It’s Halloween! I used to really enjoy Halloween, but as you get older it becomes more and more of a wet fart of a celebration, unless you have kids. For the last few years, we haven’t even had any Trick or Treaters visit — though we did have a couple tonight. For my sins, I spent the evening editing a 75 minute video about Atari games rather than actually playing the horror game I am in the middle of (Spirit Hunter NG) but such is the way of hyperfixating. I could have stopped partway through the project, but my brain kept saying “go on, you’re nearly done”, and before I knew it, I was done. I wish I could find that sort of motivation for anything that actually mattered.
Anyway, Halloween. I have a few fond memories from various years. The earliest one I can recall was from when we were in America. I talked a little about this trip to America when I revealed my longstanding (and mostly overcome) fear of the wimdotch wib hamdongs, but there were lots of other things that happened on that trip. One of them was spending Halloween with someone my parents knew. I can’t remember who the people were, what their names were or even if they were actually American or just British folks who had ended up living out there, but one thing I do remember is the lady of the house baking brownies.
I had never had brownies before this Halloween visit to this mystery family, and my introduction to them was with the most amazing home-made brownies I have ever tasted in my life. I have spent the intervening 35+ years trying various types of brownie from all manner of sources, and not one has ever matched the brownies I had that one October night in 1985. And I don’t know why. Surely a brownie is a brownie? All I remember that might be a distinguishing factor is that these home-made brownies had walnuts in, and as a fussy kid I didn’t think I liked walnuts. (I still don’t.) But baked into those brownies they were wonderful.
So yeah. I hope before I die I can have at least one brownie that is even half as good as the brownies I had that night. I will continue to feel unfulfilled until that happens.
Another completely unrelated memory is from a Halloween night at university. Scary Movie had just come out, and Scream was still fashionable, so, being a shy sort, I figured dressing up as the Scream killer would be a great Halloween costume. And it was! The really interesting thing I found was that by completely hiding my entire appearance, I suddenly had way more self-confidence than I had ever felt in my life. I was laughing and joking with complete strangers, doing the “WAZAAAPP” thing from Scary Movie, and I was having a thoroughly lovely time.
I can’t remember anything else about the evening other than the walk into Portswood, Southampton dressed as the Scream killer — I suspect once I arrived at my destination I proceeded to get absolutely twatted off my face on cheap cocktails — but that feeling of being nigh-invincible on the walk to the venue is something that has stuck with me ever since… and is a feeling I’d love to recapture at some point, somehow.
Anyway, my Halloween has been mostly uneventful, as you can probably tell, but it’s now ten past midnight, my video has finished rendering and I still have to work tomorrow. So I should probably go to bed, huh.
Sweet screams or whatever.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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