OK, so it looks like I’ve figured out a way of getting the game to run properly on monitors with higher DPI settings. (Having read up on this, I’m not the only one whose softeware has this problem. A lot of new monitors are being built with higher DPI settings than what used to be the standard, and a lot of software is not really built to handle that.) It will, however, take some time to implement, so the patch might take a couple of weeks. Still, if you’re one of the (thankfully few) people who had this issue with Desert Bridge, a solution is on the way.
Are you talking about me, human?
Little Tiger, burning bright
With a subtle Blakeish light,
Tell what visions have their home
In those eyes of flame and chrome!
Children vex thee – thoughtless, gay –
Holding when thou wouldst away:
What dark lore is that which thou,
Spitting, mixest with thy meow?– H.P. Lovecraft
This is a photo of the beast that, until about five minutes ago, was sleeping on the towels in our wardrobe. She is now sitting on the windowsill, staring out onto the street. No, wait – now she seems to be meditating.
I’m usually not big on posting biographical details of my life in this blog – they’re not really of much interest to anyone except me – but the cat is obviously such an important part of my everyday life, as well as my philosophical outlook, that it might be a good idea to say a few things about her.
(She has now moved to my table, to check out the sounds Zathras is making in the aquarium. He just went back into the water. Kitten is now sitting on top of the aquarium, staring in. We call this Cat TV.)
I first met the cat when she was still a very tiny kitten, more than four years ago, back when Verena was still living with Mr. Morden. The three of us were writing Star Warts: The Panto Menace, our first panto – though thanks to Mr. Morden, Verena never got any credit for the writing.
(The cat has now buggered off to the other room, where she’s sleeping on the bed.)
Anyway, I remember the cat as this incredibly cute, hyperactive little thing. And that’s pretty much what she’s still like. The only thing that has changed in the last few years is that she’s become a lot more fond of humans.
After Mr. Morden left Verena, and during the time that Verena lived with a roommate (a choice now greatly regretted, since that person has caused so much trouble), the cat kind of went wild. Not because she missed Mr. Morden, but because she’s a cat who likes to go out, and with Verena being the only person who could go downstairs and pick the cat up, there were many cases where the cat spent way too much time outside, and was then not so happy to come inside again – especially since the old lady downstairs would let her into her flat so often that the cat probably didn’t know where she lived. (Not knowing if the cat was inside or outside made picking her up even more difficult.)
By now, however, these problems have been solved. I figured out a system that both the cat and everyone else is happy with: we let her out sometime around 12 at night, and I get up every morning at 7 and pick her up. (We can’t have a cat flap because the people living in this house object to that, and the outside of our door belongs to the house, not to us. Yes, that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? And the door downstairs is even more out of the question. A cat flap would be too ugly. Besides, half these people hate everything that lives.)
So this is our daily ritual:
I get up at 7, tired and cursing.- I go downstairs. We live on the fourth floor.
- Downstairs, the cat is sitting behind the glass door and silently meowing at me. Why is this door closed, human? Why are you so slow?
- If she’s not there, I open the door and go “psspsspss” and she shows up, running maniacally. The human! My best friend!
- If she’s still not there, I use the recording of Verena whistling on my cellphone, and wait. She usually shows up after a few minutes. Ah, human – there you are. I thought I heard you whistling. What exactly do you require?
- If she still doesn’t show up, which is rare, I worry and try looking for her in 30-minute intervals.
- Once she’s there, kitten is very happy. She purrs loudly and rubs herself against my legs. (If it’s raining, she meows annoyedly when she comes in, and is even happier to see me.) Walking up the stairs is a bit of a challenge, as I have to stop every two steps and get headbutted by the cat.
- At this point, I have lost any verbal skills I may otherwise possess. “Ooooh little kitty-bitty, ooooh-yooo-yoooo-gooo-gooo little monster baby thing. You want to have sweeties, honey? Let’s go upstairs. Oooh, yes, you have fur, isn’t that wonderful? Yes, little monster, I like you too. Let me walk, you monster. Oooh little kitty.” And so on.
- Once we get into the flat, it’s time for food. Normally that used to mean going to the kitchen, but lately I am suffering the results of an experiment gone wrong. I wanted to see if the cat could learn to associate treats with the windowsill, you see; and so I always gave her her treats there. And it works, just like in Pavlov’s Cats: now the cat has a way of telling me that she wants her sweets now, human! So now every morning the cat runs into our room and jumps onto the windowsill, waiting for her morning dose of treats.
- Our cat loves all the Whiskas treats, but she absolutely despises all Whiskas food. She won’t touch it. Odd, isn’t it?
- Once the treats have been devoured, it’s off to the kitchen. Kitten only eats food with jelly – everything else is dismissed. She is particularly fond of tuna and chicken; rabbit is also OK. Salmon is evil.
- The human who brought her up – in 99% of all cases, me – has to stay with her while she eats. Sometimes I have to go to the toilet, which results in the cat sitting in front of the door and meowing like hell. It’s cute, and incredibly annoying.
- The next step varies. I go to bed, but sometimes she needs something done first, like a cave. Kitten loves caves. The easiest way of making a cave is to throw a blanket over the armchair, but she gets bored after a while and new caves have to be invented. Thankfully it’s possible to rotate. (Sometimes she just sits on the armchair and meows. That’s a clear sign, but I’m so good at understanding the cat that I can tell what she wants even without that. It’s a little scary.)
- Once I’m in bed and falling asleep, kitten usually runs across the flat and plays with stuff. Lately it’s the carpet. (Verena notices none of this. She sleeps like a rock, I sleep like a feather.) She also drags herself across the sofa and armchair with her claws. This is all fine, except for that she also meows, because she’s offended that no-one is watching or playing along. It usually helps if I get up in bed and look at her for a bit, or just say “Yes, kitten.” After a while, she realizes that she’s rather sleepy herself, and goes to sleep somewhere. I can finally rest for a bit.
Doing this every single morning is the reason that I’m almost always tired. But it’s worth it, because this way the kitten is happy.
Other fascinating cat info:
- Kitten likes to get up in our bed (we have a loft bed, and so does our roommate) and sleep under a blanket. Sometimes she crawls under the blanket herself, but mostly a human has to do it. When she wants this to happen, she climbs up on the bed and meows until someone fulfills her wishes.
- She’s afraid of hats. Well, of people wearing them. And no, she was never abused by a hat-wearing person. I think the problem is that hats change the shape/outline/size of a person, and that scares her.
- Once, she climbed into the aquarium while no-one was watching. When we came into the room, we found the cat lying on the land part, with the turtle sunbathing next to her. It was rather surreal.
- Another time, she went to the other aquarium while the other turtle was sunbathing. Instead of getting scared, as these turtles are wont to, Zathras obsessively tried to get to the cat through the glass. They were fascinated by each other. How bizarre is that?
- Our vet seems to hypnotize the cat. She stands still as a rock, though she’s (understandably) not very fond of injections.
- She hates being petted like other cats. If you try it, she will try to claw off your face. Well, she’s slap you first, but if you continue, beware. What she likes is being massaged. Go figure.
- She’s also been increasing the range of her vocalizations in the past couple of years. I think it’s because I talk to her so much. Cats vocalize very differently for humans than they do for other cats.
- Our cat does not watch television. She has no interest in moving pictures at all. Verena’s parents’ cats do watch television. What’s with that?
- I can hear the cat coming down from a bed in my sleep, and over loud music. Apparently my brain is trained to recognize “thwupp” sounds.
- I spend way too much time pondering cat intelligence.
- Is the cat capable of recognizing when she’s being talked about? I think so. I’ve seen her ears twitch when she’s being mentioned; sometimes she even suddenly looks up at us knowingly. She just doesn’t want us to know that she knows. Cats play mind games.
- I can stare the cat down.
- She’s not very good at defending her territory. Mostly she runs away from other cats, usually screaming so loud we can hear her from a long distance. Even if she hasn’t even been touched. Nevertheless, she pretends to be a tough street cat.
- I’m not good at carrying the cat in my arms, though I regularly pick her up and swivel her around. (She likes this.) Verena is excellent at picking up the cat, and the cat loves being carried around by Verena. But then, to her Verena is her mother. As for myself, I think the cat thinks of me as her idiot kid brother.
- Like all cats, she constantly does incredibly stupid things and then pretends that it was intentional. No wonder humans like cats: they are goofy and elegant, stupid and intelligent, tough and fragile – all at the same time. Just like us.
And now you know about the third member of our little family, the insane creature known as Cat. Oh, I almost forgot – she doesn’t have a name. Except Cat, kitten, monster, and so on. Things have been tried in pre-Jonas days, but names just glide off her shiny black fur. Think of her as an Elemental Cat.
Remind to write a post about why God is a cat. It explains everything.
The Witcher
After playing The Witcher – one of the most highly acclaimed RPGs of the last few years – for a couple of hours, we just sent the following e-mail to our friend Ivo:
Has there ever been a game with worse writing?
Has there ever been a game that made us wince so often?
Has there ever been a game that made us more embarrassed to be looking at it?
Has there ever been a game that is more clearly a rip-off of about twenty other fantasy worlds?
Has there ever… oh screw it, just thinking about it is too embarrassing!
We managed to learn how to love Two Worlds, but I’m not so sure about this game… the writing isn’t just painful, it’s PAINFUL. Like, it makes me want to rip out my brain just to forget the sheer idiocy of some of the lines. Ohh, it so wants to be edgy and sexy and gritty and ambiguous… and all it is is painfully, PAINFULLY adolescent.
The Religion of Capitalism
Certain types of people – often, but far from always, libertarians – like to refer to socialism as a religion. Some academics are also into this, referring to it as having a “teleological conception of history.” This kind of thinking is right up there with “socialism is a nice idea, but it can’t work in real life because people are mean” on the list of popular misconceptions about socialism.
Socialism is not a religion. Stalinism, sure – as with any dictatorship, you have to convince yourself of some pretty strange things in order to accept the absurdity of one person ruling over everyone, and to ignore the horrors perpetrated in the name of that person. But Stalinism is not socialism. It is the opposite thereof. And that’s not the point of this post.
Socialism is also not some kind of hippie let’s-all-be-friends utopia. Part of why the whole 60s counterculture movement was such a miserable failure when it came to politics is precisely because it did not understand this. Socialism isn’t about changing cultural norms. It’s about how we organize the economy and the power structures of society. And that’s it.
Let’s take the desert island metaphor. A bunch of people are stranded on a desert island with limited resources. How do they organize themselves? Socialism suggests that the best thing to do would be to think things through, consider the amount of resources and what needs to be done, and proceed on the basis that:
- Everyone is equally entitled to survive and to feel well, and that that should be the purpose of the economic and political organization of the desert island.
- Everyone should get a say in what is to be done, especially as it affects them personally.
- It is better to plan what to do with the limited resources and to use them according to principles of logic.
In terms of our real situation, socialism is a scientific analysis of our economic system, and an attempt to create a system that is more balanced and more successful at meeting the needs of the population, while giving people more control over their environment – which, after all, is the point of democracy.
But what about capitalism? What would capitalism do on a desert island? The central concept of capitalism is the profit motive. Everyone does everything to gain profit, to promote their own cause, and this causes everyone to live a better life. Or, alternatively, the worthy succeed and the unworthy perish. Depends on your denomination, I suppose.
We all know where this would lead in the desert island scenario, right? It leads to collapse. It’s just not sustainable – no matter how you turn it. The people on the desert island have to cooperate, or they’ll die. They have to think of what exactly they are going to do with their resources, or they will starve. They can’t have one or two people who rule them and get everything while everyone else fights for scraps.
I’m not telling you anything new. This is the oldest of human stories. It’s the story of human civilization.
Capitalism is the belief that you can build a system around greed, and that the Invisible Hand will make everything be OK. But, as socialists have been pointing out for decades, there is no Invisible Hand. You cannot have stability without logic and planning. Capitalism may have been a good thing once, a step forward; no-one is denying this. But that was a long, long time ago.
And now capitalism is collapsing, more or less exactly as logic suggests that it would. No matter what the governments do, nothing is working, including all the old tricks that got the system out of its recessions. The numbers are clean and undeniable. You see it every day: stocks are falling to record lows, unemployment is going up in incredible amounts, governments are collapsing, and so on. And yet, people are acting as if this was surprising. As if it was unanticipated. Even worse, they are acting as if soon everything will be OK again, because the Invisible Hand will make it so.
If there is any economic system that is based on a deluded and deluding kind of faith, it’s capitalism. Capitalism with its magical free market, its Invisible Hand, and its belief in the power of human greed. Like the worst fundamentalists, the believers of capitalism want to deny reason and logic, want to deny science, and replace it with their equivalent of Creationism. But pseudoscience does not hold a failing economy together, and flapping your arms and believing (or yelling that gravity is just a discourse, for that matter) will not make you fly.
Let’s just hope people realize that before we all hit the ground.
CAKE!
I will forever associate cake (CAKE!) with Stephen Fry‘s Cinderella. But that’s another story… and now the wonderful Helen Trevillion has written a song about cake! Which you shall go and listen to.
Yes.
Moving things.
As in transporting them, that is.
We spent all of today helping our friend Ivo move. It was a lot of very hard work, but it went pretty well – it could have been much messier. But now we are very, very tired. We’ll watch an episode of BSG and go to bed. Tomorrow we go back to IKEA for the rest of his furniture, assemble it, and then we’re done. And after that maybe I can tell you about the various creative things that are going on.
Real Life. (with furniture)
The reason for the lack of updates, despite plenty of material, is good old Real Life. Between my stupid turtle (who managed to hit his nose and had to go back to the vet), going to the doctor, and helping our good friend Ivo move to his new place (spent almost the entire day transporting stuff from IKEA), not to mention work, there has been little to no time for anything creative. And I must admit that I’m still wildly jumping back and forth between utter frustration with game development and the desire to make more games.
I’ll try to update later tonight.
Gnargh.
Problem with clogged pipes. Water damage to flats below. Why now? Why always when we just seem to have some free time? Also, turtle with unknown eye problem. Not a decent night’s sleep in days. Cannot write coherent sentences.
Gnargh! Gnargh, I say.
And now sleep.
Projects page up
It doesn’t contain all that much info, but from now on it will always be updated when something new is added or something old is finished. I will also add a “finished projects” page at some point.
Review. Things that will be.
There’s a new review of Desert Bridge that made me very happy:
On first impression, the whole game feels playful and offbeat. All of the graphics are sketched in crayon with a passion for colour and oddity rivaling that of a six year old. All the characters and spaces are slightly kooky, from the cat who believe he’s an emperor, to the spider-pig, the cuddly dinosaur in the garden, the collection of stoned mushrooms in the pantry, the giant hamsters, to Horaffe, the bionic giraffe. Coupled with all of this, the soundtrack really wouldn’t be out of place in some sort of clay-mation mystery adventure.
To some extent, all of this makes the game seem like it must be targeted at children, but it’s really not. The humour’s quite sophisticated and sometimes subtle, there’s a distinct hint of sadness throughout, and without giving away the ending, let me just mention that the word ’sinister’ in the title doesn’t mean that everyone is left handed.
I was so happy when I read this that I picked up the cat and waved her around a bit. She didn’t mind, but jumped onto the windowsill to demand some sweets, which I proceeded to give her despite having already given her far too many today. (Not actual sweets. Cat treats filled with cheese and chicken. But I think of them as sweets. Or sweeties. My vocabulary goes all strange when I’m talking to the cat.)
In completely different news, I am considering taking part in the Independent Gaming Source’s Cockpit Competition. Maybe. Things are being considered.
Projects page should be up soon.
I have finally, finally gotten all my film-related files onto the new PC. We’re talking hundreds of GBs. Phew! Now to finish the damn thing.
Also in the works: reviews and thoughts about Battlestar Galactica, Hogfather, and Lost. And maybe some podcast-type things.
And tomorrow I get to redesign my aquarium, because my turtles are out of hibernation and coming back from the vet. The land bit will now have a bonsai on it. How awesome is that?