I was a second year Engineering student, and encouraged the head of one of the research groups on campus to allow me and two fellow students to work on a VR project over the summer break for credit.

We improvised a poor-man’s VR helmet (a stack-hat) with a poor man’s stereoscopic HUD (two video camera viewfinders) and poor-man’s motion tracking (two POTs on the helmet for 2 DOF head tracking, and a Nintendo Power Glove). All of this was driven by two Amiga 500 computers, one for each eye, using custom software written in AMOS and AMOS 3D. One of the most challenging parts of the project was synchronising the displays via a null-modem link, and reading the POTs, which had to be timed off the vertical scan (something arcane like waiting until the electron beam of the display reached the 7th line, and then reading some register or other before it reached the 12th line).

We were excited, but, in truth, the project sucked balls.

While working on that project, we became involved with the Perth Virtual Reality Interest Group, which held meetings in Tech Park (Enterprise Building 3, funnily enough, where I returned 15 years later – ack – to work at Interzone). The SIG organised a special, private viewing of the Virtuality Arcade Machine (which also used the Amiga computer) when it made a brief appearance in the Perth Myer store.

I remember being very excited by the potential of VR at the time, in part due to a documentary that aired on TV that featured Marvin Minsky, Jaron Lanier, William Gibson and Tomothy Leary. It’s funny and embarrassing in hindsight, but it was a strange time, with people absolutely convinced that VR would be the future of entertainment, medical imaging and stock market manipulation.

I wonder what the modern equivalent of VR is? Social gaming, perhaps?

D. and I have been watching BlackAdder. I received the “ultimate collection” box set for Father’s Day, and we’re working our way through the episodes, watching everything twice (to hear the commentary), and thoroughly enjoying it.

Ben Elton did a fantastic job of re-imagining BlackAdder when Richard Curtis invited him to join the writing team for the second season, suggesting that the characters of Edmund and Baldrick should be swapped. Each episode was filmed in under two hours in front of a studio audience (apart from, of course, location footage).

Channel 7 co-financed the first season, which was the most expensive to make, but pulled out from later seasons. Nine years later, after all four seasons of BlackAdder had been released, Channel 7 created an embarrassing BlackAdder rip-off called Bligh, which starred Michael Veitch from Fast Forward. I can’t find any footage of it online; I can only remember it being very, very bad.

I find it inspiring that it’s possible to create a long-lasting piece of television in such a short amount of time. It seems that the advice to follow is do what you love, don’t compromise on quality and just damn well get it done. Speaking of which…

2008

• My next-door neighbours are involved in making a feature film, shooting tonight nearby.
• Conan the Barbarian or Super Mario Galaxy? Just one of life’s puzzles. Who am I kidding? Mario beats Arnold hands-down.
• Listening to TMBG’s new children’s album… after E. has gone to bed. Is it bad that I enjoy it as much as her?
• Just saw Eastern Promises. Great movie, great eye-stabbing scene.
• Four chicken frames -> eight litres of chicken stock, frozen, to last us for the next few weeks.
• Time to spend some time in the curious village.
• How would YOU matchmake a bunch of humans into groups that then play each other at some game? Huh?
• Basking in the glory of a freshly cleaned car.
• Bowling is easier on the Wii. Beginning to suspect same for boxing.
• Car stolen, crashed and written off. Up since 4am with the police.

2009

• Back home; squeeze in an hours coding before bed at 3:30am, then wake up at 8:30am to get back to the Jam.
• Been indoors for 8 days. Finally starting to feel on the mend. Was quite worried there for a bit – thought we were goners. Swine flu sucks!
• Dana wants to push up to jump. Eighties child can’t handle more than one button. A to blow, B to jump… how hard can it be?
• Final Twin Peaks sesh tonight. Dinner: T-Bone with Diane sauce, potato au gratin, salad, beer. Snacks: showbag goodies, beer.
• Just tried to get into the wrong car. For five minutes.
• Coffee and croissant at Perth airport, waiting for flight to Melbourne. Go!
• Whisky poisoning not too bad. Coffee and shower, then off for Jaffe’s keynote.
• Farbs: fan e-mail is a gateway drug to self-Googling.
• Best advice for startups from the big publishers: “don’t build an MMO”.
• Yahtzee says Project Natal is a “creepy little boy simulator”.
• Dinner at Attica… Rob Sitch and Eddie Maguire just walked in. Only in Melbourne!
• Plan to polish & release KranzkyEngine, and develop PostalWorker, which was devised at the hotel bar.
• What’s up with the Hawkeye 4wd driving around with like 20 cameras mounted all over it? Seen in Northbridge.
• Great party last night; 21yo scotch, good cheese, and arthouse cinema in the back garden. All while the kids went berserk. In a good way.
• I ran 14345m before hitting a wall and tumbling to my death on my iPhone.

2010

• Mixed a brandy-and-dry, and drank while munching green olives with pimientos. I think my hair will turn a swept-back grey soon.
• Frankly, you should quite frankly prototype your GUI. Frankly, I say!
• Channel 9 commentary: “he’s universally known in America”
• Note to self: don’t type “anal” into the address bar as a shortcut to Google Analytics.
• Counted dozens of smashed car windows walking to train station. Some brand new luxury cars in dealerships too.
• Arrived at beautiful holiday house on the beach in Eagle Bay. Now, to figure out the optimum way to relax…
• Played San Juan at 399bar last night, and I must say it was pretty cool. More German board games in small bars!
• “I saw it on YouTube” not a valid defense for making daughter Cheerios fried in butter. But it seems so American! And we had no popcorn!
• Curse you, Desktop Dungeons, for stealing my Friday night.
• Chicken livers and ladies fingers at The Prophet. Good friends, good wine, good times. Great party at Tee’s afterwards. Eh, what kids???
• Oh man that was totally fucked up. In the most awesome of ways. Breaking Bad, you’re the best thing ever.
• Off tonight for a beef injection (1.5kg 400+ day dry aged wagyu ribeye to share, with roasted bone marrow and potatoes gratin). And wine!
• Meat Stylus.
• I am the mayor of crumpet (unfortunately NOT a euphemism).
• Just realised I’m sharing my iTunes library at work. Trouble is, I’ve only used this laptop to assemble a playlist for my mum’s 60th.

Hmmm… what a strange way to look back on your life! But, I gotta say, I prefer myself in retrospect :)

As far as games are concerned, cleaning is a common metaphor. Tetris is perhaps the best example, as are match-3 games such as Bejeweled. In Tetris you interlock falling tetrominoes in very pleasant, satisfying ways in order to remove rows of blocks, while in Bejeweled et al you remove gems of the same colour by shifting them around. In both cases, the essence of the game is arrangement and removal. There’s something addictive about sorting like stuff into groups, identifying patterns, planning for what may happen next and progressing by removing groups of stuff to leave behind smaller collections of stuff.

Postal Worker, the game that I was intending to work on at the beginning of this year (and which suffered ludus interruptus due to the Global Game Jam and the Interzone Fiasco, and is yet to fully recover) was based around this concept of sorting things into groups. I do plan to return to it eventually, once I finish the Kranzky Engine for iPhone. But, I digress.

I started writing this blog post because I was thinking of two important issues that both involve cleaning in some form, and which are both inspired by recent events. I don’t want to make a federal election out of it, but I have been thinking about both the government’s proposed mandatory ISP-level filtering of RC content, and of the shelved emissions trading scheme.

I first learned about carbon trading about seven years ago when I read, I think, “The Armchair Economist“, by Steven Landsburg, which is a study of how incentives change behaviour (with famous examples including the fact that mandatory seatbelt laws result in an increased number of car accidents – you’d minimise accidents by requiring everyone to mount a metal spike on their steering wheel which is aimed directly at their heart). In essence, the intent of carbon trading is to incentivize individuals and corporations to look for alternatives to their energy supply by creating a marketplace that will inflate the cost of carbon-producing energy to the end user. That is, the operators of coal-fuelled power plants will need to pay more to continue polluting the environment, and will pass this cost on to their customers, who will then have an incentive to consider other means of fulfilling their energy needs. This will create a market for greener (in the sense of lower CO2-emitting) energy production. Along similar lines, wouldn’t it be interesting to introduce a cholesterol trading scheme, to improve the overall health of the population and thereby to reduce the strain on the health care system? I kid.

The proposed Internet filter has proven unpopular, as so many of us are opposed to censorship of any form. It is difficult, however, to have a proper discussion around a subject that threatens to raise the spectre of child pornography (which is a core reason for wanting to implement a filter in the first place). Child pornography is quickly replacing Godwin’s Law as a means of nipping any debate in the bud. It’s similar to accusations of racism making any measured debate of policy regarding asylum seekers difficult. The truth is that censorship simply limits exposure to offensive material that needs to be deliberately sought out anyway, and won’t prevent those who deal in such material from continuing to do so. In fact, it may make it onerous to identify and bring to justice those who produce such material, as it will only serve to encourage them to go deeper underground, obscuring any handy evidence that would have been left behind had they traded the stuff online. The fact that the production of images of child abuse is a multi-billion dollar criminal industry is under-reported, and the success rates of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice are unknown. I want to know; we should all be in the business of protecting children everywhere. Just not  via censorship.

Enough with the depressing thoughts. Just cleaning out my brain. Please don’t get all Nazi on me in the comments :)

Football

I went to a football game the other day with a few friends. One of them commented that the oval looked smaller than he had expected. I said, “What do you mean? It’s 100 metres wide and 200 metres long! Of course”, I added, “that’s only a ballpark figure.”

Axe Murderers

There was this news story on TV a while back about a young man who murdered his parents. When the reporter asked the obviously shocked neighbours about the man, they told him how quiet and harmless he seemed. Then one of them remembered how he had made constant death threats against his parents. Another chipped in with stories of him shooting cats with an air rifle. And then pandemonium broke out, as the neighbours started yelling about how he was a crazy freak, and how they all hated his guts.

Indian Food

Did you know there was an Indian version of The Beatles? They even went through a weird stage, hanging out with the Archbishop of Canterbury and playing acoustic guitars instead of their sitars. Here’s the lyrics to one of their most enduring songs:

Dear Sir and Madam, here’s your vindaloo
It took me days and days to cook it up for you
It’s based on a recipe I got from my mum
And it’s very very hot, so you’ll need to have some
Cucumber raita!
Cucumber raita!

It’s a lovely curry, with some lovely naan
(there’s some popadoms in the frying pan)
Sir, you appear to be turning pale
You’re an unsteady sod; so instead of beer
Cucumber raita!
Cucumber raita!

Words

Isn’t it interesting how words change their meaning with time? I was reading a book from 1895 the other day, and I came across a passage which read: “The chambermaid rushed sobbing from the room, followed by Mr. Dawkins, who was ejaculating wildly.” I was very offended, until I realized that the word “sobbing” has changed meaning drastically in the last hundred years.

Hollywood

I really hate those corny romantic American movies where, at the end of the film, the two lovers embrace in a public place and the crowd of onlookers break into spontaneous applause. I was in a restaurant once and this guy kissed his girlfriend, so I started clapping and whooping. But nobody else joined in. And then the guy said “Hey, what are you doing, buddy?”, so I said “I’m clapping man, can’t you see that?”, and then came on over and punched me in the nose. So that’s why I hate those movies.

Clothes

I was in the city with a girl, and she said to me, “Do you like the sarong that girl over there is wearing?”. I bellowed out, “What sarong?”, and a passing ethnic stereotype yelled back “Nothing’s a-wrong, mate! What’s da matter with you, eh?”

Ties

I have always found it rather odd that businessmen affect to wear their ties on their shoulders when outdoors in the city. I think someone should do a study on it.

Smells

I think the next big leap in technology will be smells. It will take just one geek to come up with some big breakthrough, and in no time at all everyone will be talking about the great new “smell chip”. Sony would develop a sleek smell machine, with their own smell format, but the other manufacturers would band together and develop an inferior smell format which would become successful through clever marketing campaigns. Televisions would be made “smell compatible”. If you wanted to smell in private, you could wear little “nose-olfactors”. Musicians would play special smell instruments at gigs, and you’d better watch out for the door-to-door smell salesman. Smell lovers would complain about synthetic smells, and they would harp on and on about the good old days, and how great the natural smells were back then. Computers would come with an optional “smell card”, and software for mixing smells. You could customize your desktop to have your favourite smell, and you’d be able to download new smells. When an error occurs, a special smell would be emitted.

Tattoos

The other day I pointed out a tattoo on a man’s arm to a friend. “That’s a Swastika”, I said. “You mean its not a real tattoo?”, she replied.

Body Piercing

I reckon if you’re lucky enough to have a big sticky-out mole on some weird part of your body, you should paint that mole silver and pretend that you’re into body piercing. People would express amazement at how you managed to get that part of your body pierced, and they would admire your impressive looking stud.

I’d like to think that I’m still learning and embracing new ideas, so it makes me frustrated when people my parent’s age choose not to. Sitting on the sofa watching television and wondering out loud about some piece of trivia is fine and all, but did you know you can find the exact answer in the next ten seconds if you want to? The degree of effort is so low (visit Google, type in question) compared to the value (satisfying your curiosity) that it frustrates me that you think it’s “too hard”. And digging out the Yellow Pages from the top shelf of the pantry to look up a phone number for a store that you plan on visiting is equally as ludicrous.

Did you know that Google has been around for a decade? That we were surfing the web fifteen years ago? That email was in widespread use twenty years ago? That you could buy an affordable home computer thirty years ago? Computers are central to our way of life. Many occupations involve using a computer in some capacity, yet the average competence of a computer user is depressingly low. And it’s not because it’s “too hard”, it’s just that people haven’t bothered to learn through experience. Computers are just so alien to them that they prefer not to use them at all, meaning that they don’t pick up the nuances and patterns that you need to be a confident user.

Those of us who work with computers daily aren’t smarter, and we don’t think differently. We’ve just learned the ins and outs. When we fix your computer for you, we don’t magically know the answer, we just go through the obvious steps, and you should be able to do that yourself. I’m just sick and tired of people rolling their eyes and blaming their problems on the computer, “oh it’s the computer”. No, it isn’t. It’s YOU. You just haven’t bothered to educate yourself.

I mean, imagine if you treated cars this way. You were in your twenties when you started hearing about these car devices, but you couldn’t grasp exactly why someone would want one (I mean, I can walk to the shops and get some fresh air and exercise, and I’m quite happy catching the bus to visit friends). You had kids, and they got cars, and drove you places, and they seemed happy with them. You were happy to be a passenger, but didn’t really grasp how the darned things worked. Then you retired, and went out and bought a car yourself. The man delivered it and showed you how to turn it on and off. You’d seen your kids do this, so you hopped in, started it up, drove across the lawn, took out the mailbox, floored the accelerator in your panic and crashed through the neighbours garden and into your house. “Damned new-fangled vehicles”, you complain. “Gargh, they’re always doing that”.

Well, I’m sorry. Driving a car is second nature to you because you studied them, you took lessons, you passed a test (after several attempts, probably), and you spend the last thirty years using one for several hours a day. You learned all of the nuances and tiny patterns that allow you to pilot one without really thinking about what you’re doing. You know that pouring a solution of water and vinegar into the tank when the petrol runs our ain’t going to work, and you didn’t need to perform an experiment to find this out. You know what to do when you get a flat tire, and when the fuel warning light goes on. You know how to take care of it, you know how to negotiate your route with other vehicles on the road, and you even know what to do when something unexpected happens. Cars are no less complicated, it’s just that they seem easy because you use them so much. So, please, do the same with your computer.

In one of tonight’s episodes, a recently shot Agent Cooper has a visitation from a giant who tells him “the owls are not what they seem”. Afterwards I mentioned how, back in ’91 or ’92, the idea of owls as replacement memories for alien visitations spooked me out. I think I was reading Whitley Strieber’s books at the time, and I took them semi-seriously. Daz reminded me of something I’d forgotten; I used to speak of seeing a “golliwog” – a living, breathing creature – behind the shed of a neighbour when we lived in our childhood home. I must have been about four at the time, and I guess I remembered it vividly enough when I was 18 or whatever, and watching Twin Peaks for the first time.

I can only think that my neighbour (a boy a year older than me) and I snuck around the back of the shed, and…

1. saw a toy golliwog on the ground. Or…
2. got surprised by the boy’s father, who was holding a golliwog and trying to frighten us. Or…
3. it never happened, and I’m just remembering a nightmare I had as a child. Or…
4. we saw a frickin’ alien.

Should I Facebook this childhood neighbour and put the question to him? Or will he think me insane?

The Brinkle List of Useful Words that Shall Be Quaranteen’d to Maintain their Purity
1) BORANGE: A belligerent fruitier.
2) LORANGE: Poor-man’s haute cuisine.
3) DORANGE: Yon wiley strumpet.
4) PORANGE: (unreadable)
5) WORANGE: Insignificant; a mere trifle.

In addition to reams of legal papers, my uncle is now the proud owner of a beautiful fob watch engraved with a most impressive limerick that we have been unable to decipher, but which by all accounts is one of the funniest passages of English text ever written.

There once lived a cranky ol’ borange
Whose wife once sat down on an orange
She whooped in surprise
Then shut fast her eyes
As her husband reached out for his porange