Word: coates
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Martial-arts games (like the Street Fighter or Tekken series) used to be the digital equivalent of a cheeseburger--good for a little messy, mindless pleasure but always leaving behind a coat of grease and guilt. Beating your opponent to a bloody pulp by hitting all the buttons on your controller faster than he or she did was hardly something you would call tasteful. Then came Soul Calibur (released in 1999 for the now defunct Dreamcast), the caviar and champagne of fighting games. Its sword-wielding characters preferred fencing to fisticuffs. Combat was balletic and mercifully blood-free...
There is a constellation of cigarette burns near the right-hand pocket of my new winter coat. Someone has reaffixed its buttons with coarse, dark thread; someone has worn its satin lining, the color of plums, fuzzy at the shoulders. When, sliding my hand into the right pocket, I finger a cigarette burn, I imagine the coat’s previous owner, gesturing with a cigarette, its tip bright in the early winter twilight. When I button the coat I imagine a button detaching under her hurried fingers and tumbling to the ground, imagine her pocketing it so that...
Because it turned cold Friday, I wore my winter coat. Hurrying through the Holyoke Center arcade a little before noon, I saw that people had begun to queue up at the Harvard Box Office; according to placards taped in the window, the Undergraduate Council’s Harvard-Yale shuttle tickets went on sale at noon. We had talked, my blockmates and I, about going to see the game at Yale this year—We ought to go, we said, we really should go. After having talked it over, though, and having puzzled out the logistics of bus trips...
...most colleges have their own obscure traditions—statues to rub, say, or arches under which to kiss at midnight, or implausible urban legends involving libraries sinking under the weight of their books. At Harvard, though, tradition is as insistent a presence as the cigarette burns on my coat. Upon our arrival in September our first year, we are greeted by a list the Freshman Dean’s Office has left of all the people who have lived in our room. (Actually, this was the source of my earliest disappointment at Harvard: reading my list I thought, briefly...
...even the behind-the-scenes MC himself can’t answer every question. He recalls handling Sarah Jessica Parker at the Pudding’s 2002 Woman of the Year celebration. “She came in and handed me her coat. I put her coat up. The minute I turn around, all these women rush me and want to know what the label on her coat is. I’m a guy, I don’t know these things...