Newcastle

My trip here was the usual horrible slog. It took me 37 hours to get from Albany to my parents house and I didn’t sleep at all. I’m getting too old for this!

I’ve been here a few days now and they’ve been busy! Bernard and Lakshmi we’re here the day I arrived and we had a brief shop and then dinner. To be honest I don’t remember it with great clarity due to the jetlag! But they’re gone now although I’ll reunite with him soon in Tokyo.

On the second day I walked all around the local area doing my annual catch-up. A lot has changed even in one year, especially in the CBD! The past continues to fade…

It was very hot – about 95F – but I was well covered with sunblock and managed to avoid a burn. Still, that heat can be draining so it’s important to keep hydrated:

Yesterday I went and met this chap in an air conditioned club for some card flopping:

It was so much fun we’ll do it again next Sunday 🙂

It’s the last day of 2019 and I’m off to see Aquaman (which everyone assures me is great) before watching fireworks later tonight. Happy New Year!

2018 in Photos

Distilling a year into ten photos is never easy, but this year was particularly tough. Furthermore whilst this post tends to prioritize vacation shots, that’s only because I’ve sorted them way better than the normal day-to-day photos, so there’s probably a few gems that should have been here that aren’t.

The year began, as it usually does, in Oz:

Bernard and I went on a lengthy road trip from the Southern Ocean all the way up to Newcastle and had a blast on the way. We even ran into notorious Australian terrorist Ned Kelly at one point:

In March KLS and I went to the city for the first of three trips this year. It was cold but fun, and we lived like the urbanites we are for a few days:

Our first international vacation was to Scotland, otherwise known as the prettiest country on Earth. This was one of those dream vacations we’ll never forget, and in our little car we saw the length and breadth of the highlands and hebrides islands and enjoyed one amazing day after another, like the puffins on Staffa:

Or the standing stones on Orkney:

Or even just eating fish’n’chips at the northernmost town in Great Britain:

During the summer Bernard and Lakshmi visited! Here we are deep in a dungeon:

We went on another vacation too. After a brief stop in Portland for Florence’s wedding (insert heart emoji here) we jetted off to Hawaii for fun in the sun… and a hurricane!

The first four days were beautiful and warm and sunny and we spent a lot of time at or on the beaches. But then this happened:

And next thing you know the beaches emptied and people wrote SOS in the sand:

As you know we were lucky and the storm dissolved before reaching us. But that was certainly an interesting and memorable experience, and one I don’t want to soon repeat!

I’ll end with a shot of my lovely friend Yossie, which just shows you don’t have to go to exotic places to take photos you’ll treasure forever:

So thats the year in a nutshell. A good one; a memorable one. I hope you enjoyed the blog in 2018.

What’s next? Well in a week I’ll be in Oz once again, and mid January I’ll be flying from Sydney to Tokyo where I’ll meet Bernard for a week of otaku madness. I think it’s safe to say there’ll certainly be some photos worth seeing here in the next few weeks…

Commodore 64ing

A few months back I got one of these:

It’s the C64 Mini console, which is a Commodore 64 on-a-chip in a cute little case with a bunch of software built in.

It’s good but not great, slightly crippled by a poor joystick and input lag. It’s also disappointingly bare bones in terms of presentation, with the lack of instructions making many of the games – originally from the 80s – borderline unplayably difficult.

But none of this matters since it includes C64 BASIC, and this meant I could code again! And I did…

I started to see if I could manage without an actual keyboard. I did, but it was excruciatingly slow selecting letters from the virtual keyboard (on the right of the screen as shown above). But I had enough fun I went and bought a cheap usb keyboard to continue.

As you can see I’m working on a ‘villain generator’, the obvious first step towards the long-awaited next installment in the Mercenary King series. My program would generate an infinite amount of bad guys that could easily fit into any game!

It didn’t take long, and it worked! Here’s four examples of the infinite results:

Unfortunately the lcd monitor I use doesn’t photograph well so you can’t appreciate the dazzling colour, but I’m sure you’re amazed by my amazing graphics? One of them I (may have) borrowed, but the other I designed from scratch! Here’s the sketchbook:

And here’s the sprite data in case you want to use it in your game:

Amazingly and coincidentally (*), while I was working on this I received a postcard that had this code on the back:

Naturally I had to type it in to see what it did…

It was an animated Gudetama sprite! Unfortunately the postcard had no sender on it so I’ll never know who sent me this incredible demo ?

Anyway let me know if you need a villain for a game and I’ll let my C64 mini generate it for you…

(* I may have sent my brother code on a postcard in the past plus he loves Gude…)