my memories of arcades the early years at malls trip down memory lane

Mon Jul 09, 2018

in the news 4 daughters and father were killed in a car accident



Father and 4 daughters killed in Delaware crash, mother is sole survivor

wow not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 teen daughters and father dead instantly in a crash that is not their fault, they were hit by another bad driver

at any moment i am behind the wheel, the car in the other lane can hit me and kill me. i drive 4 door sedan so any hits would be seriously injurious or lethal. or if i drive off the road and hit a utility pole like this person

Brittany Cleaver  19

the father of a 19-year-old girl killed in a traffic accident in Mobile said his daughter lived making her dreams come true.

Authorities say Brittany Cleaver died when her car hit a utility pole on I-10 near Rangeline Road on June 26, 2018

Investigators said Brittany Cleaver, 19, was killed when her vehicle left the roadway and hit a utility pole.

safety lesson hitting a utility pole in your car can result in death

not clear how that happened


i realize i could die at any second, from murder, accidental death, car accidents

so i wanna talk about my life

back in the day i lived within walking distance to a mall. a shopping mall with a food court in the early 80s.

this mall had lots of thing that are nearing extinction today in 2018

it had a privately owned pet store that sold puppies fish frogs.

it had a radio shack

it had a world of martial arts store and it actually sold knives and nunchucks and ninja stars (!) i suspect these have been made illegal

it's hard for anyone alive today but martial arts was hugely popular of the oriental kind

it had small bookstores, BD Dalton

and it had a small pharmacy, not sure if you could get drugs, but it had the same stuff a floor pharmacy offered like lotion

it had several now defunct stores like Montgomery  Wards Sears and a piano store that only sold pianos

for me the most interesting stores was radio shack and the arcade

back in those days, you put either a quarter and got a token, a dollar for 4 tokens but if you spend $5 you got like 24 tokens

you then put the token in the machine and play.

the earliest games i remember and played are all the classics

centipede



pac man



zaxxon



qbert



Missile Command



BERZERK



some of these video games like Berzerk you can hear a human voice talking and i thought it was amazing

Kangaroo



donkey kong



crystal castle



star wars



my fav game from this time period then and now is

galaga






home game consoles of the atari 2600 coleco vision and intellivision was actually really rare only 1 kid in neighborhood owned the atari 2600 and its gaming experience was inferior to what arcades offer

trade off is that i needed quarters to play which my dad when he was feeling generous provided

i've learned that the mall itself has gone out of business and arcades are extinct.

later today Mon Jul 09, 2018

Trump will announce his nominee for SC

i remember Bork when i was a kid. i remember some of my black classmates hated BORK. i actually didn't know what a SC was at the time.