1856: Streaming from Every Orifice

I decided to fiddle around with the “ShadowPlay” feature on my graphics card tonight. This is a feature of more recent nVidia cards that takes some of the strain off the main computer when either recording or streaming video of games. I hadn’t tried it at all before, owing to the fact that I’ve never really had occasion to, but I decided to give it a try with Final Fantasy XIV this evening just as an experiment.

I’m impressed! There was absolutely no impact on the game’s smoothness whatsoever, and the footage that was being streamed to Twitch (only at 480p and 30fps for this initial experiment) looked nice, clear and stutter-free. The ShadowPlay software also provides the facility to stream your voice through your microphone at the same time as the game audio, too, so talky types can speak all over the top of their favourite games like “proper” streamers do.

I’m slightly coming around to the idea of streaming, since a significant number of people seem to think that so far as video games are concerned, streaming and YouTube are the way forward, while traditional “print” (i.e. text-based) journalism and reportage is dying out. Certainly with the recent folding of Joystiq, one of the most long-running blog-style games sites, it seems that there are tough times ahead for the games press. I still doubt it will die out completely — and, moreover, I still vastly prefer reading a well-written article to watching a video in most cases — but it’s probably worth embracing these newer things that don’t seem to be going away any time soon rather than plugging my ears and going “la la la la la”.

While I have a bit of time on my hands, then, it would seem prudent to use some of this time to experiment a bit. (I hasten to add to those concerned for my employment status that I have also been writing to various places in search of work, so please don’t think I’m sitting on my arse playing games all day!) I’ve tried my hand at some sort of vaguely Let’s Play-ish videos before, focusing on bullet hell shooters, but perhaps I should have another go. Arguably even more so than games writing, it’s extremely difficult to get established in the fields of either streaming or YouTubing, but I certainly have the skills to do both and, on the off-chance things happen to go well, there’s the potential to make some money there.

I’m under no illusions, though; this is very unlikely, and pretty much reserved for the already well-established personalities like PewDiePie, Boogie2988, TotalBiscuit and their ilk. Still, it just takes a few people talking about you — and the production of decent content, of course — to start the ball rolling on something potentially bigger, and it can’t hurt to give it a try. In fact, it might even be quite fun. There are, I feel, some obvious gaps in the market so far as streaming and YouTubing are concerned, much as there are in the games press, so that’s probably the place to start; let’s explore it and see what happens.

1855: Redemption

Having Platinumed Akiba’s Trip — and a lot of fun it was, too, thanks very much — I started on my next non-Final Fantasy XIV game, Criminal Girls.

Criminal Girls drew some attention when it was first announced due to some seriously lewd scenes in which the player character “motivates” the titular girls through some touchscreen-based S&M play. It then drew some further attention when it was revealed that the localisation would seemingly obscure these scenes with pink fog and cut out the somewhat… suggestive voice acting. (As it happens, the voice acting is indeed gone, but as you progress the pink fog does fade away, revealing what’s underneath.)

As so often tends to be the case with games that draw attention for their pervier elements, however, Criminal Girls has plenty of interesting stuff going on that doesn’t involve spanking. It’s a 2D, retro-style RPG of the 16/32-bit mould, and thus far — I’m only an hour or two in so far — it seems to be most intriguing.

At the game’s outset, you, as the participant narrator-protagonist, find yourself newly employed by the forces of Hell and presented with a selection of young female “delinquents” who have the opportunity to be redeemed and resurrected if they can successfully pass the “four trials” and climb the tower in which they’re incarcerated. It’s your job to escort them on this journey and see where things go from there. Along the way, you’ll fight monsters, solve puzzles and, as previously mentioned, indulge in a bit of naughtiness in the name of “motivation”.

So far so Japanese. Thus far it’s an intriguing setup, with the four initial girls not immediately revealing why they have been incarcerated or what their “delinquency” involved. There’s also a suggestion early on that things are not quite going as expected in Hell, with the “convict” monsters showing up in places where they’re not supposed to. Doubtless all will be revealed — in narrative terms, pervert — as the story progresses, and I’m interested to see how it goes.

What’s probably the most interesting thing about Criminal Girls is its combat system. While nothing particularly fancy presentation-wise — in fact, it’s one of the most visually bland combat systems I’ve seen, although the chibi representations of the girls are cute — the execution is the intriguing thing here. Unlike most RPGs, where you have the opportunity to micromanage what every party member is doing, in Criminal Girls you only have four options each turn, and that determines what the whole party will be doing. The available options are determined by which abilities the girls have learned through “motivation” sessions, and simply what they feel like doing on any given turn. Initially, the girls will simply refuse to do anything, but as they’re motivated they’ll unlock more and more abilities, and each turn it’s simply a case of deciding which of the four suggestions the girls offer you is the most appropriate: do you go for an all-out attack with multiple members, or do you allow an individual to do something a little more special? So far it’s simple, but I anticipate it becoming a very interesting system as the game progresses and more abilities open up.

I can’t say a lot more about it yet as I’ve only played the opening section. I’m looking forward to discovering more about it, though; perviness aside (which I have absolutely no problem with, as you know) it’s shaping up to be one of the more unconventional takes on the RPG genre I’ve played for quite some time.

1854: Next Steps

I bought a piano today. This is not something I thought I’d ever be able to do, but it turns out if you look around a bit, you can actually get a decent (albeit somewhat aged) piano for a very reasonable price.

In other words, if you eschew regular music shops and instead go for a more “direct” approach, you’ll often find much better deals.

I acquired my new piano (which arrives on Wednesday) from a local business called Bryant Pianos. I stumbled across this site during my search for a place to acquire a piano the other day, and decided to pay them a visit this weekend. Bryant Pianos is, it turns out, a business run from home by the eponymous Mr Bryant, who has a workshop full of pianos that he acquires, restores, repairs and then sells on. (Sometimes he acquires, strips them for parts and then sends them off to the great piano graveyard, too.) He’s also a piano tuner — a useful person to know when you have a piano.

Anyway, I made an appointment to pay him a visit, and we did so today. I took a couple of bits of sheet music with me — Chopin’s Preludes and Liszt’s Consolations, if you were curious — and tried a few out. I don’t know an awful lot about different piano makes, to be honest, aside from the fact that the grand piano I grew up with — and which still occupies my parents’ living room — was a good (and expensive!) make because it was a Steinway. I was familiar with a few other makes but not in any great depth; I’d heard of (and probably, at some point, played) Knights, Bechsteins, Rogers(es), Challens and various others, and also knew that new Yamahas were both very nice and well out of my price range for the moment. Bryant didn’t offer any Yamahas, but he had the others, so I gave them a go.

The Rogers was the oldest piano there, hailing from 1906. It had a really nice, rich, full tone and, apparently, weighed an absolute ton, being a distinctly old-school upright piano. Its action was reasonably nice, though it proved a little difficult to control at times, particularly when playing more delicate phrases.

The Challen looked nice — somewhat “school piano-y” in a 70s sort of way — but had a rather clangy timbre that caused me to discount it quite quickly. The action was nice, but it wasn’t the nicest piano there, nor was it the cheapest.

The Knight hailed from the late ’40s and had quite a nice sound, but a slightly rickety action that, a little like the Rogers, made it difficult to control at times. It’s something I could have probably learned to live with, but while there was the choice there, I didn’t see any point in “settling” for something that wasn’t quite right.

The Bechstein, which was the one I ended up going for, had a good sound and a pleasing action. It wasn’t quite as full and rich as the Rogers, but it still sounded good, and, perhaps more importantly, it felt pleasant to play. I went back and tried the others a few times just to make sure, but felt confident that the Bechstein would be more than adequate for my needs. Bryant did say that due to its age — it’s from the ’20s — it probably wouldn’t have a huge lifespan, hence the fact it was one of the cheaper instruments in his workshop, but that it would be fine for a while yet. That’s fine with me; I need something to get started with, then if (when?) the money starts rolling in I can consider upgrading to a newer model. I’d very much like one of those shiny black Yamahas, but I can’t help but feel that’s a while off yet!

I’m looking forward to having a piano in the house again. I’ve had my electric piano for several years now, but it’s just not the same; sitting and playing it on a wobbly keyboard stand with an amplifier of questionable quality spitting and popping at me is all very well and good, but even the small amount of “setup time” required to get that going was enough to make me not play nearly as often as I should. Having a piano at which I can just sit down and play should hopefully change that; I should play more, and, all being well, it’ll form at least part of my 375th career change in my lifetime. So that’s nice.

1853: Waifutine’s Day

The whole “waifu” thing is something I find quite interesting.

For the uninitiated, a proud declaration that someone is your “waifu” (or, optionally, and possibly spelled differently, “hasubando”) is something oddly peculiar to fans of Japanese popular entertainment. It goes far beyond simple attraction to the physical depiction of a character — particularly since it’s very rare for anime- and manga-styled media to have unattractive characters, particularly female ones — and instead is to do with how the character is depicted: usually a combination of artwork, animation, voice acting and writing.

I say it’s peculiar to fans of Japanese popular entertainment because you simply don’t see it happening with Western entertainment. People might be sexually attracted to someone like, say, Doctor Who’s Amy Pond; people might be attracted to the intelligence of someone like Deep Space Nine’s Jadzia Dax; people might simply want to hang out with someone cool like Robin from How I Met Your Mother (yes, these are all examples from my own personal tastes; please feel free to replace them with your own choices, including gentlemen, if you so desire) — but it’s pretty rare for someone to proudly and simply declare that one of these characters is their “waifu” (or just plain “wife”) and develop a borderline obsession with them. Among other things, it’s seen as creepy to have an obsession with a “3D” person, whereas when it comes to “2D” characters, pretty much anything goes as far as most people are concerned, since they’re not “real people” in the first place.

Perhaps it’s to do with the contrast between animation and live action: in Japanese popular media, we get animation covering all sorts of subject matter and for all ages, while in the West, with a few exceptions like Archer, The Venture Bros., South Park and a few others, animation is still seen very much as children’s entertainment, and live-action is seen as more appropriate for adults. The thing with animation is it depicts a heavily idealised perception of reality where pretty much everyone is physically beautiful and completely visually distinct from one another, and a lot of characters fall into easily definable, easily categorisable tropes that people can latch on to and identify as being appealing to them.

In this way, the declaration of a “waifu” could be argued to be a distillation of a person’s individual tastes. It’s rare (and undesirable) to pigeon-hole real people into neat tropes like tsundere, kuudere, ojou-sama and the like, since real people are complex; meanwhile, it’s expected in anime and Japanese games. These characters are deliberately exaggerated interpretations of particular personality traits; in reality, everyone might have a bit of all of these tropes in them, whereas when we’re talking about animated entertainment, one of these tropes tends to be the defining characteristic of a particular character. In other words, by declaring a particular character to be one’s “waifu” you are effectively nailing your colours to a particular personality trait’s standard and declaring that this, above all others, is something you find appealing for whatever reason.

And it doesn’t even have to match how you feel in the “real world”. I’m crazy about tsundere characters in games and anime, for example, but if I was confronted with someone who was that bitchy and mean to me in reality, I’d be quite uncomfortable. (Although if you listened to Andie and I insult one another on a daily basis — without meaning any of it, I might add — you might question my assertion here.) Likewise, something like the yandere trope can be extremely compelling — your favourite, even — in fiction, but something you would absolutely want to stay the hell away from in reality. (And with good reason; if you’re not sure what a yandere is, I’d urge you to go and play School Days through a few times; if you hit the “Bloody End”, then you’ll soon figure it out.)

On a vaguely related note, having now completed three out of the four endings of Akiba’s Trip on the Vita, I’m fairly confident that Rin will be my waifu from that particular work of interactive entertainment. And I will fight anyone who doesn’t agree she is best girl! 🙂

1852: Stay Unsafe

Let’s talk a little about Health and Safety.

Health and Safety (because the two are inevitably linked together as some sort of single collective concept) is one of those aspects of the modern world that, like its distant cousin Political Correctness, is often ridiculed. And quite rightly so.

This isn’t to say that doing things safely isn’t important, of course. I would not attempt to rewire my house because I know I would probably blow it up. I would not stand on a rickety old plank above a bed of spikes because I know I would probably fall off or break it, and also I’m not a platform game hero. I would not open a gas tap in a science laboratory and then drink from it like a water fountain.

These are all things that normal people wouldn’t do. These are all things that normal people have enough common sense to not do. These are all things that normal people don’t need to be told not to do — or if, for whatever reason, they do do them once and survive, they probably don’t need to be told not to do them again. One of the ways we as humans learn things is the primitive but effective means of hurting ourselves and then realising that we really don’t want to feel that way again. We start doing this as children, and while we may do it a little less as adults — we’ve learned most of the things that hurt by the time we reach adolescence, in most cases — there’s still the occasional situation where you’ll do something unfortunate, hurt yourself and learn something from the experience, whether the injury you suffer is a stubbed toe or a broken arm. And that’s absolutely fine. It works. It’s how we’ve evolved. And it’s how we’ve survived until now.

The trouble with Health and Safety as a modern concept is that it works on a lowest common denominator basis, going by the assumption that everyone has absolutely no common sense and/or ability to learn from their mistakes whatsoever, and must therefore be warned of absolutely everything that has even the slightest risk of doing anything to them ranging from a slight bruise to ripping off all their limbs and head, leaving them as nothing but a bloody torso.

Even the most stupid people, in my experience, know how to protect themselves from incidents at both ends of this spectrum, however. Your average person knows how to walk up a set of stairs without falling over as much as they understand how they probably shouldn’t attempt to fellate a chainsaw while it’s running.

The organisation I’ve just parted ways with is obsessed with Health and Safety. And this isn’t an exaggeration. They plaster it all over their internal documentation, that safety is their number one concern. And for certain parts of the business in question, that’s probably not a bad thing, given that there are workers who deal with dangerous things on a daily basis.

Trouble is, none of those dangerous things are in the office environment, and yet the quasi-religious fervour that the Health and Safety zealots beat themselves into (carefully, of course) on a daily basis is still very much present and correct. We are talking about — and this is not an exaggeration — an organisation where you get reprimanded if you do not hold on to the handrail while walking up and down stairs; where if you’re carrying something that requires both hands, you’re expected to walk to the other end of the building and take the lift instead; where employees are encouraged to report each and every supposed safety infraction they happen to see; where you have to “risk assess” and wear a bump cap if you as much as drop a pen under your desk and go down to get it.

It’s utter nonsense for a number of reasons. Firstly, there’s the sheer amount of time it wastes. Meetings begin with a discussion of safety that is, more often than not, completely and utterly irrelevant to the main topic of the meeting — and, again, covering the sort of “common sense” things discussed above. Time is set aside for employees to down tools and work on “safety activities” to promote safety to their colleagues — and if that sounds like some sort of awful school project, believe me when I say that the eventual execution of these activities is equally excruciating, not to mention yet another waste of time.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the culture of utter distrust and paranoia this creates. Employees are encouraged to report any safety infractions they happen to see using a special dedicated system (that, naturally, takes an unnecessarily long time to work your way through) — and, yes, this includes happening to see anyone who dares to take their life into their own hands by not holding the handrail on the stairs. Aside from that, though, the constant beating over the head with “safety” issues that everyone gets on a daily basis gives across the distinct impression that absolutely no-one is trusted not to cover themselves in jam, jump into a wasp’s nest and then set themselves on fire unless they’re specifically told not to.

It’s doubtless some sort of legal issue, where the company needs to be seen to be “protecting” its employees from all the big, bad, horrible things in this world that might kill them at a moment’s notice. But, as with anything, you can take things too far. And this is taking things much, much too far. It’s patronising, insulting and a waste of everyone’s time, and yet no-one ever seems to question it. It’s quite scary in a way; it’s almost cultish behaviour.

Still, I don’t have to worry about it any more. But I do kind of pity the people who are stuck there who have never known any different. It’s an exciting and dangerous world out here; a world where we are free to let go of the handrail and see where life takes us. Sometimes we climb the stairway to strange and wonderful new places; others still we might slip and fall and come crashing down to earth. Both can be helpful, valuable and even enjoyable experiences. But if you never let go of that handrail, you’ll never know.

1851: Bollocks

So, I lost my job today. It’s the third time depression has played a partial role in me losing a position, and the second time I’ve been treated like absolute shit by people who were supposed to be supporting me, effectively putting me in a position where it was either get fired or be forced to resign. (Regrettably, in this case, I was not given the opportunity to do the latter.)

I was pretty furious earlier. I may have bellowed an obscenity in the face of the person who fired me. It wasn’t my proudest moment, but I don’t regret it one bit. The person in question is someone who, along with a couple of others, has contributed to me feeling like absolute shit for the last couple of weeks. So no, I don’t regret it; they deserved it, and moreover, letting out that shout was enormously cathartic — so much so that I pretty much felt the last couple of weeks of stress leaving my body through my mouth.

I guess I should be grateful then? But fuck that. I do feel surprisingly better than I thought I would, however; I was in tears while this hideous process was going on, but once I got home — after a horribly gruelling journey up the shithole of a motorway that is the M27, hopefully for the last time — I was pretty calm about the whole thing, and ready to look for the next step. (That said, thinking back on it is making me a bit angry, so I’m going to stop doing that for the sake of my own sanity right now.)

Anyway, all this puts me in a position that I was planning to put myself in at some point soon anyway, albeit a little sooner than anticipated and without any of the groundwork I was hoping to lay before I put myself in this position.

I’ve come to the conclusion that working in a corporate environment like that simply isn’t for me. There’s too much scope for two-facedness, lying, backstabbing and general unpleasantness. There’s no reason for these things to happen, of course, but having spoken to a number of people who have had various office jobs, it seems that it’s pretty much par for the course with that kind of position.

Not only that, but I have absolutely no patience for an organisation that puts policy and procedure ahead of individual welfare and performance. I’ll leave specifics for another day, but suffice to say that this place was rife with ridiculous policies and procedures that served as little more than excuses to get people into trouble — and it was also host to the nanniest of nanny-state, wrap-everyone-in-cotton-wool health-and-safety bullshit-obsessed nonsense I have ever encountered in my life. So, aside from the regular income, I shan’t miss it one teeny-tiny bit, aside from the couple of people there who were genuinely decent folk just struggling on to get things done amid all this nonsense.

The plan, then, is to try and strike out on my own; in the past, while working from home has occasionally been lonely and stressful in its own strange way, I vastly prefer it to long and tedious commutes with toxic atmospheres at the other end. I can control my own working hours, I can take on the work I want to take on and I can simply get on with it without other people interfering with me. This, it seems, is my optimal means of working, and it’s unfortunate it’s taken such an unpleasant experience — and six months of wasted time — to confirm that to me.

I have a few avenues to pursue, one of which is something that I’ve considered trying to make a living from in the past: music teaching. I’ve done a little of this on the side in the past before, but only a few pupils. I know it’s more than possible to make a very healthy living doing this, though it takes time to build up that solid base of regular pupils. That means I’ll be looking for freelance or temporary work in the meantime, likely with an emphasis on writing and/or editing. It’ll also be a good opportunity to brush up on my web design skills, which in turn will open up opportunities for other work.

As horrible as today’s experience was, it’s ultimately a good thing, I think. It’s given me a push to not settle for a job where I’m miserable, and instead to actively seek out things that I am both good at and enjoy.

I feel there’s a long and difficult road ahead of me, but I feel ready to start walking it. Wish me luck.

1850: All Wound Up

The last couple of weeks have been shit. And they are likely to continue being shit. Particularly tomorrow which, without going into details, promises to be a real humdinger of a never-ending, toilet bowl-splattering, sloppy half-digested poo of a day.

I shan’t go into details for various reasons, but suffice to say I am Not Having a Good Time. I feel marginally better now than I did earlier today — more on that in a moment — but for the most part I am reaching one of those “troughs” with regard to my emotional state and mental health. And oh boy, it’s a deep one. I’d go so far as to say that there have been times in the last couple of weeks when I have been feeling pretty much as bad as I did when I hit my previous lowest ever ebb back in 2010 when my then-wife and I parted ways. That’s not a record I particularly want to try and beat.

There was one positive amid all the crap, though, and that was that at Slimming World this evening I had successfully shed another 3lbs, even amid all the stress, anxiety and depression that the last couple of weeks have caused me. I candidly admitted during the group session that my ongoing success — I’ve now lost over a stone in total — was one much-needed positive thing in the middle of a horrible period in my life, and that I was thankful for the support the group sessions — and the overall structure and targets of the programme — were providing me in this difficult time. I walked away with the “Slimmer of the Week” award, which was somewhat unexpected, and which netted me a bag full of (healthy, “Free Food”) goodies. So that’s good.

Almost everything else is shit though. And it looks like continuing to be shit for the foreseeable future right now.

I could be pleasantly surprised. But I’m not holding my breath.

Perhaps I should. Shit stinks, after all.

1849: The Factory Floor

Lily loved Trundlebot.

She knew she was very lucky to be allowed on the factory floor, because usually the children of the colony weren’t allowed anywhere near it. The fact that her father was the manager of the complex, overseeing the various automatons’ duties and making sure everything continued to run smoothly on a daily basis, meant that she enjoyed certain privileges, though: privileges that she didn’t take for granted.

The other children in her class sometimes teased her for spending so much time in the factory, but she knew that secretly they were jealous; she overheard them sometimes talking about the robots, and how interesting they were, and how they’d love to get up close to see how they really worked. But no-one but Lily was allowed to do that. She’d have let them come with her if they’d only ask — her father often said that she could bring her friends — but no-one ever did, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

That’s because Lily didn’t really have many friends. She’d always been somewhat distant, generally preferring the company of a book from Old Earth or a headset filled with classical music. But her father had seen how much she’d come to life the first time he’d brought her to the factory, and so he’d made special arrangements for her to be able to come and go as she pleased, so long as she was careful.

Trundlebot was particularly special to her, because Trundlebot was the first robot she’d encountered up close. Trundlebot wasn’t its real name, of course, but Lily had quickly christened the mechanical giant that after seeing it trundling leisurely around the factory floor, carrying things from one place to another as if it had all the time in the world.

Trundlebot wasn’t the most efficient or advanced model in the factory, but Lily’s father had kept it around for as long as it remained functional, since he knew how much the ageing robot meant to his daughter. Even as the rest of the factory was staffed by shiny white plastic automatons with more convincing humanoid forms, Lily still found herself fascinated by the browning metal of Trundlebot; the stereoscopic cameras that formed its eyes; its spindly, awkward yet vaguely humanoid arms; the caterpillar tracks upon which it made its way around the factory.

Lily wasn’t so naïve as to believe that Trundlebot knew who she was — she was nearly ten years old, after all; far too old for such childish fancies — but that didn’t stop her thinking of it fondly and always spending most of her factory floor visits following the automaton around. Trundlebot was the closest thing she felt she had to a true friend; often, when she knew no-one was watching her, she’d talk to it, spilling forth her deepest, darkest secrets that she didn’t even tell her father. She found the experience therapeutic; Trundlebot never judged her for the things she said, and she found sweet release from offloading her emotional baggage in this way.

One day, as spring was just starting to show itself in the colony, Lily headed to the factory after school as she always did, and immediately sought out Trundlebot. It didn’t take her long to find it, but something didn’t seem quite right: it didn’t seem to be “trundling” so much as rolling around the factory floor in a somewhat determined, almost aggressive manner, with a clear purpose. It had always had that sense of purpose about it — it always got the job done, after all — but there was also the distinct impression that it would do things at its own pace and wouldn’t be rushed. It reminded Lily in many ways of an elderly man pottering around his garden; plenty of things to do, and all the time in the world to do them one at a time.

Today, though, Trundlebot seemed to be moving with unusual efficiency and speed. It didn’t look at all right, and it concerned Lily somewhat.

“What do you think?” said her father, walking up behind her and placing his hand gently on her shoulder.

“What did you do to him?” asked Lily. “He’s… different.” Lily always personified Trundlebot as a “he”, despite the robot technically being completely genderless.

“We upgraded its drive components,” said her father. “They were getting a little worn, so we took the opportunity to put some more efficient parts in there.” Here he lowered his voice. “Plus between you and me, the bosses have been getting on my back to get it sorted out for a while. It’s the weak link in the process.”

Lily did not like this at all, but she just pouted and said nothing. Despite the new-found spring in its step, it was still Trundlebot, after all. She spent her usual few hours following it around the factory floor, this time having to jog to keep up with her mechanical companion. After a few short minutes, she found herself enjoying the exercise, and it wasn’t until she was on her way home that she started to think about the old Trundlebot and how the new one differed from it.

Lily continued to visit the factory every day, and eventually became accustomed to her robotic friend’s new-found burst of almost youthful vigour. But then something else changed, and she found herself once again feeling a little strange.

This time around, Trundlebot’s spindly arms had been replaced with what appeared to be more heavy-duty lifting apparatus: large metal claws on the end of thick, almost muscular-looking arms wrapped in flexible plastic tubing, like that seen on a vacuum hose but about five times the diameter. Lily watched it from a distance for a little while; its new arms allowed it to lift much heavier, more cumbersome objects, and when combined with its new drive parts, it was doing so with remarkable efficiency.

“What did you do now?” she said, sensing her father walking up behind her.

“Well, I think you can see,” said her father. “It’s been working out.” He chuckled.

Lily pouted again, and said nothing. Her father, sensing something amiss, continued.

“We’ve been starting to deal with much heavier materials now that the Arcology project is underway,” he said. “It made sense to upgrade its lifting apparatus, as it just wouldn’t have been able to cope otherwise.”

Reluctantly, Lily found herself forced to agree; better that Trundlebot could continue doing its job than be consigned to the scrap-heap simply because it wasn’t able to do the work any more. As it passed by, its stereoscopic vision cameras looked right at her, and she felt like she had made “eye contact” with the machine; it was still her friend in there.

Once again, the weeks passed by, and Lily gradually became accustomed to Trundlebot’s new, more physically imposing form. On one occasion, her father took manual control of Trundlebot with the override device — essentially a remote control for any of the robots on the factory floor — and made it pick her up in its big, powerful arms. She was delighted, and found herself with an uncontrollable desire to fling her young, skinny arms around the cold, metallic neck of the automaton; it wasn’t quite a hug, but it was near enough.

Summer came, and the colony enjoyed a heatwave. It was delightful weather; the sun shone in clear skies, and it was pleasantly warm without being uncomfortable. Even Lily, who generally preferred to stay indoors if at all possible, spent some time out in the sun, though she quickly found that her pale skin was more inclined to burn than tan.

One particularly hot afternoon, Lily went to the factory in the hopes of cooling off. The air conditioning inside the building usually kept things pleasantly temperate all year round, but today she was surprised to discover that it was almost as hot inside the factory as it was outside. Still, the shade inside the building afforded some respite from the rays of the sun, at least; the skin on her arms was still a little tender and was peeling in a few places, so she had no particular desire to remain outside.

She looked around for Trundlebot as usual, but was surprised to discover that it appeared to be nowhere to be seen. She walked around, calling out its “name” a few times before realising how foolish that was and continuing her search in silence. All she saw were the more modern humanoid-form robots going about their business; they ignored her for the most part, only acknowledging her presence by stepping around her when she was directly in their path as they proceeded to their next task.

Eventually, eyes widening, she saw a figure that was simultaneously familiar and strange to her. There was the base with the caterpillar tracks; there was the body of browning metal; there were the big, powerful arms that she had grown used to, but atop the body was not the familiar cuboid “head” sporting the stereoscopic vision cameras she knew as Trundlebot’s “face”; instead, there was a white plastic ellipsoid atop the body.

With a mechanical whir, the robot turned around and revealed the front of its new “head”; a black screen sporting glowing green symbols clearly designed to resemble a face. As it turned to face Lily, the symbols changed to an approximation of a smiling, cheerful face, and then something very surprising happened.

“Hello. Lily,” said the robot in an awkward synthesised voice. Lily didn’t respond. She was frozen to the spot, but the robot was starting to advance on her; slowly this time, somewhat more akin to Trundlebot’s old pace.

As the robot got close enough to have grabbed Lily with its arms, she blinked away sudden tears, shook her head and took a step back. The robot advanced again, the smiling face still glowing on its screen.

“Li. Ly,” it said again.

“What do you think?” said her father, who had seen her come in earlier but had only just caught up to where she had ended up. He had a smile on his face. “Not strictly by the book, but I thought you’d like it.”

The robot stopped in front of her. She looked at its still-smiling face, then her lip started to quiver, tears started to fall from her eyes and an uncontrollable sob escaped her.

Then she ran; past the big factory machines, past the oblivious humanoid robots, out into the heat of the summer’s day. She kept running until she was no longer anywhere near the factory; she had come to the main recreational area of the colony, an area of lush greenery that sported a large tree she had spent many a time sitting under contemplating the meaning of life in as much depth as an almost-ten-year-old can muster.

She headed straight for the tree and sat down in the shade, her back resting against the trunk. She hugged her knees close to herself, then buried her head in them and began to cry in earnest.

She wasn’t stupid. She knew why all this had happened. She knew that Trundlebot had been on borrowed time for a long while now, and that her father had kept it around to appease her for as long as possible. She knew that this last modification was done entirely with her in mind, as a way to give her a true friend rather than an unthinking, unfeeling automaton who saw the world through primitive stereoscopic cameras.

But she found herself resenting her father for that. He had tried to make Trundlebot better: a better worker; a better robot; a better friend for Lily. But in doing so he had gradually eroded the things that made Trundlebot Trundlebot in Lily’s mind, until now there was all but nothing left of the robot she had loved.

She wept for her lost mechanical friend with an intense sadness she hadn’t felt since the loss of her mother a year ago. The feelings were all too familiar: a sense of abandonment, of things being beyond her control, of the universe being just so damned unfair all the time. She wept until there were no more tears to cry, then she watched the sun set, the clear blue skies giving way to pinks and golds, and eventually fading away completely to reveal the starry sky. She had never felt more alone and insignificant.

Lily never went back to the factory after that, and she never quite forgave her father; but Trundlebot as he once was lived on in her memory, and would remain there for as long as she lived.

1848: Small Change

I had a baffling… I guess you’d call it a customer service experience earlier. It was extremely unpleasant at the time, but looking back on it, it was just plain bizarre.

Some context first: where I work (which is some 30-60 minutes’ drive from my house, depending on traffic), there aren’t enough parking spaces for everyone who works there to be able to park, so parking spaces are limited to those who carshare. I don’t carshare because I’m an antisocial fucker who likes driving along blasting out Final Fantasy tunes at full volume… and also I don’t know anyone else coming from my direction. This means that I have to make alternative parking arrangements, of which I have three choices: park on a lorry park about 10-15 minutes’ walk from my office; park on a residential street about half an hour’s walk from my office; or park on a multi-storey car park in town about 30-45 minutes’ walk from my office.

None of these are particularly desirable options, but of the three, the lorry park requires the least amount of trudging through the cold and also means that I’m more likely to be able to start working early and consequently finish earlier in the afternoon. Downsides to the lorry park include the fact that, being a lorry park, lorries tend to be given priority, and consequently sometimes it’s simply not available if there are too many lorries already parked there.

Downsides also include, as I discovered today, the staff.

It costs £12 for a week’s parking on the lorry park, payable in cash. I inevitably forget to get the cash until first thing on Monday morning, necessitating a quick trip to Tesco to draw out £20, then break a tenner on a bottle of water or something. This morning, however, I knew that I had enough money in my wallet, so I simply went straight to the lorry park without having to stop off. I pulled up as normal, handed over my tenner and the remaining £2 in change — 50ps, 20ps, 10ps and a few 5ps.

“You’re having a laugh, aintcha?” said the attendant, a sour-faced man who clearly derives no joy from his miserable occupation whatsoever — and who can blame him? I initially thought he was joking, but then he continued. “You’ve had all weekend to get your change together and you give me that?”

Confused, I wasn’t quite sure what to say. I will add at this point that I had counted out the change in front of him and apologised for it being in “shrapnel”, and he hadn’t said anything until the money was already in his hand.

“What the hell is this?” he continued. I still wasn’t sure what he was so angry about. It was the right money.

“Sorry,” is all I could really say, since I’d apparently mortally offended him by giving him anything other than two nice, neat, shiny gold pound coins.

“Yeah, well you won’t do it again, I’ll tell you now,” he said aggressively — a statement which appeared to have a pretty clearly implied threat in it — and sent me to go and park at the far end of the lorry park.

I then spent the rest of the day paranoid that I’d come back to the lorry park at the end of my shift to discover my car in ruins, or the attendant refusing to hand over my ticket, or something equally unpleasant. It stressed me out a great deal throughout the whole day, and as I walked back to my car after a day’s work, I found my stomach churning in that way it does when you know you’re on the way to do something unavoidably unpleasant that scares you a bit.

Fortunately, my car was still in one piece when I collected it, and when I asked the attendant — who was busily directing a large lorry into a tiny parking space when I arrived — if it would be all right to pick my ticket up tomorrow morning, he simply said it was fine, apparently having forgotten the whole thing.

I’m glad he has the luxury of being able to forget the fact he was a complete cunt to a paying customer at the start of the day, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to forget the incident particularly quickly. As I say, it stressed me out all day — all the more so for the fact that 1) it was so incredibly irrational and 2) there wasn’t really anyone that I could report my experience to — and it’s enough to make me seriously reconsider parking there any more. Were it not for the fact that parking anywhere else is such a long distance away — making my commute almost as much time walking as driving — I would abandon it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure I have that luxury, but we’ll see.

Anyway. You may think that this was a stupid experience not worth getting worked up over, but it was extremely unpleasant to be a part of. I hope there’s no repeat of it, and while I’m loathe to capitulate to this attendant’s apparent (and, until today, unstated) demands to pay using nothing but £10 notes and £1 coins, I may have to do so if only for a quiet, stress-free(ish) life.

1847: Your TV Is Not Trying to Kill You

So another outlandish “privacy scandal” looked set to erupt on Twitter earlier. For the benefit of anyone who might be considering sharing anything regarding Samsung Smart TVs sending your personal information to third parties, allow me to clarify a few things.

Samsung Smart TVs have a voice recognition feature. I know this because I have one. (I also never use it, because voice recognition is, for the most part, stupid and pointless when you have a remote control right there. Assuming you have hands, it is pretty much always just as quick to use the remote as it is to remember exactly how you’re supposed to phrase a voice command.)

Anyway. The way this voice control works is very simple. You press a button on the “special” remote, not the “normal” one, and the microphone in the remote starts picking up your voice. When you’ve finished speaking, it sends what you said over the Internet to a speech recognition service (that more than likely converts the speech into computer-friendly text for more accurate processing) and then your TV receives an instruction based on what you said. The TV itself isn’t doing any real processing; that all happens remotely, and the TV simply receives the instruction to do something based on what the speech recognition service thinks you said.

Astute iPhone-owning readers will know that this is exactly how Siri on Apple devices works — it’s why you can’t use Siri when you don’t have an Internet connection, even to access information stored locally on your phone such as your address book and suchlike.

The reason these services work like this is to take some of the processing workload off the phone/TV/other device with voice recognition. It’s not an ideal solution, but it does mean that the devices in question can be less expensive because they don’t need hefty processing power or software to recognise voices pre-installed on them. One day we may have devices that can recognise our voices accurately without requiring an Internet connection — although chances are by the time we’ve perfected that, the Internet will be “everywhere”, rather than just in Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile coverage areas — but until then, this is how voice recognition tends to work.

As such, a necessary part of the entire process involves sending a recording of what you said to the third-party speech recognition service. This means that if you press the microphone button on your Smart TV remote and then decide that the appropriate thing to say at that moment would be “My credit card number is…”, a recording of you saying your credit card number will be sent to this speech recognition service. Chances are, nothing will happen with it, but as with any sort of unencrypted information transmitted across the Internet, there’s a slim risk of nefarious types intercepting the transmission and taking advantage of it.

Because of this slim risk of stupid people telling their TV remote what their credit card number is, Samsung have had to put a disclaimer in their Smart TV documentation that the TV may send your personal information to a third party, and of course, people have misinterpreted this as the TV always listening to what you’re saying, and it therefore being unsafe to share any personal information while within earshot of your TV. This is, of course, utter nonsense, because as I’ve outlined above, you have to specifically press a button in order to activate voice recognition mode, and the “third party” it’s being sent to is doing nothing more than converting your babblings into something the computer in the TV can recognise as an instruction to do something.

That is it. Nothing more. Nothing sinister. And if you’re still uneasy, you could 1) not buy a Smart TV, since technology clearly terrifies you, 2) not use the voice recognition function (which, in my experience, is patchy, slow and pointless anyway) or 3) not talk about credit card numbers or other personal information when you’ve pressed the button that specifically asks your TV to listen to you.

So there you go. This has been a public service announcement. I thank you.