Voodoo Time Dot Com

Whilst shopping at a fine boutique last week, I happened across a disc for the Sony Playstation 2 containing several games ported from the original Atari 2600 game system. State of the art in 1984, these games are hardly recognizable as such after these twenty years of non-stop innovation. Nonetheless, these blocky eight-color images blipping and blooping across the screen are part of my childhood. I tend to get really excited about these kinds of things, so I bought it.

In the early days of video games, the technology was pretty primitive. The earliest example of a mass-produced home video game system was Pong - introduced by Atari and distributed almost exclusively by Sears in 1975. For a retail price of US$200-$300, the first units played only one game - a modified ping-pong in black and white. It was a phenomenon. Soon after, in 1977, Atari introduced the VCS, later known as the 2600. If Pong was a phenomenon, the 2600 was nothing less than a cultural sensation. The 2600 was a bit more complex than the clunky Pong units, but not by much. Most 2600 games consisted of vague, blocky shapes chasing, or attempting to escape from other vague, blocky shapes. Dragons were indistinguishable from ducks without the aid of the small manuals that explained everything. The graphics and sound were poor. The bad games looked just like the good ones.

The Activision Anthology package includes more than 45 games - and not a single instruction manual. Some of the games are fun, and some are completely lame. After spending a couple of hours running my square protagonists aimlessly around their little square worlds, I came to wonder if maybe I had been a little too excited about this find. Somehow I remember these games being absolutely fascinating. But after all the years, I’m having trouble seeing these little marvels as I did then. I tried to cut a small slice of my childhood. And it was sweet, but it just didn’t taste the same.

These experiences usually fall shy of my lofty expectations. Much of the magic is gone from those sights and sounds. They say you can never go home again, and from what I’ve seen, I suspect they’re right. Those things and those places aren’t magical anymore, because they’re not mine. They belong to this little freckled kid with a ridiculous cow-lick. He has his pants tucked into his socks, and he’s running around with a broom handle he’s calling a “lightsaber”. He’s the king of his world. He wakes up at dawn and never wants to go to bed. He’s a being of pure energy, and as such, he’s completely ethereal and inscrutable. I can see him only in moments, but can never grasp him. There is magic there, but the magic is in him - not in those things that surround him. The wand is only magic in the hands of the sorceror.

Yet, I continue to haunt those places he used to walk, and I sometimes try to find just a little bit of magic in the things he left behind. Sometimes I get lucky.

Bye for now.

As seen on Slashdot today:

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts:

“Well”, says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, but you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault.”

Now you understand why I am so bitter and surly.

Our friend Cait has found my cat alter-ego in “Voodoo” the cat. Voodoo is dressed in pirate garb, which only goes to further my suspicions that cats are, by nature, scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells. But, while most cats try to pull one over on us by being cute and playing innocuously with balls of yarn, Voodoo makes no qualms about who he is. Voodoo does not want to play with you. In fact, if Voodoo had not lost his vessel in a high-stakes poker game in some Caribbean pirates’ cove, he would keel haul you in a second. Voodoo is one scurvy dog of a cat.

Meanwhile, he’s just biding his time… and eating fancy cat food from one of those crystal bowls like you see in the commercials. Arrrrrgh!

Wow - looks like it’s been a while since I’ve put anything new up here. I have a good reason though. I didn’t feel like it. Honestly… I just couldn’t be bothered. But I know you’ll forgive me, because you’ve all come to expect this kind of flaky behavior in these nearly two years I’ve been doing this. If you’re angry, blame it on The Real World, which has a way of cutting into my goof-off-online time.

Speaking of The Real World, I’ve been spending a lot more time in it lately. Recently, my wife and I have been lamenting the ever-increasing sizes of our respective asses. The first step in realizing our goal of achieving smaller asses is to spend less time sitting on said asses. Less ass time means less time for writing on this weblog. After all, the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. There is wisdom here. Call it derriere Taoism.

Today, for example, we spent the day at the Los Angeles County Irish Fair and Music Festival. This is one of those things where you head out to a fairgrounds in the middle of the desert and drink over-priced (but quite good) beer and listen to raucous neo-celtic rock bands, cheered on by legions of revelers wearing newly-purchased kilts in honor of their 1/16 Irish heritage. But it was a good time, and I didn’t get sunburnt.

This new cultural awareness movement is interesting. It seems that after 200 years of the “melting pot” mentality in which long Polish names became short anglicized names with a more favorable vowel to consonant ratio, there is now this drive to reclaim all this lost ethnicity. Just 100 years ago, “No Irish Need Apply.” But now Americans by the thousands are attempting to rediscover the history our grandparents worked so hard to put behind them. It can go too far, certainly, but overall I think it’s healthy enough. Anytime I get to eat sausage and drink beer, how can it be other than a good thing? Still, it’s probably also a good thing that St. Patrick’s Day and Oktoberfest are half a year apart.

So, anyway, I’m back from the dead. And hopefully, I will be spending a bit more time on the site from now on. And maybe I’ll even come up with something funny to write about soon, but I’m not making any promises. Either way, I’ll talk to y’all soon.

Bye for now.