I am realizing my life is not really marked by birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, or any of the normal milestone stuff people list. It is marked by video games.

Thanks for this thread, because it reminded me of one I cannot leave out.

There was a week I spent in a mental hospital with a major anxiety spiral. Pretty much everything felt unmanageable. The one thing I could handle was Pokémon FireRed on a Game Boy Advance.

That was it. That was my anchor.

It was actually written into my chart that I was allowed to plug my charger in at the nurses station while I slept so the GBA would be ready the next day. No arguments. No debates. Just accepted as necessary.

Not my oldest game, see my other replies for that, but it is probably the only one I have mentioned that might have saved my life.

Close, but mine was Gorf on the VIC-20, not the 2600. See my other reply for the longer story.

This thread is turning into a memory dump for me, so here is another one.

I go back farther than Warcraft 3. I still fire up Warcraft 2 on DOSBox now and then, usually when I have had a bit too much to drink and want something familiar.

When Warcraft 2 was new, I was a junior computer programmer for a very large corporation, top 25 in the world. I set up a LAN at home using token ring, which tells you roughly how old this story is.

My wife is not really a gamer, although after thirty seven years of marriage and putting up with this stuff, maybe she qualifies anyway. We would sit at our desks, hold our daughters on our laps, and battle each other in Warcraft 2.

The machines were 80286 boxes I built myself from parts. Thanks, CDW back when it still meant Computer Discount Warehouse.

So yeah, I guess I have been around for most of this history. Some people remember patches and balance updates. I remember toddlers, token ring, and orcs on beige hardware.

Joust brings back a very specific memory for me.

I was in early high school and happened to live in the town in Iowa that called itself the Video Game Capital of the World. There are enough documentaries out there that it is not exactly a secret. When I joined the Army at eighteen my nickname was Radar, which probably gives it away anyway.

I had a good friend from junior high computer club. He had a TRS-80 Color Computer. I was a Commodore guy. By high school we had mostly drifted apart. Then one day he called me up, yes phones did exist, and told me he was going to set a world record on Joust and asked if I wanted to come help support him.

Somehow I got permission from my parents. I spent the entire weekend at the arcade with him, mostly watching, bringing food, keeping track of things, and just being there. He set the record. I do not know how long it stood, but I know I was there when his name went up on the big board Monday morning.

I got an unexcused absence from school for it.

Still worth it.

That one hits close.

I started Minecraft because my kid talked me into it. I bought him the last Alpha version, then bought myself the first Beta so I could play with him. At the time it just felt like blocks and wandering around, but it stuck.

Now I play with my grandsons.

Last weekend was my oldest grandson’s eleventh birthday. Along with a Steam gift card and probably some Robux, all he really wanted was to spend the day playing Minecraft with his grandpa. So that is what we did.

Not my oldest game, but definitely the one I play most consistently. At least once a week.

Oldest game I still play is probably Taipan.

I first played it on an Apple IIe, but now it is just a web browser thing I poke at once in a while. It is basically spreadsheets and bad luck. You trade, pirates wreck you, the math never quite works out, and you lose anyway. I think that is why I still like it. No graphics to hide behind.

After that, Seven Cities of Gold, usually on a C64 emulator. That one still holds up more than it has any right to. You sail off thinking you are doing something heroic and slowly realize you are kind of a problem. The exploration feels lonely. The map still feels bigger than it actually is.

But the oldest one I keep coming back to is Gorf on the VIC-20.

I owned the cartridge. Bought it not long after it came out. I paid for the VIC-20 by walking beans and putting up hay all summer for a farmer when I was eleven or twelve. Hot, dusty work. Long days. I remember counting the cash and realizing I could actually afford a computer.

Gorf was loud, ugly, and mean. The voice mocked you constantly. The joystick barely survived. I loved it anyway. Sitting on the floor, TV buzzing, thinking this was the future and I had somehow managed to buy a piece of it.

Also, side note. I am trying pretty hard to become a professional writer. I write essays and stories over at tover153.substack.com. If anything there hits a nerve, feel free to subscribe.

So yeah. Taipan, Seven Cities, Gorf. Not because they are good by modern standards, but because they still feel like something.

I spent more than two years volunteering in the National Park system. Swore in thousands of Junior Rangers. Stood in gypsum dunes, Civil War battlefields, and a lot of places where kids looked at the world with the kind of hope adults forget they once had.

So hearing that MLK Day and Juneteenth were dropped from the fee-free calendar and replaced with Trump’s birthday just knocked the wind out of me.

MLK Day is a day of service. Juneteenth marks freedom. These days mean something.

Trump’s birthday does not.

I cannot imagine looking a kid in the eye after that oath and explaining why the end of slavery no longer counts but a politician’s birthday does. I will not volunteer under that. Not for one more hour.

The land will outlast whoever did this. The dunes will still glow white. The mountains will still hold their shape. But the values behind the Park Service only survive if we protect them.

If you want the longer version of why this hit me so hard, I wrote about it here: https://tover153.substack.com/p/when-the-parks-stop-belonging-to

If the best you can do is accuse me of using ChatGPT instead of responding to a single thing I actually said, that’s not a debate. That’s avoiding one. I write my own stuff. Always have. Sometimes I even manage to get a line right.

But if calling it “slop” makes it easier for you to skip the point, go ahead. I grew up in Iowa. I’ve seen actual slop. What I wrote doesn’t qualify.

Fair point. Although in a poem I wrote recently, I put it this way: “You learn to read the sky when you cannot trust the roof.”

Still feels about right for the situation.

More of my writing is here, if you’re curious: https://tover153.substack.com/

Thanks for the summary. Your version is definitely easier to type, but I still prefer the line I wrote earlier: “There is a point where a person realizes the boat is not just sinking, it was built upside down to begin with.”

Still, I appreciate the reply.

I grew up in an extreme conservative Christian home. Preacher’s kid. The kind of childhood where dancing was suspicious and playing cards was basically a gateway drug. So believe me when I say this: offering free beer in exchange for turning in your neighbors is not a conservative Christian value. It is not even close. It is a saloon owner LARPing as a moral authority.

If any of the church elders I grew up with had seen this promotion, the first question would not have been about ICE. It would have been, “Why does this man own a bar, and why is he handing out alcohol like it is communion for tattletales.”

Heterosexual Awesomeness Month. Ladies’ I’m Telling Tuesdays. MAGA cocktail menus. None of this is righteousness. This is dinner theater with cheaper costumes.

And the idea that people criticizing him are “showing their wickedness” is rich. If anything is showing its true colors, it is a business model that treats turning in immigrants as a loyalty rewards program.

You do not get to wrap yourself in “Christian values” while running Whistleblower Wednesdays. Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the snitches, for they shall inherit a free domestic draft.”

If this guy wants to talk about Christian morality, then he can start with the basics. You know, the parts about loving your neighbor instead of calling ICE on them for a drink discount.

Until then, it is not faith. It is a theme bar with a persecution complex.

Reading this article gave me the same feeling I get when someone tries to fix a server with what a former trans coworker of mine proudly called percussive maintenance. You can tell right away that somebody in Washington thinks they are offering farmers a real solution, even though they seem unclear about what the actual problem is.

A little background, since my political history has taken more turns than a loose extension cord. I grew up in an extreme conservative evangelical home as a preacher’s kid. That meant I carried around beliefs I had not really inspected up close. So yes, for years I showed up and did the Republican work. I made thousands of campaign calls for Romney. I worked for someone running for the state house who did not get elected while I was on her staff, though she later squeaked out a win by six votes, which felt like watching a progress bar creep from 99 percent to complete. I checked all the boxes. Special elector. County central committee. If there was an election from 2011 on, I was probably standing in a school gym with an R next to my name.

Then the party hitched itself to President Mango Unhinged. I wrote the county Chairwoman a long, weary letter explaining that I could not pretend this was normal. I switched to Independent and then, in a moment of questionable judgment, voted for Gary Johnson. Let us call that a corrupted file in my political directory.

Later, when the Senate Election Committee decided Roy Moore was still an acceptable investment, that was it. I went to the courthouse, filled out the form, and became a Democrat. There comes a point when you realize your operating system has too many vulnerabilities to patch.

During the last presidential election, I worked as the precinct chair in a rural county. My grandparents all farmed, and I spent plenty of childhood summers walking beans, putting up hay, and roguing corn with a hoe sharp enough to qualify as a safety violation. But I have been an IT guy for decades now, and even I could see what was coming when the final tally came in and sixty six percent of the precinct voted for Mango Unhinged. That was the moment I knew the whole system was about to crash.

So reading this article about a twelve billion dollar aid package funded by tariffs that Americans are actually paying feels like watching someone reboot the wrong machine. Farmers do not need giant checks mailed out after a political fire. They need stable markets, predictable trade, and equipment that does not cost the same as a mid range server rack.

And when I see a promise to cut environmental rules to make machinery cheaper, all I hear is the unmistakable sound of someone deleting files they should not delete.

At this point I half hope Pam Bondi has my name in a folder labeled Formerly Cooperative, Now Suspiciously Reasonable. It would be the most attention the federal government has ever given a middle aged Army veteran living quietly in an RV.

This twelve billion dollar relief package is not a solution. It is the equivalent of taping over a warning light on the dashboard. Farmers deserve real fixes, not another round of political tech support from people who keep unplugging the wrong cables.

This is harder to type than it probably should be. Back in 2015, because of the way I was raised in an extreme conservative evangelical household as a preacher’s kid, I was a Republican. I had already broken with that world in every meaningful way, but I had not actually sat down and examined what I believed. So there I was, still actively involved in politics. I helped campaign for Romney. I made more than three thousand phone calls, which I am pretty sure qualifies as a minor war crime. I was on the election staff of a representative who, for the record, had not been elected yet when I worked for her. I was a special elector. I was on the county central committee. I worked every election since 2011 with an R behind my name.

And then they picked the orange man. I wrote the Chairwoman a very long letter explaining, in polite terms, that this was not going to work for me. I switched my affiliation to Independent. Unfortunately, I still had not figured out where the world was heading, so I voted for Gary Johnson. The less said about that period of my life, the better.

When the Senate Election Committee decided to finance Roy Moore, I walked directly to the courthouse, changed my registration to Democrat, and started working elections for that party instead. There is a point where a person realizes the boat is not just sinking, it was built upside down to begin with.

Anyway, based on the tone of that old letter, I find myself hoping I ended up on a list somewhere for Pam Bondi. It would be nice to feel important for a moment. Besides, what a spectacular waste of resources it would be to track down one Army veteran who lives in an RV in the middle of nowhere.