Sometimes, when I’m sitting and drifting and not thinking about anything at all, the music from King’s Quest V will start playing in my head. The piece I’m thinking of is actually a classical piece of music, just changed slightly, but I forget which. I learned it on the piano once, I seem to remember. And it was wicked hard.  It’s part of my default soundtrack, which consists mainly of computer and Nintendo game theme songs and 80s cartoon theme songs. And I’m a child of the 80s who’s getting old. So it’s pretty easy to press my nostalgia button. Sigh. Just keep shoveling crap at me that reminds me of my childhood. I’ll keep buying it.

By the always jealousy-inducing, extremely brilliant xkcd, of course.

Which is where I will be for the next five days. I won’t be much in pocket online, as this is a detox from work, and my work involves all things internetty. I’ll be checking in from time to time, of course, probably a few times a day still (okay probably more since I’m a sad, sad addict) but I will NOT be blogging. Because that really does take work.

But since I love you all, I’ll leave you with some nice things to look at and read while I’m gone. I hope to come back a sweeter, gentler person. But I believe in that about as much as I believe in an actual Heaven, so, uh, yeah.

Look! Things!

I love Hyperbole and a Half.  And we all love, or have loved, a very “special” animal like this. Oh, dear, yes. Read this but don’t blame me if you fall down while you are laughing. Maybe be sitting while you read it.

Enter a Google search terms contest at Dark Sky and win Brian Carr’s new and most excellent book, Short Bus. DO IT!

The Civil War changed literature, you know. And it wasn’t just Whitman who was moved to write about it.

There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music or a good novel “sweeps you along.” There’s a selflessness in it: not just the pleasure in pausing the parts of the brain that plan and calculate and select, but in the temporary surrender of investing in someone else’s choices. Good art can be where we go for humility: when we’re encouraged to treat each of our thoughts as worthy of being made public, it can be almost counter-cultural to admit, in the act of being swept along, that someone else is simply better at arranging the keys of a song or the twists of a book and making them look like fate.

Freedom from choice is a seductive way of thinking about art—and it’s at the heart of the debate over the cultural value of video games. Video games, for their cultural boosters, promise an art based on choice: an interactive art, possibly the first ever. For their detractors, “interactive art” is a contradiction in terms. Critics can point to video games’ narrative clichés or sloppy dialogue or a faith in violence as the answer to everything; but at base, they seem to be bothered by the idea of an art form that can be “played.” Choice is their bright line.

Read the really fascinating essay here.

Cake by Artisan Cake Company

That’s right. Today is a very, very special day. Super Mario Bros. turns 25 years old. One quarter of a century of the most famous video game character ever.

As Luke Plunkett over at Kotaku notes:

It seems almost pointless marking the occasion with a round-up, or a few paragraphs outlining his importance to video games – and video gamers – because it’s Mario. He isn’t important to video games. He is video games.

So here’s to Super Mario Bros. (And the amazing peeps who made this Mario street art.) One of the first–and still one of the best–video games I ever played.

It’s not that I think kids SHOULD be playing violent video games or watching R-rated movies or whatever–I just think parents should make that decision, not Washington or some censor board or parental advisory committee. And I think blaming violence on video games and heavy metal is an easy, false, and sometimes dangerous answer (the very probably wrongful conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham was in part based on the FACT THAT HE OWNED AN IRON MAIDEN POSTER AND NO I AM NOT KIDDING I WISH I WERE)  and that there are always, as Tom Bissell says, other places for the bad son to go:

The other day I finished Columbine, Dave Cullen’s unbelievably good and bulldozingly definitive account of the Columbine Massacre. The perpetrators of the massacre were both fans of a modded version of the classic shooter Doom. Much was made of that at the time. Less was made of the fact that one of the boys, Eric Harris, was also a classic-lit buff. Shortly before the massacre, he quoted a line from one of the most transcendent works of literature in the language, The Tempest: “Good wombs have borne bad sons.” For Eric Harris, the ecstasies of violent inspiration could be found everywhere. If we dutifully close off those forms of creative expression we find distasteful, the bad son will go elsewhere.

Read the whole, very good essay here.

The New York Times has an interesting review, though I think they make too much hay of the generational divide.

Pac-Man's skeleton was built by Le Gentil Garçon and paleontologist François Escuilié.

Have you played lots of Pacman yet to celebrate the little yellow guy’s 30th yet? Well, then. Get to it.

Anyhow, some things that caught my eye today and made for tasty reading:

PANK interviews The Lumberyard editor Jen Woods. (Disclosure: The Lumberyard published one of my little poems, once upon a time. And that issue is, to this day, still the most lovely thing my words have ever been featured in.)

Yes, yes, the new issue of We Are Champion has no women writers in it. I don’t want to fight that fight again (thought I will say that I think the best thing said on the subject was said right here–and that I was annoyed at the assumption that the guidelines were male-oriented–I mean, what, do men own Basquiat and Back to the Future (two of my favorite things?) In fact, many of my favorite things are listed on WAC’s influences list, which may be why I like this publication so much.) Regardless of the politics, don’t deprive yourself of a good read.

This is just hilarious. You know those infomercials for products no one needs? Here are the people who need them, montage-style.

Poor, sassy Stephen Baldwin. He had it all–money, fame, success–until he became a born-again Christian. Then those Hollywood assholes took it all away. Or at least, that’s what the most awesome website ever wants me to believe. Oh, and also to give Stephen Baldwin my money. (via Balloon Juice.)

Obama calls bullshit on that crazy paranoid nutbag racist Arizona immigration bill the guv there is about to sign into law.

Speaking of Obama, what should he read? Submit your suggestions here and for god’s sake hurry so we can bury some of the tea party insanity cluttering these comments.

Can video games be art? Roger Ebert says no.

Have a good weekend everybody! Go get nuts.