I normally avoid video-game nostalgia

But I would like to point out that this was likely the first video game I ever played, and quite certainly the first one in my home. When I was very small, my brother Peter and his friend Bill Ross brought this home one day, hooking it up to a black-and-white TV we had kicking around in the attic.

Oddly, I only clearly remember playing it alone... game after game of Single Handball, one of its four game modes. (You selected the game to play with a four-position dial set into the center of the unit; IIRC you could actually put the dial into a between-state and cause weird effects on the screen. Looking back, I can't guess what the deal was with that.) This would have been around 1981 or 1982 when all my friends had Ataris. I didn't really have any friends, though, so with no place to play Atari, and no money or means to visit the arcade, after school it was up to the attic for Single Handball.

Mostly, I remember the music. Single Handball was a sort of solitaire Pong, you see: three sides of the screen were a solid wall, and your goal was to bounce the ball off the far wall as many times as you could. The music came about because ball's horizontal velocity remained constant, regardless of its vertical motion. So long as you didn't miss, the ball would strike your paddle and the far wall according to a perfectly regular rhythm of boop... beep!... boop... beep!... The side walls would also boop when struck, and they became the notes in between, you see.

Taken together, each volley of the ball became a four-beat measure. Since it was such a simple game, there were really only so many bounce-patterns the ball could fall into, but I didn't care... I would play for hours, or anyway so it seemed. I can still hum a couple of these Single Handball overtures -- probably those that, coincidentally, are close enough to rock percussion standards that I've heard them again and again in the many years since.

And that's why I don't need to buy Electroplankton any time soon.

In retrospect

The mail from the state did, in fact, have only an email address as its From, the subject line "Registration Approved", and began with the word "Congratulations". It really did look like spam, and the only reason it caught my eye when I was looking for it in the spambucket was that it addressed me by my full name, which is something spammers generally don't know.

I'm sorry, but there are some common-sense things you just don't do if you don't want your email being caught by spamtraps. Unfortunately. Has anyone ever tried to compile a list of these, I wonder?

Also, it's kind of weird. "Congratulations", for filling out a tax form correctly? That's almost patronizing, man, especially since the congratulators in question are gonna be the ones benefitting if we actually succeed as a business...

You there... what's your name?

You're fired.

(no subject)

Housecleaning: if you're not on my "local gamers" filter and you want to be, or if you are and don't wanna be, could you drop me a line? I make posts to that filter that I think are of interest to game-players in my geographic vicinity (but am happy to share with remote people if they ask).

I made a post to it a few minutes before I made this one, so there's your current status indicator.