I’ve got you back in my life now… wait, drinkwar.92p?

As you no doubt remember, back in 2020 I was looking for this graphing calculator game where you play the role of a shady soft drink dealer. Yes, a weird twist on the venerable Drug Wars.

Well, it seems like I finally found it: COKEWARS.

Well, mostly. First off, what I found has a different name than I thought, but my memory could be faulty.1 Also, this game was created for the luxurious TI-92, while my graphing calc gaming was done exclusively on a humble TI-83. Oh, and this one wasn’t actually published until I was out of high school. I was not playing this goofy stuff in college.2

All signs seem to point to this being a port of the game I played. But, wow, very close! My long, stupid search is over.

A clone of drug wars but for those of you that play games in school it’s good because you can say it’s for another class because you’re buying and selling things(Coke Products). So… it’s a really cool game

―Andy Barry, the creator of this version

It’s a little disappointing to find solid evidence that this gentleman definitely didn’t think of his creation as the comedy game it was to me. Damn it, Andy, I’m over here in a trenchcoat full of soda and all you can think about is scamming the History teacher!

Oh well, anyway…

  1. On the other hand, the game I found can’t even keep its own name straight, alternately going by “COKEWAR,” “COKEWARS” and even “drinkwar.”[↩]
  2. In college I was playing Counter-Strike, thank you for asking.[↩]

Android’s day-one advantages: how many are left?

When I chose my first Android device over an iPhone in 2009, each platform had exactly one device available and the decision of which platform was for me was clear.

Even back then, to those who had been paying attention to the smartphone world, the iPhone arrived as something that wasn’t quite a smartphone. It had an advanced web browser and slick Google Maps app that were both better than anything else available, but lacked a lot of features that existed in previous smartphones—the biggest omission being third-party app development. But the world very quickly forgot how anti-app Steve Jobs’ Apple was at launch, and how the ‘no, you can’t develop for iPhone’ attitude led to web app monstrosities skinned with brushed metal and pinstripes, which people quickly cooked up to look “iPhone native” in the early days.

Of course, the early days didn’t last long. An SDK and the App Store showed up a year later, but for a long time iPhone remained on my “still wouldn’t even consider” list because it was still missing things I considered basic functionality, things that Android got right, right from the start.

But it’s not 2009 anymore! So where are we now? Let’s take a look back and see how many of these Android advantages are still applicable today, 12 years later.

    • Devices available from multiple manufacturers
    • Outside-of-app-store apps available (not a walled-garden)
    • Almost entirely open-source OS
    • Third-party development possible
    • Multitasking
    • Custom input methods/software keyboards
    • Selection of devices with hardware keyboards
    • Cut and paste
    • Extensible, systemwide ‘share’ functionality
    • Not AT&T-exclusive
    • SIM-unlocking actually allowed
    • No desktop client needed for setup
    • Filesystem
    • Casually swappable battery

Things aren’t looking good! Apple (and Google themselves!) has chipped away at Android advantages over the years, though the two that remain on my list remain huge.

But I sometimes gaze jealously at the iOS world and its devices with competent support and five years of updates and wonder if the principles that led me to choose Android are still worth anything.

Wrong: a modest trumpposal

Something occurred to me late in the 2016 presidential race.1 Everybody was like “this guy lies and never faces consequences,” but was going about it in pretty much the least effective way possible.

I’m sure folks who hold this opinion were well-meaning, but they seemed to be coming from a time where being caught lying is the worst thing a public official can do. Slimy politicians are supposed to, what, recoil with shame, mumble an apology and exit the spotlight?

That’s obviously not the playbook now, and it should have been clear to anyone even a little awake in 2016. So can I just propose some slick new language for describing a case where a public statement doesn’t quite match up with reality?

You don’t call it “inaccurate” or “unfactual.” We’re all very impressed that you went to college.

You don’t call it “lying” because that’s what 4D-chess-playing businessmen do when they negotiate, I guess.

The word you’re looking for is “wrong.” They’re wrong, you say they’re wrong.

Wrong helps keep a record. It classifies the statement into a clear category, helping reinforce objective reality in a time where it’s needed.

Wrong is, at the same time, a little soft and assumes the best intentions. Swing and a miss. Good hustle out there, little buddy—you can’t hit ’em all. 

Wrong is, most importantly, universal. You could be a middle school dropout and remember the feeling from, I don’t know, multiplication tables or something. Being wrong isn’t game-over, but each wrong stings a little.

At some point, if anyone’s actually keeping score, consistent wrongness writ large in headlines for years on end makes a case for malpractice. And who the fuck would tie up their identity supporting somebody who’s just so loudly and consistently wrong, in public, all the time?

  1. I know, I’m sorry I kept this to myself.[↩]

I want you back in my life, colawars.83p

Do you know how things you treasure from your past probably wouldn’t hold up if you tried to enjoy them again years later?

That doesn’t apply here, buddy.

Because there aren’t more important things to think about these days, nope, my mind recently started wandering back to a game I played on my graphing calculator back in high school.

I did a lot of that back then, mostly during classes not necessarily math. And while there were definitely better games, more atmospheric games, more fun games, more Tetrisy games—and dozens of other games I spent more time on—I’m not sure any captured my imagination quite like this one did.

It was called Cola Wars and this game was absurd. You would buy and sell cans of Coke, Sprite, Mountain Dew, RC Cola and—because it was the late 90s—Jolt. You’d buy them on the street from a dealer and try to re-sell them. Prices would go up and down. For some reason you had to avoid the cops.

I was struck by the sheer… I guess the word would be “randomness” of the idea. It didn’t cross my unsophisticated mind that it could have been a metaphor, an allegory or something. I sincerely believed that someone in the world just one day decided that they would make a game about the risks and rewards of illicitly selling soft drinks on the secondary market.

So when I later discovered that there was a game called Drugwars, and that TI-83 was definitely not the first platform it was available on, and that the weird drinks game was a rip-off—if not a simple find-and-replace—it explained how this mysterious, supremely odd duck came into existence.

And I guess it took away some of the appeal. But just a little. I’d love to find a copy and play it again, but the places I would normally look have failed me. And I’ve done some serious Wayback Machine spelunking.

Help me, the Internet.

U and I have a problem

Hi AutoCorrect! How’s it going today? Got a sec? Can you do me a favor?

If you ever catch me typing the letter “u” on its own it was definitely a typo, 100%, and could you just go ahead and make it a capital “I” for me?

So if you catch me writing, for example…

u don’t know

…could you toss me an…

I don’t know

We have the flippin’ technology to fix literally my most common typo, but catering to those folks means AutoCorrect has to stay broken. These people—who in all likelihood are decent humans who don’t eat babies—are the reason that phone keyboards can’t fix this very obvious typo for me.

Look, I’m not even trying to inflict my good-spellin’ lifestyle on everybody else, honest. Make it a toggle. “🗹 I graduated second grade.”

I eagerly await this important innovation.

That time I sparked an international penis competition during the World Cup

Are you there, Internet? It’s me, Everett. Hey, so I actually wrote this years ago, around World Cup 2014, and never posted it. P.S. Warning: there are cartoon dicks in this post. It is not recommended for audiences of any kind.

There’s this Miami parking garage I frequent, and in this garage recently was this car that hadn’t been moved in a while.

At one point the car simply bore an unimaginative “wash me” traced into the dirt (but in Spanish), and some former finger-painting arteest later added a penis to this. It had a pair of testicles at the bottom and a shaft extending upward — this is pretty much what you would expect if you asked anyone in the world to draw you the Platonic ideal cartoon dick.

Hel-lo, middle school.1

I walked by it a few times—always cringing, not out of morality but good taste—before it occurred to me that I could fix this; I’d not only make this totally safe-for-work, but I would make this awesome. I started by adding a few extra circles to where the testicles were at the bottom, creating the appearance of a plume of smoke. And going up the side of the shaft, I simply wrote “USA.”

I’d converted this crude penis nobody wants to see into a totally sweet Space Shuttle in the process of launching. Or so I thought.

It turns out that at the time somewhere in the world, some countries were playing some soccer (football, whatever, shut up) thing, and a small but ardent group of people were concerned with the outcome of this tournament.

International Penis Car

Crazy, right? Well, as it turns out, they all seemed to park in this garage. Over the course of a few weeks, in strange outbursts of national pride, new penises began filling the windshield alongside the USA penis. Each of these bore the name of a country that—I’m just assuming here—had teams that were competing in that soccer (f.w.s.) thing. Some were big. Some were small. One was Belgium.

I’d sparked an international cartoon-dick-measuring contest.

So was it my fault that everybody completely missed what I was going for? Should I have drawn a launch tower? Solid rocket boosters? Or would they have just seen these as penile enhancements? That’s likely, since the other participants took my smoke plume to mean that this was a six-testicled monster cock.2

The next time this happens, I think I’m writing “NASA.”

  1. Speaking of which, oh man, I have this great story involving my friends Chris and David in 6th grade.[↩]
  2. Something-something… anime?[↩]

Top two time-saving keyboard shortcuts for graphic designers

Ctrl + C / ⌘ + C — This will copy selected text

Ctrl + V / ⌘ + V — This will paste copied text

Knowledge of these two simple commands will streamline your workflow, make you more productive and prevent the introduction of unnecessary typos.

If you ever find yourself thinking “It’s okay—I’ll just type the copy again into Photoshop,” it’s not okay. Just push the two buttons noted above.

You can do this. You must do this. Please do this.