Category: Entertainment & Culture

Bill Hicks: The Dark Poet Rises

Curated post, originally published Feb 23, 2009. I’ve made some edits to make the reading of it less tied to the original publication date.

William Melvin “Bill” Hicks was not always the most moderate fella.

“If you’re in advertising and marketing…kill yourself. You are fucked and you are fucking us, you are Satan’s spawn, kill yourself. There’s no joke here…I know you advertising folks are like ‘Oh I see what he’s doing, he’s going for that righteous indignation dollar that’s very clever,’ no…STOP PUTTING A GODDAMNED DOLLAR SIGN ON EVERYTHING ON THIS FUCKING PLANET!”
Bill Hicks, “Revelations”

As of the time I’m dragging this (now fifteen year old) post out of the archive, in a few months it will be fully thirty years since the passing of of one of the world’s greatest socio-political analysts, ever.

Consequently, the guy’s been on my mind a lot lately. But then, Bill Hicks has a way of always being on my mind, even when I don’t know it. As I look back through my own writing over the years – I’m allowed, I’m an egomaniac just like almost everyone else – it strikes me sometimes how often what I’ve said unintentionally reflects back to an idea that germinated with or was reinforced or articulated or enhanced by something I heard Hicks say. In much the same way Chris Cornell’s lyrics have followed, almost eerily, the track of my life, so Hicks’ opinions on everything from drugs to God to willful ignorance have, but usually without the melody.

Hicks was a man of contradictions; a walking hypocrisy. I can relate to that as well; on the one hand I really do believe that, fundamentally, whatever nickname our Creator might prefer to be called the ultimate purpose of human life is beauty, love, peace, and hope. I want to spread that love, add to that beauty, give that hope, bring that peace. On the other hand, like Hicks, I often find myself experiencing explosive anger, withering contempt and a heartfelt and passionate disdain for those who choose to live in deliberate ignorance, afraid to consider ideas that fall outside the scope of beliefs that many of them formed or had pushed on to them before they reached puberty. Why don’t people ask questions? Why do people refuse to see reality when it’s standing right there? How can people be so arrogant as to consistently confuse the Will Of The Almighty Creator And Shaper Of Universes with their desire for a Porsche?

I don’t think that Mr. Hicks would be real thrilled about the state of America today; in that, I believe him to be among the greatest of Americans. A friend does not allow you to walk around a party with a feather on your chin; someone who loves you does not leave your errors uncorrected. A friend, a lover, wants the best for you, and I believe that Bill wanted the best for us, and for this country, and for the world…even if it meant kicking our asses and hurting our feelings to get it.

Younger people, for whom Hicks is at best a relic of a previous generation, often underestimate his impact. A very good friend of mine, in her early twenties, remarked to me yesterday that she wasn’t as “in love” with Hicks as I was. I suppose that’s understandable – after all, you’ve got everyone from Denis “Pancreatic Cancer Saved My Career” Leary to Keith Olbermann channelling Hicks on a regular basis all over the place now…not to mention, of course, millions of blogs just like this one written by people who believe themselves to be every bit as witty and insightful as I am. But back then…back then you could count on two hands the number of non-musical performers who had even attempted to say these things. You know how many comedians there were in 1989 who would freely and openly admit to having not only done illegal drugs, but enjoyed them? Five. Carlin, Pryor, Williams, Hicks, and Kinison. Even today, how many comedians could get away with this bit:

“‘We have nothing against America, we just want to see George Bush beheaded and his head kicked down the road like a soccer ball.’ Gee, thats what I want to see, who’d’a thunk it, me and Saddam, we’re like this! *crosses his fingers*…”
Bill Hicks, “Me and Saddam”

If any comedian had said something like that on a stage between 2002 and 2006 or so he or she would be living in legitimate fear for their life. Hicks was the guy who said he was “for the war…but against the troops.” These days that kind of sentiment could get you shot. As it was, Hicks dodged at least one pissed-off redneck with a loaded gun, and had his leg broken by a pair of others, for routines like this and his scathing takes on Christianity. Then he turned the broken leg incident into one of his best bits…

“I did that routine about Jesus at some club in Fyffe, Alabama…after the show these two guys come up to me back stage:

‘Hey buddy – come here (shoves Bill away – beautiful subtlety there)! Hey Mr. Comedian, Come here (another shove)! Hey, buddy, we’re Christians and we dont like what you said about Jesus!’

‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘Well, then…forgive me.’”
Bill Hicks, “One Night Stand” and other recordings

Hicks never flinched from putting himself under the same microscope as he did everyone else. Although he cloaked himself in the trappings of stand-up comedy, he was much more akin to a motivational speaker or the ancient Greek philosophers; observing and reporting the world as he understood it, in the hopes that those listening would understand, learn, grow, and propagate.

[When I originally wrote this article in 2009] 15 years after his death, as I look around this country and this world, I question how successful he was in that regard. After all, we had to elect another Bush – TWICE! – before we clued in to the game of hate and fear that the hardcore conservative contingent in this country represents and embraces. But then, you know, there’s this whole Obama election thing, which on the one hand definitely has a tinge of that “cult of personality” and mindless groupthink that has worked against us before, but also has an aftertaste of Joe Public being sick of the status quo. I think that Nancy Pelosi and other hard-core left-wing politicians may be surprised to find that they didn’t actually win in November of last year; I think there’s finally a substantial portion of the populace who actually voted the “I have had enough of this shit” ticket. maybe not a majority, maybe not even a majority of those who voted for the eventual victor…but it’s there.

And it’s building, and getting bigger, and more cohesive, and the radical fringe is being moved out of the way and dismissed while those with more carefully-considered opinions seem to finally be stepping up to the plate.

Maybe it’s too much to hope for…but this week, a decade and a half after the death of Bill Hicks…maybe someone finally gets it.

Bill Hicks
1961-1994

[2023: All things considered…it was definitely too much to hope for. Indeed, reading this back fifteen years later it seems almost hopelessly naïve and starry-eyed. After the uplift of the Obama years, the Trump presidency dragged all the cockroaches and scum out into the light and made them the mainstream, and we probably won’t get back to even the pitiful level of social progress we’d reached in 1993 before my grandkids are my age.

Then we have the problem of the people who have attached themselves to Hicks over the last fifteen years. Rather than a group of people deeply into spirituality and the turning of disappointed idealism into raging, scathing, razor-sharp wit that pushes boundaries, expanding the mind beyond its usual, culturally imposed boundaries and seeking new truth, most of the people I run into these days who claim an affinity for Hicks are raging little incels, gibbering conspiracy theorists, misogynist dough-faced egomaniacs falling short of being career domestic abusers only because they can’t get close enough to having a partner to become abusive toward them.

They’ve taken the shadiest bits of Hicks’ routines – some of which frankly don’t hold up well three decades later – and make it a personality, while ignoring the fundamental, abiding love and concern for humanity that fueled all of it…which retroactively makes Hicks start looking like the pasty, bitter, anaerobic losers who have begun attaching themselves to him, rather than simply someone who was incredibly funny in his time and whose humor often carried perspectives that we have – and he undoubtedly would have – grown out of and rejected

In the end they’ve largely reduced him to “do drugs, Elmer Dinkley, conspiracy theories.”

Like so many of the people who informed and elevated my own perspective as a teenager and young man in the 80s and 90s, I really wish he’d have stayed obscure after he died. Not like he’s getting anything out of the attention now, and most of the people giving it to him clearly weren’t listening to anything he said other than the little bits that gratified their own frail and unwarranted egos.

They’ve taken a complex and beautiful set of philosophies and turned it into an hour of dick jokes, and I pretty much hate them for that. I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity over the years to end up getting to know, a little bit, over the internet, so many of the ‘Texas Outlaw Comics’ who were Hicks’ friends and colleagues. It helps mitigate the sting of watching him and his work be co-opted by the same losers he was trying to make take a look at themselves by dragging his own least flattering thoughts and impulses out onto a stage. Pisses me off.]

October 4, 2023
Six Easy Ways To Avoid Facebook Jail
Ah, Facebook jail. I’ve spent many an hour carving hashtags in those brick walls while waiting for some minor offense to fade. I’ve come close to losing my account completely a couple of times over the years.

It’s easy to joke about, but for people like me whose livelihood depends on social media and who aren’t just scam artists that don’t care if they burn through 200 identities a year, the prospect of losing an account or having a page shut down after you’ve spent years building it up can be a major threat. Late last year, a fairly huge page where I was co-administrator was shuttered by FB for some repeated violations (by other admins). I’ve not talked about what I know about that situation, but today I’m going to share what I learned from that, and from my other brushes with the long arm of the Zuck.

There’s some stuff I’m not going to cover here – if you’re posting crappy spam fake t-shirt ads or lonely-hearts scams and things like that, you know what you’re doing and I’m not trying to help you anyway. Also, this is just about Facebook. Different platforms have different standards and rules. Like I used to tell my daughter, the four most important letters in the English language are “RTFM,” so make sure you RTFM if you’re not sure about something.

Let’s get started! Use the header button below to navigate between pages, it’s a fairly long post and I didn’t want to wall-o-text you.

Disinformation, Misinformation, and “Fake News”

Disinfo on Facebook has always been a problem and in some ways always will be. The reality of the world is that there is no possible way Facebook can hire enough human beings to read every flagged or reported message and spend even five minutes carefully assessing it. However, there are some pretty common things that scammers and traffic maggots love doing that are a fast and easy way to get thrown off the network.

Super important: If you are running a page or group and something posted there gets a fact check overlay put on it, DELETE THE POST IMMEDIATELY, DO NOT LET IT JUST SIT THERE WITH THE FACT CHECK ON IT.

This is what caused the big Obama page to get taken down; we had an admin who would occasionally post questionably sourced information and particularly memes, and they’d get fact-checked. What we didn’t realize is that every time that happened and the rest of the admins let it stay up (because we were all trying to not step on each other’s stuff and like most people we figured better to leave it out there so people could see the fact check), it was another red flag in the algorithm…and they accumulate. They don’t go away. So after a decade of that, we got shut down, and while the source of the problem was definitely a single admin, from FB’s point of view it was the problem of all the admins because nobody removed the stuff. A decade-plus of work and 200,000+ readers gone overnight, and no way to get ’em back ever.
- Fake celebrity death reports – this is way too common, still. Not a day goes by when I don’t see some jerk posting about Simon Cowell or whoever’s likely to draw traffic dying tragically in the hospital. Aside from my feelings on the matter there are tons of people who just can’t resist sharing this kind of stuff because they see it and go OH MY GOODNESS SIMON COWELL WAS KILLED BY A MOSQUITO BITE ON HIS TAINT! I HAVE TO TELL ALL MY FRIENDS WHO LOVE X-FACTOR! Don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t, DON’T do this. ANY time you see a celebrity death report, even if it looks like it’s coming from a legitimate source, check the news first. Until you see it on trusted outlets – regardless of your political biases – don’t believe it and don’t share it. (Bonus points: check your local network television station website! They’ll usually have stories like this covered within a few minutes of the story being officially and reliably confirmed.)
- False medical/health information – regrettably Facebook has become less aggressive about nuking stuff like telling people to drink horse dewormer to treat viral infections, but the most egregious stuff will still be flagged. It’s not just about stuff like Covid though, and it’s not just about “what’s in the news right now.” NaturalNews.Com and the odious con man who owns them, Dr. Joseph Mercola, finally got thrown off the platform for constantly pushing bad health information so he could sell useless supplements to the naive and credulous, and FB’s tolerance for this sort of scam has become very, very low. Just like above, that means a whole lot of folks are risking the loss of their accounts for sharing this kind of information because they don’t know any better. Those unfortunates are created by people like Mercola, but that’s not going to save them from getting banned or ultimately booted off the network if they share this kind of (completely wrong and dangerous and utterly scamtastic) content.
- Fake missing animal or missing people reports – this is a more insidious form of disinformation that’s currently rising in popularity. The way this works is the scammer will post a message to a ton of regional pages and groups about a missing animal, which induces just about everybody to go “awwwww” and share the post. Then when the scammer sees one going viral, they change the post to something different and very much not what you thought you were sharing. This can range from scam sales and malware links to odious political stuff like white supremacist or neo-Nazi content. Be sure you check out any information like this very carefully before sharing it; if it’s not sourced from a law enforcement agency or known journalism source, it’s probably fake and you shouldn’t touch it.
As a general rule, if you can’t find the information on a major news site or in a peer-reviewed journal article, don’t trust it until you can. Important caveat: sites like PubMed are often mistaken for reliable sources, but they’re just source aggregators and not all the journals they aggregate from are reliable. If you’re not sure, don’t share!

Bullying & Violence

Look, there’s no polite reason to say this and no reason to say it politely – if trying to intimidate people with threats is your jam, you don’t belong online at all. You’re not fit to operate in public until you grow up. Nobody’s impressed with your empty claims about how much you can bench or how many guns you own or how you’re gonna kick someone’s ass if they don’t stop posting entirely legit news stories about Donald Trump being a criminal scam artist. Frankly, I don’t expect anyone who would do this to even find this article, but if you do…stop that crap.

For people whose entire personality isn’t a giant obvious attempt to hide their cowardice and low self-esteem behind a bunch of aggression, though, there are still risks. For instance, I got a pre-emptive warning the other day for a comment I was about to make that had some wordplay on “punch” – I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something on the level of “people like this make me feel punchtastic.” In that case I was offered the chance to delete the comment before they sanctioned the account, which is the first time I’ve ever seen that, and there’s no indication it left a lasting sanction on my account because I did in fact delete the comment immediately.

A few years back, though, I had a guy not far from me tell me straight up he was going to shoot me, skin me, and eat me. I reported the comment. He wasn’t sanctioned…but when I posted a screenshot of his threat, I got banned! So just avoid that kind of language if possible, especially if it’s in any way suggestive of a threat or of inciting other people. Stuff like “burn it all down” is likely to get you banned. (There are weak spots; I ran across a neo-Nazi a few weeks ago whose bio said straight up “shoot all communists” and that seems to have escaped FB’s notice until it was reported.)

While it’s a much milder form of this kind of talk, you also want to avoid telling people to “f–k off” and things like that. You’ll get banned. Trust me. Even aggressive but not “dirty” language like “shut up and sit down” will draw a ban if you aren’t extremely artful about it.

And stop “hey-babying” in the comments. “You’re so beautiful, please send me a friend request” isn’t fooling anyone – you’re a horndog with boundary issues and that’s just not cool, in public or in private.

Sexually explicit material

There are two very broad categories here. Let’s knock out the easy one first, and this goes out to the men: nobody wants to see your penis unless they ask you to see it, and if they do don’t show it to them on Facebook even in a private message. I can’t believe I have to say that out loud, but my female friends assure me that this is still a near-daily problem. STOP IT. If someone wants to see your junk they’ll ask you to see it. If they do, don’t show it to them on Facebook.

The second category is a bit tougher, and that’s the stuff that can reasonably be described as “artistic depictions.” FB is more relaxed than some about this – if you throw a giant emoji over your crotch in a photo, you’re usually safe so long as the subject is clearly an adult. There’s been a ton of controversy over artistic depictions, and that’s softened up a bit; I’ve seen painting or statues with full frontal nudity that weren’t taken down, and pictures involving life-like prosthetic penises as well, but then others get yanked. Best to avoid. They’ve also softened up on photos of breastfeeding, which was a big controversy a few years back; these days the rule of thumb seems to be that if you can’t see a nipple or any part of the areola, you’re okay.

Note well: depictions of sex acts, no matter how “artistically” rendered, still seem to be completely off-limits even if you cover the naughty bits. Ditto any references to minors, “family relations,” or sexual violence in any context but straight reporting of news or clinical discussion of issues is likely to get you banned (although to my eternal confusion, running around calling everyone a “groomer” or “pedophile” seems to be just fine with Zuck &Co).

Privacy Violations & Over-Networking

Ever notice how people will post a screen cap of a facebook comment and edit out the name and user icon of the commenter? That’s because Facebook considers posting those, especially when you’re criticizing or making fun of the comment, as intimidation; they treat it like you’re trying to get your readers to go mob-harass the poster. To be on the safe side, if you’re going to do the thing where you screencap your trolls and post their more entertaining BS, black out their identity. Oddly this doesn’t seem to apply to original posts, only to comments and inbox messages.

Doxxing people is bannable, even if they have their information fully visible on their page. Don’t. It’s an intimidation tactic and will be sanctioned.

“Over-networking” is when you add too many friends, follow too many pages, or send too many invites or friend requests in a short period of time. This behavior is almost always driven by commercial interest – trying to grow an audience by high-volume contact-making rather than by creating quality content and

Stupid Spam Tricks & “Dirty Words”

I’ve made occasional remarks for years about the tactic of “munging” words that are problematic – “adult” language, or words like “Covid” or “vaccine.” Those people who do things like t.hi.s and or talk about “yt ppl” instead of “white people” think they’re being clever? They’re not. They’re buffoons who think they’re smart, and here’s the funny part – Facebooks algorithm won’t punish you for saying “Covid,” but if you say c.o.vi.d they absolutely will because that’s a clear sign you’re deliberately trying to avoid/trick the algo, and that’s a clear display of intent to post content you think is a violation and get away with it. That makes you a troublemaker who’s intentionally trying to get away with breaking the rules, and that gets the algo’s negative attention even if you’re not actually breaking them.

You’re not gonna get banned for simply naming an identity group in discussion. You say something like “all white people are murderers,” then yeah. That’s not because you said “white people,” it’s because that’s bigoted as hell and bigotry is not allowed. Same with Black people or any other ethnic group, LBGT folks, etc. You’re not getting banned for using a neutral and inoffensive label for a group, you’re getting banned for what you say about that group, because what you said about that group was prejudiced/discriminatory/bigoted/racist/sexist/homophobic. You’re not getting banned for “talking about” vaccines, you’re getting banned because what you’re saying can kill people, ya jerk. Maybe take a look at that instead of thinking you’re c.l.ev.e.r.ly f00ling the algo.

You really won’t get banned for saying the “seven dirty words” in and of themselves (the two of those words that describe actions – “cs” and “mf” – are riskier). If you feel the need to mask those words to avoid jarring your audience, just use the classic asterisk substitution for that f***ing s**t. James Fell’s entire gimmick is “sweary history,” and he doesn’t make anything. It’s not the words themselves, it’s how you use them. If you say “that Rage Against The Machine concert was f***ing awesome” they don’t care. If you say “you’re a f***ing jerk and you need to f**k off,” they will – even if you mask it, because now you’re being aggressive. I drew a thirty-day ban once for posting 8 letters and a symbol to a troll: “STFU & GTFO.” It’s the tone and intent of the words, not the words themselves, unless the words themselves are slurs. Always mask those if you’re discussing them, and never use them as slurs.

Wheaton’s Law

Nearly all of this stuff really does just come down to not being a jerk, and avoiding the risk of looking like you’re being a jerk. Nobody wants to read hate speech and swaggering threats and sexist creepiness and transphobic stupidity. There are behaviors I’ve very intentionally left out of this article that will definitely get you banned, because frankly if you’re the kind of person who does/says those kinds of things you’re a dick, you don’t need to be part of a community until you can get your act together, and I’m not going to help you avoid being treated the way your behavior and attitude clearly justify.

Facebook’s highest priority is creating a space where people feel reasonably safe, free from intimidation and aggression and bigotry, and allowed to be their authentic selves, while giving maximum possible latitude for robust discussion, even of controversial subjects. They’re not perfect by any means, and sometimes they just plain blow it, but if you’re honest with yourselves and do our genuine best to honor Wheaton’s Law, you’re probably not going to find yourself unable to participate in Facebook.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find this information useful! Please remember to share it with all your friends so they don’t get banned!
September 18, 2023
JH’s Brief History Of Video Games

Introduction

I figure since I’m going to open the box on the whole gaming thing, which I really haven’t touched in terms of content creation in about 25 years, I should probably introduce myself in that context. Then I started writing and about eight hours later had a fairly cool and comprehensive article about the history of video games between 1975 and 1986, so I decided to go with it and do a multi-part project covering that history from my perspective as a gamer, and this is the first segment of that project.

This isn’t “the” history of gaming, it’s “my” history of gaming. This is what it looked like to me, as someone alive at the time, to the best of my memories. I’ve done significant work to ensure I’m not communicating any old urban legends or myths, but in the end this isn’t intended to be an objective article; it’s my subjective memories and opinions, augmented by research. Feel free to argue about it in the forum!

In this edition we’ll go from “In the beginning…” up to the calm before the Nintornado that blew through the industry in February of 1986. Note I’ve used the post splitter, so pay attention to that little navbar where the section title is, at the top and bottom of each page.

Early Days

I’ve been a gamer since before video games existed. Pong clones and two-word text parsers were hours of time spent before I was ten years old…and that was in 1980. We’re talking single-color monitors, 80×25 characters, and a “pixel” was roughly the size of your pinky nail.

When there were any pixels at all. There are none here, or there wouldn’t be if it was running on OG equipment. NB: This isn’t a really early beta of “Elder Scrolls VI,” but it’s closer than you probably think.

Whether it was early consoles like those PONG clones, ante-computer-geek text games and bad, blocky knock-offs of then-currently popular arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, or just taking a screwdriver and shorting together the pins in the EPROMS on my VIC-20 while it was plugged in so I could see what it would do on-screen, I’ve always been deeply fascinated in computer imaging and gaming both.

Trivia point: the first thing I ever “hacked” was using what eventually became Norton Utilities to overwrite the contents of a floppy drive, directly to the disk as hexadecimal text input from the keyboard, to remove the copy protection and customize the load/splash screens on a bunch of old games like this. Then I’d take off to the local mall, go to the Radio Shack, load up a game on their demo box(es) and walk away. That was when I was probably 13, 14.

So yeah. I’ve been at it for a minute.

Over the last forty years or so of course video gaming has gone from a micro-niche targeted toward “kids” to become not just a multi billion dollar industry, but depending on your sources it’s arguably the largest sector of the entire global entertainment business. While one may quibble over methodology and rankings and calculations, certainly it can’t be argued that gaming has become an incredibly popular, and lucrative endeavor.

What’s your vector, Victor?

Around 1980 we started seeing some interesting innovations, beginning with “vector graphics.” This is a little different than the way we use the term today. In 2023, programs like Adobe Illustrator use “vector graphics” to draw scalable images that are defined by mathematical formulae in the rendering software. By contrast, “raster” graphic programs like Adobe Photoshop instead program an array of pixels with color and (in some cases) transparency information.

So a raw vector formula to create an “S” might (in the simplest implementation) describe mathematically a pair of sine waves, oriented vertically, calculated such that they intersect at each end of the “S.” A rastor formula for the same “S” on the other hand would basically be a small relational database or spreadsheet – a two-dimensional array – with each intersecting coordinate being described in terms of the levels of red, blue, green, and “alpha” (transparency) that each pixel will be programmed with.

The end result of this was no more blocky edges on diagonal lines traveling across horizontal CRT scanlines…but alas, still, no more curves at all.

Pictured: not curves. A screenshot of the vector-graphics game Battlezone. This screenshot is from a version ported for the US Army called the “Bradley Trainer,” which was used to train literal legit tank operators for the US military. The Battlezone monitors were green on black, not white.

Vector monitors (a whole different setup than your traditional CRT monitors and TVs, or modern LED displays) couldn’t draw circles either, but only straight lines between a series of points (think about the levels in the video game “Tempest,” which was one of the earliest memories I have of color vector graphics).

Lines, lines, everything is lines. Screenshot from the attract screen of Tempest (1980)

What made vector monitors sort of cool and different was that the lines were sharp. Where a CRT or television simply draws a series of horizontal lines that quickly “scans” from top to bottom, a vector monitor draws the lines directly from point A to point B. An old-school CRT draws a diagonal line as a series of horizontal lines with different characteristics at different points across the inside of the tube to create the illusion of a vertical line. Consequently – although it’s impossible to really show you here because you’re all not reading this on a vector graphic monitor – the resulting drawings are remarkably sharp and crisp when compared to traditional raster graphics.

Unfortunately limitations of computing power and the overwhelming prevalence of raster graphics in consumer products like TVs and (increasingly) computers made these games pretty limited in their ability to really capitalize on the improved visuals of vector monitors. Probably the peak of the field was the 1983 Star Wars arcade shooter, in which the player sat in as Luke Skywalker on a repeating three-level infinite adventure. (World record: five days on a single credit, played back and forth between two guys in the 80’s. Total score slightly over a billion points.)

Those funny things that look like asterisks on way too much caffeine are supposed to be fireballs. The other things are tie fighters, and a shooting reticle, and then the “guns” of your x-wing fighter at the edges of the screen. Courtesy Atari, Inc or whoever owns the game IP this week.

Unfortunately as you can see from the image, this really didn’t get us to the sort of photo-realistic pinnacle of graphic art that we youngsters were hoping to reach, but in 1983 plenty of us spent many many dollars in quarters hearing “Red five standing by!” and “Use the force, Luke,” and my favorite line “Luke, let go!” The first was Actually Mark Hamill and the second and third Actually Alec Guiness. I don’t know if they recorded the lines specifically for the game, or if the audio was pulled from the film soundtracks – in fact I just tweeted Mark Hamill to ask, I’ll let you know if he offers a canonical answer. He might, he’s known for being pretty cool with stuff like that.

Color! And More…

Around the same time vector games were rising, we also saw the introduction of color into early eight-bit games.

Carrying on a long-standing tradition of pretending that Americans in the old west were all the same color.

The first “eight bit” game is generally recognized as “Gun Fight,” a 1975 arcade game by Taito (worldwide) and Midway (North America). The use of the phrase “eight bit” can be confusing because now most people related that to the graphics of the game itself, but in reality this was the bandwidth of the CPU. Prior to “Gun Fight,” video games were created with “discrete logic” electronics explicitly, physically created for the tasks at hand. When Midway licensed the game for the US, they ported it to run on an Intel 8080 CPU, making it the first CPU-based video game.

At this stage of the technology, using a CPU allowed game developers to begin true game programming – the creation of game software to run on hardware that is intended generally for “computing” rather than specifically “to be a video game cabinet.” In 1979, the game changed completely with the introduction of the Galaxian platform by Nintendo in Japan. With various leaps forward in processing techniques, Galaxian was the first truly modern video game, with the now familiar “Pac-Man” graphics. Trivia note: Pac-man was originally developed on Galaga hardware, as were several others like Galaga and (if I remember correctly) Jungle King).

This was the dawn of the first wave of modern video gaming. With hits like “Space Invaders,” “Galaxian,” and “Pac-Man” raking in billions of dollars in quarters, gaming had started to carve a niche in the culture. Although a certain Italian plumber would ultimately take the role, Pac Man in particular was the symbol of everything exciting about video gaming in 1981 or so…

Leading us to the unlikely scenario of two hillbilly-lookin dudes lip-syncing an electro-synth pop anthem about a yellow pizza with a slice missing on what was then the most-watched visual music presentation in the US, Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

Often called the “golden age of arcade gaming,” the period from 1980-1983 saw an explosion of arcade games, for the first time supplanting pinball machines as vice du jour for the nation’s misguided youth. This is where the classics really began – in basically a three year span you had Pac Man, Galaxian, Frogger, Space Fury (the actual first color vector game). In 1982 the first 16-bit CPU arcade game, “Pole Position,” was released by Atari, and with groundbreaking offerings like “Tron,” “Dragon’s Lair,” and “Space Ace” capping off the run toward the end of the wave, it was a pretty magical time to be a gamer.

This coincides roughly with the first real wave of home gaming consoles beginning with the Atari 2600 in 1977, which was the first “must have” home gaming console right up until they created a game so bad they had to bury it in an undisclosed desert location and it basically killed the platform.

Some say Atari died in 1979 when Nolan Bushnell sold out to Warner, but the gravesite’s been found and the body is definitely dated 1983.

The long version of the story is that Atari had been bought by Warner in 1979 and generated some 65%-ish of their 1982 profits…and then proceeded to lose about a half a billion dollars the next year, in part due to the failure of E.T. but also disappointing results from their port of Pac-Man – these two titles themselves owning about 85% of votes across the board for “worst video game ever.” Warner sold them off in 1983 and their steep decline continued. The brand has basically been used as a venture-capital electronics brand buoyed by its early 80’s reputation ever since, and by all accounts ceased being “the real Atari” in any way after being sold off by Warner.

Into the vacuum stepped a couple of quite decent contenders among a mess of nonsense like the Timex Sinclair. Although the Mattel Intellivision sported the first 16-bit processing in a home console and superior graphics and sound, a series of business missteps including the abominable attempt at creating an attachable keyboard that would convert the whole thing into a rudimentary home computer ended the Intellivision while the Colecovision – running on an 8-bit Z80 processor but coming out of the gate with the first home version of Donkey King that was ridiculously faithful to the original – started eating Atari’s console market share until similar missteps with their Adam ended that.

Fortunately for gaming, a revolution was around the corner.

And that’s where we’ll break it off for now. Stay tuned for part 2, coming soon!

May 7, 2023
JH The Gamer

I’ve talked for a long time about my love of gaming, going back to childhood in the 70s. For those of you who are interested there’s going to be a lot more content related to that showing up on my blog as well. Kinda tired of allowing my public life to exist under the shadow of the idea that poor people don’t deserve to have fun. So watch for that, I’m about to throw up a bunch of Fallout 4 stuff and get some basic things in place to start doing a lot more work on that and dishing out a bit of the lore and wisdom carried by JH The Gamer.

Insider secret: I tend to bury myself in reading books and gaming when I’m super depressed AND when I’m in that “percolating” mode where I’ve been through a bunch of experiences and now it’s time to sit down and process them and build the platforms for whatever’s next.

Breaking that stuff out into content mitigates some of the losses involved when I’m locked in some mental illness issue that includes executive dysfunction, by creating interesting and monetizable content out of the results…and all I really have to do is lean on the screenshot button and then write about and post the results when I’m in a more productive and energized space.

EZ mode, and as a bonus there’s zero ideological or ethical reason not to monetize it and push it as a “product” rather than feeling very averse to that idea the way I do about my social justice, public interest, and creative artistic work. MBAs & muggles cf. “long tails” and monetizing EVERYTHING, just the way capitalism demands. Plus it’ll pull some inevitable cross-traffic to my work.

Also, as part of the overall reorganization of everything I do, I decided to launch an explicit category here called “My Actual Blog” that will serve as the space for little “by the ways” and “slices of life” and so forth that go by and I feel like blogging about with no particular explicit intent or purpose. This is the first entry in that blog 🙂

I’ll set up a nav tree and proper landing pages and get it all plugged in to the menu and all that stuff soon. Meanwhile have a little gallery of screenshots from Fallout 4!

May 6, 2023
International Women’s Day: Wendy O. Williams

When it comes to glass ceilings, there are those who break them…and those who smash through them happily chewing the glass as they go.

Happy International Women’s Day, 2022!

I somehow manage to not remember this until it happens every year, but in a happy little bit of accident International Women’s Day, March 8th, is also my daughter Amber’s birthday, so happy birthday to her!

Back in the late 70’s and 80’s when we were all strung out on cocaine and wearing animal prints and most of the guys in rock music had more makeup and hairspray than most of the girls which was definitely a violation of norms at the time, one woman stood above so many other incredible trailblazers to permanently destroy the idea that women had to be nice and soft and innocent and pure.

A self-described “marginal nymphomaniac and terminal exhibitionist,” Wendy O. Williams was unabashedly foul-mouthed, aggressive, and dominant. In a time when the concept of a “strong” or “empowered” women was parsed socially to mean “masculine” or “aggressive” in popular culture, in the mold of Grace Jones or Brigitte Nielsen, Wendy O wasn’t just opening doors, she was smashing walls…and she was using your face for a hammer while screaming in a voice that sounded like a torch singer gargling razor blades.

It’ll look strange to the youngsters of 2022, to see this woman in what seems to be a weird take on a fairly typical cheesecake video, but in 1984 this was (sometimes literally) the bleeding edge of female empowerment. This was the woman who wrapped notorious womanizer Gene Simmons around her finger so tightly she got his entire band to work on her album plus one of the guy who had already left!

Of course I’m playing glib with Simmons’ reputation, but there can be no doubt that Wendy O. had a very special place in Gene’s heart, and he pushed hard for her, and good for him. It’s a little funny to see photos of the two of them back in the day, with the normally “Mr. Dominant/God Of Thunder” just about giggling at this amazing human being. (Kiss later took on a song of slightly disputed provenance which they’d given to Williams, “It’s My Life,” and recorded it as a single for their late 90’s album “Psycho Circus.” However even then it ended up being cut from the album and remained unreleased until their 2001 box set. I had a false memory of this being a much more successful KISS song than I thought, but it turns out not to be the case…which is actually a little weird, it’s a high-quality pop-commercial-arena-rock and they did it well.)

Fun fact: she did her own stunts in this.

Many of the bios you’ll find online now will tend to suggest that there was a lot of manufactured hype behind Williams and her band the Plasmatics, but don’t let the ability to see through that now in ways people just couldn’t and didn’t forty years ago skew the picture. It was theater macabre, in the grand tradition. Sledgehammers and shotguns and chainsaws casually being thrown around by a mohawked blonde woman wearing nothing but electrical tape on her nipples, patent leather bikini bottoms, and a sneer, sawing and hammering her way through guitars, televisions, and Cadillacs on stage.

It would be easy to blow her off from our perspective 40 years later as just another exploited woman in the age of hairbands when women in rock music were still largely relegated to the dressing rooms. In a world of nordic metal and buzz-saw punk you’d probably get kids laughing at you for even suggesting there was anything “metal” or “punk” about Wendy and the Plasmatics, but in the early 80’s this woman was the definition of “punk rock girl.” The now-largely-forgotten doors she broke down stayed open for eventually millions of girls and women to walk through whether as musicians or anything else they wanted to be.

There are a million bios of Ms. Williams out there and I don’t want to recreate them. There are also a million pre-fab hot takes on a million prominent women, every one of them well-accomplished and worthy of praise, and I don’t want to try to recreate that either.

Instead on this International Woman’s Day, I’d like us to think about the women who weren’t doctors or physicists or poets or dancers, who weren’t comfortable and whose success didn’t necessarily fit neatly into pre-established but traditionally male-dominated paradigms like academia, science, and business.

Ms. Williams’ long and, if you believe the image, surprising list of laudable personal behaviors and beliefs is exhausting – a committed vegetarian since the 60s, didn’t use drugs beyond some experimentation as a teenager, huge advocate for animal rights, anti-establishment rabble-rouser…her idea of a safe sex PSA in 1984 (when we barely knew what AIDS was, had only just begun to understand how it worked and what HIV was, other than a death sentence) – and this is no fooling – was “if it doesn’t taste good, don’t take it home and sleep with it.”

So speaketh Mama Wendy

One of the things that set Williams apart even from so many other women who own and leverage their sexuality for popular appeal is that she never left you with the impression she was coming out on stage wearing nothing but shaving cream (a set piece that got her arrested twice, which was the beginning of the electrical tape) to get anyone off but herself. She wasn’t “trying to get your attention,” she was taking it, and doing so for her own pleasure and satisfaction and amusement and fulfillment. She wasn’t out there showing you her chest because you wanted to see it, but because she wanted to show it to everyone. Whether they wanted to see it or not wasn’t taken into consideration…and the overtones there about consent weren’t an accident on her part, even if we didn’t really have the language in 1984 that we do now to say that.

Another of rock’s more forward-thinking leading female lights, Chrissie Hynde, once said “Remember you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not ‘fuck me,’ it’s ‘fuck you!’” Wendy O. Williams strapped on a sneer and said “Both sounds like a lot of fun, along with some exploding sedans…” Sometimes compared to later trashpunk icon GG Allin, the comparison doesn’t hold up. Allin was a doped out self-absorbed nihilist. Williams was a hyper-theatrically inclined hedonist with a penchant for violent imagery and a lifelong habit of deliberately challenging of “traditional female behavior” at every turn, going back to getting arrested for sunbathing nude on the town common at fifteen…in 1964.

After the noise and hype had died down significantly and the unprecedented expressions and behavior she created became its own mainstream, Ms. Williams in 1991 declared herself “pretty fed up with people” and moved with her longtime partner Rod Swenson into a geodesic dome house they built together in a small town in Connecticut. There she worked rehabilitating animals and at a local food co-op.

Beginning in 1994, her lifelong depression combined with the fundamental conflict between her theatrical, hedonistic personality and the more pastoral existence of a post-fame middle-aged small-town animal caretaker and grocer in Connecticut led her to several suicide attempts, the last of which was successful in 1998. Unlike many high-profile (and low-profile for that matter), Williams went to great care to make certain it was known her decision came after many years of long consideration and contemplation, and was not a spur of the moment act prompted by an acute mental health crisis. In one of her suicide notes, she wrote:

The act of taking my own life is not something I am doing without a lot of thought. I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time. I do believe strongly, however, that the right to do so is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have. For me much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.

Long before that, though, Williams was quite clear about her approach to her art and her purpose in performing it:

“We’re not out to pick fights. But then the essence of what we do is shaking up the middle class; I think if you don’t do that with your music, you’re just adding to the noise pollution.”

With her music and so much more, Wendy O. Williams was absolutely the most genuine of pioneers in the women’s movement while functioning almost entirely outside of it as she did nearly every other movement, group, club, cabal, trend, bandwagon, style, or cause. On this day of international celebration of women and their unique contributions to our world and our cultures, let’s those of us who live on the fringes remember the lady who shredded those fringes from an old pair of cut-off shorts around 1978, the incomparable Wendy O. Williams.

I would say “may she rest in peace,” but I’m pretty sure she’d rather be chainsawing a guitar in half on stage.

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March 8, 2022