The bar stool is nondescript but comfortable. My laptop bag hangs off the back. The bar top itself is an ugly pinkish marble. The walls and pillars are raw cement dressed with orange-colored wood arrayed in a vaguely Japanese lattice style. It has all the warmth of a fallout shelter. It is too bright by half. (more…)
Recently I picked up the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft to see what all the fuss was about. I’d seen YouTube videos of impressive in-game projects players had made, among them a 1:1 scale model of the Star Trek: The Next Generation’s U.S.S. Enterprise, a massive computational computer and giant cannons meant to shoot cows out of the sky. I made the reasonable assumption that Minecraft was a game about building, and being a fan of Lego and Mega Bloks, it sounded like an experience I ought to enjoy.
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When I was a kid, watching Cheers on Thursday nights at 9:00 p.m. felt like the beginning of the weekend. I hated going to school, never getting enough sleep in the morning and pretending I gave a damn about what was going on during the day while pining for 3:30 p.m. so I could get the hell out of there. When my family gathered around the television to watch Cheers, it was like taking a half-hour sigh of relief. Cheers meant that the awful school week was almost over. Watching Cheers was like coming around a bend and seeing the final straightaway of an exhausting foot race. (more…)
