the spaces I lived in in a meaningful way.

Of course, the question then becomes, what is actually meaningful to me? What was something that I considered precious, and what characteristics did it have that made me think of it as such? In answering this question I hope to be able to reveal some truth in what makes a space meaningful to me, rather than just an object.

The hunt for something precious was an extremely easy one for me. I only have one thing that really jumped to mind in my current apartment, and it has a lot of characteristics that make me feel like it's precious and has some deep meaning for me. This thing is a computer that I built about 6 months ago.

A computer itself isn't precious, as far as I'm concerned. They can be fun, and I'm certainly the kind of person who could be attached to one, but this computer is special, because I custom built it to be a kind of "nostalgia machine". The computer is built inside of a Nintendo Entertainment System, which is a very charged object for me itself. The NES was the first video game system that I ever owned, and spawned a lifelong love of video games for my brothers and I. I have tons of good memories that involve the NES in some way, and it was an effort to regain something I had lost that brought me to build this machine.

The NESputer, as I call it, isn't like a regular computer, either. It doesn't hook up to a monitor, it hooks up to a TV, just as the original did. It isn't meant to do work, or play new video games like my other computers, it's meant for one thing and one thing only: to relive the past. The NESputer has every NES, SNES, Master System, Sega Genesis, Neo Geo, and TurboGraphx 16 game ever made on it, so I can play any game that I want, whenever I want. Of course, this means that I look back to my past and play games that I used to love when I was young.

The games themselves are fun, and I enjoy them, but video games mean more to me than entertainment alone. A lot of my fondest memories of childhood revolved around video games. My brothers and I ate slept and bled video games for years, and so did my circle of friends. They were something to play when we were over at each other's houses, they were commodities to trade, and they were something to anticipate and read about and be excited by. It was a world that was exciting and something that I felt as though I owned because I was very passionate about it. In fact, my first job that I ever had was writing video game reviews for an online magazine called Gamer's Pulse. I got the job by lying about my age and sending in some reviews I had written about other games that I had posted online in other forums, and I held the job for three and a half years.

I don't find video games as exciting anymore. I think this realization is what lead me to build the NESputer. It's like a time capsule of fond memories and an effort to bring back the excitement I used to feel.

The NESputer has other aspects that make it precious to me, though, too. The fact that I spent three months carefully researching and designing the inner workings of the case, and a few weeks getting the parts together and actually building it make it something that I feel immensely proud of. The other thing that makes it meaningful to me is that it is extremely rare. No one in the world has the same thing I do. There are other people who have built computers inside of NES cases, but mine is special because I did it quite differently than most, and I was very uncompromising in how it was supposed to work.

My NES computer is rare, and it is special to me because I put so much time and care into getting it right, but it's the experiences and memories that I am brought closer to when I use it that really make it something meaningful to me.