*sigh*

i tried this whole schtick last week. i wrote a “clips show” post linking to some of Untold Entertainment’s more interesting articles to pacify the throngs of visitors charging to this site from ICE 08. Unfortunately, i was only a last minute replacement on the ICE panel, and i think i mumbled my own name into the microphone. i also had my back to the audience, and had accidentally dropped the mic down my shirt. i was in the middle of fishing it out when they asked me to introduce myself. i think most of the audience thought my name was “Murphy McFurfle.”

Hopefully there’s a more fruitful throw to this website in the latest issue of trendy urbanite rag NOW Magazine, in which Evan Davies picks my brain about Guitar Hero and Rock Band. i haven’t seen the article. It probably contains no more than a passing reference to me and a single quotation, because really, who the heck am i? Just a dude who creates and plays video games. But i’m a dude who’s only about a year or two away from getting his face plastered all across the front of that mag, mark my words. And when that day comes, i hope to High Heaven that i have the sense to stay away from any bloody Atari 2600 joysticks.

i was ten years old in 1988, a year when the Atari 2600 was well past its prime. i was enough of an outcast for digging video games so much. i wasn’t even an outcast playing on a current system. My friends were hacking and slashing their way through Bard’s Tale on their x86es, and i was still driving an excrutiatingly slow tank in Combat.

If idle hands are the Devil’s playground, the idle mind of a ten-year-old is a recipe for pure shenanigans. i was probably the last kid on Earth to discover that 1. you could pull the rubber sheath off an Atari 2600 joystick and suction it to your own skin. 2. The funniest place to stick it to yourself was, naturally, the middle of your forehead. And 3. - the suction lasts a really long time.

Thank goodness this whole Mentos and Diet Coke revelation came so late in my life. i shudder to think how i would have taken to that in 1988.

After about an hour of fun with the joystick sheath stuck to my head, pretending i was a Dark Unicorn or whatever, i pulled the little leech off. It had left an enormous welt smack dab in the middle of my forehead - a big red throbbing face hickey that bleeped “L-O-S-E-R” in Morse code.

No worries. i’d just go to bed and it would be gone in the morning, yeah?

Nuh.

The very next morning, there it was. Bright as the blessed noonday sun. A behemoth Bindi. The Japanese flag on my forehead. My mom tried to put cover-up on it, but that didn’t work. It resisted all attempts to soothe it. It would not heed reason. So off i went to school, bracing myself for an inevitable beating. After all the teasing and name-calling was done, it would turn out to be just another average day, right?

Yeah. Just another average picture day.

Mr. Lepp’s 1988 Grade Four class picture is an anomaly. Scientists don’t recommend that you look directly into the photo. But on a snowy night, when all the children are asleep, it’s rumoured that a certain jolly old elf uses the picture to guide his sleigh through the blizzard.

God bless us, every one.