I was looking through my photo archives and encountered Hanukkah 2011 (5772). My main digital camera at that time was my Nintendo DSi, and I'd assembled all of my gifts on the last night to take a photo of under the chanukia. In amongst various other things; a packet of plastic dreidels, some jelly beans, and stuff; there was the Nintendo 3DS and 1 copy each of Super Mario 3D Land and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. Like I said before, the 3DS felt expensive—like I needed Iwata's personal permission to play the games. Also, I had some other stuff going on at the time that was really killing my childhood enthusiasm for videogames altogether, so ended up using the console less and less until finally I put it away in around about March and never went back to it.
...Until last week.
I'd been reblogging the same 3ds.hacks.guide post on Tumblr for about 6 months at that point and finally decided to take my own advice and jailbreak the thing. I figured that I had nothing to lose. If it bricked, who cares? I wasn't playing it anyway. If it worked, I could add videogames back to my collection of unsmart technology. Despite my tendency toward statistical anomalies, everything went off without a hitch and I jailbroke my 12-year-old, disused 3DS; cutting her free of corporate feudal bondage and giving her a serious glow-up in the form of TWiLightMenu++, Snes9x, and 12 games I never could have afforded without No-Intro. Where I was completely ambivalent about her just 2 weeks ago, now we're best friends again! I mean, you can tell by how I keep calling my 3DS by feminine pronouns that I've changed my mind, really, can't you?
And, all of this after Nintendo terminated extended support for the 3DS and Wii U back in Q2. I'm the only Mii in the Plaza. I remember being on the Wii Shop Channel at the same time they were shutting the servers down. I'd gotten in there about 10 minutes before the end time, and it was so surreal. It was like I was in The Sims, having a house unbuilt around me. The lights were on, the music was playing, but not only was nobody home, the environment was slowly dissolving into cyberspatial oblivion. Eventually, I looked at my clock and it read 02:00 (midnight, Pacific time), and I knew that the only thing left of the Wii Shop Channel was this session stored in the cache. I kind of felt like crying. Sometimes when I couldn't sleep, I would turn on the Shop Channel just to connect to the internet so I could see that there was activity despite it being dark outside. The Shop had more immediacy than the News or Weather channels because it was in realtime; all I had to do was spend $5-$10 and I could see Mario run across the screen collecting coins as a file streamed from a server in California into my Wii system in the Midwest. I never did that much, but the option was there.
It's sort of like that now. I keep advocating for refurbishment and buying reconditioned or overstock last-gen technology, but for all practical purposes, I don't feel like anyone is in the room with me. I'm in an abandoned food court from the '90s where the lights are still on and the muzak is still playing, while everyone else is at home getting Doordash. Don't misunderstand me, I like being here. I like the decor, I like the smooth jazz, I like the fake plants and the dry fountain—I just wish that someone else were here, too.
Still, in spite of all that, I'm glad I finally have an unsmart gaming system. I'm sorry I had to leave her in the closet for so many years, but I had some stuff to work out before I could see her again. It's not like that stuff that sent me away from videogames all those years ago ever went away—it's just I'm better able to deal with it now than I was back then.
With that, I think I'll go play Super Mario All-Stars+World on Snes9x for 3DS now.
--28 December 2023--