New Things

7:33 AM

Human creations and discoveries always fascinate me. Whether it's new artwork from scratch, new music, or some new way to turn rocks into computer processors, human creations always blow my mind, because these are all so difficult to do.

Going through school, everything is laid out and planned. It also fascinates me that there were people that planned these courses for us, to educate us. I have failed courses before so I do understand this and I'm not disparaging anyone who has, but it fascinates me too on how anyone can fail any course at all, as all we have to do is follow the instructions and we would pass with a perfect grade. Some courses do require some thinking, in that case, usually all we have to do is dedicate more time to the subject to understand it, although I also understand some people are quicker in some subjects than others.

Art is entirely creative. It's creating things from scratch. I'm not very good at it. I can copy some of what I can see onto paper, but I'm not that great at it. It's much harder for me to create an entirely new drawing from scratch. All the anime and cartoons that I watch, it does fascinate me that people drew that too.

Video games too, although it often seems like we are in another world as we play them, everything was laid out and planned and designed (except for glitches). No matter how creative they are and no matter how many "secrets" and "discoveries" are in that game, they were effortfully added.

Some video games like Deus Ex and Deus Ex Human Revolution, have actually impacted and changed my life in a positive way, probably Warcraft 3 too although I probably experienced more harm than good from that. Some dialogue I've experienced in these games, since I was young at the time, were so profound and inspiring. The younger generations aren't going to be getting the same experience, since these are older games and they are unlikely to play them, just as I am very unlikely to play any new generation games.

Things truly are "in the moment" only, although many truths persist throughout all time as well. Just 200 years ago people used to write the capital letter "S" as "F", which was so weird, and everyone just accepted it. Now, no one writes an S in that way. I wonder what thing we do today will be seen as so odd in the future? Likely how we treat animals, how people irrationally ate animals, when there's truly no reason to justify doing so even right now. In just 10 years though, although still functional, all present technology we have today will basically be considered old and obsolete.

The cassette players from the 1980s and so, were the latest technology at the time. They still work, just no one uses them anymore. It fascinates me on how people were able to invent such devices in the first place. Today of course we have smartphones, but for some reason there are these devices called Portable Music Devices (PMDs), some sell for thousands of dollars, and all they do is play music, at marginally better quality than through phones, although these PMDs can look so much cooler. Although it's more of a recorder device, the Teenage Engineering TP-7 looks so cool and can be used as a PMD, it's just expensive at around $2000. I love these human creations.

Looking at the disassembled source code for the original Super Mario Bros. video game blows my mind. The whole file size for the entire game is 40kb, which is insanely small, and yet it includes the entire Super Mario Bros. game, music, graphics, the whole thing. It was written in assembly, and it blows my mind on how it was all written, and how all the technology combined to somehow make it all work.

I played Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Famicom, the Japanese/Asian version of the Nintendo NES, that was released years prior to the NES. I had so many Japanese games and I couldn't understand any of it. My favorite game was this multiplayer game called Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers 2, for the Famicom, although the NES also has a version. I loved how cool and revolutionary the multiplayer was at the time, one of the best multiplayer experiences ever.

Many games back then were of insanely good quality. I also remembered playing on the original non-color Game Boy, and then the Game Boy Color, and then Game Boy Advance, and so on. It might not seem like it, but honestly, many games at the time were such incredibly good quality. It's really hard to make a game, I think it's the hardest kind of development work there is (if Unity, Unreal, and other game development platforms aren't used), other than programming computer graphics (like the code to make lighting and 3d objects and vectors generate on the screen, etc) and AI.

I used to make games on my Ti-83 Plus and TI-84 calculators back in high school. It was such a niche, no one else did it, but other students also played games on their calculators. Some of my games have been uploaded to these TI-83 and TI-84 sites, I forgot what they were called, but I used to browse them and download all the different programs, just the thousands of programs and games that other high schoolers made. I learned a lot by reading through their source code, although today I don't remember any of it at all.

Today's generation won't really have this same kind of experience, because smartphones are ubiquitous now, back then they weren't. I used to carry around a calculator everywhere, and I would program it to do anything, because it could do anything. I used to have expert level mastery of those two TI calculators, I knew every single menu item, option, command, everything, all of it, and had them in my memory so I could just load them up as easily as typing. You had to scroll through all the different menus to do certain actions, and I just had them all memorized, even if it took like 6 button presses to load some command, I had it memorized and could do it instantly. I don't have that ability anymore.

Anyway, there's a lot of stuff right now that's present and cool, such as the Switch 2. I'm sure there are unique experiences coming out that will only be able available to it, and today's generation will enjoy it. However In around 10 years, that is going to be history, and the next generation won't have that same experience, and repeat this ad infinitum, for everything.

Anyway, I'm tired. Time to work.