In June 2009, as a reward for completing middle school with great grades, my parents gifted me a brand new Xbox 360. The grades slipped after that, but I digress.

Fast forward to almost six years later, and that same Xbox 360 is alive and kicking it. Well, barely. The disk tray jams from time to time, and the disk drive barely works anymore.

Plus the HDMI output stopped working about two years ago, and the external wireless adapter I had to purchase before it became a built-in feature of newer Xbox 360’s (RIP $120) has barely worked since I bought it. And my hard drive died, so I recently lost five and a half years of game data, making me resort to saving all my games on a flash drive.

I have numerous games on my iphone.

From “Quiz Up” to chess, there are few games I don’t enjoy playing.

But the puzzle game “2048” is, without a doubt, the game I love playing most.

I love products that give back, products that give to the greater good. Most of the time, I’ll go out of my way to find a company that contributes to a cause. One of my favorite companies is TOMS, which gives a pair of shoes to a person in need for each pair purchased.

I’ve been buying TOMS for a few years now and they have never disappointed me. I usually buy various colors of the Classic Slip-ons, because they’re reliable, comfortable, durable and go with pretty much anything I wear.

It’s not that I’m ashamed. It’s just that there’s a few things men don’t talk about very much. Mere words are hardly powerful enough to describe the sensations within the deepest, darkest parts of our hearts. Among those things we keep bottled up are the horrors of combat, the foolish chase of unrequited love, the shameful amount of tacos we eat when nobody is around to see and our unbridled, secret passion for the ’90s hit musical group the Cranberries.

Don’t even act like you don’t love the Cranberries. There’s no use hiding it anymore. The world has to know.

For anyone who has ever had any affinity for ’90s music or for anyone who was young and angsty in those days, there is almost nothing that can resonate within you like the powerfully distorted, three-chord refrain of “Zombie.”