Booted up an old Mac Classic II last night and played a bit of The Hobbit, a groundbreaking adventure game for its time. [visit this page for more info on the game and its various incarnations] I have been hoping to find an online version of the game, which ideally would utilize the best text and graphics from across the versions. But if there is one out there it is very hard to find, what with the general background of hobbit related noise thanks to both books and films.

Although the game obviously does not seem so impressive now as it did in the mid 80s, it still managed to suck me in as I wandered about in the misty mountains and the the goblin caves. I was engaged much more so than I am by the average contemporary first person shooter demo which I usually download, play for 10 minutes, then delete from my hard drive forever.

Playing The Hobbit reawakened old dreams I once had of writing my own epic adventure [on the Amstrad CPC 464] Writing an adventure game [engine] offers the programmer the ultimate exercise in elegant, structured programming, and yet it’s an exercise I never actually got around to doing.

There is absolutely no reason that a decent [ie lots of locations, characters and objects with optional graphics] adventure game could not be written now as a single HTML page with embedded Javascript. The original programmers of The Hobbit in 1982, designing for processors such as the 4MHz Z80 could only have dreamed of the storage and processor power [and hi-res graphics] available to a humble web page in 2003!

Another Blast From Not-so-distant Past

Doom! Played straight through episode 1 [on easy skill level]… what a wierd rush, and even now I look at the game and have to admire it technically. Even the texture artifacts revealing the low precision stepping on the floor when you die [texture mapping gets choppy on the right side of the screen] makes me smile.

Not much to report for the last week, as I have been rather ill, but hopefully I am finally on the way up again, so hopefully I’ll have interesting things to talk about soon.

Meantime… here are some other things to look at:

• Excellent "Tom the Dancing Bug" Comic - My favourite online comic.
• eLibrary and BookReader get mentioned at an ebook advocacy site - quite a nice mention, with a few extra visitors coming here as a result

Have been browsing the stats on this site [as I like to do, in lieu of writing software, going to the dentist etc], and was surprised to note that a significant percentage of visitors are actually downloading ebooks from the

I prefer not to give the actual numbers [at least not until they are worth bragging about], but as a percentage it appears that in the last week or so about 7% of actual people visiting this site (ignoring web spiders etc) have gone on to download a sample e-book. That percentage is much higher than I would have expected!

Of course closer inspection could easily reveal that most of those downloads are attributable to just a few keen/inquisitive visitors, but hey, that’s what averages are for isn’t it? Long-term stats [over 12 months] show a download rate [specifically of the sample ebooks] of just under 4%, so I guess it’s not out of the question that more recently the numbers may have grown a little.

Also I just remembered a script hack I added to the main site so that anyone who hits it as a result of a search query will get an extra bit a banner text inviting them to visit the downloads page for free software, so maybe that’s affected the stats a little as well.

Food for thought anyway, and it reminds me of one of the reasons I started this site in the first place… to track people’s interests and guide my programming efforts.

Maybe I should follow through on that.

[Also interesting to note is that despite the fact that this blog accounts for the vast bulk of content on this site, it only accounts for a third of all visitors. How ’bout that!]

[I should just point out that in Australia we are currently governed by a coalition of two conservative parties, one of which is known as the Liberal Party of Australia; this is not the kind of liberal I am talking about… rather I refer to the much maligned liberal in american style politics, where the word is often used as a synonym for "bleeding heart" or "whining leftist"]

So, why be a liberal? Because in general you will tend also to be a more fair, decent and considerate person. At least that is the lesson I must draw from exchanges like this one between liberal blogger and cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, and [less well known] conservative guy who took umbrage at Tom’s latest cartoon.

In conservative guy’s post, he posts an email he sent to Tom Tomorrow, introduced with the snippy assertion "In what is sure to prove an exercise in futility, I sent Tom a little note". The thing is, Tom did reply via email, and conservative guy posted his reply (apparently without actually telling Tom he would be doing this). This tendency to villify those who disagree with you and post their correspondence without prior permission is something I have never seen on a liberal blog, but it is a practice used freely by at least some conservatives who appear to believe that intimidation and public humiliation is a valid form of discourse. Note that conservative guy also appears to be encouraging his readers to contact Tom directly, to express their negative opinions. In contrast Tom is not advising his readers to go and harrass conservative guy [although a few of them might, after reading the full exchange].

Honestly, what kind of asshole would I be if I publically posted email I had received privately simply because I disagreed with it?

[For some reason all the time values are showing up an hour later than they should when I create a new blog entry (this entry should read 1:47 AM)… a daylight savings problem I guess.]

Lately I’m getting about as much work done as I was 5 years ago when I swore off computer programming forever… way back then I decided I was going to write screenplays instead.

*segue*

When I sat down to try it, I found that I liked the form because it was quite rigid, and it seemed that dialogue was fairly easy for me to write. The big problem came when I discovered that story construction was a lot harder than I had imagined. When you are really bored in your own life it seems that it can be surprisingly hard to make up a good story; perhaps a lack of imagination when "composing" one’s real life carries over into story telling as well.

I spent a good deal of time making a screenplay template for MS Word [] so that what I wrote would look more like a real script… something I could shop around to producers etc. Not that I ever got to that stage of course ;) What I ended up actually writing were just a few little odds and ends - some cute, some embarrassing - none of which I would really want to post here.

Now that I’m older and [perhaps] wiser I find that I don’t really want to write movie scripts anymore… I just want to write a novel which I can then sell the movie rights to! My shift in interest from the screenplay form to the novel is probably due to the fact that a novel is such a personal form, which is ultimately what I feel creation requires. To be honest I have had no positive experiences with collaboration… a process which always seems to suck the life out of everyone involved as you try to mash your incompatible ideas/viewpoints together into a whole that is often far less than the sum of its parts.

But then, even more so, there still remains the small matter of story, or lack thereof. Perhaps an effective approach in building a story is to nurture it from a tiny seed of an idea, and with some level of commitment over time it may mature and flourish. Unfortunately I find it very hard not to throw out any idea that is not instantly and obviously great - I want my story fully formed and ready to tell. I also find it very hard to commit to a single idea… something that should be all too apparent from my various unfinished software projects.

Then of course there are those other pesky things required for novel writing: self-discipline, research, talent etc…

Oh well, it’s back to Elevator Action for me I guess.

Various things happening, many more things being avoided. I highly recommend the classic arcade game Elevator Action as a way of running away from all the things that you should be doing. Unfortunately I can’t really tell you how to get it because someone else did the work of installing MAME + ROMS for me. I am a lazy boy.

Another extremely effective diversion is to go sign up for a free emode account and run through all their basic IQ and personality tests. It’s literally hours of fun for all the family! They give you your basic score at the end of each test, but if you want a detailed breakdown of your results you theoretically send them money, and then they will explain to you in detail why you are so smart/stupid/lovable/crotchetty.

A very cute thing I started several years ago and then kind of stopped working on for no good reason. Even though most people like it when they see it, people’s first response when you suggest that reading a book on a computer might be fun is usually of the "errr yuk!" variety, followed by an enumeration of the joys of the printed page. If popular press is to be believed the "e-book fad" is over [in fact it never really took off].

The point of my reader is to make it possible to read free plain text as a pleasant looking book; not to try to convince people to pay $8 for a DRM download of the latest bestseller which can only be read on one computer.

If you want to try it for yourself, for some pre-packaged books.