Saturday 5 June 1999
So today I played games on the new Toshiba. It truly has a fast CD-ROM, I don't particularly notice when it's accessing the silver platter instead of the harddisk. Not unless I hear the soft spin-up sound. Quite an impressive feature. I've never had a CD-ROM that wasn't slow before. I even tried to play Daggerfall on it. Fighting is rather clumsy with the mouse surrogate, but the game ran smoothly even with the smallest install. Most of the day the portable has been running Destiny, though.
Alternate history does fascinate me. Games like Destiny or Civilization allow some flexibility, but basically you're still limited to getting the most advanced weapons before your neighbors, and lots of them. But I firmly believe that history could have been radically different. It is hard to imagine, of course, but let's take a random example. What if humans had started to domesticate apes around the time they tamed the first dogs? We might have a lot of different apes by now, some of them perhaps bred for intelligence. While I doubt that we would have talking apes (vocal language is a rather distinct trait requiring a lot more than just intelligence), we could probably still have a substantial non-human slave labor for menial tasks.
Yes, I tend to think of things that are a bit wild and far out. Then again, there are ca 6 billion people now, so I guess one of us would be me. There would hardly been room for people like me in earlier, harsher times. Until recently, life was nasty, brutish and short. It still is some places in this world, though it had not needed to be like that any longer.
Note that where there is war, there is hunger and illness and poverty all around. If the rains are a few days off, whole provinces starve. But where there is peace, a few dry years are hardly noticed. And still people glorify war. Small boys run around brandishing fake weapons and play war. If they would play war for real, they should go without food for a week or two. I think that would dampen the enthusiasm quite a bit.