Brain Fun

Oofta, my friends. Spent a little over two hours tonight putting together a console table. Now it houses my coloring and art supplies and I’ve largely reclaimed my dining table but for the pencils and book I’m currently using. Still much to do, but I’m going to squeeze in an art walk on Saturday with friends (and hopefully get some good photos of Halloween decorations for you), and perhaps check out the props/costume sale at Shakespeare Theatre Company on Sunday. I also need to get a new phone as mine is about seven years old and I’m starting to run into compatibility issues with apps. Galaxy S8, I’ve loved you well.

In the meantime, I’m trying very hard to resist buying any Halloween or spooktastic games. I’m a member of Big Fish Games after taking about 10 years off from casual gaming, and they’re having a sale where you can buy bundles of games. Of course they’ve bundled three of my favorite series: Puppet Show, Redemption Cemetery, and Dark Tales, which is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s works. Three games for 15 bucks—and I have no time to play any, boo hoo! I recently told a friend that if I won the lottery, I would have to play all of the series I used to play, in order, including catching up on all the insallments I’ve missed. It would take me a year if I worked at it like a full-time job, heh.

Ooh, this one looks good. A creepy carnival!

It reminds me of some of my favorite casual games of all time, Madam Fate and Fate’s Carnival. They’re old but they’re surreal and the puzzles are some of the weirdest I’ve ever seen in a game. They’re difficult, too. Most of the puzzles in casual games are intuitive to some degree. Not these. Some of these are just off the wall. Imagine opening a screen and this is what you see:

That’s it. You have no idea what the objective is or where to start. You basically have to just click on something, see if it does anything, and go from there.

At any rate, I may have to carve out some time on Sunday night or Monday to play a creepy casual game. Cracking the puzzles makes me feel smart—which brings us to today’s candy: Smarties! I used to love those. I’d devour them and then bounce off the walls because they’re all sugar. Really, it’s a wonder my pancreas didn’t explode and I still have any teeth.

With a Twist

Watched Oddity last night. Now THAT’S my kind of horror movie! It was mostly suspense with a handful of ghoulish jump-scares. It had been a long time since I watched a movie by peeking out over a throw pillow held up to my face, ready to stifle a scream at any moment. I’m just glad it was only an hour and 38 minutes long. I was starting to wonder if I was putting my ticker at risk, heh.

Not much more to say today, kids. After work I emptied and moved my home office furniture, put down my new rug, and moved everything back in. Now my back feels like today’s twisty-turny licorice candy, Twizzlers, so I’m going to call it a day. Anyone else use the big ones as straws when you were a kid?

Glass

One of my all-time favorite candy bars is 3 Musketeers. So light. So soothing. So delicately sweet.

And in the picture above, so absolutely fake.

Did you know that the food shown in print ads is almost never real? Real food melts, wilts, congeals, solidifies, spreads out on the plate, and otherwise reacts with its environment and the hot lights of the studio, so it’s very difficult to photograph in an appealing way.

Nowadays they probably just use Photoshop or something, but decades ago they used sculptures that were anything but edible. My father was one of the original Mad Men and one day he brought home this hefty block of clear, wavy glass that had a little slot drilled into it. I remember him putting it on the coffee table, sliding a straw into the slot, and saying “There you go.”

The sculpture was for an ad for drinking water, and in photos it did look like someone could take a long, refreshing slurp through the straw. However, on the coffee table it looked like a giant, melting ice cube. Whenever people who had never been to the house before came to visit, they would stare at it like they weren’t sure what were seeing. Then they would reach down and touch it very gently and nimbly with just their fingertips. Upon realizing it was room-temperature, they’d slowly put their whole hand over it, and invariably they’d say, “Oh, my God, I thought that was REAL!”

Sometimes they’d even pick it up. By the time the 80s rolled around, dozens of people had held it up to the light, turned it this way and that, checked its weight like they would a melon’s. It was about three-and-a half, maybe four pounds—light enough hold in one hand, but heavy enough to do some damage if swung. My parents were always spritzing it with Windex and wiping it down because it would get covered in fingerprints.

And that, friends, is why I’m still out here, twenty years later, roaming free and unpunished while the one who did me dirty is in the ground and the one he did me dirty with—my bestie, she who swore up and down that she would always be there for me and have my back, the woman I trusted like a sister—is in the clink. All I had to do was show her that sparkling clean little sculpture. All I had to say was “Check this out! My parents left it to me. It’s glass!”

She never could resist touching what was mine.