Technology

Mr. Charlton Starts a Robotics Club

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Me and a couple people here at the school have started a robotics club. Why robots?

robot-army

I promise it’s not a robot army. I swear.

Before I started school, over a year ago in the summer of 2018, I went to the campus grounds to chat with one of the teachers here who took the time out of his schedule to talk to me about his class. I did some digging before hand and I found out he had previously worked on a satellite that was going to be sent into orbit. When I asked him about it, he said that he joined the group when he transferred over to the University of Victoria from Camosun. He was so successful that when he completed his degree, the University gave him $20,000 to pursue his masters. They even won an award for the project. You can read about it here:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/university-of-victoria-wins-latest-canadian-satellite-design-challenge-1.2676321

Anyways, they don’t have a satellite club here at the college and the truth is most of the students here are green and inexperienced, so building a satellite might be a little out of the scope for the student body at a school this small.

Launch

Turns out this is actually pretty hard.

Now, there is a 3D printing club that operates out of the school, and it’s pretty sweet. The only issue was the fact that the 3D printer was pretty much built when I started last year. I was terrified of stepping into a club where they were hungry for 3D models, only to find out I did that kind of thing for over a decade. After a decade of drafting, the last thing I wanted to do was have someone lean over me shoulder and tell me what they wanted built.

So I talked to some of my friends here at the school, and within about five minutes, we had enough interest from enough people to start up a club. This also means that we’ll be privy to a $400 budget from the school to build you a robot.  Can we design a robot that will recognize garbage and pick it up? Will we able to create a swarm of bots that could build a structure? What what will $400 buy us?

Well, not a whole lot. Nothing sophisticated, at least yet. What you can get is some rudimentary components and get some motors and some wheels and make a bot that avoid running into walls. And then we can teach it to make decisions on which way to turn, and how to avoid obstacles. Then we mass produce them, and then arm them with lazers, and march across the planet instilling my plan for a new world order. Under my iron wing, we’ll build a utopia together! My detractors shall be buried under the wheels of my doom machines!

mad-

This is the most relevant picture I could find.

Truthfully, we will building something more like this…

But a guy can dream of mechanized world domination, right?

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. Apparently my spelling of lazer is incorrect, but I absolutely refuse to spell it with anything other than a “z”.

p.s.s. To be frank, ruling the world seems like big pain in the ass. It’d be like the old game ‘King of the Castle’, except the little hill you’re playing on is made of garbage and it’s on fire.

p.s.s.s. See, that’s a GREAT idea for a robot. It could put out trash fires. Why am I not in charge of things?

p.s.s.s.s. That’s right, the whole ‘pain in the ass’ thing.

 

Week 1 – Gearing Up

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The other day I gave a good friend of mine a phone call to wish the man a happy birthday. The subject of school came up, as we’ve been talking about me heading back to class the moment I told him I registered. He asked me how I get to school.

“Well, first, I hop on a bus outside of my place, head downtown, wait about fifteen minutes, then head up on another bus that takes me to the campus”.

“Man, you know what you need to do? Instead of hopping on the bus right outside your place, why don’t you walk to the second bus? Clear your head, get some exercise. Sounds like you aren’t saving time taking the first bus.”

So I took him up on his advice and started walking to school for the first section of my trip. And goddamn if he wasn’t right; I feel way more awake and alert and ready to tackle the day.

20180906_173023

  1. Get some exercise in the morning.

The last three days have been more about getting ready and forming study habits, as to diving right in. Even on the last day of the school week, I’m still missing one tools from the ol’ toolbox, so hopefully tomorrow morning I can track that down. Speaking of tools though…

I’ve been bragging a little bit about how prepared I am for school, the fact that I’ve gotten a lead in a lot of my classes by taking the time to study math, physics, and programming. Well, I found out on Wednesday that being prepared has cost me. And it’s cost me roughly fifty dollars.

You see, back in June or so, when I was in between jobs, I decided to meet a couple of my professors and get a bead on what I was going to be learning. One of my profs recommended that I pick up a little kit for his class. It was a box containing an Arduino microcontroller, a bunch of LEDs, resistors, motors, and other electronic goodies. I took it home and play around with it a bit, learning a little bit about how to program the board. Awesome, right?

The tool kit for the program is roughly $420 ($418.15 to be precise) and it has everything you need, including the kit I had already bought. When I went to go pick it up, I mentioned that I had already purchased the microcontroller kit. This led to some problems, because as I found out, there’s only one guy on campus that knows the exact price of each individual part of the tool kit. Most of the other staff only know the total everything, which is roughly $420 ($418.15 to be precise). I could wait until this particular gentleman got back from his lunch, come back another time, or buy the whole thing and have two kits.

He wasn’t going to be back for about half an hour. In the school setting, a half hour when you have nothing to do can quickly become filled with things you need to do, like homework or eating some vitals or suffering the existential questions of why the hell am I here in the first place. This was the only time of the day where I was actually going to get a lunch, and I wasn’t sure when I was going to be able to make it back to grab this stuff. The power of my stomach turned over, so now I have two identical kits. My hunger cost me $50.

2. Majority of tools purchased.

The plus side of this is I now have a spare kit, as well as a crafty fiancee who wants to make Halloween decorations. Maybe if I get some spare time, we’ll sit down and try to make some interactive Halloween stuff. Who knows? We might be able to whip up some incredibly imaginative decorations.

There was another important event going on Wednesday, and that was checking out a wedding party venue in town here with Kat. Long story short, it was so well suited for our needs that we’ll be scooping it up.

3. Procuring a venue for wedding party.

Now, I should mention right now that due to both my new school schedule and Kat’s new work schedule, we aren’t actually going to see each other very often, and when we do, I’m usually going to be in the office studying. The only day we actually might get to see each other is on Wednesday afternoon, as I’m off school early and Kathryn has the day off. I made a declaration that Wednesday would be date day, and that even if we didn’t have any extra money, we would still hang out and spend some quality time together.

20180906_065330

Ladies love Italian.

4. Romancing the lady.

On another note, I’m going to pat myself on the back and let you all know that for the first time in my entire life, I actually went home and did the homework on the same day I received it. I didn’t procrastinate! I have six sheets of fresh math homework just waiting to be handed in. I’m hoping to continue this momentum this weekend.

5. Finish Math homework ahead of time.

And finally, this is the first day of not only attending school, but heading to work right afterwards. When my last class is done at 3:30pm, I whisk myself off to the kitchen to start work on the line. The restaurant closes at 10:30pm, so at the very latest I’ll be done at 11:30pm, which means I get home at midnight. That’ll make for an eighteen hour day, so even though I’m headed to the campus on the weekend, I might rewards myself by sleeping in until 8:00am.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. Right, right, I have to pick up some tools tomorrow before I head to school, and then before I go to work again tomorrow. Well, only four to five more years of this.

p.s.s. I wrote this last Friday, but didn’t post it until next Tuesday. I ain’t working the weekdays.

Mr. Charlton Gets Rid of Facebook

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This is one of those blog posts that I had a hard time writing. The kind where I would pump out seven hundred words, only to look back and realize that I was a rambling mess, ranting off in the distance without any kind of coherent structure to my ideas. It was a random train of thought, one that derailed into a small community and exploded into a fiery mess of anecdotes and half-witty remarks. The people I was writing for would be reading with a mouthful of coffee, slowly swallowing as their eyes narrowed; “What the fuck is Mr. Charlton talking about?”. Well, today he’s ranting about Facebook.

I got rid of it, finally.

If you’ve read my blog on a somewhat regular basis, you’ll know I have a deep-seated hatred towards Facebook. I’m not a fan. In fact, it’s come up in about ten percent of my writing. That’s a lot, considering that Facebook is free. And there’s a pretty strict rule that I’ve been adhering to, especially recently as I’ve gotten older.

Don’t ever complain about something you’re getting for free.

Being the hypocrite that I am, I’ve been complaining about this free service for years. I’m not alone in my complaints; tons of people like myself dislike social media, especially Facebook. So then why are we using it?

Understand that Facebook, and a lot of other tech giants, have worked tirelessly over the last decade (even longer in many cases) to integrate themselves into the fabric of our society. You might convince yourself you’ll be missing out on something if you refuse their services. Truthfully, you will be. Without Facebook, there’s a good chance I might miss events that are organized there. And that’s a shame.

But…

The party is still taking place. That get-together is going to happen, it’s simply no longer convenient for the host to invite me. They’ll have to get a hold of me some other way. They’re going to have to send a carrier pigeon. They might try and put a message in a bottle, casting it out to the ocean in the slim hopes it washes up on my shores. Or, heaven forbid, they might have to use the telephone app on their smartphone and call me to arrange the party. Facebook is convenient.

Iphone-HomeScreen

A ten year old asked me why the phone app was a ‘C’ shape.

Facebook is too convenient.

It’s so convenient, in fact, that you can have a social media relationship with someone you don’t know. I had a little over three hundred people on my friend list. At least a third of them? People I had met once. One interaction, years ago, was now something that Facebook convinced me was valid. It’s really easy to add people, over the years, over a pint at the bar when you’re four drinks deep and now everyone in the pub is your friend. Now your free social media page needs work. It needs to be culled every now and again. You’re social media image is something you’re going to have to manage.

Years ago, it used to list your friends post’s chronologically. Now Facebook has determined that you want to see what the hottest topics are. Those are the posts that keep you looking at Facebook, your eyes open on the screen while ads fill the sidebars. You know what posts seem to gather the most attention?

The controversial ones.

If you’re wondering why Facebook in particular seems to have gotten more mean-spirited in the last couple of years, it’s not because you’re getting older and more cynical. It’s because the easiest button to push in the emotion panel of your brain is the anger / outrage button. The social engineers at Facebook know this, and capitalize on it.

They’ve also figured out how to give you a dopamine hit when you participate in conversations. Someone says something wrong? On the internet? Fire back a snappy comeback, then watch as like-minded people support your post with likes and LOLs. A thirty second reply takes thirty seconds, but Facebook knows you’ll spend up to an hour or more seeing if anyone else validated your opinion.

All of your rage, your laughs, your accomplishments, your highs, your lows, everything you post to social media is facilitated by companies who are trying their hardest to manipulate your emotions. And they’re doing it because for every hour you spend on their site, they might make half a penny. Don’t quote me on that number. The point I’m trying to make is that your attention isn’t worth a lot to them, so they’re going to milk your attention for everything that it’s worth.

I’m picking on Facebook, but they’re not the only ones doing it. Instagram (owned by Facebook), Youtube (owned by Google), Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Imgur. They’re all competing for your attention.

If you’re wondering what happened to me, well, they ended up getting too much of my attention. They got so much of it that my only solution was to turn it off completely. It wasn’t the Cambridge Analytics issue, it wasn’t Zuckerberg having to testify in front of a bunch of congresspeople he was already donating campaign money to, it wasn’t Russian bots trying to undermine democracy. It was the simple problem of spending too much time on Facebook and Reddit, and not spending enough time writing, making games, learning new skills, and enjoying life.

Zuckerberg

“I swear, your honor, that I put my pants and my flesh mask on just like the rest of you homo sapiens.”

I’ve lost the convenience of easily connecting with people. But I don’t think it should be easy to connect with people. It should be tough. It should be a little bit of work. Out of the three hundred friends I had a week ago, it’s plummeted to roughly sixty. I’m alright with that. Even though it’s going to be a little more work to connect with people, I have at least an extra hour a day to it. And maybe a five minute phone call would be better than liking a photo of them online.

The internet is a powerful tool. But like any tool, it can be misused. Stirring the pot to get peoples attention on the internet is like smearing the walls with shit to get your perfume to stand out. It works, but people are going to eventually get sick of the poop smell, even if the perfume is free.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. I’m four days in of not having access to social media. It’s been pretty zen so far.

1. Image taken from https://news.sky.com/story/five-questions-mark-zuckerberg-needs-to-answer-in-congress-11325242

 

 

Ready Player Two

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We met in the one of the worst households I have ever lived in. In an effort to get back to my roots, I had thrown caution to the wind and decided to live with some people after living by myself for the last three or four years. It was both a blessing and a curse. The curse was that within three days of living with strangers, I quickly realized why the hell I like living by myself. Because goddamn it if an adult, who pays taxes and would be drafted in a war against aliens if they ever landed, can’t wash their dishes after they’re done with them. But I’m planning on saving the House of Hell stories for later. I still want to talk about video games. It’s kinda how I met my current girlfriend.

That was the blessing of the House of Hell, because she was one of my roommates.

I had been living in this backwards revival of my youth for about a week and a half, and so far it hadn’t been going all that well. The house was usually in a state of disarray and the kitchen was almost always a disaster. I had met everyone in the house, but hadn’t really spent any time with anyone, except for Kat, who split a bottle of wine with me a few days earlier. One of the housemates, an energetic 19 year old hot idiot by the name of Shay, was planning to get some of us together and have a few drink. Seeing as how I had nothing better to do, I figured this would be a great way to meet everyone in the same setting.

There was seven of us in the house. Three people said no, so there was the four of us hanging out. Shay, Katie, Kathryn, and myself.

Shay – The 19 year old Hot-Mess. The reason the house was always a pigsty. Smoked weed like it was keeping her alive. Thought she was the glue that held the house together. In reality, she was the reason most people stayed in their room. Very free spirited. Would have loud shower sex at 2:00 in the morning with her boyfriend. Always angry at the fact there was never any toilet paper in the washroom. Everyone hid their toilet paper in their room, because Shay would use it and never replace it.

Katie – The 27 year old Addict. Soft spoken with striking red hair, Katie was an incredibly nice young woman who just happened to be a full on alcoholic. I didn’t actually know what the word alcoholic meant until I met Katie. It wasn’t unusual to find her passed out in the hallway at 11 o’clock in the morning, or having the police show up at random times trying to find her. A story a lot more tragic than most.

Kat – The 25 year old woman who didn’t belong in the house. There wasn’t actually anything wrong with her. The only thing I could deduce was she was in the wrong place at the right time. Level headed and about a half inch taller than me. At this point in the story, she was the only person I was talking to on a regular basis and wasn’t a crazy person. Just finished a diploma at SAIT and was looking to go back to Lethbridge and finish a degree in New Media.

So it was the four of us, sitting at the kitchen table, having a few drinks. Katie downed a mickey of vodka in under five minutes, then went to bed almost immediately. Like I said, alcoholic. That left me, Shay, and Kat. They were both wondering about my lack of stuff. I mentioned that I was a minimalist, and that I was in the process of downsizing even more. In fact, the last big thing I was getting rid of was my Super Nintendo and my small collection of games.

“You have a Super Nintendo collection?”

Love is a weird thing. People talk about waves, or ups and downs when it comes to the emotion. My Super Nintendo, even though I was thinking of getting rid of it, represented my youth. It was my skateboards on the wall, my dumb posters on the wall, my hanging out with the crew. And here was this young woman, someone I had only known for a week, and she was flabbergasted that I was even thinking of selling it.

“I’ve got a Super Nintendo collection too! I’ve even got one still in the original box.”

Here’s this smart, funny, beautiful, slightly taller than me blond woman, and she has a Super Nintendo. I’m talking about burying my childhood. I’m talking about murdering the boy inside the man, and this wonderful person, in one weird sentence, is telling me both can exist at once. And she’s got no clue what’s going on inside my head.

Kat, if you were ever wondering why, or when, I fell in love with you, it was over the Super Nintendo collection.

I love video games. It’s how I like to spend my free time when I’m not working, or writing, or learning. When I’m kicking back, I like to do it with a controller in my hand. And this incredibly fantastic person fell into my life and wanted to pick up a controller and shoot zombies in the face with me. (Note: Kat is much better at Left 4 Dead than I ever will be. If we’re ever in a Zombie Apocalypse, Kat’s getting the gun. I’ll be organizing people, or doling out med kits, or something besides shooting zombies in the face).

That night, much to Shay’s chagrin, me and Kat stopped becoming interested the three person party and plugged in the Super Nintendo. We played until three in the morning.

It’s the weird little story about how I met my sweetheart. It wasn’t at a club, or a coffee shop, or the grocery store. It was in a shitty house, at a shitty time in both our lives, and it blossomed over a dumb hunk of grey plastic. I’m hoping later tonight, when we both get back home, we’ll pour a glass of wine, look each other in the eye, and fight over the good controller. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. We could use some recommendations regarding some sweet two-player co-op games. We’re both getting sick of the Borderlands series.

Mr. Charlton – Still Gaming

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It was a week before I got the opportunity to sit down with my new computer and play a game on it for longer than five minutes. An entire week, plus a day. I got the new computer, in a number of smaller boxes, on Tuesday March 7th 2017. It wasn’t until Tuesday March 14th 2017, that I got to fire up a game and not just stress test my machine, but actually play for a bit and unwind. One very long week.

12 year old Mr. Charlton would (have tried to) kick my ass for leaving a sweet rig sitting around for a week before playing a game.

Twelve year old Mr. Charlton had a lot less responsibility than thirty-three year old Mr. Charlton. Twelve year old me also had a lot less disposable income than I currently do. But this train of thought led to me thinking about exactly when I started playing games.

The earliest I can remember was playing games over at other people’s houses. I remember heading over to the Spehar’s place when I was five to play with Stef. They had a Nintendo, the old school grey box, and they had a couple of sweet games with it (notably Super Mario 3 and Ducktales). I’m pretty sure that after playing the first time, I sped back home and started begging my parents for a Nintendo.

There was a bit of problem with this. Nintendo Entertainment Systems were goddamn expensive. When they first hit the market, they were retailing for $199. Adjusted for inflation, this was about $450. And those were American dollars, so for a brand new Nintendo, you were looking at a pile of money. My parents didn’t have a pile of money lying around, so I never did get a Nintendo Entertainment System. What we did get, in the winter of 1989, was a Nintendo Gameboy, the handheld version of the console. We also got a couple of games thrown into the mix.

Now, this was an incredibly smart move and a really bad move on my parents part, and this was no fault of theirs. It was great because it was cheaper than a big system and could be taken on long car rides, which was a pretty common occurrence when we were children. It was bad ’cause you COULD take it anywheres, which meant I was bringing it with me on every camping trip we ever went on. It was also bad because unlike the system you could plug into the wall, this little punter used 4 AA batteries, so I’m pretty sure my parent ended up spending more on the Gameboy when you factored in buying piles of batteries every other day. The biggest flaw with the handheld device is that it was a one-man operation. So even though there were three boys, there was only one Gameboy. I’d have to ask my mom, but I’m pretty sure we fought over the stupid thing constantly.

Both my brothers play video games. Heck, even my mom is playing HayDay on her IPad. But I’m pretty sure that out of the family, I’m the only one who’d be called a “gamer”. I was, and still am, a fiend. I’d consider getting a ‘Legend of Zelda’ tattoo. I’ve put a Super Nintendo emulator on basically every electronic device I’ve ever owned. I’ve beaten ‘I Wanna Be the Guy’. I played Cave Story before it was cool. Man, have you even played Cave Story? That’s straight Indie goodness at its finest.

Now I’m starting to build games. This has been on Mr. Charlton’s bucket list for a long, long time. I told myself that 2017 would be the year I at least give it the ol’ college try. So I grabbed a couple of classes from Udemy and I’ve been taking the plunge.

Luckily, I’ve got some skills from a previous life that’s making the process of learning a little easier. A decade of drafting has given me a lot of tools for designing, planning, and executing basically anything you throw at me. I’ve been slowly learning to code for the last couple of years, so when I was tasked to learn a new language, it wasn’t complete gibberish I was learning. I’m using Unity for the game engine and development environment, Blender for the 3D modeling, Visual Studio for the IDE, GIMP and InkScape for the 2D art and textures. There’s only one thing I’m lacking…

Music. Sounds. A video game needs some sort of music to fill the space between your ears. That’s the weakest link in the chain, easily. Even though I’m not a great artist, I can manage. Even though my code is rudimentary, there’s a vibrant community who’s willing to answer questions and help a noob. Even though Blender is still new to me after years of having it installed on my machine, I’m picking it up quicker now that I’m allocating time to learning it. But music?

Look, I consider myself a lousy guitarist and an OK harmonica player. But I don’t know where to begin with making music on my computer. I’ve been given some pretty good advice so far, it’s just that I’m so new I might be asking the wrong questions. So if I’m making music on the old PC here, here’s what I need to know. Ignore these questions if you’re not

  1. What DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is right for me? And when I say right, what I mean is cheap or free. Unity? Free until I make bank with it. Ditto for Visual Studio. Blender, GIMP, and InkScape? All free. I’m going to start out with Audacity, ’cause it’s free. But people keep telling me I’ll have to upgrade eventually. I’m leaning towards Reaper, ’cause it’s cheap and people seem to like it. Keep in mind I’m doing this legit. Don’t fire me a link to a torrent for Fruity Loops.
  2. People, I’ve got no sense when it comes to plugging instruments into a computer. No sense? I might have to steal some of that sense from you. Should I get a keyboard? Or a controller? Can I rock one of these things into my computer via USB? Where can I get some cheap instruments? Where’s the shady guy with a van full of gear that ‘was just left behind in a warehouse’ somewhere? Mr. Charlton is in desperate need of some cheap stolen shit.
  3. All the other programs I’m using make sense to me. Blender is just 3D modeling, and I have a background in that sort of thing. I’m not a great coder, but I know what they’re talking about when they’re asking me to import a library. But this audio shit? Holy Christ on a cracker am I out of my element. I might have to actually sit down with someone and get this sorted out.

So music people, I’m asking you; what the hell are you people doing making music so damn complicated? I don’t need this malarkey. Can’t a guy just hammer on his computer keyboard to make some beeps and bloops for a game? Did you folks make this complicated to pretend like you’re doing actual work? Where’s the MS Paint version of music making?

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. Seriously, I am a fish out of water when it comes to music production. Any advice you wish to solicit would help me out greatly.

p.s.s. I ended up going with Reaper. I’m slowly, slowly learning it. The manual is only 500 pages long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr. Charlton – Gamer for Life

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“Do we have enough tape? This is important. Everybody, even Grandma, games–meaning checkers, cards, if not now, in the past. Show me even freakin’ nun or a hermit who hasn’t done cards or checkers.”

Adam Wood, from ‘King of Kong’

A couple years back, I can’t remember the exact date, a few years ago, but yeah, a few years ago I was sitting on a friend’s couch, and I was playing a game with Jered and Metal Rob. I’m pretty sure I was playing with Rob, and we were playing ‘Gear of War 2’. Now, the two of them had played this game before but I had not, and I was picking up the game about half-way through the story mode. There was a lot of plot I was missing, but the gist of the story was one of the main characters was looking for his wife. Alien/Demons/Monsters/Baddies had taken her, and you and your friend were tasked with finding her.

I’m just going to point out, if you haven’t played this game or don’t play the big ‘Triple A’ games or don’t play games at all, ‘Gears of War 2’ is not a happy game. It’s set in a bleak, grey world, where humanity has it’s back against a wall. The last shred of our civilization battles an unknown horde, one that has emerge from the ground under our feet. Most people have been drafted into the war, essentially becoming ‘Gears’ in this awful machine. It’s a visually stunning game, but it’s not painting a pretty picture. I mean, your gun has a chainsaw on the front of it so you can saw Baddies in half. It’s that kind of game.

So here I am, playing this game with my friend, the two game characters are battling through this horrible underground cavern trying to find a wife, and we hit the game’s climax. You find her. It breaks to a cut scene.

She emerges from her prison cell. She looks exactly like his memories. She come out and passionately embraces our character. But this is an illusion. The game character snaps out of his fantasy, and sees his wife for how she really is. Incredibly malnourished, missing clumps of hair, hollow eyes. She’s completely catatonic. Whatever soul used to inhabit this body has disappeared completely, and there’s now just a shell of human being. The game character is shattered. With no way to help his wife, he can only help her by ending her life. He takes his sidearm, and while holding the husk of what remains of his wife, he puts a bullet in her head.

Pardon my language, but What The Fuck?

People, I put down video games for a year after I played that sequence. A goddamn year. I told people I was giving up the game, forever. This wasn’t a small statement, either. I loved video games. I used to be able to play with my feet. It wasn’t just something I did, it was part of who I was. But after that jarring scene, I thought I was done.

I went back to gaming, but my views on the medium will never be the same. I grew up in the ‘Mortal Kombat’ period of gaming history, when violent video games like ‘Doom’ and ‘Splatterhouse’ and the aforementioned ‘Mortal Kombat’ were taking the arcades and the home by storm. A lot of people thought these games were obscene. For me, there was always this fat, thick line, between the game and my emotions. I couldn’t see how they’d be offensive, because it was so obvious these pixels weren’t stirring any emotions. ‘Gears of War 2’ changed my perspective forever. I mean, kudos for the medium for stirring emotions in me so greatly I couldn’t touch a controller for a year after that. If there was any question in my mind whether video games could be art, this shattered any doubt.

I went from being a die-hard gamer, to quitting cold turkey, back to being a hardcore gamer.

I’d be lying if I said the only reason I gave up gaming was because of this emotional roller coaster ‘Gears of War 2’ put me through. Deep down, somewhere buried in my psyche, was the notion that video games were a waste of time. And they are. They are totally a waste of time. But sitting down and watching a film is a waste of time. Going to an art museum is a waste of time. Cheering for a baseball team is a waste of time. And yet everyone reading this has partaken in time wasting with games or film or sports.

Which brings me to the quote above. Everyone games. Everyone, every once and a while, likes to blow off steam by doing something irrelevant, like playing crib with a deck of cards, or playing ‘Candy Crush’ on their phone. The moment cave people starting losing their teeth was the moment someone decided to collect those teeth, rattle them around in a coconut shell, and then toss them to see how many they could get right side up.

There’s this weird underlying idea in our culture that if you’re not hustling 100% of the time, you’re doing something wrong. That you should feel a little ashamed for kicking back and taking it easy for a bit. Screw that baloney. You know what people aren’t doing when they’re watching sports? They’re not killing people. You know what people going to the movies aren’t getting up to? Definitely not eating babies, that’s for sure. And you know people aren’t doing when they’re playing video games? I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely not trying to create a low-yield nuclear device in the spare room of my apartment.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. If there was only some way of combining work and play into one…

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. I am definitely not building a low-yield nuclear device in the spare room.

p.s.s. I made a game. Click on this link to see it. It’s not my first game (nor is it the most complicated), but it’s the first one I’ve been able to upload to the web.

p.s.s.s. This link is only good for 30 days. When I finally stop  being lazy and build an actual website, I’ll put it up again.

Mr. Charlton Builds a Computer

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I received my computer Tuesday and after work, chores, making dinner, and a bunch of tasks needing to be accomplished, I finally had time at about 10:30 pm to sit down and put together a massive box of computer pieces. By 2:00 am Wednesday morning, I finally had the damn thing together and running with an operating system. Ran into a couple snags, though…

  • I bought a CPU fan, thinking the CPU wouldn’t come with a fan. It did. So I have two CPU fans. Now, the extra one I bought is most certainly an upgrade, but Christ, never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine attaching such a massive and ugly piece of hardware to a CPU. It looks like my processor is being molested by a silver monster.
  • I also bought an extra tube of thermal paste. That’s only because I didn’t expect the extra fan to have some. It did. Now I’m capable of attaching a ton of processors to heatsinks and fans. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
  • I installed the mother board first, which turned out to be a mistake. You see, that crazy monster CPU fan needs to fastened to the BACK of the motherboard as well as the front. I had to take off the sucker and attach this beast of a fan before I could put the motherboard back in.
  • I was going to return the fan, once I realized what a pain in the ass it was. As I was looking up the return policy, I spilled coffee on the instructions for this fan. After a lot of swearing (sorry Kat!), I decided to keep the fan.
  • If you haven’t noticed, basically every problem I had was with this fan. But damn, does it push some heat!
  • Once everything was installed, I went to go install my operating system. Except I didn’t actually buy one. After some digging, I found my old copy of Windows 7. Brand new machine, and it’s running an operating system that’s over 7 years old. I’m off to a great start.

It might seem like two and a half hours is a long time to setup a computer, but remember, this is the first computer I’ve bought in 8 years. I was taking my sweet time, occasionally smelling the cords as I was putting it together. They had that new cord smell. Delicious.

I’ve been slowly adding software to the machine. Slowly. I’ve starting with some basics I use a bunch. Which brings me to a new problem. Because right now I’m satisfied that everything that NEEDS to be installed finally is, and I’m writing this blog at 3:00 pm on Friday. From the time of unboxing to the moment I can finally sit down and feel comfortable using my computer, it has been three days. 2 and a half hours ain’t bad, but 3 days is a goddamn long time to be waiting to use your new toy.

You see, you can’t just start mucking about on the computer the second you have it plugged in. No sir. You have to make sure everything is updated first. You have to update all the drivers for the hardware; the motherboard (you should do this first), the video card, the LAN, the audio. You have to install the latest service pack for Windows. You then have to update Windows. Now you’re going to want to install all the cool software you use on a regular basis; A good internet browser, Skype, Steam, a slew of design program I tell myself I’m going to learn but never do. Once that’s all done, once all of that was setup, I finally installed Skyrim to see how well this computer would run.

It runs at 60 FPS on the highest settings. I mean, it’s a game that’s also 8 years old, but damn, it still looks pretty good.

I’ve been going on such a downloading spree that I had to call my service provider and have them bump me up to their platinum program. If I hadn’t done that, I would still be installing Visual Studio’s 2017 (this program happens to clock in at over 50 Gbs with all the bells at whistles. No joke). I’ve only had this computer for a couple days and I’ve already downloaded well over a hundred gigs of sweet data, and from how it’s going so far, that ain’t going to stop any time soon.

TLDR; Mr. Charlton got a new computer. Mr. Charlton build his new computer. Mr. Charlton is now treating his new machine like a China vase, and refuses to even browse Facebook with it yet. You’ll know the new shiny has worn off when I start downloading crap I shouldn’t be.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. I missed a post ’cause I was enthralled with my new toy. I should be working instead of playing, but I just downloaded Batman: Arkham City and SWEET PEARL it runs at 60 FPS with every damn thing turned on. An old game, but this tells me I can at least play some new games if I choose to.

 

 

Mr. Charlton Buys a Computer

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Eight years. Eight years wasn’t always a long time for an appliance. Back in the day, it was common to have one phone in the house, and that was the phone you had for years. You had a washing machine until it broke down, and you’d at least try and get the thing fixed before you bought a new one. And kitchen appliances lasted forever, shucks, they still do. My stand mixer is going to be one of those things I will never get rid of. Mr. Charlton ain’t going back to making bread with his hands like some sort of pedestrian.

Computer’s though, that’s something that gets old quick. Not many people have vintage computers. Besides a couple of strange peripherals, you want the latest and greatest. Not only does the hardware get old, but the software for computers is always getting updated. A computer five years ago running Windows 7 won’t be running the same version of Windows 7  today. The software giant, Microsoft, is constantly tweaking and adding things. New features are usually great, but it bogs down the hardware. Unless you go rogue with an operating system like Linux, it’s something you’ll have to deal with.

For the non-techies reading my blog, think of it like this. If I bought a car tomorrow, stuck it in a garage for a decade, pulled it out, how would the car run? It’d run fine. You might have to lube up some bit here and there, but if the room was sealed, you wouldn’t really have any issues, except it might not have that new car smell anymore. A computer’s a little different. You buy a computer, hide it away, and pull it out ten years later? It’s going to be a pile of crap. We’ll take the car analogy again. You store the car away for a while, pull it out for a test drive after a decade, and you find out the roads are now made of steel coated with a strange lubricant. You can still drive, but you’re going to have to slow your ass down. But hey, you decide to go upgrade your car at the mechanics. Maybe they can help you out. No go. Turns out the new wheels use a way different method of attachment. Your car is no longer any good.

This isn’t a particularly great analogy. The gist is computers get old, and they need to be upgraded if you want to use the latest software. I’ve got a little laptop, an old netbook I call ‘The Pony’, and it’s fine for writing words. But it can’t even handle the internet anymore. That’s what I use the Pony for, though. When I want to write stuff down and I’d rather not be distracted.

Enter ‘The Work Horse’. This was a great machine. I mean, it had a Xeon Intel processor. A Xeon! It had 4 gigs of RAM. Big old 300 GB hard drives, and it was one of those new fangled ‘Raptor’ drives that spun at 10,000 RPMs instead of 7,200. You can’t just stick that Xeon in any old motherboard, though, that baby required the special server motherboard. That board was big, too, and it needed a special computer case that could handle the size. I wasn’t pissing around either, this was going to be a multi-media center, so I needed the separate audio card. To top it off, I had a 260x GeForce Video card. A couple of fans to her the Horse cool. It was a work of art. Eight years ago.

It’s basically being held together with duct tape at this point. I’ve done everything I could to keep her going, but it’s been a long eight years. I can’t part with the old gal, though. She ain’t as fast as she used to be, but she can still carry a load, so I’ll turn her into a little home server, add a couple of old hard drives to her and use her as a little storage unit.

I ain’t a car guy, never really saw the appeal, but I get why other people are. I look at computers the same way. My new machine should be getting here tomorrow, and I’m going to love every second assembling her, but I’ll miss things about the one I’m writing on right now. How it basically heats my little office here, or how it won’t boot up if I have a USB memory stick inserted into it.

Tomorrow, the Work Horse is going to be put to greener pastures. After eight years, it could use a bit of a break.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. After the OS, what should I install first?

p.s.s. I now feel like I used to on Christmas Eve. I might not even go to bed tonight.

 

Mr. Charlton is a Terrible Code Monkey

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I was recently working on a project for a friend of mine who’s a software engineer, helping him put together some 3D modeling stuff. Nothing outside of my scope, but it’s been a while since I’ve sent anything to a 3D printer, so there was some stuff I had to relearn. We ran into one major issue after I had built the first model. When we sent it off to the 3D printer, the 3D printer said the model was too small. It was so small, in fact, my model wasn’t even showing up at all.

Now, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while. When the printer balked at me, my first reaction wasn’t “What’s wrong with this stupid hunk of garbage”, it was “Okay, let’s  simplify the problem”. Instead of checking the model (which I had spent hours on at this point), I sent a boring 3D cube to the printer. I ran into the same issue. The cube was too small. Huh! This instantly told me my model was probably fine, but the model and the 3D printer weren’t talking to each other correctly. Something was getting lost in translation. So I made the cube 100 times bigger. Success! The cube was being recognized. I made the model 100 times bigger, and the issue disappeared.

I told my friend, the one who contracted me to do this work, about the issue and how I solved it. He told me the process I went through, simplifying the problem then testing it, was the same way a coder would tackle the problem. Little did he know I’ve been teaching myself the ins-and-outs of coding for a while now! The philosophy of working with code is the same as the philosophy of generating 3D models, which is also the same philosophy of dealing with technology and computers in general; Test the easy, big stuff first so you can narrow down the solution. Also, your computer does not respond very well to yelling instructions at it.

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Strangely, it doesn’t respond to hand gestures either.

Coding isn’t something that comes naturally to human beings. Unless the person has some sort of specific autism, coding is a skill everyone will struggle with. Learning how to code and making little programs has taught me an incredibly important skill, one I never got the hang of in grade school, at college, or anywhere before in the workplace. The skill of being miserable at something, and failing over and over again.

I was pretty good at school. I wasn’t an exemplary student, by any stretch of the means, but I didn’t struggle with any subject. There’s never been a time where I was overly challenged. The only challenge I ever faced was of my own doing, as I tended to procrastinate. Any problem can be made difficult if you wait until the absolute last minute to take it on. School and work never really put me in the path of failing. If it was school, I did well if I put the slightest amount of effort in, and work was basically showing up and doing the job.

Enter coding. I started coding, ever so slightly, a couple years ago. I was a lousy coder back then. These days, well, I’m still pretty awful at coding, but I can look at code and make some sort of sense of it. I can make little scripts to automate tasks. The truth is, I’m not sure if I’ll ever actually be good at coding. I think it’ll always be something I struggle with. That okay, though, because there’s few things I’ve found in life to be as enjoyable as solving problems, and a computer, well, that is basically a box full of problems that need to be solved.

The point I’m trying to make here is very few people are naturally good with computers. The rest of us nerds have to work for it. So if you’re trying to teach yourself how to code, there’s a trick that will keep you on track. The trick is learning to be happy with failing, over and over again. A computer doesn’t hand out participation trophies. Having code that is 95 % correct will still return errors. The computer will only recognize code that works. But when you finally do figure it out, there isn’t anything I’ve found that is quite as satisfying.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. Okay, an orgasm can also be satisfying, but anyone can give themselves one of those, so it’s a different kind of satisfying, I guess.

 

Who Would go to WestWorld?

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SPOILER ALERT. IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE NEW HBO SERIES ‘WESTWORLD’, UNDERSTAND I’M GOING TO BE TALKING ABOUT IT. I MEAN, THAT SHOULD BE PRETTY CLEAR FROM THE TITLE.

Westworld is a new series on HBO. The intellectual property, on the other hand, is a couple decades old. Westworld was originally a movie written and directed by the late Michael Crichton, and it premiered in 1973. In the movie, Westworld is one of three amusements parks that sits alongside Medieval world and Roman world in the near future of 1983. Tourists pay the astronomical price of one thousand dollars to spend a day in the park. The parks are filled with androids, and you can indulge in sexual encounters or a fight to the death. The androids are programmed to be incapable of violence against the tourists. Until, of course, something goes wrong. A computer virus begins to affect the androids, who are now able to maim and kill people.

HBOs series follows roughly the same plot, except there’s a lot more focus on the engineers building and maintaining the world. There’s only Westworld here, and again, the price of admission makes the park available to only the incredibly wealthy. There’s a pretty drastic change in tone, though. Michael Crichton’s Westworld was an amusement park. It was a place where you’d sleep with an android, get into a fake bar room brawl, drink a pile of whisky, and get into a shootout with the park’s antagonist, ‘The Gunslinger’ played by Yul Brynner. The HBO’s version is a lot… darker.

I like dark. I’m a huge fan of black humour. But Westworld in 2066, where the show takes place, doesn’t really seem like an amusement park. First off, the androids are made from flesh and bones. They bleed. They feel pain. And tourists can do whatever they please to these more-human-than-machine androids. Always wanted to scalp a person? Knock yourself out. Want to mow down a large swath of people? We’ve got a storyline just for you. Feel like killing children? Come to Westworld to experience the realest child killing you can do without actually killing a child. It seems more like a place where sociopaths go to live out their wildest desire. At the same time, as monstrous as some of the tourists seem to be, if Westworld was real, it would probably play out more similarly to the online games we have today.

The problem isn’t Westworld. It’s the fact that I can’t rent out the place, by myself, and have an adventure, by myself. This is how I would imagine the scenarios would actually be played out.

Scenario #1: The mysterious Salesperson at the Tack and Trade.

I’ve just gotten to Westworld. I’m wearing a sleek duster, and some killer cowboy boots. My hat is on point. I’m getting a horse at the Tack and Trade, the local store. A burly man with a mean mustache is running the joint. We start to talk, shooting the breeze. He takes me outside and shows me my new horse. It’s a majestic white stallion. We go back inside to square up. He leans over the counter and begins to tell me a story, a story of buried treasure and a map he has in his possession.  I’m intrigued, the plot thickens. All of sudden, another tourist starts shooting. He’s not shooting any of the people, mind you. He’s shooting the horses. He shoots my horse. I go outside, to find my beautiful animal full of holes. The perpetrator, dressed in green neon leather chaps and a pink fuzzy cowboy hat, looks me right in the eyes, and proceeds to teabag the dead horse. He screams “***BLAZE420*** representing 2Short Clan!” He then flips me off and walks away. I have lost the immersion.

Scenario #2: My Hired Gun.

I’ve gone to the next town over, walking there because all the horses in the previous town were shot. On the way over, I met a strange man. He is out in the desert, dying of thirst. I give him a long pull from my canteen. He’s grateful, saying he was left out to die here. I tell him I’m headed to the town close by, but I’m new to these parts and could use a guide. He says hell to that, he won’t be my guide, but my bodyguard. I’ve given him his life back, and now he has a life debt to pay to me. We start walking to the town, only to have a man on a horse chase us down. His horse is silver and has rockets on the side. He screams “They said you’d be dying in the desert!” He hops off his horse, and begins walking toward my new companion. This new threat is not very tall. Instead of running, my bodyguard pulls down his pants, turns around and presents himself to this new man. They proceed to copulate, with the small man screaming “How do you like this, Brian Treverson? How does it feel to be fucked by the great Anthony Sung?”. My bodyguard continues to thank Anthony repeatedly. It’s only later that I find out billionaire Tony Sung paid extra for the privilege of having an android modeled after a bully he dealt with in college.  That android just happened to be the one I rescued. I have lost the immersion.

Scenario #3: The Beautiful Bar Room Stranger.

I make it to town. I decide a stiff drink is in order, so I head to the saloon. Piano music plays a ragtime ditty, and I stand at the bar. A coin is slapped on the bar, and soon I’ve procured a bottle of whiskey. I pour myself a drink, when a lovely young thing saunters up to me. “Mind if I have a taste, Mr…” I once again nod at the bartender, and he brings another glass. “Mr. Charlton,” I say. “The Illustrious Mr. Charlton”. We both take a sip. Her eyes dart around the room. “Mr. Charlton, we’ve found you at last. I’m a United States Marshal, and we’re in desperate need of men like…” she’s interrupted by an incredibly intoxicated man who bursts into the saloon. He belches uncontrollably. He gets up on top of a card table and exclaims to the bar “I’ve been eating nothing but HoHos and packaged noodles for three weeks. Let me show you my collection.” He then drops his drawers and defecates all over the card table. “No Rules!” he says in a singsong voice “NOOOOOO RUUUUULLLLES.” He’s not an android, and the stench is real. I begin to vomit, the smell is too much. I have lost the immersion.

When I first started watching Westworld, I couldn’t imagine what kind of person would go there. When I thought about it for a minute, I realized exactly what kind of person would go there, and that group is not being represented in the show. To anyone with the vision of a future theme park with no rules, just remember one thing; People will take you up on that, and they might start breaking the rules in ways you never imagined.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. Tell me, Anthony Hopkins. You’ve built an incredible world, but how would you keep the trolls out?

p.s.s. You remember Martin Shkreli? Tell me he wouldn’t spend a week in Westworld ruining everyone else’s time.