not taken seriously

"Look! I'm not kidding! This is my job!"*

I had three kids try to play hide-and-seek with me today instead of working with me. What is it? Did I put on the wrong hat ... the wrong badge?! You do understand that, although playtime is fun, we are at school and we are doing ... you know ... school work.

Cute kids, but I don't understand. Normally I don't get this reaction. I guess I'm not the sinister meany I think I am. I've got to work on that.


* Animal House

old Trek game

Who's the bigger geek, the geek who seeks or the keeper?
Buy it? Get it on a 5.25 disc? What are they, mad?

That's like the 12's that were as large as LPs (long play 33 rpm records for those unaware). They don't typically install 3.5's now. Who, other than a parts geek would have that? Getting XP to recognize it would, I think, take some tweaking.

Chariot Races -- long, detailed, not fast at all

Kristia brought over a game Circus Maximus. It looked like it should be fun. Unlike the pictures on the link, we used it straight out of the box and spent no extra money or effort on it. The game was interesting, until you found the amount of effort it took to identify where things went, how far, what got damaged, etc. It was a good game, if it were on a compter, with or without special graphics. You raced around the track and could battle each other on the chariots. You could fall off, be dragged off, jump onto another chariot, but time between people's turns was about 12 minutes without thinking.

Another game I remember at this same time was ascii graphics game "begins.exe", which was a Star Trek simulator. You put in the number of and types of ships that you would battle on a two-dimensional plane using phasers and torpedoes. I liked it. It was semi-turned, but the PC would make moves around every 20 so seconds. You could have a flagship and direct all the other ships to either battle independantly or to command them to do other things.

A great little quirk was to transport your entire crew from one ship to another. Scott had this game. I remember we set the self destruct on the flagship, transferred all the crew (actually exchanging crews) to another ship. "Those poor people" * had 10 seconds to live before they were atomized. Very, very funny!

* Galaxy Quest, which was a very funny movie based on a Trek-like show.

Uncle Ducky Show

Monkeyjack, Scott, perhaps even MR was there while I made that fateful call.

It was Halloween 1991 (or 1992) and we had flipped through channels to see a local access channel. Although I had never seen the show, Scott recognized this right away. The Uncle Ducky Show was airing its usual fluff, trying to be funny. They were taking phone calls. I tried to get through for a bit and finally succeeded. The rest of the conversation went something like this.

Hello. You're on the line. Who's this?
Me: Satan, from Hell (said in a deep, dark voice)
Hey, Satan. How the hell you doin'? What the devil do you want?
Me: I just want to say one thing ...
Okay, you devil!
The Uncle Ducky Show (build up) shucks! (notice I didn't quite say sucks)

Did he say shucks?!
What is he, a farmer?
He's a Hoosier!

They got to use the heckler as a joke. Wonderful! I quickly turned the channel, not to speak of it agian that night.