Tag: games

Best yankee gift swap ideas under $30: Gifts people will literally fight over

yankee swap gift ideas

Last time I got fun and funky for the White Elephant gift guide. But what if you’re trying to please a larger crowd? This year I had to buy gifts for my very first Yankee Gift Swap. Unlike White Elephant gift exchanges, these gifts should actually be good and useful, you know… things people really want, things people will fight over!

I used a couple of the ideas in this post, but here are things that are sure to become the most popular item at your Yankee Swap or family gift exchange. (Bonus: Most of these things are Amazon Prime, so that means they’re perfect for last-minute gifts!)

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B-type messes & Tetris dreams: How Tetris helps my anxiety

tetris time

There’s a whole big wide world of nerd-ing that I don’t get: Gaming. I don’t like playing video games, and I don’t really like board games all that much. I’m more of a puzzle kind of girl. But I still have the very first Game Boy that I bought with my very own money. It’s “berry” (because Game Boy Color had just come out) and it only ever has one game inside of it — Tetris.

When I shared that photo above on my Instagram, I immediately got the question “what’s your highest level?” Is that like the Tetris equivalent of “how much do lift, bro?” I think so. 😉 Here’s the deal: Although I’ve been playing this game since I was a pre-teen, and I consistently beat everyone in our yearly family vacation Tetris competitions, I have NO IDEA what my highest level is. But I do remember seeing the rocket at least twice in my life.

I still keep this bad boy in my bedside table, and it’s actually one of the things that helps me manage my anxiety. You wouldn’t think that a game that gets increasingly faster and harder would help my anxiety, but for some reason it does.

Nowadays, I play the B-type levels and work on building the blocks down instead of working on leveling up. I mean, obviously I level-up as I play, but I like the anxiety-easing pleasure of un-fucking the B-type messes. Maybe there’s something about it that reminds me that there’s nothing so fucked up that it can’t be un-fucked. And if all it gets out of control, and I find a B-type mess that I can’t un-fuck, there’s always another chance to fix it, and not just fix it, but clear up the space and level up like a BOSS.

I have always liked to play Tetris before bed because it relaxes me, plus there’s the added Tetris Effect bonus. Have you ever noticed that you dream about Tetris after you’ve been playing it… like… a wee bit too much? Oh yes, it’s been proven playing too much Tetris will pattern your thoughts, mental images, and dreams! To get all Wikipedia rabbit-hole-y with it, it’s a form of hypnagogic imagery!

In short, science has proven that Tetris is the coolest game ever.

You can imagine, then, my immense pleasure when stumbling upon this bedding design on ModCloth…

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Even octipodes love old school Nintendo: VIP fun at the iam8bit art gallery

Untitled

I remember years ago, when I was still in college, my cousin and a his friend Drew came to LA for a visit. (It was the first time I met Drew and I totally thought “holy crap this guy is cute.”) While at lunch they told me that they had just stopped by an art gallery that was featuring 8bit and video game-themed art. I remember being SUPER jealous that they didn’t invite me to said gallery.

Yesterday, probably seven years later(?), I got a chance to go to that art gallery with Drew (who is now a really close friend, as chances of us ever dating were quite slim once I found out he was gay). Drew even got us VIP status at the iam8bit opening night event. Because of that, we bypassed standing in any lines and had a blast.

Though sadly that also meant we didn’t stand in line to have our picture taken in the life-size (yet still scaled down) plushie version of Scrooge McDuck’s money vault. Once Drew referred to it as something like “the germ-filled pit of sweaty pillows” I kinda lost my motivation to stand in a long line, in a super-hot room to wade around in gross pillow coins for a photo op. Is it weird that I kind of regret it now?

But here are the pictures that I did get:

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