It is rather vital to understand context a little better before delving into the natural resulting chaos of, oh say, any of the <i>Urusei Yatsura</i> main cast finding a new item and making use of it. The other day, Shinobu picked up a thimble from a store and accidentally caused a chain of events to unfold that ended with a massive stampede of sarcastic tophat-wearing weasels that wound up making a new home in Ataru’s sock drawer. This neighborhood is kind of fucked up like that.
In this modern era computers are ubiquitous. You’ve got cell phones, iads, laptops, desktops games consoles, handheld games consoles the list goes on and on and on. While it might be difficult to believe for those without the capacity to really think about the dark ages this was not even remotely close to the case a couple of decades back. Hell, even in the nineties computers weren’t nearly as everywhere, and the Internet wasn’t nearly as large or important as it is today. There was a time when pocket calculators were a novelty. Hell, in the fifties a computer took up the size of the room it was in. Hence the name “personal computer”, as in “a computer that one could personally use at home without having to throw out half your furniture”. Those were kind of big deals, and people honestly didn’t exactly know what to do with them. Contrast that to today where we use them for damn near everything.
Part of the reasons computers became so popular is because of the simple fact that they can be used for just about anything. Write reports, do some basic maths, perform research, communicate, entertain, draw - just about any task you can think of today can use the assistance of a computer. The other part is what is known as a user interface, particularly of the graphical variety.
See, computers didn’t always have things like windows or menus. They used to operate entirely on text. One would enter a command, and away the computer went working through its program based on user input to provide with an output. Computers didn’t used to have things like touch screens or a mouse simply because - hell, what would you even do with them? All you really needed was a keyboard once upon a time... But it also meant that anyone wanting to learn how to use a computer had to learn what all these commands meant. The benefit of a graphical user interface is that you can just give your end user all the information you need, right on the screen. A minimum of experimentation can reveal the entire functionality of any well designed software interface. No more need to tape a sheet of paper listing all the commands somewhere near the screen. Now you can do whatever you need with the click of a mouse or the tap of a screen.
But it’s actually pretty interesting watching old science fiction shows because in many ways we are very much further ahead than them in several important areas. Sure, we won’t have teleporters probably ever, but our computers seem so much more advanced than anything you see on Star Trek. Hell, there’s one Fourth Doctor story, set in the late 70s where The Doctor uses a TARDIS console to demonstrate the intended operation of a chameleon circuit... and it uses simple vector graphics to illustrate this point.
Really? Don’t get me wrong, when vector graphics are used correctly they can produce some pretty stunning results, but the image that it produces wouldn’t look out of place in one of the first three Ultima games. It’s just kind of amusing to me that even a show as inventive and creative as Doctor Who couldn’t even begin to imagine what computers would be capable of in the future and make the attempt to implement a little imagination into what they would be capable of. Then again, this was the time that computer scientists still thought teaching a computer to find the square root of numbers over a million was the key to understanding artificial intelligence. Hint: Computers are really really good at maths, but suck at things like walking across a room. If you’re interested, go check out Moravec’s Paradox.
But hey, talking about 70s Doctor Who actually sort of leads me back to Urusei Yatsura. Another rather fantastically designed science fiction story which is set in the late 1970s. They have all the standard science fiction cliches here. Spaceships, laser guns, weird aliens, robots, the works. They also have the supernatural cropping up everywhere. Ghosts, spirits, local legends, curses. Hell, the most prominent alien race are actually very similar to a particular Japanese devil and are even referred to as the same name: Oni.
So, let’s break this down a little bit. Urusei Yatsura is a science fiction/fantasy hybrid set in the late 1970s. What this means is that for all of the brilliant and dazzling alien tech we’re going to see throughout the show, even their most advanced computers are going to seem outright primitive by our standards. This is an essential point to beleaguer, partially because of the way most Word Processor or Master PC threads seem to go.
“Oh hey look,” our dopey protagonist would say. “Some fancy kind of computer that somehow has models of everyone I know, and weird sliders listing things like intelligence, strength, sexuality, etc. Let’s play around with it and see what happens.”
Okay, honestly? Who acts that way? Nobody human, that’s who! Most people would think that it was some sort of practical joke, while others would be wary enough to work out what they actually had. You’d have to be some sort of space alien to even begin to think that -
Oh. Oh <i>right. </i>
<hr>
Finally, it had arrived! Lum tore into the package like a starving man at a feast. Paper and packaging flew around the room and before long she extracted it. Her newest toy. It looked just like a book, but only until she picked it up and opened it. At which point it would become rather transparently obvious that the pages were not paper at all. Merely painted to appear that way. One page was entirely replaced with a monochrome screen, while the other was marked entirely by a keyboard.
Lum oohed and aahed over the device, then tapped at the power on key. The screen flashed and text began to scroll across it.
<font = new times roman>Welcome to World Processor
Remaining Capacity: 1GB
Enter CMD: Capacity to discover remaining capacity at any time.
Please enter password.
</font>
A whole gigabyte? Amazing! Lum chuckled a little to herself. “Such a lucky find. A portable electronic word processor on Earth! So advanced, too!” She picked up the manual, flicked through a random page and rose an eyebrow at what she saw. “It even has an automatic correction feature. Remarkable! Oh, I should enter a password, just in case darling tries to sneak a peek.”
She thought it over for a moment, and immediately discarded several of the more obvious passwords she could enter, like darling’s name or the word darling itself. Ultimately she decided on <font = times new roman> “Lum+Ataru4evah.”</font>
Good. That should keep anyone trying to break into this thing confused. It accepted the password, and a new line appeared. Time to start typing!
<hr>
While Lum was tapping away at her keyboard in blissful unawareness of the true power of what she had, Ataru was walking down the street with a scowl on his face. There was also a palmprint from a particularly vicious slap.
“Don’t know why she got so angry at me,” Ataru said to himself. “I mean, it’s not like I commanded the wind to flip up her skirt like that. And how was I supposed to not comment on the bunny print on her pink panties? I mean, it was just so cute!”
He stopped and winced, then scratched one foot with the other.
“Stupid weasels,” he groused. “Getting hair all over my socks! I thought I’d gotten rid of it all!”
Ah, but there was no time for that right now. Just across the street he saw one of his favourite targets. The ever lovely Sakura. School nurse and exorcist and all around hottie! I mean, just look at her. Curves in all the right places. Breasts you could sleep on, legs that deserved worshipping, a face that made him wonder how she ever passed by a mirror without spending the rest of the day there. Hell, how could she even see herself naked without staring in stunned silence? Mysteries of the universe!
But before Ataru could bound across the street in an ill advised attempt to hit on her fine, fine self... Something rather peculiar happened. Which is not, admittedly, a peculiar thing in and of itself given the course his life has taken but in this particular instance there was no sign of explanation anywhere around him. Usually there was <i>something</i>. The little brat Ten playing with a new toy, a malevolent spirit playing jokes, Lum pulling some stunt or other. Something. In this case, he could not see what it was that would cause this strange event. Though, of course, we do know what it was. Because in his own room, lying on the air Lum was typing away in complete obliviousness to the chaos she was about to unleash. For Lum was typing -
- A diary.
- A work of fiction, which is even now becoming real.
- A list of pros and cons about Ataru, some of which didn’t used to be accurate.
- Descriptions of people she’s met since arriving on Earth.
- A rant about her situation on Earth, and how she wishes things would go.
- Something else
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