the past

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…

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

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.

Icky Thump

I once told this girl in a bar that I was saving the White Stripes’ final album, 2007’s Icky Thump, to listen to at some point in the future just so I could have the pleasure of listening to a new White Stripes album when there were no new ones. This was a bunch of years ago, it was true, and she said she was impressed with my self-control.

Late last year I found myself in the driver’s seat in Texas late at night with a long way to go. By then I had bought the album and kept a copy stored up in the cloud, always available but never played and just kind of hanging out. I had avoided even merely reading reviews for almost a decade, but these unfamiliar roads kinda seemed like the right time, and this night the right place to pull Icky Thump down from the sky and out through the rental car speakers.

You know, I’ve got this playlist for songs that are not necessarily great, but when I first heard them made me go “whoa—what world did this thing come from?” (The playlist is actually, literally, titled “What world…?”) Rammstein, Gorillaz, Eminem, Black Flag, Mindless Self Indulgence, and a few others, have a track apiece on the playlist. None of the songs have that effect on me anymore, but every track was once mind-melting stuff.

Would adding an entire album be violating the spirit of the playlist?

Observing Design Observer’s design

Oh, goodness. I started writing this post in January, and have had it basically finished for weeks now. I’ve been putting off actually posting it for some time, thinking it needs more work. But now — in fact, just three hours ago — Design Observer unveiled a redesign and made me look like some kind of jerk. Now, if that isn’t an object lesson in shipping…

Design Observer looks dated.

DO’s header boasts proudly that it’s been operating since 2003, and you can tell. Look at it with 2014 eyes and you’ll observe a non-responsive fixed-width layout with tiny text. Is that really a blogroll? Where are the ubiquitous social sharing buttons?

It’s like a time capsule of early-2000s blog design.

And that’s why it’s so great.

Design Observer reminds me of a lot of websites from the ’00s, some of the first blog-ish things I ever read. (Like Pixelsurgeon! Or Design is Kinky! Or Pixelsurgeon!) Maybe I owe the fondness to my youth, and its design limitations to the bad old days of primitive web browsers. Or maybe it was just Web-1.9(beta) style. To my eyes, though, the look holds up well.

The Present

The information density on Design Observer is amazing and that probably has a lot to do with the typeface, which is tiny by today’s standards. I peeked into the HTML because I knew the typeface appealed to me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. IT’S 8 POINT VERDANA, you guys!¹ It’s so tiny, yet so crisp and readable. (Compare that to Arial, or its blatant rip-off Helvetica.²)

The site was definitely not designed with the current tablet craze in mind, and as a tablet owner who doesn’t love tablets, I like that. That said, I shudder to think of what Design Observer must look like at unscaled ‘retina’ resolutions.

The Future

Speaking of the future, I fear the day I’m going to visit Design Observer and find a Mediumification has happened — this has to be on their roadmap. It does seems a little strange for a design site like DO not to be following what are, for better or worse (Here’s my ballot! I vote ‘worse’!) modern design conventions, which favor clumsy UI for smudgy fingers over — you know — the stuff that helps people do stuff.³

And once it’s gone, it’s gone. Sadly, Design Observer’s robots.txt file tells most search engine crawlers to simply go away. DO specifically included a rule banning the Internet Archive, which means the page has never been captured by the Wayback Machine, the Internet’s somewhat-official time capsule… and never will. This makes it tough, if not impossible, to see what Design Observer looked like ten years ago, two years ago and even last week, to see how it changed with the times — or didn’t — to become what it is today.

And when this frankly wonderful design is replaced by something “better” and “modern,” it will also disappear forever. Hope this helps.

In college, I probably spent more time choosing a font for AOL Instant Messenger than I did studying for some classes, and this size Verdana was what I’d always come back to.[↩]
I kid… I own the DVD, honest! Now please put down those tasteful Dieter-Rams-designed pitchforks.[↩]
I’m not against designing while keeping mobile devices in mind, but these designs almost always come with designers choosing to reduce functionality across all devices in the name of consistency. Hey world, news flash — you can do responsive design in a way that doesn’t do away with sidebars, page chrome and just general functionality until websites look like WriteRoom. Just make it degrade nicely.[↩]

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.

Winamp — “feel the love”

Winamp 2.95 I probably haven’t used Winamp in a decade, but learning that it’s finally going away for good brought it back to the top of my mind this week.

Winamp wasn’t just my primary digital-music-playing-thing¹ — like many people, it was the first thing I ever used to play MP3s.

Yes Junior, back then Windows Media Player was for CDs and WAV files, and iTunes didn’t exist yet.²

What made Winamp so awesome? I could devote a whole post³ to the genius of Winamp skins, and things I’ve been reading (1, 2, 3) overwhelmingly reference the classic “whip the llama’s ass” sound clip — which, in addition to being a neat little branding thing, was permanently imprinted on everyone’s memory by being the first thing that would play after installation.

Those were cool, but my favorite Winamp memory is something a little less… superficial, perhaps? It’s a short piece of writing that long ago was featured on the “About” page of winamp.com:

What is Winamp? A player you say? No, no baby. Winamp is much more than that.

Winamp is a lifestyle. It is freestyle. Give me a word. Versatility? Yeah. Visionary? Of course. Community? Now you’re talking.

Winamp lives because it’s users have a life.

Winamp is in the coffee house. On the laptop. Of the guy. Who is writing the screenplay. That you will be watching next year.

Winamp is on the screen. In the club. Where the DJ plays the tracks. That get you through the night.

Winamp is with you. When you take your playlist. Push it to the ether. And share the music that you love. With all of humanity.

Winamp lets you put together the soundtrack. That runs in the background of your mind. And allows you to define your life.

Winamp is your skin. Allowing you to look and feel the way you want.

Winamp is what it is and nothing more. But you are the one who makes it. Winamp is there for you. It is yours. What happens next? You tell me. Download Winamp.

-jonathan “feel the love” ward

Reading it back then left me a bit misty, filled with this strangely inspired feeling. The piece comes to mind every once in a while, at which point I seek out a copy to re-read it. Look, I can’t point to anything in particular that I wrote or created thanks to this inspiration. But in some way, it made me think differently not just about the power of music, but the transformative power of what would otherwise seem like trivial software. Reading this made me feel like Winamp did more than just “play music.”

But in reality, that’s all it did. Or was there more?

Give me a word. Hyperbole? Maybe. Awesome? Undeniable.

Until iTunes for Windows showed me the value in having a library of files. Yeah, I know Winamp has a library feature, but I never used it.[↩]
Oh, and by the way, MP3s were these things people used to listen to before there was YouTube.[↩]
And, shit, I may — Winamp was doing skeumorphics before Apple did skeumorphics before Apple stopped doing skeuomorphics.[↩]

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.[↩]