Speaking of the flavors of fun, one of the sweetest that has come to our virtual world is often conceptually packaged as "Eye Candy."
Of the various manifestations of the endlessly alluring varieties of eye candy, the kaleidoscope predates, and yet somehow anticipates the visual confections of the virtual world.
This is an image I made with the aid of a site called "make your own kaleidoscope." It was all I needed to be reminded of the dessert-like pleasures of visual delight.
Like kaleidoscopes a lot? Perhaps, as the Make Your Own Kaleidoscope people suggest, you should consider joining the Brewster Kaleidoscope Society, Sir David Brewster being the actual inventor of the optically delicious kaleidoscope. Should you desire to commune with some kaleidoscopic artists, the society has an impressive list (with email addresses) of said same. Amongst the impressive resources therein, you will find a detailed history of the kaleidoscope, and an overview of some of the different types of kaleidoscope.
Want to make a non-virtual kaleidoscope? Here's how.
Professional fun tastes a little bit like candy-coated beef jerky. When you first bite into it, it's sweet. I mean, swwwwwweet! And crunchy. Gritty, even. And once you're at the jerky part, it's tough enough to chew on for a very long time. Enough to keep you, as advertised, occupied. Occupied, in fact, with a certain full, meaty, droolworthy flavor.
Getting paid to play. That's what it's all about, isn't it. And that's what they get - all those actors and musicians and athletes and surgeons - paid to play. Paid to have fun - well, a certain kind of fun. Professional fun. Responsible, focused, skilled, well-trained fun.
Every one of us who has experienced fun professionally, whether playfully or dangerously, knows exactly what professional fun tastes like: Candy coated beef jerky.
There is a difference between serious fun and silly fun. They each have a different taste. Where Silly fun is sweet, Serious fun is sour. Where silly fun is chewy, serious is brittle.
But combine them, and you get something genuinely exquisite, like this story of how Serious and Silly tried to play hide and seek and wound up finding god:
Of all the players on my inner playground, Serious and Silly are the best known. They've played together for years. They understand each other intimately. They can play the most complicated games you can imagine. And, from time to time, they can really play beautifully together. There's one particular game that they can never play particularly well. Yet they play it almost all the time, and seem to really enjoy it. It's a variation of hide-and-seek and peek-a-boo and achieving enlightenment.
Typically, Silly suggests the game. Serious always wants to be Seeker. This, actually, is a good arrangement. Serious is an expert at keeping rules and being fair and defining what's off limits. Silly, on the other hand, is remarkably good at being the Hider.
Next they decide on Home Base. The inner playground is full of potential home bases and hiding places, from Toe to Tongue, Throat to Lung. Silly usually picks the Nose.
Silly will play Hider, and Serious, as we already predicted, will play Seeker. Serious focuses all attention on being the breather, the nostril, the sensor of the air. And then begins to count (backwards, by primes, from 97). Silly is supposed to be hiding by the time Serious reaches zero. Despite years of practice, Serious just can't ignore Silly for the whole count. So, as usual, Serious has to start over again several times before Silly is really ready to hide.
Finally, Serious completes the count. At last, the moment of truth. Serious, in a blink of the inner eye, reaches the unavoidable conclusion that Silly is definitely hiding. At this point, the game almost always breaks down. It's just too much for both of them. For Silly, hiding is fun, but only for a little while. And for Serious, just the thought of being all alone, leaving Home, without Silly...it's almost too frightening. Even Serious doesn't want to have to be that serious.
Fortunately, both Serious and Silly have had a lifetime to play. All it takes to get Silly out of hiding is someone to say "Allee Allee Oxen Free." I don't know why they keep on playing Hide and Seek. Tag is a much better game for both of them. They'd never have to be apart. And, together, they could even find other players to play with.
I tried to ask them once, when I thought they were between games. And they started running after me, yelling "You're IT."
Brian Dettmer made a skeleton out of cassette tape cassettes. If you want to know how, all you have to do is look at the pictures. If you want to know why, well, there you go.
The kind of fun embodied by Brian Dettmer's Tape Cassette Skeleton has a very strong, but complex taste. The skeleton thing gives it that musty, dank, fear-like flavor. The tape cassettes add a minty, breath-freshening, born-again aftertaste. The re-use of tape cassettes to build a skeleton gives new life to the cassettes, while using them to create an image of death brings a hint of humor to the whole thing.
A significantly symbolic fun that proves to be, all in all, quite savor-worthy.
Here we can actually taste yet another flavor of fun - the taste that comes from transforming the mundane into an expression of what? Art? The Persistence of Spirit? The Power of Whimsy? A Bunch of Different Ways to Tie Your Sneakers?
On the other foot, it's the 4th of July. Independence Day here in the United S's of A. Is there perhaps a fortuitous and unanticipated connection between a day of such vasty significance and an accomplishment of such artful triviality as shoe-tying?
This fun, the shoe-tying kind, has a flavor shared by everything you can think of that celebrates the unnecessary. Celebrating the unnecessary is also a celebration of our ability to free ourselves from necessity. And thinking that we can free ourselves from necessity leads to an almost intoxicating fun, like a fine wine, dry, yet defiant, like the taste you get decorating your house just before it goes into foreclosure.
A rebellious fun, yet unobjectionable. Rebellious, yet safe. Not like the rebelliousness we're celebrating today. Not like the fun of starting a new country, but a fun that tastes very much like that country-starting kind. Minor fun, granted, but sometimes lovely, sometimes essential.
Like the quietly delicious fun of making your signature extra fancy when you sign a Declaration of Independence.
Crafteress Ulla-Maaria Engeström is the author of the Crafter Manifesto, which can be found on her site as well as in the archives of my favorite DIY publication, Make. In her "draft manifesto," she lists 12 cogent observations about the various joys of crafting. The last is "At the bottom, crafting is a form of play."
I know the taste of this crafty fun. It tastes like accomplishment. Accomplishment for no particular reason. Ultimately, despite appearances of utility, accomplishment for its own sake. Not like prize-winning or child-bearing accomplishment. More like something deep fried, if you know what I mean. Often delicious. Ultimately as necessary as pop corn.
Were you to click this link, this entire, interactively graphic Deep Fun site would look impressively like a Microsoft Word document. And, should worse come to even worse, and you have ample reason to suspect that the person looking over your shoulder is in fact your boss, simply click on the "Boss Key" as herein illustrated, the site itself would appear to disappear entirely, and be replaced by a Word document about how to increase your job efficiency and avoid procrastination.
The fact that someone would go to the trouble to program such a thing, however tongue-in-cheekily, bears evidence of a certain kind of fun that one might call "sneaky." It is the fun that has a definitely sweet flavor of "being clever," yet possesing more than a hint of bitterness, don't you think?
This is an actual work of play. As much, at least, as it is a work of art, exhibited, actually, at the städtische galerie, in nordhorn, some time in 2007.
Especially given the artistic statement, a statement that doesn't conclude until at least this.
Balloon art, performance art, funwise, it has a taste that is predominantly artlike, yet suffused with an aroma of playfulness, whilst exhibiting an aftertaste reminiscent of swords-into-plowshare-making fun.
Behold this remark-worthy animation designed by Joaquin Baldwin (UCLA Animation Workshop).
My remarks: There's a certain flavor, shall we say, of fun that comes from the synergy of artistry and technology. A certain flavor of awe-inspiring. Then, there's the flavor of fun that comes from watching this particularly artistic narrative. It is a flavor of being absorbed, utterly, combined with the bitterly beautiful flavor of self-sacrifice. This flavor seems to be most appreciated when the self that is being sacrificed is not your own, and even more delicious when the bitter beauty is completely pretend.
If it's June 6-8, then it's the Summer Come Out and Play festival in New York City, where there will be played, for example, amongst the remarkable range of games that sound new and fun and delightfully pointless, you will find:
Did I mention that "Public Fun" has a definite taste that tastes different from all other kind of fun. And when it's really fun, it tastes potentially what this kind of event might taste like - just about as fun as fun can taste.
"Sometimes I get religious about the whole thing, sometimes I think of fun and laughter as a spiritual experience. Our lives have become increasingly fragile, our world increasingly harsh. It is a miracle that we can laugh at all. And that's the whole point."
The title of the collection of images is Extraordinary Art from Metal - another remarkable collection from the remarkably collectible people at Dark Roasted Blend. Of this particular collection, the Dark Roasted Blenders comment: "Todesfee has collected in this set whimsical sculptures made from not so funny material: scrap military metal, left from the Yom Kippur War (Mount Bental was the site of large-scale tank battles in 1973)."
Thus, we uncover yet another fun flavor, one which I find myself impelled to name "ironic fun." Scrap iron, don't you know, from tanks and stuff of military horror, transformed into a funny, junky sculpture of two cartoon-like figures, trying to shake hands, and yet, because of their very ironically iron-like nature, doomed to fail.
Here's a good collection of street games from the UK. There's nothing fancy about the website. The games are submitted by the people who played them.
This is where I found a game called Knock Down Ginger. I personally never thought of it as a game. To me, it much more closely resembles a prank. I quote:
"Knock Down Ginger and it's alternative named variations has been played since there were front doors to play it on. Usually carried out in the hours of darkness, the aim is to ring a doorbell or knock loudly on a door, as though very urgent, and run away as fast as possible.
To make this game even more exciting you can play variations such as after knocking you hide as close to the door as possible, in shrubs or behind a tree, behind the owners gate or just around the corner.
The test comes when you try a second time on the same door, giving the owner a few moments to settle down in front of their TV, the quicker you do this the more exciting it can be."
Variations, yet. Alternate rules, even. As for example, this one, posted by David from Essex: "And the perpetual motion version where you tie two knockers together and knock on the first door, when they close their door the other knocker knocks ad infinitum."
It has all the flow-inducing properties of a good game. For the players, that is. There's a definite sense of challenge/risk. You can apparently make it more or less challenging/risky as you see fit.
This is a good example of a particular flavor of fun that leaves a certain bitter aftertaste - certainly for the victims, but also, despite the hysterical peals of laughter, for the perpetrators as well. Moderately mean fun, perhaps. Slightly irresponsible fun? Lacking-in-compassion fun? Fun that tastes like the joke's-on-somebody-else.
I was talking with my friend Baz. Baz is someone whom you might call a "doom-watcher." He is a close follower of the news. An especially close follower of bad news. Especially the kind of bad news that presages the end of the world. Hence, the epithet. The point is, he is brilliant at all this (he listens to BBC alot). He has an amazing command of language, speaks with great force and passion, and, behind it all, a certain grim humor. You get a sense that he is enjoying all this - the foretelling, the tintinnabulation of the tocsin of change, the promises of plague and pestilence, tribulations and terror.
During our dialogue (him ranting, me listening), he turned to his computer, fired up YouTube, and clicked on part one of a two-part Keith Olbermann editorial on President Bush. It was a perfect complement to our percussive discussion. Olbermann's anger was undisguised, his attacks on the president fearless and undiluted, his language studied and often verging on poetic, and in back of it all, it was, forgive me, immensely entertaining.
There was something fun about it - the passion, the aesthetics of a truly well-written diatribe, the thoroughness of the argument, the clarity of the supporting evidence, the sheer bravery of Mr. Olbermann's outspoken outspeaking. Along with the heaviness, the seriousness, the truth of it all, came the fun of it all. Olbermann was having fun. He was in flow. He was both brilliant and entertaining.
This led me to the discovery of yet another flavor of fun - it's the taste of fun that comes from righteous indignation, artfully rendered. Bitter, definitely. Sweet, though, sweet to listen to, to be able to agree with so thoroughly, as if the words were coming from our own anger, and it was elevating us, somehow, into some kind of joy.
Several years ago, when I was teaching at Esalen, a woman named Magdalena Cabrera came into my life. Last Sunday, Magdalena invited me to help her and a significant passel of her wonderful friends celebrate her birthday. I led a two-hour version of my 5-day program. And, because of her, and her friends, and the park and the finally perfect Palo Alto weather, we created something profoundly playful, lovingly fun.
In one of our discussions, we talked about the politics of fun - namely about how we so often feel that we don't deserve to have fun, that we are doing something wrong, something immoral, given the harsh realities of harsh reality. Magdalena was reminded of something she wrote me in response to a rather profound insight from my rather profound brother-in-law. It captures much of that feeling:
I too feel unable to enter into Fun when so much feels wrong and sad and overwhelming in the world today, everyday. I forget your teaching, so to speak, that Fun IS part of the solution and not just a form of denial, an escape, a narcissistic indulgence at the expense of others who are not as fortunate as I am...Just thoughts, which bring me back to the mindfulness practice that DeepFun is for me. It is the practice of Minor Fun all the time, despite the trying external circumstances on this beautiful and fragile earth I love and despite the woe I see. And as I practice this path, I want to change my paradigm and begin to really believe that having fun, living fun, teaching fun, being fun, can transform this world, that it is part of the solution to the distress. IF not the world at large, it may have the power to transform MY little world, my circle of influence, I hope. And that is a step in the right direction.
We continued that dialogue, Magdalena, myself, and Bruce Williamson, long after everyone had left. Two things we noted: 1) starting anything with fun is probably the best way to prepare for everything else that isn't, and 2) given the world and being a grown-up in it, having fun is inescapably a political act.
O, as they say, MG! I think we might have found the difference between the fun we have as children, and the fun we have as adults:
Kids play because they have to. It's how they learn the world, how they grow, how they cope. Grown-ups play because they choose to. It's how they change the world. It's how they endure.
Whilst we're contemplating the playworthy implications of this particular variation, it is worthy of our collective note to collectively note that there are even more profound (and potentially painful) versions of the game, such as shown in this video.
Even I, I must admit, have found myself embellishing on Slapsie lore, thinking perhaps to introduce slightly kinder, potentially gentle nuances, as in 3-person Slapsie and Hand Wave.
Should you at this moment find yourself without someone else's hands to slap, you can access a virtually painless, if somewhat less engaging version of this game online.
Slapsie-related fun has its own peculiar taste: intensely, shall we say, focusing fun, with just a touch of ouchy.
Walleyball is a one of the films produced as part of the Pangea Day celebration. It is a demonstration of how the power of play can transform a border fence into a volleyball net - a dividing line into a connection. Which, of course, is the whole purpose of the event.
Fun-flavor-wise, it's kind of a dark chocolate thing - sweet, with more than a hint of bitterness.
Take, for example, top spinning. In particular example, take the video of spinning tops and things in a bowl. Watch the whole thing. Get a good taste for the fun of it. The fascination of it.
That taste of fascinating fun, of something almost magic in how it makes you watch it, almost magic in how it beckons you to fall into its everchanging beauty. That taste of fun when we get fascinated by making something fascinating happen. How sheerly delicious!
Fascination. The fun that is peculiar to that moment of being fascinated. So much to be fascinated by. So many ways to taste this kind of fun. On watching a baby's eyelid. On listening to a dragonfly's stillness. Tracing the shine of a spider web. Observing a cloud spin dreams. So much to be fascinated with. So much fascinating fun to be had.
Yet another take on the me/we-meme - the WEME Illiterate T-Shirt. Similar in theme, if not in message, to this. And, while you're at it, see also this:
Despite rumors to the contrary, there are certain things about getting old that are, in fact and actuality, fun. Not a lot of things. But some very, almost smugly certain things about being older are undeniably fun.
Like, for example, getting to hang around, purposelessly. Almost just like you did when you were a kid.
And the older you get, the less "almost." If you're old enough, you can go to sleep whenever you feel like it, you can suddenly and for no reason start laughing - pretty much just like you did when you were a kid. If you're lucky, and with the right people (like maybe your grandchildren), you can get listened to, appreciated, laughed with, even.
So this is Old Fun. The fun that old people have when they discover that many of the freedoms of childhood are theirs again. And they know more now, so they understand the privilege of getting to play. Sometimes all by themselves. Sometimes with anybody.
Which just about completely explains why we get old in the first place.
"I love Flickr. The content is amazing and some of the photographers have ability that is other worldly. I was looking for some interesting pictures and I typed in “holding the sun” and below is a sampling of some of the great pictures that came up (sources for the photos are at the end of the posts). Enjoy!"
After you've looked at all the pictures and sent the link to everyone you think might not have seen it already, consider the following:
This is an example of yet another significantly unique taste of fun. Unique and complex, made out of at least two different fun tastes: the taste of fun you have trolling through something like Flickr and thinking up things to look for, like, for example, all the images that have anything to do with "holding the sun" - and then discovering such an amazing collection of images; combined with the taste of fun people had when they took those photos - when they created illusions together. Illusions that could hold the sun.
Seeing as how it combines accident, illusion and technology - how about: "magical fun?"
There's something oddly fun about impossible things, not just because they are, as advertised, impossible, but also because of the skill it takes to make the impossible appear not just possible, but actual.
Photoshop has proven to be a powerful tool in the visualization of impossibilities. The Worth 1000 Photoshop competitions have led to the accumulation of remarkably vivid fantasies, graphically providing that wonderful taste of fun of the almost impossible kind.
In his article Islamism and the Politics of Fun, Asef Bayat writes: "Drawing mainly on the experience of Muslim states, notably postrevolution Iran, I explore why Islamists are so distinctly apprehensive of the expression of 'fun' — a preoccupation most people in the world seem to take for granted....Fun may be expressed by individuals or collectives, in private or public, and take traditional or commoditized forms. Fashion, for instance, represents a collective, commoditized, and systematic expression of fun, yet one that is constantly in flux because it deems to respond to the carefree and shifting spirit of fun. Fun appeals to almost all social groups (the rich and poor, old and young, modern and traditional, men and women), yet youths are the prime practitioners of fun and the main target of anti-fun politics, because youth habitus is characterized by a greater tendency for experimentation, adventurism, idealism, drive for autonomy, mobility, and change. Perhaps that is why fun is often conflated with and identified by 'youth culture.' ...But the differential habitus of these social groups tends to orient them more or less to different fun practices and therefore subject them to different degrees of prohibitions and regulations that can be subsumed under the rhetoric of 'anti-fun.' For instance, whereas the elderly poor can afford simple, traditional, and contained diversions, the globalized and affluent youth tend to embrace more spontaneous, erotically charged, and commodified pleasures. This might help explain why globalizing youngsters more than others cause fear and fury among Islamist anti-fun adversaries, especially when much of what these youths practice is informed by Western technologies of fun and is framed in terms of 'Western cultural import.'"
Perhaps Anti-Fun should be considered yet one more flavor of fun. Similar to the taste of paying taxes or experiencing one's own mortality. A tad bitter, don't you think?
As you know, my interest in Improv Everywhere has been high ever since I first heard about their playful public theatrics. Most recently, Improv Everywhere launched a new, shall we say, play, which very well might prove, as they themselves describe it, to be the Best Game Ever.
Start here, with a video of the event. Then read about it. Then ask yourself what it would be like if you had actually been there, been one of the parents, or better yet, one of the kids.
This Best Game Ever is right on the edge of art, theater, and social comment. It wouldn't succeed if not for the playfulness and sensitivity of the Improv Everywhere company - the people who conceived and staged the event. It could have proven insulting to both parents and players, it could have proven upsetting, been perceived as an act of ridicule. But apparently the event stopped short of being ridiculous, just at the point of being almost entirely believable. If not because of the believability of the actor-spectators, then because of the player's willingness to belive. If not by the actuality of the giant scoreboard, then most definitely by the blimp. Why don't we do this for all kids, everywhere - invest great effort and expense, yes, but, for the kids, and parents - to give them one random hour, of sheer, magical, transformational fun. Beyond game and sport. A theater of total participation.
Fantastic fun. The fun of fantasy fulfilled. Ah, delicious.
Then there's that unique taste of what I call "Mysteriously Profound Fun" like when something you're only pretending to be true suddenly seems truer than that.
I take, for today's case and point, the Sendings of the Oaqui. Oaqui (known alternate spellings include: "Whacqui" "Joaqui" "Huakee" :-) was something I thought I was just pretending into existence, and then found myself for gosh-sake channelling. I mean there was something smarter than me, wiser than me speaking, more serious than my intention, something that frequently seemed at least as wise as it was for fun. And that's a really delicious kind of fun. One worth savoring. The imaginary taste of something you can half-believe is real.
I think you'll have to watch them in action (or in inaction) before you waste any more time reading about Improv Everywhere. You see what I mean? They get these people - they call them "agents," more than 100, and they get them to wander ....Well, you better read about it on the Improv Everywhere site.
After you've finished marveling your way to several many other Improv Everywhere "performances," you might, if you are a gameful person, think about those Big Games - large-scale, citywide events, often involving cell phones, cameras and crowds. Or, of course, of New Games. Interesting to contemplate the difference, actually, between New Games, Citywide and Improv Everywhere-type fun. Improv Everywhere games are played with spectators who aren't even watching. Not fellow fans. Bystanders, you might say, innocent bystanders.
Improv Everywhere. Artists, wouldn't you call them? Of a certain taste of a definite kind of truly public fun, don't you think, don't you know?
No doubt, you already saw this small collection of Bar Tricks. I was wondering if it might have caught your conceptual eye enough to make you want to look for more such. Perhaps you clicked your way to Bartender Magic or that inspiring collection of Easy Bar Tricks and the surprisingly large gathering of bar trick videos from Metacafe.
Bar tricks. There's a unique fun flavor if ever there was one. It's a kind of folk magic, I guess, where you need to be just drunk enough to think you can't be fooled, or foolish enough to think you can really fool anybody. Something casual, informal about how these tricks are performed for sometimes an audience of one.
And sometimes for the entire bar, by accomplished bar magicians, raising the bar, as bar-magician Doc Eason describes, to the level of public performance. "Every crowd is different," writes Eason, "as are their reactions... so the freshness of the crowd makes a difference... I absolutely love doing the card under glass... I don't think there is a stronger bar trick... I can make even the most jaded critic come around with that routine... oh, I will cut and paste the routine so I may not do the whole thing start to finish... but this gets their attention in a way that few other tricks do."
There's something fun about fooling drunks. Because for drunks, there's something fun about getting fooled. Especially when you're getting fooled by someone who is very good at what he is pretending to do, and even more especially when you know that you are too drunk to tell.
So even if you do get fooled, unless you were foolish enough to bet a lot of money, it doesn't really count. You were drunk. Your judgment was affected. You were not really taken in, not really fooled, not really gullible.
It's that taste of fun you get when you let yourself get fooled. It's like the taste of Half-Belief, only spicier.
Fooled Fun. Which reminds me: Happy April Fooled Day! All year around!
"As I approach my 35th birthday, I wonder if I'm having too much fun....Granted, what I call 'fun' is not what most people do. Here I use the term in a broad and intentionally self-deprecating way, to refer to anything my heart deeply wants, from meditation retreats to writing a novel...I think that, when push comes to shove, I have made these choices because I deeply wanted to make them. Sure, these deep yearnings are different from simply wanting to get some kicks. But they are still about 'fun,' I think: about the juiciness of life itself, about experience, about enjoying life, in the deepest sense.
"...Why are we supposed to grow up and stop having fun, anyway? First, at least for me, there is what Anthony Kronman called the 'firestorm of regret.' I am now at the age where peers of mine are not just rich tax attorneys, but also influential politicians, respected professors, and writers and editors at publications (even) more well-known than Zeek...These pangs of regret occur because of an underlying anti-fun value: that one should make something of oneself. This is a particular, Western value that is not shared by all civilizations. Probably the most obvious counterexample is the Rastafarian (or pop-Rasta) value of spending an entire life delighting in the pleasures of Jah -- working, to be sure, to better social justice, but never losing sight of the gifts of creation, which are here to be enjoyed.
"A third reason to stop having fun, along with regret and the value of achievement, has to do with dignity and maturity. It's just undignified, isn't it, to be the balding guy on the dance floor.
"A fourth reason to stop having so much fun is, of course, that life isn't always fun. Pleasure, even in its deepest form, is only one of the important aspects of life. In a long-term relationship, for example, pleasure waxes and wanes, but if the pursuit of immediate sensual pleasure (affairs -- fun!) is placed above commitment (less fun), the end result will likely be sorrow. Or in terms of health: the burger is fun, but heart surgery is not....
"Fifth, if life is only pursued for the delights of the self -- even highly refined delights like reading post-structuralist theory or creating art -- it becomes a dead end. It's too easy to keep searching for the next thrill; this is how people become addicted to drugs, like an acquaintance of mine who died, at age 38, because of his years-long crystal meth addiction. At first it's fun; then it's less fun; then you need to do it to have any fun at all. So, too, with spirituality. The first meditation retreat is such a high! You think you'll never come back down. But then you do, and you start searching for the next high: samadhi becomes a narcotic.
"Finally, I think we're meant to stop having fun, at some point, because of a sense of deeper responsibilities, most importantly to family and community. Of course, since I've defined 'fun' to include anything that provides a sense of joy in life, family is fun too. But I think it's distinguishable, in that the intention of the family man or woman may be less 'I am doing this to taste the joys and sorrows of life' than 'I am doing this because it is my role, or my duty, or my responsibility.' Likewise for career; it may be fun, but it's mainly responsibility."
Of course, Michaelson's six reasons not to have fun: "...regret, achievement, maturity, truthfulness to life, avoiding the dead-end, and taking responsibility" are, at the same time, of course, six very good courses to take, actually, to bring more fun into your life: try letting go of regret, the need to achieve, the illusion of maturity, the belief that you could be anything other than true to life, try letting go of dead ends, taste responsible fun.
There's a taste of that fun you get when you're doing puzzles - solving them, completing them, breaking them back into pieces, putting them back together again, putting them away - a complex, varied, many-textured taste.
The computer has proven to be a highly nurturing environment for the flowering of experiences that taste like that. Puzzles built on puzzles, fantasy, logic, art, music all put together to serve us that particular kind of puzzle-solving fun, over and over again.
neutral provides a good demonstration of the state of that particular delicious art of puzzle-solving, for those who can taste the fun of it.
Speaking of the flavors of fun, one of the sweetest that has come to our virtual world is often conceptually packaged as "Eye Candy."
Brian Dettmer
Here
"Boss Key" as herein illustrated, the site itself would appear to disappear entirely, and be replaced by a Word document about how to increase your job efficiency and avoid procrastination.
this
Montague Blister's Strange Games
Walleyball
this
Despite rumors to the contrary, there are certain things about getting old that are, in fact and actuality, fun. Not a lot of things. But some very, almost smugly certain things about being older are undeniably fun.
Teen/Nerd
No doubt, you already saw this small collection of 
