Typing Intrigue

When I was a kid I had a computer game called Typing Intrigue. It was a typing tutorial, obviously. There was like a murder mystery or something. Basically, you had to earn points to unlock new pieces of the story, and you earned points by doing various typing exercises. It was more or less text-based, with this sweet midi soundtrack that is on the edge of my mind but I can't quite recall.

I didn't know how to type (I didn't learn properly until I took a typing class my senior year of high school -- side note: my guidance counselor told me not to bother with a typing class because I was on a college track -- suuuuuuuuch useful advice, 70-year-old guidance counselor lady, that I'm glad I did not follow) (that happened in the '90s, BTW, not the '50s). I wasn't really interested in learning to type, either -- I thought I was incredibly fast with hunt-and-peck, which I was, for hunt-and-peck -- I just wanted to play the game. There was this one exercise called "Rain" -- droplets with letters in them fell from the sky (pretty graphically sophisticated for 1986 or whenever it was) and you had to type them as they fell, before they hit the ground. You could do different levels of rain (up to "monsoon") and different sets of letters, up to "letters, numbers and symbols" probably. The easiest set was Home Row. I quickly figured out that I could rack up a lot of points by doing Home Row on Monsoon level, over and over and over again. And that is what I did, and that's how I eventually got enough points to solve the mystery without actually learning to type (though I did, and do, have that home row good and memorized). Hooray?

Anyway. I really, really wish I could find that game again. I have googled to no avail. Part of the reason I want it is of course for nostalgia. Part of the reason is that I don't remember the answer to the mystery (it was down to one of three people as the culprit and I remember I think two of them but I don't know who it ended up being). And another part, sadly, is that now that I know how to type I think I could kick ass in Rain. I would like to crank it up to "every blessed key on the keyboard," turn it to Monsoon, and go nuts. That would show...me!

The other game we had that was massively awesome was Transylvania. This was a super gigantic technology leap in that it was graphically based. All the pictures were very clearly done on MacPaint, which I knew because I also had MacPaint and I recognized all the patterns, the paintbrush widths, etc. But they were awesome. Basically you wandered around doing stuff, like in Myst. Only a tad less sophisticated. And there were vampires or something. It was text-based in the sense that instead of clicking on the picture of where you were, you had to type in what you were doing. So there was a lot of guessing, like "hit door," "kick door," "burn door," "punch door," etc. and you never knew what was going to work.

This was before hints -- because this was before the Internet, y'all! Like, waaaaaaay before the Internet -- but once I found a hint file in whatever the plain-text app was back then. I have no idea where it came from -- I have a vague sense that we got the computer used, so maybe the person who had it first put it there, or maybe it came with the game (which I don't recall us buying, it was just there, so it must have been on the computer when we got it). It said hinty things like "Pulling the antlers beats kicking, twisting, or spitting every time!" I, of course, completely missed the value of vague hints and proceeded to edit the hint file to include explicit instructions on how to do everything. (Thus inventing the "walkthrough," I guess.)

I don't think I ever solved Transylvania. My friends and I spent hours sitting in front of it though. And this was on one of these babies. All in all, though, I think I liked Typing Intrigue better.

So, if anyone ever comes across either of these games, let me know, willya? I am a hundred percent certain that they're exactly as awesome as I remember. :)

EDIT: OMG, TRANSYLVANIA IS AVAILABLE AS AN IPHONE APP!!!!! For ONE DOLLAR!!! Apparently I've googled Typing Intrigue but never Transylvania. Yeeeeessssssss. I'll save you, Princess Sabrina! (whose name I only remembered from reading the Wikipedia page)

Wow, ask and ye shall receive

Not three hours after I posted lamenting that the Globe never dynamically page-generates anything unintentionally hilarious for me to laugh at anymore, what do I see in a comment thread on a story about Verizon billing some guy for $18,000 after his "unlimited use" contract expired without his knowledge?

Yep. This. (Price is GUARANTEED to never go up!)

Thanks for your awkwardness, Globe. Always. /hands you a rose

P.S. You win again, Google robots.

Remember when the Globe used to post headlines hilariously and unintentionally juxtaposed with unrelated photos?

Yeah, me too. Why don't they do that anymore?

I bet somebody pointed it out to them and they changed their layout for that reason. Dear whoever did that: You are a fun-killer.

I have decided to just post randomness

in hopes of fooling myself into posting more. Because I'd like to post more, just because...I would like to. I like having a blog. But then when I don't post for a while I get all hung up on the fact that I haven't posted in a while, and I avoid posting, and then the time since I've posted gets even longer, and so I run away even more feverishly, and basically it's all very silly.

So henceforth I will:

1. not care if the stuff I post is rambly and pointless

2. not care if the stuff I post is very short

3. not care if there are long spaces between postings, or if I get on a kick and post 17 times a day -- because it's not plant-watering; it is perfectly fine to do it in fits and starts

All righty. That said. Here's a random observation from today.

I've been walking to work lately, which is awesome. Oh, by the way, I think last time I was making frequent posts on this blog I was going to the gym regularly. Yeah, I remember angsting about the treadmill versus the elliptical and so forth. Well, I haven't been to the gym in like a year. See? Fits and starts. Anyway, so for a long while I was doing zero exercise, and then I HAD to walk to work on Patriots' Day (a.k.a. Marathon Monday), because the bus schedule is always shot all to hell on that day. It's on a "Saturday" schedule, which really means "if we're feeling generous, we'll toss a bus down your way, but don't count on it." Every year I get enraged waiting for the bus, and then like a half hour in I remember that it's Patriots' Day. And then I'm like 45 minutes late for work (along with being enraged).

This time, I had put on my calendar LAST YEAR (after suffering through the traditional Patriots' Day Bus-Related Raging) a reminder that the buses were on a Saturday schedule. I was so proud of myself. Then Patriots' Day 2010 approached and I realized that, since I had reminded myself, I had no excuse for being late to work. And I would have to go out like an hour early to the bus to counteract its spazziness. And stand there fuming while it didn't show up. OR!

OR, I could do what I ultimately ended up doing last year, which was: walk to work. Last year I did it in a fit of pique, after grumbling ragingly that I could have WALKED TO WORK BY NOW, I'd been standing waiting for the bus for so long. THIS year, it occurred to me, finally, that I could either stand waiting for the bus for 45 minutes, OR walk to work in probably the same 45 minutes, only at the end of one I'd be at work and all proud of myself for having gotten exercise, and at the end of the other one I'd (best-case scenario) be mashed onto a bus with the other 30 angry people who'd been waiting at the bus stop with me, plus all the people already on it. Yes, I would have to get up earlier to walk, but I was going to have to do that anyway since I'd accidentally tricked myself into being responsible.

So I walked. And it was lovely. And I did it comfortably in about 45 minutes. And I decided I should pretty much do it every day. And I pretty much have been. Since there's no 9:00 bus crunch (I have often said that every single bus arrives in Harvard Square at 9:05, no matter what time it leaves) I've been on time to work a lot more, and when I arrive at work I'm filled with about 95 percent less MBTA-related rage.

Right, so anyway. I walked this morning. Sometimes there are other people walking with you (where I live, pretty much all roads lead to Harvard Square at that time of day). I stopped at a crosswalk, waiting for a light, and this other girl caught up to me and was waiting with me. We crossed together, while awkwardly not looking at each other -- you can un-awkwardly nod hello at somebody coming in the opposite direction, but it's impossible to be like "Mornin'" to someone that you're walking beside. Now, despite being short I'm a pretty fast walker, and in the morning I'm in business mode. Mostly I'm the one passing people. This girl and I walked awkwardly beside each other for a few strides. And then she pulled ahead.

I'm not all obsessed with beating people when I'm walking. It's not a race. But this girl pulled ahead of me, thus ending the awkwardness of us walking beside each other without acknowledging each other. But then she walked SLOWLY. Not super slowly -- in fact, she was still pretty fast. Just not quite fast enough that I, endeavoring to participate in the social construct of creating a space between us, could walk at my normal pace.

I figured, well, once there's a space between us I can go back to walking normally. But I quickly realized that, if I continued walking behind her, I would be way off my usual pace and might not make it to work on time. You know when you're on the highway, and you're in the fast lane, and you pass a bunch of slow cars and then you've got a nice big space to your right, with one car but it's waaaaaay up ahead and you'll never catch up to it and there's no reason for you to be in the fast lane, so you get back into the slow lane, and then within like three seconds you're up the ass of the car that you thought you had tons of space before catching up to? And so then you get back in the fast lane so you can pass that car, but to do that you have to go uncomfortably fast, and you can't figure out why the car is going so slow when you're behind it but so fast when you're in the left lane? It was exactly that, only with walking.

I sort of eased up behind her, hoping she'd get the hint and slow down. She didn't. Finally, I had no choice -- I had to CAREEN by her, at way faster than my normal pace, in order to pass her and create that socially acceptable space between us. I felt bad because I'd JUST let her pass me. And I feared she thought I did, indeed, think it was a race and that I was an overcaffeinated, freakishly competitive asshole who was trying to beat her just because she had briefly been ahead of me.

So after that I felt obligated to prove to her that I was, in fact, just naturally an incredibly fast walker that she had never had any hope of catching up to and therefore I could hardly have HELPED passing her. So I walked ridiculously fast for a long time so I could get way way ahead of her. They're doing a bunch of sidewalk construction on the street where I walk, and I kept having to go through obstacles -- a patch of dirt, a patch of SAND, a big hole that necessitated crossing the street. I was afraid to slow down for any of it in case she caught up to me and proved to both of us that I was a race-obsessed jerk who had no business being in front of her. I almost tripped a bunch of times, I got sand in my shoe, I darted across the street in front of traffic. I never did shake her, though I was ahead of her the whole time, and she'd only get closer at crosswalks. Still, I felt she was irritated with me, even though that's probably ridiculous. Oh well.

I was nice and sweaty when I got to work, but I was five minutes early. Booyah!