MEPA Circuit

Archive for the ‘Do It Yourself’ Category

Time has not been kind to the first widely recognized video game. Pong, now even though less than 40 years-old appears more obsolete than the Ford Model T. Pong was played at video arcades – another obsolete entity. For a child born even 10 years ago, traveling to a location to pay, by the game, for something as simple as electronic table tennis would be so foreign that it would be insulting.

Technology accumulates at such a rapid pace that one generation barely recognize the existence of the next. Growing up in the 70s meant no Internet. Identification did not even include a photo. Perhaps the best way to show the rapid and extreme changes that have occurs can be shown in the area of video and computer gaming. If Pong were art it would be a cave drawing. Compared to the depth of story, art and play of series such as Final Fantasy, Pong looks less like a cave drawing than the scribbles of an infant next to the artwork of a master.
Video games went from tiny pleasure to cultural boiling point in less than a generation. Technology relegated Pong to be without any politics or viewpoints. Pong gave way to Pac-Man, which begat Mario Bros., which became Zelda, Medal Gear Solid and Grand Theft Auto.
As video games evolved it became nearly impossible to dismiss them as a mindless pursuit. Entertainment is a reflection of society and their rapid evolution displayed technology’s effect on society. While change might be healthy and necessary, such a rapid change displays volatility.
For people 100 years ago, it cold be relatively assumed that following in the footsteps of your father would not only be a comfortable path but also the only available option. Now guessing on which industries will exist in five years offers about as much assurance as a coin flip. Or to think about it another way, what students are studying in college now might be considered as important as Pong is considered today by the next generation.

With video games’ popularity exploding, it certainly feels like the golden age of gaming has arrived. And with the ubiquity of the internet, indie developers can reach wide audiences. The quality of games is at its highest point in history, and with billions of dollars being spent on video games each year, the industry undoubtedly has a bright future. So, what was the industry like in its infancy? Let’s take a look at some classic games that don’t deserve to be forgotten.

Trinity – A Nuclear Text-Adventure

It may be difficult to imagine today, but some of the best-selling “video” games in the 1980s had no graphics at all. These “text-adventures” were played by typing commands into a parser and then reading the results. Sounds boring, but these kind of games stimulated players’ imaginations and tested their logic. Trinity, written by Brian Moriarty, is widely regarded as one the best of these text adventures. The game begins in London in Kensington Gardens, but the setting quickly turns to a Alice-in-Wonderland-like dreamscape ruled by a gnomon’s shadow and populated by surreal characters and happenings. The plot revolves around nuclear testing and nuclear war – topical topics during the mid-1980s, when Trinity was published.

Trinity’s Impact

Though it would be criminal to reveal the solutions to the game’s puzzles, Trinity did involve using a lot of logic and in some cases, a little bit of intuition. One puzzle involves figuring out how to get across magical grass that repels all efforts to walk on it, and another forces the player to figure out how to survive in outer space long enough to complete a specific task. But what many took away from the game was its overt disarmament message; Trinity did not try to hide the devastating effects of a nuclear war. Perhaps that message is what has helped the game maintain a following today. In any case, Trinity features sharp writing, imaginative puzzles, and unforgettable locations.

In today’s face paced, instant access world there are a lot of new technologies emerging every day to bring information faster and no other trend has captured people the way twitter has. For those of you who haven’t caught up with the craze, twitter is a social blogging site where instead of long, drawn out blogs, the tweeter is giving those that follow his thoughts, feelings, and other musings in short 160 character bursts. This is right on par with today’s society of the short attention span.

But twitter wasn’t the start of the short, constant update theater. If you have been following the social networking and media sites you can come to the conclusion that twitter has been around forever, it’s just more of an evolution.

The first big social networking site was myspace. Myspace was a fully customizable web page where you could add friends as well as send out bulletins and comment on peoples page. Each page was allowed to have a profile pic and a quote next to it. In the very beginning of the Myspace craze, these quotes were anything from the absurd, to inside jokes, to famous sayings, to simple explanations of the person themselves.

As Myspace’s user base grew so did the use of these quotes. Quotes were being updated daily and changing from song lyrics to thoughts and feelings. There was also the increase in the rise of bulletins and how they were being used. Once only used for alerting people to special cuases, events, and chain emails. Now bulletins were being used to simply let out feelings.

When facebook became, far and away, the preferred social networking site we learned very quickly that the most important feature wasn’t a friend request. The status update became the preferred method of communication. There were people updating every day, some times multiple times in a day and it became that they may have led to the twitter craze. In the status updates people could tell you how they felt or simply promote something. The Twitter format was around long before Twitter itself.

People spend their whole lives thinking about their past. Not just what they have done as it relates to where they are going, but the past that existed before they did. They try to learn of the heritage and lineage they belong to.

In today’s world companies are established to help those that want to know get a very thorough picture of their own family tree. People will pay top money to find out where their ancestors came from and who they were. They pay money to be intrigued by the journey it took to have them created. But how is tracing a history easier now than it was 30 years ago? One answer: the Internet.

Many years ago tracing the family tree required a lot of leg work. Not only would you need to oral accounts of things that happened but you would need to call places to research documents and begin piecing together your history. However, in today’s digital world there is no need to go anywhere but the privacy of your own home.

These agencies and companies do it the same way anyone else would in this day and age. With hospitals leaving their medical records online it’s easy to search to see if someone was born in that hospital 100 years ago. With so many counties and cities being online you can find out for certain if someone had lived in the state. The reason the agencies are so successful is because they have the knowledge to understand not only where to go but how to navigate through the sites to obtain the information they need.

Still there is one thing that the family tree companies cannot help with and that is the oral history, the rich and vibrant stories that make a history worth looking into. Perhaps something was accounted for in a local paper or perhaps there was something written in a book, but more often than not there is nothing that can replace the telling of those stories.

The internet is a great place to learn about a variety of things you may not have had access to years ago. You can learn about medicine, world news, and the latest in movies and music. But perhaps you didn’t know that you can use the internet to begin to retrace your own family history. There are various companies that can trace your family history for you and while they do a good job they can also set you back a pretty penny.

So how do you trace your own family history with the whole world wide web to navigate through? The answer is simple and can have you discovering cool and interesting things about your family in no time.

The first is to start at home. Get on your computer and write out a comprehensive list of everyone you know in your family. Don’t forget to include your mothers maiden name as well as your grandmothers maiden name. Any woman who came through your family could be a descendant of another family. At some point you’ll have a pretty long list. Once you get far enough down make sure you try and keep everything straight. Things can get confusing once you branch out. When you get to far enough back that the memories and the history become fuzzy, then it’s time to get online.

As you go farther back it will help to find information about where someone lived. This will help you narrow your search down. Perhaps a person lived in Chicago, Illinois, then you can search through the city of Chicago database to find any information you can on that person. It could have an address, social security number, or copy of their birth certificate or death certificate. From there you can do a google search to narrow down the person’s name based on their city. This should pop up any other relevant information there. Then it’s a game of connecting the dots. You have to be patient but if you are then you can reap the rewards of a rich family history.

Technology has finally given us a way to be a little safer when smoking. The e-cigarette, or electronic cigarette, is a fairly new product. Not only is it cleaner, it’s safer as well.

The e-cigarette is safer in a number of ways. It has none of the tar and carcinogens that traditional cigarettes have. It also has no flame. The only chemical you are subject to is the nicotine, which is the addictive part of a cigarette. Although any smoking can be considered harmful, the most dangerous ingredients of a traditional cigarette are carcinogens and tar. The e-cigarette doesn’t include any of these unhealthy chemicals. There is also no more fire hazard to worry about since the e-cigarette is electronic and has no flame.

It’s also cleaner. There are no ashes to tap and no smelly smoke in your hair, clothes and environment. The e-cigarette has a glowing tip on the end that lights up when you inhale. A cartridge that uses flavored liquid turns into a vapor, which emits a puff of smoke just like a real cigarette. This allows people who are trying to quit to get the same feeling from smoking as they would with a more harmful genuine cigarette.

One of the main advantages of the electronic cigarette is the ability to take them anywhere. Since they are not emitting any odor and have no flame, they can be taken into any place you want such as restaurants, bars, zoos and all of the places where it’s either illegal or frowned on to smoke. The only caveat to that is explaining that you are smoking an electronic cigarette when asked. Not everyone knows what they are and how they work. However, imagine being able to satisfy that craving during a quick class break or at an upscale restaurant.