Let me tell you about Ed, my hippie gamer inventor friend. Each week he insists he's found the next big thing. But, his things ... they're never big. Often, I wouldn't consider them things.

Take, for instance, the PC simulation game he invented earlier this month. "Meat Packing Tycoon." It was an economic sim where you created this meat packing plant and cows would come in via a conveyor belt and your job was to ship them out in cans or shrink-wrapped piles of ground beef as efficiently as possible without getting closed by the health inspector. It was disgusting! I played the game for the good part of an afternoon and declared that I would never eat meat again. "Duuuu--ude," he told me, slurping his Dr Pepper. "That was the whole point!"

Ed has a tendency to get on my nerves.

A couple months before that he had programmed this game and released it on FilePlanet. It was a modification for Half-Life called "RealCombat." It featured realistic modern weaponry and physics. I spent two hours downloading it while he watched on excitedly. I logged into a server, picked up a pistol, and stepped into a corridor with peeling wallpaper. Behind me I heard a door click -- I turned and someone shot me, so I crumpled to the floor and died. But instead of respawning, the game closed, and deleted itself.

"WTF!" I cried. "What was that? The whole game is gone!"

Ed was grinning, and pushed his long mangy hair away from his eyes in between bites of sunflower seeds. "Dude, totally. It teaches people the value of a single human life!"

Sometimes I don't like Ed.

Today, though I was at his place. I mean, sure, the guy has nothing but vegetarian food and the place is a sty and all of his doors were taken off the hinges "to promote a more open environment," but he usually has some cool PS2 import games to try.

When I came in he was holding a Rubik's Cube, analyzing it, and smiling smugly. "A Rubik's Cube?" I asked.

He nodded. "It's like the 20th anniversary of the cube man." He toyed with the colorful puzzle in his hands. "So I remade it. I'm aiming for like a cultural phenomena for a new generation."

I grimaced. "C'mon dude. It's old. It's been solved. You know, when it came out, I was in second grade. We actually had contests where my elementary school would scramble up some cubes and kids would try to solve it. I could do it in under three minutes. It's all old news."

Ed, he has these piercing eyes. He looked at me kinda like my dad does. "You know man, that's just the problem. That's what ruined the cube for the rest of us. Dudes like you. People trying to win. Let me ask you: Do you ever win Tetris? No, there's just more falling blocks to stack. It's an experience, a way of life. That's what I've created, man. A Cube of Life. Something that we all can enjoy, together, as a people."

He set the cube down next to his rock garden, announced that he'd be back soon, and rushed off to his patent lawyer.

I spent three hours trying to solve that damn thing. Then I realized that he had seven different colors of stickers on a six-sided cube.

I hate Ed.