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Stardate: 20181224.22h04
Location: Out-law's house w/ the fam
Input Device: Gemini PDA
Audio: Calpurnia videos from youtube (my daughter has the remote)
Visual: Xmas tree w/ lights and gifts
Energy: 65%
Mental: 70%
Emotional: socially depleted 

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Merry Christmas to those who celebrate at the SDF, 
gophersphere, proxied gopher web interfaces, and 
cyberspace...or however means you received this transmission! 
For those who don't celebrate, happy days to you's and yours!

At the out-laws house with the fam.  Adults are talking in 
the kitchen.  I'm hanging with the kids in the family room, 
isolating in a chair in the corner by the xmas tree.  It's 
the usual.  Their conversations are not in English and I 
haven't the bandwidth for the translation overhead, so I'm 
out...which is fine since I'm not feeling very social.

I was just sitting here thinking about past Xmas seasons 
growing up.  For some reason, computing comes to mind (which 
is more fun.)  Even though there were parties and dinners to 
go to with my family of origin, the time I really enjoyed was 
the downtime in between.  I enjoyed staying at home during 
this time...and playing on my Commodore 64.  Sometimes I 
would get lost in a text adventure (Robots of Dawn, 
Planetfall, Farmer's Daughter, LOL!) Sometimes I would play a 
game with graphics (Bruce Lee and The Goonies (loved anything 
by Datasoft), Impossible Mission and Summer Games by Epyx, 
Beach Head and Raid over Moscow by Access Software (?), 
M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold by Electronic Arts...  
Sometimes I would do something creative, like dabble in 
Basic, or type in code from Compute's Gazette, or transcribe 
music in The Music Shop or create a calendar for the new year 
in The Print Shop both by Br0derbund, and print it out on 
tractor-fed, perforated dot-matrix printer paper.

One of my favorite things to do during this downtime was to 
call local BBS's.  Unfortunately, I would get a lot of busy 
signals when dialing out since there were a lot of other 
people with downtime posting to the boards or rodents 
downloading warez...or even "Christmas Users" dialing out for 
the first time.  Christmas Users...that's a term that seems 
to have dislodged itself from Long Term Storage and 
manifested itself into my conscious awareness.  "Christmas 
Users" was a pejorative term used for new computer users who 
just got a shiny new modem from Santa and were logging in 
for the first time.  Basically, a n00b.  Not sure how common 
that term was, but in my neck of the local dialup woods, you 
did not want to be labeled as a Christmas User.  Good thing I 
got my second-hand 300 baud in the summertime.  I remember my
friend got his 300 baud during Xmas so I used to tease him, 
calling him a Christmas User...in meatspace of course, not on 
the boards.

Speaking of Christmas Users, I recall a utility that was 
menu-driven and had a bunch of different phrases that you 
could use when harassing people on the phone.  You would call 
the person (manually or through a built in dialer(?)), hold 
the receiver up to your TV speaker (which the commie used as 
a monitor), and chose one of the phrases from the menu.  
These were digitized, distorted voices that sounded like some
mean guy recorded it.  I remember 3 distinct phrases.  One 
was, "Suck a slimey one, Christmas User!"  The second was, 
"Your board is going down!"  And the last one was, 
"You-you-you-you-you are sooo lame!"  Kinda like how Max 
Headroom would say it, all glitchy.  This might have been 
standalone or part of the PhoneMan terminal program, which 
also had different box tones to play over your TV speaker 
built into the software.  There might have been some other 
phrases as well, but those are the ones I remembered.

Another recollection...I remember playing one of my first 
realtime dialup games with my friend, the "Christmas User."  
We played Spy vs. Spy over 300 baud.  This was a video game 
that was based on the Mad Magazine charaters where you try to 
steal a briefcase and set traps on your opponent.  There
were even switchblade fights!  That was so much fun!  It 
probably seems pretty lame with all of the online games 
today, but back then, this was so cool!  We would call each 
other up via voice on the POTS line, load the game via 5.25" 
inch floppy on the 1541 Commodore disk drive (Epyx Fastload 
cartridge, FTW!), flip the switch on our modems to initiate 
the modem handshake, and then hang up the receiver!  GAME ON!  
The nice thing about playing Spy vs. Spy over modem was that 
my friend couldn't cheat and look at my half of the screen 
(which was shared when played in meatspace...actually, the 
cheating was part of the fun!)   There was also Operation 
Terminal, which was also a spy game that we played over the 
modem, but wasn't as fun as Spy vs. Spy.

Those were some fun times and I'm surprised by all of the 
recall.  I guess they will stay with me even longer now that 
they have been summoned out of Long Term Storage, the neural 
pathways have been reactivated, and I have committed them to 
gopherspace!
 
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