Category: Blog

The Ballad Of Dust

  • April 29, 2019

At first I didn’t notice,
Or pretended to ignore.
Yet the more I used the camera,
The more I saw.

A blemish on the image,
A ghostly disc appeared.
What should never happen.
What we all feared.

Something on the lens
Left a shadow signature.
I cleaned and wiped and wiped and cleaned
But still it was in the picture!

The Internet to the rescue:
Force will remove it!
I shook the phone like a maniac
But all I did was move it!

I gave not up and set to work
Shaking like a fiend.
I shook so much I near passed out
My hand incarnadined.

And then when I came to
An image I did capture…

The photo was clear!
The dust was gone!

And in this home…
Was rapture.

My Collection: Game Gear

  • March 23, 2019

Sega released their Game Gear handheld console in 1990 as their answer to Nintendo’s Gameboy. It was marketed heavily on the strength of its full colour backlit screen, but poor software support coupled with the market dominance of the Gameboy led to the Game Gear never becoming a true hit.

This is my Game Gear. I never bought the system myself – I wasn’t interested in any of its games – but JAF (ie. KLS’s mum) bought herself one. Specifically on June 27, 1993 for $129.99. I know this because I still have the receipt, which shows the rechargeable battery pack ($49.99) and ‘Super Wide Gear’ magnifier ($29.99) were bought at the same time.

Joyce would eventually bequeath the system to me along with the few games she had bought. I myself had bought one game (shown above) but when I inherited it in 1994 I put it into storage and essentially ignored it for 24 years.

Then last year in Scotland I found a large collection of Game Gear games being sold at a CEX used game store and bought them all! Eighteen games in total cost me £18, which was a steal even considering they were unboxed. I was eager to try them, and when I returned to the USA I powered the system up for the first time in decades and saw this:

Yes it had broken and the screen just displayed garbage. There were sound problems as well. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this because in the decades since release the Game Gear has become infamous for the lousy quality that Sega chose to cut costs. Many components are second-rate, and the capacitors in particular are known to be the worst ever placed in a game console.

In short, all the capacitors (about 30) needed to be replaced. I bought tools and a capacitor kit, then did nothing for four months! This was because I knew it wasn’t going to be easy at all (leaky surface mounted capacitors needed to be replaced with wired ones) and because the cost of paying someone to do it was cheaper than my time. Eventually that’s what I did, and $30 and one month of work later my Game Gear was fixed.

Now it works we can see the other flaw. The much-marketed full colour screen? It’s terrible! Very washed out, with a slow refresh rate and very limited viewing angle it makes playing anything a bit of a chore in the day of OLED invisible pixel displays!

In short: all games look bad on it, and don’t even have the retro appeal of (for instance) a Gameboy.

Things are slightly better using the magnifier, even if it does make the system less portable. It also reduces the viewing angle quite notably, so you’re better off putting it on a table if you want to use it.

Let’s not discuss the absurd battery pack (top left in the above photo), which gives only about an hours battery life at the expense of a heavy eggplant-sized unit that clips onto your belt. Less expensive I suppose than 6 AA batteries every three hours, but once again something that makes us question how portable this system actually was?

The above is most of my library. I forgot to take a game out of the system (Columns) and of course Shining Force isn’t included. Game Gear games aren’t particularly valuable compared to other handhelds, mostly because if you’re interested in playing them you’ll almost always be emulating. The most valuable game in my collection (Shining Force) is ‘worth’ only about what I paid for it 25 years ago.

This system is a curiosity these days. It had very few good games at the time, and almost none worth seriously playing today. The systems themselves are unreliable, and even when repaired are frustrating to use unless you spent too much to replace the screen with an LED upgrade. This is very much a system just for my collection, and I reckon it could be decades before I turn it on again…

Robotclaw Analyzed

  • March 2, 2019

With big thanks to Bernard – a maestro of data science -many secrets of this blog can now be revealed! Here then, a peek into the details of 13.5 years of ‘Robotclaw’…

Above you can see (click on it for a larger version) a plot of the post and word count averages since blog creation. Ignoring 2006 and 2019 (both partial years of data) you can see that the average number of posts has been increasing steadily for a decade but the word count while drifting down does so at a slower pace.

All told there have been 1820 blog posts since the blog was created. That’s an average of 130/year or just under one every 3 days. I reached my posting peak in 2008 with 300 posts (!), but in recent years the average is under 100/year. This is in-part intentional, where I have attempted to focus on fewer more interesting posts rather than a simple chronologue of my model-making and game-playing exploits!

I’ve typed 178,229 words in those 1820 posts, with an average of about 99 words/post. To put this in perspective, here are the lengths of some well known books:

Animal Farm – 29,966 words
The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy – 46,333 words
The Great Gatsby – 47,094 words
The Hobbit – 95,356 words
To Kill A Mockingbird – 100,388 words
Robotclaw – 178,229 words
The Fellowship Of The Ring – 187,790 words
Mody Dick – 209,197
War and Peace – 561,304 words
King James Bible – 783,137 words

So we can say I’m in Tolkein territory! A printed novel contains about 275 words per page, so if printed without comments and images, the blog would require about 650 pages!

If you’re curious about the longest posts, here are the top 3:
How Times Change (1571 words)
Shining Forth (The History) (1380 words)
The Vault of Helgorim (957 words)

Now let’s move on to the actual words…

The above is a ‘wordcloud’ of many of the most commonly used words on this blog (click on it to see detail). In total, the written vocabulary here includes 20,705 unique words and of those, the ten most commonly used (in order) are: game, time, day, games, days, bit, shot, hours, cards and trip. And just because it’s cute, the eleventh most commonly used word is ‘kls‘ 🙂

Game, time, and day are each used over 1000 times (statistically game is represented in about 70% of posts!) and games is only slightly less than 1000. None of this is surprising: you all know about my game obsession and the other two (time and day) often occur in trip-related posts which have become a hallmark of this blog.

Yossie was mentioned 48 times across 35 posts, and thus placed just outside the top 50 words.

As for bigrams (two word combinations) the three most commonly used have been ‘star wars‘, ‘monster hunter‘ and ‘video games‘. I’m starting to think this is some sort of otaku blog!!

Of the 20,705 unique words, the most common word size was 7 letters, and the longest was 24. Bernard didn’t provide examples of each (what’s the 24-letter one?) but I think ‘monster’ must have contributed to the 7-letter median.

As for that vocabulary count… well it’s high. Here are a few others to compare (all these include proper nouns):

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland – 2766 unique words
Pride and Prejudice – 6424 unique words
Oliver Twist – 10,419 unique words
King James Bible – 10,867 unique words
Robotclaw – 20,705 unique words
The Collected Works of Shakespeare – 31,534 words

So from the above, I think it’s appropriate to rate me halfway between The Bible and Shakespeare. (Incidentally almost half of Shakespeare’s 31k words were only used once, and depending on who you believe he actually invented anywhere up to about 1500 words, several hundred of which have never been reused by anyone and the meaning of some of which is still in question!)

A high vocabulary isn’t necessarily a good thing if you want an audience. The fewer unique words the easier something is to read, so I imagine the average reader may be a bit glossy-eyed by some of my content (for more reasons that this)!

The above chart is taken directly from the data Bernard sent me, and shows the average sentiment of this blog. Happily it’s positive! In fact his conclusion was that the writings on this blog are in fact 78% positive and are becoming more positive over time!

The most common emotions in my writings are apparently ‘joy’, ‘trust’ and ‘anticipation’ with the least common ‘disgust’, ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’. Come to Robotclaw to cheer yourself up!

If you’re curious, here are the top three most positive blog posts:
Dream Gear Showdown (worth reading again for the awards ceremony alone!)
The Heart Of The Cards (features a ‘young Florry’ appearance!)
The Day Jesus, The Devil, King Arthur and The Magical Emperor of Light, Nero Griffth, Made My Dream Come True! (I’ll never surpass that post title…)

And here are the top three least positive:
The Vault of Helgorim (It’s a pretty grim adventure!)
Corporal Punishment (controversial!)
Review: Galactica 1980 (I literally laughed myself to tears re-reading this just now)

It’s mind-blogging to think of all this I’ve written and uploaded over the years. Every now and then I go back and re-read posts and forget writing them, and are often entertained myself. I still love the blog and still love writing it so you can look forward to much more in the future, and I promise I’ll try to stay positive and keep delivering you the high-vocabulary, star wars and monster hunter themed content you know and love 😉