My Favorite Arcades: Introduction

The 80’s were fucking lame.

The music was automated brain-dead crap with mechanical beats, insipid lyrics, no soul, no balls, and no swing. Even previously great artists churned out synthesized crap. Members of the best progressive rock bands of the 70’s joined forces to give us…Asia?

The movies were equally awful. You had a choice of cheesy teen ensemble romances (complete with best-selling synth-pop soundtrack), shitty slasher sequels, and jingoistic warfare jack-offs where the lone hero fights off the evil Russkies to save America.

The clothes were horrible. Remember the shit people wore? It was hard to find jeans that weren’t acid-washed and all the shirts made you look like some kind of preppy gay circus clown. The guys put more shit in their hair than the girls did.

And contrary to right-wing revisionist history, Reagan was a colossal douche nozzle.

Lamest fucking decade I’ve had the displeasure of living through. Sure, there were exceptions here and there. The Police were pretty awesome, and there was Bladerunner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Star Wars sequels. But mostly it was a lousy time to grow up, and I was honored to be an outcast. And like all the other outcasts, I spent all my time at the arcades.

I don’t know if there even are arcades any more. I sure don’t see them on the rare occasions I go to the mall. I guess there’s Dave and Buster’s, but I’ve only been there a couple times. These days I’d rather stay home and play GTA or smoke some noob in Warhawk.

But in the old days, arcades were seedy joints, owned and operated by bikers and the mob. The air was thick with smoke and the glorious bleeps and bloops of 8-bit music and sound effects at full volume. The lights were low, the floors were sticky with spilled soda, and the machines had lengthy cigarette burns on the panels (because who has time to smoke with brain robotrons on your ass?) and graffiti scratched into the side-art (Puck-Man was quickly renamed Pac-Man, due to the temptation to modify the P to an F).

And in every arcade was the shirtless long-haired stoner who could play Galaga for hours on a single quarter. And when he wasn’t playing Galaga, he was on Joust exploiting the pterodactyl bug. I wasn’t that dude, I was the guy marveling at his skill, my quarter on the marquee waiting for the next game.

The arcade was not a place our parents wanted us hanging around, but we were kids with the freedom of bicycles. My peers and I got our entertainment in 3 minute increments for 25 cents a pop. Our allowance went into the machines. Our birthday money went into the machines. If we got paid for mowing a lawn, it went into the machines. Even our lunch money went into the machines. If we had a dollar in our pockets, we pedaled our asses to the arcade, and when our money ran out we stole from our parents to keep the buzz going for a little longer.

But nothing lasts, and most cool things die a tragic death in the name of corporate profits. The arcades were no exception. Soon it was noticed that all those quarters were adding up to huge bank, and the powers that be couldn’t let it all go into the hands of bikers and the mob. Arcades moved into the malls, and were almost always owned by Bally. Tokens replaced the lowly quarter, smoking was prohibited, and the pterodactyl bug was patched. Oh we still went and spent our money, but the thrill was gone.

Eventually, we discovered girls and weed, and the games got shitty anyway. The industry crashed and never quite recovered. Though I’m still an avid gamer, I’ve only gone to an arcade a handful of times since, and usually just to play pinball. But thanks to emulators, my children know what it’s like to be humiliated by Defender’s brutal difficulty.

This post is the first part of a series. Look for new installments in the coming days.

True Tales of Stupid Fucking Teachers (Part 2)

From 1990 through about 1994 I attended Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC for short) trying to earn a two-year degree in Data Processing. In my defense, let me say that they expected me to learn arcane system calls on antique mainframes at 8:00am three days a week. Those who know me well know that the only time I’m awake at 8:00am is if I’m still up from the previous night.

In addition to learning IBM 370 Assembler Language and an OS called DOS/VSE/SP that was considered thoroughly horrendous even in 1968, I was also learning COBOL. No self-respecting programmer will ever admit to knowing COBOL, but I have no self-respect, so what the hell. I didn’t like COBOL, but a programming job, any programming job, sounded better than being a cook, and COBOL was the only thing they really taught locally. I was a great programmer, having already written code (just for fun, mind you) for 10 years prior to that. Me and two other guys, one of whom would later become my brother-in-law, were the best in the class, and there was a pretty good gap in talent between us and the next guy on the list. Despite this, not one of us graduated.

I can’t speak for the other two-thirds of we who called ourselves Foobar Hacking, but the reasons for my dropping out were varied. Mostly it was because I saw COBOL and mainframes as being a dying branch of computer evolution. “Everybody knows this is nowhere” was a phrase often in my head. I knew that a job doing COBOL would take me through fixing the Y2K bug and then pretty much dump me. No new code was being written in COBOL, and therefore the bulk of my work would be maintaining code somebody else had written. Having seen the code that the majority of my classmates shit out, I knew what I was in for wasn’t pretty. I had also taught myself C++, which I considered to be a real language. Right about the time I dropped out, I discovered the internet, and I thought that was probably going to be something big. Of course there was nowhere official to learn that stuff, especially not on what a 24-year-old fry cook could pay.

And despite my loathing of COBOL and DOS/VSE/SP, none of the teachers in the DMACC Data Processing program were stupid fucking teachers. One of them I truly respected, and I showed this by being a constant pain in his ass. He didn’t care for my rowdy friends and I, but he did respect my programming skills.

Anyway in 1994, I dropped out of the Data Processing program and decided to study something with a future. The immediate future, I decided, was PC networking. At the time Microsoft still didn’t have its networking shit together, so I studied Novell Netware, again at DMACC.

Towards the beginning of the first semester, the teacher handed out a sheet with a flow chart showing the various Novell “tracks” one could take. You could choose to be a Certified Netware Associate, a Certified Netware Engineer and a few other things I don’t remember. But one of them was for something called UnixWare. I had been screwing around with the internet in all my free time, and for a geek like me who likes to get his hands good and dirty, that meant screwing around with Unix. I thought then, as I do now, that Unix was cool. The teacher went over the flow charts and explained what the various Novell tracks entailed and what classes you needed for each certification. But he never said a thing about UnixWare.

So I approached him after class. Our conversation went like this.

Me: You didn’t mention this UnixWare thing, what’s that?
SFT: That’s Novell’s version of Unix.
Me: Well, what do I have to do to get that certification?
SFT: You don’t want that certification.
Me: But…the internet runs on Unix.
SFT: The internet is a toy.

Now this was a long time ago, so I can’t say that the conversation was word-for-word like I have it above, but the last two lines are, I swear, exactly as they were spoken. Let me say that last one again: “The internet is a toy.”

Now it’s true that in 1994 the internet pretty much was a toy, an electronic playground for geeks. There are times I wish it still was that way. However, every one of those geeks saw the potential. We knew what the internet was destined to become, and in fact, we were instrumental in helping it fulfill that destiny.

But my Novell teacher didn’t see it coming. Novell didn’t see it coming either. It wasn’t long after I’d dropped the Novell classes (which wasn’t long after the “toy” comment) that I heard they had sold UnixWare to a company that would become The Santa Cruz Operation, which then released SCO UnixWare.

Five years later I got myself a job as a web developer, and I was unfortunate enough to have to work with SCO Unix. In a way, the stupid fucking teacher was right. If this was any indication of what Novell UnixWare had been like, I really didn’t want that certification.

True Tales of Stupid Fucking Teachers (Part 1)

These days I’m more partial to “The Walrus and the Carpenter“, but for a long long time, from the first time my maternal grandmother read it to me when I was a child, my favorite poem was Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky“. I grew up in one of those houses that always had, like all good houses should, at least one copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass kicking around. So by the time I was 10 or 11, I had pretty much memorized Jabberwocky.

Now, for those who may not be familiar with this brilliant little bit of poetry, it’s beauty comes from the fact that it is filled with nonsensical words, yet meaning can be derived for most of them via context. Others are combinations of other words, whereby “triumphantly galloping” can be succinctly expressed as “galumphing”. Just read the fucking thing if you’re unfortunate enough to have never read it previously.

Jabberwocky first turned up in school in about 7th grade. It was in one of our English textbooks. My teacher, Josie Martinez (who was not a stupid fucking teacher and is, in fact, the single best teacher I ever had) chose a student seemingly at random to stand before the class and read the poem. He made it past the first word, “‘Twas”, then choked hard trying to sound out the alien “brillig”. He gave up, sat down, at which point Mrs. Martinez asked for volunteers. My hand shot up, which was very unusual indeed. It should be noted though that this class was pretty tight, and intelligence was actually respected in this school, so these other kids would actually think it was cool that I could nail this. So she called on me, I carried the book up and pretended to read from it (hey, I didn’t want to seem like too much of a geek). I delivered Jabberwocky flawlessly. She said, “You’ve read this before then, huh?” Had it happened today I’d probably have said “no, never heard of it before today” just to fuck with her.

So flash forward a couple years, and I’m a freshman at Herbert Hoover High School in Des Moines, Iowa.

Wait a minute. Brief digression while I slag Hoover High School.

This was a school of fucking retards. It was filled with mindless, soulless preppy fuckwads, and I despised nearly every fucking last one of the Wham-listening-Guess-wearing-Daddy-bought-me-a-Camaro pukes. Now Hoover always looks good on paper because their students get good grades, but trust me, the bar there is set astoundingly low, or at least it was in 1984. Despite my lifelong underachievement (in all my years of education, grade school though college, I can count the times I did homework on one hand) the year I spent at Hoover was the first time I ever got mostly A’s (algebra being the exception, I’ve always sucked hard at math).

So my English teacher in this lovely institutional learning facility was not the shaprest stick in the bunch. I wanna say her name was Mrs. Morgenstern, or Morgenton, or something like that. Maybe it was just Morgan. Anyway, whatever her name was, she taught 9th grade English at Hoover High School in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1984/1985 school year if you want to track her down and tell her I think she was a stupid fucking teacher.

So one of our early assignments was to memorize a poem. We had a week to do this and then we had to stand before the class and recite our poem. I thought this was pretty fucking easy for high school, I remembered doing that in 4th grade, but whatever. Always one to take the path of least resistance, I chose Jabberwocky, which of course I already knew by heart.

So the day comes where we have to recite our poems. I don’t remember what the other kids chose to learn, but suffice it to say that nobody did “Casey at the Bat“. So, my turn comes, and I already know it was a mistake to have picked a poem that was three times as long and infinitely more complex than the ones my classmates chose. So I go up there and recite the poem to a bunch of clueless preppy fucks with their mouths gaping open.

And when I’m done, Mrs. Morganheimer says, “Wow, that was a really difficult poem, especially with all those old words we don’t use anymore.”

I gave her a very quizzical “are you fucking kidding me?” look and sat down. Bitch thought that “frumious” and “uffish” were Old English. And she was supposed to be teaching me?

Thankfully, that was the only year I spent at Hoover. After that I got a car and used Dr. Bill’s address (behind his mother’s back) on all my official forms so I could go out of my district to Lincoln High, which despite being violent and full of metalheads actually made an effort to teach its students something. My grades immediately fell back to their usual pattern of straight C’s.