Pandora does not work in the UK. Neither do the other things I'd listen to. However, Spotify works great and it seems so much awesomer. Because I can listen to "Roc Boys" over and over.
Cricket video games. For some reason, I can't stop thinking about giving that this is what I want to give as a wedding present for the next American wedding I'm invited to. That one, or World Snooker Championship.
I was never that into normal video games, but the more unusual ones did interest me - the ones very particular to a region or demographic, or just kind of odd. Like I never liked Tecmo Bowl or RBI Baseball, the touchstones of my sorry generation and gender, but there was a baseball video game with robots and I loved it - Super Baseball 2020. Robots also played hockey, and I played that game a lot - Solar Hockey League. The game I think about most is Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball - we rented it once and it has stuck with me ever since. I never really liked bass fishing games, but the concept seemed okay. I like golf games (particularly "Golf" for NES), tennis was alright, but they never really figured out how to make them non-repetitive (i.e. interesting).
Sports games are interesting, because their market is pretty much limited to the region where the sport has an audience. And the weirder sports games even further. The more unusual non-sports 'concept' games are easier to transport across borders - a fondness for Crazy Taxi or Katamari is pretty universal.
At some point, I kind of stopped caring about the over-arching narratives that much of sports culture is based on. I was never that into it - I only really liked the numbers inside of sports - but it has completely vanished from my life in the past few years. It is at once freeing - it is spare mental capacity you can apply to other stuff - and guilt-inducing. My dad does care. He reads the sports page and all that. In some ways, I really feel like I am letting him down by not caring, or I'm not holding up my end of the father-son relationship. My brother cared a lot - he cared too much sometimes - and that's probably why there's been this growing sense of guilt about it.
