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Dec. 17th, 2002 02:25 amWhile I haven't been at all worried about the draft since then (and these days I'm a little too old to be worried about it even if I wanted to be), I was at least faintly obsessed with the notion, and all other things World War III promised, throughout the Reagan administration (much as you were, I bet). I could feel some echoes of that fear just poking around that well-organized website, learning about the process that the draft would follow should it ever be activated again. Chilling.
Some FAQy things are interesting, like an essay about women and the draft (did you know that the draft almost was extended to women during WWII?) and reasons why a man would have a tougher time legitimately dodging a draft call today than during the Vietnam War. (Academic deferments are a lot weaker now, for one thing; full-time students used to be passed over entirely, but now they'd simply let you finish your current semester before shipping you off to boot camp.)
I haven't written any letters at all. I'm going to stop talking about it now. They'll get written when I feel like it. This will happen at some point, all at once. It might take a whole weekend. We'll see.
I spent this weekend playing Fallout 2, unfortunately. A breakthrough came when I figured out how to get the car, which lets you skirt over the world map at high speed and steer clear of most random encounters. (It also changes the world map music from creepy wood-flute to more pleasant acoustic guitar chords.) The pathetic thing is that I think I was supposed to have gotten it a long time ago, and so the mid-game has taken me a lot longer (in both game-time and real-time) than it really should have. So, free to play the fun and well-designed city/dungeon quests and ignore the boring and frustrating wilderness encounters, I spent about 10 hours (*choke*) driving from the mid-game to the endgame. Signed off at midnight, just a few steps from my invasion of Fortress Endboss. A good stopping point. If I'm good, I'll give it a rest for a week or two.
One puzzle was deliciously... horrrrrrbile. It demands that you do something rather naughty, but it's a perfectly in-character sort of naughty (it's for the greater good, arguably), and once I realized without a doubt what the solution was, and how the game had subtly set things up for me to carry out the deed -- if you don't see the solution, the set-up looks like mere flavor text -- I smiled a big smile. This doesn't happen very often in these sorts of games, so, yes, I was pretty impressed.
In describing a novel to someone, I regretfully used the word "endboss" to describe the hero's confrontation with his nemesis at the end, because I quite honestly couldn't think of a better word (such as "nemesis"). Naturally, the person said, "Wait, did you just say 'endboss'?" as I knew she would, thus my fruitless hesitation.
I wonder if there's documented proof of the first video game to use the word. (I'm imagining that it had to be a video game.) The first reference I can find in my memory is the old Sega arcade game Quartet (something of a side-scrolling, space-themed Gauntlet knock-off that was actually rather fun), whose introductory patter I can still recite: "DESTROY the BOSS! USE the KEY to OPEN the DOOR!" Ah, that was back 'round 1985, when I'd spend hours at a time in the little game room with the The Empire Strikes Back wallpaper that was in the rear of the LaVerdiere's drugstore in Ellsworth. There were other kids, too, enough so that the Quartet machine was usually maxed out at four players, and there was always a crowd around Super Mario Bros. I know I was there before anyone found the warp zones, and I was there after, but I don't remember being there for the actual discovery. That must have been something.