Goodbye to Minterland

Outwit the killer Coke-cans, the murderous
Big Macs, I should have breezed through level 1
but I’ve been zapped. A virtual Cerberus
hunts me down, the mythic Llamatron

must die, while herds of yellow mutant camels
explode like custard pies. The sound track’s fake
Prog Rock, a spacey riff, some Peter Hamill
rip-off, the Tonto bass-line, pure Greg Lake.

I’ve dumped my old Atari in a skip;
through Windows watch Potsdamer Platz collapse;
Tienanmen replays through Youtube clips,
the world’s become an interface, each synapse
controlled by Saint Bill Gates. Behold the Nerd -
his mighty Works, his all-consuming Word.

When this one hit the Sonnet Board in May 2007 it perplexed a few of the Ivy League educated members. The exception to this was Quincy Lehr, who despite his tender years, revealed a soft spot for English prog rock. The poem celebrates all the fun I had with our first home computer, an Atari 1040ST  which we must have bought around 1990. Our excuse to purchase it was that it came with lots of educational maths and literacy games which were meant to engage the kids in hours of purposeful play. Actually they much preferred Duplo Lego, My Little Pony and Meg and Mog. I had great fun though playing all the cheap shareware games you could get. My favourites two were both products from the fabulously talented and inventive British games designer, Jeff Minter or 'Yak' to his cyberpals. As chief executive of the mighty Llamasoft company of Reading, England, he  never quite reached the iconic status of Steve Jobs, but the company name alone trumps the mighty Jobs-worth in one important respect, it sounds straight out of by Douglas Adams. That makes it cooler than Apple.


Jeff Minter, founder of Llamasoft Games - looks the part.....

has a desk like you'd expect....

and has created the most bizarre, compelling and cheap! arcade style shoot-em-ups EVER!

Happily, and perhaps unexpectedly, Yak goes on strength to strength living with his partner Giles and some livestock (including a Llama or two) in West Wales. His blog is very entertaining.

My post about  'Re-reading Jack' said it was a slightly silly poem which made some serious points. The same could be said here. When I first started teaching Advanced Level Communication Studies back in the early Eighties, although no-one really predicted the rise of the internet and mobile technology, nevertheless discussion around satellite technology envisaged a more wired world in the future. There was much talk of the cultural difference between 'the global village' and a Schumaker style 'globe of villages'. Commentators at the time got the global bit right, but we did not end up with a 'cyber-village' at all -  more like an electronic urban sprawl, a wired megacity, at best shiny and glittering like Tokyo/Yokohama, at worst some kind of dark Blade-runner dystopia like the favellas of Sao Paulo.



The Tokyo megalopolis, with a population of 35.6 million, the worlds largest city.

Politically and economically perhaps the new burgeoning cyber-city does not resemble contemporary urban environments at all. Imagine it more like a futuristic wired version of imperial Rome - the plebeians obligated to various elites, kept from becoming restive through lavish spectacle and games, free so long as the cult of empire is maintained, barbarians either affiliated or invaded, but no need for slaves in Cyber-Rome, technology does all the menial stuff, or immigrants.

It has been an amusing couple of weeks news-wise. The CIA's errant ex-employee Edward Snowden has provoked a flurry of anxiety about human rights and privacy by revealing that the UK's GCHQ, in cahoots with US intelligence has been monitoring UK citizen's email traffic using the US 'Prism' software which can access the servers of Google, Twitter and Facebook. I feel the furore is very much a question of trying to shut the stable door after horse has bolted. In our eagerness to use the convenience of e-commerce, socialise and swap consumer tips on-line, tweet incessantly about the minutiae of our extistence we have already inadvertently opened our private life for scrutiny and manipulation. 

There seems to me to be no turning back. Just how sophisticated e-commerce's algorithms are, and how well integrated they have become with our on-line life was revealed to me earlier this week. My youngest daughter Laura is on a college trip to Florence at the moment. On Tuesday we made a very early start for Manchester Airport to meet up with the rest of the group. I needed the postcode for Terminal 1 to put into the sat-nav - Google Maps provided the information in one click. By the time I'd returned home around 7:00am. there were already emails from airport parking companies offering me discounts. This level of customised marketing based on real-time monitoring of your on-line activity feels invasive and scary to me. Just how sensitive  GPS systems really are was shown later that day. I happened to be using a Google Maps app on my Nexus 7 tablet. I moved from the patio next to the house to the shade of the decking -  about 12 yards; the small 'your location' arrow nudged a little to the left registering my relocation. Can that be monitored? who knows? Who knows, indeed, I might be more concerned if I lived in Pakistan or Yemen and US drones were on patrol.

So, my sonnet in praise of the mad world of Llamatron celebrates the frontier days of home computing before our parallel existence as obedient cyber-consumers kicked-in. Back then, be happy - just zap the coke cans before they explode, life was simple. I wondered about sending 'Yak' my sonnet, I'm sure poetry is not his bag, but he seems a nice enough chap , so perhaps I will.