I do believe that my favorite thing about the beginning of a new month has steadily taken form over the past year: To with, the launch of a new series of projects in Talking Time’s Let’s Play forum that each turn of the calendar page brings with it. Although TT’s completion rate isn’t quite 100%, I think the crew here has a much better ratio of finished Let’s Play threads than most similar venues. That is because Talking Time is quality people.

This month’s new collection of entries is particularly significant, because it brings with it Nich’s already incredibly promising Let’s Play of Clash at Demonhead, which already has revealed many of the most important long-running insider references ’round these here parts. Also on tap is a roundtable presentation of Mega Man 2, and newcomerish Umbaglo delving into Konami’s absolutely fascinating N64 brawler RPG Hybrid Heaven, which is one of those games I always liked in principle but found entirely too opaque to properly enjoy. So this should be a nice way to experience it.

As ever, I strongly encourage the clickage of the links above, because entertainment is guaranteed.

In other news, between marathon review sessions of Crackdown 2 (which I finally finished today) I’ve been hanging out with my brother, who is visiting San Francisco for a few days. This is the first time we’ve ever really had a chance to spend time together as adults, what with him having been flying with the Navy for the past decade or so, and it’s been nice to really get to know one another.

Much of this has simply been him regaling me with hilarious stories from his time in the service. Take, for instance, the story of one of his former squad mates from his Pacific tour of duty, a man my brother describes as “the African-American Yogi Berra of naval aviation” for the guy’s tendency to speak wisdom through a haze of malapropism. “When I hear anyone mention dim sum, all I can think about is my old squadmate,” he tells me. “The first time he ate dim sum, he said, ‘A black man must have named this.’ I was like, ‘What?’ And he nodded and said, ‘Yeah, some brother must have eaten this and said, Man, dim sum nasty eats.'” As someone who doesn’t much care for dim sum, I find that this tale resonates powerfully within my soul.

Anyway, the main thing I’ve taken away from my brother’s stories is that people in the military make for much more colorful anecdotes than people who write about videogames for a living. We’re all a bunch of boring ol’ stiffs…. the ’90s staff of GameFan very obviously excepted, of course.