I’m away from home right now, and I’ve spent about 8 hours of my time trying to get this piece of crap computer set up, just to the point where I can check my mail and post this entry. It’s my old P3-550, and a hard drive failed while I was reinstalling the OS. And this frikkin’ modem is only connected at 26.4 Kbps!

Anyway, here is a picture of an old building, beside the old highway which passes through my home town:

It’s kind of interesting looking, and obviously quite old, but for some reason I don’t even remember it being there.

Looking at places I used to go, houses I used to know, etc, doesn’t really do much for me, but merely driving down a familiar road can instantly transport me back to a simpler, more embarrassing time.

I half expect to pass myself going the other way. And when I overtake kids riding bikes, I have to glimpse over my shoulder to see if they look like me.

Rory reviews a BASIC drawing program he wrote when he was a kid: Worst Drawing Program of All Time (ever)

It’s great that he managed to preserve it for all this time— I wish I had done the same. I wrote a bunch of stuff on an Amstrad CPC464 around 1985, but it was all stored on crappy audio tape and so lost or disintegrated many years ago.

Some of the programs that would probably bring a tear of nostalgia to my eye if I could somehow bring them back from oblivion, all written around 20 years ago:

• A knock-off of Elevator Action where I never sorted out the trick of making a character stand on a moving platform [he kept falling through the elevator]. All objects [background and character] were drawn using customized character cells. The protagonist had at least two colors, achieved by drawing him twice with different glyphs.
• A pixel based paint program [similar to Rory’s] which supported 160×200 @ 16 colors. Also incorporated a flood-fill algorithm cribbed from a magazine. The only pictures I ever drew with this were poor recreations of images from an old Robin Hood adventure game I had played on an early Apple computer.
• A surprisingly cool block shifting puzzle, with sound. This was another knockoff, but actually worked very well. A beetle would shuffle along tracks drawn on squares, which you would dynamically reaarrange in order to direct the beetle to various goals [and avoid nasties]. My first proper sprite graphics, featuring animation and more color.
• A 3D object modeller, in which the keyboard was used to manipulate a cursor in an isometric 3D view. It even had a “lathe” function for creating endless variations of polygonal goblets. This was the first time I ever worked in 3D, and many of the basic equations were arrived at by trial and error. Rendering a solid-filled object took more than a minute, and the pinnacle of the project was recording an incredibly jerky 3FPS animation of a spinning goblet using the pause control on a standard VHS video recorder. Woooo!
• A Z80 assembler, then used for writing small chunks of machine code to speed up sprite and paint routines. I got a real kick out of this, even though I never used it enough to justify the time that went into it. It also served as my introduction to the concept of bootstrapping, in that the core routine of the final version was actually written using an earlier version.

[ A random sketch, apropos of nothing ]

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UPDATE: coincidentally, within minutes of uploading I discover that Scott features a Mr Incredible in his latest post, and that a google search for “apropos of something” turns up this blog with a superhero in the header. Spooky!

God of Television, hear my prayer… please let there be only one more season of Lost… don’t let this become another X-Files, pointlessly convoluting the plot without ever reaching a proper climax…

, my 18 month old niece, pretending to play Drivey. Keyboard lockout functionality is on the way ;)

[ Hmmm… something familiar about this… ]

Recently I added an HTTP permanent redirect to the old jujusoft/log feed [the original location of this blog], which means that all the early subscribers’ aggregators should be automatically updating their URLs to point to intepid.com instead.

Wow, that must be the most technical sounding paragraph I’ve written here in ages ;)

Anyhow, the point is that it’s seeming more and more important to me that there should be only one intepid feed, and so, after hardly any careful consideration, I have decided to lose the Atom feed as well [also using a permanent redirect]. Maybe a lot of people still don’t know what RSS is, but I bet there are even more who’ve never heard of Atom, and I figure that removing the choice will hardly disadvantage anyone, since all aggregators [that don’t suck] support both standards anyway.

Of course, the main reason I’m doing this is so that I can feel more popular; by rolling the duplicate feeds into one canonical URL, my Bloglines subscriber count has now jumped to 25 31 (from 8). Most gratifying!

The latest episode of This American Life is quite a corker; entitled Godless America it features a monologue from Julia Sweeney, in which she discusses her horror at learning the full story of Lot’s flight from [the doomed city of] Sodom, and listening to her description I found that I too was horrified. Beyond Sodom and Gomorrah and the pillar of salt trick, how many people actually know the details of this story?

The following is excerpted from the King James Bible [as downloaded from Project Gutenberg]. Please forgive the impractical three-column layout, but I think it’s an important reminder of the biblical context…

[…two angels arrive in Sodom, to warn Lot of the impending destruction of the city. Lot invites them to his house for the night…] 19:4 But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter: 19:5 And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them. […which is to say, rape them. Lot is understandably horrified, and goes out to address the horny mob, offering an appeasement…] 19:8 Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.

[…luckily for his virgin daughters, the mob aren’t interested (because they are homosexuals). In the nick of time, the angels render the mob blind and then in the morning help Lot and his family escape the doomed city. They make for a smaller non-doomed city called Zoar…] 19:26 But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt. […we all know that bit. So now it’s just Lot and his two daughters fleeing to Zoar, but after a while it seems that city life no longer agrees with him…] 19:30 And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters. 19:31 And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth:

19:32 Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. 19:33 And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. 19:34 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. 19:35 And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. 19:36 Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.

This post is not about atheism versus religion. It’s about common sense versus fundamentalism. And it’s also about my utter lack of understanding of how anyone could believe that “everything in the bible is true”, for I hear there are large [growing?] numbers of such people, especially in the US. Moreover there are such people in positions of power, some of whom are keen to use the bible to justify laws enshrining bigotry and hate. It’s getting to the point where I’m actually finding it difficult to believe that it’s even possible for such people to believe what they claim. Am I perhaps the ignorant one, for assuming that when someone says they believe something that they might actually give a toss about the details…?

Obviously there’s loads more where this came from. That there are biblical stories advocating incest and mass-killings as the will of God comes as no great surprise; I’m just a little dumbfounded that even such a “well-known” story could be so vile. The only man deemed virtuous enough to be spared from the destruction of a city takes off for the mountains [after his wife is conveniently dispatched for having second thoughts] to enjoy carnal relations with his two daughters. Now that’s Deliverance!

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Postscript: It may seem [and may be] pointless for me to get all hot and bothered over the spectre of Christian fundamentalism in the US, since I have never lived there and have no plan to do so in the future; but when ideological shifts occur in Washington the whole planet is affected— and even though policy decisions made by the US government affect everyone, most of us get no say in who’s making those decisions. If Bush and his supporters truly valued the democratic ideal, they could never be so dismissive of world opinion… but then, democracy is not actually mentioned in the bible.

Wil Wheaton, on planned changes to his blog:

I hate Reality TV, and I feel like my blog is dangerously close to crossing the line from “this interesting thing happened to me” to “come with me while I take a shit in the woods.” I need to tell more stories, and bare less soul.¹ You know what I’ve learned about The Internets? It’s full of freaks, and if a high-profile person bares too much soul, they really come out of the woodwork and latch on. It’s a little creepy…

…read more…

Wil’s post was kind of gratifying to read, since I have always wondered if my own blog needed to get more personal. Reading Wil’s comments I feel more confident that I’ve made the right choice [for me] regarding the balance between public and private. If you pick through my archives [which I’ve just realized aren’t easily accessible— wups!] you can find out an awful lot about me, but there is still a whole lot I never talk about.

I do occasionally regret not being more personal/candid here, when I dig back through the archives to read about what I was doing a year or two ago and feel frustrated by the lack of information about my private life at the time. Perhaps the number one reason I keep this blog is for personal reference; it is my journal, and until blogging came along I had never kept one before. I have occasionally considered starting a separate private or secret blog,² but several false starts have shown I would never keep it up.

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1. Wil’s original text has it as “bear less soul”, which I could have copied and added a [sic] to, but seriously that has got to be one of the most condescending things you can do when quoting someone; you might as well write [idiot] instead. Spelling is not that big a deal, so I am content to simply change it without further indication [with the obvious exception of this particular footnote].

2. I think I read maybe four or five anonymous blogs [out of 150 or so], and even these give me the shits sometimes. Note that when I say anonymous I mean “takes pains to keep identity secret” rather than “doesn’t bother to mention real name on front page”

I’ve just read Michael’s review of Episode III. An excellent read, and I agree for the most part, except that for me even seeing Anakin rendered limbless [and on fire] didn’t quite make up for the rest of it.

Rather than write my own [mostly redundant] review, I will merely try to epitomise what I thought was most wrong with this film by… uh… borrowing the two stills Michael used.

After the opening crawl had vanished into the stars, this is what I wanted to see:

A freakin’ huge spaceship, plowing through space in the relentlessly straight line dictated by the rules of inertia. It’s so imposing, so dominating; it looms into view and the sheer presence of it almost induces vertigo. This image is taken from the opening shot of Episode IV, filmed in 1977.

But in Episode III (2005), this is what exploded [vomited?] onto the screen:

The closest I got to vertigo here was a sense of vague nausea. There is so much color and chaotic motion that it all becomes meaningless. The various craft all seem to move according to utterly disparate physical laws; some move like planes, some like boats, some like fish— None move like spacecraft.¹

George Lucas needs the phrase “Less is more” tattooed onto the back of his eyelids.

NB: If you haven’t already, go read Michael’s review. ²

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1. See the recent Battlestar Galactica for some beautiful space flight stuff to see just how well it can be done. Note that I do understand that Star Wars has an established look-and-feel for space flight, but I don’t think it was adhered to either— Can you imagine two x-wings bumping against each other to brush away a few pesky wing-walking droids?

2. So I can feel less guilty about nicking his images.

This is a snapshot of the small metal bin beside my desk:

It’s like that all the way down.

In my defense I would point out that as a totally digital dude I use virtually no paper in my day-to-day activities, so food wrappers are pretty much the only reason I need a bin in the first place.

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NB: If you visit Arnott’s website, you may be interested to note that the popular Tim Tam maneuver known [by everyone I know] as “Shot-gunning” is officially referred to as “the Tim Tam Suck”— Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it IMHO…

Have just made an executive decision that my two-tone palette concept was simply not working for me, especially since it reduced the quality of gradients, so I’ve chucked it for the JujuScript version of Drivey. [ That’s the version which will never see another release because I am not supposed to be working on it. Only on C++ version. So just ignore this picture ]

When just one colour is used the human eye is reasonably comfortable adjusting for it¹— so in the shot above we aren’t looking at a green landscape; we are looking at a landscape though a green filter — whereas using two or more colours prevents this automatic adjustment, and so the colours just end up looking fake.

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1. A bit like the white balance on a video camera.