Thorne Blogs.

It has been much too long since I last wrote anything here. There are some good reasons, but they themselves are news deserving of publication, so:

1. I have a new job! If you have seen neither hide nor … um … absence-of-hair of me in the city recently, that’s because I no longer work there. I’m still a sysadmin, but now I work for a certain Very Large Australian Supermarket Chain. This has a number of awesomenesses to offset the loss of decent coffee and plentiful company that the city provided: A five minute commute, Real work which is mostly not thrown away when complete or shortly beforehand, Innumerable systems which, while oppressive, mostly work and are (in some cases) actually documented! This is so different from my former employers as to have resulted in a fair degree of culture shock.
2. I have been variously sick… I always associated “bronchitis” with an extreme form of the-hacking-crud, but I have come to know it rather as the slight pervasive nagging illness that makes one lastingly tired and miserable and will not die.
3. …and broken. I recently attempted my first Big Motorbike Tour with my brother (Heffa) and two of his work colleagues (lets say SM and SJ). It was to be a week-long ride through some of the most beautiful parts of Victoria, pausing in such scenic places as Myrtleford and Raymond Island before joining the Barry Sheene Memorial ride from Bairnsdale to Phillip Island (it concludes with a lap of the Grand Prix circuit there). The last three days of this trip were to be spent at the 2009 Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix.
   It did not go badly, or even horribly badly.
   It went disastrously.
   Before we even began, we were forced to abandon our original route because, as we were told, the unseasonal depth and frequency of snow on mount Hotham meant the mountain was closed to motorcycles, period. We revised our route to go further east and less north, but less than an hour into the ride my elderly little bike suffered a snapped clutch cable. My noble brother, SM and SJ spent two hours seeking a replacement (the first of which failed after about 20 meters).
   That fixed, we were mostly OK for several hours, and had a rather fun ride through Healesville to Marysville. We dodged a bullet in Marysville by detouring for petrol (we had no excuse for imagining that there would be petrol for sale in Marysville this year). Around Reefton, however, it began to rain. A failure of planning contrived between me and my brother led to both of us getting soaking wet despite our rainproof gear, and I almost gave up in Warburton. Alas that I did not.
   By around 5pm, we had almost made it to the tiny town of Noojee when, in my soggy and confused state, I took a corner slightly too fast and rode into a patch of slippery leaf-mush, slid off my bike and bounced down the road a little way. Miraculously though, I was merely bruised, my riding gear and bike largely unharmed. After many enquiries of “are you sure you’re ok?”, we all remounted our bikes and rode on… for about ten more minutes.
   We were not yet outside of Noojee when the final blow was struck. SJ, spooked by my recent road-surfing attempt, was checking his mirrors at the precise moment that my brother (not far ahead of him) abruptly stopped to check the map.
   The result was a spectacular high-speed collision.
   My brother was unharmed, but SJ was not so fortunate, severely breaking his leg and largely destroying his bike.
   The rest of that wonderful week was spent recovering at home, feeling stiff, sore and systematically disheartened. SM and Heffa eventually went on to the GP, and I hear, had a whale of a time. SJ was eventually released from hospital.
   A restful recuperative sojourn  it was not.
4. A recent brush with RSI, perennial adversary of IT workers everywhere, plus my new employer’s all-too-efficient zeal for preventing ‘recreational’ computing among their employees have led to a whole new layer of dust on my home PC and most especially on this blog. I have sympathy for Pah, and am cautioned by his example: RSI is to be taken seriously.
5. For all my methodical obsessing about the latest and most innovative and forward-looking PDAs, I have finally sold out to The New Evil, and purchased an iFool. It has had its ups and downs, and I will write more about it in another post, eventually. Suffice for now to say that the availability of a WordPress app for it has not led to a revolutionary increase in my ver-blog-bosity, but it has led to a resurgence in my use of LikenessTome, and finally driven me to sign up with Blather.
6. Now that E has (we hope) finished being Examinatized (YAYZ!), our plans to be wed next year have become steadily more and more palpable. More on that later too.
7. [last-minute edit] I almost forgot: I have once again signed up for Movember, and will be sporting facially-mounted industrial abrasives again in the name of mens health, free burgers and vile humour. Please PLEASE PLEASE Sponsor Me!

That is all.

Lately, as a consequence of following Boingboing, I have been catching their periodic round-ups from their gaming-centric spin-off site, Offworld. As a consequence, I have observed what seems to me like a wonderful thing: a renaissance in classic gaming!

Two free games in particular have struck me recently with their sheer mind-blowing awesomeness, so much so that I am compelled to blog about them: Glum Buster and Music Catch.

Glum Buster

Justin ‘CosMind’ Leingang’s Glum Buster is random. I would not be the first to say so, if I said that the alien, unexplained sideways-scrolling nature of the beast strongly reminds me of the classic Another World. That said, this is nothing like Another World…

Glum Buster seems to revolve around the life on an anonymous little guy in what looks like a little yellow raincoat. One day this guy steps out his door and meets (spawns?) his evil doppelganger, who proceeds to suck him into a series of alternate/alien dimensions, where things are frickin’ strange!

The game is at pains to give you the minimum possible advice about how the controls work, and absolutely none about what they’re for. That part is a matter of exploration, changing anew with each little level. Occasionally, it seems as if a sequence of levels is progressing along some pattern, in terms of how each stage works, but then it will throw you again as it convolves in some previously unthinkable axis.

Beautiful and gentle, I can’t help thinking as I play that this game is what Hayao Miyazaki would have made if he were a hobbyist programmer, and not an animator.

Music Catch

Reflexive’s Music Catch 2 is a flash game with a non-free downloadable counterpart and, I gather, an iPhone port. It’s addictive, but without that arm-scratching, crack-addiction dementia that one tends to get from PopCap games.

It’s a concept alomst too simple to describe: wave your mouse pointer around. Collect as many as possible of the (numerous) blue things, and especially the yellow things, while avoiding the red things. Purple things provide a temporary ‘vacuum’ effect which only sucks up good stuff.

While complete, that description overlooks nearly everything that’s good or original about the game. In particular, it overlooks the feel, and it overlooks the music.

Music is central to the game: The things one collects or avoids are generated with a rate and distribution governed by the music. The downloadable game doesn’t have levels, it has tracks, and it will let you create your own new levels without limit… by selecting your own MP3s.

The resulting feel, with the thing-generating surface slowly revolving around the field of play, is hypnotic and serene, even when the music and the pace of the game are respectively driving and hectic.

Music Catch ably maximises the oldest heuristic for the quality of a game: It is very very easy to play, and very, very hard to master.

“Google Shock” denotes the state of stunned disorientation which arises when an unexpected new Killer App crops up with the likely potential to dramatically alter some aspect of one’s life. Similarity to “Culture Shock” is intentional; Google Shock is a form of temporal culture shock.

For example: Google Maps Real Estate.

In my youth, I spent great scads of time cycling or driving about the suburbs within a few kilometers of Monash University (Clayton) clutching a thick wad of liberally annotated rental lists which I had gathered by hand from the many faintly dodgy little real-estate agencies which cater to the student-housing market in that area.

Now, I am in Google Shock. Once again, I find that something I just accepted as a fact of life has been expertly hoovered up into the web.

The rammifications of this are only just beginning to dawn on me…