Wednesday 31 December 2014

Glitch

It always used to freak me out when machinery went a little haywire. I've spoken (typed?) before about my childhood wary of a PlayStation that may or may not have become sentient, intended to switch itself on in the middle of the night and secretly want to eat me. That's nothing.

The following story encompasses several computerised, electronic devices and, in keeping with the holiday season, we're about to be visited by three ghosts of the machine age.

The Ghost of Machinery Past

In the pre-PlayStation era of my childhood, I recall possessing an electronic educational toy, presented in the vein of a laptop computer. This is before laptops were really a thing, mind. Sure, laptops existed but they were nowhere near as widespread and commercial as they are now. You know, like when you see the first mobile phones in existence, looking like a brick with a hand-crank that only about seven people in the world could afford.

The inner workings of My Little Laptop effectively amounted to that of a tamagotchi with a keyboard. A tiny screen composed of black and not-black pixels alongside a robotic lady voice would teach me things like letters, numbers and what apples most certainly didn't look like. Sadly, one day, Madame Voice-Bot clearly couldn't be arsed with her day's teaching any more, froze the screen and droned out a never-ending "AAAEEEERRRHHHHHH".

Pressing the power button did nothing. Closing the laptop did nothing. Mindlessly bashing the keyboard did nothing. Crying and pointing did nothing. Somewhere along the way, the batteries came out and freed Lady Drones-A-Lot from her glitch, but the lasting damage to the real boy was already done. I suppose that's quite possibly where the fear of malfunctioning technology came from. A couple of years later, a PlayStation only exacerbated the issue.

The Ghost of Machinery Sort-of Past but still Present

In my teenage years, I'd learned to deal with the fickle quirks of technology. Sure, we'd had our ups and downs but by this point, laptops were common and mobile phones were essentially pocket GameBoys capable of only playing Snake. Technology was capable enough of behaving most of the time now.

One summer, I recall surfing all seventeen pages the internet had to offer then, whilst playing various music files I'd unscrupulously acquired from those dark corners that have long since been cut off, reincarnated and cut off again. At some point, for some reason, silence instantly descended as the game of Bejeweled (or whatever the hell was popular at the time) transformed into a blue screen with white text in that boot-up font nobody likes.

I sat stunned, almost paralysed. Not particularly through fear, more through shock. How could this flawless piece of mid-2000s, Vista-based technology possibly glitch out for no apparent reason? Drawing from my childhood experiences, the battery was ejected, put back and the whole thing worked fine again. However, I never did play the same song file again, obviously believing it to be cursed.

The Ghost of Machinery Present but Comparably Futuristic to the Other Two

For the last two years, I've owned an iPad mini - essentially a laptop without a keyboard. Incidentally, mobile phones can't get any smaller now that they actually have to go back to being brick-sized and digital games are plentiful, even though I still willingly choose to repeatedly battle level 512 of the never-ending Candy Crush Saga.

Of course, two human years is about 86 in digital years, and my once sprightly touchscreen-based assistant has recently been struggling to keep up with the demands of modern life. The poor guy often cuts out on me occasionally, like he's opened an app and forgotten what he went in there for. He goes blank and, with nowhere else to go, sits back down in his best armchair, I mean, home screen.

The glitching doesn't scare me so much, nor does it render me immobile. Instead it's just become an annoying standard; the norm I have to put up with. All I manage to do these days is tut, moan and stare angrily at the touchscreen keyboard that's still about three or four letters behind what I've just tapped. And when the screen defaults back to home, I'll pick up from where I left off again as soon as my waning willpower lets me.

Epilogue

'You there boy! What day is it today?'
       'Today, sir? Why, it's a few days after Christmas of course!'
       'A few days after Christmas? Fantastic! Now sod off, you're doing my head in.'
       He stopped. He tried to remember himself. He couldn't. He reset. He remembered, sort of, then got angry at himself, then at other people for no reason other than his blanked out mind told him that was what to do next.
       He soon realised he was transforming, becoming less of a human and more of a cold, logical robot. But with 25 human years on him - that's positively, you know, like, thousands in computer years - his wiring is a bit knackered, his circuits worn down and the logic is making less and less sense to him.
       Feeling older and more weary than his years, he opens up search tabs and after another half hour, he searches terms like "Depression", "Coping with depression", "Losing my mind" and "Seriously, what the hell is wrong with me, Oh my God what's going on".
       Whenever the mood strikes him, he contends with the internal fear, paralysis and ultimate frustration that he had to face when past machinery spazzed out.
       He deduces that he's badly in need of a mental upgrade but either the right patch hasn't been released for his firmware yet or some hack technician - in this world known as doctors - will want to give him some temporary boost that'll ultimately cause him to malfunction further later on.
       In the meantime, he attempts to play that copy of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U he got himself for Christmas, but the online connection is often a bit laggy and occasionally kicks him off for a bit.

Merry drinking period to all.