I'm trying out a contest on 99designs.com for Guess Who's a Mess's album art. If you're a designer, feel free to have at it. If you're not, you can still enjoy these goofy photos of me as a kid I included in the design brief:

That was a Michael Jackson Thriller FM transmitter microphone. So you could sing through your stereo. Also an all-black Thriller jacket. The cabbage patch doll was not mine. I had sparkly socks too but I'm not wearing them here.

Atari 2600 and a Texas Instruments 99/4a, my first (borrowed) computer. All I did was type Basic programs into it. I had no cartridges so I'd lose whatever I had typed in when I turned it off.

Math tells me I'm eight years old here. Update: ken and my mom disagree. I was seven and the eighth candle was "one to grow on". Embarrassing.

Sulking at my sister's birthday party (reason: too much attention for her, not enough attention for me.)

A few years later. Lanpar IBM PC, my first official computer. It had a 20 meg hard drive and ran at 4mhz. Later I found out it had a "turbo" mode which doubled the speed to 8mhz.

Also visible: terrible, boxy first mouse, Gravis Joystick, collection of Sierra games and my entire California Raisins collection.

Update: Contest's over. Unfortunately it was not a success. There were lots of entries but nothing I could actually see using so I'm still on the hunt. Thanks to everyone who entered, sorry I'm so picky.

Welp, Michael Jackson died. What can you even say about that? Like many, he was a hero of mine and then he was kind of a monster. It was probably a good learning experience to have to reconcile those two things at a young age. It's hard for me to feel sad that he died since the guy was clearly in nearly constant emotional pain. Also he maybe molested children.

Anyway, here's me in March 1985 dressed up as him:

That's me in my Michael Jackson Thriller jacket (in black – though I wanted the red and black one), a glitter glove (in red, I wanted white like Michael had), a Michael Jackson microphone that I can't find the name of (“Mr. Microphone”?) – it transmitted your voice to an FM radio station so your voice would come out of the stereo.

And I can't tell from the crappy quality of the photo if those are my sparkly Michael Jackson socks. Once I wore them ice skating and my feet went numb as the glitter material cut off my circulation. I remember sitting in an arena penalty box, crying as an older kid helped me pry off my skates, revealing my sparkly white Michael Jackson socks. She wasn't impressed.

Last Halloween was our first time trying to go all out on the decorations. This year we extended it out a bunch and improved a lot of little things. Some photos:

Everything went over real good. The black light where we gave out the candy was a big hit. We wound up dragging a big mirror out so that kids could see themselves glowing and they really dug that. You can see more pictures here if you're interested.