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 | After the death of Bob Bemer, the inventor of the escape key, which must be the most cruelly mocking button on the keyboard (escape? You can't escape this. You can't escape that your program has crashed. You can't escape your desk. You can't escape your job. You can't escape that your hair is thinning and your waistline thickening. There is no escape. For you, Tommy, the war is over), it's rewarding to look back over his history of computing. Incredibly, Bemer was present at pretty much every major innovation in cmputing ever. Even more incredibly, the history of the development of computing seems to be oddly connected to the history of the horn.
My wife reported that, after settling in, Learson put a hand on her knee and asked "Is there anything I can do for you, honey?" Marion, one of the brashest, replied "Yes, give my husband a raise". A startled Learson asked "Your husband? Who's your husband?" Her reply was "You know - Bob Bemer - he works for you".
It wasn't much more than a week later that Learson moved me out as IBM Director of Programming Standards and shipped me off to Research. Andrus said later that the reason Learson gave to him was that I was giving the store away by cooperating too much with ANSI efforts on ASCII. I was of a different opinion. I thought it was because of the affair in the basement.
Once again we see that, like the torch of Prometheus dfor our primitive cousins, the throbbing horn has done much to shape our society.
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| Tuesday, June 22, 2004 |
| Unless you are Dave Winer, UserLand, Rogers Cadenhead or myself, you lack enough facts to make rational statements about the situation
I'm not sure one actually has to know facts in order to make rational statements. A Kantian might argue that facts are only likely to get in the way of rational statements, being as they are related to phenomenal rather than noumenal entities.
Interesting piece, to which the above was a response, here on the Winer situation. I confess that IMHO the person who trusts to a moral rather than legal imperative to protect their work is certainly on thin ice, and that obviously when one is a one man band you can't cover every eventuality - you have to sleep, for starters, and also, if you are paying for it out of your pocket and find that it is consuming disproportionate amounts of time and money, you have a right to take appropriate steps.
However. Throwing a gigantic benny is not always the most appropriate step. The subsequent edicts about how people should react when they wake up to find that their weblog has been replaced by nine minutes of Play for Today - also suspect. Blogger in adenoidal outburst shocker. However, he is entitled to make choices. What it does for the credibility of RSS as a standard or DWiner as its champion... well, that remains to be seen.
Anyway, if we can all take one thing away from the whole mess, I think it must be that people just love to jump up and down.
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| I feel for Phil Neville, you know.Do you think he ran on thinking to himself "Come on, Phil, play up! If you do well now, then surely a starting berth beckons for the quarter-final..."
Poor fool.
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| Wednesday, June 16, 2004 |
| Of course, that dream is not entirely grounded in fantasy. Although I never quite managed to forget that I was meant to be learning shit until fourth week, I did manage to miss a shocking number of lectures, tutorials and cetera at college. I'm not sure which, looking back fondly, I regret the most - the hames I made of my academic career, my personal fuckwittery or not having chummed up more to people who were then rich and are now rich and famous. OK, that last was largely a gag. Largely.
One of the terribly regrettable things about having been depressed for most of the 90s is that there are a fair few people out there whose last experience of me was basically of a deeply demanding and fucked up emotional void. The number shrinks, of course, as I reencounter people - and the Internet, as we know, makes it impossible not to find one's past lurching up at one. I don't know how teenagers cope these days, when every personal transaction can be subject to endless personal and peer review by digital preservation. By shouting a lot, as far as I can tell. Some of these people become my friends, others I just get to write off the list of "people who think I am a honking twatfarm". Still, you can't reassure everybody you have ever left on a bum note that you are all nice now. I guess that's not such a big deal, these days (that was sort of a Nico reference, btw).
These thoughts of self-improvement have been inspired primarily, I suppose, by my first unsupervised gym session, after my trainer announced that I was essentially sound of body, but could do with stretching a bit. The old me, it goes without saying, would find the idea of going to a gym when I could be off my face and having emotionally ruinous relationships with people who didn't much like me any more utterly absurd. The new me is slighly surprised by it, too. However, it is oddly rewarding. If I could just work out a way to listen to Radio 4 when underground, I'd be sorted.
Incidentally, the few people left reading this after its lengthy hiatus (and yes, I know I need to update my bloglinks) and the proliferation of blogging to cover every single human being with a knowledge of electricity may have noticed that I've been off current affairs, despite all sorts of fascinating things having happened. That's because if I thought about it too hard, I'd really get depressed. Again.
Let's look at a picture of a baby otter instead.
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| Monday, June 14, 2004 |
| Wooh. Just had my recurring dream, in a variant form.
I tend not to remember my dreams, except for this one, which has been burned in by sheer repetition. I'm at college, although in this case it was happening in the grounds of my old school, and somebody is chatting, when I suddenly realise, as a result of something they have said, that I have not attended a single lecture, not gone to a single a single tutorial, and not in fact met my head of subject once that year. Screaming ensues.
I have to get over this anxiety. Every time I wake up panicking, and have to slow my breathing and remind myself that the reason I have not been to any tutorials is that I graduated seveeral years ago, and I have a job now. One without tutorials. Usually.
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| Friday, June 11, 2004 |
| Elsewhere, what's been making me happy?
Karaoke at the Retro Bar has been making me happy. Wednesday before last, out for a drink, wending our way in a pubcrawly fashion back towards the Strand, we decided to pop into the Retro Bar for a drink. After all,we reasoned, it was a Wednesday: it would be pretty quiet. We had reckoned with the power of the magical empty orchestra.
One of my main reasons for karaoke avoidance is the choice of songs, which is uniformly dreadful - given a choice between singing Karen Carpenter and just throwing up all over the front three rows, I'll pick the latter every time. However, the Retro being an indie bar, but also a gay bar gay bar gay bar, we got indie karaoke, perhaps for the first time. Rock. I've never heard a karaoke "Panic" before, much less a note-perfect one.
Enormous sandwiches have been making me happy. Japanese food is making me happy, despite the pissed bloke who managed to compare me first to Hugh Grant and then to Jude Law, I think for no better reason than that I'm a posho, last night. The poor guy had also requested his waitress' name and was working unsuccessfully towards her phone number. When you start looking at the Japanese girls as part of your meal, leave the restaurant, pignuts. The Tokyo Diner is surprisingly inexpensive for a neophyte's restaurant, and most importantly has a sci-fi door). Clay kitten shooting is warming my black, black heart. On the whole, sleepy. More when brain work better.
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| Although bloggar certainly has its uses, one profoundly annoying thing about it is its tendency to efface itself, quietly tucking itsaelf away in the taskbar so that you don't think to save and/or post your blogging before shutting your bollocking laptop down.
All a bit awful, really. This space should have been occupied with a near-romantic admiration for Hammell on Trial (who, it turns out, was opening for Ani, not, as I first assumed, Ianni. It's terribly sweet to have a live album from a gig where you were teh opening act, but everybody is very nice and supportive),and then went on to a mixed review of the Magnetic Fields' i, which, briefly, is a bit mixed, has abandoned the synths which I rather liked about the mid-period stuff like "Get Lost" and "Holiday" and feels a lot like a codicil or endpaper to 69 Love Songs, but has some quality songs, especially the mighty I thought you were my boyfriend. MOre later maybe on this.
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| Tuesday, June 08, 2004 |
| So, farewell Creed.
Now, admittedly, I never actually heard any of their songs. In fact, I don't think that I had really registered there existence until right about now - they were just avague feeling, like you get when you realise that Gavin Rossdale must be doing something to pass the hours these days. However, their departure has touched me deeply. It seems that all our lives were somehow touched by Creed, no matter how lightly or how little, and now we must mourn. Until, once more, the crown of utterly unnecessary rock is onced again taking up and, even as we cry for Creed, we can see a future of mildly forgettable songs performed by people whose private life is far more interesting than anything they will ever actually commit to CD.
I call this piece of art "Vivat Rex". If it moves you, please give generously to one of Bryan Adams' favourite charities. It's what he'd want.
Meanwhile, I am loving the Hammell on Trial live CD. Nobody does banter like that man.
"I've watched the Osmond's MTV - Behind the Music five, six times now, and I'm still waiting for the part where they say 'we had sex once'".
Genius. Songs are pretty good, too. More on that when I have stopped commemorating Creed, as I feel we all shall in our own way.
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| Monday, June 07, 2004 |
| Oh you fuckers. You fucking, fucking fuckers. Once again, you give me reason to hurt you.
What precisely does Microsoft seek to achieve with this? A Microsoft spokesthing might say that it aims to show the universal method of communication that is the text message. To demonstrate that even the Iliad can be expressed through brief, abbreviated sentences? In doing so, the Microsoft spokesthing would show itself as mean in thought and limited in conception as the mean and limited interests it represents. Any cretin can tell you what happened in the Iliad, which varying levels of detail. Is that reading the Iliad? It is not. It is knowing, to some degree, what happened in the Iliad. One could do the same by watching Troy. You'd be wrong in a comical variety of respects, but perhaps no more wrong in some ways than somebody who had received a factually accurate statement of perhaps one thousandth part of the action and not one part of the poetry of the Iliad. In both cases you have not even come within bowshot of the Iliad, and if you are being led to think that you have, somebody is lying to you.
Fuckers. Now I have to go and kill. See what they made me do.
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| Oh my lord. Breakdancing Decepticons. I am going to file this in my "reasons why the war between the Transformers went on so long" file. Clearly they were enjoying the social life. Soundwave, of course, was always goign to be the one doing the dancing. He probably had salsa class on Wednesdays, on the grounds that it's a great place to meet women. Women dig Soundwave, because he has a cool voice and is a single parent.
The main reason for the interminable length of the Transformer wars, by the way, barring the fact that an inordinate amount of time was spent developing technologies that looked cool but were almost immediately copied by the other side (triple changers, combiners... they could have just stuck with rocks and had the whole thing over by teatime. No, not transforming rocks. Just rocks)and had no strategic effect whatsoever, was that whatever time they did not spend on R&D they plowed into demolition. It was always a far better idea to be a Transformer in a Transformer battle, almost guaranteeing survival, than a piece of scenery. The Transformers have a proud history of *demolishing* things. Scarcely a day goes by without one of them, through collateral damage, malice or incompetence, blowing up something big and important. So, they destroyed their cities without leaving a dent in each other, in much the manner of equally shit warriors the A-Team, the fatalities being from disruption to public services and confined primarily to civilians. As per usual.
This seems credible. However, by 2004, according to the movie (or 2006, depending on who you talk to), Cybertron was in the hands of the Decepticons, the Autobots having been driven off onto its two moons and their bases on Earth. Therefore, at some point there must have been some breakthrough by the Decepticons that enabled them to win the Cybertronian war. After long cogitation, I have reached the following conclusions.
1) Transformers are, in general, pretty hard to kill. This was what always confused me about the death of Optimus Prime – surely they could just replace the damaged widget, hammer out a few dents and have him roadworthy again? All most peculiar. I suspect a JFK-style cover-up.
2) With the exception of Optimus Prime, Autobots cannot fight for toffee.
3) With the exception of Megatron, neither can the Decepticons. The level of ordnance unleashed in a Transformer battle expressed as a ratio of the amount of actual structural damage done to the shapeshifting metal beasties themselves would make any quartermaster weep. Basically, they suck ass.
Except…clearly everyone had been putting in some work during the twenty years between our modern tales and Transformers: The Movie, as some of the shots were actually hitting their targets. The joy of practice. However, if I recall, not one Decepticon is really wiped out by the Autobot shelling – they are loaded into Astrotrain injured and dumped in space later.
All this leads us to only one possible timeline.
Somewhere between 1984 and 2004, intensive training allowed the Transformers on both sides to improve their accuracy to some level involving actually hitting each other once in a while. The fact that both achieve this bespeaks some sort of independent contractor.
Unfortunately, once their shots actually hit Transformer once in a while, they discovered that their guns were utterly ineffectual. Against oil tanks, towers, rock formations, futuristic buildings…all good. Against Transformers, utterly cack. Completely ineffectual. Embarrassed silence settles over the battleground as the warring factions realize that they may as well have spent the last three million years down the (no longer extant) pub.
However, somewhere around the turn of the millennium, superior Decepticon science (or, to put it another way, Soundwave. See above) produces a gun that *actually* works on Autobots. Nice one. Autobots thus driven headlong from Cybertron, although reports from survivors of Decepticons using guns that did more than blister paint were largely dismissed; as confusion had turned to boredom and increasing ataraxy, and thence absolutely enormous drug abuse among the disenfranchised and deeply unengaged (both literally and figuratively) warriors. After all, what point was there in eternal vigilance when a surprise attack would at worst melt your wheels, if the enemy had a chance to play his weapon over your body for about half an hour before you turned around?
So, the element of surprise is still intact when the newly-functional Megatron attacks the Autobot shuttle. Which is why Prowl, Ironhide, Ratchet, Brawn et al go for the traditional tactic of running in to close with the enemy, since there really isn’t much else to do. Before crying, “Oi! Shit! That hurt! OK, time out! TIME OUT! Stop shooting at us!” and expiring in some consternation.
So, in conclusion, for a long time the Transformers were indeed unilaterally shit, but between 1984 and about 2001 they could have conquered the universe, had they only tried using their pathetically inadequate weaponry on literally any race other than the Transformers themselves. This, I fear, is one of the perversities of galactic history.
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