These are pointless.

Get it? Pointless?

It works on so many levels!

Hey, have you ever noticed how sometimes people say things that are kind of stupid in online message boards?

Yes!

(Watch out for a bit of naughty language there kiddos!)

Last night, I set aside a vital stack of papers that I needed to bring in to my new job today to hand over to the HR department.

This morning, I couldn't find my keys. I can usually find my keys. I usually know exactly where they are. This morning, I could not find them anywhere. Not a huge deal, as I take the bus, and I'm sure they're there somewhere, but still, it was unsettling, and I was kind of panicking.

Now, here I am at work, and I go to hand over the paperwork to HR only to discover that the stack of papers I grabbed this morning is not at all the one I set aside last night, which I really need to turn in to HR today. Outstanding.

This means that I get to spend my lunch hour running--literally running--back home, hoping that one of my roommates is there to let me in because I don't have my keys, grabbing the correct stack of papers, and running back. If I'm lucky, I should just barely get back to my desk, huffing and puffing, in under an hour.

I'm not normally this clueless, I swear. It's just been one of those days.

UPDATE!

Keys: found.

Papers: delivered.

Sammich: eaten.

A pretty heroic lunch hour, I must say.

I picked up Space Invaders Extreme for the DS today. I think that a number of cIassic games, like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, achieve a kind of perfection in their simplicity. Both Pac-Man and Space Invaders have seen numerous iterations over the years, most of which have strayed too far from what made the original games so timeless. However, last year brought us Pac-Man Championship Edition, one of my favorite games of the past few years, which thoroughly delivered on the potential inherent in an update by staying true to the cIassic gameplay and just making a few minor tweaks that made it feel totally fresh and new and really, really intense. Now we have Space Invaders Extreme, which takes the same sort of "let's stay faithful to the original but kick it up a few notches and set it to a techno beat" approach as Pac-Man CE did. Personally, I'd say that the cat-and-mouse gameplay of Pac-Man is inherently a bit more exciting than the blast-the-relentlessly-descending-invaders gameplay of Space Invaders so, in a battle of the awesome updates, I'd put Pac-Man CE ahead of SIX (That's a more extreme way of abbreviating it than SIE would be, wouldn't you say?), but they're definitely in the same category, and I'm really enjoying my time with SIX so far.

I uploaded my high score after my first go at the Ranked mode and am currently ranked #1,547! But I didn't really get how scoring worked, and as I come to understand the game better, I'm hoping to improve my ranking at least somewhat. It seems, though, that at this point there's only one person out there extreme enough to really understand how the scoring works in the game. Currently the #1 ranked player has a score of 1,411,603,407, while the #2 ranked player is way behind with a mere 13,281,740. That's got to be the most ridiculous scoring gap I've ever seen.

UPDATE: I played by far my best ranked game so far last night, making it to stage five and initiating a number of Fever Times throughout the game, winding up with a score of 5,562,320, which currently has me at 146th on the leaderboard.

I came home this evening after spending a gorgeous day out and about in San Francisco to find this email in my inbox:

BERKELEY'S CODY'S BOOKS CLOSES AFTER 52 YEARS

Berkeley CA, June 20, 2008 –

After 52 years, Cody's Books will shut its doors effective June 20, 2008. The Berkeley bookstore has been a beacon to readers and writers throughout the nation and across the world. Founded by Fred and Pat Cody in 1956, Cody's has been a Berkeley institution and a pioneer in the book business, helping to establish such innovations as quality paperbacks and in-store author readings. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Cody's was a landmark of the Free Speech movement and was a home away from home for innumerable authors, poets and readers.

The Board of Directors of Cody's Books made this difficult decision after years of financial distress and declining sales.

---

This news saddens me. I'm a big believer in supporting local businesses, and Cody's has been one of my favorites, from the shop on Telegraph to the store just a few blocks from my home on 4th St. to their final home on Shattuck. More than just a bookstore, Cody's has been a Berkeley institution, with a passionate, knowledgable staff and frequent appearances by some of the most wonderful and important authors of the day, and I will miss it. I urge you, whenever possible, to spend your money at local businesses rather than nationwide chains.

Now if only someone would open up an independent local video game shop in the space Cody's is vacating so that I can stop giving money to GameStop!

Few things make a game really stick in my heart like a powerful sense of place, and since there aren't many places I know as well or love as much as my native California, games that really capture California well seem capable of making me homesick for it, even though I'm still living here.

I spent so many hours gathered with friends around the Commodore 64 playing California Games, the superb, extremely sunny collection of games put out by Epyx in 1987. I remember how much I loved rockin' the Ocean Pacific and schoolin' friends on the half-pipe with the Hollywood sign in the background, a sign I associated as a child with glitz and glamour, hopes and dreams. I'm looking forward to this game getting released as a downloadable title for current consoles, hopefully with online leaderboards so I can demonstrate how much better I am at computer hacky sack than you are.

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is undoubtedly the game that captures the feel of contemporary California better than any other. I played some of Rockstar's beautiful epic again in the weeks leading up to GTA 4's release and this aspect of it still got to me. The trees, the sunsets, the architecture of the strip malls, apartment blocks and mansions, the dusty stretches of road between small towns--it's all so gorgeous and so California. (Except for the parts that are more Nevada, of course.) Standing in the ghetto cul-de-sac that CJ calls home, I could almost feel the Santa Ana winds.

And finally Outrun, Yu Suzuki's 1986 driving game, remains a personal favorite of mine in this regard. The unforgettable, summery tunes and diverse, vivid locales come together to create a place that has little to do with the actual California, but is obviously a depiction of a kind of idealized California. Every time I hear Last Wave, the game's lovely end game high score music, I remember those drives I loved so much as a kid, riding with the windows down and the wind in my hair, my dad driving us along Pacific Coast Highway or through Topanga Canyon, out to the beach in Malibu.

Regardless of whether they're inspired by a real place like California or are the stuff of pure fantasy, what games have created an especially powerful sense of place for you?