Ye Olde Staging Point

As it was foreseen, so it has come to pass. I've done my best to avoid it, not wanting to see with my eyes what my heart knew to be true.

The day that I hauled my Amiga 1200 out of storage, turned it on (how familiar and satisfying the soft click of the power switch!)... and nothing. The hard disk spins up with its comfortable whir, humming along like the quiet banter of an old friend, and everything seems to be going OK... but no more. It's not booting up. It's not booting up.

My Amiga is dead.

To paraphrase a certain starfighter pilot, that little machine and I have been through quite a lot together. How many unreadably dull college term papers did it patiently store away for me? How many turgid, mediocre short stories found a home within its metal-and-plastic brain? How many times did it faithfully fire up Shadow of the Beast and Wing Commander at my command?

The Amiga--I believe I even gave it a name once, but never really called it anything other than "the Amiga"--was a great machine, and I have a lot of fun memories of it:

• There was the aforementioned Shadow of the Beast and its sequels. And Awesome. And everything else Psygnosis ever published. I used to hook up the big family speakers to the Amiga, fire up Awesome, and just enjoy the music.

• There was the time during college when Brian and Arie played so many frantic games of MegaBall on the Amiga that they actually broke the mouse. By that time, the Amiga was officially "dead," and acquiring replacement mice was no mean feat.

• There was the heated ongoing argument between myself and my friend Jason about whether the damaged building graphics looked cooler in the Amiga or IBM PC version of Crescent Hawk's Inception.

• There were the text-adventure games I wrote, or at least tried to write, using the wonderful Aegis Visionary programming language. For many years after my defection to Windows-based machines, I dreamed of the day I'd go back and port them over to Inform... but alas, that dream is now dead.

• There was the sanity-blasting, but somehow fun, challenge of getting the Amiga to connect to the internet through my 14.4 modem, back when teh intarweb was something you really only used if you were trying to hack into the Pentagon or something. I remember something about AmiTCP, something about PPP, and all too much about Alynx, the Amiga port of Lynx.

• I remember the zeal of loyal Amigans willing to die before they saw their precious machine whored out to the Intel-chipset-using masses. As an eventual defector to the world of Windows and Linux, I lived for years in fear that Amigan predictions of inevitable victory over Micro$oft would come true, because I knew traitors like myself would be first up against the wall when that particular revolution came.

• I remember playing Bard's Tale a lot. A lot. And Angband. I remember frantically racing to beat Alien Breed 3d before my college roommates Jay and Arie did. (Jay ended up winning first, but that's only because the Final Boss Monster got stuck behind a pillar and couldn't move. Cheater.)

• I remember that my dot-matrix printer (donated by our family's venerable Mac Classic) in college was so horribly loud--I mean really, really loud--and took so long to print things that I had to schedule print jobs days in advance, because printing out a typical term paper made it impossible for anyone within 50 feet of the printer to focus on anything at all for the two hours it took the print job to complete. I remember attempting, with the assistance of roommate Brian, to strap a stack of pillows to the printer in a desperate, and doomed, effort to somehow muffle the hellish screaching of the printer. (I later upgraded to Inkjet technology, but by that time Brian was no longer my roommate.)

I remember a lot more. But that's enough for now. The tears just aren't coming; I think it hasn't sunk in yet. There are Amiga emulators out there with which I might get my fix, but that just wouldn't feel right. There's a community of diehards whose Amigas will have to be pried from cold, dead fingers sometime down the road. And there's even an effort to bring the Amiga OS to the open-source world, although that particular project violates Andy's Rule of Basic Decency #42: Don't Use Seductive Furries In Your Logo.

So the spirit lives on. But my Amiga is dead, and my heart is broken.

Posted by Andy at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, it's not quite that dramatic. But I note with sorrow that Alan is retiring his personal blog (at least for the time being). Alan, you'll be missed. Fortunately he's still forging boldly ahead with his food blog, which has contributed at least one delicious recipe to the Rau family kitchen.

Personal blogging is a real challenge to keep at consistently, especially when time is limited. Readers of this humble blog will note that 2005 was a fairly grim year as far as posting frequency went. For me, besides the ever-present factor of limited free time, I've found that the lack of focus in a personal blog sometimes makes it difficult to keep at it. Perhaps bizarrely, I find that blogging is most rewarding when it's done under at least a few topical constraints. Having a blog at which I can post, well, anything that springs to mind actually intimidates me a bit; it feels a bit too scattershot for my tastes. I know that some people like the stream-of-consciousness, whatever-will-he-write-about-next style of blogging, but speaking for myself, I am particularly fond of blogs that follow some sort of ongoing conceptual thread, no matter how slight.

And so I'm sad that Alan is closing his personal blog, but also glad that he's found a successful and focused outlet for his creative energy in his food blog. Nicely done, Alan... and I do hope you return to personal blogging at some point when time and energy allow.

Posted by Andy at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Nice.

Posted by Andy at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another odd but somehow entertaining piece about the problem of "Chinese farmers" in World of Warcraft.

Articles about "gold farming" and other bizarre MMORPG issues have been popping up frequently lately. The latest iteration is that some legitimate Chinese Warcraft players are being shunned by suspicious Western players, who assume that the Chinese players are gold farmers out to join up with an adventuring party, then snatch the best treasure and run at the first opportunity.

Having played the game semi-regularly for a few months now, I can't say for sure that I've spotted any of these infamous gold farmers (although reading all the recent stories about them, you'd get the impression that nobody but gold farmers plays these games). I have run across a few people behaving rather suspiciously, but obviously it's hard to tell from their in-game avatar if somebody is a foreign sweatshop worker or just a "legit" player with exceedingly poor communication skills and an alarmingly intense obsession with acquiring treasure. I guess I just like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Only on the internet, eh?

Posted by Andy at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just in case you were wondering: the worst song ever recorded is not, in fact, Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping." It is the version of REM's "Star Me Kitten" in which William S. Burroughs (coincidentally the worst writer in the history of literature) reads some sort of whacked-out poem inspired by a Marlene Dietrich song.

It's... unlistenable.

Just in case you were wondering.

Posted by Andy at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Brace yourself, my friends, for a rant.

Saw an interesting piece this week at The Escapist about the importance of used-game sales in keeping computer/video game shops like EBGames and Gamestop alive. Here's a rather eye-opening factoid:

GameStop executives describe this as a "margin growth" business - because they make a much higher profit margin on the sale of every used game than they do on the comparable sale of a new game. And in the highly competitive retail trade, margins matter. How much?

"Used games are keeping the entire ship afloat," a vice-president of marketing for Electronics Boutique tells me. "EB and GameStop make basically no money from new product."

Huh. I always failed to keep my lemonade stand running, but that doesn't strike me as a stellar business model. And then there's stuff like this:

Throughout most of the entertainment and media industry, when publishers want to make sure first-run entertainment sells in droves to the public, they charge what's called "sellthrough prices" - and for virtually every form of media, including books, movies and music, that price is between $15 and $25. You can get the brand-new Feast for Crows hardcover for $16.80, the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith DVD for $17.98, and Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor for $18.98.

But you have to pay $49.99 for Perfect Dark Zero, or any other new release videogame. In comparison to its closest substitutes from other industries, videogaming isn't priced to sell through.

And yet, selling through is the one thing a videogame must do. Videogames suffer from the shortest shelf life of any media.

My knowledge of large-scale economics is limited to what I learned in my high-school civics class, but it seems to me (and it's seemed clear for a while now, actually) that there is a serious shakeup coming for the computer/video game industry. Full-priced sequels and retreads are released within a year of the original titles. Prices of new games are ludicrously high, enough so that this sad old game addict purchased only a handful of new titles in all of 2005 and will likely purchase even fewer in 2006. Even with $50 price stickers, margins are apparently so low that your local Gamestop has to hawk used games to squeak by. Where games were once programmed by nerds in their basements with too much spare time and a cool idea, they're now cranked out by gigantic corporate teams with Hollywood-scale budgets. The latest round of consoles cost Joe Gamer a small fortune to actually purchase (and the games are sold separately!) but don't, to my eyes at least, offer anything remotely resembling gameplay that is more fun than what I used to play on my NES.

People have been ranting about this for a while--Greg Costikyan railed rather gloriously about this last year--and you're always hearing that direct-download game distribution (like Steam) is going to break down the current whacked-out game creation/distribution system, and every year people predict that the game industry is on the brink of another 1983-esque crash... but the months roll on, and the sequels are churned out, and the games still cost $50 (edging towards $60 now!), and old-timers like myself continue to gaze through rose-tinted nostalgia at the Commodore 64 gathering dust in the back corner of the closet.

Can't say I have a point here, but it felt good to rant a bit. Now to go drown my gaming sorrows in the blood of my (online) enemies.

Posted by Andy at 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been playing around with my blog feeds--specifically, I'm toying with using FeedBurner in conjunction with my blog. To that end, I've got a new feed you can use for my blog which incorporates my flickr photos and del.icio.us links as well as normal blog posts. If you want to try it out, plug this link into your feed reader of choice:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheStagingPoint

(If you aren't familiar with blog/RSS feeds, take a moment to read about 'em--you'll thank me later, I promise.)

If you'd prefer your feed to contain only posts, as is the usual custom for blog feeds, that feed is still available. Links to both are down at the bottom left of the blog.

I'm mostly playing around with this to see how it works, and so I'd appreciate it if you tried out the new FeedBurner link and let me know what you think. It's quite possible I've broken things in the course of meddling with the feeds, so if you notice any problems or annoyances with the new or old feeds, please let me know.

Posted by Andy at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, and see if you spot a certain familiar name! Let's just say that our humble apartment has of late been stacked with even more books about the ancient Mediterranean world than usual.

Class starts next week! Good luck, beautiful!

Posted by Andy at 8:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Why, you ask, is Hawthorne ranked among the greatest of American writers? Because he finds room in his prose for quotes like this:

"Where is it, then?" asked Hilda. "I never peeped into it."

"Wait, and it will open for you," replied her friend. "The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage scenery amid which we tread."

From The Marble Faun. Simply glorious.

Posted by Andy at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For those of you who just can't get enough of my blog, I've added my del.icio.us feed to the sidebar. If you're not familiar with del.icio.us, it's a nifty little tool that lets you store and share your web bookmarks online. So we'll see how that goes.

Posted by Andy at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy New Year! I hope your New Year's Eve celebrations were as riotous as ours. We got together with some friends and played Im Schatten Des Kaisers, a boardgame that Michele and I bought in Germany. We were armed with a crude English translation of the rulebook, but it still took us a few turns before we were correctly identifying all of the playing pieces. (Turns out it's an excellent game--very strategic, in the vein of Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne.)

You know you're getting old when it's 11:00 on New Year's Eve and you're ready to pack it in. That's right--we didn't even stay up late enough to witness the Dropping of the Ball (a ceremony the appeal of which has always eluded me). One of our friends had a sermon to deliver at church the next morning, and you don't want the pastor dozing off during the service. So we called it a successful New Year's Eve.

Oh, and in other exciting New Year's news, I played around with the theme and layout here on the ol' blog. Gone is the Squad Leader visual theme, although it's sure to return at some point given my fondness for it.

Hope your New Year is off to a good start!

Posted by Andy at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)