jeremy's strange obsessions, unlikely heroes, and stupid in-jokes

Obsessions

• Adventure Games
  

• Apple IIgs
  (See also Old Computers, Zany Golf)
  The IIgs was the computer that my father, being the science teacher of a relatively small middle school, would bring home to us during the summer. (In fact, I now own that particular IIgs, as the school got rid of their old Apples and Dad brought home a truckload. This is how my Old Computers collection started.)

• Atari 2600 Development
  The Atari 2600 is a bizarre machine, where space and time become one. When you begin to learn the limitations of the machine, you become astounded that anyone was able to do anything at all with the damn thing. First of all, you have only 128 bytes of RAM, and generally 4kb of ROM. The video hardware had to be programmed one line at a time -- while the scanline was being drawn on the television. Worse yet, the damn thing was optimized for Pong. There is a "ball" (a blob that can be 1, 2, 4, or 8 pixels wide), two "missiles" (blobs that can also be the same range of widths as the ball), and two "players" (8-bit wide sprites whose colour is tied to that of the missiles). There is also a "playfield", which is 20 bits long, has a convoluted structure, and is symmetrical. To position anything, you must write to a register at the exact moment that the electron gun of the television is in the place that you want the graphic to be. Afterwards, since 3 pixels are drawn during every CPU clock cycle, you can further write to registers in order to more accurately position it -- but only at certain times, otherwise strange behaviour results.
  Now, take a good look at Pitfall 2 and ask yourself -- how in the holy hell did they DO that?!
  My personal Atari 2600 project is a port of robotfindskitten. It progresses extremely slowly.

• Atari 7800
  

• Brave New Waves
  

• Bumper Cars
  

• Chaos: A Fantasy Adventure Game
  I've never actually played this, but the fact that I still vaguely recall a review I read of this game years ago -- an adventure game based on chaos theory -- and am still trying fairly actively to find a copy qualifies it. Beyond "It's an adventure game based on chaos theory", I don't actually know much about it.

• Dave Thomas
  Dave Thomas (the Wendy's guy, not Doug McKenzie) goes here and not in the Heroes list because that list implies serious geek respect. "Oh, but he was adopted and learned the value of hard work and perseverence and blah blah blah!" You, my friend, have not read Dave's Way, his autobiography. In it, he devotes a whole page and a half to meeting his wife, marrying her, and having children. (PS - to be a good wife to Dave Thomas, you let him sleep in on the weekends and take the kids outside so that they won't bother him. Also -- singlehandedly raise them. Dave is a busy man!) Then he talks about restaurants again. For instance, the Dave Thomas Method of Motivating Your Employees is summed up in one word: "Harassment." Dave Thomas was a crazy, ridiculous man.
  But then, so am I for having read his autobiography.
  Allow me to explain the sequence of events which prompted such an action.
  At one point in time, my local Wendy's was promoting a contest they were holding. This contest had Dave Thomas, dressed as a cowboy, guitar in hand, plastered on the placemats that went inside the food trays. The object of this contest: Write a song about Wendy's. The best "Hamburger Harmonies" would win a prize or something. It occurred to me -- that would be a lot of fun. I would never win the contest, as my songs would likely tarnish the restaurant's wholesome image, but it would be an interesting source of inspiration. I took the placemat home with me.
  (On a side note, this guy appears to have actually won the contest, with a song whose chorus goes as follows: "It smells so great, I never wait / I tear into the bag and then / I scarf it down and pull around / into the drive-through lane again." The chorus of "Dave Thomas The Cowboy", for contrast, contains the lyric, "Dave Thomas was a cowboy / Dropped out of high school, a big mistake / Dave Thomas was a cowboy / Had a high salt intake.")
  Now, since the esteemed Mr. Thomas has passed on, Wendy's' advertising strategy has changed quite a bit. Back in the old days, however, Dave had his face on everything. In fact, I rather suspect that it was only his face on much of the advertising, photoshopped onto someone else's body. (There was one campaign in particular, in which he was dressed up as a sea captain, where anchor-shaped broaches were literally drawn on in Photoshop with a simple gradiant fill.) I also suspect them of shrinking his head horizontally in order to make him look slimmer than he was. Anyway, most pre-death in-store advertising involved Dave dressed up in various crazy getups. Thus, I was inspired to base an entire EP, The Dave Thomas The Cowboy EP, on his various personas. Included: Dave Thomas the Beat Poet, Dave Thomas the Sea Captain, and Dave Thomas the Middle-Aged Man In A Hawaiian Shirt. It was going to be brilliant.
  At some point, my friend Roman and I are going to enter a Wendy's dressed in suits, and stand silently in reverence in front of the portait of Dave Thomas for a minute or so. Roman will remove his hat.

• Esoteric Languages
  

• Learning to Sing Insanely Fast Songs For Novelty Value
  

• Little Big Adventure
  

• Lost Games of My Youth
  There were a few games that I played and loved as a child that no one else on the whole, entire internet has heard of. Even with the magic of emulation, I was unable to properly relive my childhood as advertised. Eventually, my quests to regain these lost classics became fruitful; I now have copies of Super Cobra and Whirlybird. However, I still do not own the Tiger handheld version of The Terminator, which I lost many years ago.

• Making Pirate Karaoke CDs
  

• Ninja Golf
  I would love to meet the man who thought this up and shake his hand. Ninjas and golf, together at last, on the Atari 7800. Damn.
  For those of you unfortunate enough to have never played Ninja Golf (and if you are, please fix the situation), you are a ninja. You hit the ball towards the pin. Then you run after it, fighting off other ninjas, crazy monsters, and, if you happen to have to walk through a water hazard, motherfucking sharks. When you reach the green, you must, instead of ninja putting, destroy a large, fire-breathing dragon.
  What more can I say about this, but HELL YEAH!

• Old Computers
  (See also Apple IIgs, Vic 20, Atari 2600 Development)
  I love old computers. One day, I want to be able to develop for every platform. Have crosscompilers and technical documents around for every system made available in the 80s (really, they were all 6502 anyway). I've lost count of how many I own. It's not my goal to collect every single obscure iteration of every single computer, however. For example, I have an Apple IIgs and no real motivation to procure a IIe, let alone a II+ or a IIc, nor any of its clones. (Although the IIc would be nice and small... but I've already passed one up in Value Village.) My goal isn't to collect for the sake of collection, but to collect to actually work with and develop for the real hardware. I don't really understand why.

• Out of This World
  The single-greatest game of all time. Written almost single-handedly by Eric Chahi (with his friend Jean-Francois contributing some music), this game is a masterpiece of a brilliant game mechanic which is perfectly in line with my taste of games as debugging. If I had to describe this game in two words, I would say, "You die." Three: "You die lots."
  Indeed, that's the brilliance of it. You're a guy on the run in a strange dimension facing impossible odds. Chances are that you will die a hundred times on the first "level" just trying to avoid a few tiny alien blobs, let alone puzzling out what you are actually supposed to do with yourself. But you aren't penalized for dying. You're thrown back to the beginning of the current "stage", but the stages are generally quite short anyway. Once you finally accomplish the feat of completing a stage, wonderful! You've proven yourself! And you move on to a completely different set of challenges.

• QNX
  

• robotfindskitten
  A brilliant, surreal "zen simulation" by Leonard Richardson. I've personally created several ports for various Old Computers. There are many more available, including a version which runs in an Infocom interpreter. I'm even working on a version for the Atari 2600 (see Atari 2600 Development).

• Self
  

• Super Cobra
  When I think "Super Cobra", I am not thinking of any of the official incarnations. No, I am thinking of a ripoff for the Vic 20 called bomber.prg. (This is because it was labelled "Super Cobra" on our tapes when I was young.) Simply put, this game rocks. The jaunty theme song and sound effects have never left my head in the 17 or so years that I've been on this planet since this game entered my life. If I could have only one game where I blow shit up, this would be it.
  When I sold my Vic 20, years ago, back when I didn't realize how much I'd miss it, this game went with it. Later on, when my nostalgia returned, I realized that nowhere on the whole, entire internet did anyone list Super Cobra as a Vic 20 game. It seemed like I would never see it again. The only reason I was able to find it again, and relive the experience on my actual Vic 20, was because I did a google search for "vic 20 shift lock". Since you have to enable the shift lock key to shoot missles, I thought someone, somewhere, might have described this. It was an incredibly long shot -- and it paid off.

• The Terminator
  

• Vic 20
  (See also Old Computers, Super Cobra)
  The Vic 20 was the first computer my family ever owned. It had 4kb of RAM, and pixels the size of your head. It also had a surprisingly good library of games, and in my particular case, a tape drive that wouldn't record. I love the fuck out of that machine.

• Webcomics
  

• Whirlybird
  

• Zany Golf
  Zany Fucking Golf.

Heroes

• Eric Chahi
  

• Leonard Richardson
  

• Matt Mahaffey
  Matt heads a little band known as Self. Self, I think, is the greatest band in the world, ever.

• Matt Wilson
  Matt Wilson used to do like three Webcomics at the same time. I always thought they were great. (Hep Mario is awesome.) Then he gave up on comics and turned his full attention towards animation. The result is the fantastic High Score. I think I'm probably his creepiest longtime fan. He sent me an email once thanking me for linking him, which, in my puddle of hero-worship, I never responded to.

• Philippe Vachey
  A brilliant musician who wrote an astoundingly beautiful soundtrack for the Little Big Adventure games. I actively seek out any game he is involved in, and spread his music wherever I can. He currently freelances as the companies he made music with kept closing.

• Tim Rogers
  Tim Rogers likes to fuck with the heads of his fans on the internet. He likes to tell us that. He may or may not actually be called Tim Rogers. He may or may not use curse words in real life. What he definitely does do is write so damned well that I cannot stop myself from reading the 50,000 word essays that he routinely posts on his LiveJournal and Insert Credit (the greatest video-game related website ever). He writes about how Metal Gear Solid 2 is the first post-modern videogame. He creates video essays about staying up all night finishing Final Fantasy. He dissects his formative childhood memories with Super Mario Bros. 3. And it's all fuckin' brilliant.

• Tim Schafer
  Tim Schafer designed Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. Thanks to my love of Adventure Games, this makes him the brilliantest genius on earth. Eventually, his company Double Fine will release a game called Psychonauts for the X-Bizzle, at which point I will have to buy one. It's worth noting that every link on Double Fine's webpage is crammed with pure comedy gold. Seriously, it's the funniest damned corporate website ever created.

• Will Harvey
  Wrote Zany Golf as well as the Music Construction Set for the Apple IIgs. As a child, I had dreams about meeting Will Harvey. Literally. He currently runs a company called There which does something that is not as cool as Zany Golf.

In-jokes, Slang, and Phrases I Think But Don't Actually Say

• Aww, Shatner
  

• Bah dap bap bap baaah, x
  From the McDonald's ads, was originally "Bah dap bap bap baaah, I'm Justin Timberlake." (For this reason, "Bah dap bap bap baaah, I'm x" is also a common variant.) This gave rise to a slew of Timberlake jokes, McDonald's jingle jokes, toast-modern Timberlake McDonald's jingle jokes... (Bah dap bap bap baaah, I'm totally Timberscongin'!) The form is endlessly useful. Bonus points if x completely misses the rhythm of the McDonald's jingle. (Bah dap bap bap baaah, the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the lengths of the remaining sides.)

• C is for Cookie, but that is insufficient
  Too long to be a catchphrase, too meaningless to be actually used anywhere, I still love this joke.

• Call before you dig
  

• Dojo, casino, it's all in the mind
  

• Goat cheese Rice Krispie square
  One day, years ago, I was listening to CBC on my walkman on the bus home from high school. (Because I was cool.) It was the top of the hour, the news had just finished, and it was time for whom I now believe was DiscDrive host Jurgen Gothe to come on and begin his unique brand of babbling about classical music. Only, he didn't. There was nothing but dead air for several seconds.
  Suddenly, he came on the air. "You'll have to bear with me for a moment, dear listeners, as I'm eating a Rice Krispie square."
  More silence.
  "It's... ah... it's a gourmet Rice Krispie square. It has goat cheese and hazelnut in it."
  Several more long, silent seconds passed before he finally began his show.

• I should x
  This construction is generally used in reference to the current topic of conversation, or something currently happening in the background, as a way of abruptly changing the topic. x is typically something which would be ridiculous for me to do. As well, I am often slyly pointing out that x is also something which is ridiculous for the person who is actually doing it. An example: Listening to "Naked Baby Photos" by Ben Folds Five, I might remark, "I should release an album made entirely of B-sides." Obvious: I do not have enough musical material to reasonably compile leftover songs and have it be any good. Implied: Neither did Ben Folds.

• I'll be here all week! Tip your waitresses!
  

• Indood
  Like "indeed", only indood.

• Office, submarine!
  From a Kids In The Hall skit in which Kevin McDonald had an office in a submarine, jube-jubes in a teapot, and mistook pop cans for money. This phrase tends to end a list of things, but can also just generally be used to be random. Goes well with Dojo, casino, it's all in the mind.

• Sub-tacular, Danny, just sub-tacular
  

• Totally x-in'!
  x is generally a noun. It is best if the noun is completely unrelated to anything, so that the sentence is basically entirely meaningless. Example: "Totally Timberlakin'!" Better example: "Totally Scongerlakin'!"

• X-Bizzle
  X-Box. I assure you that I use this phrase to mock the Zellers ad, rather than contribute to Snoop talk. I don't even know if this is spelled properly.