Scrabble

This week I've become fairly addicted to an iPhone game called Words With Friends.  It's basically Scrabble, played like chess-by-mail via the interweb.  I can challenge friends anywhere to a game, then my phone lets me know when they've made a move.  I can take as long as I want to make my move, and so on.  My LDF was playing it with her sister all the time, and I finally grew curious.  I had no idea how hooked I would get.  I've always enjoyed Scrabble, but never been a fanatic.  But this game really gets me.  I have to exercise considerable willpower not to play when I need to be doing other things.  As an addiction, though, it seems pretty innocuous.  It was a free download, and if anything it's challenging the verbal portion of my brain, increasing my vocabularity.  If you have free time, I highly encourage you to look into Words With Friends.  It's available for Android as well as iPhone, and also on the computer, I believe.  My user name is GingerDana, and I'm ready to play you!

8-Bit Video Games

Because the colors are so bright and pure.  Because the sprites and landscapes are endearingly blocky and indistinct.  Because the sound effects evoke the future and the past at the same time.  Because nothing about the goals and interactions really makes sense when you think about it.  Because prizes are hidden inside boxes and catchy theme music follows your hero everywhere she/he/it goes.  Because you get points for doing just about everything.  Because they remind me of some beautiful afternoons in my youth.  Because I should really go outside, but they're so much fun!  For these reasons and more, I salute 8-bit video games, which accomplished so much within such strict limitations, which gave us whole worlds of shared cultural reference points, which boosted our hand-eye coordination to the point where we can now use iPhones without hardly thinking about it, and which made us think that jumping on the heads of our enemies was an effective tactical maneuver.  Thank you, 8-bit games.  And thank you, 8-bit game programmers, whose Snickers Bars-and Jolt Cola-fueled coding binges brought us brave new worlds of adventure.  And Mom, who I know is reading this, I want you to know that I am not sitting in my basement playing video games tonight, but in fact at a coffee shop writing this post.  I feel so mature!