I guess I didn't know

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.

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.

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.”

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

Is this going to be forever?

Let’s talk about me.

Super Smash Bros. Melee wasn’t released at a very good time for me. I was in college, away from home and most of my gaming friends. Also, it was released for the Nintendo GameCube, which history has shown us wasn’t a terribly successful console. In fact, I don’t think any of my closest friends back then owned a GameCube.

But because I know people who know people, there was a handful of opportunities to play Melee over the next few years.

I’d be at people’s houses and find mostly-young, mostly-male groups gathered around the TV trading smash attacks between signature Nintendo characters in the most wonderfully whimsical cartoon fighting game imaginable. Mortal Kombat this is not. Up to four players at a time would spend a few minutes at a time battling Links, Marios, Kirbys, Pikachus¹ (and many others) in levels pulled from familiar Nintendo games. They’d be talking trash and throwing flowers and bombs and baseball bats at each other… much as my closest friends and I had spent literally hundreds of hours doing a few years earlier in the Nintendo 64 Super Smash Bros., the original game in the series.

smash-bros-melee 2001’s Melee, however, was a very different beast from ‘64,’ and is still held in high regard by many, and still a tournament-favorite—despite new installments of the series being released in 2008 and 2014.

Gosh, I’ve always hated Melee.

Even today it’s still the fastest-paced and most brutal game of the series—the speed each game runs at is a design decision made by the developers—but Melee felt especially amped-up coming from the downright glacially-paced 64, even today still the slowest-paced game in the series. That alone made it tough to get into Melee—imagine picking up the controller and being mercilessly pounded by up to three other players (who probably play this all damn day), while you struggle to figure out how to not accidentally fall off the edge of the level.

“Seriously you guys, when you’re ready to play a real game, I’ll kick your ass with Link in 64!” is a thing I probably said every time I played Melee.

Speed was one problem for me in Melee, but my other one was the GameCube controller. Yeah, I know: the design is still held up as one of the best controllers ever, believed by many to represent Nintendo at their peak, right before their Wii-era folly of appealing to the dreaded “casual” market with the waggle-motion-centric Wiimote. The classic GameCube controller is still supported in newer Smash titles, and is still the choice among the hardcore Smash crowd… despite the half-dozen other controller options that are also supported at this point. How could I possibly not see what an amazing gift Nintendo had bestowed upon us with the GameCube controller?

gamecube-controller-smash-bros Yeah, so I never really “got” the GameCube controller. I never learned how to effectively use the soft analog ‘shoulder’ buttons, never became comfy with the layout of the right-side ‘fire’ buttons (X, Y, A, B)—the real meat of any controller. Coming from 64, I knew what the C-stick was for, but it just wasn’t the same as the four yellow buttons of old. And I’m sorry, but the Z button is just wrong—it goes on the bottom, you jerks.

With a decade-plus of hindsight, it’s clear now that my problems with Super Smash Bros. Melee, and with the GameCube controller in general, were mostly due to a lack of familiarity. I didn’t have the chance to spend time alone learning Melee at my own pace… or barring that, having hours upon hours to spend competing with close friends to sharpen my skills, like I did in high school. And I’ve always felt a little handicapped when it comes to picking up steam at new games that favor players with, you know, reflexes. I didn’t really grow up with games at home when I was young—I definitely missed a lot of the formative stuff that other 1980s babies grew up on.

Anyway, although I essentially sat out the entire GameCube era, busy with college and other life stuff, my interest in gaming was reinvigorated with the release of the Nintendo DS and later the Wii. (Yes seriously, the Wii.²) When the Wii-era Smash game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, came out a couple of years later, there was no stopping me from picking it up.

I enjoyed Brawl and played a lot of it. Having my own copy at home put me in a good position to get fairly good at it. It was very different from 64—way more characters and way more everything—and as a lot of the hardcore complain, way, way different than Melee. “It’s so slow!” “It’s for noobs!” Whatever; the slower pace and the not-GameCube controls are probably what I liked most about Brawl. Thank goodness they corrected their Melee misstep, I thought.

My newfound enthusiasm for console gaming died down a few years later. I haven’t really been keeping up with the new Nintendo Wii U or 3DS stuff at all. But my original Wii remains below the TV, and I turn it on every couple of months, usually to play an old-timey 8- or 16-bit classic.³

Something happened last week. An Ars Technica article about competitive Smash, and the enduring tournament legacy of Melee, showed up in my RSS. Before I had even finished the article, I’d already been to Amazon and ‘Prime’d myself a GameCube controller and memory card… and an overpriced used copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee.

My girlfriend was going to be out of town for the rest of the week. The time was right to dive in headfirst.

What happened to me?

Look, I developed this attitude as I grew closer to 30 a few years back. It goes a little like this:

So… is that it? Is this really how it’s gonna be for the rest of your life?

As I read the Ars article through these attitude-tinted lenses, I decided that my hating Melee was based on shaky reasoning at best. The way I felt about it after my few tries may have been a genuine and reasonable reaction to getting pummeled while flailing uselessly with this weird-ass controller, but let’s be honest: I never gave the game a fair shot.

That, paired with the fact that Melee‘s still so widely held in such high regard almost 14 years later—it’s definitely not just mindless fanboys trumpeting the new hot thing—made me think hey-why-not? I essentially have a GameCube just sitting there—it’s actually built into the hardware of the original Wii.

A couple of days later, my little care package from the past arrived. Predictably, I still fucking suck.

But I think it’s going to be fun this time.

By the way—just sayin’—f Pikachu.[↩]
The console was cheap enough, the motion controls seemed interesting enough, and the potential for amazing first-party Nintendo games (Mario, Zelda, etc.) made me take the plunge. I camped out on release night in 2006. Also, I had a job, some money, etc. And despite the tons of shovelware, there were more than enough good Wii games.[↩]
There’s a good chance it’s Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball. Gotta stay sharp.[↩]

Not everyone’s a critic

As a kid, I hated “critical thinking” questions.

I didn’t know what the term even meant, but what I did know was that about a third of the questions at the end of each chapter in my school textbooks were “critical thinking” questions. I’d read the assigned text — well, usually — but skimming the chapter for key words would magically reveal the answers… at least for all the normal questions.

In what year did Napolean whatever? I knew the hack for that: scan the text for numbers.

My goal was to get my work done as quickly as possible, because the draw of TV time at home, and “free time” in class was strong. Critical thinking was an annoying roadblock to very important leisure. I just wanted to get done.

As an adult, I take my time when I work — I just try not to completely Douglas Adams my deadlines, if you catch my drift. Quality is important (although it’s only job two), and if I finish something early, odds are it could use some more thought, another look tomorrow with fresh eyes, or something like that.

There really is no prize for finishing first.

I realize now that the critical thinking questions were the only ones that ever really mattered. Teachers probably told us that, but it didn’t mean anything at the time. And when I look around today, I get the sense that to a lot of my peers, it still doesn’t.

Derechos, am I right(s)?

Spanish is a language I’ve studied on and off throughout my life, but never hard enough, it seems. Seeing a pamphlet recently, titled Declaración de los derechos, made me feel that way. The actual meaning (“declaration of rights”) was easy enough for me to figure out, but I was surprised when I realized that the Spanish word for “rights” is derechos.

Whether or not you understand Spanish, you may be wondering why I found this so strange.

Well, a word in Spanish I certainly know is derecha (which means “right”… as in, the direction that isn’t “left”) — it’s one of the first words anyone learns in Spanish. And despite that word and derechos having different genders, it can’t be a coincidence that the two words are almost the same in both English and Spanish.

What’s so weird about that? Why shouldn’t these English homophones be similar in Spanish?

I’d explain it like this: I mostly feel this way because of how it works with another pair of Spanish words — in English, the word free has different meanings that each translate differently. Most of the time we probably think of it in the “costing zero dollars” sense… but there’s also the arguably higher-minded definition “existing without restriction.” In Spanish, they’re two very different words, the former being gratis and the latter being libre.

In the English-speaking world, I see the difference between the two “frees” most often come up in the Free Software¹ community. When discussing Free Software philosophy, people will wax eloquent about the different meanings of free, using phrases like “free as in beer” and “free as in freedom” to help contrast the two. They’ll also occasionally veer into explanations of Spanish vocabulary to highlight the difference, pointing out that gratis and libre are more precise ways to describe two kinds of software, both of which are “free,” but in significantly different senses of the word.

With my mind steeped in this software salon culture of the back-alley forums of the Internet, I became so keenly aware of the extra meaning words can pick up when translated into other languages.

And that’s why I find it so hard to believe that, en Español, “rights” are simply derechos. The translation should be something more abstract… more libre-like. I wouldn’t have guessed that when translated, my rights become “not lefts.”

You may also know this as “Open Source,” although there are folks who will tell you that they’re not the same thing. These folks have beards.[↩]

No Ovaltine please — we’re cool

As a kid, I didn’t know anything about Ovaltine aside from their commercials, so I hadn’t seen it as a sponsor of classic radio and television, as a joke on Seinfeld, or as a big fat liar in A Christmas Story. I can’t remember any of my friends having anything to say about it, either.

I was totally unbiased.

But from the company’s marketing alone, I could tell that rich chocolate Ovaltine was uncool. I had never drunk any — and decades later, I still haven’t — but if I ever had, I certainly wouldn’t have told anyone about it.

I’m not exactly sure why the stuff made my lame-sense tingle as a kid. Maybe because Ovaltine was named after a shape (and shapes are for little kids), or that its marketing proudly proclaimed that it was full of vitamins (like everything parents love, and kids don’t), but what I suspect it was… was a little more basic than that.

Watched the ad above? Note the ending. “More Ovaltine, please!” closed all Ovaltine ads of my childhood. My present-day cynical, works-in-marketing self can imagine some agency selling this concept to the Ovaltine company with “Look, these kids not only love this vitamin-filled drink, but they love it so much they’ll develop manners and ask for it politely! Parents will eat this up!”

But my kid self saw things a little differently. “Wow, these kids are super-polite. That’s totally uncool.¹ I don’t want this. Where’s the Nestlé Quik? That rabbit is cool.”

There’s a marketing message here, and it probably goes a little something like this:

If you have different targets, your messaging needs to speak differently (use “code-switching”) when speaking to different targets — there’s peril to face when one target receives a message tailored to another. It may fall on deaf ears, or maybe turn them off, entirely. Tell my mom about the vitamins — tell me about the chocolate.

And so on. But there’s also a human message here:

Look, as you grow you’re encouraged to “act your age” and as part of that, cast aside things and behaviors associated with people younger than you, and instead do things that are more becoming for someone as grown as you are. Society beats the kid out of you.

To be able to act your age is wonderful and arguably necessary… as long as you can still, as they say, “walk a mile” in smaller shoes when the situation calls for it. And, of course, recognize why a kid — this kid, kind of grown up now — may not be interested in your vitamin drink, however how rich and chocolatey it might be.

Full disclosure: I was kind of a polite kid, and I definitely thought I was uncool. Shoe fits.[↩]

Interchangeable Parts: Double-edge safety razors

This is the first in a series of posts about cool things with interchangeable parts. What?

The first time I shaved, I used a cheap disposable razor that I happened to find in the bathroom. I was 15.

These were dreadful, by the way.

I didn’t know any better at the time, and I didn’t learn any better for a while. It was easy to just keep using progressively bladier multi-blade cartridge models. Two blades to start, then four after a couple of years. I stuck with four long after the world had moved ahead, but I soon caught up with the whole five blade deal.

Clearly my razor wasn’t the only tool in the bathroom.

I’d hear mumblings from other men about better ways to shave, but the thought of my mother scolding me because I cut my throat open because I was using a dangerous razor still loomed large in my otherwise-independent adult brain. I was in my mid-20s by that point, but I’ll never outgrow that sort of thing because she’ll never outgrow not letting me hear the end of it if something goes wrong.

It’s a good thing I didn’t listen to hypothetical-her (sorry, mom) because if I had, I wouldn’t have picked up my first double-edge razor a couple of years ago.

My what?

Double-edge razors are also known as “safety razors” because they were a heck of a lot safer than those big, scary straight razors that were common before them.

It may seem ironic today, because it’s definitely easier to cut yourself with a double-edge than with a cartridge razor, but you know what else is easier to cut with a double-edge? The hair on your face. Which is what matters.

Shaving with one of these sharp thingies requires you to take it slow, but that’s alright.

Seriously though, they’re actually good

I use a double-edge razor because¹ I find them to be more effective, lead to less skin irritation and fewer ingrown hairs, and over the long run, actually be cheaper. It’s also nice that shaving this way leads to a lot less waste to be thrown away.

It was only after I began shaving with one for the reasons above, that I realized another benefit: I’m shaving with an open system of interchangeable parts.

Fuck yeah, interchangeable parts

Since safety razors have been around since the very early 1900s, any patents on the system have long-since expired. That means that anyone can create handles or blades that are compatible with everything else available for the system, which leads to a wealth of choice for both handles and blades… which of course means low prices.

What excites me much more than the potential for saving money (sorry again, mom) is the potential for customization that such an open system allows. Basically, I can pair any razor designed for this standard—fat handles, skinny handles, short handles, shiny ones, douchebag ones, ones from the future, uh, this one—with any blade that I want. This means I can separate the style from the substance; I can pair my favorite handle with my favorite blade and have what is, to me, the ultimate shaving machine.

Also, cheap

Ever heard someone complain about how expensive it is to shave, or more specifically, to buy refills for a cartridge razor? I probably don’t need to explain the razor and blades business model that cartridge razors follow. (If you like paying a lot of money for the rest of forever, you’ll love it.)

If you perused those Amazon links above, you’re probably wondering what’s wrong with my idea of “cheap.” Well, the double-edge razor turns the razor and blades model on its head; in this world, the handle is the more expensive item, with $30 US not being unusual for the more common brands. However, this buys a quality metal instrument that will likely outlive you… and you definitely make up for it with the blades—10¢ or 20¢ blades are common!

The future

The double-edge shaving system isn’t going anywhere.

While it’s obviously less popular now than it was in its heyday (but so were fedoras, and cool guys still wear those), we know how the Internet changes things; retailers can use it to sell obscure products to weirdos everywhere, the kind of things mass-market brick-and-mortar locations would never bother stocking on their shelves. I don’t mind buying online and waiting a few days, so I can have any blade I want delivered to my door.

Cheaper, better and ultimately, more interchangeable. That’s why I shave like this.

I don’t use them for the same reasons these strange shaving gear fetishists do.[↩]