Peggle Fever

Hi, folks! I’m really excited to go white water rafting this weekend, because if there’s anywhere a noble grassland beast like myself feels at home, it’s lurching precariously down a river!

No, really, it’s going to be great. I allowed Jimmy and Marina to convince me this was a good idea and I’m not about to back out now. They insist it’ll be fun and I have virtually no reasons to doubt them.

On an entirely different topic, did you know that the structure of a unicorn’s trachea means we can drown on less than two tablespoons of water? I didn’t. I just looked that fact up now. Huh.

Anyway, I’m sure the expense, hassle and life-threatening risk involved in this madhouse adventure will be entirely eclipsed by some perceptible amount of fun. I’m confident that not every one of my legs will be broken, just as I sincerely believe the logistical problems of airlifting a comatose unicorn out of the wilderness for emergency resuscitation have been clearly worked out beforehand were such unfortunate steps to become necessary. Seriously, it’ll be fine.

Have a good weekend, folks!

Hi, folks! I and the rest of the Peggle Institute staff just returned from a field trip to the circus. I think we all learned a lot!
For instance, Claude deduced a secret code woven into the Fattest Man in the World’s stage show, Master Hu became aware of the stolen heartbeat of a reawakened dream while he was eating a burrito, and Tula didn’t get to go.

Splork established having only one eye can be disadvantageous when trying to toss a hoop over a milk bottle, Renfield discovered what hats are for and Jimmy verified how acetocetyl-ACP enters the elongation cycle for fatty acid synthesis. Kind of a strange one there for Jimmy; I’m not sure where he picked that one up.

Meanwhile, Warren learned important lessons about not trying to grift professional carnies, as well as how to roll with the impact after being launched from the grounds by those same carnies. Kat Tut learned that twenty pounds of cotton candy is a lot more than it sounds like, Marina came away from the experience with a new appreciation for the inadvisability of combining electrical shocks with local police, even in jest, while Lord Cinderbottom learned valuable lessons about how burning down a corndog vendor’s kiosk for failing to address him as “Lord” can end up exposing the Institute to a great deal of financial liability. He also learned that balloons are not dragon eggs and don’t need to be rescued from their owners.

And me? I learned sometimes it’s best to not do field trips ever again.

Hi, folks! I learned the most astonishing thing this week. Evidently you human beings use various forms of monetary currency in order to facilitate your economic exchanges!

I think you people may really have something with this idea! I don’t mind telling you, the way we do it here works about as well as an ill-motivated gopher teaching a Peggle class after a three-day potion bender. Which, if you’ve seen Jimmy this week, you would know is not that well at all.

Essentially, we still exchange goods and services here in the Peggle universe much as you humans do in yours, but rather than using increments of currency, we use a complex set of secret hollers. So, for example, if I were to place an order for six kilotens of rainbows for the Institute, I would pay for it by screaming “BAZOOMPANTS!” as loudly and secretly as I could, while the vendor would respond with a covert bellow of “CRACKLYBALLZ!” Each party to the deal is then obliged to check the surrounding area to see if anybody heard us yelling at each other, and if anybody did then we have to find somewhere else and repeat the process until we get it right. Once we’ve exchanged these secret screeches we can make the trip to the Central Exchange Exchequer to file our secret sounds and receive an accounting of the relative exchange value of the screams. This usually takes between six to eight weeks.

As I’m sure you can imagine, errors of valuation and security can creep into even the most scrupulously performed transaction, and as a result the Peggle universe suffers a crippling economic collapse every twenty minutes or so.

Hmmmm… money, eh? Currency? It really is a smashing idea. I may have to propose it at the next big unicorn conference!

Hi, folks! We’re out of oxygen this week at the Peggle Institute, but don’t worry: we’ve got loads of Synth-Ox!

I’ve noticed I spend a lot of time on this blog harping on the differences between our world and yours, and because the Peggle Universe has so many advantages over your human one, much of my harping sounds like bragging.

So this week, I’m delighted to take time out to discuss one of our great commonalities: our mutual love, need and respect for oxygen!

In our world and yours, oxygen is the chemical by which we all, dragon and human, unicorn and dog, metabolize our stuff. Without oxygen, that loveliest, most reactive of substances, we all perish!

Well, as I mentioned above, we suddenly ran out of oxygen this week. I’ll admit it was my fault; I was so busy supervising the magical instruction of our 2nd level Peggle Masters I completely forgot to put in the order. Renfield, who usually keeps track of our oxygen supplies, was holidaying in Peggle Portugal for the week, and without his careful attention Tuesday rolled up and we were down to our last kilojug. Since all the O-mongers were closed for Glanquor, we had no way to replenish our supplies until next Monday.

Luckily, though (and this is where forward-thinking unicorn administrative skills really reveal themselves), I’d had the foresight to get in a solid stock of Synth-Ox the previous month. As you surely know, Sythn-Ox is an artificial version of oxygen, tremendously useful in certain Peggle-related systems, so we were able to break open the stores and huff furiously to keep ourselves alive.

No need to worry; the fresh kilojugs of regular oxygen are on their way for a prompt Monday delivery, so our Synth-Ox supplies will hold us out over the weekend in only mild discomfort. So you see, though I often make our world out to be so much more different and magical and superior to yours in every respect, really we are much the same!

Non-Magic Powers

Hi, folks! While there really is no better thing to be than a unicorn, nonetheless I am sometimes forced to admit that you humans can make up for your magical deficiency with remarkable resourcefulness!

Take, for example, the matter of games. Here in the Peggle universe, when an inspired and creative unicorn like myself has an idea for an earthshatteringly fun game such as Peggle, he merely needs to focus on his horn, mutter a few forbidden phrases and Ping! the thing is wished into existence.

For you humans, however, the process is far more arduous. I’ve had occasion recently to peruse Racing the Beam from your world’s MIT Press. It describes the hurdles faced by humans in creating the Atari VCS, a home game system from the early 1980s. Not having access to magical horns or fairy-dusted incantations, your world’s game-makers had to resort to cartwheels of ingenuity that would tax even the most accomplished unicorn mage. Consider the following:

The machine is not equipped with enough memory to store an entire screen’s worth of data in a frame buffer. The 128 bytes of RAM in the system are not even enough to store one eight-bit color value for every line of the 192-line display. … Instead, the VCS programmer must draw each frame of a program’s display manually to the screen, synchronizing the 6507 processor instructions to the television’s electron gun via the [Television Interface Adapter].
- Racing the Beam, MIT Press 2009, p. 27-28

Incredible, no? My brain and other magical organs throb in astonishment just thinking about it. It is to your credit that not only have you humans risen to this challenge, but you continue to surpass yourselves every day! Well done, humanity!