I watched a documentary a bit ago on the Baltimore Colts marching band, which I guess continued to exist after the Colts left town for Indianapolis in 1984. (It was part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” series. I find that even though I don’t like or understand all sports, I love pretty much any well-done documentary about sports, and all of these have been excellent.) The story itself was interesting, but what caught me was the 1984-ness of it, and the fact that I only peripherally remember football coming to Indiana. (I only remember it at all because my mom still bought my school clothes for me when I was in like the 8th grade, and she got me a Colts shirt, and this was the season when they went like 4-12, and dressing your kid in a Colts shirt and sending them to school was a virtual death sentence, probably two steps worse than dressing them in blackface and a Confederate uniform and dropping them off at an inner-city.) But some of the footage pulled my memories back to that time window for whatever reason, that era when I was in junior high and the EPCOT center was brand new and the future, and everyone thought “The Superbowl Shuffle” was cool as hell.

I guess I don’t think of the difference between network TV news now and then until I see old newsreel. I don’t know if it’s the timely look of the reporters - the hair, the clothes - or if it’s something about the production values. Like, when it was the late 80s/early 90s, I don’t remember thinking “this looks horrible”, but now when I go back to a TV show of that era and see everyone with the giant, giant glasses (like I had) and the sweaters over their shoulder and the generated graphics that look like they were done on a ColecoVision, I think “what the fuck were people thinking?”  I never turn on the TV news now and think “wow, this looks 100% different than it did last week”, but then I see a clip from 1995 and it looks like it could have been produced on 1947 equipment.

There are a couple of things I immediately think about from that period. One is the Fiero. I don’t know why, but I really wanted a Fiero when they came out in 1983. It was like the future of cars to me, and the way they marketed it, they made perfect sense: the slick design, the EnduraFlex body panels, the Italian-style mid-engine, only two seats. I didn’t care that you could only carry one bag of groceries in it, and I didn’t know anything about the engine fires or the fact that the whole drivetrain was cobbled together from the leftovers of a Chevette and a Citation, and performed accordingly. I just remember getting a glossy brochure when I saw one at the Concord Mall, and I memorized the thing, wishing that after the four years or so passed when I got my license, I’d somehow magically get the money to get such a cool and futuristic car.

The Fiero shared the philosophy of a sports-only car like the Corvette, the “fuck you, family man - it’s a two-seater”, and it had the styling of the Pontiac Trans Am, the Knight Rider car, but in a smaller cousin. And this was an era when people in Detroit were trying to put performance back in cars. Every coked-out Miami Vice wannabe person rich off of Reagan-era stock market rapings was going out and picking up a Ferrari. And the big three were coming off of a horrible decade where performance cars were all but killed by wimpy engines and EPA guidelines and DOT requirements. But Delorean was trying to win people over with his future (albeit underpowered) car; the Knight Rider third-gen F-body was on the road; and the high-end Vettes were getting into fuel injection and computer controls that would usher in a new era of performance. It was the start of a good time.

Another consumer mind bug that caught me back then was the Apple IIc. I had a love/hate relationship with the Apple; my schools always had them, and when I got a crack at them, they were always great, but they cost an insane amount of money, at least compared to the Commodore and Atari computers built up around the same 6502 CPU. But then Apple released this new machine, essentially a portable “all-in-one” version of the II line. And once again, I got a slick multi-page brochure booklet, maybe at the mall, maybe at Templin’s Music, which sold some computer stuff (although they mostly stocked Atari gear.) The brochure was part an implementation of Apple’s Snow White industrial design language in the form of a pamphlet, and part the genius marketing philosophy Apple was hacking out back then. And for whatever reason, I pored over this book, and tried to count out the number of lawns I’d need to mow to get one of these things to myself.

The genius of the IIc was that it heavily advertised itself as a “portable,” but it was, at best, a “luggable.” The computer did seal in everything that came with a IIe into a single eight-pound unit, maybe two or three times the size of a large laptop, but that didn’t include the power supply or monitor. Back then, they announced a small LCD screen that would sit on top of the computer, and had the same snow white design.  It didn’t solve the problem that you had to haul around a giant power brick and be within arm’s reach of 110 AC (or bring along a Honda generator).  Also, from everything I’ve heard, those LCD screens completely sucked.  But those shots of the IIc plus LCD looked absolutely mind-blowing to me, especially since I spent forever hauling around my Commodore and earlier Aquarius, jumper-cabling them onto my dad or grandma’s TV sets on the every-other weekend divorced child shuffle. In fact, the Commodore was infinitely more portable than the IIc, but the Apple looked like a cleaner solution. And it had a floppy disk built into its side, which was a first at the time.  (And yes, I know they made a luggable version of the C-64 with a built-in monitor and 1541 drive, but that was way out of my price range.  And a quick look at eBay shows that they still are.)

I never got a IIc.  I spent a lot of time on the IIe and IIgs at school, but never even saw a IIc during that timeframe.  Years later, when I worked at Wards, this girl Michelle had one, and once she talked me into coming over to tutor her on BASIC for some class she was taking at IUSB. Of course, they were using GW-BASIC, probably on the piece of shit Leading Edge computers I’d later have to maintain when I worked at IUSB, and she had the Apple IIc, which was just different enough BASIC-wise to throw off the whole damn thing. We sat in her bedroom, hacking away at it, and I don’t remember how I felt about the computer, although it wasn’t a slam dunk like the brochure made me think.  (And there’s part of me that thought this tutoring session was about more than just computer tutoring, but I was so stupid about the opposite sex back then, even if she chained me to a wall and started raping me, I’d still be like, “wait a second, we could use a GOSUB here and save five lines of code.”)

I never got a Fiero, either. When I lived in New York, I would occasionally see one on eBay and wonder if I should jump on it. The interiors look really dated now, the boxy gauge panel, the 85 MPH speedo. Most people bought these things either to become donors for some kind of kit car (Ferrari, Lambo, etc) or to drop a V-8 into and completely fuck up the balance of the thing. I still wonder about doing a full restoration on one, keeping the sleek exterior body but maybe transplanting in some 21st century powerplant and a real suspension system, plus a cool digital dash and some modern sound system bits.  And then I start thinking about buying a 1970 Z28 and a 2011 Camaro, and taking the body of the ‘70 and putting it on the fuel-injected, 4-wheel ABS, all-modern electronics chassis of the 2011.  And then I remember that I drive about 40 miles a month now, and even vacuuming the floor mats of my current car is way beyond my patience level, let alone some extreme welding project involving $30,000 of shit I’d have to scrounge off the internet or at junk yards across the country.

And now I need to close the damn eBay window, and stop looking for a cheap SX-64, or even worse, a cheap PSOne monitor and C-64 innards in order to roll my own C-64 laptop.  It’s better for me to fire up x64 in an emulator window and get bored of it after ten minutes.  Or even better, I could shut off all of this and actually WRITE.

I don’t know how I remembered it, and managed to do the time calculation correctly, but last week, about five minutes before it happened, I suddenly realized it was the day of the last Discovery Space Shuttle launch.  And my Roku box now has the NASA channel (which will be essentially useless after this mission, except to maybe watch some scientist drone through a powerpoint on why some speck of dust on a telescope’s long shot is relevant.)  So I fired that up, and watched the stack sit on the pad down in Florida, and waited for the countdown, and thought about that stupid Rush song, but also thought about how I watched the very first Shuttle mission as a kid, and now I’d be watching one of the very last ones.

It’s pretty cliche to talk about how we’d all have jetpacks by now or be able to go out to LaGuardia and catch an American Airlines flight to Mars three times a day in 2011.  I spent a lot of time in those pre-Shuttle years as a nerdy kid reading every single book I could find about the Apollo and Skylab.  And it always disappointed me that the era right before I was born had tons of launches, capsules that orbited the planet and launched to the Moon and back.  And in my childhood, we had a space station made out of leftover junk from moon missions that only got any name recognition whatsoever when it finally fell out of the sky.  Meanwhile, the evil Soviet empire was sending cosmonauts up there constantly, living for years in those Soyuz orbiters, eating tubes of borscht in zero G and laughing their asses off at us Yankee bastards.

The Shuttle was a big deal for me as a kid.  I spent all of my time playing with a Millennium Falcon, thinking that if the Space Shuttle got off the ground in ‘81, by the time I got my driver’s license in ‘87, they’d have a ton of those things in the air like Southwest currently has crappy Boeings criss-crossing amongst second-tier airports, and by the time I finished college and entered the much-distant 21st century, it would be no problemo jumping on a high-speed train to O’Hare spaceport and getting on a commercial flight to the moon for a long weekend.  So I was riveted to those early launches, the long delays and the shaky cameras from a distance.  I guess they flew the tail end of the Apollo missions when I was a baby, and Skylab and that joint Apollo/Soviet flight went up in the early 70s, but the grade school didn’t drag out the giant wood-encased TV on a cart from the AV room for those ones.  This was live, and real, and we all stared at the video footage of this tiny airplane-looking thing shoot an insane amount of white smoke and orange flame as it crept upward from the Florida swamp and into orbit.

We watched a couple of those launches back in the 4th or 5th grade, and then it seemed like a Shuttle was going up every other month.  It was really 24 missions between the start and the loss of the Challenger, but they had four Shuttles going at once, and it pretty much fell out of the news unless you dug for it.  This was long before the days when you could fire up google and point your browser to all sorts of time-wasting distractions detailing every small aspect of manned space flight; typically, the Elkhart Truth would run a paragraph or two per launch, buried somewhere after the local bowling scores.  To get any real news, I had to go to Osco Drugs and hunt down a copy of Omni magazine, which typically included a ton of articles on mind-melding and peyote experiments and whatever the hell else they used to write back then.

I didn’t think much about the Shuttle for a while, but when I was a sophomore in college and bored out of my mind at IUSB, I discovered usenet news, and spent a lot of time reading the sci.space newsgroup.  The one thing I loved about it was this guy Henry Spencer at the U of Toronto who posted endless amounts of news about the space program.  I probably have a bunch of floppy disks somewhere in storage - the 5 1/4 type of floppy disk - that contain endless numbers of those usenet posts.  I remember poring over those Shuttle news reports, that showed details of the schedules, what was sitting at what pad, what was being assembled, and so on.  And I remember being excited as hell when a nameless OV-105 started appearing on the list, as parts and pieces of the future Endeavour arrived at Rockwell.

The Shuttles kept flying, and after those evil Soviets became our pals, we started swapping Cosmonauts and Astronauts, and Americans hung out on the Mir, and eventually they found a way to hang a Shuttle off the side of that firetrap and give the Russians some hamburgers and Pepsi to go with their caviar, porn collection, and frayed combustible wiring harnesses.  But around that time, I realized how the whole space exploration thing was under attack from both sides of the aisle, and how we’d never dump the money in it to get any man to Mars, let alone this man.  The left-wingers saw that NASA budget as a bottomless money pit that went to defense contractors; the right-wingers didn’t like the idea of non-Jesus-related science research or the flight of any space hardware we couldn’t use to kill brown people from orbit.

So yeah, you boomers got golf on the moon, while us GenXers got a nearsighted space telescope, a couple of exploding Shuttles, and too many Mars landers and orbiters that blew up or crashed or otherwise went MIA.  But not only that, but the children of the 60s had this whole legacy put forth that had to do with a space race.  They had a President that pulled out of Marilyn Monroe long enough to say, “God damn it, we’re going to put a man on the moon even if it kills us”, and even after the CIA/Mafia/freemasons/Scientologists/aliens blew his head off, everyone still followed the order and put a damn man on the moon.  Nowadays, if the President took a 31-minute lunch break, he’d come back to find some bastards dismantling and defunding every single thing he tried to do.

And honestly, I know almost nobody is interested in drinking Tang and crapping in some adult diapers 86,000 miles from home in zero-G.  But space exploration is more like a side effect of a well-fed science research and education program.  When we had an arms race and a space race, we also had an education race to produce scientists and engineers to build weapons and technology to send men into orbit.  Education means a higher quality of life.  Take a look at a place like Liberia where there’s absolutely no education and kids live in shitholes (LITERALLY shitholes - they use the beaches as toilets), snort heroin, eat human flesh, and fight in wars at the age of twelve.  Then look at a country like Sweden or Finland, which has excellent education and an overwhelmingly positive quality of life.  Here in the USA, we now gravitate between not giving a shit and wanting to completely remove all education, especially science education.  And a country with more education not only has a bigger talent pool for jobs more technically advanced than ditch digging, but it means companies who want to attract top talent are going to have an easier time when said employees can send their kids to a decent school.  And people with kids tend to want to buy houses in good school districts, which means the prices of those houses goes up, and property taxes are based on home sale price.  That’s why you can buy a house for $18,000 in my old home town of Elkhart, Indiana.

So now I’m sad as I watch blurry streaming video of the Discovery tethered to the ISS, knowing it’s pretty much the end of the line for this stuff, at least in my lifetime.  Bleah.

Something like 87 years ago, my friend Ray Miller had a zine.  A zine is like a tumblr account, except it’s on dead trees, and instead of pictures you take of yourself with a cell phone camera, it has words on it.  His zine was called Metal Curse, and it was essentially a way to get to meet bands and get free crap from record labels before it got into stores.  And in Indiana, it was a way to get things that never showed up in stores, because the absolute best music store within 50 miles of my house was a 45-minute drive away, and was only marginally better than buying CDs at Wal-Mart.  Also, at this point in time, most of my peers were extolling the virtues of an artist that largely advised us to stop and observe an occasion known as “hammertime,” and the only way you could talk to anyone interested in any music not designed in a government laboratory for sale at malls was to write a letter to some dude in Sweden or Japan, and the only way to get in touch with these people was to read a poorly-photocopied publication ordered through the mail.

In my second year of college, I went to IUSB, a commuter college that was mostly parking lot, and I hung out with Ray a lot, mostly driving around, skipping classes, and listening to thrash metal bands like Helloween and Napalm Death.  He did three issues of his zine and was starting to pick up steam with it, getting more self-produced demo tapes in the mail to review.  Back then, zines had reviews of albums or demo tapes, interviews with bands, and news updates about bands, usually a giant bulleted list of who was releasing what or where they were touring or who broke up or whatever.  But there wasn’t much else as far as content.  You couldn’t really have cool pictures, because they didn’t photocopy well, and every picture turned out looking like a black and white thermal map of Uganda taken from a plane window. Outside of NASA, digital photography didn’t exist, and even if you had a decent camera, good luck getting it into a show.  Most of the zines out there were also not well-crafted literary journals honed by intellectuals either, and sometimes the writing was funny, but 90% of the interviews out there asked the same exact ten questions.  Zines weren’t known for their in-depth editorial content.

I wasn’t a writer back then.  I helped teach a writing class in the English department, oddly enough.  But that mostly involved telling people they had to press Shift-F7 to print, and walking distressed students through the procedure involved when underlining words in Norton Textra, this horrible WordPerfect clone we used.  I studied computer science, and spent all of my free time trying to learn C and write games and whatever you did to waste time before the web was invented.  (Tetris, I think.  And downloading crap from anonymous FTP sites.)  I took one writing class, and the teaching assistant either liked my stories a lot or wanted to sleep with me; looking back at what I wrote then, it must not have been the stories, but you should have seen the glasses I used to wear back then.  But I didn’t consider myself a writer, and certainly didn’t do it in my spare time for fun.

At some point, I suggested to Ray that I should write an advice column for his zine.  I don’t know if I asked him to do it, or if I just wrote it first, but I had this idea of a fake Dear Abby sort of thing.  I think I subconsciously ripped off this idea from a free newspaper I used to read in Bloomington.  Or maybe it was because one of my parents gave me a copy of Dear Abby’s Guide to Sex for Teenagers, and I thought this was the funniest damn thing I’d ever read, and wanted to write something just as humorous.  One night I fired up that cyan-on-blue screen of WordPerfect 5.1, and cracked out a handful of fictional questions mailed in from readers.  I don’t know what inspired me to come up with the name, especially because now it takes me years to name anything, but I called the column “Dear Death.”  It probably had to do with listening to that Metallica song “The Four Horsemen” 58,000 times a week.

I gave Ray a laserprinted copy of the column, and he put it in issue #4.  At the time, he used this GEOS program instead of Windows, and did the whole zine in its word processor, then printed it out on his dot matrix printer, so that one page looked an order of magnitude better, and he rushed out and bought his first laser printer.   If you were born before 1990 and have no idea what a dot matrix printer is, I wouldn’t even recommend going to a museum and looking at one, they are such huge pieces of shit.  I spent most of my tenure as an IUSB computer consultant un-fucking these Epsons where the tractor feed wheels would get jammed, and the ribbons would gum up or get unspooled, and some deranged bored housewife type would keep jamming it worse and worse until it involved stripping the whole thing into tiny pieces and realigning every little piece.

Anyway, #4 turned out great.  I didn’t do a column for #5, but then wrote one for the next seven issues.  Luckily, those seven issues took like a decade to put out, so I had plenty of time to come up with new ideas.  I did five issues of my own zine during the timeframe of Metal Curse #6 and #7 (although mine was way shorter and had less stuff in it) and some time after #7, I started calling myself a writer and chipping away at my first book. But these columns pretty much mark the start of my writing career.

Metal Curse had 13 issues as a print zine.  Ray recently resurrected it as an online site, and has started with a lot of new reviews, plus he’s slowly bringing online the back archive of old stuff.  And part of that is the Dear Death columns, which means you can go read all of them online.  The writing is much different than what I do now, and I don’t really listen to that much death metal anymore, so it’s both embarrassing and interesting to look back at this stuff. Anyway, you can check out my columns at http://metalcurse.com/index.php/dear_death.

I have a printout of some random PDF that illustrates twelve stretching exercises I am supposed to do to prevent repetitive stress injury.  I never do them, because I always forget, but that’s not the point.  The point is, the people illustrated have no faces.  They have ears, and you can tell from the side view that they have noses, but you can’t see the noses from the front view.  There are no eyes, no mouths, no nostrils, and no holes in the ears.  One of the exercise guys is wearing a tie; the other ones are pitiful fucking slobs. One is either wearing a skirt or the kind of baggy shorts you see in the NBA, or that a hesher wears.  I suppose it could be a kilt, and the person has short hair, so they are probably not a metal dude.  Two of the illustrations are wearing a wristwatch; the others are either too poor to own a quality timepiece, or they use their cell phone to tell the time.

I’m almost certain that back in grade school, we had some workbook or set of ditto worksheets that had similar line art people, probably either showing how damn great it was to recycle your pop cans (i.e. soda cans, this was Indiana) or how we should all work well with others, lessons that were mostly lost on my schoolmates.  I don’t remember if these people had faces or not.  It was the seventies, so I’m sure they also mixed it up with a token amount of men and women of various races.  I do remember this was the era when the “he” pronoun was falling apart, when they would alternate using “he” and “she” in every other example, as if that made things better.  It was better than having to use “he and/or she” every time you’d normally use “he”.

I didn’t do the stretches today.  I’m going to a chiropractor and he has me doing a different set of stretches for my back.  He took x-rays last week, and I got to look at those, which are always amazing.  If I could buy an x-ray machine on eBay, I’d be dead of radiation poisoning in a week.  I’d walk around with scans of x-ray films taken from every conceivable angle, all loaded onto my iPad.  I’d start talking to a stranger in a drug store, and say, “hey man, you think these mediastinal contours look normal? No man, I know you’re just a bricklayer, but do you think this aortic knuckle has any loss of definition? I’m always worried about adjacent lung consolidation.”

The x-rays showed one of my legs is shorter than the other.  I knew that.  I’ve known since junior high, when they would line up everyone in gym class and check for scoliosis.  They would train the new teachers by having them look at my back, as an example of a fucked-up spine.  By junior high, I’d been to the Elkhart Clinic at least a hundred times, to the orthopedic guy, the optometrist, and the allergy clinic.  It’s thirty-some years later, and I’m now going to a chiropractor, an optometrist, and an allergy clinic.  It’s a recurring theme.

When I was a kid, you’d have to wait for the TV set to warm up before you watched it.  I totally forgot about that.  We had this giant Magnavox console TV that you could shackle inside of a B-17 and drop on a German industrial city to take out an oil refinery.  You’d turn it on, and the sound would fire right up, but the picture would slowly fade into view.  One day, the picture never came on, just sound.  We turned it on and off ten times, nothing.  Left it on for an hour, just listening to audio of Tom and Jerry (not as good), no picture.  My parents opened the back, took out the dozens of little glass tubes, brought them to a drug store with a tube tester, this giant machine that vaguely resembled a stand-up video game, but instead of a joystick it had a bunch of knobs and an armada of sockets, where you plugged in the little glass cylinders.  I don’t know if you waited for a red or green light to come on or a needle to swing or what happened, and I don’t remember if they sold tubes there, but I remember every damn one of those tubes came back good.  We got another TV set, a smaller solid-state unit, and it sat on top of the deceased set, which functioned as a TV stand for the next decade.  This was Indiana, everyone did this.  I bet a half-million Hoosiers have their new flat-panel LCD HDTV sitting on top of an old beast like our Magnavox.

The Magnavox had a little lead box inside of it, containing a couple of tubes that gave off x-rays.  The lead box had a ton of warnings stuck to it, in an era when a potentially lethal meat-grinder with exposed blades and no guards whatsoever would not have a single warning on it.  I probably could have turned this into an x-ray machine if  I could buy some film at the Osco’s where we got those tubes tested.

I think I got my first x-rays in maybe the first grade.  Chest films.  Elkhart Clinic.  I had pneumonia for weeks.  My sleep cycle went completely off; I’d sleep twenty hours in front of the Magnavox TV, then be awake all night, reading Encyclopedia Brown.  It must have been around October, because my mom said I should just wear the x-rays as a skeleton costume.  I’m sure she said this because I probably asked for a Spider-Man costume roughly 48,724 times that month.

The guy that wrote and directed the Encyclopedia Brown TV show also wrote and directed Better Off Dead.  He also animated the Whammy on Press Your Luck.  He often casts Curtis Armstrong in his movies, better known as “Booger” from Revenge of the Nerds.  I always used to see Armstrong in the BMG cafeteria when I worked at Juno.  I also used to run into Diddy in the elevator all the time.  Booger was much cooler.

I turn 40 in a week.  I can’t really wrap my head around that.  I’m sure there’s some Nick Hornby book I can read that will explain all of this.

We went out yesterday for lunch at this Burmese place (which was thankfully not renamed a Myanmarian place which would completely screw up the GPS, which would probably tell us to drive 5,427 miles on I-90, take three left turns, then drive 5,426 miles in the other direction) and I can’t tell you much about the Burmese place except the food was decent, and they brought me this salad that had 16 ingredients checkerboarded on a huge plate that was then mixed together at the table, which is a great concept unless you’re the poor bastard that has to lay those 16 ingredients on the plate for minimum wage.

After lunch, we wandered around this neighborhood on Telegraph, looking at thrift shops, including this craft reuse place that had loads of trippy stuff, like giant boxes of photos you can buy by the pound.  The pictures were not like getty stock photos; they were just boxes of random family photos, vacation photos, and snapshots.  I seriously wanted to load up on these, scan them in, and use them as stock photos on this web site, so you’d come here to read my blog, and the featured photo to the left would be two dudes playing hackeysack on a beach in Yo La Tengo t-shirts.  And maybe I will do that, except that I absolutely hate scanning photos, and wouldn’t mind having a lot less stuff in the house, not more.

We wandered up Telegraph a bit more, and I saw this game store.  For some reason, board games and RPGs have had a huge resurgence lately, which I find fascinating and annoying.  The annoying part is that I was playing D&D back when it was a rung below pedophilia on the social acceptability scale.  And I blame the two-pronged attack of role-playing games and computers as the reason I never got my shit straight from a social standpoint back as a teen.  And I got out of the whole dragon-slaying thing well before college, but then a decade or so later, every damn hipster doofus in the world is reading Tolkein and talking about how cool their pewter half-orc figurine collection is.  And part of me wanted to get back into it, but I don’t have endless expanses of time like I did when I was 14.  But it’s always been something I was curious about, like how I’m vaguely interested in the world of model railroading, but I honestly have no deep affection for trains themselves, and do not have the time, space, or close-up vision to build a giant railroad setup in my house.  (But I still re-read Sam Posey’s Playing with Trains every other year.)

So we went in this game store, and it was wall-t0-wall stuff that would have made me have an aneurism when I was fourteen.  I mean, back then, in bumfuck Indiana where I grew up, you had essentially two choices for all of your TSR gear: the Kay-Bee toy store stocked some small amount of books, modules and dice, and Walden’s Books carried some of the hardcover books and Dragon magazines.  There weren’t any other places to get any of the non-TSR games, although I’m sure if I had a car to go to Chicago or Indianapolis, I could have found some of the more rare Avalon Hill crap and delved even deeper into the life of geekdom.  But this place - the Oakland place in 2011, I mean - they had tons of board games, books, modules, game systems, models, miniatures, and collectibles.  If I was still a gung-ho Dungeonmaster and borderline hoarder, this was the place to show up with a rented u-haul and a cashed out 401K.

And then just as I was thinking “maybe I should get on Facebook and find some people in my ZIP code who would be interested in playing some Axis and Allies”, I saw the store had a little game area in the back, with a bunch of tables where you could come in and battle it out, tournament style.  And there were a couple of people playing.  Do you remember this kid in the documentary Trekkies?  Okay, imagine three of him in a shouting match with each other that goes something like this:

1: YOU CAN’T USE SILVER AGAINST A CHANGELING IN A HUMAN FORM

2: NO THEY ARE ALWAYS AFFECTED BY SILVER SO YOU NEED TO THROW A D20 SAVE YOU MORON

1: NO THEY CAN BE AROUND TRACE AMOUNTS OF SILVER IN THEIR HUMAN FORM YOURE JUST TRYING TO RUIN THIS CAMPAIGN

3: HE CAN BE AROUND SMALL AMOUNTS BUT IF HE ISNT SHAPESHIFTED AND YOU POURED FIVE GALLONS OF LIQUID SILVER DOWN HIS THROAT IT WOULD CERTAINLY HAVE AN EFFECT ON HIM YOU CRETIN

2: I’M THE DUNGEON MASTER AND THIS IS MY CAMPAIGN SO YOURE GOING TO ROLL A D20 SAVE BECAUSE EVERY IDIOT KNOWS SILVER AFFECTS CHANGELINGS.

And so on.  I wish I would have pulled out my phone and recorded it, because it was the funniest damn thing ever.  And it also reminded me why I’m probably not going to rush out and get the Red Box set and start re-learning how to play D&D again.

(Side note: the kid was named Gabriel Koerner, and he’s going on 30 and has done a ton of pro work as a CGI artist in stuff from Lost to Enterprise to Shutter Island, so it looks like things worked out fine for him.)

Okay, so here’s the other thing.  There were a ton of cool board games there, and I wouldn’t mind having people over to play board games every now and again.  But it also made me think it would be cool to design some whacked-out board games.  And I spent the whole day thinking “is there some lulu.com-like print-on-demand thing where I can upload my own rules and text and artwork, and have it spit out really cool board games?”

Well, there is: http://www.thegamecrafter.com.  I don’t know how well it works, and the web site is not exactly web 2.0, and a lot of the games on there look cobbled together by 14-year-olds with very little photoshop experience.  But, if I had infinite time, I would sit around and churn out some kick-ass games, like “Abortion Clinic Tycoon,” “Zombieopoly,” and “Crips versus Bloods: the Board Game.”  And I’m almost certain this is how I will waste at least a few days of my time until I realize I can barely draw a stick figure.