i am handheld

I Am Handheld:
A blog about a collection of portable gaming devices and their awesomeness or lack thereof.

Authored for you perusal and tentative acceptance or dismissal by Sean Fear, a video game professional in Seattle Washington.

I do not read blogs, I find them bland, I do not know how blogs are supposed to start. It seems to me a blog should start with a manifesto of some sort, some big statement of intent that sets down an overarching theme and will foreshadow later events. It is both poetic and deep, touching on some basic human truths and it shines a light of reason onto some unilluminated shadow of human thought. Unfortunately most people don't have lives that are nearly that profound. I don't either and, perhaps, expect too much. This is the crux of why I am a failed blogger, with a few exceptions, I do not care about your boring life. Conversely I do not expect you to be interested in my boring life. If I wanted to blog about My Life, I would not put the word boring in the first paragraph. The blog would be called "I AM SO EFFING AWESOME: the misadventures of Sean 'the Macho Man' Fear". I'll try to include bits from that imaginary blog but don't really intend to address the current state of affairs in My Life. In any case I have signed Non-Disclosure agreements that preclude me from blogging about what I do eight hours a day and the other hours of my life are spent rather uneventfully figuring out how to be as unproductive as possible. This is a nice arrangement for the time being.

I am a obsessive collector, a relentless pack-rat. This is a polite way to say a filthy e-bay junky and thrift store aficionado and like any consummate junky I always need just one more score. This driving lust for the consumption of the useless is not unusual. It is practically a national religion. Just visit a Best Buy, pick up any mens' magazine or, better yet, a Sharper Image Catalog and a world of high tech Nitchkitchery will stare back at you. The shear scope and sexiness of it all is practically pornographic and is certainly obscene in it's opulence. Men, unsurprisingly given the mentioned pornographic nature of it all, and now much more commonly women, are adopting these gadgets and tech wonders at an ever increasing rate. This necessitates oceans of failed and just plain dated devices. Allow me to exercise my weakness for rhetorical sentences. What happens to the vast numbers of these antiquated things? Many of them end up in the rubbish heap, like the legendary Atari ET videogame graveyard of lore somewhere in the heart of Nevada. Many others languish in pawn shops and some lucky few end up on e-commerce sites which prove undeniably that the internet is made for more than porn. Who will deliberately seek out the obsolete? Who will care for these dinosaur ancestors of the I-device and Nintendo DS? At last count I had collected over 30 hand held game devices. This blog is their story.

If I could wish one thing for my anthropomorphic hand held gaming machines it would be this. I would wish that each one of them could stand up and be counted. From the jankiest Korean made NESclone to the mightiest of gaming capable PDAs, from the Gameboy, the granddaddy (but not great granddaddy) of the modern portable gaming system to the creepy uncle of modern portable gaming, the N-Gage. I would say, stand up you bastard children of home consoles and televisions. Stand up you princes of pockets, you kings and queens of shovelware. Stand up and say in your loudest voice, I am beautiful, I am handheld.