![]() ![]() Just a made-up mascot for typing software. It turns out Mavis Beacon isn’t a real person. “Oh my god, how do you not have a game yet!?” “I’m the nephew of a guy who invented a cockamamie keyboard layout.” Jesus, ANYONE could get a computer game back in the day. The Dvorak on this game is not the same Dvorak who came up with the alternate layout. But it’s not really clear how the action on screen relates to the typing. It gives you a setup, you’re a knight beating the shit out of Pan, then another knight, then a dragon on a pile of gold, and you do it by typing. ![]() Measuring such high levels of nerdiness is like something being so hot that you can’t get a temperature gauge close enough to measure without melting it. Nerds of a degree that’s difficult to assess. I say “supposedly” because there has been some evidence to the contrary among nerds who care about this stuff. I’ve heard of this Dvorak method, which is an alternative keyboard layout that supposedly allows for easier typing. I think the premise is “Pete was writing a column when he got distracted and read about a thousand Wizard of Id comics. If anyone wants to make a typing game based on my life, I will give you an excellent deal on my likeness. The game is pretty crappy, but it’s also so damn old, and hey, if I made a newspaper comic strip and someone offered me money to make a typing game I’d go for it. We all know the kid from school who claimed to be dating a sewer wisp who went to another school across town.ĭid you know that The Wizard of Id is still going? Not by its original creators, but by some grandsons? According to Wikipedia, this Evil Spirit has mentioned that it has a sewer wisp as a girlfriend. Okay, this character is known as “Evil Spirit” and lives in the Wizard’s cauldron. Maybe a genie? Hold on, let me educate myself… You shoot lightning bolts of annoying noise at a.maybe snake. It doesn’t take long for this one to get old. Nothing like a 70’s newspaper comic strip to really bring in the kids! Well, at least there's some comfort in knowing it's entirely possible they're dead. When you die, you're treated to a de-motivational leaderboard where some assholes set records on this game in the mid-80's. Maybe it could just be, I don’t know, a failure means he doesn’t press his pants before going to work and looks a little disheveled? Becoming food for another creature is a harsh punishment. My ability to type being tied to the life of a character is a little heavy. This is really demotivating as a student. You have to type fast enough to outrun bad guys or pneumatic presses or things like that. You move this character, which appears to be a.caterpillar’s head, down a path by typing. The game is the same thing over and over. But it begs the question: What is it? And why would another human being create this? I don’t think it was ever intended to be music. This one greets students with an absolute racket of MS-DOS noise when you fire it up. To attempt some training, I played games. I repeatedly typed “Thom Yorke,” which violates my sense of the way “Tom” is supposed to be spelled. This one has my typing what I can only assume are the liner notes to a Radiohead album? Not even kidding. This one had me typing up a text about how horribly depressed people with Alzheimer's and Dementia can be. To be fair, a pop-up popped up in the middle of this test. Is it worth my time (or yours) to work on those typing skills? Would a writer save some time and energy with a little bit of back-to-basics? Will I get to type the word “inbred” over and over? My typing style is somewhere in-between quirky and bad. Sometimes the quirks are more of a problem, like the self-taught mopper who’s rubbing the mop head on the floor front to back instead of in a sweeping, graceful side-to-side motion that actually accomplishes the task of cleaning a floor. Sometimes these are charming, little things, like the kid who jumped along with Mario until the first time he played with friends and realized what he was doing (I was ALSO this kid). Self-taught practitioners usually have some quirks to the way they do things. This was a sure sign of a self-taught player who spent a lot of time alone at the hoop. ![]() The first time I played basketball at a friend’s house, I was the only kid still deploying the two-arm, underhanded “granny shot.” Everyone else shooting overhand was a completely new thing to me. ![]()
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