Goodbye Childhood Confidence

My best game of charades got crapped on... This is a grudge, a very old grudge, for this happened when I was 8... Yeah, I don't let go easily.

It was a life lesson, which put the nail on my opinion from experience that as a child adults can be dumb and remain so outside of their own specific fields of interests, and will miss no opportunity to knock a child's confidence.

What was this about?  Well, it came after a string of little things where adults put me down, my mother would not accept that "ambulate" is a word... And before you start to say "why didn't you just google it and show her?... well, there was no google, this was the 1980's.  There wasn't even a dictionary in the house!

She'd also in correctly corrected my mental arithmetic on numerous occasions, which set me on the path of a life not trusting my own number skills for life.

TL;DR; I'd had a load of adults putting me down...

Anyway, the story.... I go to school this day, you know school; where all the teaching staff encourage learning and being clever like.... Well... No.

On this day, we were all given over to full charge of the schools one teaching assistant, because the teacher herself felt very ill, the teaching assistant, who I will call Mrs C, had no idea what to do with us so we played charades.

Each child was asked to think of a TV show they had watched the night before and to come up with a sign or gesture for it without speaking and we each had to guess the show.  Recall there were only 4 TV Channels at this time, and most of us played out right after school or our tea, so pickings were slim.

Eastenders was signed by one girl pointing east and clapping the drum motif.

Coronation Street was signed by a boy making out a crown on his head and walking about a bit.

Things dried up a bit, "The Bill" was two lads walking around slowly flicking their heels a bit, we all thought they meant a dance show.

Then after a lot of silence, and I was a shy child, I decided to give it a go with the last show I was allowed to watch.

I stood and I performed a wave to everyone, waving and blowing a kiss across the room, then bent down and stroked an imaginary dog at my heels... A pet dog.... A wave goodbye and a pet dog.... A goodbye and a pet... 

I thought this quite clever, I remember watching the men in the show in their bunk room, never really paid any mention to the plot nor story, it was something on the TV and I knew that the words were "goodbye" in German and "pet" was added to affect a geordie accent.

And the teaching assistant, clearly knew what I meant and rather than be encouraging, as she had been to the other kids, who worked in pairs or made only strange motions to intimate their thoughts she shat all over mine.

Like proper shat on me from a great height.  "Don't be ridiculous, how was anyone going to get that?"

Was it my fault you lot can't speak English, or work backwards from "petting something" to "pet" to.. Oh the only show on one of the 4 measly channels last night has the word Pet in it, even if you don't know the funny foreign words because you're 8 English and this is the era before the Berlin wall came down and Germany was a distant ignored memory from old war films and Grandad's recollections of their not liking it up them.

I've never let this go... Not even now.

Software - Sharing, Piracy, Subscriptions

I'm going to hedge my bets here and assume the limitation of prosecuting me is well expired, and I'm going to talk about something I did, probably something you did, perhaps something everyone of my generation and inclination did... And that was pirate software.

The difficulty in saying "I pirated software" today is that it holds such a negative connotation, is carries prosecution and it lands you in a lot of trouble; so kids don't do it!

But back in the 1980's we didn't even call it pirating, we shared software, we lent software, and sometimes we bought it of course.  But as a kid partaking of a hobby where you could buy an old audio album for 10p or a new game for £1.99, you bought the album for the cassette and then you copied software over onto it.  The copying wasn't even done on a computer, so primitive were they, no you copied your software on a hifi, with a tape to tape, or deck to deck, cassette recorder...

This was my introduction to software, and how you handled it, unfortunate for the many companies and individuals who didn't get my pocket money, but in the long run this sharing went out and out from everyone and through every computer platform I knew until I think around the year 1999, when I sort of stopped getting involved in software sharing and started to play online games which needed a real copy of the game.

But before that, for generations of machines, we all shared and shared a like, and as opposed to the companies who lost out on revenue I think we need to think about the ethos of shareware - born in the 80's - as well as freeware and the free software foundation, which though gaining ground now was lost on the mass of 80's financial effluent.

People sell things to other people who pay for them, that's how the world goes around, except with software, where the bits and bytes can be facsimiled, copied, duplicated in less than a blink of the eye.

In this special realm of software I believe that still paying for games at the extortionate prices they are is getting rather boring, we went from avoiding paying for £1.99 games, to kids today demanding - and getting - £49.99 games regularly.  It boggles the mind.

Copying or pirating those games does go on, but with the hardware level of entry and risks of prosecution involved it is very much an underground and unspoken topic of conversation.

However, you ask a real enthusiast about pirating older software "back in the day" everyone, and I mean everyone, worth their salt will have a story to tell.

And armed with hindsight, as well as the up-swell of Free to Play online titles (World of Tanks, WarThunder, Heroes and Generals, Unturned, D&D Neverwinter etc etc) you have to argue their production value is as much as any on the shelf for £49.99.  Except they're free, if you so chose you could sit and play for ever for free.  This may not benefit the developer, as you're not paying for content nor paying for the title, but if you did, employing Micro Transactions or subscriptions to attain a bleeding edge, as they do.  Then you are paying less for a game you might potentially play and get more from.

Also, with such transactions you can choose how and where to make them, £19.99 for a head start in a new game you've already gotten into for free is not a bad idea, when you could have been paying that same for a Subscription to World of Warcraft or Eve-Online, and simply not playing enough to warrant the money spent.

So how does this come full circle to the good old days of sharing software?  Well, we used to share by having face to face meet ups, we would physically carry the cassette, or floppy, or even magazine with the code written within from person to person.  With the internet today this is redundant... But should it be so?...

Could there be a place in the world for a face to face software meet & greet?...

P.S. My story of pirating, was with a lad at school who thought he was the bee's knees... 

I remember him arguing with and calling another kid dim because the kids said "CD's turn around in the player", and this "cool kid" strenuously denied they turned... "They don't spin around you retard" he said... Zahid... Richard was right, CD's spin you fuck-tard...

Well, this same Zahid thought himself the Godfather of pirate video, probably because he'd made a copy of beatlejuice and shared it around his mates.  But he came up to me and declared "What do you know about cassettes, how do you stop them being copied over?"... I of course knew, you just remove the plastic tab... but this moron was so above and beyond himself he thought this was special knowledge...

The fact it was printed on every video cassette manual said how much he read the dim wit fuck that he was, but he was happy to try and take the piss out of me for "not knowing", and when I knew he just wandered off mumbling.

It is dick heads like him out there now breeding kids who demand £49.99 video games and he's probably providing them from his dole money, but I still think a trick was lost, if we'd just educated those types to share like we all did... Perhaps today the software landscape would be different...