I took 101 at San Jose State and had to participate in a study as part of the curriculum. It was pretty cool. I went to the NASA Ames research center and did a study of seeing how well people could predict an object being exactly on the side of them. It was small spheres that came at you then went out of view and you clicked a butten when you thought they were exactly on your side. The tech was the most interesting, 90's era VR run on a Silicon Graphics reality engine. We has Iris boxes in the computer art lab but this thing was a much bigger...
Most people? Am I one of the few who grew up with video games from the beginning and mostly missed Nintendo? My equivalent for the time period was Falcon, in my case played on an Amiga 1000.
If you could afford an amiga around this time, you most likely weren't impressed with any of the consoles. Even if you had a commodore 64, you may not have been interested with the NES, my experience was that the games on the commodore was that many of the games were closer to the arcade than what you got with the early NES cartridges could do. Later cartridges outstripped the commodore since they added extra processing in the cartridges themselves. By the end of the NES life, the games had gotten really good, some games could almost compete with the early SNES titles.
I had a similar feeling towards the N64 some years later. I had a 486 that could do much better 3D and with more interesting games, and there was nothing in the nintendo catalogue that could compete with what I basically had free access to due to the internet.
The first mission is to start and land on a carrier.
Video games were never even a question: You couldn't copy games and had to pay ridiculous prices for each!
Back in the 80's I worked with a lady that had the north American rights for t-shirts in all things Escher. I did a good deal of the graphic arts photography (how you did prepess pre computer) for the t-shirts. got to handle the original prints of most of the common Eschers you see. They have amazing detail that you usually don't see in reproductions. I used to say a good looking halftone is a terrible halftone as part of it is compensating for ink spread. A deep black on a normal press is about 85% black, even more grey if it was going to newsprint. For the shirts we were down to 40-50% as there was considerable ink spread in the silkscreen process...
I had those shirts and I loved them, assuming they are the shirts that had multiple Escher designs over the whole shirt. I think I still have them in storage.
I have been very impressed with the Steam Deck and if I ever build another gaming PC, I would be very tempted to skip windows and install SteamOS. But then I have a PS5 for the online/AAA/games with company specific launchers...
My kid is about to learn a bit of electronics as I plan to replace some PS5 joysticks with TMR replacements. Cracking open without destroying, documenting dissemble so we know where everything goes back and quite a bit of de-soldering, re-soldering. Should be interesting...
I remember in high school signing up for this electronics stuff. I was just learning what a resistor was and a few engineer kids over the two semesters bought and built an original Apple I kit. Ah, growing up in the silicon valley...
For me it was Carmageddon. I bought it later on an ipad and it may have just been rose tinted glasses of being completely blown away back in the day but the ipad version never seems quite as crisp...
I got to take a tour of the plant when I was in high school. This was long before it had lithium batteries. A very interesting experience and very loud.
When I got certified for diving through the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in college, there was nothing more curative after a long morning of diving than a Phil's chowder in a bread bowl...
I remember dragging my wife there ages ago. Being a vegetarian, she was concerned there wouldn't be much for her until she saw there was a section of the menu labeled "Artichokes"
Having grown up in Santa Cruz, the place kind of died for me after the Loma Prieta Earthquake. The Santa Cruz downtown merchants/city council really screwed up with the rebuild. Took the beautiful Roy Rydell botanical mall and turned it in to little San Jose...
Any idea of where his house was? "just south of Pleasure Point" is odd for a "house on the beach". There are a bunch of houses on the low cliffs looking directly out at Pleasure Point, then the O'Neill house, then the house bordering perverts perch by the Hook and then it's opal cliffs cliff houses down to Capitola. A bunch of cliff houses in back of Depot Hill and down Grove Lane and then you are on New Brighton Beach and a little down from there are the first real "houses on the beach". Seems a bit far for "just south of Pleasure Point". There are beaches below the cliffs but tiny unless it's low tide. But then I grew up in a Santa Cruz beach house so maybe I'm jaded and his description more metaphorical than literal...
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