I have had a hell of a month. Not “a helluva month,” which would be positive. Hell of. The unhappiness kicked off literally the first weekend of July, and it hasn’t let up for a single day. For example, I took Thursday and Friday off of work so I could mourn my grandfather’s death; instead, though, I spent those two days dealing with a plumbing crisis… a time-bomb from the house’s construction that of course chose to detonate now, at this moment. Then, a couple of hours after I discovered this massive leak, my parents were in a car accident (fortunately, they’re sore but safe). That’s a lot to deal with in the space of 48 hours. And, frankly, this wasn’t even the most devastating and difficult thing I’ve dealt with all month; there are some things I’m still not ready to write about, if ever I will be ready.

It’s OK! This isn’t me venting or seeking sympathies — sympathy is implicit. Decent humans read what I write, and compassion is a given. I’m fine, thanks, don’t worry about it. I may not be so fine if August decides to be as awful as July, but let’s pretend for a moment that calendar dates aren’t just arbitrary chunks of time and that some guiding power observes those divisions; we can all just hope the pain and frustration and stress have been quarantined to the current page of the calendar, which thankfully is nearly over.

Nah, I wanted to post something that made me happy: I finally had an opportunity to add photography to the Good Nintentions 1985 book. Which, now that Super Mario Bros. is written, is actually remarkably close to being complete! One of the biggest missing pieces so far has been the off-screen photos I took all of the games being covered within the book, and those are now complete as of today. They look… well, I guess photos of game graphics on CRTs are kind of a cliché, but they’ve become a bit of a rarity in this day and age, when CRTs are a pain to use and emulators offer so much convenience. So hopefully these embellishment lend the book a certain retro charm? A bit of ’90s cool, maybe?

The analog nature of the book imagery is possibly my favorite thing about the project. No pun intended there — besides these photos, I’ve taken all screen shots from the direct-feed Analogue NT video capture I recorded for the video series. So they’re not quite as crisp as emulator shots, as they’re taken from a standard-definition analog (RGB) stream, and the upscaling process introduces a bit of softness you wouldn’t get from a pure digital signal. Hopefully, though, I’d like to think that makes these images more valuable — they’re like the old video capture you’d see in magazines of the ’90s, except even cleaner and more NTSC connection artifacts than even Game Fan‘s screens were.

I still need to write up the NES hardware and grab some more screen shots (and take a few missing packaging and hardware photos), but there’s literally just a weekend of work to be done in order to get this volume ready for edits and publication. And seriously, I can’t wait to see it on my shelf. I appreciate the small but steady stream of people who have picked up Game Boy World and Good Nintentions in print, but truth be told I’m really just creating these for the vain satisfaction of seeing my own work lined up on my bookshelf. Ain’t I a stinker?