Charles Entertainment Cheese is not going down without a fight
A kid can still be a kid
Welcome to (Mostly) Good Dumb Fun, a new email newsletter that we hope will deliver on exactly what the title promises! (It’s harder than it sounds!)
The email is written by Jordan Zakarin, Emily Gaudette, and Eric Francisco. We’re gonna collect the best of the weird stuff we find throughout the day and then send it to you every evening. Everything is bad right now, so hopefully this helps a little bit.
You know that idle “having some screen time” mood where you’re doomscrolling or texting about inane stuff? You type out “hahaha” in response to an okay joke that really only got of those quick exhale little sniffs out of you, and you think, who the hell am I? Is this living?
I’m kind of into meditation (yes, I know, I know) and my big transcendental epiphany is this: nothing. If you do nothing for an hour, letting the soft animal of your body settle, the world just keeps on rotating. All your internal whirrings and nervous tremblings and punitive snappings of a rubber band on your wrist are pointless.
What a cool thing: nothing. It doesn’t heal you or improve you or damage you. It just sits there. I hope you get to do a bit of nothing today. It’s a luxury. - Emily
I can’t do nothing. I need to always be doing something. It’s a sickness, born of brain chemicals and encouraged by hyperactive ‘90s children’s entertainment. I only went to Chuck E. Cheese’s as kid once or twice, the first (and maybe only?) time for a birthday party that we left early because it was near Newark Airport and the traffic was going to be a bitch on the way home. That abbreviated visit was all it took — I was enamored by the animatronic band and the endless arcade games, and as my mom cursed at the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Jersey Turnpike, I played with a little wind-up Chuck E. toy beneath the planes taking off into the sky.
I still love animatronics — I’ve covered them a fair amount for different science/tech/movie sites — but I admit to not fully keeping up with the comings and goings of Charles Entertainment Cheese and his friends/bandmates once I reached 9 or 10 years old. The last few years, however, have brought the mouse roaring back into my life. First, I edited this piece by Jamie Loftus (after a play-by-play Slack conversation) about spending all day in Chuck E. Cheese and taking advantage of its new “adults” menu, and then Emily and I had the world’s biggest Chuck E. fan (and part-time employee?) on our podcast multiple times.
The podcast was called The Fandom Files, so it actually made sense for him to join us (listen to the episode here), but we felt a little bit uncomfortable throughout the recording nonetheless; we generally lightly ribbed our nerd guests, but very quickly realized that would just be cruel to do to earnest Matt the Franchize (his DJ name). Anyway, he runs an entire fan convention devoted to Chuck E. Cheese and has has far more friends than I do.
Now, I initially laughed at the photo above and asked who gets takeout from Chuck E. Cheese? The photo was taken in the Bronx, which you have to assume has better pizza joints even with a huge percentage of local restaurants shut down at the moment. I wanted to gently rib any consumer desperate enough to turn to Charles Entertainment for a slice of pizza, but then I looked deep inside and saw my inner child, playing with the wind-up toy under the screeching passenger jets on the smog-filled turnpike. You know what? Fuck it. Let people enjoy whatever they want to enjoy right now.
- Jordan
I’ve been having a rough few days at work. Not for any one reason or person. Working from home, which I’ve been doing for the last few weeks and will continue doing for the foreseeable future, has never been an ideal situation for me. Though I get to wear comfy inside pants and freely fart for most of the day, which is nice, I am biologically hard-wired to be at optimal efficiency somewhere else. I blame being a commuter student in college, when I couldn’t just roll out of bed and run to class, but actually had to shower and get dressed and drive there. It’s conditioned my productivity to actually work “at” work, so to speak.
That isn’t set up for anything. I’m just trying to share a personal crisis in [checks notes] a carefree email newsletter titled “(Mostly) Good Dumb Fun.” This part here is the exception that necessitates the “(Mostly).”
In any case, I need your help. I’m trying to interview tabletop role-playing gamers — you know, the ones who like Dungeons & Dragons and such — to talk about playing amidst a pandemic. What have your games been like since quarantine? Are you meeting more often? Meeting less? How are your games different? I’m especially interested in talking to first-timers, those who have found an interest in playing D&D for the first time because being stuck in quarantine means you got nothing else to do. If you’re Elizabeth Banks, for example, I’d love to chat with you/her about it.
If you’re playing D&D during a pandemic and want to chat about it, give me a holla. - Eric