![](\"http:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/img\/230517\/0517b.jpg\" "\\"Clear")
<\/center><\/p>\nFirst things first: I am incredibly lazy do not lack for well-considered (and self-serving) reasons not<\/strong> to do something.<\/p>\n This site has always been something I worked on when I couldn’t do the things I’d rather be doing — be it playing video games, napping next to the puppy, or staring into space for hours on end. Any notions of the pandemic shutdown being a golden opportunity to get back into the writing groove died a quick and ignominious death before the first week of lockdown had ended.<\/p>\n The only bit of self-discipline I did observe and stick to was to jump off the treadmill of “live service” gaming. While I wasn’t sure how I was going to fill the next two weeks<\/span> two months<\/span> two-and-a-half years, I didn’t want to spend them chasing the shiny bauble du jour in Destiny<\/em>, DCUO<\/em>, GTA Online<\/em>, et cetera.<\/p>\n It was one of the wisest decisions I ever made, because the contours of my pandemic period experience rapidly took shape along lines which I hadn’t expected yet I probably should’ve. In the half decade leading up to the spring of 2020, I’d been engaged a multi-front attempt to revisit\/reassess\/reclaim\/reconsider various artifacts from my past — rebuilding a record collection around stone cold favorites, obtaining representative samples of childhood playthings, consolidating my funnybook collection into trade paperbacks covering the parts I’d actually re-read on a semi-regular basis.<\/p>\n There was no grand plan involved, just the multimedia meanderings of a middle-aged nerd caught up in a nostalgia-trauma loop. That’s what has kept me from writing about it until now even though the notion of doing so came to me sometime last fall. My sense of narrative coherence kept demanding a contextual framework for it all, even though it was an impossible task. Diving into the nostalgia middens is a convoluted and very personal process. An old magazine ad for A reminds you of B, the search for which uncovers C which in turn leads to D.<\/p>\n