Screenshots and History

I stumbled again with this old nice article by Alex Chan on taking screenshots as history preservation. I have a small screenshots collection of old machines of mine, dating back to 2000 and they always bring a smile to my face. I can vividly remember where I was and with whom, how life was back then, etc.

This one’s from December 2004. I had a two-monitors configuration which wasn’t common at the time, you needed two graphics cards and play with Xinerama to get it working. I just finished writing a script that captured and stitched each monitor’s screenshots into a single image, using ImageMagick:

I should do the same with Real Life. I should take more photos like I used to. While I enjoy artistic photography, composition and stuff, there’s also a place and value for casual snapshots, like the old days with point-and-shoot cameras. Nowadays, I always carry a camera with my smartphone, I have no excuse. Just snap without much planning. This is not about art but about history and logging.

We were there. We lived like this. Our kids looked like this. We dressed like this. Our house looked like this. Our pets looked like this. I looked like this. I have so few photos of myself; I’m always behind the camera.

Just capture things with a screenshot, with a photo; all its imperfections, mess and lack of glamour. History. Preserve it as it is.

The Making of Dune II

A phenomenal insightful article about the creation of one of my favorite games. Although the mechanics haven’t aged well, Dune II will always hold its place in history as the father of modern RTS games.

I remember a school friend raving about it, saying it was a very different game and not knowing exactly how to explain it to me. «Real-time» wasn’t a thing back then. The whole gestalt of building, gathering resources and strategically placing your units was overwhelming for us kids. Just looking at the details on the Windtraps, the little flags waving, the units walking, the sand tracks left by the Trikes, it looked like a real, living, breathing world existing right there in the screen. So fascinating.

Oh, and the manual (we had a photocopy of it) had a cool photo of the development team on the back. That was also super cool and inspiring, as the dream for Oliver, Oscar and I was to develop our own games.

Mr. Boom y yo

Mr. Boom es un juego antiguo para DOS programado por Remdy en 1997. Es un clone de Bomberman muy bien hecho y bien divertido. Hasta ocho personas pueden jugar al mismo tiempo en una misma computadora o varias en una red IPX. Oliver y yo lo jugábamos bastante y se convirtió en nuestro juego favorito.

Remdy era parte de la demoscene, del grupo Dentifrice. Mi pseudónimo en la demoscene era Jaguar.

Le envié un correo electrónico (no existía Twitter ni Facebook en ese entonces) felicitándolo por el juego y comentándole lo mucho que nos gustaba jugarlo. Me respondió agradecido.

Tiempo después, salió una nueva versión de Mr. Boom con nuevas características de juego y correcciones. El juego te permite poner tres letras para tu nombre, yo siempre pongo «JAG». Pero esta vez sucedió algo diferente…

En lugar de quedarse con «JAG» como siempre, el nombre cambió a «JAGUAR». ¿En serio? ¡No podía creerlo! ¡Me pareció la cosa más genial del mundo! No recuerdo si le volví a escribir, pero thanks, Remdy, it’s the most awesome thing ever!

Mr. Boom está disponible en RetroArch, lo he probado y el easter egg sigue allí, mi nombre inmortalizado para la posteridad. Viendo el código fuente en Github, hay otros nombres que también reciben el reconocimiento de Remdy.

Si algún día hago un juego, le pondré un easter egg similar, y tendrá un saludo para Remdy.

Living With a Computer

He disfrutado un montón leyendo este artículo de 1982 sobre un escritor (James Fallows), su primera computadora y la fascinación con muchas cosas que a nosotros nos son naturales.

For six months, I found it awkward to compose first drafts on the computer. Now I can hardly do it any other way. It is faster to type this way than with a normal typewriter, because you don’t need to stop at the end of the line for a carriage return (the computer automatically «wraps» the words onto the next line when you reach the right-hand margin), and you never come to the end of the page, because the material on the screen keeps sliding up to make room for each new line. It is also more satisfying to the soul, because each maimed and misconceived passage can be made to vanish instantly, by the word or by the paragraph, leaving a pristine green field on which to make the next attempt.

Lo que me parece más interesante del artículo son las acertadas observaciones del escritor sobre cómo la computadora ha cambiado su vida. Por ejemplo, acerca del tiempo:

Computers cause another, more insidious problem, by forever distorting your sense of time. When I first saw the system in the back room at Optek, I was so dazzled by the instantaneous deletion of sentences and movement of paragraphs that I thought I could never want anything more. When the scientists at Optek warned me about certain bottlenecks, I had to stifle my laughter. In particular, they warned me that I might grow impatient with tape recorders as a way to store data. You have to understand, they told me, it can take five or ten minutes to load a long draft into the computer from tapes, whereas a disk drive (which would add a thousand dollars to the cost) could do the job in seconds. Typical vulgarians of the machine age, I told myself.

Una foto de Exito

Recordé que en el manual de Dune II — un juego de PC que jugué con mi primo años atrás — había una foto del equipo de desarrollo.



Esta foto fue (y sigue siendo) bastante inspiradora. Hasta hice un par de dibujos de mí mismo con un equipo de programación en mi libreta, como una epítome de éxito.