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today's thoughts
Jan. 10th, 2009 07:40 pmI bought a 1 terabyte external hard drive today, and started backing up my music and documents onto it today. (What do people use for backups, incidentally? Anything?) A terabyte is a lot of storage. I remember when my mum bought her first hard drive for the PC she had in the early 90s, when running Windows from 5 floppy disks was quite a common thing to do. The hard disk she got was a then-large 40 megabytes. I proceeded to fill this up with classic games like Elite, Doom 2, Sensible World of Soccer, and Ultima VII.
Before all that, I still have memories of games for the Amstrad CPC 464, loading from cassette into a subset of the roughly 43 kilobytes of memory available once you subtracted the area reserved for the screen and firmware. I also encountered some people with machines with even less capacity: one person with a Dragon 32, and someone else with an even more anaemic ZX81. The games of today might be far more immersive and visceral, but the actual gameplay is rarely any different from before in pure ludological terms, and the variety has really dropped off as costs have risen, which is possibly the saddest thing. You don't see many, if any, commercial games along the lines of Lords of Midnight, Feud, Ranarama, The Bard's Tale, Ikari Warriors, Rampage, Tau Ceti, etc. Time to dig out my old games and read more Retro Magazine, I think.
On a completely different and more serious note... big demonstration rallies for things other countries are doing irritate me somewhat. In this case a bunch of people, annoyed with the Israeli assault on Gaza, march on the Israeli embassy in London. So the rest of London is inconvenienced by a few tens of thousands of people marching through the streets because of something largely out of our hands, which is the first thing that I think is a bit selfish. The UK is already attempting to back UN action to end the fighting, which is about as much as it can be reasonably expected to do under international law.
Then they have the fact that this march goes to the actual embassy, which just seems like intimidation to me. How else to interpret thousands of people chanting outside your residence? What actual good is it going to achieve - is the person in there going to call Israel and demand they change their policies so that he can get some peace? Diplomats can send news and opinion back to their country, but thousands of foreigners chanting and making a disturbance is not going to carry any more weight than thousands of letters being sent. And finally, these things always provide a handy smokescreen for militant trouble-causers, who start criminal damage, so then the police get involved, and then the other demonstrators get caught up in it, etc. It's just a rather foolish waste of resources all round, which I get the feeling is more about relieving people's personal guilt and feelings of obligation than about actually helping.
What should people do instead? Maybe donate to relevant charities. Write to MPs requesting that more pressure is applied through diplomatic channels. Take a course in conflict resolution and publish a plan for peace. Volunteer for the Red Cross and fly out there. I don't know, but do something constructive which might actually move things forward, not just march around in a mob attempting to intimidate people while inconveniencing locals and depleting our already stretched police force.
Before all that, I still have memories of games for the Amstrad CPC 464, loading from cassette into a subset of the roughly 43 kilobytes of memory available once you subtracted the area reserved for the screen and firmware. I also encountered some people with machines with even less capacity: one person with a Dragon 32, and someone else with an even more anaemic ZX81. The games of today might be far more immersive and visceral, but the actual gameplay is rarely any different from before in pure ludological terms, and the variety has really dropped off as costs have risen, which is possibly the saddest thing. You don't see many, if any, commercial games along the lines of Lords of Midnight, Feud, Ranarama, The Bard's Tale, Ikari Warriors, Rampage, Tau Ceti, etc. Time to dig out my old games and read more Retro Magazine, I think.
On a completely different and more serious note... big demonstration rallies for things other countries are doing irritate me somewhat. In this case a bunch of people, annoyed with the Israeli assault on Gaza, march on the Israeli embassy in London. So the rest of London is inconvenienced by a few tens of thousands of people marching through the streets because of something largely out of our hands, which is the first thing that I think is a bit selfish. The UK is already attempting to back UN action to end the fighting, which is about as much as it can be reasonably expected to do under international law.
Then they have the fact that this march goes to the actual embassy, which just seems like intimidation to me. How else to interpret thousands of people chanting outside your residence? What actual good is it going to achieve - is the person in there going to call Israel and demand they change their policies so that he can get some peace? Diplomats can send news and opinion back to their country, but thousands of foreigners chanting and making a disturbance is not going to carry any more weight than thousands of letters being sent. And finally, these things always provide a handy smokescreen for militant trouble-causers, who start criminal damage, so then the police get involved, and then the other demonstrators get caught up in it, etc. It's just a rather foolish waste of resources all round, which I get the feeling is more about relieving people's personal guilt and feelings of obligation than about actually helping.
What should people do instead? Maybe donate to relevant charities. Write to MPs requesting that more pressure is applied through diplomatic channels. Take a course in conflict resolution and publish a plan for peace. Volunteer for the Red Cross and fly out there. I don't know, but do something constructive which might actually move things forward, not just march around in a mob attempting to intimidate people while inconveniencing locals and depleting our already stretched police force.
