Tuesday 5 December 2006

Pic of the day: You may remember this from the frontpage of my Diary Farm, back when I had a separate website for my retired journal entries. Today, however, I write not about their retirement but mine.

20 years now...

Looking back on my 5 years ago entry, I kinda wish I had done what I thought about: Bought up a couple used Pentium 300 machines exclusively for use with Daggerfall. In that case I might still be playing the game, even though Morrowind and especially Oblivion are graphically far ahead and have way more custom content. Somehow the endless freedom and the random machine-generated dungeons and towns and villages (hundreds of them) still stands for me as the peak of offline role playing computer games.

And unlike some other users, I have not been able to run the game under DosBox. Perhaps in a later version of DosBox, or on a different computer, I don't know. Master of Magic runs quite fine (though I burned out on it again, of course; it will be back if I live long enough, probably within a year). On the bright side, my wrist and shoulder are acceptable these days. They are certainly not healed, but they don't grow gradually worse like they used to. A lack of Daggerfall could be a major reason for that.

20 years now till I can retire. It is a race against death, as well it should be. It has become commonplace now to see retirement as a life phase, some kind of human right. Just like child labor is illegal in all civilized countries, so evidently there is a similar phase on the other side of working life. But this makes no sense. Children are hard at work already, building skills through school and play. Humans are not expected to go idle, and it is generally not good for them. Back when the retirment age was set to 70 years, most people were farmers or factory workers. They were worn out at that age and most of them did not have much time left. It was to give them some dignity when facing the end. Later the retirement age went down to 67 (voluntary) and life expectancy increased. This was the beginning, I think, of this idea that you are supposed to save up money during your working years so you can enjoy life at its fullest when you retire. But that is rarely going to happen.

If I am still here 20 years from now, it will be in a world where Windows Vista will look as modern as MS-DOS 3.1 does today. And that is if we assume no acceleration in technological change, the way we have seen so far. A disposable pen might hold the computing power of this PC. When you call a company, you will quite possibly never know for sure whether you talked to an employee or a computer.

If I am still here 20 years from now, it is a safe bet my body is in much worse shape than today. My vision will be dimmed at best, my hearing unable to pick up nuances or high-pitched sounds. I will tire easily but sleep lightly. And my brain will not be quite what it used to be either. I will have to wait longer for the words, and sometimes they will fail me entirely. My reactions will be too slow for combat-oriented computer games, probably.

But hopefully my spirit will be stronger, clearer and richer. Most likely not because of Daggerfall, though.