My initial thoughts on Apple's latest geek toy were clouded by hype. I knew that going in. When I was a kid, I remember sitting on the floor Christmas morning and looking at my first bicycle, and thinking, verbally and clearly and with full internal dialog, "how will my life be different now that this thing is in it."

While a ludicrous piece of materialist existentialism in retrospect, I can't help but put the iPad in the same category as that bicycle. On day one, flipping through dozens of shiny new games and apps, it was impossible to have any perspective. Everything new was awesome, every wart a fatal flaw that would doom it to irrelevancy.

I was lucky enough to get the iPad immediately before a major rash of travel. I made the decision to eschew any of my normal travel toys. No DS, no PSP. I did pack my laptop, because I couldn't risk the grand experiment being a failure, and being thousands of miles from home in a foreign country unable to work.

I needn't have worried.

As a travel companion, the iPad has shown its true colors, and with some caveats, they're bright and shiny. Here are my discoveries in the last week.

"Excuse me, I don't mean to interrupt."

I'm deep in a conversation, so this is clearly a lie. Even the most casual semiotician would gather that the meaning here was precisely interruption.

The interrupter is a short, wild-haired kid, perhaps 17 years old. He's non-specifically Asian, expectedly geeky in a Wil Wheaton "Don't Be A Dick" T-Shirt, cargo pants, and a safari vest studded with nerd-flair. He's clearly nervous behind his buddy holly glasses. Instantly charming.

"Oh hey, no problem. What's up?" I ask.

It really is OK. By Saturday afternoon I have PAX East figured out. Unlike GenCon or E3, PAX isn't about doing, it's about being.

The drink cart slams into my elbow. I wince in pain, pulling my arm in and grabbing the offended bones.

"Coming through," drones the flight attendant, 10 seconds too late and oblivious to my agony. In my headphones, I hear a fairytale klaxon sound. I reach to the seatback in front of me, surveying the sickly-green imaginary poker felt displayed on the touchscreen. I'm holding garbage cards — 8-4 unsuited. But I caught a lucky break, not having been raised off the big blind, and getting an 8-4-K of hearts on the flop. Two pair.

Don't miss your chance to ridicule us in person. Tune in Saturday Night, January 30th at 8PM Eastern for a Very Special GWJCC, live from Rabbit's basement.

Our cast this week is Julian "Rabbit" Murdoch, Lara "Katerin" Crigger, Allen "Pyroman" Cook and Erik "Wordsmyth" Hanson. The topics? Well, we're fielding questions live in Chat, but we'll also be talking about Boardgames, face-to-face gaming, strategy gaming and "serious" games.

See y'all there. Here's the link at Ustream!

Note: if you want to participate in chat, you'll need to make a Ustream account. It takes but a minute.

Yesterday was great.

Sure, Apple launched a product that may or may not be great. It might or might not be an awesome gaming platform. It's either really expensive or super cheap. It's either the next big thing or the Apple Newton all over again. But the thing itself isn't what was great, it was (and remains) the experience of its announcement.

I admit it, I stopped everything and jumped onto a live stream of the iPad announcement. I did it mostly for the same reason I watch the Super Bowl when my team isn't playing: because I buy into the hype.

It's not hype over the specific object, it's the hype for the sake of hype. I enjoy the feeling of being caught up in a crowd. I like being in a room that is being effectively worked by a pro -- and lets face it, Steve Jobs is a pro. I like suspending my disbelief and my skepticism just for a while, to imagine that anything is possible.

This is really the Apple product -- hope. In magic Apple unicorn land, everything just works, everything you ever wanted is already in the box, and every object in your life is a totem, invoking the animal spirits of technology and efficiency and beauty.

I know that's not the real world, just like I knew that Obama wouldn't magically transform the country in a few months, and that riding my bicycle up the local mountain is not the same as riding the Tour de France. But I choose to live a life focused on possibilities and hope and be regularly disappointed rather than live a life of constant skepticism and be occasionally and begrudgingly surprised.

Perhaps the most astounding thing about yesterday's circus of hype and hope was how quickly the sharks circled the drops of blood in the water. This shouldn't be a surprise at this point, there's hardly a tech gizmo or game launch that doesn't drag hate out from the woodwork. I imagine that there's an old school BBS run out of a server farm in Duluth where haters get together and practice their barbs, so that a coordinated campaign of ridicule can sweep the web.

This thing Apple has made will be what it is. I'm not going to defend its virtues or attack its failings. I am, however, thankful for yesterday's Hallmark Moment. Like midnight game releases, opening nights, and Christmas mornings, these hypeful, hopeful events bring color to the gray New England winter, and the long slow grind of adulthood.

“It’s Christmas!”

I press myself up from the sensible mattress. The impression of my 42-year-old form marks a crime-scene chalk outline for a brief moment, until the NASA-designed foam releases that shade of Julian Murdoch into the ether. I can feel last night in my lower back — too many hours hunched over, sitting on the floor, wrapping presents and watching Dr. Who. By tradition, I head downstairs first while the kids sit on the stairwell, out of sight of the Christmas tree. I turn on the coffee maker. I turn on the tree lights.

“Santa came!” I cry out in my most enthusiastic dad-voice, a tone reserved not just for children, but specifically for my children in moments when I’m channeling Ward Cleaver.

Small feet rattle the house. I hug the kids as they race by. They’re warm in their matching pajamas, wide eyed and full of animal glee.

The coffee is sour.

"What are you thankful for, Daddy?" asked Peter at dinner this weekend. Thanks to the omnipresence of Thanksgiving as a cultural touchstone here in America, that this question is propping up a week before the actual death-to-large-fowl event isn't surprising.

"My family," I replied, with a genuine smile on my face. Of course this is true. But it's also a cheap answer. It serves the purpose, making Peter smile and allowing the conversation move on to less saccharine topics. But hours later, I realized that my real answers, the ones one layer deeper than "family, food & shelter," were harder to come up with. I know what all the answers are supposed to be. But in my heart of hearts, the thing I'm thankful for every day are just plain embarrassing.

Just two weeks ago, I wrote "Better to look for the shock of the new than the warm blanket and comfort food of what will never be like it was."

The words were written in haste, anger and with malaise. Looking back on that look-back to the 70s, at my pre-adolescent youth and my angst at having missed something big, I can see why I wrote them. With few exceptions, my experiences with retreads of old games have left a sour feeling on my fingertips, almost profane.

But I couldn't shake off the feeling that, those words now permanently etched onto the internet, there was no way to scrape the words off and try again. It's not simply that the "retro" game movement is strong and counts many of my friends, it's that, perhaps, I was wrong.

Jim Carroll died yesterday. It wasn't as if I knew him. He was but one of many representatives of that era in southern Manhattan that I just missed. In 1967, when I was born, Carroll was 17 and had just published his first book of poems. By the time I could walk, he was working in Andy Warhol's factory. In 1978 he published The Basketball Diaries. I was 11. My sister, infinitely wiser at 4 years my senior and deeply into the cranky edge of New York music, had a copy.

I read it serendipitously over and over again--the story of a boy, not much older than me, who experienced a world of sex and drugs and music and life that seemed exciting and forbidden to an overweight pimply farmboy. New York was impossibly far away: a three hour drive. I'd been a few times on field trips. It seemed inconceivably large and claustrophobic at the same time, like standing underneath the bones of a woolly mammoth.

Fascinated by Jim's bad behavior, titillated by his experiences, I found my own excitement in the form of an Atari 2600.

"Dad, I don't wa-a-a-nt to play Wii Golf."

This is how it starts. My 9-and-a-half-year-old daughter (the half means "halfway to me buying a shotgun") sits criss-cross-applesauce on the Sumosac in the corner. I've recently lost her into a fathoms-deep angst following her emergence from all 7 "Harry Potter" books in two weeks, only to realize that nobody would arrive on her 11th birthday to whisk her off to Hogwarts. To deal with her depression, she's re-reading "Half-Blood Prince" again. For the 11th time.

Frustrated, I turn off the Wii. "Well, what do you want to play?"

My question falls on deaf ears. She's disappeared back into her book again.

I cross the stained Berber carpet and flop dramatically next to her.

"OK, Jen. If you made the perfect game, what would it be like?"