FAUX: The Peripheral Issue

THE PERIPHERAL ISSUE Who Will Tell Their Story?

It’s So Bad

Dave Grohl

The Desirable Geek

Gaps.

peripheral adjective 1.

Relating to or situated on the edge or periphery of some thing.

Synonyms (outlying, outer, on the edge/outskirts) 2.

Of secondary or minor importance; marginal.

Synonyms (secondary, tangential, unimportant)

How does one hear what remains unheard? They listen. Outsiders have always been synonymous with this adage. It’s in this idea that we decided to reward all who continue to live life according to their own thoughts, beliefs, hobbies and, in some cases, careers. The Peripheral Issue of FAUX. magazine will explore skate culture and its future, the impact of Grunge on the world of music & the rise of the geek, all in an effort to bring to light every walk of life.

Barron stadiums and halfway crook swimmers in the summer Olympics. how are skaters meant to fix this?

Ever since snowboarding was introduced to the winter Olympics, Viewership is at an all-time high. With skateboarding at a cultural high in society, it’s obvious why the committee choose skating to be the next big sport.

FAUX. The Peripheral Issue

6-15

Who Will Tell Our Story?

16-19

It’s So Bad: The 9 Worst Video Game Peripherals

20-25

Dave Grohl is a Back-Aching, Coffee-Guzzling, Minivan-Driving Classic Rocker

26-31

The Desirable Geek

32-37

Gaps.

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WHO WILL TELL OUR STORY??

S

ince it was announced this year that kateboarding was going to be in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. I’ve come to

terms that skateboarding is and isn’t a sport.

Over the course of years, decades, skateboarding has been an activity that requires no weekly training, no gear, no coach, no team, just a skateboard and you. With the idea that skaters are Olympians, the best in the athletic world, it kinda makes you think....

How desperate are the olympics?

With the decline in viewers on TV, empty seats in barren stadiums and half-way crook swimmers in the summer Olympics. How are skaters meant to fix this?

FAUX. The Peripheral Issue

Ever since snowboarding was introduced to the winter Olympics, viewership is at an all-time high. With skateboarding at a cultural high in society, it’s obvious why the committee choose skating to be the next big sport.

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But with no introduction to skate culture, the average viewer will think Rodney Mullen is the next Isaac Newton or that Tony Hawk is the second coming of christ or that Nyjah Houston isn’t a fuck boi.

There’s a need to inform what made skating what it is. There’s a need to explain why Gonz is a god, why Reynolds is the boss and why skateboarding is fun.

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The goal of skating isn’t to be a pro skater, more so, it’s to teach you the rules in life.

That no one except yourself can make you achieve your goals & that there’s no need to stop only to go forward.

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Out of skateboarding, you have Ufc fighters, accountants, politicians, lawyers, mathematicians, freak and geeks.

weirdos,

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I’m not interested in the future of skateboarding.

I’m curious who will present skateboarding past .

-Declan

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soon.

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IT’S SO BAD

THE 9 WORST VIDEO GAME PERIPHERALS Rollin Bishop

(popularmechanics.com)

With the rise in virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR, there’s never been a better time than now to see folks with goofy-looking gadgets strapped to their heads.

There’s no telling just how history will remember this particular wave of peripherals, but it’s as good a time as any to reflect back on those gaming peripherals of the past—so them truly, truly terrible.

1.

R.O.B

There is perhaps no peripheral that is poked fun at as much as Nintendo’s R.O.B., short for Robotic Operating Buddy. R.O.B. released in 1985 for the NES, and works with a grand total of two games that set up physical obstacles for him to move around while a CRT television flashed him directions. Unlike many of the other entries on this list, R.O.B. received a renewed appreciation thanks to becoming a fighter in Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series.

Sega Activator 2. The 1993 was a simpler time,

though Sega seemingly wanted to make it more complicated.

The Activator is an octagonshaped ring for the Sega Genesis that uses infrared to keep track of movements made within. The idea being that it would make fighting video games like Mortal Kombat that much cooler, translating actually punches to virtual ones. In reality, the reaction time of the ring compared to a controller was abysmal, and the Activator was quickly deactivated.

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The SNES Super Scope

3. The Super Scope is a bazooka-

shaped light gun released for the SNES that essentially serves the same function as the NES Zapper: it “shoots” things on the screen. Except, you know, it’s huge. The thing clocks in at just under two feet in length, which seems a bit excessive when compared to the handgunsized Zapper—especially since they accomplished the same thing. The paltry list of games supporting the Super Scope also doomed it to relative obscurity.

The Aura Interactor

5. 1994 brought with it the

Aura Interactor, marketed as “virtual reality game wear.” The idea of the device was that kicks, punches, and shots in video games would be transmitted to the Interactor in such a way that the wearer would feel them. In reality, the vest was essentially a glorified speaker that translated bass into rumbling. Think of it like a vest-shaped Rumble Pak and you’re not far off.

4.

The Steel Battalion Controller

There are plenty that would argue against including the Steel Battalion in this list.

While the thing only works with two games, and is unabashedly ridiculous to look at, the fact of the matter is that there’s tons of buttons to control what is essentially a bipedal tank.

Even so, the only time you’re likely to see these in action is at particularly ambitious gaming conventions.

The Guitar Hero Grip

6. As you might have noticed,

a number of these peripherals date back to the ‘80s and ‘90s.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t terrible decisions made in the aughts. Guitar Hero: On Tour for the Nintendo DS included this awkward grip featuring four buttons in 2008. It clips into the GBA port on the DS and requires players to hold the system sideways in a weird open-palm manner just to use. It made playing fake guitar feel harder than just, you know, actually playing guitar.

FAUX. The Peripheral Issue

The Joyboard

7. The poor Joyboard for the

The Game Gear TV Tuner

Atari 2600 only got one game, Mogul Maniac, back in 1982. It is essentially a balance board, controlled by leaning in one direction or another. Folks that are actually aware of both tend to compare it to the Wii’s Balance Board, though the Wii accessory was much more advanced. With just one game and not being much more than a glorified joystick, the Joyboard soon tilted into oblivion.

8. The Sega Game Gear actually

had a TV tuner peripheral that let users, as the name implies, tune in TV. Though the Game Gear’s screen is criticized often, portable TVs of the time were likely comparable if not worse.

The little peripheral had and continues to have fans, but it feels like an oddity on an already odd console. The switch to digital television broadcasting from analog made it all but useless as well.

The Power Glove

9. And then there’s the much-maligned NES Power Glove. While it’s

actually a nightmare to use, nostalgia for the device is strong enough that there’s still a strong amount of affection for the thing. Released in 1989 with a spare few games designed for it, the peripheral features a number of buttons in addition to the typical NES ones. The main draw of the Power Glove is how it uses special speakers and sensors to keep track of the hand position, though not particularly well. It’s most famous moment? The 1989 movie/advertorial for Nintendo The Wizard, when it’s pulled out of the box like a holy relic, and the reverent words are spoken: “I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.”

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DAVE GROHL IS A BACK-ACHING, COFFEEGUZZLING, MINIVANDRIVING CLASSIC ROCKER Libby Copeland

(washingtonpost.com)

E

ven before he fell off a stage in Sweden and broke his leg, Dave Grohl was feeling creaky.

He is 46, drinks too much coffee, and wakes up at 6 wherever he is, even on days he doesn’t need to pack lunches and get the kids into the Honda Odyssey. When he’s touring, his back aches and the muscles in his neck hurt from screaming.

“The pre-show now is, like, a couple whiskies and a couple Advils,” he said with grinning derision one day in May. When his Foo Fighters play RFK Stadium on July 4, the 20th anniversary of the band’s first album, it will be their first time playing since Grohl’s June 12 accident forced them to cancel the remainder of their European tour. Even with a freshly broken leg, he insisted on being carried back onstage (after getting medical attention) to finish the Sweden show.And in conversation, he has the tensed

energy of a stalking cat. The Foos frontman is a man of delightfully meandering anecdotes, most

“The pre-show now is a couple whiskies and a couple Advils” of which are tame save for a recurrent verbal tic that rhymes with “muck” and serves as the equivalent of “um.” His appetites are wide-ranging and ravenous.

At one point during an interview in the cafe of the Park Hyatt, to make a point about the power of music to connect, he expounded upon the lyrical beauty of the quintessentially cheesy ’70s pop hit “Escape (the Piña Colada Song),” which he learned to appreciate only recently, when it came on the radio while he was stuck in traffic.

“Then, the third verse they decide to meet — so they meet, and it’s his wife!” he exclaimed, leaning forward in excitement. “He’s like, ‘I had no idea you liked piña

FAUX. The Peripheral Issue

coladas and getting caught in the rain,’ and then they fall back in love!”

Whoa.

“Actually listened to the music,” he said with satisfaction. “Now I’m totally down.”

By this point, the conversation had already touched on the craft shows Grohl’s mom took him to as a child and the time an image of the murderous cult leader Jim Jones inadvertently wound up painted on the teenage Grohl’s bedroom wall. (It’s a long story.)

The onetime Nirvana drummer has said that he was essentially anonymous back when he played with Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. But over the years he has figured out how to reside in the limelight without revealing too much, using humor and hyperbole to defuse interviewers’ deep

questions about Cobain and the meaning of rock-and-roll.

His talent for putting people at ease is part of the reason profiles inevitably call him the nicest man in rock, a phrase often conveyed with surprise, since people expect their musical heroes to come with a side of angst, ethical lapses and bizarre backstage demands.

Instead, Grohl and his bandmates are winningly adorkable in a way that suggests they have little to prove. They are fully domesticated rock stars. Grohl

gave up drugs when he was about 20, and his greatest vice appears to be caffeine. He talks about helping his 9-year-old daughter redecorate her bedroom to reflect her improbable love of Queen.

(He has two other kids, ages 6

“If I die while playing on the South Lawn of the White House, I mean, imagine that ‘Behind the Music’ ” and almost 1.) His bandmates talk about the night they rented a limo van to shuttle them to

back-to-back fundraisers at the private schools that assorted Foos offspring attend.

Grohl’s stories are laced with self-deprecating humor. There was the first and only time he tried yoga, on the day after a big show, and nearly threw up doing downward dog. There was the time, about six years ago, when he started having chest pains.

He was 40 and thought he might be dying, but instead of going to the doctor he played a scheduled show at the White House, with two Bayer aspirin in his wallet in case of a heart attack.

FAUX. The Peripheral Issue

“I actually thought, if I die while playing on the South Lawn of the White House, I mean, imagine that ‘Behind the Music,’ ” he said.

When he didn’t die, Grohl visited some doctors who gave him an EKG, a sonogram and a CT scan. His heart was fine, it turned out; the culprit was his coffee consumption. With two little kids at home, he was sleeping little and drinking four pots a day.

There’s a certain logic to Grohl playing the White House through chest pains, or playing a stage in Sweden with a broken leg. Music is not only his career but a religion of sorts. “Nothing makes me feel more like a human being on planet Earth than listening to My Bloody Valentine or [f---ing] Al Green or the Beatles or Slayer,” he said. Declaring something “rockand-roll” might be the highest compliment he can pay. (The Foo Fighters were in New York in May to perform on the final episode of “Late Show With 23

David Letterman”; Grohl has described Letterman as having “something rock-and-roll about him.”) The preservation of rock history, as well as the effort to define what rock is and isn’t, have been causes of Grohl’s in recent years, inspiring his 2013 documentary “Sound City,” about the legacy of a storiedbut-forgotten studio featuring an outdated analog soundboard, and his 2014 HBO documentary series, “Sonic Highways,” a city-by-city take on the history of American music. The Foo Fighters even struck a blow for the old school, recording their 2011 album in Grohl’s garage.

But while the rock-ism wars have been noisy and fierce, Grohl has somehow remained unbesmirched. His ubiquity at red-carpet events may be mocked in some circles, and his promiscuous tastes in side projects and collaborations — from Tom Petty to Diddy — prompted Maxim to joke that he’d “been in more bands than chlamydia.” But somebody has to be the face of contemporary rock, or whatever’s left of it — and everyone seems to agree that there couldn’t be a nicer guy for the job.

Grohl has a gee-whiz quality that can seem like a put-on — he once expressed shock that Kenny G knew who he was and claimed to have almost fainted upon seeing Barry Manilow in an airport — and the Internet abounds with stories gushing about his kindliness. (“Dave Grohl Stops Foo Fighters Show to Give Gift to Blind Fan.”) On a Web site called Mean Stars, Grohl gets a rating of “100% nice” from average folks who’ve crossed his path (“he spoke at length with our moms”; “he wished me the best of luck with the cancer treatment”). A recent biography of Grohl was criticized for having too little Grohl in it — perhaps, one reviewer suggested, because he’s too nice to make for an interesting subject.

That seems a little unfair, though, because Grohl doesn’t come across as the least bit boring — just deeply earnest.

The son of a single mom who at one point worked three jobs, Grohl and his sister grew up in Springfield, Va., and as a teenager he became enmeshed in the local punk scene. He never imagined a career in music, never imagined there was money to be made selling cassette tapes or “playing squats

“playing music on the weekends and begging my boss for my job back when I’d come home from tour — that’s just how I imagined it was going to be” and running from skinheads.”

By the time he was playing drums for the hard-core punk band Scream in his late teens, he was just working to support the music.

“I never needed much to be happy, so working at Marlo Furniture warehouse and playing music on the weekends and begging my boss for my job back when I’d come home from tour — that’s just how I imagined it was going to be,” he said.

Instead, he found himself broke in Los Angeles in 1990, when Scream’s shows were canceled, he said, because the bass player disappeared. He was “eating pork and beans with mud wrestlers” (another long story for another day) when a friend called to say a Seattle band was looking for a drummer and liked his style. Conflicted over leaving his bandmates, Grohl called his mom. She told him, “Sometimes, you just have to do what’s good for you.”

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FAUX. The Peripheral Issue

Niklas Gaal

Since the dawn of time itself, geek-kind has always struggled to find their place in society and for this they have been punished.

From death to wet willies and everything in-between, geeks have had it tough. UNTIL NOW! Geek culture is at the forefront of popular culture with cinematic comic book universes appearing everywhere and reboots of old sci-fi dominating the box office.

But why? How have the long tormented geek-kind risen to the top of the world?

Simply put, geeks have never been ‘cool’. T he source of constant ridicule and anguish for decades in both television and film.

So what has changed? The easy answer of course is witchcraft, but I don’t think that can be readily proven, so research it is.

Geek culture is being embraced.

We have to look no further than the master of Harry Potter for evidence of this. J.K.. Rowling, a fantasy writer, has been a member of the billionaires club for several years, with her novels standing tall at the top of the top sellers list for the majority of the 2000’s.

How is this possible? Rather fitting that society is to blame, with a poll taken by Kaiser Family Foundation outlining how, on average, children between the ages of 8 & 18 are spending close to 8 hours (7 hrs, 38 min) exploiting a technology.

This has meant that our society has created a generation of people obsessed with geek culture because it is what they’ve had access to.

In saying that though, the word geek has been used widely for centuries so its ensuing culture has had to have some influence of people in the past. Cue comic culture. Comics as we know them today exploded into the market in the 1930s. The camp nature of these comics enabled people to see entertainment in a new light …a different light.

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Comics aren’t just a thing of the past though demonstrated by the fact that the sales of comics are at a twenty year high. Television & film have too embraced the culture, with super-heroes from to embrace it in the first place. I the 1930s breaking the billionwould compare the geek rise to dollar mark on the silver screen a tsunami, but geek culture has with a relative ease. This is due risen with no clear signs as to to the fact that TV and film is now how and why. Geeks are at the a major part of modern day life. top of the world and it’s difficult It is this same to explain how reason that and they got there.

I don't think anything film franchises like Star Trek can really beat the pure fun Perhaps by just & Star Wars saying they will and pleasure of holding are back, with one day rule the large influence. a magazine in your hand, world, society

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has simply let it But, in reality, reading the story on paper… happen without it honestly all I think young people have even blinking, surrounds the letting a geek always loved that kids. The kids of or two infiltrate this generation - STAN LEE their brains, are geeks because the parents one small moment at a time. of this generation are geeks as well. I do however feel it may I don’t know about you, but I am be a demonstration of survival of glad you could all join us. Did I say the fittest. Not to be too political us…I meant them. Yeah, them. or anything.

“

However, this constant battery of ‘geek-ism’ means that the culture is being forced down the throats of every person on the planet. The market is the definition of flooded thus making it impossible to avoid the culture even if you didn’t want

Hail Geek Culture!

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GAPS.

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FAUX Peripheral

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A life cultivated on the ideas of others is no way to live. Humans in nature are unique, so why try and change this gift we have been given.

Whether you choose to be a part of a group of people or not is irrelevant as long as it is your choice. That’s what we have learned anyway.

I hope you too gained a similar understanding of what it means to be on the peripheral of society and how being outside the mainstream is really quite refreshing.

THE PERIPHERAL ISSUE Declan Kasi Nik