A Christmas Greeting

For anyone that I may have inadvertently omitted from my general "Christmas card mailing".

It's Christmas time in Baiyin but there's no snow on the ground.

The streets are not all ringing to the jolly Christmas sound.

The main square doesn't have a gigantic Christmas tree,

And I've checked the schedules, there's no Christmas on TV.

Nonetheless it's here, if you look around you'll find it.

There's tinsel round the bar and little tree behind it.

At the supermarket checkouts the girls are dressed as elves,

And there are Santa hats for sale among the clothing shelves.

There may be no carol singers, no chorus of "noels"

But when I entered class today the kids sang "Jingle Bells".

So, a wish from far-off China – have a Christmas that is Merry,

And if you ask if mine is too, I'd have to tell you "very!"

 

Merry Christmas

Bob

To Put Away Childish Things:Text Based Adventure Games

When I moved house, in June, part of the process, as anyone who has ever done it will know, was to clear out the loft. There was all sorts of stuff up there – books, VHS videos, a red box full of scratched 78 rpm records, a sink unit, a partially completed plaster cast set of twelve inch tall chess pieces, a large sack full of my mother's old handbags, a shopping bag full of old pairs of glasses, a couple of armchairs, numerous assorted empty cardboard boxes, A bag of 00 gauge railway track, a lava lamp, miscellaneous ornaments, a children's snooker table, a fully decorated Christmas tree, a shower unit, bottles of homemade wine from the late 1970s, wine and beer making equipment, assorted cushions, various computer games for various obsolete computers, a box of Rubicks-cube-style puzzles…

 

Hold on. Back up a moment. "Various computer games"?

Ah yes, various computer games. Those were the days. I had all sorts of different early computers - ZX80, Spectrum,BBC, Atari. Back in those days we'd moved on from "pong" and  monochrome Space Invaders and Asteroids were state of the art in graphics but what I always liked were text-based adventure games. Gamers today are used to astounding graphics, worlds with millions of locations, complex interfaces, on-line group quests and all the other paraphernalia that go with their fictional worlds. They would probably laugh at the quaintness of the old games.

But I remember the days when there were no graphics at all, when an adventure with two hundred locations was colossal, when the interface was that you typed <verb><noun> instructions on the keyboard and waited to see what, if anything, happened, when your adventuring was done solo.

I think the first text adventure that I played was Scott Adam's Adventureland on my old Atari. It's astonishingly crude by any standards. Go North – Take Lamp – Go West – Climb Tree.

Ah those were the days.

I did several of the Scott Adams adventures – Adventureland, Pirate Adventure, Ghost Town, and the Spiderman and Hulk Questprobe adventures. I moved on to Zork and Colossal Adventure and the (astonishingly good) Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy. I ploughed my way through fantasy adventures and science fiction adventures and even a text based Alice In Wonderland Game (which didn't get thrown away with the others: - even though the machine to play it on is unobtainable now, I filed it away, after all a collector is a collector).

I played for hours trying to solve the puzzles – which were sometimes fiendishly difficult. Even getting the damned babel fish into your ear wasn't all that simple when the vocabulary available was so restricted.

I endured the frustration of repeatedly dying and having to start over because I had forgotten to save or, more frustrating still, had saved but hadn't realised that there was some hidden item in a location I passed through days ago that I now needed.

 

And then I stopped. I don't know why. I probably bought a new computer and the old games became obsolete. I haven't touched a text based adventure since the mid-eighties. In fact I haven't really done any kind of adventure gaming since around then – but I have discovered, doing my usual minimal research for this blog post -  that the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy game is available – in its original form on line.

 

Which accounts for the rather abrupt ending that you are about to experience.

 

Must dash. Vogons are demolishing my house.

 

Bye.

China: monkey hear, monkey speak

On the rare occasions that I sit for any length of time in the office (which is what the staff room is called in China) I witness an apparently endless stream of kids come to see their Chinese English teachers* with oral homework and time after time it's the same drill. The boy or girl will stand in front of their teacher clutching a textbook which has been folded back to the correct page but NOT looking at it. Then the learned passage will be recited. The interesting thing is that there is never any attempt at correct speech rhythms or correct intonation. All the syllables carry the same timing and the same - flat - tone, and the same amount of stress. Pauses between words are constant and exactly the same as pauses between sentences.
The result is that the passage is recited correctly - by which I mean "to the teacher's satisfaction" - but with no evidence at all that the child in question has understood a single word of it. It has been learned the way a parrot learns to say, "more tea, vicar" and with just as much effect. This isn't how to learn a language it's how to learn a parlour trick that is to be trotted out to amaze your aunts and uncles when they come to visit.
Then the child is replaced by another one who recites the same passage with the same lack of meaning, and another and another and another.
I suppose that with so many children to teach something of a production line approach to the task is inevitable, but there must be something better than this.

China: Shipwrecked!

This week's lessons have been going rather well, though producing some
novel - and unexpected - results.
The details of the lesson vary from class to class but the main
activity is, for the seniors at least, constant.
I divide the class into groups explain that they have been shipwrecked
on an uninhabited island and that before the boat sank (taking with it
all the teachers) they had time to fill a suitcase with useful items.
As groups they have to come up with a list of items and then explain
to me how they chose them.

On Monday one group had a list that included "beautiful women, whiskey
and a pig". The pig, apparently was so that would be able to kill it
and eat it.
Yesterday a group went one better with a list that consisted solely of
"Doraemon, love and condoms". Doraemon is, apparently, an anime cat
who can provide everything they need to survive. Apart from love and
condoms.
Today didn't provide anything other than a class taking the task
seriously with sensible suggestions. Until I was leaving after the
lesson, that is, when one group handed me an origami boat and told me
that I didn't have to drown with all the other teachers.

Can't wait to see what tomorrow's groups come up with.