Whoa....

There's a friend of mine from my elementary and junior high school days whom I think about from time to time. His name was Mark Jensen, and he and I enjoyed many a fine moment of pre-teen geekery together. We saw Return of the Jedi together on the second night it was out; we watched an awful lot of MTV together; played Dungeons and Dragons (the simpler version, not AD&D); we hung out in the computer room at my father's college playing the local variant of the classic Colossal Cave game*; we hung out at Mark's house playing great Atari games like Pitfall and Adventure and whatever else.

(Mark would also occasionally get pissed at me, usually on the basis that, in his words, I was being a "dickhead". I, of course, thought no such thing -- but now, twenty-odd years later, I look back at think, "Damn, I really was being a dickhead. Boy, self-awareness years later is just useful as hell, isn't it?)

Anyhow, I used to try Googling Mark's name on occasion, but "Mark Jensen" isn't a terribly unusual name, so there was really no way for me to narrow down the two million or so hits for "Mark Jensen" to the guy I knew. Oh well.

But then, just an hour or so ago, I decide to do one of a bit of ego-checking on Google by searching under my own name, and wouldn't you know it -- I find Mark's GameSpot profile, wherein he mentions me at one point. That's just friggin' spooky, man.

It turns out that you have to have a GameSpot profile of your own before you can send a message to one of their users, so maybe I'll set one of those up for myself sometime in the next day or two. Meantime, Mark, if by some chance you're already reading this blog, drop me a line. Sounds like you've been busy.

* Wow, was Colossal Cave the funnest thing ever! I loved that damn game, even though the student at my father's university who had put it on the mainframe was highly territorial about it, refusing to give me hints about some of the game's tougher puzzles and even going so far as to add his own puzzles to the game, including one that had no solution at all.

Anyhow, it's a great game, if you like the old text-adventure thing.