What is a man?

I'm not the type of person who throws around the term "favorite" lightly. My interests are in a constant state of flux, and today's treasure could very well end up in the day after tommorow's discard pile.

There are a few constants, though, and if I was forced at knifepoint to pick a "favorite videogame of all time," the honor would go to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Even a decade after its release, the game's mix of classic 2D platform action/exploration and RPG elements can keep me captivated for hours at a stretch. Everytime Halloween season comes around, I set aside whatever overhyped next-gen title I'm playing at the moment and dedicate myself to some old-school monster whacking at its finest.

The game isn't entirely flawless, though. Konami did a lackluster job in localizing the title for English-speaking audiences, which is most painfully apparent in the voiceovers which accompany SOTN's big dramatic moments.

The worst of the lot occurs during the prologue mini-level, which recaps Richter Belmont's confrontation with Dracula at the end of Dracula X, the previous entry into the series. What was supposed to convey high drama and theological commentary, ended up sounding like outtakes from the worst LARP session ever.

With no small amount of goading from fellow Castlevania fan Chris Sims, I decided to deliver my own hyper-localization of the dialogue exchange in honor of Halloween.

Townsylvania!

Do You Cay-ah?

Missing Persons - Words
Featuring Dale Bozzio's unmistakable Medford accent.

Special Delivery

The street is in my blood.

(Okay, it's actually gravel in my kneecaps, the legacy of a bad scooter wipeout on Beech Street in 1987.)

An Important Message!

(The source material.)

We're all fine here now, thank you.

When my brother was down in Albuquerque doing geological field work, he went to catch Star Wars at a local theater. The kid behind the ticket counter couldn't figure out what movie my brother wanted to see. Weird, huh?

Thanks to the indispensible audio wizardry of Kevin Church, we have two flavors of awesome to choose from today.

Classic Version

Retrologist Mix

Keeping the Faith

I've recently begun to have second thoughts about the stated purpose of pronounced WOO-BIN. While there is a certain nobility to recording and presenting a slowly vanishing accent for posterity, I have the nagging feeling I ought to be doing more. Instead of taking notes as a historic indicator of regional identity fades into the long night, perhaps I should take a more proactive stance.

Perhaps I should move from passive archivism to active evangelism. It would be a Sisyphean task, to be sure. I harbor no illusions about its chance of success, yet if it holds back the rhotic tide of accent-neutral blandness for a few extra moments it would be victory enough.

All I require is a suitable vector for my plans, and I believe I have found it -- the audiobook format. What better way to proselytise than under the guise of passive entertainment? And what better way to reach a massive audience than by taking advantage of the huge market for quasi-softcore vampire fiction?

I am fortunate to have connections in the scene. The renowned Christopher J. Sims, whose Solomon Stone series is easily the gold standard of the vampire-fiction-written-by-comics-blogger subgenre (not that his competitors have set a high bar in that regard), courteously granted me permission to use an excerpt from his magnum opus for my test run.

Stone Me Deadly

-------------------

On a less megalomaniacal front, pal Thirdmate of the HMS Impossible has started up The Old Swampers' Almanac, a new blog dedicated to the lore and custom of the wild, wooly, and oh-so-historic South Coast of Massachusetts. Check it out.

Waxing Poetic

The Bay State has a rich poetic tradition, from Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath.

All are wonderful in their individual ways, but there is one piece of verse concerning this fabled region that stands above all others. It speaks to my soul as few works are able to, perfectly capturing a the essence of a place both geographically and spiritually familiar to me.

Here's an excerpt...

Modern Poetry

...though it pales in comparison to the complete genuine article that no person of culture should be without.

The Wikkid Truth

If you have been following my other ongoing project for any length of time, you've probably noticed that I have a strong sense of regional pride -- for Massachusetts, for Boston, and especially for Woburn, the middle-ring suburb that sits ten miles northwest of the Hub, astride the interchange between I-93 and I-95.

My pride isn't a matter of blind parochial chauvinism born of sports rivalries and narrow-focus bias. I'm well aware of the faults and follies of the region and its residents, but despite the occasional (okay, frequent) bouts of teeth-gnashing and directed torrents of profanity, I find those idiosyncracies to be part of the total endearing package. We're an impatient breed of inveterate complainers who stick it out today for the sake of finding something else to complain about tomorrow. Taxes, bad roads, local politics, the fortunes of the various home teams -- we are spoiled with objects of potential ire.

Yet despite the inferiority complexes and grousing, I wouldn't leave this place if you paid me. I'll take a nonsensical tangle of streets based on 17th century cowpaths or a treacherous rotary over a neatly laid out road grid any day. We don't need logic or transparency. We've got character born of nearly four centuries of history.

...and that brings us to the subject of the Boston accent, oft imitated (and mocked) by outsiders, but rarely duplicated successfully by the same. Rooted in Colonial Era English and filtered through the various immigrant groups (especially the Irish) that settled in the area, it is more than just a broad impersonation of Kennedy-speak (and honestly, only the Kennedys talk that way) or a vaguely Brooklynese patois featuring dropped r's and liberal use of "wikkid." It is a creature unto itself, my native tongue, and the most obvious manifestation (next to aggressive driving habits) of our shared sense of regional identity.

Which is why it pains me when I hear my nieces and nephews speak in the generic accent of Nickelodeon sitcom characters. Within the space of a generation, the global media village has made massive in-roads in panel-beating regional speech patterns into flat neutrality. While previous incursions by exotic dialects into the region, like the 80's "val-speak" fad, have been handily assimilated into the local accent ("Oh my Gawd, he bahfed in the back of my cah!"), this new strain, aided by the decline of regionally-based media, has been steadily supplanting the native one.

"Are you cutting keer-its?" Maura's nice asked her recently. "No, I'm cutting kah-its," was Maura's reply.

I accept that one man swinging a rusty sword will not hold back the incursion. What I can do is present to you, my dear readers, a sampling of audio clips spotlighting the glories of the Boston accent as applied to a variety of material, and offer it to you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So feel free to email me any requests for things that you wish to hear rendered in the language of bean and cod.

Our inaugural clip comes courtesy of a suggestion by a Mr. Christopher Sims of South Carolina, whose unhealthy fascination with (and hysterical laughter over) my pronuciation of "Star Wars" livened up many an XBL multiplayer session and was the true inspiration for this project. The context behind the choice of material can be found here.

Gee, Scarlet!

Short, sweet, and right to the point. See you on Wednesday!