I've retroactively made all that wasted time rotting my brain into research. It makes me a hypocrite when I try to tell my own daughter, "I don't know, I think we've played a little too much Mario."

Very well! he said. You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust! I'd never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber. All right, I said uncertainly. But won't we be needing horses for that? Not horses, he replied, stepping away from his throne. Birds.

If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game's two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It's just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.

Everybody has this fond association with the car from Back to the Future, but most people have never seen one. I've seen people drive off the berm trying to take pictures. It ends up being dangerous.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.

I was one of the boys who made passes at girls who wore glasses. Any girl who was smarter than me - that was a huge turn-on.

You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.