Setting the Chip from Read to Write

June was a busy month. I do not offer this as an excuse for the rarity of my updates, just as a backstory for the even more lame excuse that will shortly follow. My day job was transitioning from one location to another, ComedySportz again offered me a chance at teaching level 202 of the training center as well as a once-a-year gig as one of a bunch of fathers singing Christmas carols about Sears merchandise, and my tertiary career as a graphic designer got some exercise in the form of PowerPoint operator for a chair manufacturer's annual showcase of new products. For a few weekends, I slept more or less where I dropped and cursed the name of that she-devil Work.

Then the money came. One of the things you'll almost never hear Joe American complain about is, "I just think they're paying me too much money. The laws of supply and demand need a rewrite and the first guy who should get the axe is me!" I had such noble plans: throw some of it in our joint account for the upcoming New York trip, make a big car payment, lower the balance on my credit card. Sure, some of these things happened, but another, BAD thing happened whereby I succumbed to temptation and bought another handheld gaming system.

Had I learned nothing from the Game Boy Advance I bought three years ago? I remember my plan to play Metroid on the CTA to shorten my commute boredom turning into an all-consuming passion to race to the end of the game, which I did. Twice. I remember hiding the unit, its charger and cartridges away like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark because, while both contained power enough to touch the face of the infinite, was humanity (or your humble narrator) ready for that? I mean, really?

It turns out, no, I really had learned nothing except how to fool myself into thinking I was learning a useful skill. See, even though I had been ogling the PSP for more than a year and couldn't walk into a toy store without trying the DS touchscreen, I could not justify in my mind the idea of buying a gaming platform. There's no font for contempt, but, boy did I want one for that last sentence. Here, Gizmodo and Engadget had given me just enough knowledge to make me a danger to myself and others. What gaming system played homebrew games, emulated NES and SNES games of yore and could play movies and more, all using as its operating system a special flavor of Linux? Why the GP2X, that's what!

If you've never heard of it, never fear, most of America joins you in ignorance. It comes from Korea and doesn't even have a distributor here in the States. My box comes, like Rod's girlfriend in "Avenue Q", from Canada. It comes in a sexy black cardboard box with a listing of everything it does printed on the front, two AA batteries and a spare USB plug. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with anything else: no headphones, no CD, no free SD card to hold your games, and certainly no instructions on how to get things from your computer to work on this dual processor, 200 MHz Linux workhorse. Start it up and you'll see options for Games, Movies, Utility, Explorer, Music and System, but figuring out the difference between "Explorer", "Utility" and "System" takes a little thinking. Not to mention the fact that regular ol' MPEG movies just didn't play on the GP2X and you've got a somewhat-sexy (like Scarlett Johansen, it's a little thicker than its press shots would have you believe) black box that plays MP3s and is about two and a half times larger than the video iPod which dwarfs it in capacity. It took a lot of good hours at work - hours that I would normally have devoted to updating my blog, surfing the web, writing sketch comedy or even, lord forbid, updating status reports - to figure out how to install homebrew games on it. A few more hours went down the sucking time vortex of the GP2X before I could even figure out which of those games did not suck, and their numbers were not large. Then I found the tutorial on encoding AVIs in DivX-friendly formats and another on NES emulators and everything started to fall apart. The nail in the coffin: the ROM for Super Mario 3.

History repeated itself. Hours vanished from my life. People called, but the message just went to voice mail. I went through batteries like gangbusters. Well, I recharged them like gangbusters. Even if I'm throwing my life away it's no reason to throw the environment into the toilet. Work got put off. I even tempted my darling wife into my corrupt lifestyle, enticing her with a homebrew game within a homebrew game called "The Minigame Project", itself called "Fruity Guy". See, it's fantastically simple: you start out with 60 seconds. You run around a green field until you hit the strawberry that appeared anywhere on the screen. When you do, another stationary strawberry appears, along with a non-stationary ball that moves across the screen either horizontally or vertically on the same axis as the strawberry you "ate". Hit the ball and the game ends. Don't do anything until the sixty seconds are up and the game ends. Keep eating strawberries and more balls appear on the screen, until eventually the game ends... Unless... and I probably shouldn't even be mentioning this, but sometimes a slice of watermelon appears. If you eat that, you become large for five seconds. Don't think of this as a punishment! No! During this five seconds, the tables are turned and, far from the balls destroying you, YOU CAN DESTROY THE BALLS! Even better, for every ball you destroy, another second appears on the game clock. Play the game right and it might never end! Except for one thing (else): balls get faster the higher your score. Eventually, you can't outrun them. What can save you? Blind luck, maybe? Skill? Ha! I laugh at this thing you call "skill".

As well you might laugh at me. Now the GP2X sits in its beautiful box, at the bottom of a drawer, left at work for the first time in a month and a half and I'm writing about how much it's destroyed my life in a plaintive, abused lover kind of way. It's sad. Imagine all of the blogging I might have gotten done if I hadn't felt compelled to get Mario the fireflower so he could beat Bowser in the castle on board five of level one in game three. Imagine how sad it would be if you understood all of that, or even cared.

So it's time to set that chip from "Read Only" back to "Write" and let you know a little more about the real world drama in my life, which I promise is more exciting than warping from level two to four and then on to five. Really.