Talking to walls

 So far it seems nobody has found this blog, so nobody has read my posts. Which is fine. I will continue. Perhaps one day I will add the link to my fb or x profile. Maybe. We'll see.

Elite

Perhaps my number one all time favorite game is the C64 version of Elite. The legendary game by Braben and Bell. I remember playing it as a kid, trading goods between planets, occasionally trying some piracy, battling thargoids, mining asteroids, and dying a lot. The sheer richness of the universe is mind boggling, considering the simplicity of the game.

Of course there isn't any chatting with the pilots of the other ships, you cannot talk with the merchants, and you cannot woo the governor's daughter (that reminds me of another all time favorite, so another blog post will be in the works), but what you can do is to try to maximize your profits, improve your ship, and grow your reputation.

"Right on Commander", says the ship's computer after a particularly well executed kill shot of a viper trying its best to avoid your military grade front laser, and you almost cannot help but feel a little proud of yourself.

What makes Elite so compelling and seemingly rich? There is after all only a couple of special missions, and mostly you are just buying and selling things, and battling space pirates. Sometimes a run from planet to another is as simple as this:

• Exit the station
• Activate hyperjump
• After arriving at target system turn ship towards planet
• When you're close enough, system will detect the station, so fly to the station
• Dock with the station

This is through the roof excitement. Usually there's some asteroids, and some other ships flying around too. Also as soon as you can afford it, the docking computer usually makes the docking process smoother and you get to listen to the beautiful rendition of "The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss II.

And all of it actually follows fairly simple logic. If you have a cargo hold full of stuff that is very expensive, and the system you've jumped to is on the bad side of the tracks, the pirates will show up in large numbers. If you are carrying less expensive cargo, and flying towards a rich planet, you are less likely to be bothered by anyone.

What our brain does is it adds motivations and additional complexity to the actions of the computer controlled ships. In our minds, we think about the pilots flying those ships, and why they are doing what they are doing.

image source: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Elite

About writing

I wrote a book when I was a kid. Started writing when I was about 12 years old, and it took me 3 years to finish the story. The story features Tarzan, some wild savages, explorers and of course human sacrifice.

The way I approached this project was that I basically started by collecting some background information, for example listing some words in the language of the great apes, creating a list of the characters with some basic information such as their motivations etc. I also created an overview of the story, so I knew the main turning points and the general progress, and divided the overview into individual chapters.

I must have also estimated how many pages each chapter would take, because the way I created the book I pretty much committed to a certain number of pages. Now I suppose I could have added a few more but looks like I didn't. I haven't read the story in years, so I'm not sure if it reads like I had to try to stretch things towards the end, or alternatively try to close things up more quickly. I'll report back when/if I get around to reading the book again.

I don't know exactly where I got the ideas for how I approached the writing process though, but I suppose I must have read about it in a book or a magazine or something. Regardless, it's interesting to realise I was able to take a very structured and professional approach to the writing process back then. Something I seem to have lost the ability to do in my personal projects these days.

The story itself is fairly standard for a Tarzan book, full of cliches. From what I remember, there's a tribe that abducts Tarzan't wife Jane, and intends to sacrifice her. Tarzan has to find and rescue her. At the same time there's a group of explorers, some of whom are evil and some are nice. The nice ones help Tarzan, and the evil ones have other aims. In the end the good guys prevail and the bad guys get what they deserve.

The story starts like any traditional Tarzan story.

The total number of pages is just over 100 pages, which I guess is not bad. In the beginning I also wrote very neatly, as can be seen in the picture. Later in the book, the handwriting becomes a litte more messy, though still nothing like it looks like now. Again, something where my young self was able to exercise control and patience to produce more consistent quality results.

What I'm planning to do is to try to scan this book, so I'll update here if I do. Also as I do that I'll likely also manage to read the story again.

Gamescom 2023

I visited Gamescom again this year. There was a period that I was going regularly, but this was the first time since 2016. It hasn't changed much. This time I went on the media day, since I was lucky enough to win the wildcard lottery that allows a regular person like myself to buy a ticket for the day that's mostly meant for business and media people. Media day was wednesday, and then normal people get their chance from thursday to sunday. In the past I'd buy a ticket for all four days and basically spend half a week in Cologne. Anyway, this time only one day. 

It was perhaps a little less busy than I remember from previous times. Also perhaps slightly fewer companies presenting, but that could also just be in my mind.

By far for me the most impressive section is the retro area. Not that I really engage with anyone or anything, but just to soak in the atmosphere and see the buzz and excitement around things that are upto 40+ years old. New games being released to machines like C64 and Amiga for example. Or the rows of arcade machines that I remember playing when I was a kid.

Then there is the yearly installments of FIFA, NFL,  F1, Farming Simulator, etc. What I think was missing this year was a new Civilization game. Or I just didn't notice it. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if there was a new version of the ones I mentioned. Except for the Farming Simulator, that one was definitely there and had a much bigger stand than what I remember from my earlier visits.

Notably for me, Blizzard was less present than in the past. They had a merchandise stand, but were not showcasing their full lineup anywhere. Theirs used to be one of my favorites to hang around.

Besides checking out the stands, I had to sample the food and drink offering a bit. I only tried bratwurst, which was ok. For beer, I couldn't find kölsch anywhere in the Gamescom area, which felt very strange. Instead they had Corona on tap, which is ok, but I can get Corona anywhere. Kölsch is a bit less easy to find outside of Cologne area I think. Luckily I was able to get my fill later in Peters Brauhaus, which is by the way the best place to eat in Cologne. If you ask me, which I know you didn't and possibly wouldn't, but I offer my opinion anyway.

I should probably put some pictures here, but I'm too lazy. (Edit, I got over my laziness and added a couple of photos. Looking at them, a better excuse for not showing any pictures might have been that they are all really bad. But hey ho here we go. Regardless, the
recommendation in the following paragraph still stand.)

So if you got interested and want to see some photo impressions or other online content they make available, check out https://www.gamescom.global/en.

Computers

 This post may or may not be very similar to the one I may or may not post in my finnish language post. Either may also be later edited to match the content of the other, if I feel it makes sense.

Anyway, to start from the beginning.. the first computer in our family was a Sinclar ZX81. It was a magnificent machine, and we spent countless hours rubbing the famous pressure-sensitive membrane keyboard. We did not have any storage device, so everything we did was lost when the power was turned off.

Later, we got a Commodore 64, complete with a tape deck and later also diskdrive, and I think that was the real start for our computer hobby. Mostly playing games, but also trying our hands at some programming. I started my first proper programming project on the Commodore 64. It was a sprite-editor, the idea was that once that was ready I could start making my games. Sadly, while it was at least partially functional - I do remember I was able to edit individual sprites but I cannot recall if for example save and load functions were usable -  I never managed to fully complete it.

The next one was Commodore Amiga 500+, which was a fairly natural move. Again, mostly playing games, and a little bit of programming. I was trying to create a 3d-routine, but somehow I didn't get the math to work as expected.

Fast forward to christmas a few years ago, and my wife surprises me with a Commdore 64. It was something I had been thinking about a lot over the years, and obviously talked about enough for her to pick it up as something to get me as a present. What is amazing is that she researched where to get it, how to get it, what peripherals are needed and had even found out from my brother what was my absolute favorite game. I unpacked it, and everything worked perfectly. Except for the game, it had some kind of copy protection mechanism called lenslok (I think), which didn't work so well. It took me a few hours to figure out how to bypass it and then I was flying around the universe just like I had been doing some thirty years earlier.

More recently I have purchased an Amiga 1200, complete with a 060-turbo card and memorycard to act as a hard drive. With enough space to host pretty much everything I could ever want to have on the Amiga. Also I have added two examples of ZX81 into my collection. One of them works perfectly and came with a 16Kb memory expansion. The other needs a new keyboard (already have it, but haven't replaced it) and potentially a new ULA chip.

At the moment I am not doing much with any of them, but I am hoping to be able to spend a bit more time on these old machines at some point. I did btw restart my C64 sprite-editor project few years ago, and did manage to get it to the point where I can edit a sprite, but managing them, saving-loading etc has not been implemented yet.

I am also dreaming of being able to add more of the old machines into my collection. Next ones on the list would be Sinclair Spectrum, Spectravideo 328, Spectravideo 728 or 738 or one of the other MSX machines, Commodore 128D, maybe a Commdore Vic-20, one of the Atari ST or STe models.

The Finnish version of this post listed a lot of games. I will eventually get to that, but I want to introduce them all a bit more in detail so that'll be a separate post.

First

This is a translation/adaptation of the first post on my finnish language blog. 

This might be my first officially published ramble. I could be wrong, or less than exactly right, but I think it has been fifteen years since I created my account on this platform and tried to start my first blog. It does not seem that I managed to publish anything back then. The original name of the blog was something like "My words are these", which took a couple days to come up with back then, and when I saw it now I immediately trashed it.

A couple years ago I also setup a blog on wordpress, and I think even managed publish some kind of an introduction. I had also been working on a couple of posts, but didn'd publish anything further. I have saved them and maybe I'll be able to turn them into something to post here later.

My head is swirling with so many potential ideas that I don't even know what to try to write about it. So I will start with some random thoughts. I might write more on any of these later.

I am originally finnish, but lived abroad over twenty years. I've moved a few times here, but within less than a hundred kilometer radius. I worked in the same place for nearly twenty years. I also bought my first apartment here. After finding my life partner and getting married with her, and after the birth of our first child, we bough a new apartment together which is where we currently live and where we had our second child.

These days I'm working remotely, which is mostly nice. Sometimes I miss being able to just have a quick chat with a colleague.

I have subscriptions with quite a few streaming services (Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax, SkyShowtime, Prime), and watch something from each one every week.

I have been trying to write ever since I was young. So far, my only so-called completed works are from more than thirty years ago. A few comics and one novel. Happily I still have all of them. Story seeds and random notes I have in abundance. There's one idea that I've had thirty something years, and I return to is every now and then.

I have also tried to make computer games, but haven't managed to complete anything. Lots of ideas for multiple games, some potentially only pending the actual development, some needing a bit more prepwork.

I suppose this will do as an introduction of a kind. More later. I didn't now mention any old computers (Sinclar ZX81, Commodore 64, Amiga) of which I again have a couple, reading and gaming hobbies, etc. Or I was about to not mention. I'll surely write more on those topics later.

Note. The below is a translation of the second post on my finnish language blog.

With my previous bloggin attempts, I have had the idea to try to do some kind of commentary on current events or politics etc, but I never seemed to have time to pick up the topics quickly enough, or to try to provide deeper analysis later. So I've decided to drop those thoughts for now and write whatever nonsense comes to mind.

Let's call it some kind of writing practice.