Greetings, friends. (XLV)

Greetings, friends. Today I would like to thank a number of you for some gifts that you have shared with me recently.

On Friday, Matt and Kim invited me over for dinner. Matt made cocktails and a delicious home cooked meal. Their son Kaleb introduced me to the pastime of letterboxing, which has some similarities to geocaching:

Letterboxers hide small, weatherproof boxes in publicly-accessible places (like parks) and post clues to finding the box online on one of several Web sites…

Individual letterboxes usually contain a log book, an often hand-carved rubber stamp and occasionally contain an ink pad. Finders make an imprint of the letterbox’s stamp on their personal log book, and leave an imprint of their personal stamp on the letterbox’s logbook.

What’s more, Matt had shared with Kaleb the story of the bucket of fermented urine that I posted to this journal last week. Kaleb was inspired by (took pity on?) the photo of me in Mom’s cornuthaum and depicted me on a hand-carved letterbox stamp!

How cool is that? He also gave me an ink pad to go with it. I told Kaleb that this was by far the most awesome handmade gift that anyone had given me in a long time. And it is. Now I just have to get a box and find some place to stash it.

I am here to tell you that the kids are alright. Thank you, Kaleb!

I received another gift via text message from Jasmine, which was an image of her mother captioned “topless photo with monkey”. Which it certainly was. The photo was not explicit in any way. The portrait was black and white, and was probably taken about fifty or sixty years ago. Miss Jasmine’s-Mom-to-Be is turned away from the camera, but she is looking towards the viewer with an impish grin, she is definitely not wearing a top, and she is most definitely holding what looks like a monkey.

“Her monkey??” I texted back.

“Yeah she had a pet monkey in Boston,” Jazz replied, as if that explained everything.

Apparently, Jazz has been following my journal, and drew together her own strength to take another pass at sorting through her own bereaved mother’s possessions. I can wholeheartedly sympathize with the challenge.

But look at the things we sometimes find! I thank Jasmine for sharing with me her joy in discovering this absurd and delightful photo, which incidentally is not mine to share. Ask her if you want to see it.

My sister Kat gave me the gift of a memory, when she posted to my entry about the Clifton Heights Denny’s that “Last I checked, you could still find Squiggby (sic) and Online Denny's on the Wayback Machine!”

This was both true, and not quite true. Online Denny’s is partially captured in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but not enough of it survives to make a playable game. I think I have a hard drive from my very last rackmount server that might have the content on it, and I think I know where it is. Do I have the case and cables to power up the drive and see if the data is still there? No. Will I? Hmmm. Sometimes we keep this thing only because we’ve had it forever.

By contrast, the entirety of the Squigby website was available in the Wayback Machine, so I scraped the site, posted it to Github Pages, and resurrected the website domain. The whole process took me maybe 25 minutes?

So, I present to you: Squigby, a card game played with a normal 54 card deck, that uses some of the basic concepts of Uno, but layers on the requirement that players must say specific, nonsense words of increasing silliness, in order to make any progress in the game.

I am incorrectly identified on Wikipedia as the creator of Squigby. Those of you who know him will be unsurprised that it was actually conceived by Eric, who delights in saying nonsensical things, late one night while a bunch of us were hanging out at Denny’s and starting to get bored. We taught it to our friends, and then built a website to catalog the expanding ruleset and provide a reference to the fetal Internet.

Most of the Squigby website consists of a play-by-play tutorial written by Aaron, which is good, because I was extremely stoned when I wrote down the “official rules” and they do not make any sense at all, if you don’t already know how to play the game. Or even if. Anyway, if you bother to click through, please forgive the adolescent tone of the site. We were adolescents then, after all.

But Squigby was above all a gift of the Clifton Heights Denny’s, and of Eric, who visited us on break when we were all in college, and of Aaron, who was probably the game’s biggest fan, and finally Kat for reminding me that the original website had been fossilized in the Internet Archive like the residents of Pompeii in the tuff of Vesuvius. Thank you all.

As usual, I have more to say, but for now, since you’re reading this, I will send you my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. Toodles!