8/20/13 - Exclamation Point!

Warning sign. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I really hate people who feel the need to mark their emails as High Importance. Not once have I ever received a High Importance email that was any more important than the countless other emails filling my inbox. That little red exclamation point sticking out like a sore thumb on my Outlook screen doesn't scream "Hurry, this is important!" Instead, it just sticks out like a big red middle finger and says to me, "Oh look, another self-important asshole who thinks their email holds greater precedence over anything else you might be receiving this morning. Also, they apparently don't trust you to read and respond to their email on your own, so have provided a handy visual aide to assist you in prioritizing your electronic correspondence. Best skip this one for now." Unless you're warning me of an impending meteor strike or have some lab results that are going to rock my world (in which case I would assume a phone call would be more direct and productive), just leave your little "Look at Me!" alert in your bag of email tricks. Dick.

My Life in Video Games: Pong (1972, Atari)

Recently, I've found myself looking rather closely at the video games I play these days, and contemplating how drastically they've changed in the last thirty or forty years, and what it was that I apparently spent hours upon hours playing back in the old days. Just thinking back and comparing some of them led me to the idea of tracking my life by the video games I have played over the years. Not just any video games appearing on the timeline since my birth, mind you, but specific ones that I have special memories of, or that consumed massive amounts of hours of my childhood (and adulthood) over the years. I'm not a gaming geek or a tech head, mind you. Just somebody that grew up in the culture of electronic entertainment, and was lucky enough to be born into the era of Video Games.

I'm so lucky, in fact (if you can call it that), that I can trace the beginning of my interest in video games back to the beginning of video games themselves. Or, more precisely, My first video game was the world's first video game: Pong.
 

That's right, I'm old enough to remember Pong. And the only thing that makes me feel old more than saying "I'm old enough to remember Pong" is when I say "I'm old enough to remember Pong," and somebody old enough to drive says "What in the hell is Pong?"

I was born the year after Pong hit the shelves, and my parents, young and married freshly out of High School, owned a Pong system. I remember playing it on a small, round, silver television with built-in rabbit ears on a rotating base; it looked like a robot head, and Google refuses to find a picture of it for me, no matter combination of search criteria I enter. The system had switches that allowed to change the size of the "paddles" and, I believe, the speed of the ball. I also recall that you could switch between two or three different Pong-related games, whatever the hell those were, but for the most part that switch stayed set to Pong. The controls, which we also called paddles, and which I also can't find a picture of, were hand grips with a big wheel on top that you would twist to move their namesakes on screen. Years after the pong system was defunct, the weird dial-topped hand grips served as props for many imaginary childhood games. I guess as far as controllers go, we've come full circle with the Wii.

I'm not sure how old I was, but I was definitely very young, since the new age of video gaming was right around the corner. But I do still remember playing for hours on end, entertained simply by the notion that I was controlling what was happening on the screen. There were even Easter Eggs in Pong, so to speak; there was a certain thrill in getting the paddles to line up just right, so that the ball would bounce back and forth on its own, stuck in loop produced by the low-rent electronic duplication of physics.

English: Atari Super Pong (model C-140) - First era console of 1976. It has 4 Pong games (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The mind reels at the lack of choice involved with setting up a game. These days, you can spend hours creating characters, sometimes worlds, before settling down to business. With Pong, the only decision you need to make with your gaming partner was who would be sitting on the left or right. There weren't even colors to choose from! That's right: challenging somebody to a game of checkers involved more decisions than squaring of on a Pong tournament.

Forget the minimalist black-and-white playing fields, what about the audio? Video games today have their own soundtracks, and ambient background noises can sound like they're coming from right behind you. What did you listen to while playing Pong? Just a steady, almost metronome rhythm of electronic beeps whenever the electronic ball bounced off a paddle or the walls of your television screen. They didn't even bother trying to make it a pleasant sound, they just through in an electronic bleating that almost sounded like an alarm clock trying to wake you up one beat at a time. Maybe it's because I was still too young to appreciate a good stereo system, but never even occurred to me to listen to music when I played. Just me and some other giddily tortured soul, staring intently at moving white dots and lines for hours on end, listening to the beeps as if they were an integral part of the game.

It's almost not fair to compare Pong with today's cornucopia of ultra-realistic video games. There are a lot of things from the seventies that seem completely ridiculous now (in fairness, some of them were), especially when it comes to electronics and entertainment media. It's easy to overlook the importance of the wheel's invention when today's concerns focus on miles per gallon (highway) or fossil fuel versus green energy. Then again, kids do tend to amuse easily, so maybe I'm making too much out of it. But yeah, I rocked the paddles big-time way back then. Thus was born the first generation of Video Gamers.

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2/13: Duck Sauce, Paper Routes, Doppelgangers and Google

duck sauce SQ (Photo credit: wintersoul1)

While trading instant messages back and forth with my fellow employees the other day, I made a startling discovery upon sending the message "I'll take car of it, I'm all over it like Duck Sauce." Apparently, the 'U' and 'I' keys are far closer together than I previously suspected.

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I received a reminder last week of just how desperate I had been to find an alternative to my previous job. A call came in on my cell while at my new job: it was from the Morning Call (a local newspaper), asking if I was still interested in a paper delivery route.

Have I mentioned that I love my new job?

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I've decided to run for Mayor. I am going to run as two separate candidates, one Democrat, the other Republican. For one I will appear clean shaven and use my proper name; for the other, I will wear a large fake mustache and goatee, and reverse the order of my first and last names. Print advertising will be plentiful, and I will call impromptu press conferences frequently, during which I will always make slanderous accusations of my rival and openly challenge him to a public debate.

When canvasing towns for votes, I will go through a neighborhood ringing doorbells and answering questions as one candidate, then immediately circle through the same streets as the other and demand to know what attacks my opponent has been leveling at me. Whenever anybody points out that we look alike, I will take great offense and go on a lengthy diatribe about my opponents unsavory facial features and personal grooming habits.

On the night of the election, I will immediately call for a recount, claim rampant voter fraud, and immediately concede in disgust, vowing to never run again. Unless my opponent throws his hat into the ring again, of course.

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I refuse to click the Google logo anymore. I don't need this kind of entertaining distraction when I'm running a search for the latest nude celebrity photos at three in the morning.

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