From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXI

Introduction

This is the twenty-first installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, and Volume XX is here. The different volumes are unrelated, though the real tales related are all real late and do all relate to me. You can read them in alphabetical order, numerical order, chronological order (note that these are all the same thing), check or money order, in some semblance of order, and/or because you’re “just following orders.”

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs? Well, imagine you’re making homemade pasta. When you cut the noodles, you get these stray shorter bits from the ragged edges of the dough sheets that fall on the floor or—if you’re smart—into a large bowl placed to catch them. You can totally use those fallen bits by gathering them up, pressing them together in a ball, rerolling them, and re-cutting them. That’s kind of what I do when I’m writing letters to friends and some extra words fall out of my word processor. The only difference is, I don’t reroll them, so what you are about to read is a big ball of scraps. Serve them with a nice Bolognese Ragu or Alfredo, or your favorite literary equivalent. (And if a presenting a big wad of literary scraps sounds half-assed to you, consider all the effort I put into that extended metaphor you’ve just enjoyed.) This week’s selections of Bits & Bobs are from letters I wrote during college.

[If you’re wondering whose portrait that is in the background, it’s the playwright Antonin Artaud, best known for his “theatre of cruelty.” I happen to remember this from 1990. Neither ChatGPT nor Copilot was able to identify him from the photo, by the way, thought Google nailed it instantly. To its credit, ChatGPT had a pithy comment: “Honestly, it might be the most fitting photo of someone who’s read Artaud and survived.”]

October 30, 1989

I had the weirdest dream last night. I’m at this party and dancing with this totally fly girl. I’ve never danced so well (and as you know full well, in real life I cannot dance at all) and we’re really hitting it off, and then the song ends and the girl collapses into my arms. First I think she’s trying to be funny but then I realize she can’t even stand up. Her legs drop out from under her, so I have to pick her up into my arms as though I’m going to carry her off. Then she whispers, “I have to tell you: I’m going to die. I’ve been poisoned.” I’m totally freaked out, looking at this girl’s face, and then she dies right then and there. I start to wonder if I’ve been poisoned too. I guess the Freudian analysis kind of conducts itself here…

March 1, 1990

I hope March goes better than February; that was out of hand. First off, I was sick all month. Then last weekend I finally started [collegiate bicycle road] racing [for the season]. The time trial sucked because I’m not fit and still not totally healthy after that virus. The criterium was one of these bullshit parking lot jobs that’s roped and coned off so they could make it twist around as much as they wanted. Half mile laps. Oil everywhere—in addition to all these big puddles of oil, the whole surface of the road had this kind of film on it. It was in Irvine, pollution capital of the universe, which gave me a gnarly sore throat. I figured on riding the crit mellow, for fitness etc. Well, the only guy on our team who was riding well was the new tri-guy, Eric, who hasn’t really perfected his sprint, so I went for the primes myself. I won one, and took third in another, and was actually kind of digging the technical course. I got in this breakaway of five halfway through, and T— and Eric were surely blocking for me, so I pretty much had to stick with it, but I almost didn’t want to because I felt like shit. On the other hand, Tony Palmer [a notoriously fast Colorado racer I’d admired as a junior, who raced in the Olympics in 1988], was in the break with me so I was excited about that.

Well, T— was sick and dropped out, and a then few riders bridged up including Eric, who of course would give the break a giant boost, almost guaranteeing our chances of staying off. So things were looking really good when suddenly I stacked in the hairpin for no apparent reason. I think I slipped on some oil. Ripped a big hole in my new Aussie bib shorts, and got this oily asphalt smear on my helmet—really sucked. Road rash on the hip, both arms, and the left leg, but not too bad. I ran over to the pit, and the asshole race officials wouldn’t give me a free lap because I didn’t go all the way around the course. So the Mavic neutral support guy just straightened my bars and sent me off. It took me like five laps to regain my composure, and I was dry-heaving and really wanted to drop out, but I was still in eighth or ninth or so, on my own between the peloton and the breakaway, so I chased hard and eventually got within about fifty feet of the break.

[Zoom in on that photo and you can see the oil smear on my helmet. Note also my teammate, T—, watching from the sidelines.]

I thought I was about to latch on when Eric attacked and blew the break apart (temporarily, anyway). So much for closing that gap. I thought maybe I could solo in ahead of the main pack but about ten laps later I got swallowed up. Towards the end of the race the break lapped the field and I was trying to get Eric off the front, since I knew that was his best chance at winning. Well, Tony Palmer was having none of that, and started cussing at me and yelling, “Don’t even try it!” Somehow, in the moment, feeling as crappy as I did, I accepted his authority, sat up, and just waited for the sprint. Damn, the tricks your mind plays on you when you’re miserable…

March 16, 1990

I was going to hit the sack but I forgot I did my laundry this afternoon and left everything festering in the washer so I just went and put it in the dryer and now I have to kill some time while it dries and I don’t really feel like studying even though I really should because finals start next Monday and I hardly even have a clue what’s going on in any of my classes, especially this boring as hell history class which is so lame that the best I could do for notes are statements like “1629: some emperor on verge of something with his edict of restitution which means something is restored to church; things after this began to go downhill for the Hapsbergs while Wollenstein is an example of why whatever war this was was the way it was, however that was” (that’s an actual quote from my notebook) which doesn’t really put me in a very good way as far as the final exam goes.

May 28, 1991

My dickhead roommate—the one with the Rolex and the $15,000 stereo—had a birthday recently. His mom called and asked for him, and when I said he wasn’t home, she said, “Just tell him happy birthday, and that his present is in the bank.” Nice. Meanwhile his girlfriend got him a Nintendo and he plays it 24x7. At first I couldn’t figure out why she bought him this thing, and then I realized, duh, she’s sick of him, and this will get him out of her hair. Easy enough for her … she doesn’t have to live with the guy. First thing in the morning, he’s playing “Contra,” and actually, he never stops, except to go to the bathroom or grab a snack. Same game, day in and day out. My other two roommates and I keep telling him to get a life and his answer is the same as when we tell him to do his dishes: “I’ll do it later.” What really sucks is that every time his guy is killed, he cusses like a sailor. Like it really matters. What’s he supposed to say if, one day, the television—my giant 26” Sony Trinitron Color Console in the giant cabinet—falls on him and pins him to the floor? Nobody will answer his call for help because we’ll assume his little Nintendo guy just got shot again. I keep hoping he’ll finally lose his temper and smash my TV so I can make him buy me a new one that isn’t all blurry.

November 25, 1991

So I’m in the school library restroom and this guy comes in, heads to the next urinal over, and before even doing his business flushes it. I wouldn’t have noticed except he used his foot, so for a second it looked like he was trying to kick me in the head. I have no problem with him flushing with his foot since the handle is presumably gross, but why the pre-flush? I guess he doesn’t want his good, clean urine mixing with the bad, dirty urine in the bowl. That would be terrible, even if he’s not planning to use that urine again. Just the very sight of his elite urine mixing with the vulgar, common urine is too harrowing for him to witness. What a knob.

April 20, 1992

My mom and [her husband] the Landlo’ left their car here while vacationing in Morocco and I’m using it as much as possible to date this girl. So far that’s only been twice, so I better hurry things up while I still have the car. I don’t expect you’ll chastise me for refusing to have a really deep introspective contemplative period following the death of my last romance; as you well know, I am not some sort of Love Guru. But I can hold my own with the women: which is good, because that’s what they usually want me to do.

July 29, 1992

[To Giro Sport Design, Inc. who had given me a free helmet about six weeks before.] Dear Giro people: A month ago, my Giro Air Attack acted as liaison between my head and the ground. I was mountain biking in nearby Tilden Park, and that’s about all I remember because for several hours after my accident I alternated between being unconscious and incoherent. I was flown by helicopter to the nearest trauma center, where I underwent a CAT scan and was stitched up. Twenty or so sutures were put in my forehead beginning, notably, just below where the helmet left off covering my forehead. I have suffered no permanent damage to my head and for this I thank you.

October 8, 1992

I called my dad the other day and said, “Dad, I need twenty dollars.” He said, “Fifteen dollars?! What do you need ten dollars for?! Okay, I’ll mail you the damn five dollars.” But he didn’t.

But seriously, my medical bills are starting to catch up with me after that mountain bike crash. I wrote letters to the ambulance and helicopter companies, saying basically, “I have no money. Please dismiss my account. Thank you.” The helicopter company was cool about it, but the ambulance company ($550 to drive me one block, to where the helicopter had landed) wrote back threatening to slash my credit rating if I didn’t pay up the balance. (My crappy school insurance had only paid $100.) So now I’m on the installment plan, sending $50 a month through next June for a five minute trip I don’t remember going on. I plan to write in the “memo” section of each check, “You thieving bastards!” or at least “You teething hamsters!”

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Virtual Reality Killer App!

Introduction

For many years we’ve been hearing about how Virtual Reality (VR) is going to be a game-changer across the human experience, and not just a whiz-bang enhancement to video gaming. This is an amazing technology just waiting to be monetized. We’ve heard various proposed use cases involving education, physical therapy, tools for first responders, etc. but decades on VR is still kind of a fringe thing, without the “killer app” that will launch it into the forefront of blah blah blah. Well, this post proposes a truly germane use of this technology that could benefit millions of people. Instead of boring you with an essay on what I’m proposing, I’m going to walk you through the experience I have in mind. Call this post “VVR” ... as in, Verbal VR.

The experience

You enter the VR facility, receive a brief tutorial, don a haptic suit and a virtual reality headset, and mount an omnidirectional treadmill. Immediately you are immersed in a totally new world … but actually, it’s not exactly new. It’s all too familiar, from the dry heat of a late spring day (courtesy of the haptic suit) to the sound of yelling and cheering, to the sight of a red-orange running track surrounding an unrealistically brilliantly green infield. It’s a lot like where you ran track in high school except that the bleachers are completely full.

You look down at yourself and you’re wearing the same track uniform, with the distinctive Cobra insignia, that you wore in high school. You explore your environment and find you’re surrounded by ultra-fit looking teens in the identical uniforms, many of them calling you by name. “Stacey, are you pumped?!” a girl asks. After a pause she gives you a simpatico look and whispers, “Gawd, I’m actually so nervous!”

You look down again and see that you’re definitely wearing track cleats. You realize you’re not just here to wander around. “Stacey, we gotta warm up, we’re up next!” someone yells. She jogs over to you and says, “Let’s go!” But before you can follow her, a gruff forty-something man with a Cobras cap, a tracksuit, a clipboard, and a whistle hanging on a lanyard approaches. “Stacey, I need a minute with you,” he says, and ushers you off to the side.

“Look, today has got to be the day,” he declares. “We’ve never been this close to winning Conference. All our top runners are totally peaking right now. This is a massive opportunity. And like we talked about after last practice, I’m not having you run any events except the 100 meter hurdle, so you can just focus purely on that. Obviously there’s no way you’ll win, but I really think you can get top three. Your speed, your form, it’s all there—but as I’ve said all season, you need to three-step it. It breaks my heart every time I see you heading for the hurdle, flying along, everything perfect, and then you suddenly chicken out and do that childish stutter step. You should be well beyond this. I know you can three-step because you did it that time in practice when I ran next to you and yelled at you the whole time. You did it perfect. I really thought that was the breakthrough, that you’d do it right from then on.”

It’s all coming back to you now: the dreaded three-step, the bane of your high school existence. When you graduated, most of your excitement was actually relief that you were done with track: you’d managed to get your letter, you’d put the experience on your college essay, but you wouldn’t be running in college, and nobody would ever hassle you about three-stepping for the rest of your life. And yet here’s this coach, practically frothing at the mouth, exhorting you all over again.

“It’s not just the points, Stacey. I mean, it is—you definitely need a top three here, and like I said you cannot get that with all the momentum you lose stutter-stepping—but it’s bigger than that. We need every girl to be totally on today. Do you remember how stoked everyone was when Barb won the 400 at the last meet? That lifted everyone. We were having a good meet but after that win, everyone dug deeper and we had a great meet. If you do your typical step-stuttering thing here you’re gonna bring down morale for everyone. We’ve worked on your speed and technique all season and I know you can do this, you have to do this.”

Here he peers over the top of his sunglasses and looks you right in the eye. “Are we good? Are you gonna do this right?” You manage to croak out some kind of response and he nods and trots away. There’s a lump in your throat. Before you can make another move, a girl has bounded over and says, “Okay, Stacey, today is the day! We all gotta give our 110%! It’s Conference!” When you don’t respond, her smile vanishes and she glares at you. “This is our senior year. Our last chance. Don’t you fuck this up for us!” This girl must be the team captain.

Now the first girl is grabbing you by the wrist. You’d marvel at the tactile accuracy of the haptic suit except that you’ve entirely forgotten this is VR … that’s how good it is. It really feels like you’re being tugged toward an actual infield by a real teammate. “Wait,” you tell her. “I … I kind of need to hit the restroom.” And it’s true. Along with the butterflies in your stomach you’ve got the age-old pre-race instinct, deep down in your body, to lighten the load. You really need to go. Like, number two. It’s a strong urge—your bowels are starting to churn. Your teammate points toward the restrooms and you start jogging over there. You start to worry: am I gonna make it in time? But when you get there you remember this is only VR and there’s only so much it can do. You need an actual restroom. Merely touring the virtual one would be no more satisfying than those nighttime dreams you have of eating, where the food always vanishes as soon as you try to take a bite.

You paid good money to play this game, but that’s not important now. You lift the VR goggles off your head and prop them on your forehead, and step off the treadmill. You head over to the lobby and tell the attendant, “I need to use a restroom.”

“Now?” he says. “It can’t wait? You still have 20 minutes on your game! By the time you take off the haptic suit, do your business, and zipper yourself back in, it’ll be half over!” But his eyes are smiling: he knows how pressing your need is. You nod vigorously. “Right over there,” he points. You stride swiftly to the restroom and push through the door.

It’s not just any restroom: it’s gleaming perfection, all brushed aluminum surfaces, a big drain in the floor and state-of-the-art sprinkler system overhead. There are giant fans in the louvered windows. It’s clear the entire room is totally sanitized and refreshed between uses. The throne-like toilet even has a bidet option. You’ve never been so glad to see a public restroom in your life. And that’s when you know: today’s VR experience isn’t about the game at all. It’s about this.

Conclusion

According to Johns Hopkins, about 4 million Americans suffer from frequent constipation, which “is the most common gastrointestinal complaint, resulting in 2.5 million doctor visits annually.” It causes bloating, sluggishness, and abdominal pain. Treatment is challenging, because laxatives cause side effects and prolonged usage can become a problem of its own. Diet and lifestyle changes are a good long term course of action, but don’t provide much help when you’re having a bad bout … maybe you haven’t had a good bowel movement in days, and you wish there were just some silver bullet providing instant relief. Well, I just contrived one.

Of course there are details to work out, like matching up the details of the specific gameplay and script with the player’s individual history. (For example, maybe you never did a sport, but at least used to run through the neighbor’s yard and had to make it to the far fence before their dog caught you.) The game makers could create versions involving other fraught human enterprises like dating or public speaking. Fine details aside, I think you can agree that the immersive VR technology now available could provide exactly what so many people really need: a non-ingested, 100% safe, 100% effective psychological laxative. Now someone just needs to go code this game!

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From the Archives - Video Gaming in the ‘80s

Introduction

It’s pretty clear video games are insanely popular … perhaps too much so. Time magazine has called them “the greatest threat facing America.” (Note: I totally made that up.) A grown man was mugged in my neighborhood a decade or so ago, an obvious target because he was walking down the sidewalk absorbed in his Game Boy. The very next day I saw him again, this time at the nearby train station, still absorbed in his Game Boy. I couldn’t decide whether to push him on to the tracks or mug him myself so I slipped between the horns of the dilemma by silently pitying him.

Considering the wealth of smartphone gaming apps, and gamers’ souped-up computers, and X-Boxes and Playstations etc., it seems like we must be in the heyday of video games. What’s seldom remembered is that there was a lull in this national pastime, when kids got too lazy to trek out to the arcades but before the time when the home consoles got really sophisticated. This post, from my archives, documents a bit of that time, and wistfully recalls what I once took to have been the glory days of video games. I wrote this in college, when I was a student at UC Santa Barbara.

Video Gaming in the ‘80s - December 7, 1988

We can all remember the big video game days, back when there were fifteen arcades in town, all offering at least ten tokens on the dollar. Machines were scrubbed shiny; knobs were packed with grease or oil for extra smoothness. These were the salad days of the gaming world. Finding any kid was as easy as remembering which arcade he preferred. We were good, too. Any seasoned vidiot could play for at least forty‑five minutes on one token. But alas, kids eventually came around and the arcades died out suddenly, just like the dinosaurs.

It’s a good thing, too, because the games being designed today are not so innocent and harmless as what we played back then. My favorite was Tempest, a game in which your “guy” (a random thingy shaped kind of like a C-clamp] skittered around on the edge of a geometrically shaped hole shooting abstract figures, which had names like flippers, tankers, spikers, and fuzzballs. Shooting a tanker caused it to vomit up two flippers, complicating your job. When you’d destroyed everything coming up from the hole, you flew through it (avoiding dangerous spikes that could skewer you), then briefly through space (on autopilot, apparently), and landed on another hole to shoot more figures.

If you didn’t like shooting stuff, you could drive a racecar; that was a popular format. It started with Monaco GP which had really lame graphics; when Turbo came out I like that a lot better.

Then we got Pole Position. Its graphics were so amazing, it was tempting to throw over Turbo entirely, except that a game of Pole Position just didn’t last very long (typically 90 seconds). Sure, you could get Extended Play if you drove well enough, but if you got really good at it, eventually you’d make it to the Finish line and then—well, you’d be finished! I was pretty ticked the first time that happened, but then what did I expect? It’s the Finish line!

Or you blasted spaceships. That was the meat and potatoes of the vidiot. Those games were abstract, and promoted manual dexterity. Today, a typical video game involves beating up street thugs and prostitutes with clubs, or gunning down soldiers with a machine gun. I know this because last summer I went bowling with the boys from Broad Street Bikes and we observed the mêlée. I have to wonder what the lasting psychological effect of such blatantly violent games is on our youth. But all preaching aside, I must confess that recently, I have visited the arcade here [in Isla Vista] on more than one occasion.

It’s nothing like the old days. But one night, a few months ago, I was out with the boys and we wandered into Video Madness [a video rental place]. They had a bunch of the new-fangled games. I could hear the grunting of the street thugs as they pulverized each other, and the shrieks of the karate champs as they beat each other into submission. But over at the end of the dark room was a Tempest machine. I had to investigate.

Alas, the original knob was gone … the machine was out of order. But right next to it was Space Duel. For me, this game is nostalgic, since [my brother] Bryan and I used to play it back during the glory days of video games. I even talked Mom into playing it with me once, although I doubt she’d remember.

[This video is amazing, by the way. It’s an Atari ad showcasing the game in order to sell it to arcades. It even shows, here, how to set dip switches on the printed circuit board to select different languages.]

Space Duel is a totally unique game among the rest. The graphics are nothing special, the controls are nothing unique, but the method of play is unlike any other. There are various options of gameplay, but my favorite is the cooperative play mode. Two spaceships, joined about their rotational axes by a short rod, are controlled by two different players, who work together to blast various octahedra and other geometric shapes. The cooperation is key. While the players rack up individual scores (the object of any video game), they also rely on each other for survival. Kind of reminds you of the real world, don’t it? And when one player gets hit, his ship is seriously disabled, and his partner begins to outscore him. The wounded player almost longs, at this point, to get hit again so that he and his pal both get new ships and his point deficit is minimized.

The tragedy of the commons is ever‑present here. The injured player has seemingly little to gain from preserving his friend’s life, since this limits his own ability to get points. But if he decides to end it all, he hurts the common fighting unit. And remember, he’s here at the arcade playing with a friend … who would do that to a friend? Well, almost anyone actually. I mean, it’s not like there’s no recourse … your friend can always punch your arm or something. Still, the point of the game isn’t just to score points—it’s to make the game last as long as possible. So you usually limp on.

[Oddly enough, I didn’t know at the time that Space Duel was kind of hip, in a way. The Who had featured it on the cover of their 1982 album “It’s Hard.”]

Naturally, Space Duel can also be played by one person alone, and I haven’t lost the touch. I mostly drop in to Video Madness after intense study sessions, to remind myself how trivial school is when you’re fighting for your very existence against a variety of colorful geometric foes. I’ve discovered that I can actually use my score to monitor my stress levels. The lower my overall stress in my life, I have realized, the better I do at the game.

Occasionally, the game itself begins to cause me stress. I mean, losing at anything can be emotionally taxing, and in the moment it can be hard to remember this is just a game. When this happens, and it dawns on me that I’m paying good money to stress myself out, I fire my thrusters on full, sending my ship reeling out of control to its eventual death and the end of the game. In this way I remind the video machine that times have changed, and—unlike the game-possessed vidiots of the past—now I am the master.

Postscript

For further reading, specifically on the video game of the future, check out this fictional albertnet post: Robotron 2084’.

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