Well, slap a carrot in my mouth and call me Wilbur.

I'm not an unlucky person. I have a nice job that pays almost enough to live comfortably. I have a nice, clean, cozy apartment. I live in New York City, so there's always something to do. I have a caring family and rock-solid friends that all live very far away from me. I have a Wii, a PS2 and a Nintendo DS. I have lots and lots of little robots to look at. I have a wonderful girlfriend who makes every day more fun than the one before it.

That said, I've never been particularly lucky, either. Not in the way my stepmother is lucky. Liz wins things like it's her job. A new kitchen. Several trips and concerts. Liz calls the radio station, and she wins. She's a lucky fucker.

Well, some of that luck must have rubbed off on me, quite literally, when she was here visiting with Dad. While they were here, we made a trip into The City to go to the Build-A-Bear Workshop on 5th Avenue to get one of the fantastic new Tropical Hello Kittys for my sister Rebecca (who has apparently abandoned 57.1% of the letters in her given name and now goes by the curt moniker "Bee"). While there, of course, Katie simply had to pick up a couple of $2 shirts for our regular, snow-white Kitty.

Jolly good. So while we're waiting in line, Katie sees some sweepstakes entry box thing and says, "Fill out two of these forms." I sigh and do it without really paying attention.

Flash forward to yesterday afternoon. I've just gotten home from a long day of dealing with this bloody Scott Foresman-Pearson Spanish Science B-Printing. We have guests. Josie and Andrew are in town from Des Moines, Iowa for a few days. I'm drinking a rum and coke, and we're all sitting outside on our steps (which is apparently the done thing in our neighbourhood). The FedEx man walks up to us. I'm so used to getting FedEx packages at work that I'm momentarily taken aback, like walking into your favourite bar only to find that your grandmother has made friends with all the bar staff while you were gone.

"Adam Hunt?" he asks. I take the envelope and sign. I examine the label. Build-A-Bear Workshop? Double-you-tee-eff? Kindly scroll back up to the beginning of the post to see the contents.

Apparently I won the 'grand prize', which consists of four tickets to a Mets game next week. Huh. I'm quite sure that it was sheerest coincidence that I won these on an excursion with Liz. Has to be.

My favorite part of the letter is the opening line: "Cubgratulations™!" They actually trademarked the word cubgratulations. LAWLZ.

Other things:

I really really really want this game to end up as fun as it looks. Pretty please?

I love the way the webbing looks, all squiggly.

Now, I don't know how much you know about Spore, but the game has me so excited. It's designed by Will Wright, the super-genius who created SimCity as well as the best-selling PC game in recorded history, The Sims. Basically, in Spore, you start off as a unicellular organism (like in Jenova Chen's free and fantastic flOw), but then you evolve to play as a bug, or whatever, then evolve and take control of your tribe, then civilization, then galaxy. It sounds fantastic. ANYway, Maxis have released a Spore Creature Creator, which allows you to play God and craft new organisms that could potentially eventually populate the game world when the full version of Spore releases in September. Needless to say, the basement-dwellers have used the Creator to create hordes of eating, shitting, running dicks, but the cleverest among them have fashioned reasonable replicas of creatures from other corners of the nerdiverse. Such a one is 'sylphx', whose blog showcases various beasties from the Final Fantasy pantheon, Sporified. Bravo, young man, bravo. (Edit: here are links to his Cactuar, Tonberry and Lavos creations.)

A lovely somebody named Lee Vidal (I presume) has created some fantastic backgrounds for your computer desktop over at deviantart. The ExciteBike one is on our iMac at home, and I have the colour Advance Wars one on my work computer. LOVE 'em.

Jamey and/or Christy were kind enough to send me this very entertaining flash animation about flash animation.
Quick! No cheating! Can you name the game pictured above? Trickier than it seems, huh? Well, it's not Mega Man 7 or 8, because they feature the new, slicker Mega Man. It's not Mega Man, Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 3, because we all know those games off by heart, right. So it must be 4, 5 or 6, right? Yeah, no. Motherfucker is a screenshot from Nintendo Power's big reveal of... wait for it... Mega Man 9. Now that's what I'm talkin' about. Paco sent in a link to this guy's website, which features a nice side-by-side comparison of 3, 8 and 9. The best part? Kotaku, Joystiq and all the rest have confirmed that Mega Man 9 will be released exclusively on the Nintendo Wii's WiiWare service. Bloody superb. Plenty of screenshots here. Man, my thumbs are starting to ache just thinking about it...

Okay, that's all you get. If you want to say hi or cubgratulate™ me on my awesome grand prize win, you can do it in the comments.

Now fuck off.

Love, Adam
K: Adam was raised Catholic, so he doesn't take the Lord's name in vain.
A: Yeah, I just say fuck, shit and cunt a lot.