So I have whooping cough, am uncomfortable and a bit miserable. And then I found this image on Amazon:
And I got happy again!
AW: Have you read Secret Files yet?
Archive for the ‘Otaku’ Category
Returning To The Diogenes Club
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010Seaside Rendezvous Too
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010Ok, where was I… ummm… oh yes: Scarborough!
Scarborough was a moderately low-brow seaside resort. Beautiful, but they did sell chocolate gentleman’s sausages so they can’t claim to be prideful. However the next day we cut across the country to one of the most famous seaside towns of Blackpool.
There it is: REAL ENGLISH WEATHER!
We had enjoyed glorious sunny days for the entire first week of our trip, and it wasn’t until Blackpool that the rain came. Even then it was little more than a heavy drizzle, but enough to make me go and buy an umbrella (see a future entry for details…)
The leftmost shot shows the Blackpool tower (admission, £17, we passed) and both the central and (in the distance) northern piers. These were like the Brighton pier; containing amusement parks, arcades and restaurants. The rightmost shot is looking back in the other direction (both shots were taken from the south pier, at different times) toward Pleasure Beach (the rollercoaster).
I went down to the waters edge and put my hand in. It was very, very cold and great amounts of sand were suspended in the water. I imagine it would have been an uncomfortable swim.
Pleasure Beach is a very good looking amusement park and is apparently Britains top tourist destination. We walked past just after it opened (our hotel was right next door) and the lines to buy tickets were mind-bendingly long. We didn’t go in, which was a shame since that giant coaster is one of the worlds tallest and looked like a lot of fun.
Here’s two pieces of airbrush art from rides on one pier:
Yep, Blackpool isn’t about high class 🙂
The streets were alive with Britoners of all ages and all classes. Many of these were gangs of roaming females all dressed alike: hen parties (aka. bachelorette parties). Drunkenness was on full public display. Everyone was having fun.
I ate the best fish’n’chips of the trip here:
< Yum!
And JBF and I shot some Terminators:
And here are the horsey rides, protecting themselves from the rain:
Blackpool had 1.5 surprises for me. The first requires some backstory. For many years Britains only official Doctor Who museum/exhibit was in Blackpool, right on the promenade. It closed late last year, but I was surprised and elated to find that the gift shop is still there. I was amazed by some of the stuff they had for sale, and even made a few purchases. Alas most of the stuff was either way too expensive or impossible to bring home. Such as the finest item of them all:
< Yum!
The other surprise relates to the Blackpool Illuminations. Every year in September the city turns on a large amount of lights all along the seafront. This is a big spectacle, and is always done by someone famous (such as David Tennant or the Top Gear guys). Even though the lights are not on yet, they are there, and you can guess my reaction when we discovered the particular sets of lights outside our hotel were themed around Doctor Who!
Blackpool was kitschy and quaint, saucy and quite a bit special. I wish we’d had more than one day there.
The Greatest Lie Ever Told
Thursday, July 1st, 2010I believe it is important to document important knowledge for future generations. With that in mind, a tale from my distant past…
It was 1982 or 1983, and I was at Jason L’s house doing what kids of that age (10) do. Riding bikes, eating lollies, talking about Star Wars. And – of course – playing Atari 2600.
We were in Jason’s downstairs room. The one where his dad stored the pickled tumors and testicles (I think he was a urologist). There was a large cream-coloured sofa and an ancient console-style TV on which the 2600 was connected. There were quite a few people there – a dozen or more. It was probably a birthday party for Jason. Many were there to hear the lie.
John F lived nearby. He was there with his brothers. I remember them as twins, although I doubt that is true. They were both younger, and probably only invited because they were virtually neighbours. Both were energetic and talkative boys, especially compared to John. They are key players in the tale, since one of them (I forget which one) would be the person that would that day utter the greatest lie ever told.
I wonder what we had for lunch? Hamburgers maybe? Hotdogs? Jason had a pet crow in a giant aviary-cage in the backyard. Or was it a magpie? I went into the cage one time and fed it. I was no doubt scared, for corvids scared me at that age.
Many years later (at university) I would befriend Jason’s sister Alison, who was a few years older than me. She was a sweet girl, who once had trouble at school because she was reluctant to euthanize the rabbits and rats used in her lab. I assume she was there that day to hear the lie.
We were all playing Pac-Man on the 2600. It was dark. Was it winter? Was it a pyjama party? I doubt the latter; probably just a party that went into the evening. There were quite a few of us in that room all playing Atari at the time, probably unaware of how legendary the game would become one day.
At that age children exaggerate. It is common for younger boys to attempt to impress older boys with outrageous statements. Lies if you will. On that day one of John F’s younger brothers revealed a dark and spooky secret, otherwise known as the greatest lie ever told:
“One night I was playing Pac-Man and the game stopped and a skeleton hand dragged across the screen and the words ‘don’t kill my babies’ appeared.”
I imagine it looked something like this:
As I said, many heard this claim. He was quizzed on it, and stuck to his story. Laughter ensued, and in the days that followed amusement would turn to mockery as word spread at school. Somehow John himself became the victim of some of the teasing, as if he was responsible for his brothers ludicrous comment. I recall dimly the teasing became so bad a teacher was involved at some point (or so I heard).
I think it is safe to say that few – if any – of us believed that such an incident had occured.
Looking back almost 30 years later I am torn. The scientist in me requires hard evidence to believe anything, but the imaginist in me likes to be proven wrong on such matters. In time, the boy that made the claim grew into a man and (sadly) passed away some years ago, so the veracity of his tale is beyond further investigation. Did he even remember it? Does anyone else? Why do I?
More importantly: could this really have occurred?
Suffice to say, even if he was telling the truth, the title of this post would remain accurate…
Competition Pro
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
That is a picture of the ‘Competition Pro’ joystick – the first (and I believe only) item I ever bought on lay-by.
Known as ‘layaway’ in the US, lay-by is the process of buying an item in installments. It is virtually unknown these days due to credit cards, but used to be very popular.
One day in 1984 (or early 1985), after endlessly reading about how great the Competition Pro joystick was in the imported UK game magazines of the day, I discovered they were sold at K-Mart, Charlestown Square. I remember seeing one in a glass case in the electronics section and wanting it so badly. In those days game systems did not come with controllers, so there was a vibrant market of third party devices. For me, the competition pro was at the top of the pile. The pinnacle of control! It even had microswitches!
This was the box:
I forget the price, but A$40 comes to mind. Whatever the cost, it was much more than I had available, and I was so worried about the joystick disappearing from the shop I hastily put it on lay-by. I remember being very excited as I collected the various documents (including payment slips) with all sorts of dates on them (“Pay this much by XX” etc.). I planned out my repayment schedule, based on what meagre income (pocket money?) I had in those days. I can even remember having dad drive me to the shop one day just so I could put $2 onto my lay-by! Only when the full price was paid would the joystick be mine.
Oh the unfettered enthusiasm of youth 🙂
Eventually I got my competition pro, and it was awesome. I still recall how much I loved the thing, and how much I loved the little clicks from the microswitches every time you moved the stick or pushed the button. It was the ticket to even higher love for my Commodore 64. I even carried it to friends houses when I went over to play games with them. I was so proud of it, and that I had lay-bought it.
Remembering this, and writing about it now, makes me wonder what ever happened to that beloved competition pro of mine. Is it in a box in an attic, dusty and forgotten? Or was it long-since buried in a mountain of landfill, or crushed in some reprocessing plant?
Or could it be – impossibly – that some retro enthusiast is loving it still, and using it to this day?
A Technical Discussion
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010So I was thinking yesterday, during a hot walk to the post office “How did Eugene Jarvis do the lasers in Defender?”
I swear this is not a joke post. Such thoughts as this do occasionally work their way into my mind.
To see what I am talking about, here’s a video of the arcade version of Defender:
There are countless amazing things about the game Defender. The sound effects, the controls, the particle effects, the sublime design. All this in a game that is 28 years old.
Pay close attention to the lasers the ship puts out. See how they are not an unbroken line? See how they seem to start as a random stream of particles and then connect into a solid line. They are simultanenously chaotic and structured; solid and discrete. Could this be a representation of the wave and particle duality of light in video game form? Who knows… certainly not me… but I do know the laser graphics are mesmerising and one of the most memorable things about the game.
So I wondered to myself yesterday, in my memory, how did he do these very organic and colourful particle-y laser beams? How did he make each beam unique and therefore special?
I came up with what seems like a good technique. Start with an 1 dimensional array representing the laser. Pick some random positions (on the left side) and occupy them: these are the dots that begin the laser. Then do a pass through the array populating empty spots with a frequency depending on the occupancy of nearest and next-nearest neighbours. This gives a good representation of particles knitting together to form a beam. You could even fake the movement of the laser by making the array width the same as the screen width and base the start on the ship start position (ie. no sprite movement is needed). Using this technique you could even write to the screen memory directly and possibly avoid sprites.
I’d solved it! Randomized laser beams that look like those in Defender! Voila!
But…
Take a look at this video:
It’s a little tricky to see but if you inspect the lasers you will notice they all look… similar.
Can’t decide? This may be clearer:
Nothing special about those lasers. Just lines… but more importantly: all the same lines. (As an aside, that previous video deserves a blog post unto itself…)
So is it because the BBC Micro and the 2600 are craptastic computers that the coders couldn’t reproduce the majesty of Jarvis original lasers? Perhaps, and this is certainly an attractive thought.
But go take a look at the original video again. Look very closely.
Yes, the sad truth: all the lasers in Defender are identical. There is no magic coding at work there. Just a sprite.
Another childhood illusion dashed on the shores of truth 🙁