The Adventures of Arganoid and Bongle Twonker

There was fury today when "Sir" "Keir" "Starmer" won the 2024 general election. The news was instantly condemned by Nadine Dorries, Ann Widdecombe and God. Starmer, a leftie lawyer who has defended the likes of Abu Hamza, Fred West and Noel Edmonds, swept to a majority of 170, cruelly depriving our Conservative betters of their God-given right to rule. The Conservative MP for Werther's Originals, Lord Bentonbury, who lost the seat he'd held since 1875, said in his concession speech "Sir Keir Starmer? Sir Woke Tofu, more like!" He then fell on his bayonet.

It is feared that the incoming Labour government will undo all the progress of the last 14 years, such as the blowing up of all council houses and the replacement of hospitals with escape rooms.

Nick Oliver, chairman of the pressure group Families Against Everything, has written to the new Prime Minister urging him to erase the word "trans" from the dictionary, and bring in mandatory hair length checks for all children. Sources in the new administration say that the proposals are being seriously considered, and an announcement is expected soon.

Editorial statement: We stand on the brink of the apocalypse. It is only a matter of time before right-thinking Conservative voters are sent to Angela Rayner's woke concentration camps. Just like in Stalin's gulags, prisoners will slowly waste away on a diet of quinoa and Ryvita, all served directly from the kitchen of Caroline Lucas. Those who survive will be required to work 24/7 serving banquets to Afghan immigrants, some of whom didn't even risk their lives to translate for British soldiers. There is only one conclusion we can draw from the victory of this insane Left cabal: the Tories were not right-wing enough. If Britain still exists in five years' time, the Conservative and Unionist Party's only hope is to stand a ChatGPT replica of Andrew Tate in every consitutuency.

This was a new entry in a series of parody articles I wrote in 1998 and 1999, inspired by the Daily Mail and Daily Express newspapers. You can find the original articles here: Arganoid's Comedy Page

Radio 4's Money Box Live had an episode the other day about the difficulties the 1.3 million UK citizens living in the EU are about be faced with. These people, along with the over 3 million EU citizens living in the UK, have been almost completely ignored in the Brexit debate. People who called into the programme included:

Yvonne - lives in France, travels to Switzerland every day to work: "Companies will look at me and say 'If you're not an EU citizen, I don't want to hire you, because the paperwork is complicated and I can get anybody who's an EU citizen to do the same job. I have two kids who are studying, and my family relies on my salary, so I really don't know what would happen."

Delia, 71, has lived in Italy for six years: "The healthcare, I think, is a really, really big problem. If there is no deal, then we have no rights to anything, and at our age it is a really major issue. We can't get health insurance, the cost of having to deal with everything privately is prohibitive.

Anne, 68, lives in Italy: "I came over to the UK with my husband because we became grandparents yesterday. While we've been here we've been thinking 'how can we be grandparents to this lovely granddaughter, and so we put in an offer on a house, and the offer was accepted, we got very excited, and then we thought about it and thought that – we don't know if (husband) Mario is going to be able to live here after March – on Brexit day all our rights cease, and we may not be able to live together in the UK. So we've had to cancel that plan. Our dreams have collapsed."

Later in the programme we hear from:

Zoe, who lives in Italy and provides translation services to customers in Germany, France and Italy. As things stand, after Brexit she will not have the right to provide services to companies outside Italy – as that would count as exporting services. Getting Italian citizenship would take four years. She wouldn't be able to return to the UK with her Italian husband unless she met a certain income threshold. As she's self-employed she would have to be established in the UK for two years to prove she could earn enough money to bring her husband over. They have a newborn baby.

Listen to the full programme here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00010yt

Hardcore was a game being developed by legendary game developer Jeff Minter (aka Yak) of Llamasoft in 1992, following the success of Llamatron and Revenge of the Mutant Camels. It was never finished, because he was hired by Atari to work on games such as Tempest 2000 for the forthcoming Jaguar console. Hardcore was therefore only released as a five-level demo. When I played it aged about 14, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I noticed recently that there was only one video of it on YouTube, and the quality of that video was terrible. So I've produced two high-quality videos of the game, one running at the default refresh rate of 50 Hz, the other running at 60 Hz (which my 14 inch TV couldn't even display at the time).

In these videos, I'm playing the game on an emulated Atari ST running at 32MHz, rather than the 8MHz that the standard models of the ST ran at – this is to ensure a perfectly smooth frame rate. For the 50Hz video, the difference between 8MHz and 32MHz is very minor, but the 60Hz version benefits much more.






In the late 90s, aged about 19, I did some work on a game of my own which was inspired by Hardcore, named "DEATH". This was also never finished, but I have recently made some tweaks to it and put it online – it can be downloaded from http://argnet.fatal-design.com/pilsbry/death.htm

My goal with this game wasn't to make an exact clone of Hardcore – and at the time I was writing it, I wouldn't have had the programming and game design experience to achieve that anyway. I definitely wouldn't say it's a great game, but with 20 years more experience, it's interesting to look back at my game vs Hardcore, and have gained a greater appreciation for the design of the latter.

The news has just come out that 80s and 90s game designer Paul Woakes died last summer. The only game of his I played was Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis from 1992 – a unique game with a brilliant sense of humour, that managed to fit an entire 3D solar system into a computer with only half a megabyte of RAM. You could land on any planet or moon and explore (admittedly sparsely populated) cities.

To begin with you get around using taxis and buses – this must be the only game that came with a printed bus timetable. Sometimes you would come out of a building just in time to see the bus pull away, and have to wait a few minutes for the next one – all part of the game's slightly evil sense of humour. You can free yourself from the drudgery of public transport by buying a spaceship, but they can be very expensive. One brilliantly cruel trick the game plays on you is that after a few hours of the laboriously getting from one side of the solar system to the other, you enter a building and find a note that tells you "we left your ship behind the building we started". That was also a brilliant piece of game design, because it means the next time the player starts the game they can just go round the back of the building, climb into their free ship and start exploring the solar system without being constrained by public transport – but by the time they found that note, the player would have had plenty of time to familiarise themselves with the locations of the major planets and cities. If they'd been given their ship from the very beginning, they would have just got hopelessly lost.

The plot is that a billionaire named PC Bil wants to begin open-cast mining on the planet Dion, which would be an environmental catastrophe. You have three days to stop him – but that's going to be hard, partly because he's about to be elected President. One way to win the game is to run against and beat him in the election. You have to go to all the TV stations and newspapers (and spend a lot of money) to make sure your campaign is well-advertised. One of the game's most memorable moments is when you come across a father and son standing outside a spaceport. If you briefly pick up the child, it's good publicity – but if you leave without putting the child back down, the headlines become "Mercenary kidnaps child" and the poll ratings drop.

There are six ways to win the game in total (including bankrupting PC Bil by cheating at his casino) – the other one that springs to mind is the one where you find evidence of PC Bil being involved in some kind of criminal activity. You then have to get authorisation to be some kind deputy sheriff or something, so that you can arrest him. But before you do that, you have to sort out somewhere for him to be imprisoned. First you have to buy the deeds to an empty plot of land, then you buy an inflatable prison (I'm not making this up) and place it on that plot. Finally you had to find a special glove that allows you to carry heavy things (such as people), and find the key to PC Bil's room. The final step of this solution, as you carry him to the prison, is very funny as he continually insists that you put him down and that you have no right to do this.

Here is a series of videos where someone plays through the opening parts of Mercenary 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHvlNYDPEmU&list=PL0537E0F6A3427964

And here is a site with a lot more information about all three Mercenary games, and a download of MDDClone, which allows you to play all three games on a PC:
http://mercenarysite.free.fr/mercframes_graphic.htm

Update - 10th February 2018:
Thanks to Simon from the Mercenary site, I have the stuff that PC Bil says as you apprehend him and carry him to prison -

On approaching PC BIL
"HOW DID YOU GET IN HERE - GO AWAY"
"DON'T YOU COME NEAR ME - I'M WARNING YOU"

Triggered when player picks up PCB
"PUT ME DOWN - THIS INSTANT"
"I'M P C BIL - YOU'VE NO RIGHT TO DO THIS"
"I DEMAND TO SEE MY LAWYER IMMEDIATELY"
"- - - - - - HELP! - - - - - -"

Update - Jan 2020:
PC Bil stands for Palyar Commander's Brother-In-Law - a reference to a character in the first Mercenary game.

10 years ago today, I felt the first symptoms of "repetitive strain injury". I put that in quotes because it's a flawed term that only partially describes what's going on. I also sometimes describe my problem as being a chronic pain condition, although that is also an imperfect label.

I developed my condition after seven years of working as a videogame programmer for Frontier Developments - a job that often involved working ridiculous hours and high levels of stress. The year before I developed my condition had been particularly bad - three months without a day off (including weekends) and working until at least 10PM most days. On one occasion, I went into work on a Sunday, left to go and see Mitchell and Webb perform at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, then went back to work after the show. I would work through lunchtimes and through the weekly doughnut sessions, where the boss would give a motivational talk. If someone came to my desk to speak to me, I would often keep my eyes on the screen and carry on typing for the duration of conversation. In addition to my crazy work hours, my home life mostly consisted of being on the computer or watching TV, and even if I got home from work at 10 or 11 PM, I would usually get on the computer straight away.

The first symptom I felt was an ache in one arm that persisted for two days. Within a few weeks I had started to feel other symptoms such as tingling, weakness and sudden jolts of pain when reaching for objects. My productivity at work went down to perhaps a quarter of what it had been before. I started seeing a physiotherapist for treatment (two or three times a week), which helped, but I couldn't get back to where I had been before. My condition is poorly understood, both by me and by experts. At first it seemed to be related to tight muscles in the neck, shoulders and arms, which put pressure on the nerves. Muscle tension still seems to mostly correlate with worse symptoms, but it seems there's more going on than that. I learned a lot about how the brain and the pain system can change over time to make symptoms persist even when the original physical cause is diminished or absent. I also learned that expectations can affect how the brain modulates pain – thinking that something will be painful will make it more painful.

I have spent four and a half of the last ten years off work - six months in 2008, and four years from June 2013 to now. Technically I'm still employed by Frontier and there is a chance of going back, but it seems increasingly unlikely. Therefore I'm currently supporting myself by working as a personal tutor for GCSE and A-level Computer Science students. I mainly work over Skype, so I can tutor any student regardless of where they live. I have also been working on a game, although at a slow pace because of my condition and because tutoring takes up a lot of my time.

There are some good things that have come out of this. Because I could no longer spend much time online, and couldn't play games (which had been my main form of entertainment), I was forced to get out of my comfort zone and try new things. I tried gardening, dancing, climbing, indoor scuba-diving, having 15 minutes of fame on TV, running for elected office and driving American cars round America like some kind of American. I joined environmental groups, walking groups and St John Ambulance. I made some amazing friends, many of whom I never would have met if it hadn't been for this condition. 10 years ago I was so unfit that exercising five minutes would have left me out of breath for half an hour. Now I can jog or swim for an hour without stopping. I'm considerably less bad at dating and relationships than I used to be.

However, this isn't a tale of triumph in spite of adversity. I have to live with both the physical effects of my condition, and the frustration of having to hold back from doing the amount of work I really want to do. The financial implications of all this have been enormous. It's worrying to think about what the next 10, 20 or 30 years might be like. I've grown a lot as a person, but I'd love to be able to combine this with the work capacity I used to have. I'm more ambitious now, but my ability to apply it is very limited.

If you want to help, there are three things I need. First, if you know anyone who would benefit from a computer science/programming tutor let me know. Second, if you're game programmer or artist, I'm looking for people to collaborate with. Third, if my game ever gets finished, I'll need people to help test it, write App Store/Steam reviews for it and sharing posts/tweets with their friends.

Yours sincerely,
Me

“This is likely to be the most complicated negotiation of modern times. It may be the most complicated negotiation of all times." - David Davis.

Bear in mind that the government has yet to successfully roll out Universal Credit nationwide after 6 years in power. How many times more complicated is Brexit - 10, 100? It will take up most of the govt's time for many, many years and will require us to replicate at great cost many of the EU's agencies (eg European Aviation Safety Agency, European Maritime Safety Agency, European Chemicals Agency), will require us to quickly become experts in the extremely complicated realm of international trade - and in exchange we get a worse trading relationship with what is by far our biggest trading partner, an exodus of the EU doctors, nurses and care workers that our society relies on, huge disruption to scientific and medical research, and less money for the NHS as banks downsize and the economy as a whole takes a hit. We also risk seeing the country break up, which would compound all of the problems above.

Here's just one example of how complicated it will be to actually achieve Brexit:
https://tradebetablog.wordpress.com/2017/01/06/limits-of-possibility/

If the government were made up of geniuses, they might just about be able to implement Brexit with only moderate disruption to the country and economy. Given that they appear not to be geniuses, Armando Iannucci may have to invent a new word to exceed "omnishambles".

I always try to give our politicians the benefit of the doubt, even when they come from a party I don't like. Nothing a PM has said has left me as disgusted as what I just heard Theresa May say in front of a Republican party group.

She had just been talking about her principles of "liberty, work, nationhood, family, economic prudence, patriotism and putting power in the hands of the people". This is what followed:

"And your victory in these elections gives you the opportunity to put them at the heart of this new era of American renewal too. President Trump’s victory – achieved in defiance of all the pundits and the polls – and rooted not in the corridors of Washington, but in the hopes and aspirations of working men and women across this land. Your Party’s victory in both the Congress and the Senate where you swept all before you, secured with great effort, and achieved with an important message of national renewal. And because of this – because of what you have done together, because of that great victory you have won – America can be stronger, greater, and more confident in the years ahead."

She is out there representing our country to both America and the world, and her message in this paragraph is that America has done a taken a huge step forward by replacing the thoughtful, principled Barack Obama with the sociopath and self-confessed groper Donald Trump - and that we Brits are all for this. It's not even just about Trump - I've followed American politics for long enough to know that Trump is just the shit-encrusted tip of the iceberg. If the Republicans were a British party, many of their representatives would be considered far-right. They have too many horrifying policy positions to list, so here are just a few. Even after the Sandy Hook school shooting in which 20 six and seven year olds were killed, they blocked proposals that would have restricted the ability of people with mental illnesses to buy guns - indeed some states loosened gun laws. While publicly professing to never forget the heroism of the first responders who dealt with the immediate aftermath of 9/11, they heavily resisted a law introducing healthcare and compensation for those people, many of whom were literally dying of cancer due to the particles they breathed in. They have subverted democracy by gerrymandering voting districts and introducing laws that deliberately make it harder for blacks to vote. They refused to even consider Merrick Garland to fill the Supreme Court seat which became vacant following the death of Justice Scalia - an issue which may not be familiar to British readers but which could have repercussions (in their favour) for decades. The Republican party have spent years fostering the level of public discourse which led to Donald Trump. He and they are as much a threat to the world as Vladimir Putin - Putin is worse, but Trump and his friends have much more influence. These are the people Theresa May has just praised and given Britain's support to.

Some sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jon-stewart-sept-11-responders_us_567ab1e5e4b06fa6887f7bd8
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/north-carolina-voting-rights-law/493649/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_nomination