Door Stop

I have a part-time job to provide pin money for such luxuries as beer and food – stewarding Glasgow’s two football stadiums Ibrox (Rangers) and Hamden (Celtic). I’m lucky to be in “hospitality”, unlike the poor sods in fluorescent jackets who man the turn-style gates in all weathers, I man the doors inside any of the various season-ticket holder bars and director suits, and I get to dress in a blazer and (clip-on) tie. We don’t get to see the game, but that’s fine as I couldn’t give a fig about football. Actually I’m against football, like most organised sports, on the moral ground clubs and supporters revel in bigotries including sectarianism and nationalism. However, it turns out I’m entirely happy to accept their money for doing not very much work, so colour me a hypocrite. It looks like the company has plenty of work, including other football, sporting, and various entertainment venues.

First night of it went well, Rangers played Norwegian club “Molde”, and, I understand, won 2-0, which keeps them “in” some European cup or another. I don’t care much about that, but the colleagues I have to work are friendly enough, they even gave me a free traditional Scottish pie.

I did notice a statue of a footballer. I considered it quite ugly at the time, but in retrospect am relieved I didn’t say a word. It turns out it is a memorial statue, observing a disaster twenty years ago where 66 Rangers fans (31 of them children) were killed, and 140 others were injured. It was a crush. After an emotional late-minute win in a game, the croud went wild and some stumbled and fell on those standing lower. A snowball effect occurred and fans kept falling on fans. With this in mind I’m VERY glad not to have made a comment. I should point out these days there are no standing areas, all statiums are seating-only.

Classes & Classes

Class-changes abound, and for the good. Monday afternoon maths has been moved to the empty mid-Wednesday slot, filling a lengthy mid-day gap and leaving Monday afternoon free. Also we have a new Programming lecturer, a highly-experienced Java developer on contract to our college once a week just for us. Very cool. Java is a language used on Mobile Phone games, among others, and is similar to C++ which is used for the rest.

We’ll be using DarkBasicPro too as that provides a toolset to make games quickly which is handy for demos, freeware games, portfolios, and experimenting with game-play.

The X-Man

I’ve started a good number of assessment projects, each of which is multi-file, along with various research notes. Just a month into the course I have 135 files in 34 folders. This has led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth when manually copying them between the college server, my USB stick, and my home PC. There is also a degree of not-reasonable paranoia in pondering if I’m over-writing a new file with an older one thus eradicating my work.

The latest model of my USB stick features automated data synchronisation, via an in-built Windows program, and I did consider getting that version, but it costs another £15, were out-of-stock from my favoured supplier, and most importantly I fretted about compatibility. Some of the college PCs can’t have software installed on them. Even so I briefly wished I’d bought that instead. But my geek id roused and called my geek ego a “feeble” and they joined forces and demanded I code a solution. Thanks guys! Though not being a PC-DOS batch-file expert I am quite familiar with scripting languages generally. A quick read through the HELP screens and “tah-dah!” I have my synchronisation batch file working.

Okay I’ll admit, boast perhaps, they were not difficult to write. Two batch files of two lines of code utilising the Xcopy command, hence this entry’s title. Given the price of error (utter destruction of essays, ejection from college, destitution, prostitution, and an untimely end in an unmarked paupers grave) I spent a good deal of time making damn certain they work. During this process it struck me how difficult anyone raised in the GUI (graphic user interface) environment might find this sort of task. I suppose they’d just download and install a freeware (or crackware) program of some sort, or buy the expensive version of the stick, or spend their evenings and mornings manually copying files.

So in a strange masochistic way I’m grateful I was raised on the Commodore 64 and not an Xbox 360, and those aren’t words you’ll hear me say every day because at-the-time I’d have certainly taken Project: Gotham 3 over Daily Thompson’s Decathlon (click those links to see how far games have come). It has been stated and theorised for some amount of time the reason the United Kingdom is a world-leader in programming in general, and digital entertainment in particular, can be attributed directly to the incredible success of the 8-bit Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 computers in the early 1980s.

I should mention the USB storage stick itself, the Kingston DataTraveller® 2GB, is excellent and certainly recommended. The case is strong and wafer-thin (essential when it has to slot between chunky college USB devices), and it’s blisteringly fast. There are sticks in the same price bracket that boast none of those features. As already mentioned there is a slightly more expensive version that will synchronise files for you. If you have a degree more control over your environments, e.g. synching between your lap-top and home PC, or if you can install software at work, it makes a lot of sense. You can fit a lot of files in two thousand megabytes.

Two fast-access gigabytes from a well-respected brand is a steal at around £25. I remember spending ten times that amount on a bulky hard disk exactly one-hundred times smaller. And I was at school. Jesus. I must have been out of my tiny fucking mind.

For anyone who cares I made a small text document on Xcopy synchronisation.

Science vs Nutters

I spent a little time animating a cartoon strip I’ve had stored for years. It perfectly encapsulates the difference between science and religion.

Click on the thumbnail for the whole story. Frames have quite an amount of text on them and take about fifteen seconds each, so please be patient.

Free and Fantastic

I’ve downloaded a number of freeware games recently, and I’ll do a summary of them at some point, perhaps, but one that stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, certainly of commercial quality and superior to a good many commercial games, is The Battle for Wesnoth.

It’s a straight-forward turn-based fantasy combat game. Each map pits a leader, starting in a keep, against other commanders and forces. You recruit troops from villages, gain gold per turn to spend on new troops and upkeep existing ones, units successful in combat gain experience, and in addition to humans are the usual array of mages, dwarves, elves, orcs, ogres, goblins, and trolls are a few more interesting ones like giant spiders, merfolk, undead, lizard-men, etc. There a number of sensible rules, such as evil troops fight better during the night and good ones better in the day, elves do well in forests and dwarves to better in mountains, and the like. You can even use veteran units from completed scenarios in more difficult ones.

The in-game help describes itself well:

Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based fantasy strategy game somewhat unusual among modern strategy games. While other games strive for complexity, Battle for Wesnoth strives for simplicity of both rules and gameplay. This does not make the game simple, from these rules arise a wealth of strategy, making the game easy to learn but difficult to master.

The game is vast and includes single-player scenarios, multi-player maps for both local network and Internet play, as well as a thriving on-line community of over 4000 players. It also has and one of the best tutorials I’ve ever played, both humorous and instructive. If only all professional games were this professional! You know a game is fan-driven when the localisation includes not only the usual languages like German and French, and less-common ones like Russian and Japanese, but also the likes of Swedish, Hungarian, and Indonesian. It even comes with a fully-functioning map editor. There are, of course, vast numbers of new units, scenarios and multi-player maps to download.

It’s well worth a shot.

Click on any of the thumbnails for a screenshot.

Are YOU “Hip To Death”?

UPDATE. I haven’t gotten any further with Blade Runner 3 and probably I never will. I want to show you an extract of dialogue which, I hope, will fully explain why. Of course K. W. Jeter isn’t going to write in the style of PKD’s Do Androids Dream…? but he doesn’t even make an effort to, well, write well. In this section Deckard is talking to a film director about why one of the replicants was shot on-set, mimicking one of his own Blade Runner ‘retirements’:

‘Can it.’ Deckard had had enough of the director’s rattling on. ‘The Kowalski replicant didn’t faint. I don’t need to know about video production to see what happened to him. I’m hip to death.’ His voice lowered to a grim frequency. ‘That was my job … for a long time. I know what a dead body looks like.’

‘”Hip to death.” That’s a good one.’ Urbenton nodded in a show of appreciation. ‘I like that.’

“Hip to death”? Deckard? Hip to death??!. Not only did Jeter put dialogue worthy of E. J. Thribbs into Rick Deckard’s mouth, he goes ahead and fucking congratulates himself for it.

On the swing-side I have started I am alive and you are dead: a journey inside the mind of PKD by Emmanuael Carrère (reviewed by Michael Moorcock). I haven’t read any other PKD biographies so obviously I can’t compare, but it’s good, in a tangential, messy way, written with confident flair. The author asserts, as the title implies, he has tried to get inside the mind of PKD and empathised with him, and wrote as-if an insider. Perhaps only a Frenchman would dare take that perspective. It’s entirely appropriate for a work on PKD.

I think he would have approved.