3 April

Childhood Collage

The following are 96 images from my childhood see if you can spot them all!!! (click on collage for key)

 

18 January

Apple//e

My brother just recently downloaded this Apple IIe emulator which comes along with a catalog of virtually every game ever made for the Apple II series.. Sifting through these games 20 years later is a like a punch to the head from some guy wearing brass knuckles wrapped up in a tube sock.. All those formative years sitting in front of that computer.. Endless hours frittered away on games with evocative names like 'Gruds In Space', 'Drol', 'Hard Hat Mack'.. In my mind's eye, I remember them all possessing this indiscernible vibe.. An odd combination of mystery, excitement, illicitness… I guess the illicit part was due to the fact that every day my father would get home from work in a bad mood, and glare at me and my brother perched in front of the computer… Two portly, pale hopelessly nerdy misfits, only reminding him what a failure he was to have borne us.. On top of that, he would rail on at us about wasting our time on the games, while our grade point averages plummeted to below sea levels..

 

 

The thing was, it was a viscous circle… We played the games because we were alienated, we were alienated because we were fat and weird, we got bad grades because we were alienated, we played games to escape the horrible reality that we got bad grades… It all seems so ridiculous now.. First off, we learned a lot from our time on the apple IIe… With games like 'Apple Mechanic' ,'Alpha Plot' and 'Dazzle Draw (an early photoshop type program' we learned how to program, manipulate images we basically learned computer skills that would ultimately serve us to this very day.. Way more than anything I ever learned in fucking Sequential Math that's for sure.. Besides which, if my father was so concerned about our studies, he should have made more of an effort building a conducive environment at hom

That's all water under the bridge… In the end everything is what it is and that's how it should be.. Still, it began a whole theme to my life where all my joy would be inevitably, inexorably, inextricably mixed with a searing metaphysical pain..

Looking over some of these games now, I realize that although they are indeed primitive by today's standards, they're also a hell of a lot more creative and sophisticated then what's out there now… All that first person shoot em' up bullshit hadn't started yet.. We played text adventures.. Yes games with no graphics… Stories which you controlled the destiny of your character, solved puzzles, used your brains… There were also games like 'President Elect' and 'Conglomerates Collide' where you learned about politics and finance… We were 12 years old!... Think of it..

Of course there was an endless supply of mindless games as well, but even they were more charming and naïve then the violent nature of today's fare..

Around the age of 19 I was home from college suffering from a nervous breakdown.. One night I was downstairs playing on the apple IIe, again escaping into that tired electric cocoon.. All the floppy disks were spread all over the place in sort of a mess.. I loved those floppy disks, I guess it was an early sign of my obsessive nature.. I would label them, and catalog them using an early word processor.. They were a way of having control over something, as the wheels came off my cart… Around 10pm my father came home late and disgusted with the sight of his 21 year old broken shell of a son, he gathered all my floppy disks put them in a garbage bag and threw them out…

I was so traumatized, that about 2 months later, I remember looking all over the place for my disks.. I had literally blocked out the memory of that night…

Prologue

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