Day 244: Blockheads Of The World Unite! The Tetris Story

Originally published August 31, 2012 It was the summer of 1989. Tone Loc was doing his Wild Thing on the radio, western civilization was somehow finding its way forward after the series finale of Moonlighting, and a 14-year-old me wandered into an arcade on the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver. I remember the […]

Day 227: The Hasbro Conspiracy

originally published August 14, 2012 On the surface, Hasbro brings joy and smiles to hundreds of billions of people every second by giving Shortcake to our Strawberry, Action to our Figures, Ladders to our Chutes, and Head to our Mr. Potato. But underneath lies something more insidious, more… well, I don’t want to say evil, […]

Day 226: How Kids In The 70s Slew Computer-Generated Dragons

originally published August 13, 2012 For as long as they have had the ability, people have yearned to escape their drab lives by crafting a more interesting one inside a video game. But imagining yourself as a large yellow circle-portion, munching on white Tylenols whilst being chased by a bunch of ghosts out of a […]

Day 206: Pog-Slamming – Not As Dirty As it Sounds

originally published July 24, 2012 When would be the perfect era to come of age? To be college-age amid the debauchery of the 1960s? Old enough to drink illegally in the 1920s? Or should we envy the youth of today, who are growing up with a virtually endless trove of pornography but a mouse-click away? […]

Day 175: An Uppercut To My Youth

originally published June 23, 2012 This will come a shock to those who know me well: I was never really much of a fighter. I know, my physique has been compared to a young-ish Raymond Burr (he was an athlete of some kind, right?), yet I still never got into a lot of fights. That […]

Day 166: Let’s Make A Probability Puzzle

originally published June 14, 2012 I may have unearthed the most lengthy and mind-taxing article in Wikipedia about goats. Seriously, this thing reads like a textbook chapter, delving into variants, theorems, and something called the quantum version. It even features this: I’ll be ignoring that portion. Today we’re dealing with logic and, to a lesser […]

Day 159: Playing With Your Pee

originally published June 7, 2012 Tired of peeing like a common schnook? Do I have a treat for you. If you’re like me, and I believe wholeheartedly that you totally are, you find urinating to be a dull, uninspiring task. “Why is it,” I have often asked myself, out loud and in a mezzo-soprano Scottish […]

Day 150: Operation – A Game Of Skill, Patience, And CRAP! I Hit The Buzzer!

originally published May 29, 2012 If you grew up in western society during the last 50 years, chances are you have spent some fraction of your time on Earth hunched over a cardboard human with a red plastic nose, steadying your tweezer hand while digging for a plastic wishbone tucked within his innards. Maybe you […]

Day 147: Spoiling Magic – Three Card Tricks To Impress The Young Or Feeble-Minded

originally published May 26, 2012 Wikipeida is not merely a wonderful resource for information and finding out if old celebrities are still alive (you go, Abe Vigoda!), but it can also be employed to shatter childhood wonder. Gone are the days when some guy in a top hat can convince me that there are otherworldly […]

Day 127: Bad Video Game Art

originally published May 6, 2012 Are video games an art form? If you ask Roger Ebert, his answer would be a resounding “no.” But I would argue that there is art involved in the game world, whether it’s designing a likeable protagonist character, an immersive and often colorful environment, and even in designing the game’s […]