Having a bit of a muse today about how living seems to be about the “betweens”, either achieving something in the “betweens” or waiting, using those items to define life or to segment it.

Between birth and death.  Between childhood, adulthood and old age.  Between jobs.  Between relationships and friendships.  Between birthdays, weddings, funerals and Christmases.

Between holidays, between weekends, between parties.  Between getting up and going to bed.  Between meals, between beers.  Between meetings, between emails, between clocking on and clocking off.  Between phonecalls, between SMS’s, between IMs.  Between Facebook posts, between blog entries.  Between runs, between matches, between games.   Between raids, between deathmatches, between LANs.  Between movies, between shows.  Between kisses, between roots, between arguments.

Most of our lives we spend looking forward to things that occur on a regular basis, or working towards making the best of a time period between major events.  Most of the time we just drift while waiting for the next party, pissup, job opportunity or slice of free time.

The question is, what are your “betweens”.  What are the waypoints of your life that assume such importance that everything else becomes stuff to do while waiting for the event or working towards the event.  Can these be used to gauge the type of person you are and whether your priorities in life are wrong (and whether that can be categorically proven anyway)

Approaching 30, getting philosophical, you know the drill.

Most of us like video and computer games, from big blockbuster set piece extravaganzas to playing solitaire to while away the time.  They’re a fun diversion.

Then there’s games which should be played because of their importance.  Passage is one such game.

Created by Jason Rohrer, Passage is about.. well.. life.

It would be a disservice to describe it.  What I will say is that if you wanted an example that games could be art, well this is it.

Get Passage.  Play through it once.  You won’t really get it.  Then go and read the Creator’s Statement (it’s on the page linked above, I won’t hyperlink it so you won’t cheat).  Like art, Passage should be looked at, examined and interpreted based on your own personal viewpoint before noting the author’s explanation.

Jason Rohrer is a very very clever man.  I’m very late to the party on this, but it deserves being noted and celebrated.

I grew up in a country area of Australia in the 80’s and had most of my videogaming education during the 90’s, when I was in high school and myself and various friends had pretty much every gaming console that you could find.

Note that this was in the country, where gaming consoles that you could find were limited to what you could get in Target and the one independent gaming store in the district, so you’d be fed on a diet of Nintendo and Sega.  A friend nearby had a NES, I got a Game Boy, we both graduated to the SNES and it went from there.  Friends and relatives had the Sega consoles and so our gaming educations were complete (in the teenage console-warish model of that generation, decrying the opposite faction but appreciating a good game when it came along)

Then something interesting came along: the Gamate.

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An article from the internets today about a new study that’s shown that playing Tetris in a certain time window after experiencing something nasty may help reduce flashbacks.  FTFA:

Researchers at Oxford University took 40 healthy volunteers and showed them a film that included traumatic images of injury from several sources, including drink driving advertisements.

After waiting 30 minutes, half the people played Tetris for 10 minutes while the others did nothing.

Those who played the game had far fewer flashbacks to the film over the next week.

Of course, the only way to make this practical is to issue every person in a warzone a DS and Tetris.  Imagine whipping our your portable console and clearing some lines after just seeing your squad get blown up.  Surely that’ll help.

Sarcasm intended.  The power of gaming is awesome but this is just a bit weird.

I came across a Slashdot article today (diverted from this original piece of writing) about how being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes due to excessive stimulii and we need to be around nature to recover from this.

Being from the country originally, I always find a brief break in an area with a bit of nature does wonders for relaxing me, and I try to get up to the country whenever I can.  However if you want anecdotal discussion about whether or not this is accurate, Slashdot has plenty of that (as per usual).  What I’m more interested in is tying it back  to the chosen relaxation methods for the modern generation, which are based on electronic distractions.

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Seems like a strange choice.  Monochrome pinball game (note, not a pinball sim) released on the original grey brick that handheld gaming was built on.  Released in the early 90’s, where gaming progressed to a highpoint in purity with the late 8-bit early 16-bit generation.  Not a big seller, rarely seen on the shelves, and even I acquired it by chance.

Yes, it  is good.  Very good in fact and apart from various notorious time-suckers over the years it’s been by far my most constantly played game.  I’ve had it since the early 90’s and have played it on the original Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color, Super Gameboy, GBA, PC emulator, emulated on PSP, on my eeepc while on holidays and now on an M3 cart on my DS.  What is it that makes it so good?  First, a bit of history.

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Welcome to angrypixel.net.  This place has been a static portal to other long-defunct sites of mine for years, and prior to that was a site for the games creation community.

Now it’s a place for general musings about anything and everything.  I intend it to be low on quantity and high on quality (ie longer indepth posts), but the content may only be amusing to me..