Some sad news this week. A guy I went to school with -- elementary school through high school -- unexpectedly died in his sleep. It's really affected me in a way no death has before. It's not because I was close to him -- on the contrary, I barely knew him. He was a year older than me, and I can remember having exactly one conversation with him one time when I was seven -- he asked me if I wanted to play football with him and his friends at recess, as I stood their silently, like a fanboy, watching them play. We played indoor soccer on the same team for a year or two in grade school. But he was the best player on the team, and I was somewhere near the bottom, so the rules of boyhood social hierarchy dictated we didn't intact often, if at all.
But those days are long gone, and now it seems as if he was just a middle-aged dude raising young boys, like me. And that's why it hit me so hard. I saw photos of him online with his three boys, all under ten, and I couldn't help but imagine if that was me. The thought of my kids being fatherless is just... I don't have words to describe it. But for a lot of you, I don't need words to described it, because you have children and know exactly what I mean. I also clicked on his wife's Facebook page (we went to school together too), and it looked as if she hadn't posted anything since his death. So, it was full of normal photos of her being normal and happy (one of them was captioned "Life is good"), and again it just made my heart sink imagining that being S. One of her friends posted a Go Fund Me type link for funeral expenses and to help keep her afloat during what must be an impossibly difficult time, so I gave her $50 -- anonymously. It felt weird giving money to somebody I barely knew, and I didn't think the "Hey... Remember me? I know we didn't hang out in high school but..." message would be appropriate. But I wanted to give something, perhaps selfishly, perhaps trying to assuage these visions of dread I've been experiencing. I don't know.
I am also very curious about how exactly he died. The only thing I heard is that it was "in his sleep" but that's not a cause of death. Forty-year-olds don't just die in their sleep. Something else has to be going on, and the fact that it hasn't come out yet -- that it's been omitted in all the announcements I've seen -- makes me wonder... even if it is none of my damn business.
Anyway...
In other news, happier news, this interview with Quincy Jones exists. If you want to know what a whip-smart, ridiculously brash, 84-year-old music icon has to say about nearly every major celebrity of the past half-century, in the most giving-no-fucks way possible, then this is for you. Here's what he says about the Beatles. It might be the twentieth most provocative thing in the interview.
... they were the worst musicians in the world. They were no-playing motherfuckers. Paul was the worst bass player I ever heard. And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it. I remember once we were in the studio with George Martin, and Ringo had taken three hours for a four-bar thing he was trying to fix on a song. He couldn’t get it. We said, “Mate, why don’t you get some lager and lime, some shepherd’s pie, and take an hour-and-a-half and relax a little bit.” So he did, and we called Ronnie Verrell, a jazz drummer. Ronnie came in for 15 minutes and tore it up. Ringo comes back and says, “George, can you play it back for me one more time?” So George did, and Ringo says, “That didn’t sound so bad.” And I said, “Yeah, motherfucker because it ain’t you.” Great guy, though.
In other, other news, my most recent deep-dive is this story about how the "bad guy" from the documentary King of Kong, Billy Mitchell, is being stripped of some of his high Donkey Kong scores. I've gone back and forth on this one. I really enjoyed the documentary, so I bought into the idea of Mitchell being a villain. But there's always more to it than that, and documentaries are usually more interested in telling a compelling story than they are an accurate story, and antagonists make things more compelling. Plus, even if Mitchell is a legit a-hole, it doesn't make him a cheater.
But then again, the case against him is pretty strong. The tl;dr version is that all the available footage of his high scores look as if they were generated by a Donkey Kong emulator, not an original arcade game. The reason this matters is because emulators can be more easily manipulated and thus require a higher standard of proof. So, the claim isn't that Mitchell cheated necessarily; it's that he misrepresented the type of machine he used, so his scores are no longer considered "official." Now, Mitchell claims he didn't use an emulator, and that the raw footage of his games will prove that. The only thing publicly available at the moment are uploads to YouTube, which, could, in theory, be fakes. (In fact, if you read the first linked article, it suggests that it's possible somebody did fake it.) Supposedly, the original footage, which was being held by a gaming association called Twin Galaxies, will be made available soon, and it, according to Mitchell, will exonerate him.
I'm dubious. For one thing, making a fake tape of his game using an emulator and uploading it to YouTube to discredit him sounds really hard. How on Earth would you even do it? It would have to be a near pixel-for-pixel match with the original to fool anybody. For another thing, Mitchell is already hedging, saying that maybe his original tapes do look like he used an emulator, but that could be explained by other technical reasons, which he conveniently doesn't understand. (And equally conveniently, this is something that will be extremely difficult to establish isn't true.) If I had to put money on it, I would say he cheated, or at least lied, in someway -- but who knows? If somebody actually made a fake tape to discredit him that's even more interesting. I'm eager to see if anything else comes out of this story.
And it also goes to show that people will cheat at anything. It people are competing, people are cheating -- sports, chess, bridge, Scrabble, and apparently video games.
Until next time...
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