Here’s the situation.

Earlier tonight, we were informed of a surprise visit that was going to take place no more than ten minutes after the sudden warning. I had no issue with the person visiting, but since I was grimy, groggy and without time to clean up, I decided to sit this one out. “Tell him I’m sleeping,” I said, leaving Ms. X to work on her small-talk prowess while I hid in the bedroom.

I sat on the bed, trying my hardest to stay mouse-quiet. Like it was willed by the gods of spite, as soon as the guy got here, I felt a tickle in my throat. And that’s how I came to spend one full hour desperately trying not to cough even as EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING demanded me to. I lost three years of my life tonight.

More to the point, I decided to make the most of this self-imposed exile. It was time to make some MS Paint art on the laptop I so cleverly remembered to take with me.

(Well, it was actually Mac’s version of MS Paint, which isn’t MS Paint at all, except for the fact that it totally is.)

I asked my friends on Twitter for suggestions. What should be in my masterpiece? Around twenty people replied, but I only had time/room/energy for seventeen elements. These are them, suggested by seventeen people that I will never meet but still quite like:

What, you think this is garbage? You try drawing that stuff on a laptop touchpad. I could convince Jupiter to become three smaller Jupiters with less effort.

If you’re having trouble figuring out what’s what, please see this handy screenshot of everyone’s tweets: Read More…

If you live in anything resembling suburbia, maybe you’ve seen an Allstar vending machine. They’re stuffed with trading cards of all types, and at least around here, there’s one near the exit of every grocery store.

I’m going to take the long way to get there, but here’s a quick summary of this article: DO NOT IGNORE THESE MACHINES.

If you’ve only afforded them a passing glance, you may have gotten the wrong impression. Sports card packs are the predominant choices, but there’s much more to Allstar machines than that. Movie, TV and toon cards are in there too, along with non-card items that are unbelievably endearingly in their screwiness.

Best of all, the assortments in these machines are anything but new. You’ll easily find packs of cards from twenty or even thirty years ago. The machines exist more as portable collectible shops, inspiring us to relive our pasts through the quarters in our pockets. Read More…

I first went online in 1995, back when you paid by the hour for an extremely slow connection. At the time, my concept of the internet only went as far as what America Online would show me. Actual websites existed, of course, but between the slow speed and my unfamiliarity, I mostly stuck with chat rooms, forging fast friendships with total strangers that were completely forgotten ten minutes later.

Even after just a few years, a lot had changed, but it was still no comparison to what we have today. Here’s an actual screenshot of my computer screen from September 16^th, 2000:

Still on AOL. Still on dial-up. Thirty programs always running simultaneously. Goddamned RealPlayer.

Everything was plodding and everything was made of glass, but we didn’t take it that way. Hell, I must’ve been having fun, since I somehow spent more time on the internet back then than I do now. (Well, duh. It took ten times as long to do anything.)

Below are five things I enjoyed from my earliest days online, in no particular order. Read More…