Lost my Bullets in the River!

I apologize for the odd lack of a post yesterday, but after this week at work, I came home, went to bed, and just recently saw consciousness again. It's amazing how a long, good night of sleep can improve your outlook. I'm glad the president gets 12 hours of it a day.

If I hadn't been sleeping, I would have been dutifully playing two addictive games I just found on the internet.

Both games depend upon you to activate various aspects of the scene in the right order, sometimes at the right time. Each features prominent stick men to carry out certain tasks - and get blown up if they fail. Who knew stickmen had so much blood?

I've had to bar myself from visiting these sites at work, lest I scream out "no no! Move the bell tower!" during a marketing meeting.

Hapland is the bloody and more difficult of the two - requiring you to light two torches in order to open a "gateway." (It's like that "Stargate" TV show with a smaller budget and an easily splattered stickman as Richard Dean Anderson.)

Free the Balloon isn't nearly as bloody, so you can't act out your Richard Dean Anderson snuff fantasies online, but it still features some exceptionally helpful stickmen. The objective of the game is to free the balloon. Go figure.

Both games remind me of an earlier time, when the secret of gaming wasn't remembering up arrow, down arrow, B, A, A, down arrow, but was based upon thinking things out before you did them, such as how much you'd like to spend on oxen for your journey.

I think for people of my age - who grew up attached to an Apple IIe at school - applications like this relax us and hit that nostogia button just like leg warmers and Molly Ringwald. It's a good feeling - and corporations will exploit it until the day we die.

Still, I always got my family to Oregon safely.