Month: February 2006

When my friend Pauly isn’t covering poker tournaments on Tao of Poker, he tries to spend ten minutes each day writing in his other blog, Tao of Pauly. He says, "I’m trying to do that ten minute exercise where I just ramble on
incessantly for ten minutes in order to keep up my blog and not feel
like I’m ignoring my first and original blog." I think it’s a good idea, and though I enjoy writing for CardSquad, and I’m getting pretty good at editing the technology newswire at Suicide Girls, it’s been coming at the expense of writing just for me, in my lame blog. It’s also taken time and energy away from finishing my book, (or given me an excuse to avoid it, depending on how I’m feeling on a particular day) and that’s just not cool.

So I’m going to try Pauly’s ten minute blast this morning, and do some "because it’s fun" writing before I settle into some "pay the bills" writing.

And . . . go:

That NES thing I talked about yesterday, which I got at the mall? It’s called Power Player with Super Joystick and Gun. I’m pretty sure it was made by six year-old kids in the sub-sweatshop of a sweatshop in China. I probably shouldn’t have bought it, but like BB Gun Mania, Classic NES Mania can make a man do strange things.

I don’t write about the kids here very often, because they’re old enough to read my blog, and possibly be embarrassed by thier lame stepdad talking about how proud he is of them for working their asses off to ace most of their finals. I don’t write about how happy it makes me that they have recently made me feel truly accepted and appreciated for the first time in our lives together, like I matter to them, because I know they or some of their friends may stumble across this, and they’ll feel weird. I haven’t written about how much fun it’s been to play Talisman and Dungeon with them a few times a week, and how happy I am that we all have made the time to hang out together, even if it’s just turning off the TV, turning on the radio, and sitting on the couch together while we read our books. (I’m almost finished with The Dark Tower, and Nolan is deeply involved with a book called Catalyst, written by the author of this book I got him for Christmas called Speak.) I also haven’t written about how happy it made me when Nolan came into my office the other day, and said, "I just wanted you to know that I’ve loved every book you’ve recommended to me, and I wanted to say thank you." Until last summer, Nolan hated to read, and I’d like to think that I had something to do with changing that.

But I also like to write about the things in my life which I feel good about, and those things which bring me joy. Though that list is currently rather short, Ryan and Nolan are right at the top of, and occupying most of it. Sorry if I embarrassed you, guys. But as long as I’m at it, I may as well go all-out: I love you, pookers.

Woah! Firefox just told me that it’s ready to auto-update itself to 1.5.0.1. That’s pretty cool. And it reminds me that Google Earth is out for OS X. I really like Google Earth, but should I worry about any privacy issues? I mean things like personal tracking info, like the damn google cookie that I have ao anonymize every morning. I can’t find anything online that says I should, but the company that seems to be so concerned about "do no evil" has been pretty goddamn close to evil lately.

If you missed the tilt-shift photography thing at boingboing last week, go look at it right now. I am confident that anyone who reads WWdN regularly will love these images as much as I do. In fact, if you don’t, I’ll refund your WWdN entry fee for the entire month of February.

I woke up this morning, checked my e-mail, and was thrilled to discover that for the first time in weeks, comments on my last few entries out-numbered the spam that made it through Thunderbird’s junk mail filter. Honesty time: I write this stuff because it satisfies some sort of creative need, but it’s reassuring to know that my time isn’t wasted, and that this stuff connects with some of you in some way. When there’s more offers for \/!.agr@ and c1a1i5 clogging my inbox than anything else, it gets me down a little bit. And I’ve been feeling a little down, lately, and I’ve longed for that feeling of community and interaction from the old days.

Okay, time’s up. While it’s nice to actually sit down and write for myself, giving myself an arbitrary time limit is stifling, and results in a disjointed series of thoughts, rather than a coherent story. I guess that’s okay, because the coherent story-telling energy needs to be saved for the book right now, and it’s better to have some rambling bullshit than nothing at all. So this exercise was worthwhile, I guess. Maybe I can give myself a minimum to ten minutes each morning to write for myself before I get to "work." Yeah, I’ll do that. I can still write longer and more interesting stuff when the inspiration hits me, but for the near future, I’m doing at least ten minutes every morning, except on weekends, because that’s Willie’s time!

How about we finish off with a Quote of the Day?

Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable than risk being happy.
  – Robert Anthony

Two things you probably didn’t know about me:

1. I’ve always wanted to be a bartender.
2. This Nextel thing with the guys dancing around to Salt-n-Pepa makes me laugh real hard whenever I see it.

My friend Dawn is up for MySpace Girl of the Week on Attack of the Show. I can’t say anything about the other girls who are in the contest, but I know that Dawn is a real geek girl. I can guarantee you she’s the only nominee who knows the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel, and odds are she’s the only one who knows the correct answer to the question, "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

So quit reading my non-cute-girl-having blog, and go vote for Dawn.

This week’s Games of our Lives makes me giggle. The subject is one of my childhood favorites, Kung-Fu Master. Here’s a little bit:

. . . Thomas found a note from "X": "Your love Silvia is in custody now.
If you want to save your dear Silvia’s life, come to the Devil’s Temple
at once. 5 Sons of the Devil will entertain you."

Well isn’t that nice? Mr. X doesn’t want to kill Thomas, he just
wants the Kung-Fu Master to enjoy his temple’s top-quality
entertainment. Maybe when Thomas finds Silvia, they can join X at the
late-night comedy buffet, which we hear gets a little blue.

Gameplay: The Devil’s Temple is a lovely five-story building,
decorated in the style of a ’50s Chinese restaurant. Each level is
filled with those Unknown Guys from the prologue, who attack Thomas
using the ancient "raised-arm hug of death" technique.

At the end of each level, a different Kung-Fu Bad Guy must be
defeated before you can move on, and all your favorites are here:
Beating You With A Stick Guy, Boomerang Guy, Wizard Guy, Freakishly Big
Guy, and, of course, Mr. X himself.

Kids today might like it because: Okay, we all know that she’s
just a cartoon, but holy shit, is Silvia hot. She’s got this totally
sexy china-doll thing going on, and that silk dress is just—what?

Now check this little bit that had to be cut for space, which my editor and I both thought was funny. From Gameplay:

Level one is pretty easy, but starting at level two, Jumping Midget Guy will join Knife Throwing guy and the Unknown Guys, and they’ll have help from the various Jars of Death: snake-releasing jar, fire-breathing dragon jar, and deadly exploding confetti ball, uh, jar.

Hyuck. Hyuck. Hyuck.

Remember this game when it was on NES? I remember playing it like crazy, marvelling at how much it was like the arcade version. In fact, the only real difference between Nintendo’s Kung-Fu and Irem’s Kung-Fu Master is the graphics. The game played almost exactly the same at home as it did in the arcade, and if you played it on PlayChoice10, it was identical.

Do you associate certain games with certain arcades or places?

• Donkey Kong will forever be associated with Verdugo Bowling Alley in La Crescenta, because that’s where I first saw it. In fact, I thought it was some weird bowling game because the barrells on level one look like bowling balls, if you’re nine years old and in a bowling alley.

• Centipede will always be Shakeys Pizza in Tujunga, where this young couple in their 20s let me play their last man at the cocktail version because their pizza was ready, and Ms. Pac-Man will always be associated with this head shop in Sunland, where I got to the pretzel level on the first try.

• Super Pac-Man, Defender, Gyruss, and Mouse Trap take me back to Sunland Discount Variety and Hober’s Pharmacy (they’ve become interchangable in my memory) and Donkey Kong Country on SNES will always remind me of when I lived in
  Nice, France, during production of Mr. Stitch, and my brother and I
  beat it when my family came out to vist me for Christmas.

• Crystal Castles is Alladin’s Castle at the mall in Eugene, Oregon, during the filming of Stand By Me, and Burger Time and Tutankham will always remind me of the smell of chlorine and concrete, from the basement-level pool at the Eugene Hilton.

Funny, just writing about those places I can almost conjure up sense-memories, like smells and other ephemeral things that I can’t quite put into words but I can feel, but I can’t quite make them out, like the boobie channel on cable in 1984 that was scrambled but would occasionally resove into view for two or three glorious seconds, which would be the subject of much discussion the next day at school.

There are also all these games that just remind me of the happiness of my childhood, too: Journey, Riddle of the Sphinx, and Dodge-Em on Atari 2600, and the robot gyroscope game, Excitebike, and Super Mario Brothers (the turtle trick!) on NES are just a few. Writing about those, I can feel the orange shag carpet at the house in Sunland, the blue berber carpet in La Crescenta, and I can see the little television in my friend’s bedroom where we played RC Pro-Am until we had "NES Thumb."

The kids and I bought this game controller thing in the mall a few weeks ago that has a ton of NES games built into it. It has Kung Fu, Ice Climber, Duck Hunt and Hogan’s Alley, Contra, and a bunch of other NES classics. It is the most fun to play these games that I played from 8th-10th grade at every opportunity, with my kids (I just had this flash: after ten years, I think they’re finally okay with me calling them my "kids" instead of my "step-kids" – that’s awesome) who are just as excited to play these games with me as I was to play them with my friends when I was their age.

You know what I need to find and play again? Castlevania.