Category: Games

I went to the mall this weekend to buy Dead Rising, to use in my next GiR, which will be the now-annual Creepy, Geeky Games feature, and ended up with fodder for this week’s column while I was there:

Geek in Review: Carded
My wife and I are both in our mid-thirties. We have two kids, one of
whom is in college, but we must look young, because we still get carded
in restaurants, bars, and even at the market. It happens so frequently,
we’ve made it into a contest, to see who can get carded most often, and
in the most unlikely circumstances.

This last weekend, I pulled ahead in our contest, when I was carded at the mall, while attempting to buy a video game.

“Wait.” I said to the cashier. “You’re carding me for a video game?”

“Yeah,” he said, “It’s an M-rated game. I have to.”

“I’m 35,” I said. “This is hilarious.”

“I’m sorry, but my manager is standing right there, so . . .” he said.

“Well, I don’t want to be a dick, and I don’t want to get you into any
trouble.” I said. I reached into my wallet and handed him my ID. “But
isn’t this sort of lame?”

The manager nodded. “It’s the stupidest thing in the world, and it’s all because of the Grand Theft Auto thing.”

I submitted my story to Propeller, if you think it’s worth a vote.

I don’t have as much time to play poker as I did in days gone by, but I still love a good game of cards, whether I’m sitting at a kitchen table with my friends, a casino with strangers, or at PokerStars.

A few years ago, PokerStars started this freeroll (that’s what you call a tournament where you don’t pay anything to enter, but there’s still a big pile of money to win) for bloggers, called the World Blogger Championship of Online Poker. I played in it when I was on Team PokerStars, and I’m pretty excited to play in it this year as one of the thousands of bloggers hoping to scoop up part of the prize pool.

Anyone with a blog can enter the tournament. All you have to do is sign up and paste some code into your blog that gives the following SEOtastic result:

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 5575088

And as long as we’re talking about poker, if I convinced PokerStars to
do a freeroll for people who signed up via my blog, would you all come out
and play in it?

I just came across some video of my PAX keynote:

This is me talking about the first time I played NES, with my brother, in a department store. It contains what is probably my favorite line of the entire keynote.

I watched a lot of video from PAX while I was supposed to be working on my GiR today (which actually makes sense, and fits this week’s column) and was viscerally reminded of how much fun I had there. If you can only attend one convention a year, make it PAX. Trust me.