Why old arcade games amuse me greatly.

My first official post in a good long while is about Pac-Man. How sad is that? Not some up-and-coming ingenue in the art world or photos of a celebrated Japanese fashion designer's newest runway show.

No, bloody Pac-Man.

Actually, it's not really about Pac-Man. It's about old video games in general, "kill screens" in specific.

A kill screen is a stage or level in a video game (often an arcade game) that stops the player's progress due to a programming error or design oversight. Rather than "ending" in a traditional sense, the game will crash, freeze, or behave so erratically that further play is impossible.

That's right, I quote from Wikipedia. I couldn't be bothered to find any esoteric literary criticisms of the subject to increase my artistic blogger street cred, so the Wiki will have to do.

The Wiki article then goes on to say that programmers didn't even bother to program additional levels once they hit a certain stage (usually around the 256th level. Maybe 265 is some sort of enigmatic number that represents the apocalypse? I bet it was all deliberate, to warn us ignorant gamers of the upcoming end of the world). They didn't think anyone would be bored enough to play through hundreds of levels of a video game, so they started to become a bit lax on coding the later levels. Therefore, that means the "final" level of Pac-Man looks like this:


There are all sorts of kooky schemes discussed on the Internet pertaining to how to overcome this infamous "split screen level", and people devote meticulous, extremely confusing websites on how to create a patch to fix this level. But in the end, the level counter still resets to zero.

I'm not sure why I find all of this so amusing. It's not because I'm amazed by the legions of gamers who have dedicated their life's work to fixing an essentially unfixable bug in an arcade game.

No, it's because I keep imagining the poor original programmers of Pac-Man, possibly a single man whose life was shattered by this pie-shaped yellow creature that eats dots. Holed up in his cubicle surrounded by hundreds of pages of code, he slowly goes mad from staring at nothing but white numbers on a black screen all day and night, until he finally screams "I CAN'T FUCKING DO THIS ANY MORE!" Frothing at the mouth, he finishes one last half of a Pac-Man level haphazardly before knocking over his chair and running out of his office shrieking to locations unknown, never to be seen again.

Expect updates to come at a much more regular pace, now that I may or may not have my groove back.

I never know how to start these.

In retrospect, it probably would have been better if I had started this a few weeks ago, to sort of compliment my therapy (does every wannabe intellectual go to therapy? Or just pretend university therapy like me?). Generally, though, I always think "you know, now would be a good time to start a journal" when I don't have time to start a journal.

I suppose that means they aren't good times to start a journal after all.

However, although this still isn't an ideal time for me to start writing again (no time is really an ideal time for people with extremely short attention spans whose ideas tend to fizzle out over time), the current situation with my university, which can only be described as "full of fail and AIDs", has lead to me having quite a bit of time of my hands. But, it HAS lead to certain new developments in my life that are making things a lot less dull.

• I am attempting to better myself as a film student (surprise, surprise. No, I don't worship at Wes Anderson's altar, and yes, I am aware I will be making little to no money in future) by watching critically-acclaimed cinema. However, because of the aforementioned short attention span, I can't seem to bring myself to watch all of a Hitchcock film or a Nordic independent movie because there are no people asking metaphysical questions while blowing things up set to a pumping techno soundtrack. Coincidentally, I love Run Lola Run.

• Although I attempt to stray as far away from that irritating classification of person known as the "art fag", it is a constant fear that one day I will begin to casually namedrop obscure bands whose music consists of acoustic guitars and xylophones and become obsessed with studying German Expressionism while smoking clove cigarettes. However, I think that as long as I maintain my sense of humour and my love for Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, I will be safe from this fatal disease.

• I have rediscovered Tetris. I fully expect it to be a serious adversary in my struggle to combat the evils of procrastination. But good god is it a fun adversary.