Picking On Jeff

It took me at least three tries to read this.

I know, who am I to talk, right?

I can't even find my pants!

But when did that ever stop me.

So anyways, it took me three tries to read that thing.

Now go ahead and try to read it before you continue, I wanna see how well you do.

Yah you.

And you too, Linst, Grizz, and Critter.

Go on, do it.

Do it.

Okay, you read it, right?

The whole thing?

You ain't tryin' to lie to me, are ya?

Alright, I'm gonna keep going, but I hope you ain't trying to lie to me.

The first time I started reading it, I started drifting off a little, so I started skimming it, and when I was finished, I thought it was all about how great it was to organize your programming functions into little game designer toolkits, or the invention of object oriented programming or something.

The second time I tried to read it, I got all jealous of the fifteen dollars he made off all his years of hobby programming, and the way he invented email, and so I got all pissed off and quit reading it.

When I finally managed to actually read the thing, it made me remember all sorts of nerdy shit, like making my own Choose Your Own Adventure Story games on a TI994a and saving them on cassette tape when I was in 3rd grade, downloading free games from BBSs like Corncob 3d and TestDrive and Wolfenstein, using terminal libraries and coding my own Sidewinder joystick driver for Linux, being so happy that my mom bought me watcom C for my birthday, y'know, with that DOS4GW memory extender thingie, oh sweet merciful heavens.

And all the hilariously bad virtual reality game programming mistakes me and my buddy did when I was in college, I mean, running your latest version for the first time was always a frickin' riot, 'cause you could walk around inside your own bad logic and brain farts.

"Okay, here we go!"

"Oh man, turn it off! TURN IT OFF!"

I actually got famous for ruining two monitors while trying to invent something better than Mode X, but my favorite accident was a simple ray-casting wolfenstein-type thing where I forgot to set a limit on what my program would scan in memory for a map, and so it actually let you walk around in your own RAM, seeing all the 1s as walls and the 0s as places you could walk, so there were big empty stretches where nothing was loaded, and if you started at the beginning, and you had a general idea of where you had loaded everything in RAM (which we all did back in those days), you could take a hike across a few big empty fields fulla 0s and walk around inside your own mouse driver.

We thought that was cool as hell 'cause it looked just like Tron heh.

And it made me remember how me and my Stepdad used to argue about whether Forth (with its mystical capabilities for Fuzzy Logic) was better than C (I was always a C guy), and how I ran all around the house telling everybody in my family how exciting it was that the clock cycle logic gods who wrote Quake were actually responding to my emails and giving me programming advice.

"That's nice, dear."

So whatever, I figure its some kinda nostalgia piece.

Yah, or he's sorta bucking for a job at a college or something.

But whatever, all that shit aside, I was dying to write responses like:

"hehe I don't understand what you are saying but my grampa used to play everquest before they had cable tv"

"ya hehe I hate that old black and white TV stuff too"

"no guys they used to have games made out of letters because they were poor"

But I think that would scare off anybody that might write something legitimate, and I'm kinda dying to see if anybody like that exists, and what they might write, so I just wrote my stupid little crap here.

Yah, fergit this game crap, man, if we got a bunch of people talking about all their super nerdy nostalgia crap like that together, we could use it as a script to make a pretty awesome super nerd talking head independent film.

"Well, you know, I love it, baby, you know I love it, I know you know I love it, its like, genuine, authentic, the real deal, its life, its all about pain and loss, its in your face, it doesn't apologize for itself, but I think maybe we should replace all the computers with Macs or nobody will get it, you know?"