(no subject)

[prog]

Did you know that mechanical calculators existed well over 100 years ago? I am amused to see that they sold in about the same price range as Palm devices do today. (In unadjusted-for-inflation dollars, anyway.) They were intended for thousands of keystrokes a day, apparently, though their guts were all fine meshes of gears and levers... gah. I can't imagine what the maintenance costs (in both time and money) must have been like.

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While I like the idea and have been enjoying other peoples' efforts at it, I have clearly chosen to not meet the challenge of Blank Verse Blog Week. I guess that it takes me long enough to write this stuff as it is, without trying to pentambulate it. True fact: I am a very slow writer, because I spend a lot of time groveling over even informal things like weblog entries, unless there's immediate deadline pressure (which obviously doesn't apply here).

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I unexpectedly finished Ico last night, in one three-hour session. What a game. I got very vocal at plot developments towards the end; a lot of "Oh my god!"s flew at the TV from me as things fell into place. (Then again, I often said that just panning the camera around at the scenery while playing. It's just a beautiful piece of work.) While story isn't the game's strongest suit -- it's almost entirely contained in the prologue and endgame, with the whole vast midgame containing only one dramatic cutscene -- I can say that it did contain the first really effective plot twist I've seen in a video game, besides the "oho, your ally is actually your enemy" revelations that are actually pretty common in console adventure games or RPGs (or Harry Potter novels and so on).

I have a small problem with the very very very end, which has a tacked-on feel to it. I guess I can just ignore the last few seconds of visual if I want to continue savoring the more melancholy finale I first perceived. (On the other hand, I can genuinely see some people absolutely hating the game as it would stand without that final image, not just because it would be less happy, but... argh, I can't continue this discussion without spoilers.)

Random interesting point: the game's "Teen" rating seems to be earned only during the endgame. Everything up to that point would be suitable for broadcast on American TV during daytime hours, but the final challenge contains some imagery that's a touch too intense for that (though it remains far clear of the excessive). Usually games that have a certain rating due to some aspect tend to spread that aspect around evenly; yea, make it central to game play. So, I found this unusual. (And it certainly did make the ending that much more jaw-dropping.)

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Bought some books yesterday

• Amphigorey Also. Yay Edward Gorey.


• Krazy & Igntaz: 1925-1926. I had a deep need to purchase this as soon as I saw it. The last time I looked for Krazy Kat kollected komix -- years ago, when I was in my dreaming-about-professional-cartooning phase -- I could only find a single book, half of which was a Herriman biography. I mean, yeah, an interesting read, but I just wanted to absorb these strange and wonderful comics. So I'm very happy that Fantagraphics Books seems to be aiming to bind and sell unabridged collections of the strip. Hey: now that I look at it, this cover seems to be designed by Chris Ware, because I recognize his lettering (to say nothing of his layout preferences.) Am I right? Yes I am.


• The Difference Engine, bought as a stand-in while failing to find the newest William Gibson novel (Pattern Recognition, which sounds very interesting). It's by Gibson and some other guy, and wheeeew it's a stinker. I get the impression that Gibson came up with the background ideas (described on the back cover copy, which sold me on it), and the other guy did the actual writing. While Gibson isn't my favoritest author ever, I still hold him in too high regard to credit him with the hat-popping pretension in the prose that introduces the first character on page 1, and the circus-clown story pacing that rendered the whole exercise insoluble by page 4. Seriously. That's how far I got. This is rare; impressively bad. Oh well.

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WRT my guts: two mornings have passed without any complaints at all, so that's good. Haven't heard from doc. Visited the lab yesterday but they were closed for Patriot's Day, and I am working from home today. I'll try again tomorrow.

Comments

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

Nifty stuff there about the Comptometers. I think I still have an old mechanical electronic calculator dating from the 1940s. It could do addition, subtraction, and multiplcation. Addition and subtraction were done in one quick 'ker-chunk' but the multiplication feature required to go 'ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk' several times. I popped the cover off to see it in action. Pretty much the entire interior was a solid mass of tightly packed gears, cams, and other hardware.

I tried to find my old typewriter I inherited from an uncle in this office museum web page -- Its a portable Corona typewriter (circa 1912?) I guess before the company became Smith-Corona. The carriage could flip-over the keyboard to reduce it's size so it could fit in its own carrying case. There were only 3 rows of keys... the standard QWERTY layout however it had two 'shift' keys. One shifted from lowercase to capital letters, the other shifted to 'numbers and symbols' (including the number '1' and medicinal symbols for 'ounce' (ࡍ) , 'dram' (Ĥ), and 'scruple' (࠼) symbols which 'may' show up on your computer if you have the right fonts and unicode support -- and if I did this right). It is still mechanically sound and would probably work if I could find a new ribbon for it.

* I'm not sure how many people remember this .. but many typewriters did not have a '1' key... the standard practice was to use a lower-case 'L' (l) for '1'.).