2024

Time for the yearly recap. As usual, I don't dwell on work and home life. I'll still note that 2024 is a weird year to retrace, as my time use has become disrupted. I watched less films and TV than probably ever. I didn't play that many games. I didn't read many books.

There was some coding, tinkering with stuff and visiting demoparties, though.

The retro year was bookended by two ZX Spectrums. I gave intense attention to the Spectrum Next at the beginning of the year, even writing a small article for Skrolli about it. This enthusiasm ceased almost as rapidly as it was built up. It's an interesting hobby computer, but somehow I can't get my head around working with such a niche-of-a-niche platform. Now that a QL core has arrived, I may be tempted to dig it out again.

A family of Sinclairs and Spectrum-likes

The Spectrum from Retro Games also appeared late in the year, got it up and running with the nearly mandatory HDMI/VGA, memory stick and joystick tests. I've been fiddling with some extra material during the holidays, and the fruits will be posted in the blog eventually...

Demos and Games

In 2024 I visited the most demoparties ever, which isn't all that much though. But, most of my retro and demoscene motivation coalesced around the Vammala Party, Assembly, Alt Party and especially the Zoo 2024 event. I partook in my first ever Assembly contribution with the LVL001 entry Astral Plane Mechanism for the Tic-80 fantasy console platform.

Telefunken VR520, in glorious PETSCII

At best, the party bubble persists even after the event, with recurring fantasies of giving up one's day work and concentrating on 8-bit platforms for the rest of my life. As the fog subsides, reality returns and I find it less meaningful.

Zoo did have a longer afterglow than usual, further helped by the mythical Fishbomb demo from Extend, which failed to appear at Zoo. (It was presented in the Transmission64 online event.)

Zooparty: Elite turned 40

Alt Party likely served as a gentle reminder of the "I ought to have had" mindset that always follows when not contributing anything. This may have helped me create a whole game for the Zoo Party, The Last Z-8. However, made under a month it was still a little rough around the edges and I have been adjusting it still.

I also finally organized my game imperium into a bare-bones representation at drterrorz.itch.io, also featuring the Multipaint release. Time will tell if this is somehow useful, or if enshittification will eventually eat itch.io too.

Sound

The quest for the perfect music/sound creation environment continues, the old Akai EIE sound card serving as a catalyst for change.

I'm now thinking that computer-gear hybrid setups are too clunky, whereas either doing everything on a computer or without a computer, is more viable or suitable for my approach. The former means using Goattracker to create SID music for games, the latter means messing around with mini-synths and a MIDI-synced multitrack recorder. More about this later, maybe.

A Roland Boutique JX-08

God forbid actually producing, or learning more music.

Films, TV, Games

Ok, I did really watch TV and played some games. But No Man's Sky was the only substantial new game I got my hands on to. But I just couldn't become hooked to what is essentially an endless customization, crafting and tinkering trip. Otherwise games were limited to the occasional 5-minute plunge into vintage ZX Spectrum, Amiga and C64 games.

I restarted my Lichess account for playing chess, and concentrated on playing only the 5+3 games and puzzles, with varying success. I've now again lapsed, it remains to be seen if I can find the time and better sleeping patterns to continue it meaningfully.

No Man's Sky

Three Body Problem at Netflix didn't entirely mess the books' premise, but it was still more of a slideshow collection of all the cool ideas and iconic moments. Then again the books were mostly one cool idea after another.

Umbrella Academy is one of those series that started with a promise, but kept dwindling. I'm glad it is now finished.

I watched some original Star Trek from Netflix, concentrating on the episodes I already knew to be good or at least iconic. Which mostly means seasons 1-2. The Doomsday Machine, Amok Time, Journey to Babel, The Ultimate Computer, The City on the Edge of Forever, Balance of Terror, The Squire of Gothos, Naked Time...

Acolyte was a modestly interesting Star Wars series for a change, so of course the army of tiny JD Vances had to review bomb it out of existence. I haven't still finished Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. It looks like it's more aimed at kids, which is ok – nearly all Star Wars is – but altogether it seems the series didn't really need to exist in the Star Wars universe.

Physical space

The 2024 was marked with more activities oriented in the physical reality, which I also blogged about. 

The electric kickbike customizing pretty much died for 2024, although I did ride the rentals just as before.

I did get a few more woodworking/DIY tools. One reason for this is the near-constant modification and attempt to squeeze something out of fairly small spaces, but also making boxes for electronics and joysticks, which require more precise tools.

The Z-saw "best" 90-degree sawing guide

A pro might make do with simpler tools and learn to be accurate, but I can't resist the idea of having gimmicks that make tasks easier. Seeing as nearly every task has a corresponding life-saving tool, such a tendency can easily fill your non-existent garage.

Gadgets may be doomed to gather dust at the back of a shelf. Hopefully blogging about them reminds me of their existence.

I've also learned not to buy the cheapest alternative, which can deal a blow to the old wallet. There are the cheap "Temu" knock-offs, which are to be avoided. I'm also a little suspicious of what one finds at Clas Ohlson or Motonet, even though they can be reasonable. 

Then there's always the Woodpeckers® ultimate solution, imported from US will cost an arm and a leg.

Trangia cooking with spirit alcohol

Last but not least, I had some experiences with Trangia camp cookers, first through "passive smoking", eventually receiving one version myself.

Again, a hobby that involves material configurations and acquisition of extras, accessories and superfluous crap, it does have the positive side of doing something outside. That is, if I get that far.

2023

The 2023 retrospective has been delayed a little...

Listing "what I did last year" is not now very appealing, but I'll try to keep up the tradition.

Programming, graphics

The year started with the release of Multipaint 2023 with Vic-20 modes and the beginnings of a large internal overhaul. Every export and import of native formats is handled through external scripts, and I hope to extend this idea to a few other facets of the software.

Still, the most ambitious programming task was the Commodore 64 game Lancess Priya, which had been brewing from since 2022 summer. The semi-vector graphics routines make it more of a technical exploration than a proper game. I found the energy to port the game to Commodore plus/4 too.

ZX Spectrum Next... but what's wrong?

Of old computers, Sinclair Z88 inspired me for a while, fostering thoughts about focused, keyboard-based text-only computing, but the computer eventually became just another oddity in the pile.

In December, at long last the ZX Spectrum Next arrived from the 2020 Kickstarter batch. The final moments of the year were spent tinkering with the Next and getting Multipaint to do 256-color graphics.

As the "Z80N" processor has fantasy extensions, there's really no way to build a similar computer by putting together a real Z80 and an FPGA for video/sound chip. But despite some quibbles about the authenticity of this new "Spectrum" it has been enjoyable to explore.

No Escape

The retro graphics output was modest this year, although notably it does feature the first official ZX Spectrum gfx compo outing, No Escape, a remote entry for the Edison 2023 demoparty.

For me this is somewhat humorous moment, as I originally made Multipaint to create ZX Spectrum graphics, way back in 2013. Well, okay, the one-screener Unhanged Speccy demo already featured my gfx.

This and the Vammala Party piece New King were mostly left-overs from earlier times.

Applescii Macscii, happy 40th, Mac!

Although the old computers never really left me during 1990s and early 2000s, it has now been a more dedicated ten-year journey with exploring 8/16-bit computers, PETSCII, bitmap graphics and programming.

I sometimes think this "phase" is winding down rather than going to higher gear, but something new comes up all the time. The balance of the hobby may become shifted but apparently there's no real end in sight.

Games

No sooner than I thought the year would not have much gaming in it, I found myself playing Eurotruck Simulator 2, Carrier Command 2, Mudrunner, Lake and Just Cause 3, as documented in the blog.

I did touch Disco Elysium, but despite all the accolades it didn't look like a game I would play. Too wordy and narrative-driven for me. Before 20 minutes had passed I switched it off.

I also started with the 2009 Bionic Commando, and although it looks solid enough it will have to wait for another time. 

Again, Proton/Linux with Steam largely enabled all of this. I'd perhaps nominate Carrier Command 2 as the most interesting game experience for my 2023, despite all its flaws.

Lake

In addition I would play the occasional vintage game, and a few games on the aforementioned ZX Spectrum Next platform. Perhaps the tiny tower defense variant Next War took most of my time.

I finally became fed up with chess, at least the online variety. On self reflection, what began as a slow alternative to computer games, with focus on physical pieces, boards and paper books, ended up as an online grind with diminishing returns, sense of wasted time and increased irritation. I will return to it eventually.

TV, Books, Films

Star Wars: Ahsoka was not that bad, but it's not my generation's Star Wars anymore. Perhaps it is made for those who grew up with the prequels, Expanded Universe novels and the animated Clone Wars and Rebels series. Now instead of having rare encounters with Samurai-like Jedi, we're now treated with 1-2 light saber fights every episode.

Ahsoka. Not the series.

The first resurgence of what should be the post-slump Doctor Who has arrived, and although it looks promising, I'm wondering if the re-invention is sufficient. Soon it's 20 years since the renewal of the series, and one can say there's already nostalgia building up for those early 2000s times.

Dark was the most memorable TV series I watched this year, even if the third season went off a tangent and mostly just stalled the outcome. It started out looking like a poor man's Stranger Things, but had its own clear voice after all.

More recently, Umbrella Academy has proven to be entertaining enough, following on the footsteps of Watchmen and the like. I don't too much care about TV or film format superhero adventures, having read the stories in comic book form long time ago. Again the third season meandered and stalled around a plot point that was already evident in previous season. Such is serial TV these days.

Talking of TV, my mind is rather blank about 2023's TV. Perhaps the increasingly splintered nature of streaming TV is something that puts me off watching more. Want to rewatch Twin Peaks or a few episodes of McGyver on the spur of the moment? No, not possible.

I managed to see about 70 films (not counting re-watches) in 2023, starting off with Koyaanisqatsi and Lawrence of Arabia. Koyaanisqatsi is less artsy than its makers probably intended, but at least it sports the Philip Glass soundtrack that eventually mutated into the C64 Delta tune in Rob Hubbard's hands. I could see Lawrence as an important and influential film, but the "grand historical epic" format dragged it down somewhat.

Truman Show could be added to the list of films I really ought to have seen before, and whatever one thinks of Jim Carrey I thought the concept was more interesting than the one in Matrix. Oh, and I did see the clever Barbie, but Oppenheimer is still waiting.

I saw more than the usual amount of Finnish movies in the theater, partly because of research purposes.  The new Hirttämättömät (Unhanged) and the Spede biopic were not all that impressive but were mandatory viewing. In addition I saw Je'vida, a not too happy film about the integration of Sámi people in the 1950s.

Aki Kaurismäki's Dead Leaves (Kuolleet Lehdet) was the same usual what Kaurismäki does, but the new actors made it feel fresher and less of a "one man's odyssey". Aki's films are often set in an ambiguous time period – Man without Past looks like it could be 1950s, but suddenly you see a computer terminal in a bank... Dead Leaves is set to a specific year with laser-precision. Also, weird to see some of my neighborhood, so recently filmed, in the film.

This new year is unlikely to be very film-heavy.

Nearing the end of the year I read what felt like a ginormous amount of sci-fi, but in actuality it was a generous handful of books. As a kind of literary highlight I read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a monumental and not entirely enjoyable task. At least afterwards I could easily read normal-sized sci-fi paperbacks in one evening or two.

2022

The customary look-back at a year passed, and mix of themes that didn't make it into a blog post. 

As usual, the blog follows an interest which generally last from a few weeks to about a month or two. The year begun with some C64 related matters, then engaging with Amstrad CPC and writing some text with it. More space was taken by detailing my adventures with an electronic kickbike, a hobby which unfortunately took a badly timed hit after having an accident.

Programming, Pictures, etc.

Despite not releasing any programs or games this year (when did that even become granted?), the new version of Multipaint is still under construction and I have hopes of getting it out soon-ish.

Some of the biggest developments are not even intended for release at this point. There's a companion piece to Multipaint, a C64-only editor that should enables sprites, multiplexed sprites, sprites in borders and so on. I have made couple of works that relied on this new program.

Cartoonzone workstage inside Gfxlab

Here I liked exploring the use of both extended and non-extended sprites in the same picture, and finding a fitting context for each.

There's some actual Commodore 64 game goodness coming out too. My reluctance to discuss on-going game projects means it will have to wait, but it's now safe to say it should be complete in 2023.

Then a few examples of C64 PETSCII and bitmap images.

Ego The Living Planet

Above, Ego the Living Planet PETSCII and below Night of the Homeless at the Vammala Party graphics compo. This is a plain hires without sprites.

Asunnottomien Yö

Oh, and one of my older works, Countryside, was printed and exhibited in the Pixeled Years exhibition at the Game Museum in Vapriikki, Tampere, Finland. Some of my other works were included in the rolling slideshow along a bunch of Finnish bitmap C64 art.

Multipaint running on a PC was also displayed opposite to a joystick-driven Advanced Art Studio, to also give an idea to the visitor how the conditions for making images differs. The exhibition, curated by Electric and Duce of Extend, is still running.

The panel discussion at the exhibition, alongside heavy presence and comments at the Zoo'22 demoparty (and an experience in tutoring the platform at a university) did make me reflect on my role as the tool creator. I'm now thinking that the resemblance to a 1980s/1990s paint program is actually a good thing and shouldn't be ruined by trying to add too many features.

Pictures at an exhibition

Talking of Advanced Art Studio, recently I've dug out some of my old C64 floppy disks in the expectation I could find some hilarious BASIC gems and pictures from around 1989-1990. This was helped by SD2IEC SD card reader and JaffyDOS program which allows me to create D64 disk images, using the real 1570 drive as a source.

It turns out the treasure was not as abundant than I had hoped for. The BASIC programs tended to be short and unfinished. It's also tricky to piece together the few machine code and sprite materials which generally don't have any kind of loader built-in.

But there was a nice instant payoff in the form of a couple of graphic artefacts, such as this copy of a cover from a Traveller 2300AD Role Playing Game extension Kafer Dawn.

1990: Traveller 2300AD

I'm fearing that my earliest programs are not present, as my findings looked like they were from a second wave of creativity. Going through dozens of disks, I no longer think there are any significant "lost disks". The floppies back then were mostly reserved for copied games which tended to have priority and I could have overwritten my programs on a whim. The same was even more true for ZX Spectrum tapes, and I have very little or nothing remaining from that era.

I'll return to these in more detail if I get around to examining the BASIC program disk contents.

Interlude

The blog saw slightly more MIDI minded postings recently. It is as if I finally have the kind of setup I envisaged at late 1990s, never mind actually producing something with it. Maybe it is a kind of eternal "garage project".

I have continued to work on a sequencer that combines tracker and piano-roll editing into some kind of fake Atari ST/Amiga sensibility, partially hard-coded to the kind of equipment I happen to have. MIDI only, no VST support. Again, this is unlikely to be released, there is enough such software out in the wild and I don't want to be answerable to this...

Windowman

This project which I've only called Miditracker, and its latest incarnation, Windowman, has obviously been under development before 2022. It has a some sort of genealogy dating back to late 1990s. Now was simply the year when it began to feel more fully formed.

Games

I felt I played less games overall during the year, but looking back it's not true. At the beginning I did complete Control, after which I had a long pause from larger games.

Control

Control was more action-oriented than I expected. Cleverly the confined setting doesn't require so much content creation (I suspect) so the focus is instead on the explosive encounters and modulating this experience almost endlessly through power-ups and weapon variations. The story and the underlying mystery didn't captivate me so much, but the milieu and the relatively banal environment are well done. At some point I simply wanted to be good enough to beat the game.

I still used GeForce Now to stream the game, which was surprisingly doable. But overall I became weary of streaming games. Too random selection of games, the streaming can hiccup and a game can just as well crash remotely as they do locally. After returning to non-streamed games it felt like a breath of fresh air.

Gris

The largest game was Jedi: Fallen Order, which despite some hiccups and crashes could be finished in Linux/Proton. I have to say Linux has come far from Quake and Tux Racing, although in a sense these Proton-games aren't "true" native Linux games. Apparently Proton can run some games better than Linux native versions, though.

Generally, somewhat smaller and just so slightly older games work almost always on Proton without even fiddling anything.

Jedi was a fine game, but surprisingly it wasn't that different from Tomb Raider, or I guess almost any third person action adventure these days. The guy is even explicitly raiding tombs.

Jedi: Fallen Order

Towards the end of the year, I picked up pace and completed Rise of the Tomb Raider, then Gris. The Tomb Raider sequel didn't have the same impact as the 2013 reboot, being mostly more of the same.

Gris was stylish and enjoyable, occasionally utilizing the simplest of 8-bit game mechanics without the frustration and unfairness that often went with the early games.

I also picked up a bunch of cheap games from the Steam sale which is still going on.

For shits and giggles I got Garfield Kart, which I quickly set aside. 

Garfield Kart

Now I'm looking into the Giana Sisters 2D which I bought on the reputation of the DS game it appears to be based on.

However, the rather nice pixel graphics of the DS version have been translated somewhat unevenly into mobile game vector muck. Sometimes it even refers to the Amiga airbrushed cover art, and the music has some of that Amiga twang too. Can't say how the game play differs from the DS version, which I never played, but it does feel a little clunky at times.

At some point I also completed Great Giana Sisters on the C64, something I've not done since the early 1990s I guess.

I have alternatively numbed and irritated my mind by playing battledudes.io, which I might be finally leaving behind together with surviv.io and the like.

Giana Sisters 2D

TV, Books, Film, Star Wars

After getting the Chromecast dongle and discovering streaming apps for Android, we've been watching this and that, opening and closing subscriptions as needed. I've had Netflix subscription quite permanently, occasionally turning Disney+ and HBO Max on/off. 

The apparently final season of Westworld felt more satisfying than seasons 2-3, but I guess there's little to salvage from that concept from now on. 

What else. Stranger Things, Locke and Key, Bridgerton, Emily in Paris, 1899, Manifest, Witcher, Lucifer, Sandman, Raised by Wolves, Discovery of Witches, The Nevers...

Although it looks like this should make me a couch potato, it was achieved by watching one series at a time, 1-2 episodes per evening.

The Doctor in Doctor Who was finally reincarnated. The final hurrah was better than most material from the recent years, but still a far cry from the most glorious seasons. Given the new series has been going for 15 years (sigh), it's not surprising it had to go through a bad patch. Now there's some signs of course-correction, but this isn't usually a very promising artistic direction.

If anything, you'd think Star Wars would be that one pop-culturally over-saturated, over-ripe thing that would better lay down and rest for a while. But I did binge on Star Wars during summer. The expectation of the Kenobi series led me to watch the films in episodic order, up until Kenobi, then after the series I followed with Rogue One, the original trilogy and the sequels. (I left out Solo).

Some of my Star Wars junk

I have to say the prequels felt slightly better than before, whereas my previous assessment of the sequel trilogy as "better than prequels" began to feel doubtful after this proper re-watch. At least the Rise of Skywalker was pretty dire. The film dives into depressing depths through Palpatine's return with a killer fleet, the stupid hyperspace-skipping scene, the Sith dagger plot... Yet strangely the film managed to end on a reasonably high note and cast an arc back to the prequel themes.

Disney+ keeps churning out Star Wars. Mandalorian season 2 wasn't as triumphant as the first one, relying more on cartoonish characters, fan service and pushing the uninteresting Mandalore mythos. Still all in good fun. Book of Boba Fett was enjoyable but tended to derail from its premise and ended up with prequel-style hijinks. I liked Kenobi better, because it was bold enough to take central characters and bring a kind of emotional closure to the Vader/Kenobi interactions the prequel trilogy lacked.

Star Wars: Andor was in some way what I always feared a live action Star Wars series might be like, before any such existed. Talky drama, low on fx and action, 99% planetside... However they managed to make it compelling, mixing genres and ideas not usually seen in Star Wars. What was the Imperial bureaucracy like, mentioned off-hand in the first Star Wars film? What's the world like outside the Skywalker saga and force-users? My main gripe is that as season 2 became a certainty, various plot threads were vaguely non-committal by the end of this first season.

All this re-watching and watching was capped with reading the famous Star Wars "Thrawn trilogy" books. Short verdict: it wasn't that impressive to me. Perhaps you had to be there, a kid in the early 1990s, starving for more Star Wars and buying into the idea this was the "sanctioned, official sequel" to the film trilogy. Bullshit! I do not think these novels would have made a great premise for a film trilogy or TV series.

Otherwise 2022 wasn't a huge year for sci-fi reading, but I did get into Liu Cixin's Thunderball, and lately, Carl Sagan's Contact. At some point I also re-read Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud. Through serendipity, the themes of these books were not that far apart from each other, life careers in science conflict with politics, military and religion.

2021

Ok, the usual year recap thingy, biased towards the retro/c64/scifi side of things.

Retro things and machines

I've been strangely worried about being less "productive" when it comes to things like PETSCII or bitmap graphics. But all in all I did quite a lot of other things. For example, I released the C64 game Leilei Relay, even if this was mostly coded in 2020. 

Goodbye 2021

The working title was Uranus Lander (cf. Jupiter Lander), and I really did intend to make a PETSCII one-screener out of it. 

Then I got into vertical scrolling, character graphics, smooth sprite animation... This way the project grew in size.

Hyperspace PETSCII

Although I have worked on a new Multipaint version from time to time, there is no hurry and for once the program seems to work across platforms without too many bugs, so why not have a little vacation. Well, no, I did work on it but the internal overhaul is so large that it's not going to be seen out soon.

With re_monument, I did go public with the first "demo-something" intended for more modern computers. This was outed at the Vammala Party. The code was originally p5.js browser-friendly, but eventually put into Processing/Java to get the music working more easily. The music was put together with my weird MIDI-setup and the software I may eventually open up more.

Frame from re_monument

Also, I put a lot of attention on Amiga and Raspberry Pi at the first half of 2021, but stopped working on that. I'll see if I can pick up some of the things next year.

Electric kickbikes (or "scooters") became a new blog theme, first starting with the Voi rentals and eventually getting my own. It's one idea for steering my mind away from sitting in front of a computer both at work and at home. Sadly the weather's not currently very good for riding.

Games

It looks I got to play a lot of games though.

2020 was the year of Steam/Proton, but this year I've also added Geforce Now streaming service to my arsenal. With some luck, it's possible to collect games to Steam and Epic and stream them using this service, without having to use your own hard disk space for installing.

Recently I played through last year's Cyberpunk 2077. Despite all the bloated early hype, it's a decent fairly linear story-driven game. Many in-game technologies that looked like dynamic gameplay elements in the trailers are more like skin. Granted, it might reward more in-depth play and optimizing the character's cyber implants.

Having said that, the hacking elements are rather nicely done and do not distract too much from the other gameplay. Still, it looked the fastest way to play through was to emphasize gun skills and damage hacks, then shoot everything to pieces.

Spot the glitch.

Plague Tale: Innocence was on the table too, but had to give up halfway because of stressful gameplay. Likewise Shadow of the Tomb Raider was eventually (digitally) shelved. These games are not duds but simply did not click with me now. Reventure took a surprising 16-hour chunk to play "through".

I also got round to playing Fortnite, only to find it's not that inspiring to sneak around for 20 minutes and then end up killed by the first person you meet. Somehow surviv.io had already shown a better format to me. I can still understand the appeal of the game. 

Talking of surviv.io, I might have continued playing, but the numerous problems with logging in, and apparent disregard for the browser version began to demotivate me. Not that many play it currently, it seems.

Proton has continued to be useful. I had quite an educational streak of fps games with the remastered Quake, Black Mesa (Half-Life 1 remake), Halo: Master Chief Collection, and replaying Half-Life 2 once again.

Chess is still on the playlist, but the lessened playtime begins to show in the ratings. It may also be the average opponent at Lichess has become better, what with the surge in popularity of chess in general. But in any case, a vicious circle of not playing may be complete as it's not fun to see the rating drop. Yet, if the only remaining motive to play is the rating, then it may be worth reconsidering whether to continue playing at all. I'll still give it a chance when a suitable moment comes.

Sci-fi, films, TV, books

Instead of a full season there was a Doctor Who 6-parter called Flux. On one hand it was a bold experiment with disjointed story-telling, but on other hand it also suffered from the format, cramming in ideas that would have been more suitable for a full season arc. 

The show has been best when the stories have been more muted and given some time to build-up, so of course everything had to be extremely amped-up, spliced and shifting gears rapidly.

One of the Ravagers. Like, Ravages of Time. Geddit? Sigh.

Sure, Doctor saves the Earth and the Universe routinely in the season finales, an in-joke at this point, but now everything was hoovered back to the good old status quo in the most rapid and CGI-laden way possible. Plus a couple of genocides here and there.

Ok, it was actually unclear what's the state of the universe(s) now. We'll see. There's a couple of specials to come, but rumours also abound of cancelling or switching ownership of the whole series.

Sisyphus: The Myth, was initially promising but a very un-even time travel scifi show. Lost in Space ended in a decent way, but it never quite captured the concept of the original, of, you know, actually being "lost in space". Except maybe as the final punchline of the final episode. The not so great Another Life also ended, improving somewhat from the first season.

Lucifer has not that much to do with Neil Gaiman's world from which it originates, but it has been a fun and competently done series. Likewise Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency americanized the original concept a lot but was still nice while it lasted.

The 1990s mapped: as internet became widespread, Gibson had to follow

As for books, the most important was Liu Cixin and the trilogy of The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest and Death's End. (Curiously, the Finnish version of Death's End would be "Death is Eternal") It's a somewhat "post-modern" take on classic science fiction, and despite being "non-western" it's very aware of Clarke, Asimov and the like. Although working in this classical hard science fiction frame, it is comparatively pessimistic and to extent even nihilistic.

I read William Gibson's sprawl trilogy in very early 1990s, but have not really paid much attention to his later works. Now I've been going through the 1990s "bridge trilogy" of Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties.

Blog 10th Anniversary

Hooray, the blog is ten years old!

How to celebrate? Retrospection, of course.

2011

In 2011 I only made two blog posts, overviews on Laser 200 and Panasonic JR200 computers. My original idea was to present explorations on home computer hardware, more obscure the better.

It's possible I first got interested in having and using old computers and the idea of the blog simply grew out of that. 8-bit computers were still quite cheap at that time and I had made a few extremely cheap "lot" purchases that would seem impossible now.

Another explanation is that I had been looking to found a blog, but I wanted to avoid direct job-related postings or a diary. I also felt I would be a crap commentator of any topical or current themes, which may or may not have been true. Additionally I thought the theme shouldn't be anything as general as "drawing", "films" or "music" even if like all these things.

After writing some posts, I realized these were really notes that I could later use myself. This approach may have rescued the blog for me, as I didn't have to care so much whether anyone read it or not.

2012

For a while I did continue on the hardware side of things, exploring the JR200 tape format. Some of these posts are extremely thorough, and although I never quite learned to do simple and short blog posts, I've relaxed somewhat over the years.

I continued to explore JR200 with Marq, the other active Panasonic user in Finland (or in the world for that matter). 

After the JR200 theme ran dry there was a long pause in blog posting. I continued in autumn with modding a ZX Spectrum +2 case, gaining some minor infamy with this sawed-off mod.

Even if Panasonic JR-200 was a good start for the theme, there aren't that many un-explored computers out there. I bought ZX Evolution and this generated a lot of posts for the following year.

2013

This was the first really active year, as I managed to do 20 posts. Various ZX Evolution-related keyboard and casemod projects kept me engaged. 

I was able to keep the computer overviews going with Sinclair QL, Schneider EuroPC, Canon X-07, Panasonic MSX and Orel BK-08. However, I also exhausted this angle here and in many cases I didn't have that much new to say. I also learned it was perhaps too much to try to go into each platform as deeply I had gone with that JR200 tape format. 

I also often later found some of my statements were inaccurate and I begun to steer away from this type of posting. I relaxed the blog theme a little and provided game overviews, and other "hardware" such as typewriters, fleamarket findings and a clone of Sinclair A-bike.

Significantly, PETSCII was first discussed. As Marq made his PETSCII editor for Zoo 2013, I made my first "official" scene C64 releases under the handle Dr. TerrorZ and was involved in the First Ball PETSCII demo. The base was built for later developments such as Commodore 64 code and Multipaint software.

2014

I took a lot of interest into Sinclair QL and peripherals, writing a blog post with QL and so on. There are also ZX Spectrum/C64 hardware projects and still more ZX Evolution posts.

The year saw the ZX Sprites post, which is one of the most viewed. It's still something of a mystery how many of the hits are genuine and how many are robots, but there's at least a clear difference between a post that's viewed by dozens and a post that is viewed by thousands, which is also reflected somewhat in the amount of comments received.

There were again less "computer overviews" in 2014, but I did discuss Sharp MZ-800.

I had a notion of moving towards building electronics and logic, but I had also to admit there were even more limitations to what I could do and what I could present as reliable information on this blog. I'm nowadays a bit wary to present anything electronics-related.

I also dared to present a top-list of what I considered all-time best games. This could be revisited at some point. (Where's Half-Life 2 and Blue Max? Why is Neuroshima Hex positioned so high?)

2015

As I moved to Linux this also meant more Linux and "modern computer" blog posts, such as Raspberry and Arduino.

There was some rekindled interest towards ZX Spectrum, but it seems that old computer overviews are now largely gone. There's a nice post about ZX Spectrum isometric games.

This year saw one of the most viewed pages, Gimmick guns of the Spaghetti West. I still don't quite get how people find their way there.

2016

I went more into Commodore 64 direction, building up the development environment, building up to the release of Fort Django, three years after(!) having worked on that PETSCII demo at zoo 2013. 

Multipaint was first made public, and that had been under development for 2-3 years too.

The only "system overview" was Commodore Plus/4.

Rest of the year seems to have been somewhat thin, continuing with some C64/6502 themes and commenting on a Jarre concert in Helsinki(!)

The five-year anniversary went without fanfare.

2017

I started reflecting on my PETSCII and bitmap graphics as collected posts.

More retro game posts, such as Saboteur II and a post on icon driven games.

After a long time I bought an old computer, Basic 2000. I already think I made a note of having made a rare new acquisition. I also got Atari Portfolio, though, but was quite disappointed with it.

The decision of not being a collector had already been made earlier. I really wanted to use the platforms, and couldn't concentrate on too many. So I tended to go for the Big Three of C64, ZX Spectrum and MSX. Even then I'd mostly concentrate on C64.

Significantly, I made an Amiga post, but the time had not yet really come. A few hardware posts, a TAC-2 microswitch mod and building the Sinclair QL EPROM cartridge. At the end of the year, Sinclair QL momentum was building up as new hardware had appeared to the scene.

2018

I continued with QL theme, but also Amiga. First chess posts are from here.

Here I had reached a kind of natural blog mixture that has not changed much after. I post about twice a month. As explorations computer systems are quite rare, the discussion is more about peripherals or simply whatever I have been working on. Then there are the occasional bitmap and PETSCII presentations, sci-fi literature and whatever casemod/building projects I could bother to do.

At the end of the year I released Digiloi for the C64.

2019

A nice active year with QL, C64, Linux, PETSCII, some chess, Atari Falcon (a new system which generated a bunch of new posts).

I first posted about Linux Proton/Steam, a way to play non-native commercial games on Linux. Looking at these games has become an occasional feature.

2020

Notably a pandemic year so I probably had some more time and motive to concentrate on blog writing, therefore there are more posts. Then again it appears I've done shorter blog posts.

Strangely, there are three book overviews, which were rare previously, but it didn't become a huge trend.

I had fun time exploring The64 Microcomputer and later, the BMC (Raspberry-emulated C64) environments.

2021

And here we are. I'm going on with the same twice-a-month pseudo regularity, posting about whatever I happened to have time to do.

This year I've done more Amiga/Amibian posts. In recent years there has been perhaps a shift towards 16-bit computers and who knows it might continue.

More to follow

Has the world changed much in ten years? Computers that were 30 years old in 2011 are now pushing 40. I've become more aware that the equipment might just be rotting on the shelves and I should get rid of them if I'm not interested in servicing them.

Blogs were no longer especially fashionable in 2011, and this hasn't changed much. I don't myself regularly follow many blogs or even retro news. There is now more Facebook group activity than at 2011, and a lot of retro activism appears to have been concentrated into these groups.

There's no end in sight, but it's also clear the themes are shaped by available time and energy. The blog has transformed from the original 8-bit reporting to a more personal site on themes which may or may not relate to old computers at all.

2020

The customary look-back into the year.

Retro stuff = C64 stuff

Apparently I'm concentrating on fewer and fewer platforms. The year was quite Commodore 64-centric, such as toying around with THE 64, 1541 Ultimate II and casemods. More recently, I've worked with the BMC64 Raspberry Pi C64 emulator again.

I did a bunch of 6502 code but only a little of it has seen the light of day. I did release a small videotester for C64, though. PETSCII graphics is small enough to do occasionally. Also I made a couple of tiny demos based on PETSCII, such as the Petmanbatman and Advanced Pet Dragons.

I also got a PETSCII piece out in a paper publication, Kuti #57.

I've done less pixel graphics. I prefer to draw fast and that's hard to reconcile with the pixel aesthetic. Compared to PETSCII it feels time consuming and the results are not that different.

Multipaint got the inevitable 2020 update with transition to Processing 3 and resizable windows. Possibly it finally works reliably on a Macintosh. I'm perhaps hoping to put less time into this project and the 2020 version could be one of the last big overhauls. Many tiny improvements are on the to-do list, though.

On less retro front, I've been playing with a server, more and different Linux installations, a "new" mac and with some help I'm getting to know my way around these systems. Even Raspberry Pi looks more attractive now that I understand more about Linux than 5 years ago, and maybe it's a platform to look at more closely in the future.

Games

Mostly thanks to Proton, I could enjoy new games in 2020. The biggest game I completed was Just Cause 3 which worked nicely on Linux. A very enjoyable and not too long open world destruction romp.

I couldn't finish Nier:Automata, but maybe will return to it eventually as it had some quite impressive parts. It also glitched more on Proton than Just Cause, but was playable. 

Some of the smaller games were Lonely Mountain Downhill and Saboteur Sio. 

Lonely Mountain was incredibly addictive at first, but when I got bored I got totally bored with it. Perhaps less routes and bikes might have been better so I would have had more genuine motivation to optimize the courses, like with Stunt Car Racer.

It amuses me now how I initially dismissed Surviv.io, a game I first tried at the end of 2019. Then I played it for most part of the year and still play it. The overhauls to the login system and various outages almost put me off it, though. I'm now better at it but even now the results seem more to do with whether the really good players happen to be on-line or not, rather than my inherent skill. Outright cheating/hacking may have diminished somewhat at least.

Chess is still on the playlist but I've been concentrating on it a bit less. I make this complaint every year, and I'll make it again: I feel I could improve if I put even 30 minutes into it every day, but that measly amount would feel too much to dedicate. I did manage to play about 1000 games this year, although mostly blitz on Lichess. Slower chess would be nice but the time use is even harder to justify.

TV, Films, Books, Scifi

For films, the year 2020 was more about re-watching rather than covering much new terrain. Tenet was a memorable film but perhaps not the bullseye everyone was hoping. Well, amidst the worst Covid-19 stupor, this film had begun to gain a messianic promise which it really could not fully deliver.

Doctor Who continued, the episode ideas were good but the writing overall had some problems. No reason to stop watching, though, it's still solid TV sci-fi. In some ways I'd compare it to the first season of the new Who, an attempt to keep the episodes self-contained and finding ways to renew the mystery of the character.

Westworld season 3 started with a bang, what the season 2 ought to have been. But it begun to veer away from the Westworld concept and overall was a puzzling addition to the series. I guess it was meant to deliver the idea that we all live, or are about to live very soon, in a sort of "westworld". As a detail, a lot of people got shot from a close distance in a random and nonchalant way, something that got boring very quickly. 

The 100 came finally to an end, a not so high-profile series that over the years has had its ups and downs. I often felt it built upon watered-down themes from bigger series (Game of Thrones, Hunger Games) but it had its own voice too. The confused last season perhaps took some story-telling elements from Westworld.

The Mandalorian was probably the best Star Wars related thing in ages, but it also reminded me of how bloated the whole SW phenomenon has become. There's a lot of verbal/visual in-jokes and meta-gags, which the series can now afford as there are so many layers to the SW verse. 

The Queen's Gambit mini-series was a fascinating story about chess and a nostalgic look at 1960s US. As a TV series it was able to give more detail to the games and the chess player's practice than films usually do. Given how popular it has been perhaps there will be more chess-themed shows.

As for books, I also kept revisiting the old rather than reading much new things. Well, when I was somewhat ill I did go through Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy and Stig Larson's Millennium trilogy, pieces of past zeitgeist I had previously ignored. I made a point of reading the Asimov Foundation/Empire/Robot novels in a chronological order and a blog post about it is still in the works.

Onwards to 2021

I'm hoping to continue with business as usual. This blog will have its tenth anniversary in June!

2019

Recapping the year 2019 for me, concentrating on the blog angle but as usual some other observations too.


Programming, developing

Again, Multipaint was revised into 2019 version and the inclusion of pull-down menus and file safety makes it much more robust program.

The new ULAplus mode took a lot of time to make, fortunately it was also quite an interesting task to work with. It's not even finished, as it's not obvious how it ought to work.

An entry to the competition celebrating the original compopic

I've come to a point where I get some sort of message about Multipaint nearly every other week. Mostly these are good pointers towards bugs and bad program behavior. Sometimes I get feature and platform requests that I simply don't feel are within the scope of Multipaint, or don't fit to what I intended the software to be.

It's not likely I can or want to make Multipaint fit everybody's workflow, nor will it cover every possible platform. After all I made it for myself to make some ZX Spectrum pictures, everything else sort of grew out of it.

Problems with certain Mac/Java versions still persist, and in the future I can hopefully address these a bit more.

It's now one year after the Commodore 64 Digiloi game release!

The web accolades include "9.9 after 63 votes on CSDb" and "mentioned in an 8-bit Guy video", but I also noted there were print reviews of the game.

As an author of the game, a part of me says "wow, my game is reviewed in a magazine!" Another part of me says that we're really living a weird LARP of 1980s conditions, with different people playing the role of game developers, software houses, magazine publishers, reviewers and it's not always clear whether this all really serves the same purpose as back in the day.

Computer magazines, they still exist

Retro Gamer magazine from Future Publishing was the most "real" magazine (200+ issues, found from newsstands) to feature the game and they had about 2/3 page review, with the pleasant score of 86.

The English version of the K&A magazine not only featured the game on a tape but gave a full spread for the review. Acknowledging some of the problems the reviewer is still mostly positive about it and figures some of the deficiencies could be seen as virtues too.

The Zzap!! annual came later, and although the text is rather positive, they dissected it pretty thoroughly and dealt the rather rough score of 44%.

Jukka O. Kauppinen, a Finnish game journalist legend made a review for the Retro Rewind magazine in his inimitable gonzo style. The Digiloi review goes back and forth from an overview of PETSCII games, reviewing a couple of other PETSCII games in the meantime, and even includes a short comment on the actual game, finally landing on "thumbs up".

Apart from the reviews, I've also read many comments and discussions about the game. It seems more strongly to me now that many are prepared to champion a game they have not really tried that much, or at all.

I tried my best to make it work as a game, but again, as with Multipaint, I made something I'd prefer to play myself. I'm not that keen to play a new C64 game for more than a few minutes at a time or am just happy to see a video about it.

I couldn't find it in me to make another game yet, only the tiny Nine Rings demo showcases some improvements over the Digiloi routines. A scrolling game could be made with the same approach, but that might not be wise from a game design standpoint. At least I have slowly upgraded my 8-bit developing techniques, and perhaps something comes out of this eventually.

The Fall of Rome

The beginning of the year was a bit slow for Commodore 64 graphics, but I made it up in the end with releasing a bunch of new PETSCII images and the bitmap at the top.

My renewed interest into PETSCII was mostly thanks to the new Facebook group PETSCII World, check it out!

Back in Videoland

The major retro hardware acquisition of the year was the Atari Falcon. Updating the hard disk to an SD card reader and transferring software over to the computer was more interesting than doing anything with it really.

So, as a side-effect I got to learn more about Unix and Unix/Linux shells and writing shell scripts. It goes to show that if one gets intensely involved with retro platforms, apart from the intrinsic fun they can also result in learning that may be useful for today.

(I recall that figuring out Panasonic JR200 tape format in 2011 and the QL disk format in 2017 resulted in some practical "computer science" knowledge. Perhaps I'll save these reflections for the 10th anniversary blogpost.)

Speaking of QL, although I also bought the Sinclair QL Super Gold Card clone, it didn't result in that much new QL tinkering. I'm starting to suspect the 16/32 bit generation is just not worth the effort for me.

On another note, Unix-descendants seem to have taken over about everything in the roughly 50 years of their existence, so in the long run learning something about it may be a good investment into the future. I am also slowly building some more server, web scripting, programming and network expertise.

On the more physical side, I've continued building cases and boxes for devices, sometimes out of some perceived "need" but also simply for enjoyment. I also often need new tools for the next work stage, and the collection is growing. This is also going to some direction that I'm not yet quite aware of, possibly instead of casing old computers I'll try to build some Arduino thingy.


Games, Films, Books, TV

I have persisted with chess, with 1000 online games behind me at Lichess, not to speak some over the board games in beginner tournaments and even one park tournament, all in which I performed rather poorly. No obvious breakthrough in play skill has arrived. Although my online rating has improved overall, it seems my play quality suffers nearer the darker season and from other stresses a bit too randomly. A blog post about these experiences is in gestation...

As usual, I read a bunch of science fiction books which I also hope to review in a blog post in near future. The most important might be the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons, a 1990s kind of sci-fi rife with ideas that found re-use in Matrix and even as late as Insterstellar.

To me 2019 was not too memorable in terms of new films and TV. But at least we got to the end of the Star Wars saga, at least from a certain point of view. The technical oomph of Star Wars is somewhat diminished as it has become the movie standard these days, but at least the promise of nine films was fulfilled and I enjoyed this final ride. The new trilogy had perhaps less solid story trajectory in it, as they were rather isolated stories with a fragmented plot.

We had a full year without Doctor Who, but she's coming back real soon.

I hardly ever play the latest games. I finally saw myself through Portal 2, and completing Half Life 2 every few years appears to have become a ritual. But it seems I'm getting closer to the zero moment, especially now that my computer has processor, GPU and SSD updates. It almost feels I've spent more time tuning the thing than actually doing anything with it. Well, can't always be "productive." Completing Everspace took a chunk out of summer, Inside was a short but pleasant spiritual successor to Limbo and Broforce was a nice piece of 2D action candy.

And that's about the most kills I can achieve!

The Long Dark, Virginia and Firewatch introduced me to the 'walking simulator' genre, something that I thought wouldn't care much about but as the games are short they can be rather pleasant.

surviv.io in the browser was nice end-of-the-year snack but after the addictive 50v50 mode was removed (a temporary event) I found going back to the solo mode less appealing.

In 2019, Proton was the key to making Linux a proper gaming platform. I could launch complex games like Elite Dangerous and Prey, but did not really find the time and energy to get into these.

2018

As last year, I try to recap the year.

Firstly, what I said in the 2017 post, the idea of platform-specific pages for the blog has not proceeded, although I've updated the existing Sinclair QL one. I'll have to look into it some more.

I have avoided buying more old computer hardware, although I did buy that atrocious hand held console and a crappy flea market NES-clone. And just at the end of 2018, a C128D motherboard. Oh well.

On with the show!


Releases, Coding, Events

At the end of 2017 I was quite enthusiastic about Sinclair QL, but it turned out I did not spend that much time with it after the beginning of 2018. Even the work on the still unreleased QLDD software was mostly done in late 2017.

Commodore 64 has kept its position as my retro favorite, and the building of a new desktop case for the computer has occupied much of my hobby-time (and this blog). I recently got my IRQhack64 transfer working and a more in-depth blog post is already in the works.

Multipaint was revised into a 2018 version, and a nice version it is. I'm beginning to see the need for better file handling (e.g. recent/last file, autosaves, overwrite warnings) and possible GUI updates.

Panasonic JR-200 returned in a more virtual form, with starting the work on an emulator. I hope this eventually results in something new for the platform.

As usual, I also produced some pixel/text graphics. One was sent to a disk cover competition, the first time I made a 5'25" disk cover. This type of scene output was quite unfamiliar to me, I've probably never seen demoscene disk covers before the 2010s.

The demogroup Desire asked me to make a picture for their X-party demo called C 64, Hear 64, and make it I did!

I didn't do that much graphics in 2018, it seems. But after Christmas, I released a new Commodore 64/plus4 game, Digiloi, following the footsteps of Fort Django. Another PETSCII showcase, it turned out much more popular than I thought it would be.

It also made the blog post about the game easily the most read entry in 2018 and one of the most read altogether.

I'm the first to say there's much more potential in PETSCII games than what I was able to put together here, as even I could see in hindsight it might be coded better in parts. Even as it is, more stuff could be moved on-screen, but the game was getting a bit crowded.

Also, the plus/4 conversion proved to me finally that this computer is something to explore a bit further.


Games, books, films

From the beginning of the year I have put more attention to Chess, playing puzzles and computer matches at Lichess.org, acquiring sets and reading literature. I even went to a beginners' tournament.

But I'm starting to waver a bit. The amount of time it would take to improve my skills might be disturbingly high. So far I've not seen reason to stop altogether. I'll blog about my experiences at some point.

During summer I played some Atari 2600, and recently I've enjoyed old Commodore 64 games such as Blue Max, Rambo and Raid Over Moscow, also taking mental notes about what makes these games click.

Of more modern games I played Tomb Raider 2013 version, as it worked quite nicely on my Linux. I also had a peep at Life is Strange, but it didn't catch my interest. At the very end of the year I put some effort to try to solve Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, but it's still going on. I still play Larn every now and then.

On the book front, I read a bunch of sci-fi books, with emphasis on bestsellers and famous books I might have missed earlier. Turns out there is quite a lot. Some of this I also documented in the blog, noting how many plots and ideas in these books have found their ways into various games.

Westworld was the most important TV series. I expected more nods to western cliches & classics, but the concept is less about the west and more about the responsibility towards the imaginary worlds we create. The parallels and connections to video game culture are obvious.

I liked the season 2 less, it felt more of a mixed bag and less purposeful than the first season.

W was an enjoyable Korean "paranormal romance" (genre made popular by Twilight, I guess) TV series which I learn is a quite common there. It's from 2016 but now shown on Finnish net TV. A comic book artist discovers a doorway into the comic world, bit like in that A-Ha video. The daughter of the artist gets involved with the tragic yet resourceful hero of the series and the indefinite murderer.

Take ... on ... me ..

The new Doctor Who with Jodie Whittaker was enjoyable TV somewhat in the same way the 1st new Who season (Eccleston) was, except with higher production. What I mean the writers have given up complex overarching plots and mysteries and concentrated on the one-off episodes, with less metaphysics. The format and storytelling was more straightforward.

This was clearly the most brutal reboot of the series in the 2000s. There was something of a post-Brexit and post-Trump vibe with the season. Instead of pushing the proud Britishness every now and then it tried to be a bit more considerate and inclusive in more ways than just adding a minority companion.

After the New Year's Eve episode I am even more convinced that the writers have decided to 'stretch' the narrative. What would have taken a few episodes at best for each new doctor, now takes a whole season. As the doc returns in 2020, they have plenty of time to think of a follow-up.

Solo: A Star Wars Story. To me it was a pleasant small surprise, even if the film does not add much to the broader 'Wars lore. Well, Lucas was originally influenced by early movie serials, and in Star Wars we now have them. Is that a good thing?

As Solo was the character that most embodied the "space cowboy" side of Star Wars, it makes sense to make his film a western. The space scenes on the other hand were a bit messy. What with the candy-colored Maelstrom and the Maw, it's like there never was a good clean space shot, the kind that made the original films so stylish.

On with 2019...!