So, you go to the Portland Retro Gaming panel of 80’s Atari programmers. Each one of which made the most popular games of the age, ones you and all your friends played. After the talk, you’re chatting with them and everyone discovers it’s well past lunch. You say, “Hey guys, you wanna go across the street and grab a bite to eat? My treat.”
And that’s how you end up taking all your childhood programming heroes out to lunch.
From L to R: David Crane – Founder of Activision, Activision’s Pitfall Tod Frye – Atari’s PacMan, Swordquest series Rob Zdybel – Star Trek, Star Raiders, Atari Football Bob Smith – Star Wars, Video Pinball, co-founder of Imagic Gary Kitchen – Donkey Kong, Keystone Kapers Mr Kitchen’s son Me
This thing shoots paper airplanes. That’s cool in itself, but its ‘ammo’ is regular sheets of paper and the machine folds and fires them as it goes. Awesome.
Reed college is having an open house today and doing 2 tours through their nuclear reactor. You get to enter the reactor room while it is running at 90% of it’s 250 kwatt output (they turn off the lights so you can see the Cerenkov blue glow!) – and then they scram it for you (shutdown). Sadly, they use a magnetic control rod system – so there isn’t really a guy with an ax anymore…
Dave Devries takes drawings from little kids and then paints them more realistically. The results are published on his website, and in his book: The Monster Engine.