How I Stopped Fighting And Learned To Love City Hall

// Filed under: Life on Friday September 28th 2007, 11:36 pm

Back in 2005, when I was working at Coles Express, it was required that I wore a badge. But not just for identification purposes, no. Coles Express takes the wonderful opportunity to use my name as a ledge for the purposes of which to hang advertising. Fuel discounts, Fly Buys specials, there is nothing which the Company feels is too ostentatious to decorate your body with. But I had enough. I fought back. I wore this:

As you can imagine, the Company found this distasteful in the extreme. Not so the Customers, who laughed uproariously and thanked me for bringing joy to their small, insignificant and carbon-based lives. But alas, the Company was Always Right, and the badge was removed. Fast forward to 2007, and anybody fortunate enough to receive an email from one Tim Colwill could expect to find the following buried at the end of their email in tiny, tiny text:

Unencrypted electronic mail may not be secure and may not be authentic. This is the sum of most large tracts of small text that follow most business-related emails. As such, this large tract of small text is not likely to be read by most users and will be skipped over for a belief that it contains no new or relevant information. If you have received this email in error, please inform me by return email with the subject line “The Sparrow Chirps At Midnight”. A man will contact you by the usual method and provide you with further instructions. After these instructions have been carried out, destroy your computer by ejecting it from a fourth-storey window onto a large pile of unstable explosives. Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly.

Alas, despite receiving several blank emails subjected “The Sparrow Chirps At Midnight”, and sending not one, but two, academics on a fruitless search for a man in a bowler hat at Berlin Central train station, this happy state of events could not be allowed to continue. The email signature was forcibly removed, leaving it empty, amputated and floundering in a sea of whitespace.

That is not to say that I do not understand the Company’s Position; I understand the Position with great clarity. I just long for a world in which everyone can tell the difference between bringing a bit of fun to a dreary commercial world, and sustaining punishing body blows to the reputation of the Body Corporate. Perhaps the Sparrow does still chirp at Midnight, somewhere out there in the tempting wilderness, where the long arm of I Don’t Think That’s Quite Appropriate Do You has no grasp.

To work; perchance to dream…

// 2 Comments

Not Really A Direct Analogue

// Filed under: Random, Life on Sunday June 17th 2007, 8:32 pm

It is the year 2007, on the planet Earth, in the aftermath of Debari’s rocking-out superhero costume party.

I go to bed late, sleep on a borrowed pillow made entirely of rocks and broken glass, get up a mere five hours later, pig the fuck out on junkfood and chocolate cake, and then wonder why I didn’t realise I’d feel like utter shit after the party-adrenaline wears off.

I guess this is pretty much as close as I’ll ever come to having a proper hangover.

Christ, I’m such a nerd.

// 6 Comments

In Which Gaming Is Discussed

// Filed under: Video Games, Life on Tuesday June 12th 2007, 9:30 pm

For the last three days, I have been unable to stop thinking about how much I want to play Mario Strikers Charged.

That sounds retarded I know, but I played it for maybe a mere half an hour at Felix’s going-away party and am absolutely entranced. The ridiculously intuitive gameplay grabbed me by the metaphorical testicles from the first minute, and with only the most basic knowledge of the controls I was able to pass, charge and tackle like a maniac.

Even a half an hour in, I could easily pick out the levels of gameplay and tactics that were shining through, and the merits of team selection and captaincy. It was such a beautiful thing. Everything about the game has a tangible impact. Even the most basic tackle, the simplest steal, shakes the screen with a grinding, slow-motion impact that makes you want to do it again and again and again. When you make a particularly great tackle, or you fire off a beautifully charged shot that the game thinks will probably cannon into the back of the net - the game time slows to a crawl, the interface vanishes and you get to see your play happen in deliciously slow motion, successful or not.

You can feel the crunch as Wario puts his boot into the face of an unsuspecting Shy Guy. You can hold your breath as your shot careens towards the goal at crawl speed, and the whole room can groan in frustration as the goalie picks it effortlessly out of the air. Then it’s game time again, and you’re passing the ball around like a maniac and shooting and screaming and sighing and it’s so freaking seamless that it feels like every pass, every shot, every tackle is a part of your motherfucking soul.

I’m not kidding. This game has crawled beneath my goddamn skin in less than half an hour. I don’t know what it is, but I am more excited about this game than I have been about any Wii game so far. It could be the thing - the thing other than sweet, sweet Super Smash Bros. Brawl - that actually rekindles my long-flagging interest in this console. I can’t wait to get a copy of my own and experiment with team selection, power-ups and special moves. I can’t wait to play the free online mode against my friends.

I can’t wait for Simon to finish his motherfucking exams so we can beat the unholy shit out of this game without it distracting him. Study, you bastard. I know you’re reading this.

Speaking of untidy segues, talking with Ross in the car on the way home from the Perthcomics meet last night really made me miss the days of the old RIFTS and Palladium games. Ross has just been hired to re-write Cyberpunk - not the genre, the actual game - had his own system published (the Awesome system), and is basically living the beautiful dream of the writer.

Damn you, Ross. You and your stories, they make me miss the good days. The days when I would craft what were probably terrible stories, put on terrible Dwarven accents, and let Jimi critical-hit a motherfucking baelrog for ((6D6+8)*2)*2 motherfucking damage direct to its hit points* because goddamn that shit is just cool. I’d love to GM again. I love telling stories. I’m probably rusty as fuck now, but hey.

I guess it’s just another thing to stack on top of the already overloaded pile of things-I-wish-I-had-the-goddamn-time-for. Sigh.

*This actually happened.

// 6 Comments

We Do This A Lot

// Filed under: Life on Wednesday April 25th 2007, 8:41 pm

So, Simon and I are in the kitchen, and we’re drying the dishes. And what better time, my friends, to discuss the nutritional value of a carrot.

This begins when my mother remarks that she read in a report recently that the nutritional value of a carrot substantially improved after boiling. Simon pounces. “Ridiculous!” he cries, stabbing his index finger into the sky. “How can mere water add anything to a carrot that wasn’t already there! I spurn your voodoo magicks and all who swear fealty to their cause!” It’s all I can do to restrain him as he sprays bile into my face and gnashes his angry, aspiring-biologist-teeth in my mother’s general direction.

“Fie!” I hiss in his throbbing ears. “What evidence do you have to support this claim! Our mother cites a publication of repute! You cite merely your own unsubstantiated judgements!” He tears free of my grasp, wielding a teatowel as lesser men wield broadswords or battle-axes. “It’s common sense, you unwashed jackanapes! I don’t need to prove it! I know I am right.”

“But,” I say, “how can you know that you are right, if you have no proof or evidence with which to back up your spurious claims?”

“Tim, you are a small-minded nitwit, and therefore much of what I say will be lost on you,” he begins, his muttonchops dancing in the soft breeze of the kitchen. “It is a held tenet of Glorious Science that nothing can ever, truly, be known. To know something, one must be able to prove something to be right, and nothing can ever be proven absolutely right - only absolutely wrong.”

“So basically, dear brother - what you are saying to me in effect is that the only thing you can be certain of, is that you can never be certain?”

“Correct.”

“And yet you know - you are certain - without any proof or evidence to back you up, that a carrot, once boiled, could not possibly have increased in nutritional content?”

“Right.”

Wrong.

// 12 Comments

Hello World

// Filed under: Life on Tuesday April 03rd 2007, 10:13 pm

So hey, somebody graduated on Monday night. Was it you, Tim? Why, yes it was! I may now officially refer to myself as Tim Colwill, BSc. (Games Technology), which I think we can all agree has a much better ring to it than Tim Colwill, Undergraduate Machineslave. Of course, being a graduate of the presitigious Murdoch University comes with several rights and responsibilities, not the least of which is to sit through about twenty solid minutes of Discoverers Welcome advertisements for the university we just graduated from. Yes, Murdoch, we all know you’ve just paid a couple million dollars for some designers to develop a new corporate image for you - and frankly, it was about time you got rid of the “Brilliant!” slogan that it must have taken all of 10 minutes to cook up in your smoke-heavy multimedia rooms - but, hey, and this may come as a surprise - we just graduated from you. Reminding us again of exactly how great our former university is, is probably a slightly less than worthless procedure.

But that aside, it was a most excellent night. We retired to the Moon Cafe to try our hand at consuming an entire Moon Burger - each. Not a small feat, and definitely one to cull the weak from the strong. Needless to say, I was the only victor, the others complaining of intestinal bleeding and “Jesus, Tim, you’ll fucking die, just stop, man, you’ve proved your point”. And I had.

It’s definitely a weird feeling, this graduated-thing. I mean, I understand that it is, on a theoretical level - very important. But… I don’t feel as if anything has changed, pretty much at all. I still talk to the same lecturers, I still go to the same university - albeit for work, instead of study… hell, I spend all weekend at the GO3 Expo staffing the Murdoch University stand there. The only thing that’s changed is that none of us are screaming about incoming deadlines and impossible game requirements. So basically, I don’t really know what to think.

Of course, one of my first acts as a graduate was to receive a rejection letter from Interzone Games, the new company setting up shop in Perth. While they are hiring, it’s only for people with years of industry experience under their belt. Of course, this might be a somewhat difficult proposition given the fact that Perth has absolutely no games industry from which to draw this experience, but at any rate I am left with two options, one distinctly desperate, and the other distinctly frightening. I can either sit around and wait for the inevitable lowering of standards, or emigrate Eastwards towards the sort of bustling metropoli that I, a small-town Perth boy, finds innately terrifying.

So, it looks like I’ll be moving interstate, then.

I don’t know when, or where, but from this point on, it’s pretty inevitable, and that frightens me a bit. I still live with my parents, as I have for the past 21 - nearly 22 years. The idea of both moving out AND moving interstate in one fell swoop is one that will need a lot of serious thinking about, and all I really want to do is play video games and spend time with my girlfriend.

Bah, it’s all too hard.

// 8 Comments

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