I wondered who among us was responsible for putting that icon there. It was bizarre, even horrible, a round blue marble of a head with severe red lips. On the computer desktop, crowded in among the students' saved files, I remember there was a single strange, stray icon. ![]() The lab itself was always quiet, always empty-but other people had been there! You could see their documents right there on the desktop! Any evidence of human life was reassuring at 4 AM on a Wednesday. It was slow, and the Internet connection was slower. It wasn't just that the lab's printer was slightly more reliable than mine: I'd discovered I actually preferred working on a public computer. "Go to the computer lab," we'd lazily remind one another, "downstairs." The few sad sacks who used Zip drives had nowhere to turn.Ī lost game is especially unsettling. A short funereal dirge plays: Nice going, savior, they're all dead. Mornings in Chapin were a scramble, teenagers half-dressed, floppy disks (!) in hand, running from room to room. By the end of our first month as students, we all had the same Aimee Mann album. Dozens of us were running the same copy of Half Life (mine) we unanimously upgraded from Windows 98 to XP on the same borrowed registry key. In those days dormitories were collaborative black markets. Possibly I was coaching the printer into printing that fascinating typewritten insight (triple-spaced, margins set to a billion). Probably I was trying to wring out some fascinating typewritten insight for my next class. In the gray hours before dawn I must have been sitting there stupidly, hunched over a portable coffee from Burger King. ![]() Snood first insulted me almost 14 whole years ago in the "computer lab"-really, just a pair of computers with a printer strung between them-that was then located in its own room on the first floor of Chapin Humanities Residential College, where I lived as a student. It isn't your imagination: Yes, they're insulting you. They idle in this really disconcerting way, too: The hipster hexagon may suddenly grimace, while the green square might stick out his tongue. ![]() Their facial expressions change, but you usually only catch those shifts out the corner of your eye. Then there's Purple Triangle with Horns, Yellow Hexagon in Ray-Bans, Angry Red Robot, Boring Green Square, Pale Blue Hairball, and my personal favorite, Lady Horseface. There is the game's most memorable snood, Round Blue Head. "I haven't installed Snood!"Īt the outset of any Snood session, more than half the playfield is filled, without gaps, with a wall of characters straight out of a Martian bowl of Lucky Charms. But everything in my game library looked too heavy. Instead, I began inching my cursor toward the Steam icon in the bottom-right corner of the laptop's screen. Now that I had assembled my workspace, I was too bored to work.
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