I was recently sent a link pointing here, and what a wonderful, insightful find. With regard to feed readers, I was advised once to keep the list short, chock full of smart people, and this certainly qualifies.

I hardly play any of the games and I feel I miss a lot of references, but Penny Arcade still makes me laugh. More so, these guys are heroes, marked by grand achievements such as Child’s Play and PAX. Beyond these artifices, however, emanates their unadulterated love for gaming and it’s this seeping honesty that keeps me coming back.

Thus, without hesitation, I’ve plunked down for their first game.

The sucker runs on the Holy Triumvirate – Windows, Mac and Linux – how? Apparently through the Torque Engine, a little marvel of a game framework. I’m not well-versed in such things, but I certainly respect a system that presents a unified view of such disparate foundations.

By this time next week, I will once again, for the second time in my life, “own” a car. I place “own” in quotes because, once again, I won’t legally own the vehicle, but for all intents and purposes it will be considered mine. Huzzah.

My feelings on cars these days are quite mixed. For one, they are damned expensive. I fondly remember watching antiquated gas pumps out of a minivan window, gallons oh-so-slowly exceeding dollars. Today, the math is all wrong, the race clearly fixed.

Second, Thom Yorke is right – cars are downright killing machines.

If I may indulge nostalgia, my first car was actually two cars – I started with one and smoothly switched to another. So perhaps I should call this my second period of car ownership. In any case, my very first was an old Bonneville, with a sloping, mournful hood and a paint job that mixed gold, burgundy and brown. It was certainly nothing to be seen in, but it could haul ass.

When my sister headed off to college, I inherited her Ford Taurus, which my mind strongly associates with my teenage years, successfully masking any adventures I had in the Pontiac. But this car gave me freedom, the ability to start choosing the time and place of my presence and effort, and it was vastly transformative.

Suddenly, however, I moved to the city, my stewardship of automobiles ended and I’ve never missed them. Sure, there were occasional periods of foster care and a car-crazed college friend revealed their inner workings, but overall I was quite happy to be rid of them. And that sentiment has carried on until today.

Why then? Why join the ranks of people crazy and stupid enough to own a car in NYC? The question almost answers itself. The car is a promise, a commitment, to leave this metropolis in a timely fashion. It’s a meatspace nag screen that will constantly remind me to work on our departure, to search out greener pastures where alternate side parking rules are foreign and unwhispered.

All refrigerators, without exception, should be designed to hold a large pizza box.

Anything less is utterly disappointing.