Strange Black Rectangles

Eternal Eyes is an obscure PSX RPG notable basically for receiving a stunningly condemnatory RPGamer crit:

Eternal Eyes starts off promisingly—it fits in the PlayStation CD tray, it spins when the console is activated, and it produces images on the screen after the PlayStation logo appears. Without fear of hyperbole, it can be said that these are the best features of the entire game.

One has to be curious after that...

Toying with World Map memory, I found something a bit odd, and possibly suggestive of some removed material. 800D4730 00XX determines the floating graphic that displays the name of a target location while the pointer hovers over it (albeit imperfectly, with flicker between the forced and real ones), and the regular location names are assigned to single digit values. Most other values give no results, unsurprisingly, but two do. This is 0x00E0:

Click on the map just above the black rectangle (maybe a removed graphic) with this code active and you'll be warped to the Gross Castle area; I haven't played enough to be sure, but I don't think this area is ever normally acessible from the World Map, and certainly the scenario flag that determines which locations appear on the World Map (80090E74 000X) never reveals it; it also seems to be in the wrong place geographically. My guess is that either access from the World Map was planned but disabled during development (maybe to prevent repeat visits later in the storyline) or this was a testers' warp. The fact that it's 0x00E0, rather than a lower number like the existing locations', inclines me to favour the latter guess.

This is 0x00EE:

I can't find a warp for this one, and look at the overlap with existing map locations. It's much larger than the Gross Castle warp rectangle (which is about the size of a regular location name floater). I really don't know what this is; maybe it's where some sort of error message or placeholder note went.

Maybe To Be Wholly Consistent I Should Have Put It Into Early Modern English Too

Not having posted one of my amateurish translations for a while (or anything at all for some days, for that matter), I thought I'd put the Latin portion of 'Venus' (early Theatre of Tragedy) into English. (The English portion of the lyrics to 'Venus' is one of the more comprehensible of their cod-Elizabethan pieces.) Apparently this song falls into the doubtless proud tradition of plucking lines from various parts of the Carmina Burana.

Many 'round my bosom¹ are the sighs
Anent² your beauty that³ do smite me dismally.
...
Now with a virginal love I burn entire:
Love's flying all about⁴; captive is desire⁵.
...
Now with a virginal love I burn entire:
Many 'round my bosom are the sighs
Anent your beauty that do smite me dismally.
Your eyes are shining⁶ like sunbeams⁷,
Like the lightning's splendour⁸ that gives light unto darkness.

1. The sense of 'heart' seems to be more common in translating this line.
2. Pardon the affected touch; I didn't really find any word that sprang to mind quite satisfying in suggesting sighs about/concerning beauty.
3. What's given as que is indeed quae; I checked an online source for the Carmina Burana. Maybe it's a mediæval thing.
4. I'm assuming undique is meant to imply flight all over the place (fully contrasting with the captured libido) rather than flight from all over.
5. Take your pick.
6. Okay, '[do] shine' would involve less of an assumption.
7. Presumably radij is a post-classical way of writing radii; I've never seen it before.
8. Maybe I should have translated this as 'brilliance' or something similar, but the context is clear enough, and I think there may be a risk of draining the image in pursuit of literal exactitude.

Nous ne savons quoi

If the quotation is properly reflective of the source, this must be a new low in media effects concern:

In response to a report by France's Directorate General of Health warning against "channels for children under three years of age, irrespective of the type of programming," [a minister] said..., "I want to tell parents not to use these channels. They bombard children with images and sounds. We do not know what effects this may have on such young people."

On the positive side, it's an admission of ignorance, albeit coupled with instructions anyway. On the negative side, simply referencing 'images and sounds' really doesn't cut it. Parents may find protecting their children from profusions of images and sounds rather tricky.

Next We Search For Literature Neutrinos

One of those moments in which I wonder how it is I haven't heard of some discovery already: chancing upon The Book of Disquiet in a bookshop recently, I found a work that combines a structure like a more languid cousin of Kierkegaard's 'Diapsalmata' with some of the strangest sort of evocative everyday melancholy I've ever seen.

Fernando Pessoa might have created a novel if he'd ever got close to finishing the project; as it is, the book somewhat resembles a diary, but more than that it's a disorganised collection (even after editorial assemblage) of observations, phantasies and reflections: 'a haunting mosaic of dreams, psychological notations, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims' (George Steiner). The whole edifice is loosely held together by the persona of Bernardo Soares, one of numerous 'heteronyms' Pessoa projected into ecstatic being; but the translator's introduction reveals that Soares was in fact a late insertion into the project, taking over to an uncertain extent the role of an earlier heteronym, the diarist Vicente Guedes.

Some pages in, I've formed enough of an impression to rave about the book but am still unsure whether in the end I shall reflect that it lived up to the electrifying suggestions of the translator's introduction. Richard Zenith (what a marvellous name to possess...) tells us that The Book of Disquiet

never existed, strictly speaking, and can never exist. What we have here isn't a book but its subversion and negation: the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep sifting, the mutant germ of a book and its weirdly lush ramifications, the rooms and windows to build a book but no floor plan and no floor, a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins. What we have in these pages is an anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man's anguished soul.

Pardon my quoting the translator's preface at such length – in my view it's an underrated genre – but you can surely see why my appetite might be whetted. Even so, if I don't in the end conclude that Literature has indeed been exploded I don't expect I shall be very much disgruntled. Right now, hungrily but wistfully leafing through these subtly, sadly woven vignettes – wondering whether she is indeed busy letting her life fall apart whom I'd love to share the bookish delight with – I can't imagine anything more apt than this sliver of §18:

Perhaps my destiny is to remain forever a bookkeeper, with poetry or literature as a butterfly that alights on my head, making me look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful.

“One Moment, Mister Speaker, While I Cross the Floor For the Third Time This Speech...”

I keep hearing that there's no great contest of ideas in politics today, but there seems to have been one lurking below the surface of the news recently. On the one hand we have post-Enlightenment adulations of free-floating belief itself as a proper object of government: in today's news, we learn that the main problem with the criminal justice system is that people haven't noticed that it works, while political opposition to current licensing arrangements governing lap-dancing clubs has muddied its argument by treating 'feel[ing] uncomfortable' as in itself an attitude worthy of accommodation. States of affairs in the world aren't the problem, or at least they aren't the only problem: people's attitudes are just as much part of the raw stuff of policy.

On the other hand, the Lisbon Manoeuvre is already bearing progeny: a minister countering opposition to plans for the Severn Barrage 'told [a] Welsh grand committee the RSPB did not understand the impact of climate change and sought the "comfort" of saying no to environmental projects'. Here attitudes, even those attributed to a large organisation collectively, are written off as mere products of uncomprehending error.

So the parties are these: those who require anxieties to be well-founded in order to be respectable (or at least, who try to write off opposition they don't like with psychologised ad hominem retorts), and those who regard psychological states not merely as problemata in their own right but as worthy vestiges of political influence (or at least, who who neglected to learn that an argument is strengthened by having its weak elements removed, not by piling in every contention you can think of). Well... I never said it was going to be a meaningful contest of ideas.

The Continuation of War By Other Means

As one more conspiracy theory dies, new political potential rises from its ashes:

As Gorbachev was well aware, these jokes had not been manufactured by some sinister department of the CIA; they were real ones, as told by real Russians. He was probably also aware that although people in the West told jokes about the frustrations of ordinary life, there was no such thing as a whole category of jokes about the capitalist system as such. If there had been, we can be sure that his aides would have been feeding them to him, contributing to an ever-escalating jokes race between the superpowers.
Telegraph

As Alasdair MacIntyre tells it, the potential for comedy as an armament was there centuries ago. Here the philosopher tells an ancient joke:

In the Icelandic sagas a wry sense of humour is closely bound up with courage. In the saga account of the battle of Clontarf in 1014, where Brian Boru defeated a Viking army, one of the norsemen, Thorstein, did not flee when the rest of his army broke and ran, but remained where he was, tying his shoestring. An Irish leader, Kerthialfad, asked him why he was not running. "I couldn't get home tonight," said Thorstein. "I live in Iceland." Because of the joke, Kerthielfad spared his life.
After Virtue, p. 123

If Ron Gilbert had become a military strategist, or Goscinny and Uderzo had infiltrated the political classes, or indeed more people had concurred with Nietzsche in seeing Socrates as 'the buffoon who got taken seriously', this tradition might have developed into a proper dialectical form; instead, the closest comedic analogue for modern diplomacy frequently seems to be 'Mornington Crescent'. There's plenty of comedy about politics and war, but these things themselves merely have the odd moment of outright absurdity. Part of the problem, of course, is that bizarre projects like the Dome cease to be funny once the cost to taxpayers is announced.

Perhaps what we lack, though, is not political will but the means of commentary to understand political conflicts comedically. I'm probably not the first to suggest that the E.U.'s commitment to pretending the Irish haven't really committed pacticide is obvious dead parrot material—with perhaps a touch of Fawlty Towers, making it possibly the most elaborate John Cleese tribute of all time. The battle to oppose 42-day detentions... in support of 28-day detentions likewise has a darkly surreal flavour appropriate to gallows humour.

Maybe the real secret leaders are not the Illuminati or the Rosicrucians, but a small cabal of comedian-diplomats who craft their performances out of unlucky citizens' lives, for the lonely amusement of the initiated.

Prospects of Pedagogy

Yesterday we had the meeting for aspiring departmental tutors; it looks as though I'll be given teaching work for first-year ethics, and just possibly second- depending on how much help is needed there, but since for one thing the budget hasn't been fixed yet it won't be finalised for some time. After being forced to slash undergrad. tutorials back from fortnightly to tri-weekly following an external review about three years ago in which it was accused of 'overteaching', and having received clamorous complaints in the years since then, the Dept. has managed to reinstate the former system for next year; people who were undergrads between my year and the next wave of freshers clearly had rotten luck, but at any rate Professor Scarre will no doubt be pleased to see the pendulum swinging back a little.

I've heard dark stories about how disorganised support for tutors was last year, so it's good to see the Dept. seems keen to get its act together for us.

A Politics of Metaproblems

The Culture Secretary has been busy, not only warming to the doctrine that artists should be above taking out pension plans, but also indicating governmental 'support for a common set of standards for Internet content in response to worries about the impact of violent and sexual output online..., [saying] he wanted to see online content meet the same standards required for television' (Grauniad). Observations about the actual practicalities of such standards I'll leave to more technically competent people; what struck me was his comment, building on one of the worst aspects of the Byron Review, that

I just sense the moment in time where people need to have this kind of discussion about the online world. There is an unease out there about it. What I am challenging is this slight sense of helplessness.

You can find relevant discussion of the sort of pragmatic measures in actual use if you care to look for it, which may or may not ease your sense of helplessness; but if you have a sense of helplessness it's unclear to me how a bid by the State to grasp your hand can do anything but reinforce it.

'Unease' itself seems to have been construed as a political problem, in place of any foundation for it, real or phantasmic. A certain moderate wariness is a thing worth having, and some scenarios – here I look back to first coming up to university, for example – just are such as to inspire unease, but not out of any malign nature. There are plenty of things to watch out for online, but an indefinite, free-floating unease 'out there' gives me the suspicion that the minister is out to tilt at windmills.

It Bears Repeating

On the grand philosophic scale, there is no such petty one-upmanship as other disciplines have. Mostly because I abandoned as too complicated a plan to include the various claimants to the title of First Philosophy. Also because on the grand philosophic scale there are no research budget allocations.

Click for the full-size version.

Mystified

When people have expressed doubts about my employment of 'value' as a central term for thinking about heritage ethics (inheriting it from Young among others, of course), it's often been because of doubts about how accurately it describes the sort of relationships that exist between people(s) and their heritage, when maybe instead of 'valuing', a description in terms of binding or meaningfulness or something else might be a more precise fit; and generally my answer has been that 'value' gets used for the purposes of looking at heritage through the lens of normative ethics precisely for the sake of speaking generally about heritage ethics without having to fill in particular anthropological details first. Where I think 'value' does run into trouble is that it's not straightforwardly clear what follows from it in turn: even where we can confidently say that some object has value as heritage to some group (for whatever reason), that may (to put it in a vaguely Dancy-esque fashion) function as a reason for the group to keep and protect it, but it may also function as a reason for them to consider it fit to be a gift for someone else. So if 'value' is neither applicable as a precise piece of fine-grained description nor all that helpful in implying what kind of moral patiency heritage might possess, maybe it simply amounts to a convenient shorthand.

That said, I'm coming to wonder to what extent people's engagements with heritage are necessarily always fully effable at all. Earlier I hinted at 'the sense of voices from antiquity speaking from the pages of old manuscripts' and 'quiet awe at the traces of generation upon generation in a centuries-old building'; in trying to make general sense of that I've been thinking in (fairly psychologically compartmentalised) terms of 'emotion' or 'affective response', wondering whether work on the emotions by philosophers of mind might be helpful, and whether I ought to be looking for parallels with sentimentalism—and not really finding that line of enquiry altogether fruitful.

Take the example of reacting to a war memorial: in being moved by the memorial, we are presumably drawing on our general understanding of death. The opening of Professor Scarre's 'Should We Fear Death?' sets the tone: 'Death and the sun, thought the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, are two things which are not to be looked at steadily', for 'death deprives us of ourselves—it eliminates us as subjects. Being dead is thus quite unlike any other misfortune...' To put it rather simplistically, the prospect of death is something we have trouble grasping, despite its inevitability; a memorial grants a kind of ersatz presence to the eliminated subjects of a past generation that avoids trying to 'eff the ineffable' in favour of a silent symbolism.

Now, if I want to talk about a memorial as heritage, I can't avoid the fact that this is its function, especially since it's an expressly transgenerational significance; but equally, I can't very well gloss the matter as just another feature of this particular case: "People report finding this memorial moving. (That happens to be because it commemorates people who gave their lives for the sake of their homeland.) Therefore they probably value it." So I simply have to consign the ultimate mystery of the grave to the list of 'things outside my remit'; but what does that leave me to say about being emoved by war memorials, or any other forms of heritage?

My broad problem is this: I want to say something like, 'this is a defined category of ways of engaging with heritage, and engagements in this category do/do not tend to offer moral insights concerning its status as heritage'. However, when I've tried to delineate the kind of engagement I have in mind, I've ended up with the sort of vaguely psychologised 'affective response' language which dissatisfies me because, as a typological category, it's based on the form the reactions take over what aspect of heritage objects excite them: the differences between elegiac pathos before a war memorial and the somewhat different sense of loss and sadness that might attend the memorial's destruction in an earthquake, for example, are plausibly more important to my current concerns than the fact that they can both be considered 'emotional'.

This isn't altogether a new problem; previously, when I've suggested that historical interest, æsthetic value, etc. can serve as 'reasons' for items' possessing moral value as cultural heritage, I've rather skirted around the question of how to tell in which specific cases this happens to any given extent, and I've done this by treating the matter as one for some appropriate area of expertise (historiography, art criticism, etc.) and – not unreasonably, I think – judging those to be outside my remit. If I want to talk about emotions then to an extent psychology might be of help, but once I start thinking in terms of evocatively mysterious ruins, hallowed traditions and moving war memorials it would seem I've crossed over into poets' territory.

Is that such a problem, if insights of this sort can be constrained by a demand for popular assent in order to avoid mistakes and sheer personal eccentricity (since one would naturally imagine that cultural heritage would excite suitable sentiments in more than a single person whose culture it was)? With regard to establishing what things are evocative, moving, etc. one can of course poll a given demographic; what bothers me is the gap between 'n% of such-and-such a group find this ancient site evocative' and 'n% of such-and-such a group judge this ancient site to be valuable as a part of their heritage'. If I were to try to get around the unworkability of ad hoc agglutinations like 'evocative things' (and the corresponding lack of evocation critics and their theories) by relying wholly on testimony and popular assent, then I think I should be evading a question about which philosophical work on heritage ethics really ought to seek to offer some guidance, viz. are such experiential impressions, even when irreducibly mysterious, fit to form the basis for judging that something has moral worth as heritage?

As I write this I'm persistently reminded of æsthetic value – there may well be overlap – but the mysterious by its nature seems to resist our getting to grips with it; Otto's mysterium tremendum, for example, doesn't look as though it boils down to a matter of standards of taste and æsthetic judgment. It does look like a form of engaging with things that, as in the case of the war memorial, may involve heritage and the significance it holds; but the difficulty remains that even hazily quantified moral value on the one hand, and things not readily captured conceptually on the other, look hard to reconcile.

Little Shop of Electronic Horrors

Having finally got around to acquiring A Perfect Vacuum, I was thinking recently that it's a pity I hadn't encountered Les Robinsonades when I was writing a dissertation on 'being alone', given the insights offered in this commentary on a man who imagines an entire population into effective being; but the most sublime intellectual aid for the reflective student of solitudinarianism, I now discover, is surely the Pekoppa.

Sega Toys has come out with a new plastic plant robot thingy that apparently is designed for people who have no one to talk to.

That makes it sound like some sort of Aibo-esque companion. However...

The Pekoppa sits there like a regular plastic plant until you talk to it, which will cause the stem to bend, creating the impression that the plant is nodding in agreement with what you are saying to it.

Yes.

Talking to plants I'm fine with: a perfectly reasonable activity for the caring gardener. Visions of lonely people, hollow inside from a dearth of meaningful contact, coming home and talking to an artificial plant that nods back... Won't it ever shake its leaves, give some vague impression of resistance, of another point of view? (Why have I started complaining about the obsequiousness of an artificial plant?) As a development of the dancing flower concept it at least avoids tackiness, but as a device designed to be spoken to, without understanding, it turns the routine practice of directing monologues at inanimate objects into a surreal theatre of meaninglessness.

Surely only an agent of the NHK could devise such a thing.

Not Encouraging Reading

The backlash to proposed age-ratings on the covers of children's books continues. (The next time I 'phone home to talk to Mater is going to be interesting, given her background in children's librarianship.) Seeing that one author's objections include the concern that age branding constitutes 'a move towards censorship, giving publishers and booksellers more power than... it’s healthy for them to have', reminded me of other suggestions that populations should be 'nudged' into doing what was considered good for them: it's in such a light that the merely patronising and philistine starts to look like a Foucauldian fever dream. Sometimes I wonder how large a dose of ubiquitous designed-in directives the human mind will prove able to stand before neurosis sets in.

I also wonder how a transition from the subtle and arguably insidious to the outright roughly prescriptive would change the experience of a text (given that already it sometimes seems 'mature', 'adolescent', 'juvenile', etc. are thrown around as weird æsthetic categories): rather like the more opinionated species of marginalia, it may give that sense that someone has been rooting around in my book and has insisted in scrawling an appraisal on it.

Perhaps instead of mere bowdlerisation we shall end up with a sort of Yearbook of the Khazars—along, of course, with people simply looking up the differences between editions on the Internet. Meanwhile, sooner or later someone will write a Menard-esque play on age rating hermeneutics, imagining, perhaps, that some book had been accidentally published with an incorrect or revised rating in one of its editions, producing two wholly divergent, yet equally artificial, critical receptions. Whereupon a whole genre of subtle literary innuendo will be born, an art of masquerading as a book for small children until the knowledgeable reader employs a suitable critical apparatus and long life-experience to bring out the more elevated ideas—and confusion will reign more supreme than ever as critics wonder whether there was ever an identifiable time before that had happened.

A Reaction to Reactions to a Question About Reaction

Talking Philosophy wonders whether philosophy has 'responded adequately' to 'big events and debates of the last decade'—a vague and open-ended category, but clearly understood to imply the political vogues of climatology, Islamic theology, not being calm, etc. One might have hoped for a more philosophical calibre of responses to that very leading question itself; only Fodor, Žižek and McGinn seemed really to be grappling with making sense of it. Which is odd, because it's such an obvious target for philosophical analysis: what counts as a suitably big event or debate? Is it defined by how many people care or participate, by the scale of difficulties involved, by the numbers potentially affected whether or not they presently care (or even exist), by some combination of these, or otherwise...?

It's hardly surprising that several respondents express confusion about what it would mean for philosophy to respond adequately to an event; the notion suggests an intersection of philosophical reflection and historical development in which intellectual reflection stands tied to concrete happenings more intimately than even Marx imagined. I think it's uncontroversial that events can be philosophically illuminating (even if the world can be an inconveniently messy place at times, and we decide we'd prefer to imagine babies on railway tracks and whatnot); but what would it mean for philosophy to respond to an event itself? Our own concrete history, of course, consists of series of events like, for example, A apparently refuting B, whose work is subsequently tweaked by C to make it fit for resurrection, whereupon D seeks to undermine the intellectual paradigm within which A, B and C all worked, which D's biographer seeks to explain in vaguely psychoanalytic terms involving D's sexual frustration, etc. To an extent, moreover, philosophy is constrained by setting: there could be no Christian philosophies in the centuries B.C., for example (and meanwhile Nietzsche looked forward to how his 'untimely' philosophy might be received in future times). However, that's a far cry from even an elevated form of political punditry.

What would it mean to read philosophy as a series of reactions to concrete events in the world? Maybe not a lot, since plenty of texts gather dust as it is. Given that to be analysed and probed for insights by generation after generation is counted as a mark of distinction (perhaps the mark), maybe one should ask instead: if a philosophical insight were genuinely enlightening yet at the same time a reaction directly to the contingencies of the era that generated it, what might such 'philosophy' look like...?

Another Lost City

Chihu is a Lost City which Google seems keen to keep that way, convinced that I actually want to hear about chihuahuas. Reading about the world's deepest lakes, I learned of a reputed ancient civilisation beneath the waters of the lake of Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan, and on chasing up information about archæological work there I was introduced to the name of Chihu. A post at the Anthropogene (which incidentally also has an interesting post on a possible source of the Atlantis legend) comments on the Chinese sources concerning Chihu:

The Chinese chronicles describe a nation known to them as the Wusung (Wusun, Ossounes, Issedones) and they name the lost city as Chihu. The physical description of these people potentially link them to the ancient Tocharians of the Tarim Basin. Having 'green [or blue] eyes and red beards' describes a race of Caucasian heritage.

The legends confirm the destruction of Chihu in a flood. There is a well-documented history of what are called outburst floods that wreak havoc in the region...

That speculative bit about the Tocharians makes Chihu even more intriguing. There are surviving texts in Tocharian languages which scholars are able to interpret, but the information they provide is limited:

The Tocharian A and B documents all date to a period roughly between the sixth and eighth centuries AD. The materials are predominantly translations of Buddhist texts which were in common circulation in Central Asia. This of course is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, the well-known content assists in the process of decipherment; on the other hand, it provides very little information about the people who spoke the language. There are, however, some texts that are not translations of Buddhist progenitors, including monastic and business letters, caravan passes, and graffiti. These secular documents are all written in Tocharian B, leading some scholars to conclude that Tocharian A, by the time the surviving documents were written, may already have been extinct, preserved only as the liturgical language—much as Latin was preserved, in Europe. The relative paucity of secular documents, however, necessarily makes such conclusions tentative.
Tocharian Online

In short, there are archæological sites under a lake in Central Asia which may or may not be associated with a city referred to in some Chinese documents, which in turn may or may not have something to do with the mysterious Tocharians.

Now I Want a Tower Too

From Shedworking I hear about a folly (in the architectural sense) called the Philosopher's Tower—the philosopher in question being Lord Shaftesbury. Actually it has only two storeys and a basement, making it less of a tower than our own Philosophy Dept. apart from the fact that it's free-standing, but detractors can probably be countered with cunning deployment of the Sorites Paradox.

Anyway, a bonsai tower is surely no less dignified than a porch, a trench or a barrel.

Geo-Graphic

Some more fun with maps, combined with the sort of lifting of words from other sources in which I've dabbled and which the Decoyist has been developing recently: every word or phrase in the following two paragraphs is the name of somewhere, according to Google Maps. (Indeed, there are more words given on the map than I used in the end.)

"Pity me, high lords of Dragonville, once the home of old Mathias Starcross," said sick Clara Vale, "and young Thomas Starcross, help thou now this sad lady. Kept alone, roughly used below a hot furnace Vulcan kept burning well, ever under pain of a whip and blades..." She felt her shoulderblade scar. "We beg help and protection: only such hope have we thrall folk."

Thomas, mad but lusty, and ever a nasty crackpot, came close, and struck. His lips felt more bitter than wormwood: a little more even than kissing a dead horse, maybe. But horseheads will not start licking, nor prod lower down. Clara had not seen this risk...

Pardon the cliffhanger, but the rest of this sordid tale may be best left to the imagination.

Evidence That Game Designers Sometimes Do Arrive At Names By Sticking a Pin In an Atlas

I wouldn't be surprised to learn this had been done before, but even if it has, it probably hasn't been done before by someone who lives near Belmont.

View Larger Map

This is a quick prototype of something I may or may not get around to expanding.

Open 255

A couple of minor oddities in the FFIX in-game memory's item list. First, finishing off the regular items is item #256 in the list:

open 255{END}

I imagine it's some sort of placeholder related to the organisation of the item list in the menus (maybe reflecting the fact that you can't move the cursor to the absolute bottom-right place)... More interestingly, at the end of the list of 'key' items is this:

none{END}
none{END}
none{END}
none{END}
none{END}
none{END}
none{END}
none{END}
none{END}
none{END}

One of these on its own I'd write off as another placeholder, but ten? Would it be excessively excitable of me to wonder whether Square planned, and allocated memory space for, more key items than they implemented in the end...?