Pantechnicon
05-25-2007, 12:10 PM
Making Out With My Atari
By “Pantechnicon”
If you’ve ever owned an Atari 2600, chances are pretty good at one point while you had it that the protective rubber covering around the shaft of one of your Atari-manufactured joysticks managed to work itself loose from under the slip-ring which is supposed to keep it affixed to the joystick’s base. Lifting the covering exposes the thin white plastic of the stick assembly. It was a fairly common problem with supplied controllers. My system was no exception. After a few years of regular use both of my joystick covers were likewise fully removed from their slip-rings.
One lazy Sunday back when I was sixteen I was loafing around the house watching movies on television all morning. My hands, being somewhat more restless than the rest of my body, drifted over to the nearby Atari console and removed one of the loose rubber stick coverings. Fumbling around with the covering I realized that by squeezing the open end against a smooth surface I could create a vacuum suction effect - much like a toy dart or a bathroom plunger - that would stick the covering to a tabletop or a window for a brief time. I attached the joystick cover to the bottom of my face which gave me the comical appearance of having an elongated Van Dyke-style beard. Mentally distracted by the droning television, I kept sticking this thing to same spot on my face for another hour or so until I became bored with television and decided to walk to the mall to waste even more of my day off.
Traipsing through the mall, I noticed that an unusually high number of my fellow teenagers that kept giggling and/or pointing at me as I walked past them. After a while I sought out a mirror to see what was so funny. Looking at my reflection outside of a JC Penney, I saw that by fooling as I did with that joystick cover that I had given myself a very dark and perfectly round hickey centered squarely on the edge of my pale adolescent hairless chin. I promptly left the mall, wishing desperately for a scarf or a turtleneck or something to cover up this self-inflicted deformity.
School resumed the next day and the kids there proved to be no more forgiving than the ones at the mall. The string of taunts whilst walking between classes never let up: “Nice hickey!” “Who’s your new girlfriend?” I just kept my mouth shut and waited for the bruise to go away, which took almost a week. In my high school days I was considered nerdy enough as things were. It would have been the end of me if it were revealed that I got my first hickey not from a girl, but from a videogame.
By “Pantechnicon”
If you’ve ever owned an Atari 2600, chances are pretty good at one point while you had it that the protective rubber covering around the shaft of one of your Atari-manufactured joysticks managed to work itself loose from under the slip-ring which is supposed to keep it affixed to the joystick’s base. Lifting the covering exposes the thin white plastic of the stick assembly. It was a fairly common problem with supplied controllers. My system was no exception. After a few years of regular use both of my joystick covers were likewise fully removed from their slip-rings.
One lazy Sunday back when I was sixteen I was loafing around the house watching movies on television all morning. My hands, being somewhat more restless than the rest of my body, drifted over to the nearby Atari console and removed one of the loose rubber stick coverings. Fumbling around with the covering I realized that by squeezing the open end against a smooth surface I could create a vacuum suction effect - much like a toy dart or a bathroom plunger - that would stick the covering to a tabletop or a window for a brief time. I attached the joystick cover to the bottom of my face which gave me the comical appearance of having an elongated Van Dyke-style beard. Mentally distracted by the droning television, I kept sticking this thing to same spot on my face for another hour or so until I became bored with television and decided to walk to the mall to waste even more of my day off.
Traipsing through the mall, I noticed that an unusually high number of my fellow teenagers that kept giggling and/or pointing at me as I walked past them. After a while I sought out a mirror to see what was so funny. Looking at my reflection outside of a JC Penney, I saw that by fooling as I did with that joystick cover that I had given myself a very dark and perfectly round hickey centered squarely on the edge of my pale adolescent hairless chin. I promptly left the mall, wishing desperately for a scarf or a turtleneck or something to cover up this self-inflicted deformity.
School resumed the next day and the kids there proved to be no more forgiving than the ones at the mall. The string of taunts whilst walking between classes never let up: “Nice hickey!” “Who’s your new girlfriend?” I just kept my mouth shut and waited for the bruise to go away, which took almost a week. In my high school days I was considered nerdy enough as things were. It would have been the end of me if it were revealed that I got my first hickey not from a girl, but from a videogame.