Quick Post

Just a brief few words for right now. I'm about to drive back home for the evening, but the weather forecast looks pretty bleak for the rest of the week: snow, snow, and in case we didn't get the memo, snow.

The last few times it's snowed, our power has gone out (so if you don't see any new posts from me in the next day or two, you'll know it's because I'm cut off from the rest of the planet). My wife's grumbling aside, I've always enjoyed our power outages. Yeah, it sucks not to be able to go online or use my computer for longer than an hour before the battery dies, but I always enjoyed doing stuff by candlelight. Also, everyone comes into the living room to gather around the fireplace as the rest of the house gets cold, so it's a perfect excuse to, you know, interact with each other. And play games.

Nothing reminds me of Old School gaming like power outages, because they force me to remember what I used to spend my time doing before we had computers more advanced than a Commodore 64 and consoles better than an Atari 2600. And as much as I love my computer, the internet, and all the goodies those two combined give me as a gamer, there's nothing to compare with the feeling of writing up an adventure or drawing up a dungeon on graph paper by candlelight. That's some straight-up nostalgia there.

This time, we're going to be ready for the inevitable blackouts. My wife and I are stopping at Target on the way home to pick up a new edition of Trivial Pursuit. We played our old copy with my parents last blackout, and as it turns out none of us remember 1981 with much degree of clarity. This might surprise you to learn, but things that were considered trivial in '81 only become more trivial after three decades. Sadly, a cursory Bing search shows that Hasbro doesn't make the cards-only specialty sets for Trivial Pursuit any more, so we're going to have to buy the full game again if we want new questions. Oh, well - hopefully that'll set us up until 2041.