25 Years Of Laughing Through It (Some Thoughts On Final Fantasy X)

(Spoilers for Final Fantasy X abound. You've had 25 years, gang. Go play it.)

It's funny how synchronicity and coincidence works sometimes. What you've done before, what you're doing now, and what you're planning to do all coalesce into this reflective mirror of timelessness. Is it future, or is it past? Yes. That particular swirl of synchronicity, this time at least, has led me to write these words. Right now it's July 19th, 2026. 25 years ago to this day, Final Fantasy X came out for the PS2. Last week, I beat that game for the first time and had a lot of thoughts about it, which I intended to write down when I gave things a moment to settle. The moment is now because of even more of those synchronicities. Yesterday afternoon, I finalized tentative plans for a summer vacation to be taken near the end of the month, to a little town in Newfoundland called Grand Bank. I may have mentioned it on the blog before, or to you if we've spoken before, but suffice it to say that Grand Bank means a lot to me. It's the town my grandparents as well as aunts and uncles lived in, and I consider it a second home. I try to get there once a year, a pilgrimage of sorts to soothe my soul and refresh my energies. Let me tell you about how these two things, Final Fantasy and Grand Bank, came together in a wonderful coincidence that changed my life forever.

This is my story.

The Golden Age Was Actually A Vibrant Yellow (The Simpsons) [Seasons 8-9]

 (All screencaps courtesy of Frinkiac. Any accompanying texts are direct quotes from the episode.) 

(Continued from Part 3)

If there's any era of The Simpsons which has become analyzed to death from a forensic perspective, it's this stretch right here. Countless Simpsons fans have tried to perform the critical equivalent of an autopsy, struggling to confirm the exact moment that the so-called Golden Age ended and the show slid into supposed mediocrity. It's fragile ground and we must tread carefully in our own analysis. Hell, I'm not even sure if this is where things go from bad to worse! Maybe it happens in Season 10, or 11, or maybe the consensus is wrong and those have their own charms. Perhaps someday I'll revisit them and find out, but like I said last time: I want to write about other shit, so let's put a capstone on seven months of Simpsons coverage and talk about these last few seasons. Despite their oversignificance, there's some fascinating things going on here.