Futurália

Yesterday I volunteered to represent this Techical Specialization Centre (loosely translated there) at a show of several similar schools and universities. Basically, what it was for was introducing people, old and young alike, to the opportunities the country has available for their betterment and pursuit of career. It got me wishing they'd done something similar 10 years ago and saved me a lot of grief.

So I get there and they hand me a white t-shirt with the school's logo on it. Logo might be an over-statement. It was a blotch of ink about the half the length of my pinky. 'Ok,' I thought, 'at least we'll have balloons.



View from our stall

We didn't have balloons. Well, we did but there were three of them and they were all icky with something. We had no pens, no paper roses, no nothing. Except plastic calendar cards. I made do.



Got to see the backstage of something



I put on my least frightening face and decided to make the least interesting booth the Calendar Booth. I soon realized many people were strolling past us and eyeing them calendars so I decided to use them as bait. At a certain point this circa 14 year old geek/nerd-ish boy passed by, on the rear of his circle of friends. He made the mistake of making eye contact. I beckoned him and he shyly approach. 'Take one,' I said. 'You know you want to.' You should've seen the look on his face.

Eventually we got to leave the stall to cruise around the pavillions. I must say, Portugal has a wide variety of choices to pursue other than colleges. I never knew. The college pavillion was desolate and depressing. There were few booths and fewer people in them. College people will always have fun however and whenever they can, especially if you leave them alone to their own devices with a sound system (meaning, fat guys dancing topless to speaker cheering). A small note about academic dress in Portugal. It's hot. That doublet-like thingy just gets me all flustered. Must convince Mike to wear his again.



Massages and men in leotards

But our pavillion had the people from clown school, from robot school, from lifeguard school, from the army, from the navy, from beauty school, fashion school, cooking school, you get the picture. We had cocktails and fruit kebabs; we wad mimes (shudder) and models; we had free massages and free waxings; we had people interviewing each other and we had robots; we had an Adidas booth where you could kick a ball and we had consoles with FPSs and PES. It was fun. And I had calendars.

There were also representatives from several radio stations and paper merchants. Two stages provided the setting for some interesting cultural displays. Apart from the occasional fashion show and contemporary dancing display, the radio stations cooked up a few dance-offs. Dancing in Portugal, as in every other country, can take a variety of forms. Having been a colonialist country until recently, we've always had a great influx of african immigrants, of which I am a direct consequence. This has inevitably led to a massive cultural influence from all things african, be it music, dance or food. You'll hear about mainstream international musicians talking of going back to their roots but none do so quite like ours (<- oh please do click). Not to say that I enjoy it - because I don't - but it's still true. So, to the sound of these african derived sounds they had a dance-off with one of the afore mentioned academically atired men and the sons of immigrants. 'Twas awesomely fun.

Most of my time was spent cruising the other booths trying to smooch off pens and organizers and, in the end, I was sad that it was over. It wasn't a task that anyone that knows me would guess I was comfortable with, what with me having to actually interact with people, but I quite enjoyed it. It was a change of pace. It reminded me that I'm still young and that there is life beyond boredom and videogames. And balloons.

New Quest: Balloon Handout

First of all Disqus and my lack of coding skills clashed. Hm. I miss my computer geek. I'm sure he could've fixed it. Oh well.

Secondly, I'm on balloon handout duty today. I was recruited to work as a representative for this training facility and so the rest of my afternoon will be spent standing up among a sea of people looking bored and unfriendly. Also, I've been told that I'll have to inflate the balloons myself. And I can't steal any pens...



FIL: Feira Internacional de Lisboa
I'll be in there. Come visit.



The Meaning of "Arcade"

I had very little contact with arcades growing up but, from what little I did, I must say I don't much like the use of the word for these console "Arcade" games. The feel just isn't there.

Let me explain.

According to Wiktionary:

arcade (plural arcades)

1. (architecture) A row of arches.
2. (architecture) A covered passage, usually with shops on both sides.
3. Establishment running coin-operated games.

But, to me, the meaning is simpler because to me there were ever only two arcades in the world, the one near my high school and that other one on the second floor of an inconspicuous building lost in the less walked streets of Tokyo. This will be a long one.



One is the loneliest number

 When I visited Japan a few years back I got to visit the afore mentioned salon(salon as in "a gathering of people for a social or intellectual meeting"). Me and my boyfriend at the time were touring the country with some japanese friends we'd made. Once we got to Tokyo we both immediately started pestering them to take us to an arcade, any arcade. Contrary to popular belief, or maybe just our own, not every japanese teenager is into that kind of thing. So they took us wandering about town for a while, trying to look like they knew where they were going. Eventually they found a gaming arcade running in the top floor of a small comercial building. They herded us inside and our eyes twinkled with excitement as they tried to explain that this wasn't really a good example of an arcade, this was just a small place to extort money from the neighbourhood kids. But we didn't care. To us, it was the holy grail.

They released us into the establishment, dividing their forces so they could have one of them translating (and more importantly, watching out) for each of us gaijins. No matter how awestruck we were, we still tried to keep a low profile because we were the foreign party here, me looking a bit more exotic than most. Pretty soon my boyfriend found a machine to play Guilty Gear on but I wasn't (and still am not) interested in that particular game. So I sat (yes sat; you wouldn't believe what a shock it was to actually sit down when playing something other than Daytona) next to him and, as fate would have it, it was a Soul Calibur 2 thingy. 

The proverbial "Kill you with a stick" move

Oh, I love Soul Calibur. I could have counted the ways but I chose not to. Pretty soon after I started dabbling with it lo and behold, a challenger appeared. I was pretty self-conscious already, being the only girl in there actually playing and not just escorting (in the most innocent sense of the word) and I was the only one of african descent. I gulped down hard but decided to pretend there was actually no one there. This is why japanese arcades were so alien for us. You could actually play a game against someone and not have to look at their face, not have to deal with the fact that they were a real person that you'd never met. So the embarrassement of losing or the cockiness of winning didn't ever have to be shared with this element so alien to your private life.

Wouldn't you know it? I won; Kilik never disappoints. I let out an excited girly giggle because that's what I do and I saw a face looking down at me from above the bench/machine thing. He was clearly amazed but he was japanese enough to not say anything even though he assumed I wouldn't get it if he did.

One other thing I found fascinating about it was a job I had never known existed. There was this young man, his back already hunched by the weight of his lot in life that was going around just emptying ashtrays and wiping down an arcade machine immediately after it was done being used. This was beyond everything I know and soon you'll get why.


My only other term for comparison was MC (wittingly spelled Émecê because that's how you actually say it), an arcade near the school I went to and, strangely, even closer to the maternity hospital where I was born. To a layman, MC was just a small hole in a wall that led straight down to a dark hole in the ground. It's a place that gets all its business from word of mouth but, if I'm not mistaken, its still open for business.

It was a dark place with little lighting and no windows which, in retrospect, isn't surprising because it was underground. At the bottom of the stairs the space opened up to a be a low-ceilinged jobbie with 3 pool tables and 2 table football ones to one side, watched closely by the dubious owner behind his counter where he supplied dubious candy and smokes. To the other side, behind the stairs, sat the dusty arcades with games that weren't upgraded in years. These were scarred by cigarette burns and the buttons had faded after countless years of mashing by grimy fingers. The centre piece of the establishment was, at least for us, the Daytona USA machine. Sporting two pseudo racing car seats and big yet-untarnished screens, it was where we the girls (all two of us) retreated to eat our dubious candy when the boys went to massacre the foosball. It must be noted that our foosball tables are made of sturdy wood, the dummies of solid iron and the rods are covered in an eye-sorish black grease. It's a manly game where boys become men and we would rather stay clear of it.

 

We would pop in a few coins from time to time, always resorting to the same cars and the same track. To this day she still nags me about that one time when she was winning and, at the last minute, I rammed her into the pit stop and came in first.



"Let's go away!"



This was a magic place. The smoke-filled cave to where we retreated when going to class was simply out of the question and we had no joints to smoke. We would lose ourselves there, hours we would never get back but would never regret because magical things happened there. Impossible shots in the pool table where you hadn't enough space to even place the queue and had to sit up on the green and worn cloth; bouncing, murderous balls from the feet of the iron foosball players. One of these magical events involved a hole in the far wall near a derelict pool table.

Me and a friend of mine were chasing a rogue ball and, once we found it and straightened our backs, we noticed a hole in the wall right at eye level. He looked at me and I looked at him. I'm squeamish about strange holes that may contain strange bugs so he went ahead and looked inside. He smiled back at me and placed his hand inside the wall. When it came back out he was holding a pack of cigarettes. It was full. For the longest time we were lost in debate about whether or not to smoke them. We were active smokers, quite professional at it and the prospect of free smokes was tempting. But what if they were spiked with something? Well, I was never one to believe people would waste drugs on random objects they would then deploy into the world without any certaitny where they would end up or sticking around to find out. What would be the point? Someone must've just stashed them there to smoke them later.

So that's the story of how I ended up smoking the most suspicious carton of smokes I ever came across.

And that, my friends, is why I take offense on all these variants of "arcade" games. Where's the japanese man wiping my controller when I'm done using it? Where's the hole in the wall with a pack of cigarettes? There's little arcade in them, except for the fact that you waste money on something not very deep. Which is not to say I don't like these types of games. But that's a story for another day.