It's Time to Focus

My mind is racing out of control and eventually it will hit a brick wall - unless I slow it down.

The usual national media outlets - CNN, Newsweek, Time, etc. - have been running stories this year about, somewhat ironically, media overloading among today's under-40 generation. The general consensus of these articles is usually the same: those people raised in the age of modern computing and especially in the last ten years of the Internet are more likely to suffer from short attention spans, an addiction to information, and an inability to focus on daily activities to some degree.

Think about how easy information is made available today. With a simple Google search, one can have almost any information they desire in a matter of seconds. Recipes, news articles, videos, stories, maps, pictures - all available instantly thanks to super-fast modern broadband. The "social web" means that more voices than ever are heard at once, so sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook put millions of people in the spotlight without much more effort than a Google search. Even Facebook's biggest feature - its oft-maligned News Feed - was designed around a generation starved for information: it delivers updates about your friends to you on one screen instead you having to search for them individually. It was an annoying new feature in 2005 and now it is a way of life for 500 million people.

I am an information addict myself. It was not until this current summer that I took a long, hard look at my own habits and realized how much time I waste trying to take in every snippet of information from the corners of my favorite websites. I read Engadget religiously. I check on my Facebook News Feed so often that there are no gaps - what I saw at 11pm last night is what I read back to during my 7am check-in this morning. Sometimes when I am trying to do something productive such as programming or writing I instead end up clicking frantically onto my favorite websites. When I open up the same sites at twice - two Ars Technica tabs at once, for example - just to be sure I am not missing something - well, something is wrong with me.

I also believe that gamers have it a little worse. While I do believe games do help improve twitch-based reflexes in long-playing individuals (myself included), games provide a form of instant-entertainment that is borderline addicting to the dedicated gamer. Again, thanks to the Internet, games of all types are available to more people than ever before, and sometimes satisfaction comes from variety. There are some nights where I will play six or seven different games in a five-hour timespan. Thanks to the Wii's Virtual Console I have been known to hop in and out of games every couple of minutes, trying to find what sticks to my sloppy attention span.

With my attention span constantly needing to be filled with some new bit of information or some new game, I am finding other interests taking a backseat. While I have made quite a bit of progress with my programming career - learning PHP, MySQL, and Apache of the LAMP stack - I have not been able to focus on any one particular project for too long. I have not been able to get any significant creative writing done, nor get back into reading (something I picked up near the end of my career at Meijer), nor reignite my passion for biking - in fact, almost all of my creativity is dead. There are plenty of things that I would love to be doing besides sitting in front of my computer, yet I have trouble pulling myself away. This is going to change.

Since moving to Findlay I have made a huge push to become more productive in many areas of my life. This past May I took up exercise on a regular basis, and for it have lost twelve pounds and counting. I am working on a big web project, Yola, my take on a Twitter / Facebook hybrid. I recently set up a web server for hosting my own websites and applications (a future article!), and moved my brandonbruno.com domain name to it.

With my web server project out of the way I am moving on to a big new project: getting my attention span back.

My ultimate goal is to get off the computer and become creative again. I can hardly be inspired for my next short story by reading endless articles on Kotaku or scrolling through Reddit. I can't exercise enough when I find myself spending six hours of my free time per day on the computer.

I have a lot of activities that I would like to focus on outside of the Internet, and hopefully after this fall and winter I will be able to reclaim the creative spirit that I lost so quickly after college.

With that, I am off to enjoy the outdoors.

B3 out.

Hydro Thunder Dreams Do Come True

Earlier this year I counted down my top seven most-loved video games. Had I done a Top Ten, this game would certainly have been included: Hydro Thunder.

My love affair with Hydro Thunder goes back to 1999. Released in the arcades in mid-1999, Hydro Thunder was something unique: a seemingly basic racing game with all the right twists: a loud-as-hell, bass-driven cabinet and fast-as-hell twitch gameplay that balanced the chaotic with the serene.

During the summer of 1999, at the Wood County Fair, I found two Hydro Thunder arcade cabinets set up in the rear of the arcade tent. I was not a big fan of arcade games at the time, but the bright blue cabinet of Hydro Thunder caught my eye amid a smelly tent filled with fighting games and poorly-aged "games of skill."

I was clumsy as hell my first couple of races, but after sinking about four dollars in quarters into the game, I was finally finding my groove - and my addiction. In one week I put almost $80 in quarters into that game, usually with a friend or two at my side. After the fair I found Hydro Thunder in a few arcades from time to time. Al-Mar Lanes in Bowling Green had one machine, and I included a few races before and after my Friday and Saturday night bowling routines.

Why is Hydro Thunder such a blast to play? Because just like with Wave Race 64, Hydro Thunder strikes a balance between perfect control and complete chaos but never cheats the player. The tracks are littered with shortcuts and other ways to shave seconds off your time. Opponents are finely tuned to provide a decent challenge. The over-the-top physics are tuned just right and never once get in the player's way. As your watercraft glide over the rough waters of each track, they bob, bounce, roll, drift, and rocket through every turn and straightaway with ease. The game is not all flash and speed, however; there is deep strategy in managing boost, angling into turns, and taking-or-leaving some shortcuts. Everything about playing Hydro Thunder just feels right, and that is a quality that few racing games do well.

As Hydro Thunder arcade machines became more and more scarce after the turn of the century, the game faded from my memory, but not before I learned of a port to the Nintendo 64 due out in late 2000. Without hesitation I paid fifty-some dollars for the game and played the hell out of it on my 13-inch TV for weeks on end. But wait! The magic of the arcade was lost. The N64 controller did not compare to the steering wheel and throttle design of the arcade original. Where was the heavy bass that thumped throughout my body every time I hit my boost button?

While watered down on the Nintendo 64, I still enjoyed Hydro Thunder thoroughly. After high school I lost sight of the game and only played it every once in a great while when I found it in an arcade (Cedar Point, anyone?). Some years later - long after my Nintendo 64 had been retired - I played it via an N64 emulator on my PC. I also played it on the Playstation 2 via Midway Arcade Treasure 3. Neither of these compared to the sheer thrill of the arcade original. By now, 2010, Hydro Thunder has been regulated to the status of "relic."

Hydro Thunder, one of my favorite video games, is barely survived today by dying arcade cabinets and a few home-ports that simply don't do the bass-thumping arcade original any real justice.

Today I have found the Europe-only release of Hydro Thunder on the PC. The original Hydro Thunder arcade game ran on a Pentium II-based PC with a Voodoo 2 GPU, which means that every computer I own today can tear through this awesome game. With a solid controller in hand and arcade-perfect gameplay, I now make Hydro Thunder a part of my weekly gaming routine.

The original experience may be dead, but the thrill lives on as best as I can keep it alive.

B3 out.

Correctly Quoted: I'm a Lucky Man

"Happiness

Coming and going

I watch you look at me

Watch my fever growing

I know just who I am,

But how many corners do I have to turn?

How many times do I have to learn

All the love I have is in my mind?"

(From "Lucky Man" by The Verve)