Middle Age Punk in Tattooed Prague
Middle Age Punk Issue 014
PRAGUE IS INKED UP
Everybody in Prague has tattoos.
Young. Old. Middle aged. Everybody. Well, not children. Probably.
And not just like a heart on their arm or a little something or other on their ankle, like, fully tattooed up. Head to toe.
I have tattoos. Nerdy ones. Star Wars, Creature from the Black Lagoon. I recently got the beautiful visage of my late pug Lucy on my hand, and I generally don’t like when people stare at my tattoos, but I just can’t help it here. Everybody has the most beautiful tattoos everywhere I look.
It could be that I’ve moved to a metropolitan European city where public transit is so phenomenal that everybody is out and about riding it, or that at the close of Summer people are still wearing more revealing clothing, but to my eyes, it seems like there is vastly more tattooed folks here than I ever saw bumbling around the greater Denver metro area and I wonder what that’s about.
If you have tattoos you probably recognize the urge to get more tattoos. I’ve been overwhelmed with that desire since landing here.
Tattooed in Prague.
MORTAL KOMBAT 1
I fucking love new fighting game day and this year has been gorged on that front. Street Fighter VI earlier in the summer, and now, the new Mortal Kombat 1.
It doesn’t even matter if the game ends up being good or not, I love getting my hands on a new fighting game.
I start each one by running through the provided in-game tutorial to learn how the game works and how it wants me to play it so I will immediately forget 95% of what they’ve taught me.
Then I go in to practice mode and try out each and every character to see which one fits me best and eventually land on the one I find most visually appealing, or easiest to use.
I follow that by trying out that character in the combo trials to attempt lengthy and flashy combos that nobody will every be able to pull off in an actual match against another human being.
After that it’s straight into the arcade mode where I play against the computer, dominate the artificial intelligence of the game and feel like a fighting game god.
Then I hop into online mode to put my skills to the test against other living, breathing, human beings from around the world and get embarrassingly hosed repeatedly until I give up, blame the character I picked, then start the process over again.
It’s a the cycle of fighting games, and I fucking love it.
SPEAKING OF MORTAL KOMBAT
In case you missed it before, I posted a story earlier this year about how a young me in the ‘90s spent a lot of time being drug to dingy, cigarette smoke-filled bowling alleys by my father while he bowled away at league night and left me to my own in the alley’s arcade where upon I first witnessed Mortal Kombat and all it’s decapitating glory.
WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO
Gridlink - Coronet Juniper
Blood Incantation - Luminescent Bridge - Single
Tomb Mold - The Enduring Spirit
Final Gasp - Mourning Moon
Lydia Loveless - Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again
Cannibal Corpse - Chaos Horrific
Because you're young, you're torn between
A world of hate and a world of dreams
So much to lose, so much to gain
So much to fight for, so much to change
Cock Sparrer - “Because You’re Young”