2006.07.23
In the end it was... just alright. The music selection was a bit uneven, and the DJ bothered with smooth transitions for maybe 1 in 3 songs. I was trying to gauge the age of the crowd... I thought it was pretty young, but Miller pointed some 80s and 90s standards like "Hey Micky" and "Pour Some Sugar On Me" were getting a lot of people yelling along. I was kind of amused by the Coyote Ugly-esque counter they had, and the gals trying to work it, though it was in front of a VIPish area, not a bar.
So, we didn't try to close the place out, and beat a retreat to IHOP (incidentally, the parking gods had previously smiled upon me, and we got a free metered spot right there by the BU dorms) I was pretty dang good at resisting the breakfasty temptations of IHOP, limiting myself to coffee, a link sausage, and a small onion ring.
A good night in all, though we didn't climb into bed 'til a bit after 3.
Geek Nostalgia of the Moment
The "Adventurers of Alfredo" where these odd little stick figure animations that came with Big Blue Disk in the 1980s... (Big Blue Disk was one of those "magazines on disk" where every month or so you would get some games, applications, etc... it's also where the programmers who went on to make Castle Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM got their start.)
I've been musing on Alfredo for a long time. In the 90s, I thought it would be cool to port or at least pay homage to the adventurers on the black and white Palm Pilot, but I of course never got around to it, partially because I only had a vague memory of what the adventures were.
But no more!
Devi Ever has retrieved 10 of the 13 episodes and ripped them to a convenient (well, for many) Windows format, so now you can enjoy The Adventures of Alfredo on your own desktop.
I admit in some ways they haven't aged all that well, and not just from a graphics standpoint. It's pretty juvenile in parts, but still fun in a minimalist sort of way. If you're just going to check out one, I'd say Episode 9, "Alfredo's Nuclear Nuisance" is as good as any. The later ones added some welcome complexity.
Alfredo is kind of hapless video game character minus the video game, getting blown up or demolished in about every episode. Actually it seems like he might have been the inspiration to the later trend of Stick Figure Death Theater (which unfortunately has gone beyond its roots as charmingly simple animated GIFs into full multimedia Flash productions.)
In a fit of wanting to support random bits of geek nostalgia, as well as "more Indy Geek than thou", I bought one of the cafepress shirts. I even bought one for my Uncle Bill, because at my request he dumped a whole bunch of his collection of Big Blue Disk onto CD-ROM, but I never made enough time to do much with the episodes that were contained in there.
Apology of the Moment
Sorry for all the long-windedness about topics of such special interest! Or is that part of the charm of my site?