Grim up North Heath

Tag: Daily prompt

  • Things happen

    Things happen

    Do you believe in fate/destiny?

    I don’t think fate or destiny are real. Where you are in life is subject to so many variables that to believe is fate is egocentric. You are where you are, things could be better and they could be worse.

    This is a very British atheist view of life. It might be comforting to believe in fate and be helpless to its whims, but that abdicates responsibility and it’s no better than believing your horoscope. There are also many factors outside your control, billions of people and many millions of things that can fail, fall or fuck around with your life.

    Could things be better? Yes. We could have a bigger house that’s less of a mess and more money because we worked harder or we took an opportunity that we missed. We could also still be renting a grotty flat in Bootle because that’s as far as our ambitions and opportunities took us. Or Mrs S could have got into Bristol Old Vic – which would have been a big win for her – and we’d never have met.

    How to explain it? Through Terry Pratchett, of course.

    Terry Pratchett’s gods

    The Discworld is ruled over by gods who are at a loss to know how to pass a wet afternoon. Fate is real in this world. In Lords And Ladies the wizard Ridcully suggests to Granny Weatherwax that if they’d stayed together then their life would have been very different. What if they’d settled down and had children, grandchildren. She responds:

    What about the fire? … Swept through our house just after we were married. Killed us both.

    This is Pratchett’s ‘trousers of time’ multiverse theory, where you go down a different leg and there’s continuinuums all over the place where everything and everyone bifurcates1. I’m not sure I believe that, either. That would mean there’s a universe for every decision everyone ever made. There’s loads of them – where do they keep the ones we’re not using?

    I suppose it could be that there’s an omniscient and omnipotent controller who guides the destiny of us all. That’s a cop-out, or perhaps extreme solipsism if you think only you matter. I believe there’s one universe and I don’t believe in any gods.

    Celebrate your wins, be annoyed at what goes wrong if that helps. Don’t sweat the missed opportunities. And remember, you can’t control other people.

    1. The trousers of time have more legs than a centipede dry cleaner’s. ↩︎
  • Pet B

    Pet B

    Write about your first computer.

    There are two ‘first computers’ for me. The first one I used was when I was at Thurso High School. This was the school’s 8K Commodore PET that was available to book for lunchtime use. I was at the school from ‘81 to ‘82 before we moved to England. I don’t know that I learned very much; some programming in BASIC but no guidance, played a text adventure game and perhaps gained an awareness that computers were a thing that would feature in my future.

    Commodore PET from about 1980.

    The second was a BBC B that was a Christmas present to the family in 1983. Transferring data and uploading was a challenge using cassette tape recorder. It could take half an hour to load games, along with the clanking racket of data transfer and you’d come back from your tea to find the load had failed. Jealous of a neighbour (an engineer) who had a floppy disc drive and he could load a game in under a minute! He’d also expanded the BBC B’s 32K RAM to an unbelievable 128K.

    The power!

    Having a BBC C at home was handy, because this was the machine I used for ‘O’ level computer studies. In theory I could have transferred work between school and home, but data transfer wasn’t really viable and we only did a small amount of programming during the course.

    Inevitably games were played on the BBC at home, once we hooked it up to a spare telly. Elite was my favourite, a space adventure game with trading commodities and the occasional space battle. I also have fond memories of my dad playing ‘Estra’, a collect-the-pieces game that took ages to load. But while it loaded, it played ‘Entry of the Gladiators’1, which was fun.

    You can play Estra here, and listen in awe to the theme music.

    After O levels, I didn’t use computers much for a number of years. I first heard about email in 1990, when I was at uni in Loughborough. One of my tutors told us that he could send a message from his computer2 to a friend at Portsmouth and get a reply later that day. Much faster than letters and less intrusive than a phone call.

    Mrs S and I didn’t own a computer at home until about 2000, after we had bought our first flat. The mainly so that I could work at home on my PhD. I had to run an extension line right across the flat to get dial-up internet and it was honestly easier and quicker (and possibly cheaper given the cost of phone calls back then) to take a bus up to the university (from central Bath) and get journal articles from the library than it was to try and download them at home. But I did write my thesis on it, so it served its primary objective.

    I can’t remember the specs, but I do know it was quite an expensive bit of kit for us at the time. Given its cost, we shipped it over to Australia in 2003 and back again in 2005. We still have it in the loft, gathering dust and awaiting possible resurrection so I can play Quake III Arena again.

    1. The circus music. ↩︎
    2. He had a computer in his office! ↩︎
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