Clicky Keyboards!

Ok, time to accrue some nerd cred. I have recently been using a 'clicky' keyboard purchased from Unicomp. To be precise, it's the Spacesaver 104, which means it's moderately less leviathan than the rest. They have a niche - they sell keyboards based upon the old IBM series M line, which were desirable for any number of reasons. Let's explore some of them:

• Clicky Keys: these keyboards generate the good old-fashioned clickety-clackety you've learned to miss in the office. The technology behind this was developed in the 80's and is called the 'buckling spring'. This means that each button has in it a spring that compresses when the key is pressed and releases with that satisfying sound we all love (including everybody on your floor of the building). There is something very basely affirming about pressing these keys - each keypress is a statement! The modern alternative is called the 'rubber dome', which will be present in the vast majority of the keyboards you'll see these days. A look under the keys of such a keyboard reveals rows of little rubber nipples that, while cheap to manufacture and functional, are inferior in quality to their ancestors. Think Arabica vs. Robusta coffee beans. The main reason for this is

• Ergonomics: the action on this thing is lovely! Your finger feels cushioned very nicely throughout its downward travel, and I notice a significant (!) decrease in the amount of finger, hand and forearm fatigue compared to my crappy previous Dell keyboard. If you spend an hour plus typing at a time (if you're a student, Facebook chatterer, long-distance-email writer or some kind of hacker) you will feel very happy you invested in one of these.

Quite the compact wonder, wouldn't you agree?

• Durability: As old IBM keyboards have proven, these things will easily last for decades. There is a large metal plate upon which these keys sit. This keyboard weighs several pounds, and you could probably hurt someone with it. Just remember to clean them every once in a while!

• Eliteness: the indelible low self-esteem of most geeks requires constant gadget upgrades to ensure their status on the imaginary pecking order. This keyboard will earn you nerd points.

Have I convinced you yet? Here's a link to a far superior article on the subject on Dan's Data: http://www.dansdata.com/clickykeyboards.htm . The length and breadth of appreciation in his writeup is the stuff of which geekdom is made. I, for one, am happy with my purchase and feel no need to go any further into the 'vintage keyboard' market. Peruse for your own Unicomp keyboard at http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/

Hip Hop you shouldn't miss

If you're into hip hop, there's a few albums you should make sure you hear.

Prefuse 73 - Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives

Guillermo Scott Herren is probably best known under his moniker Prefuse 73, and this was his first album as such. Although many would consider One Word Extinguisher his finest work, and while that album is an hourlong glitch-hop opus, I find that for me it has neither the subtlety nor the staying power of his first. Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives is what I feel the best hip hop should be: understated and greater than the sum of its parts. It begins with the garbled voices of a number of underground hip hop radio station DJs giving shoutouts and bigups. Then, suddenly, the rug is pulled out from under your feet as Prefuse's signature ribbon of clips and slices unfurls before you. You become acutely aware that this is NOT another collection of instrumentals waiting to be spit upon or an uninspired mix tape from some DJ Shadow knockoff (RJD2, I'm looking at you). This is a unified, refined, singular realization of artistic vision. Beats and samples are vivisected and strung together gleefully like Christmas lights, though nothing about this album is wanton. There is a sensitive intelligence behind each decision and inclusion - listening to Prefuse's finer work elicits the feeling of each track having been pre-approved by a genius (I feel similarly listening to Aphex Twin, an obvious source of inspiration for Herren). What surprises me about this album, what keeps me coming back, what keeps its tracks creeping under my skin is the gentleness of his presentation. Where hip hop is hard, Vocal Studies is soft. Where you expect his cuts to be sharp, they are smooth. The tracks hit, but never do they feel domineering or demanding, two common afflictions of the genre. This album could be considered a contradiction embodied, but I would have to disagree.



MC Solaar - Prose Combat

MC Solaar IS French hip hop. He is France's answer to Bob Marley. He is one of the only rappers I would unreservedly call a poet. It's a shame that most of you reading this will not be able to understand his lyrics, for they are special. This album has more than its fair share of inspiration - it has the condensed feel of a greatest hits record. Floating on the exultant beats provided by Jimmy Jay, Solaar spans the spectrum of emotions in his witticisms and philosophical observations. Jay's tracks are a spectacular jazz and soul retrospective, and the album's backing vocalists and Laurent Vernerey's bass contributions join them seamlessly. Through its horns, slick drum breaks, pulsing grooves and bizarre samples, Prose Combat is as refreshingly new as it is classically old. This album exemplifies the genre during the creative rush of the mid 90's, and is not to be missed by any fan of hip hop.



Q-Tip - The Renaissance

After a decade of relative obscurity, Kamaal Fareed emerged with this, his album of rebirth. Good thing, too - many of you probably had forgotten all about this man, this half of A Tribe Called Quest (ok, let's be fair - 80%). If ever there were a rapper possessed of a gilded tongue, it is Q-Tip. The Renaissance is many things, but what struck me about this album was its maturity. Every moment of every track is older, wiser, more dense with intention than we're used to, especially from New York's good-time fun-loving charmer. The sound is so very him, but so very modern, and so very compelling. Everything is tasteful; each groove is spoonfed to you, lest you tire too quickly. Q-Tip covers a lot of ground in his lyrics and provides a journey through the process of becoming a 40 year-old rapper. He gives credit where credit is due, and sometimes demands his own. Bassist Antuan Barrett provides some of the bounciest, most compelling lines I've heard to date, and a quick list of important album credits includes Raphael Saadiq, Amanda Diva and D'Angelo. My suggestion to you would be to listen the hell out of The Renaissance. Pardon my french.

Masters of Doom and a short history of family geekery

I have just finished reading a book by David Kushner, a journalist and author known for his work covering the music and videogaming industries. The book, Masters of Doom, is a biography of the gaming company id Software and its two founding fathers, John Romero and John Carmack. You'll have to forgive the book's melodramatic and repetitious delivery; you'll be wondering why three full descriptions of the origin of the "Burger Bill" moniker were needed, and you'll never again want to hear the phrase "bit flip". Some sections of the text feel like they were stitched together from a number of disparate articles. What lies beneath the gluttonous delivery, though, is a well-researched and entertaining exploration of the decade that saw PC games explode into the mainstream, and what many alive during that time might refer to fondly as the golden age of PC gaming.

Part of what makes this book so exciting for me is that I was alive during this era! For once, I can read the recounting of historic occasions in which I participated, in this case occurring within the computer geek subculture of the 90's. Granted, my older siblings were more steeped in it than I was -- coming of age around the beginning of '98 meant that I experienced most of these developments via the trickle down effect. They were no less thrilling because of it.

First, though, a short history of my first six years. Like any kid raised during the 80's, I grew up against the alluring backdrop of computer games. They became the object of lustful desire for any red-blooded child who got a taste. Nintendo and Sega were in a full-scale console war and the consumers were the beneficiaries. Some of my earliest memories of my older brother extend back to his frothing excitement over the release of Sega's next big system, the Megadrive. Television ads at the time exclaimed, "I dreamt I was in a Sega! It was wicked!" One of Sega's biggest appeals was its apparent lack of censorship -- while Nintendo was content with psychedelic jumping plumbers, some of Sega's more gruesome titles played out onscreen in a manner that many parents decried, including my own. As a hyperactive and violent child since birth, I was forbade to play video games at precisely the age I became aware of their hypnotic pleasure. I vividly remember hiding behind the couch or on the top bunk in my brother's bedroom, contenting myself with watching what I could not touch.

Consoles weren't the only appealing virtual escape in our house. My mother, a graduate student at the turn of the 90's, brought home a computer on which she did her schoolwork. My brother, not content to let a gaming opportunity pass, was soon blasting away on games like Bruce Lee and Elite. The latter, now considered a cult classic and the target of many ports, remakes and copies, had an unsurpassed depth and freedom to its game world that may have provided many with their first glimpse of the freedom PC games could provide. Admittedly, I never could get into Elite. I was only six, and had no patience for the slow pace of space exploration.

Around the time that Nirvana released Nevermind, our family packed up and relocated to the U.S. It was a shock for all of us, emerging from the concrete oppression of London to discover the rolling hills and forests of upstate New York. This wildness would set the tone for the next couple of years, for we had brought with us no TV and no computer! Though shocking at first, I believe we all found the verdant setting refreshing. I preoccupied myself with that most virtual of realities, pure imagination, exploring and fighting with invisible things.

In late 1993 there were two major developments in our household. One was the birth of my little sister. The other was an IBM PC packing an Intel 8088 processor clocked at 4.77mhz! It had an industrial-sized red power switch and sounded like a helicopter launch when powered on. Even at the time it was clear this was a dated computer, considering it had been released in 1981 about three years before I was born (!), but the effect its presence had on our family was immediate. It had two 5.25" floppy drives and no graphics card, meaning we had to content ourselves with ASCII text graphics and our imaginations. Interfacing with white-on-black text only computers was a wonder akin to staring up at the stars, piecing them together into the constellations we knew should be there. All of a sudden we had channels streaming in again: BBSes and the web! Email and chat rooms! Though the quality of communication was primitive when compared with the standards of the day, it all felt new and brave and exciting. My older sister became entranced with online text-based role playing games. They had a narrative intrigue and a crumb-trail of incremental rewards that pulled one beyond the binary litany of the blinking cursor.

The aspect of the primordial internet that interested me most was the Bulletin Board System (BBS), an early example of an online forum. A programmer would host a service on their computer or network that would allow others to dial in and interact in any number of ways. The beeps and static shrieks of the modem were a telltale sound in our house, and woe betide the person who picked up the phone during a session, disconnecting the logged-on user. The local BBS scene culminated in biweekly Geekfests, where geeks and anyone who identified with them would hang out and celebrate their culture. These events were marked by gaming on any platform available, quirky and far-out interactions, and probably a lot of weed smoking (I was too young at the time to know about such things). The characters who attended these events were as vivid as any dreamed into virtual existence: the wispy-haired and ethereal Dren Eht Sral (larS thE nerD backwards) and Noid, whose daily attire consisted of welding goggles, gloves with Freddy-Kreuger finger-knives and a black trenchcoat. It was par for the course in a community that declared the definition of a geek to be "one who bites the heads off of live chickens!"

The geekfests I was allowed to attend were held at a labyrinthine house off of some back country road in Tompkins County, NY. The place looked like a pile of wood cabins dropped from the sky that had since healed together - it was a mess of rooms, corridors and staircases. It was at these geekfests that I first caught wind of the sensation surrounding id's Doom. All gaming and hands-on geekery took place in the basement of the house, which was outfitted with a number of PCs and the Super Nintendo responsible for holding most of my attention each visit. I was enthralled by a recent release, the hovercraft racing game F-Zero that I was surprised to read in Masters of Doom was enjoyed by the staff of id software during the development of their early games. My brother and some others shrugged off its gameplay as boring and sterile, but for me it was the pinnacle of technical achievement in gaming to date. Also popular (but never appealing to me) was the controversial Mortal Kombat, whose gorily animated disembowlments were performed on animated sprites created from photographs of real people! I spent hours in front of that Super Nintendo and am sure my religiosity was a major annoyance to more than one geekfest gamer.

Meters away, a network of several PCs cranked away on Doom, perhaps the most visceral game yet developed at the time. I'd heard about the immersion, the tension, the gory graphics and thrilling sound effects. But, to be honest, the first time I saw Doom load up on a PC screen I felt a niggling sense of disappointment. This was it? While Super Nintendo games of the day were smooth, polished and colorful, Doom looked pixellated and dull-palletted. I watched as a player ran around some shapeless laybrinth, chopping up demons with a chainsaw. They groaned in lo-fi. I didn't get it. There were no puzzles, no colorful backdrops, no real sense of a consistent visual style, and the point-shoot-move-repeat game dynamic lost its appeal for me within minutes. This is no revolution, I thought. Someone made a game where you shoot stuff, and it's not as much fun as those overstimulating, epileptically staged simulations at the arcade. I exclaimed aloud, "Doom sucks!"

There was a moment of shocked silence. Then a veritable geek chorus retorted, "Doom rules!"

Hardly the most exciting achievement...

I was not, in the moment, able to see what made Doom so important. The fact that the PC finally had arcade-level action titles made for it was a huge breakthrough for the platform, but that was just the beginning - Doom supported network multiplay! You could assemble tens of your buddies and duke it out together in an arena. Doom invented deathmatch. It was also arguably the first real catalyst for the game modding community, a bunch of self-taught hackers who modified the game's code to implement their own changes. The Barney mod became one the most infamous examples. The subsequent release of level editors and dedicated modification tools meant that even unskilled players could try their hand at personalization. This game took full advantage of the PC as a platform, allowing people to play in ways they'd never played in the past. And the "first person shooter" genre (popularized by Doom but contested as to its game of origin) was almost singularly influenced by Doom for the next decade.

Doom earned its many successes, but what made it so timely was its coincidence with other cultural trends. Its hellish theme and unapologetic gore harmonized well with the attitudes of angsty grunge and goth kids who were listening to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Satanic and occult images were flooding the collective teen consciousness through films, literature, Magic: The Gathering and, now, computer games. All of a sudden, everybody knew somebody who practiced Wicca. Vampires, werewolves, zombies and demons were more popular than ever in this generation's mythology. If you don't remember smoking weed while listening to Downward Spiral and playing Doom, you probably weren't teenaged in the early nineties.

Though id's John Romero (Doom's ideological father) cratered his game coding career through an ill-fated and over-inflated flight of ego, John Carmack (the other parent) remains one of videogaming's most revered geniuses. His work on 3d engines and virtual environments continues to be at the forefront of game development. If you've played Games in the last 15 years, chances are you've used some of his code. Though I didn't personally discover the joys of Doom until 1997 (when the family got its first Intel computer with a 66mhz Pentium processor!), I have reaped countless benefits from id's contributions to gaming.

... And those benefits will have to be explored in a later post, because this is getting ridiculous. Hats off to one of gaming's finest developers! And many thanks to David Kushner for taking me down this whole silly path of nostalgia in the first place. For another good gaming-related read, check out Tom Bissell's Extra Lives.

An Excuse

So now I have undertaken to write my own blog.

Why? This is a question fledgeling blog authors should be obliged to ask themselves. Who would want to read what I have to say? The answer in this case is nobody, really. Family, maybe. Some friends might poke their heads in from time to time as a vote of sympathy. By putting my thoughts up in the free public domain I have knowingly created "another fucking blog", which any erstwhile browser of the web would be justified in thinking.

My reason in this case is that I need an impetus to start writing again. I've been on hiatus now for some extraordinarily long passage of time, for any number of reasons. It's time to resume, and I need an obligation to some arbitrary sense of the public in order to get work done. I am writing for you to ultimately keep writing for myself.

Often lately I have been consuming some media or another, only to find myself starting to review it in my head. Articles and opinions are writing themselves. I've been politely ignoring this tendency over the last year or so, but it will not let up. So here it is: the unsolicited opinion of another blog.