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“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of midi-chlorians, must be in want of an empire”

See what I did there? I was eating a currant bun when I came to the conclusion that Revenge Of The Sith is one of the best films ever, mainly due to the fact that DVDs have a ‘skip’ button which lets you fast forward through the slushy annakin / padme scenes. Normally, that would just make me a typical action-film loving bloke who is bored by romance, but I’m not. One of my favorite films is the Kiera Knightly version of pride and prejudice. So I got thinking that in a perfect world, if you spliced the dialog and romance from P&P into the visuals of ROTS, you would have the perfect movie. Frankly, Jane Austen has a lot to learn from George Lucas, and Lucas has a lot to learn from Jane Austen.

Take the opening scenes. A group of elegantly dressed women gossiping by a church. Meh. George at least knows how to start his stories with some decent space battles. Ok, so Attack of the clones starts slowly, but even then a spaceship explodes in 3 minutes, so it’s not a total loss. Spaceships exploding is like zombies or boobs, there is no movie not improved by their addition. Even P&P has cleavage.

Now the dialog, the dialog for star wars isn’t classic. “I’m luke skywalker I’m here to rescue you!”. it’s not classic stuff. Lets not even discuss Jar-Jar. Jane Austen has the whole dialog thing sorted, with several different layers of meaning and subtlety going on all the time.  Jane Austen can represent the inner turmoil and angst of someone like Mr Darcy effectively and convincingly. Should he propose to Lizzy? George would have a scene where he had a bad dream, shaking his head from side to side saying “NooooooOOOOO!”. This would not be good.

“I’m luke skywalker I’m here to rescue you”

Conflict. Now in a  sense, it’s a score draw here. Austen handles the dialog and the emotion much better, but Lucas has the bigger context and the visuals. If Lizzy marries Mr Collins the family will be safe from poverty, but her marriage may be unhappy. Oh The angst! If Luke doesn’t hit the exhaust port, the empire will triumph and evil will conquer the galaxy. Lets face it, Lucas wins here. He also does well when it comes to villains. Mr Wickham runs off with a young girl and marries her without her fathers permission. Meh. Grand Moff Tarkin incinerated the planet Alderaan. Let’s face it,I’d rather have wickham as my nemesis than Tarkin.

Lucas has his moments with high drama. Vader telling luke he is his father wasn’t *that* bad, but even then the dialog is pretty shaky. He always compensates with the visuals. I reckon that if whenLizzy was told mr Darcy proposed against his better judgement, she lept off a bridge and flew through an exhaust port in cloud city, it would really add drama.

And lets look at the big ‘conflict’ scenes in pride and prejudice. Mr Wickham nods at Mr Darcy, and Darcy rides off on his horse. Feeble! Lucas would have had both of them on landspeeders, and after a high speed chase, they would have fought each other with lightsabers.

“I’m find the countryside most diverting”

When lady Catherine visited Lizzy to chastise her for trying to ‘seduce’ My darcy, the dialog is excellent, but the setting is amateur-hour. Two women with raised voices using polite language in someone’s garden? Lets be honest, just because the scene is at midnight doesn’t make it dramatic. Ideally, Lady catherine would have expressed her dissaproval using force lightning, countered by lizzies prowess with the lightsaber. If it was possible to somehow change the setting from the Longbourne estate to…. say a planet of lava, then that would be even better.

I think I’m on to a winner here. When I get a chance, I’ll email george lucas and ask if I can do a game called ‘Pride and Wookies’. If he says yes, I’ll get right on it.

Lots of people mocked Rumsfeld for his classic ‘known unknowns’ and ‘things we don’t know we don’t know’ speech. It was an easy target, but it’s also an interesting topic. Although in theory, the older I get, the more I know, in fact I think the older I get, the more I know I don’t know.

My politics changed a lot between ages 18-30. When I was 18, like most 18 year olds, I could put the world to rights and know I was definitely correct. I was totally wrong, and I just didn’t know it. Now, I have different political views, but I know enough to know I’m not sure I’m right.

It’s not different with my job. Ok, I rant about me knowing more about customer interaction than big companies, and I’m pretty confident there, especially after this, but that whole episode just went to show that what I thought I knew about piracy (all pirates are cheapskates) was just wrong. It is very very difficult to change your views on a topic you feel strongly about. The chances are, everyone reading this has some views that are not based on their objective evaluation of the situation, but views they got from their parents, their friends, from TV, religion,  from an experience as a child, from irrational fear or emotion.

I used to be very anti-fox hunting. I was bought up that way, as a city dwelling son of trade unionists, and never questioned it. I knew nothing about fox hunting, or the countryside, it was just the de-facto position for me. I became less and less fussed about it over the years (It’s now banned in the UK, at least the fox-killing aspect is). Very shortly after moving to the country, I actually saw (for the first time ever)  a bunch of people on a hunt (I think they just go through the motions now), and it is quite a spectacle. I can see why people feel its part of their culture, community and history. It gave me a different perspective, and one I really lacked. I’m not neccesarily pro-hunting now, but I am at least aware that my teenage views on it were colored by my surroundings and not the facts. I now know what I don’t know. Experience has actually made me less certain.

Here is a scary admission. When I started working at Elixir, I didn’t know how to use a debugger. I’d heard of them, but never known how they worked. I was gobsmacked that you could step through code and look at variables. Holy crap that looked really cool. And I had already shipped 4 games at that point (yes, they were damned hard to make). I was suffering from that classic problem of unknown unknowns. It’s not that I didn’t know how to step through code, I didn’t even know it was an option.

I’m still learning how to code, learning how to run a business, how to design games , how to balance games. I always will be. And I wouldn’t have it any other way, it’s what keeps life interesting. Try to find out what it is you don’t know you don’t know :D

How much TV do you watch? If you are like me, you are watching less and less. It seems to get less appealing every month, let alone each year. I’m sure eventually my TV will be used for DVDs, and maybe the news.

One of the TV progs in the UK that is supposedly for grown up, intelligent people who want to know what’s going on in the world is Newsnight. It’s a lateish-night politics and current affairs program. The last time I saw it, they were doing an item on the upcoming voting reform referendum, and whether or not it would cause a split in our governing coalition. How did they present this serious and deep issue?

By an animated cartoon showing the two leaders as john travolta and olivia newton john, and playing the music from grease. Oh, granted, there may have been a few minor nuggets of actual commentary about the topic, using short words and visual aids, but I still felt like it was aimed at the 4-8 year old market, who should definitely be in bed at that time.

British TV is increasingly embracing it’s role as ‘the idiot box’. Not only are a lot of the subjects covered by TV purely for bored idiots, but even the stuff that you would think was serious, or needed in depth coverage is treated as some sort of lame comedy routine. Maybe some clever TV analysts have discovered that everyone with college education or higher just doesn’t watch it anymore, so they just cater to the lowest common denominator? Silly visual gimmicks seem to assume that the entire audience has attention defecit disorder.

Maybe I’m weird, but I can cope with watching someone sitting still, talking to camera for ten minutes in a normal voice about something that is really interesting. When I read a book, the book doesn’t have little animations, or cartoons, or wave its arms about wildly every sentence to keep my attention. Books can’t do that, so they compete merely by having good content. It really doesn’t matter how much you wiggle your head and wave your arms as you talk, if you have nothing to say, nobody cares. We get closer to this mitchell and webb parody every day…

I hate the x-factor and american idol and similar programs for many, many reasons. One of them, is that you constantly hear people who are awful at singing or dancing saying they have ‘done their best’. This is clearly bullshit 99% of the time.

We seem to have developed an entire culture based around low expectations and under-achievement. Mediocrity is the new celebrity. Putting effort in is so last year. The reason we all love ‘reality tv stars’ is that they perpetuate this bullshit that you can have the trappings of success and fame without doing any work. No need to do your best any more…

There is a great scene in an episode of Star Trek: DS9, where worf fails to help his brother die in a ritualistic suicide because they are interrupted by some humans. Worfs brother confronts him over his failure to help him, and worf protests that they were interrupted by two (weaker) humans. His brothers response:

“Did you fight them? Did you threaten to kill them both if they interfered? And are you here now with a mevak dagger to slit my throat and bring me the death I deserve?”

In other words, this is the klingon way of saying “So? is that the best you could have done?”
I like that. I see it so often, in others, and also in myself. I don’t think I’ve “given it 100%” or “done my very best” very often in my life. I rowed like a maniac once in a thames river race, but despite being knackered at the race end, I didn’t actually collapse and need to be taken to hospital. I didn’t burst a blood vessel with effort. If the life of myself and the people closest to me had been at stake, I could have rowed much much harder.
Gratuitous Space Battles is a game I worked very very hard on, But I didn’t work 100 hours a week on it. I didn’t skip TV entirely for a year to do it, or sell everything I owned to invest it in the artwork. I didn’t scrap the entire game and re-do it and the slightest hint of dissastisfaction. I didn’t do my best.

One of the best things about knowing, accepting and really understanding what it means to do your best, and to know you have not done so, is it means you can definitely, 100% no doubt about it, do better next time. People who go through life saying “I gave it my best shot” are just scared of admitting that in all likelihood, they didn’t, and have themselves to blame.
Of course, it might not be worth it to you to go to the extreme, insane lengths of actually doing your very best in everything you do, but I think its a good policy to know the tradeofs you make, as you make them.

Yup, I’m in motivational speaking mood :D

Ignore this post, it’s here purely for google, unless you know the answer.

When I was a kid, I lived in Barnes, London. I remember that near Beverly Brook there was a  piece of wasteland, not far from station road. Eventually they built a housing estate there. I’m sure I remember there being a WW2 pillbox and some factory gates there, during the early seventies. Am I imagining it? Is it true there was a factory there, maybe a munitions factory that got bombed? If so, what do you know about it? Just curious… :D