Day: December 24, 2014

flower garden

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Liwaco_Flower_Garden4

Over 40,000 tumblr notes for this one image of a vintage handheld game (I saw it on Rising Tensions).
Reasons for the popularity of this pic: (i) innocent (ii) "girly"/pink (iii) nostalgia for simpler times and games (iv) for millennials, imagining a world less horrendous than the present one (without having actually lived through, say, Reagan) (v) the anomaly of a game that doesn't appear to be based on violence but rather something pleasant like flower-picking or -arranging (vi) beautiful Japanese woodcut-style design of the LCD graphics.

More images of the game can be found on the sites Handheld Empire and Electronic Plastic. According to the latter, the manufacturer was Morioka Tokei; Liwaco (an acronym of Liebermann, Waelchli & Co.) might have been the European distributor.

Still looking for a narrative describing the gameplay but EP tags it "girls" and "action." Screenshots from Handheld Empire allow us to make a few educated guesses. A Little Red Riding Hood character is picking flowers:

Liwaco_Flower_Garden3

There are some smaller people sitting on top of the mushroom who raise flowers above their heads in joy (after LRRH brings them to them?):

Liwaco_Flower_Garden2

But ah, speaking of Reagan, there is a wolf in this garden! (Just as there was kleptocracy in "Morning in America.") Perhaps the wolf steals the flowers and/or has the little people "treed" atop the mushroom? Any information or guesses about what's actually going on here are welcome.

Liwaco_Flower_Garden

a hip poster-person for opt-out

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“We don’t put things up on servers anymore,” she said. “Everything we work on, if we work on computers, we’re not on WiFi, we’re not on the Internet, we don’t work in a way where anybody can access the information.”

The author of the above quote was not some Edward Abbey desert rat cyber-contrarian but rather a privileged mega-insider, who became wealthy thanks to the pre-Internet saturation "push" advertising of one-way TV and radio and is now all freaked about losing market position due to "sharing." Five Arbitron Ratings points if you guessed Madonna.

It's amusing, in a sick way, to see the upper crust behaving like the perpetually cash-strapped, who can't afford phone plans and pay bills with postal money orders. They don't put things up on servers, either!

This leaves a broad middle swath of the population susceptible to cyber spying and pocket picking, from powerful but naive corporations (if Sony had one ounce of Madonna's paranoia the famous recent "hack" wouldn't have happened) to techno worker ants with phones and data in the "cloud."

For those not buying into the phone-and-cloud lifestyle for ethical and aesthetic reasons (which is not mutually exclusive with being cash-strapped) a convenient explanation for non-participation in the new media world order could now be, "no, I'm like Madonna."