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Your Mom And Gaming
Tomorrow is Mother's Day in the US, and Newsweek's N'Gai Croal rightly estimates that many gamers owe a lot to their mothers. Because they indulged what they likely initially saw as a strange choice of hobby, we have a thriving gaming industry to enjoy today. The Level Up site offers an interview with a woman on the Newsweek staff who learned to tolerate those 'console things', and another piece where N'Gai interviews his own mom about his games-related past. "N'Gai: Growing up, you allowed us kids to have a computer, but we weren't allowed to have a videogame machine. What was your thinking behind that? Yvonne Croal: Well, in my estimation at that time, videogames were just another silly game. We certainly didn't want you to be spending 24/7 playing these games that we considered not productive in any way." If you're still looking for a gift for your own mom, Pop Cap is giving away a free copy of Bejeweled to anyone that signs up for their newsletter. Worked on my mom. Happy Mother's Day.
a chance to tag something "yourmom". I've been waiting since high school for this :P
Monstar L
Forget indulging the choice of hobby, a lot of gamers owe their mom first for the 35 years of living in her basement!
The Farewell Tour II
It's pretty sad that, like most American holidays, Mother's Day has been corrupted into a holiday that celebrates consumption and hollow platitudes rather than anything meaningful. One of the original premises of Mother's Day was a call to women worldwide to stand up against violence and war that had taken the lives of so many of their sons. It wasn't a tribute to mothers, but a rallying cry for mothers of the US to band together in a political cause to improve the world. The "mother" of Mother's Day became so disillusioned with the commercialization of the holiday that she actively campaigned against it.
My mom bought us a TRS 80 (remember those?) back in the day, that was a key start into my life in computing. She was too cheap to buy a PC when I got one in '82, so she had her brother in law, who worked for IBM, get her a discounted IBM desktop machine of some sort, whose name I can't recall. It had a tiny little 8 inch CRT, 16k of RAM, a tape drive as the only storage, and APL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_lang uage)/ as an embedded language in it. It didn't do anything, and she wanted a word processor, so, she wrote one. In APL. It was pretty close the first program she ever wrote in her life. It didn't do much, opened a file, allowed you to type into it, position a cursor, etc, but I was impressed, and still am. She inspired me to try things I didn't know how to do or even try, which has been good for me.
Happy Mothers day, Mom.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Get the PC registration codes, download the Mac trial, and then activate it with said codes.