Life With Nick
Oct. 10th, 2019 12:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteMe: (Hearing WHIRRRR noise across the room.) Hey Nick, you could you shut your laptop?
Nick: (From the couch.) Oh yeah that’s my screensaver. It just sits there pushing my stars around for me.
Me: Your stars?
Nick: Yeah see? (He holds it up. A bunch of fuzzy dots are constantly plunging at the viewer.)
Me: You leave your laptop pulling 60 watts of power all the time and making noise so it can push stars around for you, and you don’t even look at them?
Nick: Well now that you mention it I’m just gonna go use it some more. (He plops onto the floor in front of the laptop and resumes playing Civ)
Me: Now the fan is louder!!
Nick: (Says nothing; stuck in his game)
(Several years later, describing this to his brother...)
James: Oh yeah. When he was playing that game Factorio it was the worst. At a certain point the game mostly ran itself, so he’d just leave it on for days at a time while machines built factories that built machines that built factories.
Me: Ah, modern computing power. It has done strange things to simulation games. The earliest example of that I think would be the 2-dimensional “game of life” that scrolled endlessly on UNIX machines. People would invoke it on a terminal and then just leave it there, making weird drifting geometric patterns, for hours.
James: The most fundamental version of it I can think of is good ol’ cookie clicker. “I must click on this cookie so that I can purchase items that more effectively click on this cookie," ad infinitum. The cookie, perhaps just like life itself, shall never be fully clicked. (Translated from unknown French poet circa 1722)
Me: Those wacky French poets and their anachronistic metaphors...
Nick: (From the couch.) Oh yeah that’s my screensaver. It just sits there pushing my stars around for me.Me: Your stars?
Nick: Yeah see? (He holds it up. A bunch of fuzzy dots are constantly plunging at the viewer.)
Me: You leave your laptop pulling 60 watts of power all the time and making noise so it can push stars around for you, and you don’t even look at them?
Nick: Well now that you mention it I’m just gonna go use it some more. (He plops onto the floor in front of the laptop and resumes playing Civ)
Me: Now the fan is louder!!
Nick: (Says nothing; stuck in his game)
(Several years later, describing this to his brother...)
James: Oh yeah. When he was playing that game Factorio it was the worst. At a certain point the game mostly ran itself, so he’d just leave it on for days at a time while machines built factories that built machines that built factories.
Me: Ah, modern computing power. It has done strange things to simulation games. The earliest example of that I think would be the 2-dimensional “game of life” that scrolled endlessly on UNIX machines. People would invoke it on a terminal and then just leave it there, making weird drifting geometric patterns, for hours.
James: The most fundamental version of it I can think of is good ol’ cookie clicker. “I must click on this cookie so that I can purchase items that more effectively click on this cookie," ad infinitum. The cookie, perhaps just like life itself, shall never be fully clicked. (Translated from unknown French poet circa 1722)
Me: Those wacky French poets and their anachronistic metaphors...
