boriel.com

Today, after leaving my work, I met this scene: A bus had run into the tram. Fortunately, there’s been no casualties. Just four slightly injured, and nothing else (well, the train and the bus damaged, but that has solution )

You can see the bus derailed the train, but the bus was also side-displaced about 5 meters.

I walked by the calm path, until I reached a clearing in which there was a lake. A faint light sorrounded everything and there it was the answer to some of the question I’ve always been asking to myself.

-“What does really matters?”- I though insistently.

Then there was a brief silence, like the calm before the storm, and I feared having done something wrong. But the storm arrived, in the form of sensations. Then an inner voice answered:

Many times, we look for happiness on external things. Paradoxically, that search for happines usually brings much more unhappiness, so you should make balance to see if it’s worth the hassle. However, on the other hand, sometimes and unexpectedly, you bump into people with whom you share happy moments. They’re free moments, you didn’t have to struggle to reach them.

There was a little pause. It was looking into my memories… I felt an odd tickling. And then it continued:

Meeting accidentally your friends when going back home, having a beer and chatting with them; going out to the cinema or
having dinner on New Years’ Eve talking about simple things, together. Sharing a little nice time together and enjoying it so you forget about your problems for a while living only in the present. Keeping that moment, that instant and what it means, with you, in your memory…
That’s what really matters in the end…

And then I walked all the way back, bringing that answer with me…

In a previous post, I commented on a book being released, ZX Spectrum Golden years. Finally it arrived, and I started reading it with some expectation.

The book finish and design is really good. Perhaps what I dislike was the binding glue, which was a little weak, so I went to a printer works to rebind it with a stronger glue.

Back to the book design, it’s perfect. If you have sometime wanted to read a book on ZX which brings you those sensations back, this is your book: Page numbering is made with ZX spectrum gum keys fonts. The books goes in chronological order and it’s pledged of neat artwork from that ages. The Manic Miner, the Alien 8 bot, and so on appears on some pages mixed with some background screenshots.

Each page comments on a game and shows two screenshots of it and the cover tape. It also tells about the programmers of the moment, their lives and the companies they were working on. The book comments 250 games. Some of them where absolutely unknown to me whilst others were very very familiar (of course, Knight Lore and all the Filmation saga from Ultimate).

However, I missed some writtings about others like Bruce Lee, Abu Simbel Profanation (although other Dynamic games are exposed), Wizball (I will comment on it here soon) or Bomb Jack.

Besides that, absolutely brilliant and absolutely a must for any ZX Spectrum fan: every moment, every memory brings that “flavour” back from times that won’t be here anymore.