robohara.com

A friend of mine sent me this link yesterday, which I think is pretty cool!

Chris “Sven” Svensson (Corporate Officer and Vice-president of Strategic Planning & Business Development at Capcom) mentioned my book Commodork on his blog last week. Here is what he had to say:

“Ok. If you started messing around with consoles in the 70s and computers in the early 80s (as I did), you’ll get a hearty dose of nostalgia if you pick up Commodork by Rob O’Hara (if you have a Kindle, it’s only $0.99). Talk of disk trading, the computer and specifically BBS culture and even the rarity of computers in that era all bring back tons of memories. And there’s lots of game stuff too.”

How cool is that? (Answer: Very cool.) It’s awesome that four years after the book’s release, people are still discovering it.

Link: Capcom-Unity.com

There’s this guy that works in my building — I don’t know his name and I don’t know what department he works for. All I really know is that he looks like a guy I used to go to high school with, and because of that I give him “the nod” every time we pass in the hallway. The thing is, he never gives me “the nod” back. And it’s not like we don’t make eye contact. We do. He sees me and I see him. Then I give him “the nod” as if to say, “Hey,” and then he gives me no nod in return.

I run into this guy about three times a week, and I’ve been here 18 weeks. That means I’ve nodded at him almost 50 times and not got a response back yet.

Our passing last Friday was quite noticeable. Our eyes locked. When I gave the nod, he averted his eyes. That’s it, I decided. No more nodding. From this point forward I am making a conscious decision NOT to nod at this guy!

On the way back from lunch today I walked past the nice Chinese custodian woman in the hallway and saw “him” coming toward me. “No nod for you,” I thought to myself. “Just look down, keep looking down,” I repeated.

And then, for the first time, I heard him spoke.

“Hello, Zhong Shee,” he said. What he said didn’t click until the cleaning lady responded. “Hello,” she said back.

Are you kidding me? He greets the cleaning staff but won’t acknowledge me? That’s some BS, right there.

Is there any way to “un-nod” someone? I’m talking my 50 nods back.

(Note: I’m not sure how old this article is. I found it on my hard drive and I can’t remember why I wrote it or who I wrote it for. I think I wrote it for a magazine or web site. It doesn’t look like I ever posted it here, so now I will so I can delete the file. Enjoy.)

In the early days of home video games it was hard to associate with your on screen character due to graphical limitations. I don’t know anybody who ever felt like they “were” the paddle in a fierce game of Pong. Surround was fun, but those blocks didn’t look like anything but blocks to me. As graphics began to improve, it became easier to relate to the on-screen characters you were controlling. By the time Superman for the 2600 was released, even though the graphics were pretty crude compared to today’s standards, while flying around you kind of got the feeling you were Superman (or at least that you were controlling a tiny little Superman).

Still, Superman didn’t have a face (or even any hair for that matter), just a small, pink cube where his head should be. The earliest face I remember seeing in a video game was Mario’s in the arcade classic Donkey Kong. Mario’s head was no cube; he had a nose, a hat, an eyeball, even a mustache! Even the inferior Atari 2600 version managed to squeeze in similar details.

As characters began looking more realistic I began relating to them even more strongly, especially in arcade games. When playing Rastan, I felt personally responsible for getting my muscle-bound barbarian from Point A to Point B. In Donkey Kong Jr., I always felt a little bad when the tiny monkey would get smacked and his eyeballs would pop out of his skull shortly before falling off the playfield. But there was still one thing that kept me from “being” that character — the control panel.

How many times in your life have you tried to walk and instead, on accident, punched the person next to you in the face? My guess is, this has never happened to you. (Or, if it has, it wasn’t really an accident now, was it?) And yet, I can remember screaming hundreds of times “I PRESSED LEFT” or “I HIT JUMP” at arcade monitors and television screens whenever my on screen pal didn’t do what I wanted them to do. When ghosts are hot on his tail, Pac-Man needs to maneuver corners quickly to avoid being chomped. Your eyes see this; your brain knows it. Your brain sends the signal “GO LEFT” to your muscles; your hand presses left … or so you thought. You miss the alley and end up with ghosts on both sides. Game over. I PRESSED LEFT! We’ve all done it and we’ve all done the same things like wiggling the joystick back and forth, pretending like it must’ve been stuck.

As player characters began to look more realistic, this began to become more of a problem. For example, most of the early golf games used a swingometer ™ to control the strength of your swing. If you weren’t paying attention and let the meter go too far, you would end up hitting the ball at maximum strength. Even on a two-foot putt, if you weren’t paying attention. WHACK! The end result is this surrealistic moment where you are taken out of a game’s immersion. Tiger Woods never hit a ball 80 foot while trying to make a 3 foot putt. It would be funny if he did though.

One limitation of early fighting games is that they were 2D. In games like Karate Champ and Kung-Fu Master, people fought “left to right”, and that was it. Before long, fighting games were drug into a pseudo-3D world. One of the earliest (and one of my favorites) from this genre was the professional wrestling game Mat Mania. The ring in Mat Mania is isometric, and the characters can move up/down/left/right, but the characters are only drawn looking left and looking right. You cannot attack “up” or “down”, only left and right. This creates a unique issue. If you stand “behind” (above) someone, they cannot hit you until they move on to the same plane as you. Since they cannot punch “up” (only left or right), and you cannot punch while moving in the game, this creates an unbeatable situation. To beat your opponent in Mat Mania, all you have to do is constantly move above or below him and start punching. When the CPU moves up or down to meet you, you’ll already be punching him in the face. In Mat Mania you must beat five opponents to win the title, then the opponents begin repeating. I have played Mat Mania for two hours before on a single quarter.

The problem with 2D characters in a 3D world is that they don’t understand the third dimension. 2D fighting characters want to punch you in the face, and they can’t do it while above or below you. This brings me to the Double Dragon Elbow.

Double Dragon, the early side-scrolling beat ‘em up that I’m sure most of you are familiar with, suffers from the same design flaw that Mat Mania does. It’s a 3D world with 2D characters fighting in it. Bad guys not hit you from above or below, so to attack you they must rise or drop to your plane. This is where the elbow comes in.

In Double Dragon, the two protagonists (“Hammer” and “Spike”) are each controlled by a joystick and three buttons: punch, kick, and jump. There are, however, more moves available to them than that, the most important of which is the elbow. By pressing punch and jump at the same time, Hammer or Spike will throw a reverse elbow, leveling any opponents behind them. Using this technique, Double Dragon becomes one of the easiest games in the world to beat. Even when enemies approach you from the rear they want to punch you in the face, meaning you can hit them with the elbow long before they ever throw a strike. By using a “square” pattern of moving down and left followed by up and right, you become virtually impossible to defeat. Enemies will line up behind you to gladly eat your elbows. What makes the move even sweeter is that, when throwing it, your character can not be hit. Timing and spacing of the move is also pretty forgiving. If you throw the elbow too early, most enemies will just walk into it and fall down. You can also time it just right so a fallen enemy will stand up into your elbow and fall right back down.

So why can I not beat Double Dragon every single time? Because you have to hit the jump and punch button at EXACTLY THE SAME TIME to throw the elbow. Hit the punch button slightly early and you’ll end up throwing a punch in the wrong direction, followed by a jump. Can you imagine doing that in real life? “Okay, here comes a guy. Oh man, I am sure looking forward to elbowing this jerk in the teeth. Here he comes, he’s coming, and … WOW I JUST JUMPED INSTEAD.” (POW)

Hitting jump a split second early causes your character to jump up in the air; hitting punch at this point launches a kick to the right. The spacing is different for this move so even if your opponent is on your right, your kick won’t connect. And if your enemy is to the left, well, it’s another one of those surreal moments. “Man oh man, I’ve been looking forward to elbowing this dude in the chops for days now. Aaaaaaaand … WOW I JUST JUMPED AND KICKED IN THE WRONG DIRECTION INSTEAD!” (POW)

There are other things that can go wrong, too. For example, occasionally in Double Dragon you will find items on the ground that, under normal circumstances, would help you (baseball bats, daggers, and whips, for example). The way you pick up an item is by pressing the punch button, which is also half of the elbow combo. When you hit an opponent wielding one of these items, he or she will drop them, usually at your feet. If you are standing on one and you try to throw an elbow, you’ll squat down and pick up the item instead. Typically this is followed by your character getting pounded repeatedly in the face. Another common mistake is hitting the joystick twice in the same direction, which causes your character to attempt a head butt. I find myself doing this on accident quite a bit when trying to line up an elbow. Can you imagine that in real life? “He doesn’t know I’ve got my elbow ready, boy he’s gonna get it … here he comes … AHHH WHY DID I THROW A HEAD BUTT IN THE WRONG DIRECTION?” (POW)

The “elbow technique” was mitigated in later versions of Double Dragon. It’s much more difficult to throw and land in Double Dragon II, and was removed altogether from Double Dragon 3.

If you ever see me in public or at a game convention suddenly jump or kick in the wrong direction, now you’ll know what happened. If you ever extend your hand for a handshake and I head butt you instead, don’t take it personally. I just hit the wrong button.

Last week, Amazon and Macmillan (one of the “big six” book publishers) locked horns over the selling price of Macmillan’s eBooks on Amazon’s site. Amazon thinks that the eBook ceiling should be $9.99, while Macmillan wants to sell their books for $12.99-$14.99 (the same price as their physical counterparts). Things have escalated to the point where Amazon has (temporarily, they say) pulled all Macmillan books from their online store. Macmillan CEO John Sargent countered by taking out full page ads in multiple periodicals explaining their position. In a New York Times full-age advertisement for one of Macmillan’s new books, the bottom of the ad states that the book is “Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.”

To understand how and why things turned so nasty so quickly, we only have to go back a few years to the birth of mp3s.

I have talked about this before, but in the music business, the average royalty rate hovers around 10 cents per song, for up to 10 songs per album. That means that for each CD Joe Superstar (the guy that actually performed the music) sells, he makes $1. Everything above and beyond that dollar is essentially split between the vendor and the music label. For every $15 CD you buy at Walmart, $7 goes to Walmart, $7 goes to the Record Label, and $1 goes to Joe Superstar.

And, as you probably know, when Joe Superstar got his record deal, the record company fronted him a lot of money to record that album — money that they get back through Joe’s royalties. Let’s just say that Joe’s album and first small tour cost the company $200,000. For Joe Superstar’s first 200,000 sales, $7 goes to Walmart (or whoever), $7 goes to the Record Label, and that last dollar? It does to the Record Label too. According to MusicCareers.net, the average major label album sells about 3,000 copies. That means, odds are, Joe Superstar will never see a dime.

Of course, who does see dimes (and lots of them) are the music industry. While Joe is travelling around the country side in a ratty old van, record labels are working overtime just to count all those dimes rolling in. Unfortunately in the mid-90s, something threw a wrench in the recording industry machine — mp3s.

Initially, mp3s weren’t seen as a threat to the music industry. They were low quality, took too long to transmit, and were only being traded by technical computer people. My, how things have changed. For many people now, mp3s are the primary way they listen to music.

Enter Apple, whose iTunes has become the major pipeline of legal mp3s. What Walmart was (and still is) for physical CDs, iTunes is the digital equivalent. iTunes is now responsible for 25% of all music sales, and about 70% of all digital music sales. To put it in perspective, Amazon came in second place with 8%.

For iTunes, Apple gives a 70/30 split. For each 99 cent song you download from iTunes, Apple keeps 30 cents and gives 70 cents to the performer. Actually, that’s not true; they give 70 cents to the copyright holder — which, if you’re signed to a major label, is your record company. Many signed artists are making … well, let’s just say that a dime per song was looking pretty good. Depending on the deal, the artist, the label and the deal, artists are typically making anywhere from a dime down to a penny per digital download.

Let’s switch gears to Amazon for a moment.

What Walmart is to CDs and Apple/iTunes is to mp3s, Amazon is to books. They’ve been one of the largest retailers for physical books for years, and now in part thanks to the Kindle, they’ve become one of the largest — if not the largest — retailers of eBooks as well.

There’s one major difference between Amazon and iTunes, however. Remember when I said iTunes keeps 30% and gives 70% to the copyright holders? Well, Amazon keeps 90%.

Let me run some numbers by you, as I am wont to do. For a while, I tried selling my book Commodork through Amazon for a price of $10. For each sale, Amazon kept 90% and offered to pay me my profits (a lousy buck) via PayPal. And while this is not directly Amazon’s problem, PayPal takes .35 cents per transaction, plus 3.5%, which left me with about 62 cents per copy.

These kinds of profit margins are, quite frankly, only possible when you’re the only seller in town. And for the most part, Amazon is — or, was. Recently, Apple introduced the iPad. And guess what’s coming with the iPad? Yup, the iBookstore. And guess who gives content creators 70% of the selling price? Right again — Apple, not Amazon.

The problem that’s been facing mp3s for a decade now is how to get the genie (free music) back in the bottle. The industry has tried a few different methods. They’ve lowered the price of digital songs to a dollar each, Apple has made it incredibly simple to find/buy/deliver music to your iPod, and when all else fails, the RIAA will sue you for hundreds of thousands of dollars, which only seems to be stopping the people who get sued.

Amazon is determined not to let this happen to the eBook industry, and they think the solution is DRM and price-limiting. Amazon thinks that if they can keep the price of eBooks lower than the cost of physical books, and if they can keep people from sharing them amongst one another, they may have a chance. That’s why they don’t want Macmillan or anybody else selling eBooks for more than $9.99.

What Amazon didn’t take into consideration was the arrival of the iBookstore — which is essentially the same as running the largest clothing store in town and noticing that a Walmart Super Center is being erected across the street. When done the right way, competition is good for us as retailers, although I’m not looking forward to the inevitable separation of media. I foresee only being able to get some books through Amazon and others through the iBookstore in the very near future.

As an author though, it’s an exciting time.

When I was in second or third grade my dad built me a pretty cool fort. It consisted of two 4×8 rooms with walls made out of particle board and floors covered with giant rubber mats (old printing blankets from my dad’s work). It had an Army cot for sleeping and a long piece of PVC pipe that ran from the back window out into the creek that my friends and I could pee in. (When mom found out about the PVC pipe she made us get rid of it.)

It’s easy to forget the details of a place like that, but you never forget the feelings associated with it. I miss those feelings.

A Hackerspace, as defined by Wikipedia, is “a real (as opposed to virtual) place where people with common interests, usually in science, technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and collaborate. A hackerspace can be viewed as an open community lab, workbench, machine shop, workshop and/or studio where people of diverse backgrounds can come together to share resources and knowledge to build/make things.”

The original hackerspace (as far as I am concerned) is the now infamous L0pht. According to legend, the L0pht was originally formed back in the early 1990s when one of the group’s members (Brian Oblivion) was forced to relocate his extra computer equipment. “[He] had so many computers in the bathroom that his wife couldn’t use it anymore.” (Link) The L0pht originally referred to their organization as a “hacker think tank,” which is, to me, the point of a Hackerspace.

The Wikipedia entry on Hackerspaces lists around a dozen examples. The vast majority of these are warehouses that have been converted into places where people can work on projects, play games, or just hang out.

I want one.

I recently found a usable space within 10 miles of my house. It’s right at 2,000 square feet, and with utilities (meaning electricity and Internet) would run me around $1,000/month. Now all I need to get it off the ground are 9 other people who are willing to kick in $100/month for their share of the space (or 4 people willing to kick in $200 …) Oh, and a cool name. Every hackerspace has a cool name. I was thinking Pee Wee’s Playhouse, but the domain is already taken. :/

In my mind I see weekly meetings and weekend bashes/build parties. I see an entertainment area, with music and big video screens. I see a classroom area and a computer lab where people could learn and experiment and do all kinds of crazy things. I see late night gaming tournaments. I see open houses where my friends and I could show off our creations. I see lots and lots of shelves, full of old hardware and nuts and bolts and cool things with wires sticking out of them. I see killer robots. I don’t even know how to make a killer robot, but if I’m paying for this much real estate, I guess it’s time to learn.

Really what I need is someone to talk me out of this stupid idea.

More information: Hackerspaces.org

Private Sub Command1_Click()

Dim Line As String

‘Input Nessus Log / Open Output Files

Open App.Path & “\” & Filename.Text & “.nbe” For Input As #1
If CheckXLS.Value = 1 Then Open App.Path & “\” & Filename.Text & “.xls” For Append As #2
If CheckTXT.Value = 1 Then Open App.Path & “\” & Filename.Text & “.txt” For Append As #3

Do While Not EOF(1)

Start:

Line Input #1, Line$

If CheckTime.Value = 1 Then
If Left$(Line$, 1) = “t” Then GoTo Start
End If

Line$ = Replace(Line$, “\n”, ” “)
Line$ = Replace(Line$, “\r”, ” “)
Line$ = Replace(Line$, ” “, ” “)
Line$ = Replace(Line$, “Description :”, “|Description :”)
Line$ = Replace(Line$, “Solution :”, “|Solution :”)
Line$ = Replace(Line$, “Risk factor :”, “|Risk factor :”)
Line$ = Replace(Line$, “Plugin output :”, “|Plugin output :”)
Line$ = Replace(Line$, ” |”, “|”)
Line$ = Replace(Line$, “| “, “|”)

If CheckXLS.Value = 1 Then
Print #2, Line$
Print #2, vbCrLf
End If

If CheckTXT.Value = 1 Then
SplitArray = Split(Line$, “|”)
For intx = 0 To UBound(SplitArray)
Print #3, SplitArray(intx)
If intx = UBound(SplitArray) Then Print #3, vbCrLf
Next
End If

If CheckTXT.Value = 0 And CheckXLS.Value = 0 Then
MsgBox (“You chose no output. There’s just not much I can do for you.”)
Close #1
Close #2
Close #3
Exit Sub
End If

Loop

Close #1
Close #2
Close #3

MsgBox (“Done!”)

End Sub

ManBabies.com is a blog dedicated to Photoshopped pictures where people have swapped their baby’s head with their own. Some of the best of the best were featured here.

Personally I think it’s a pretty despicable thing to do, pimping one’s family photos out for a cheap laugh. Disgusting.

Pathetic.

For eight years now, Susan has been waiting on (at least) one kid hand and foot — and, since 2005, she’s been waiting on two. (Some would say three.) Whether it’s cooking or doing laundry or cleaning up buckets of puke (last night’s gift from Morgan), Susan spends the vast majority of her free time working for the kids. I thought this was pretty funny, until it started happening to me.

My jobs are admittedly different than Susan’s. While Susan is folding clothes or putting away groceries, I do “dad” duties like wrestle, or find movies for the kids to watch. (Susan gets the short end of the stick, no doubt.) As of Mason’s 8th birthday last December, I have acquired a new role: tech support.

Mason’s had a Nintendo DS for a couple of years and a Game Boy Advance before that, but not much tech support was needed for those. Most of the questions I got were about how to do things in games. “Where do I go now? What do I do? Who’s that guy?” (My answers: I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know … in that order.) He either figures it out, or goes and finds something else to do. Either solution is acceptable.

For his 8th birthday, Mason got an iPod Touch. The interface is simple enough that an 8-year-old can use it, but he can’t do things like install apps, or music, or configure the wireless encryption keys needed to piggyback onto my router, and so those things fall back on me. “Dad, I can’t get on the Internet,” he said the other day. After a bit of troubleshooting I discovered he had deleted the 20-character encryption key needed to connect. After looking up the code and punching it in on the iPod’s small, virtual keyboard, I handed the device back to Mason only to hear, “Oh, so THAT’S how I erased it … Can you type it in again?” seconds later as he handed it back to me.

About two weeks ago, I lost my netbook. I mean, I didn’t lose it, I lost possession of it. Mason’s been guarding it tightly. He knows how to search Google for things and has found several websites with online games hosted on them. I’m sure when I regain possession of it I’ll have to format it to get all the viruses off but, eh.

This morning I woke up around 7:30 only to have the netbook handed to me. “Google Chrome is broken,” he said. What he meant was, the wireless card had quit working. I tried releasing/renewing the IP address a few times and got nothing. When I searched for local wireless access points, I found none. After fifteen or twenty minutes of searching Google (from a different machine) I discovered that the Acer Aspire One has a manual switch that disables the wireless card (for air travel, most likely). After finding the switch and flipping it, everything started working again. Throughout the process, Mason was as helpful as the average tech support caller. “What did you do?” “Nothing, I promise!”

And now, it’s the Nintendo DS again — specifically, the Action Replay cartridge. The Action Replay cartridge isn’t a game — it’s a cartridge that lets you cheat on games. Mason is playing two or three different Pokemon games and has resorted to cheating to collect all the Pokemon, or win the game, or whatever the point is to those Pokemon games. Man I sound old.

The Action Replay uses cheat codes that have to be manually entered into the DS by using a plastic stylus and a virtual touch screen keyboard. Mason asked if I would type one of the codes in for him, and I said sure. He handed me the DS and showed me a code that was 500 characters long. I politely handed the DS back to him and said, “Good luck.”

Now the Action Replay comes with some software for your PC that allows you to sync codes between the two, but it’s lacking the most obvious feature — a way to cut/paste codes found on the Internet into the device. I knew there had to be a way to do it, but so far what I’ve found hasn’t been easy. The codes are stored in XML format and can be imported that way, but I haven’t found a good list that anyone’s put together for Mason’s specific games. I did find a way to cut/paste codes in one at a time, but doing so appears to delete all your other stored codes until you restore, which deletes the code you pasted in. It’s such a clunky system that anyone (including 8-year-olds and 36-year-olds) would look at and instantly say, “this sucks.”

In the meantime I’m having to hear about how much it all sucks from Mason on a daily basis. And by daily I mean several times an hour. “Daaaaaaaaaaaad,” he says, “I can’t get the Juju from the Pling-Plong because I don’t have a code to make Doofasaurus invincible so I can defeat Glorgo and obtain the Sword of Rafadafading Dong.” The names are made up, but barely.

This morning I figured out how to format the XML files and where to store them on the PC. I wrote a quick script to parse codes I found on the net into the right format; with that, I was able to import all the cheat codes Mason could ever want into his Action Replay. He is giddy with delight and I was just informed that Glorgo has been defeated and the Sword of Rafadafading Dong is now in Mason’s possession.

Bow down — I am POKEDAD!

… or, something like that.

2010 is the year I “go digital,” as much as I can. That means getting rid of dead weight, and some of that weight comes from old books. Last night, after everybody else went to bed, I went out to the garage and began sorting books into piles.

By the time I was done I had sorted through around 400 books. About 300 of those went into boxes to take to the thrift store tomorrow. Many of these were old paperbacks that I either read years ago, or never got around to reading. The remaining books, “the good stuff,” were then sorted into about eight piles based on categories like UFOs, True Crime, Horror, and so on. I listed those on Craigslist, but who knows if I’ll get any bites. The day before yesterday I listed a bunch of old VHS tapes I still had lying around. I got three e-mails: two of those were from Nigerian widows, and the third guy never got back with me.

There were lots of books I felt like I couldn’t part with just yet. These included books that I got as gifts, and/or had sentimental attachments to. When I turned sixteen and got my first car (a 1979 Mustang), my dad bought me a hardback book about Mustangs. It’s in the keep pile. All my Three Stooges books and old AD&D manuals stayed in the keep pile as well. I think I have it down to where I can fit everything I want to keep on one bookshelf.

Tomorrow I’ll take the first load to the thrift store, and if nobody bites on Craigslist I suppose I’ll take the rest of them down there next weekend.

Believe it or not, getting rid of 300 books barely made a noticeable dent on the pile-o-crap that lives out in the garage.

But it’s a start.

Directly behind the house I grew up in was “the creek”, a large ditch that was roughly 20 feet across and 10 feet deep (just a guess). During the summer, the kids of Sun Valley (my old neighborhood) played a lot of “Army” back there. It was full of weeds and trees and all kinds of cool things to climb and play on. In the spring and fall there would almost always be water standing in the bottom of the creek. With a plastic cup and a quick hand you could catch crawdads, and if you were lucky, with a hook on a string and some bacon you could catch a fish — usually catfish or perch. The creek was full of red dirt, which made for red mud and red water. You always put your old clothes on before going down to play in the creek, as your white underwear, socks and shoes would surely come home stained red.

In the winter, whatever water was left standing in the creek would freeze, giving the neighborhood kids our own ice skating rink. Rumor had it that, if you followed it far enough, the creek led all the way from Sara Road to Lake Overholser, about two miles away. I never personally made it that far. Usually around the one mile mark the ice would break, someone would go knee-deep into the water and we would turn tail and head home in fear of frostbite. I don’t know if you could really get frostbite in those conditions, but it seemed like a real enough threat at the time.

At the other end of the creek (just one backyard away from my own) was the Sara Road bridge. Before they rebuilt it back in the early 90s, the bridge was barely wide enough for two cars to cross at the same time — and, if you knew how rickety the thing was, you wouldn’t try. One game the bigger kids used to play was to hang from the underside of the bridge as cars passed overhead. The whole thing shook and rattled with each passing car while kids hanging underneath clung for dear life. It was so loud that just standing under the bridge displayed a certain amount of bravery.

One winter while a dozen or so of us were hanging out underneath the bridge, a few of the kids came up with the idea of pelting passing cars with snowballs. A few of the older kids made their snowballs and sat in wait by the side of the bridge. No motorist had any chance of catching us. By the time a car could stop, we would already be scurrying through the creek like the rats we were. There were plenty of places to hide in the creek, but really all one had to do was make it up into the neighborhood where we would be home free.

As the first car approached the bridge, kids ducked just out of sight behind bushes and piles of brush. When the car whizzed by — POW — it was pelted by handfuls of snowy spheres. As expected, the driver hit the brakes and slowed, but didn’t stop. We heard the horn honk and saw a middle finger wag, but that was it. Hey, this could turn out to be fun! (Unless, of course, somebody got killed.)

This continued a couple of times. Each time, butterflies ripped through our stomach as we prepared to flee.

Now as we were doing this, one of the kids came up with an idea of his own: ice balls. While we were up by the bridge watching cars zip by and tossing snowballs at them, this kid was amassing an army of frozen snowballs by dunking them into creek water and freezing them until they were rock solid. With a couple of these frozen weapons in town, this kid worked his way up to where we were hiding and took his spot among us.

At the end of Sara Road, a car turned toward us. We couldn’t really make out the details of the car … just the headlights. Waiting in anticipation, I smoothed my own snowball to perfection, waiting for just the right moment to release it.

As the car reached the bridge, we all jumped out of our spots and let them have it. POW. POW. POW.

CRACK.

The sound of the ice ball hitting the windshield. The driver hit the brakes — hard — the wheels screeched and the car came to a stop. The mood changed instantly from “hee hee hee” to “oh, SHIT.” An ice ball? Seriously?

No one dared to chance staying in their hiding spot; it was each kid for himself as we ran down the creek’s slope at full speed and hit the bottom of the creek running, a blur of gloves and mittens and scarves and hats. We splashed through the ice cold water, grabbing at trees to propel our bodies quickly through the brush.

It seemed too risky to lose the millisecond it would take to look over my shoulder and see if we were being pursued, but I did, and we were. The man was screaming for us to stop as he made his way down the creek’s slope toward us. We ran faster as if our lives depended on it — and it probably did.

There was a fork off of the creek that ran down beside my house. I made the turn and kept running all the way home. I think everyone else did too, and I don’t think anyone got caught.

And that was the last time we played “Pelt the Car from the Creek”.