WWdN: In Exile

more eighties video game nostalgia

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.

defining a blog

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.

less than you think

 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.

essential reading for aspiring writers from scalzi

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.

strange as angels dancing in the deepest oceans

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.

Seeking a potential Marrow Donor

One of my fellow Los Angeles Poker Bloggers, StudioGlyphic (who won the WPBT Winter Classic last December) is looking for some help for one of his friends, whose girlfriend is very sick with cancer, and desperately needs a bone marrow transplant to survive. The odds of finding a donor match are about 1:20,000, but this girl's odds are even longer because she is Fillipino:

Medically, the only option Christine has left is a Bone Marrow Transplant. The survival rate of this procedure is 30-40%. Of those who do survive the procedure itself, only 50% survive the next two years. However, if she does survive those two years, it means the cancer won't come back.

This is a pretty terrible option. However, the non medical option is also horrible. Her doctor says that if she chooses not to have the Bone Marrow Transplant, she'll be dead within a year.

This is hard enough for the average person. There are over 20,000 types of bone marrow, so the average person has a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding a match. These numbers are even worse for Christine. Because she is Filipino, she needs to find a donor of the same ethnic background, and there are hardly any Filipinos on the National Registry.

Because we caught the cancer early, right now is our best chance of having the Bone Marrow Transplant work. Every day we lose her chances of surviving drop.

So please, contact your friends, and ask them to contact their friends. Anyone you know who is Filipino and between the ages of 18 and 61 is a potential donor. The system is nationwide, so it doesn't matter where they live. Signing up on the registry is easy and painless. All it requires is a simple blood test. Some hospitals charge a small fee for this blood test, however if your friends contact me directly, I can put them in touch with one of the hundreds of local organizations that will do the blood test for free. They can use this email address:

jacobkrueger@gmail.com

You can reassure your friends that signing up for the registry does not require donating any bone marrow. If it turns out they are a match, they will be contacted, and can make the decision at that point about becoming a donor.

There are lots of misconceptions about donating bone marrow. (I know I was terrified of doing it before I learned how minor the procedure actually is.) The procedure is simple and safe. You will be anesthetized the whole time, so you will not feel anything. When the procedure is over, you may have some soreness in the area for a few days and you may feel a little tired. That's it. The bone marrow you donate is replenished within 3-4 weeks. And again, you will only undergo this procedure if your blood sample shows that you are a match and you decide to donate, in which case the slight soreness you'll be feeling will be saving someone's life.

All medical expenses for the donor will be covered by Christine's insurance. And as I mentioned before, if they contact me directly, I can put them in touch with an organization near them that will put them on the National Registry for free and also make sure they are listed as a Sponsor for Christine.

Even if you aren't a match yourself, and even if you can't personally help Christine, please link to this post, and spread the word around. I know there are about a million of you who read this lame blog every month, and if just half of you make some effort to spread the word around, we may be able to help save Christine's life.

if i could only make time stand still for a moment

Unless I crash into something that makes me think, "OMG I HAVE TO BLOG THIS RIGHT NOW KTHXBYELOLORZ," I find that it's much easier for me to write in the very early morning, or very late at night. Sitting down here in the middle of the day is a little weird, and I don't quite know where I'm going to go. (I guess this thought process is not exactly the sort of thing one writes down when attempting to engage an audience, huh?)

Ah! I know where I'll start!

To continue this week's, uh, theme: why am I pushing myself to write for at least ten minutes a day?

Because I've done so much writing lately that isn't really story-telling, those muscles have atrophied quite a bit. Because somedays there just isn't anything obviously worth writing about, and on those days I have to dig a little deeper for something that's at least moderately interesting to me. Because it's easier for me to write when I fell happy than when I feel sad, and blogging every single day has the bonus side effect of making me seek out and focus on happier things. I find that I appreciate things much more, and that I'm more observant of the things around me, because I'm always on the look out for something cool to write about.

A friend of mine who is a hell of a writer once told me that being a writer can make otherwise emotional and sensitive people become detached and distant, because we're so busy observing things, we forget to experience them. After this week, I totally grok that. On the one hand, it's important to always have my senses as open as possible, but at the same time, I can't lose the forest for the trees.

Okay, navel-gazing over.

Last night, my friend Kevin came over to have dinner with us. Kevin and I have been really good friends for over a decade, but as we've grown older and our various commitments have grown larger, we have had less and less time to hang out. In fact, before last night, I hadn't seen Kevin in over three years, which meant I hadn't met his girlfriend (we love her, by the way), who he decided to bring with him at just about the last minute, turning our "let's get together with Kevin" dinner into a "oh my god we're having a new person into the house quick get the vaccuum and I'll clean the bathroom" experience.

It was totally worth it. Not only did we get a nice clean house in forty-five minutes, we had a really great time, and it was quite amusing to watch my two teenaged boys deal with the presense of a very pretty 20-something girl in their house.

After dinner, I played in the WWdN Thursday night game at PokerStars (where I busted out early because I made the mistake of getting my money in as a dominating favorite) while Anne and the kids watched CSI. The kids went to sleep around ten, and Anne stayed to watch Without A Trace, so I grabbed The Dark Tower, which I've been close to finishing for several days now, and settled into the couch to finish it.

You know, one of my strongest criticisms of Stephen King is that he just can't end a story, and the closer I got to the final page of this one, the more knotted my stomach became. I've invested at least fifteen years in this series, and I was really worried that I was going to feel the way I felt when I finished It. I won't get into specifics, because publishing spoilers totally fucking sucks, but I can honestly say that I was not disappointed with the way The Dark Tower finally ended, and I appreciated Stephen King's honesty about it in the afterword very much. It's far from perfect, especially what would be the last two reels if it was a movie, but it was still a satisfying finish for me, and I felt like all the characters I'd grown to care so much about were given the appropriate resolutions.

How's that for muddled?

Speakng of caring about characters, Nolan has been absolutely glued to this book called Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson. As a writer, parent, and book-lover, I can tell you that there are few things as wonderful as seeing him turn off the TV and walk away from Xbox so he can read this book. Last night, he came up to me with a pale face, and red eyes and said, in a quivering voice, "My book just got really sad. A boy I cared a lot about died."

He could have been telling me about the loss of a friend. I felt like I should hug him.

"I totally understand," I said, and pointed to my copy of The Dark Tower, "One of my favorite characters in this book died about two hundred pages ago, and I felt like I'd lost a friend."

"It's weird how a book can make you feel that way," he said.

"I think it's really wonderful that you are sensitive and intelligent enough to let a writer affect you like that, Nolan," I said, "that makes me feel really good as a writer and as a parent."

"You should totally read this book, Wil," he said, "and Speak, too. You'd really like them."

"Okay," I said, "your recommendation means a lot to me. I'll put them into my pile."

He ran into his room, and came out with Speak. He handed it to me, and I saw what a beautiful forest I was in. I marveled at every single tree.

attention european poker players!

I run these weekly tourneys at PokerStars, at 5:30 PST on Tuesday and 8:30 PST on Thursday.

These games are filled with a really cool mix of players from hee-haw (me) to HAWESOME (GRob) and everywhere in between (Pauly, CJ, PokerGeek, Heather), but there aren't that many players from the other side of the pond, because the game just starts too damn late for them.

Tomorrow, I've cleared a couple of hours in the middle of my morning, so I can host a game specifically designed to be Eurofriendly. In fact, it's called WWdN: Eurofriendly Friday.

If you're interested in playing, head over to PokerStars, and from the lobby go to tourneys -> private, and look for tourney number 19345283. The buy-in is $10 +1, and the game starts at 1:30 PM EST (5:30 PM GMT) which should make it "friendly" for the bulk of European players.

i'm on slice of sci-fi number forty-three

Last week, I spoke with Michael and Evo for their Slice of Sci-Fi podcast. Our interview is around twenty minutes or so, I guess, and is included in Episode #43.

I dig their podcast, and I especially dig how they've built the website for Slice of Sci-Fi. I think I'm going to steal take a lot of inspiration from their design when I make Radio Free Burrito a real, once-a-week, I'm-serious-about-this-after-all podcast.

it's just another day

This morning, my ten-minutes-a-day thing is kind of a challenge, because there's really nothing to write about. Honestly. Nothing has happened since yesterday that I can make even remotely interesting.

I thought about joking, thusly:

So long, suckers!

I sat down to check e-mail this morning, and discovered that I hit the trifecta: I won a lottery in New Zealand, another one in Nigeria, and got an offer to become the legal guardian for some Irish billionaire who'll give me a whole bunch of money just for showing up.

If anyone needs me, I'll be under a pile of money.

But that's cheap and too easy, and I wasn't really willing to go all the way with it and tell you about how I'm going to have the biggest penis in the universe that's built for maximum loving, daring . . .  so I'll see if I can dig anything else interesting out of my skull.

. . .

. . .

. . .

Nope. Nothing.

OH! I know. I'm quite proud of this week's Games of our Lives, which is a game called Astro Fighter. I wish you'd all go over to the AV Club to read it. Thankyouverymuch.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day writing next week's Games of our Lives, as well as a review of a new game (I probably shouldn't discuss specifics right now) but it was really fun to pick a classic arcade game that dovetailed with the current console game I reviewed.

When I was done with that, I did a short training walk with Anne and the dogs. We're nowhere near running, yet, but it still feels great to get out and walk every single day.

OH! This is cool: Anne, the kids, and I are going to run in the 10th Annual Race For the Cure at the Rosebowl on February 26th. We did it last year, and it was Hawesome. We're not going to do any fundraising for this race, but we will be fundraising for the RnR Marathon later this year. I am planning some REALLY cool fundraising events, and I've even convinced Anne to write in a special blog that we're building just for that.

Of course, if any of you reading this are interested in contributing $5 or $10 for the Race for the Cure, I bet we could raise a few hundred dollars for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. If you're interested, send me an e-mail or mention it in comments, and we'll figure out a way to take your donation. In fact, now that I think about it, it would be Hawesome (and probably pretty easy) to raise at least $500 in tiny donations, if the stats about people who read my blog are true.

Okay, so this entry isn't entirely lame, and at least I've stayed on target for writing something every morning. That's helping wake up the part of my creative monkey that needs to be jumping around my head to finish the book.