Category: Silly

The Unluckiest Game of Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail: simultaneously enticing and frustrating schoolchildren since 1971

Sometime during my undergrad years, I discovered that you could download The Oregon Trail for PC and play it at your leisure. No more waiting excitedly for the Thursday computer lab session, where you could maybe shoot a bear and then you’d die of dysentery and then you’d have to let your classmate have a go as you looked on frustrated. This was altogether perfect and wonderful. After all, due to the nature of Thursday computer lab sessions, The Oregon Trail was both desired and unobtainable. Urban legends of people “winning The Oregon Trail” were obvious fabrications, that shit was unwinnable – a simple fact of programming.

One of the first things I discovered upon playing The Oregon Trail in college was that: kids are stupid. Continue reading “The Unluckiest Game of Oregon Trail”

The Dangers of Phase Contrast Microscopy

“Every time that the person before me left the scope in phase 3, and I forgot to check.”

This honestly happens to me far too frequently, you’d think I would learn to avoid it or something. I’m just going to say that I get so excited to see my little bacteria under the scope, that I can’t help myself and shove my eyes into the eyepieces as fast as possible. I mean, some of these guys have week-long doubling times!

An Outbreak of Hair

Painting this LEGO portrait series has really made me get LEGOs on the brain.

When we were children, my siblings and I had tons and tons of LEGOs which we played with almost daily. We had a small core set of main characters, and tons of peripheral characters. As you may have guessed, our “main characters” were mostly just Minifigs that my siblings and I had assembled to best resemble ourselves.

And this point is what lead to the hair outbreak: back in the day, LEGO had a very limited selection of hair for Minifigs. Being of mostly Danish ancestry, my brood of siblings 1,000 young consisted of roughly 700 blonde girls. Some of them were very dissappointed that they couldn’t make a blonde Minifig, so my mom actually called LEGO to complain.

Continue reading “An Outbreak of Hair”