Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on April 30th, 2018 in Main 
Each year I look forward to my old neighborhood’s annual garage sale day just as much as I did when I was a kid, and each year it seems like fewer houses participate. This year may have been an all-time low. Thanks to 24 hours of solid rain, when Susan and I drove through Sun Valley in search of deals we only saw two houses with their garage doors open. In its heyday, I’ll bet there were years where there were at least 50 garage sales. Of course the garage sales are only half the reason I like to go.… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on April 25th, 2018 in College, Main, My LifeIn the fall of 1991, three months after graduating high school, I walked into Redlands Community College. I walked out two years later with no degree and a 3.25 grade point average. After another year at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, I still hadn’t graduated and my GPA had dropped to 3.10 after pulling a 2.75 there. As much as I enjoyed journalism, there was zero chance of me being nominated for any sort of honor society based on my academic achievements (or lack thereof). It took me a few years to get my head on straight. In the fall of… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on April 20th, 2018 in College, Main, Writing 
One of the main characters in my novel has a glaring flaw. A couple of scenes still feel clunky. I may or may not have a plot hole. If it weren’t for deadlines, I might have gone on editing my novel forever. There’s always something that can be improved. Rough parts can be made better. Good parts can be made great. Wednesday night, my deadline came. With Susan waiting out in the driveway, I saved the final copy of my novel to a thumb drive, and off we went. Thirty minutes later, I walked out of Office Depot with 570… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on April 19th, 2018 in Arcades/Arcade Games 
In 2013, I traveled to Denver, Colorado to attend the Kong Off 3, an officially sanctioned national Donkey Kong tournament. That weekend I got to see some of the world’s greatest Donkey Kong players play live in person, people like Hank Chien, Steve Wiebe, and Robbie Lakeman. Of everyone there, the person I was most excited to see play was Billy Mitchell. At least in video game circles, Billy Mitchell became a household name after the release of the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. The film follows two gamers, Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, on… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on April 9th, 2018 in Articles, Main 
As a kid I used to watch cartoons every morning while waiting for the school bus to arrive, and one of those cartoons was Popeye. Although the original Popeye cartoons by Fleischer Studios date all the way back to the 1930s, I was more familiar with the Popeye the Sailor series, produced in the early 60s. In the late 70s and early 80s, CBS brought back the characters for The All New Popeye Hour. This was around the time the live-action Popeye film starring Robin Williams was released, and the character became popular with kids all over again. Despite this… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on April 3rd, 2018 in Main 
Over the past week I’ve picked up three new vintage lunch boxes: The Fall Guy, Annie, and the Care Bears. In the picture above, you can see the The Fall Guy and Care Bears lunch boxes stacked in front of some of the others. The cube holding the Annie lunch box is three boxes deep. I’m really good at collecting things. What I’m not really good at is limiting my collections. Or, for that matter, paring them down. When I first moved those upper shelves out into the hallway, I only had a handful of lunch boxes — four or… (read more)
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