Overlay

Yes, two weeks without a post, then two in one evening. I wanted to let the last one stand alone, and not to complicate it by changing subject, as this one will probably do a few times.

My google analytics map overlay is quite interesting.
I can easily understand that most of the visitors to this blog come from Singapore, no surprise there. The next biggest source, at a little less than half the number of Singaporeans, is the US, and that is not really a surprise either simply because there are so many of them in the one country. Australia at number three and just a bit less than the US is also not a surprise. But the next, with only a bit fewer than Australia, is routinely Brazil - now that I, and I suspect you, would not have imagined. Well, it has been Brazil at number four for a few months now.

I am playing Rome Total War again, without the Total Realism mod and without using cheat codes. I was recently playing Evil Genius via Steam, yeah, I have the game discs somewhere but couldn't find them - turns out my nephew has them - and Steam was selling it for only US$10, so why not? Anyhow, I got bored with the constant overload of enemy super agents when I moved to the second island. I just wasn't getting the chance to build the base up. You would think that having moved islands you should be able to build the second evil lair in piece, the forces of justice (huh!) would/should imagine you out of the game. I tried hacking the save files to reduce my notoriety score, even to kill off the super agents, and I tried the unofficial patch so I could put gun turrets inside the base (have them covering the cells I have the super agents in so all five of them are pretty well out of consideration), but the non-stop avalanche of soldiers and veterans just got boring.

I have started reading a book about gamers, specifically how some US management consultants think the computer/console gaming generation will impact business culture. I find it fascinating. The bastards classified me as a baby boomer. My parents are baby boomers, so how can I be???? I have noticed that every time I read something they are extending the baby boom forward and cutting generation X back, those of us who were once one, are now called the other. Anyhow, I am gen X, it is not up for debate, I was gen X ten years before gen X existed. I am a gamer, this book assumes that people my age are the parents of gamers, but I am a gamer, my friends are gamers, one of my friends mothers is a gamer, so eat that. (As in, she is a little old grey haired lady.) My friends and I were into computers when they first came out, before the Microsoft/Intel combination changed the landscape. Blah, blah, blah, except to add that when my father (who was head of the school of mathematics at one of the unis here) had to baby sit me I was plonked in the unis mainframe console room and the post-grad students would log me in to play Star Trek. Space was a ten by ten grid, stars were asterisks, Klingons were 'K's and Romulans were 'R's and I was the 'E' - yeah, you couldn't play the good guys. Probably the entire multi-storey computer had less power than a wrist watch does now.

Anyhow, all that is waffle, this book was written to help generation history understand generation future, and finding myself amongst the latter I find that in a perverse way it has helped me to understand flat-scans in ways that I never thought before. How ironic.

But, yeah, all of these boomers and hippies and drugged out drop-outs that thought they were the future, and all they ended up becoming was the problem. Our grandparents and their parent built a great world, and our parents just coasted on a raft of bubbles, inventing things like welfare states and tax-funded pensions to ensure that everybody else paid for them, and it is left up to my generation to fix it all. I consider that my brother, who is only two years older than I am, to firmly be in that dead generation, that locust generation, that is the way his mind works. Whereas for me, by the time the rest of the world got into the X-Files I had been there, done that, and moved on. But now I find that I can talk with people twenty years younger than me much more easily than I can talk to people ten years older than me. I talk with my nephew and his friends and they get it, I talk with people at work supposedly in my age cohort and they don't get it, and I can't understand how their minds work.

There was going to be something else about something in the news recently, but I can't be bothered right now, and quite frankly, I can't remember what it was...