I’ve been fooling around with Intellivision Lives! on Xbox, and it’s lead me down one of the most enjoyable rabbit holes I’ve ever dug on the Internets. The Intellivision Lives homepage has a metric assload of information about "Intelligent television," including catalogues, screenshots, history, programmers, all that cool stuff. I hit up WikiPedia for some extra information on the console itself (I had no idea that Intellivision was 16-bit all the way back in 1980!) and eventually found myself at The Dot Eaters.

Okay, If you’re a 1980s gamer geek, you could easily spend an entire day at this website, which is a comprehensive history of video games, beginning in the years that preceeded Pong, and heading all the way up to the Vectrex/ Atari 7800 years. The whole site is wonderfully put together, with old adverts, screen shots, and pictures of consoles, machines and designers. You know what it feels like? If Ken Burns did a documentary on video games, this material would be the companion book. So if you damn kids today want to research your Xbox’s family tree, or understand where your PSP came from, go check it out, but only if you have a lot of free time.

I just read the following over at Iggy’s:

Somebody was once asked to define blogs. They refused and said:

I
don’t care. There is no need to define “blog.” I doubt there ever was
such a call to define “newspaper” or “television” or “radio” or “book”
— or, for that matter, “telephone” or “instant messenger.” A blog is
merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share
your shopping list. People will use it however they wish. And it is way
too soon in the invention of uses for this tool to limit it with a set
definition. That’s why I resist even calling it a medium; it is a means
of sharing information and also of interacting: It’s more about
conversation than content… so far. I think it is equally tiresome and
useless to argue about whether blogs are journalism, for journalism is
not limited by the tool or medium or person used in the act. Blogs are
whatever they want to be. Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining
“blog” is a fool’s errand.

Iggy agrees, and so do I.

 I didn’t go to Jeff Tweedy last night. Because of the blizzard in New York, my friend’s friends were stuck in town, and I gave up my ticket so one of her friends, who loves Wilco as much as I do and was stranded here for an extra day, could go to the show. (It helps to draw a little picture with arrows connecting friends, so you can see who is who in that paragraph.)

Instead, I had dinner with them before they headed to the show, and came back home, intent on spending the evening with the family.

When I walked in the door, Nolan and the dogs greeted me in the entryway.

"Hey, Wil!" He said before I even had the door closed, "do you have any plans tonight?"

"I’m just hanging out with you guys," I said, as I hung my keys on the designated key hook (you’ll find one in every house, you’ll see.)

"Cool! Can we play a game?"

"Sure," I said, "figure something out while I check my e-mail."

Nolan ran off to the back of the house, and dug through the big trunk of games. I opened my laptop and did a little TCBing from the dining room table.

He dug through all sorts of games, as simple as Jenga and as complicated as Illuminati. Finally, we settled on Gold Digger, which is a simple but incredibly entertaining game (especially when you call the mine with all the fool’s gold in it ‘the booty mine,’ and you sing a song that goes, "It’s booty time, in the booty mine; it’s mighty fine in the booty mine!")

So. We played several games of Gold Digger at the dining room table, while Ryan and Anne watched this total trainwreck of a show called Wife Swap.

Oh. My. God. Okay, seriously. How in the hell did that pile of shit get on television? How many great dramatic shows or brilliant comedies were passed over so that monument to completely disfunctional fuckups could pollute the airwaves? When it was about 2/3 of the way through, I asked Anne if she’d ever seen it before. She said that she hadn’t, and would never watch it again, but it was like picking at a scab: once she’d started she couldn’t stop. Ugh.

Anyway, Nolan and I did our best to tune out the "reality" television that snuck in from the other room like stink from the dump, and we had an absolute blast while we played.

We played three games, and Nolan ended up beating me by one point, thanks to his genius card-counting skills, and a bonehead play by me which set him ahead by four after the second game.

When we were done, he went to get ready for bed, while I cleaned up the cards and put the game away. Alone in the dining room, I thought about how totally awesome it is that my fourteen year-old kid wants to play games with me, and asks me to do things with him all the time. When I was fourteen the last thing in the world I wanted to do was hang out with my totally lame parents, much less play games with them, because they so totally didn’t understand me.

I have prided myself, these last ten years, on never trying to be a friend to Ryan and Nolan. I have always taken my responsibilities as a parent very seriously, and I believe that trying to be your kids’ friend is one of the fastest ways to screw them up. My thinking goes: they make friends at school, and they need parents at home. But this never meant that I didn’t want to play whiffle ball with them, or introduce them to geeky games, or anything like that. I guess it’s a parenting philosophy that one either intuitively groks or doesn’t, so I won’t spend a lot of time trying to explain it. The point is, even though he’s fourteen, (and occasionally has serious pod-person days,) he still wants to hang out with me. We make an effort to do things together, and I always feel like it’s important and rewarding to us both. It’s more than awesome. It is the hawesome. In fact, it is the reason hawesome was invented.

John Scalzi has a couple of must-read posts for aspiring writers that I meant to link to over the weekend:

• Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don’t Want To Work at Writing filters the best of On Writing through Strunk & White, and delivers outstanding advice for anyone who writes, whether it’s for fun, for profit, or fot for both.

• The John Scalzi Agent FAQ is exactly what it sounds like.

John takes what could be boring and dry HOWTOs, and makes them
interesting and informative. Even if you’re not an aspiring writer it’s still a fascinating behind-the-binding look at two essential
parts of the publishing process.

The kids spent the weekend with their dad, so Anne and I got to hang out together the entire weekend. It was hawesome.

During the day on Friday, I played poker and Anne headed to
downtown with our friend Stephanie (who introduced us, and was part of
the best man triad in my wedding, with Dave and Darin) to enjoy the
insane bargains and donut-throwing crack whores that can only be found
in the garment district.

Around four in the afternoon, they called and said they were finished, and wanted me to join them for dinner and drinks in Old Town. I successfully lobbied for a change of venue to Dave and Buster’s, and we rolled in just after five. Over the next five hours or so, I had . . . a few . . . Newcastles and Guinnessessessssses, and had an absolute blast playing Dayton Racing (the trick is to completely spin around when you miss a turn, and take out a computer car if you can. You may not win the race, but you look so cool doing it! And don’t drink and drive, unless it’s in a video game. Duh.) and the coin-shooting game with them. (Yeah, check me out: I have 17000 tickets on my D&B card, baby. One of these days, daddy is going to get a Yacht.)

Remarkably, when Saturday morning rolled around, my body gave me just enough of a headache to remind me that I’m 33, not 23, but apparently the fifteen gallons of water I drank between pints did something to ease what could have been a repeat of an incident that is just called The Hangover of ’97.

Anyway, we met some friends for lunch on Saturday afternoon, and stayed in on Saturday night, watching Cops (guilty pleasure) and A River Runs Through It on DVD. You know, I am a huge fan of Robert Redford’s work, as an actor and as a director, and I’m an equally big fan of Brad Pitt’s work, yet somehow I’d managed to never see this movie.

Wow. Quite an incredible bit of filmmaking there, and one of the very few movies I’ve watched at home that I regretted not seeing on a big screen.

Yesterday, we both woke up at 8 (WTF?) and spent the entire morning pulling weeds in the front yard, and cleaning up leaves from our neighbor’s oak tree that her idiot gardener blows into our planters. Can I just say how fucking sick to death I am of cleaning up other people’s messes? She pays the damn gardener to clean up her yard (she’s 900 years old) and this jerk takes her money, and makes the clean-up my responsibility. Guess who’s getting a cockpunch next time he turns on the leaf blower on her driveway?

After we completely filled our yard cans — all six of them — with leaves and weeds and junk, we took the dogs for a nice long walk, then did our weekly grocery shopping. This week is going to be filled with insanely good meals, because we spent a lot of time with the Whole Foods Cookbook and Sunset Magazine, planning out some —

Okay. It’s just occurred to me that this is an incredibly boring, dry, and uninteresting factual recounting of the last three days. I mean, I’m writing the goddamn thing, and I’m already bored with it. I chalk it up to a bad night of sleep, incredibly sore muscles from working in the yard all morning and the fact that my heart just isn’t in this right now. This is the downside of committing to ten minutes a day: sometimes, it just sucks.

I guess the important thing to take out of this, and the reason I even felt like writing about my weekend in the first place, is that even after ten years together, I look forward to, and totally love spending a weekend hanging out with my wife.