Incidentally, I ran the automatic WordPress update and broke the theme for the site, which is why you’re seeing the Kubrick default theme and not the hashed together over a month on a netbook thing that’s been here for a year or so.
This does tie in nicely with my plan to give the place an overhaul, though, so perhaps this accidentally enforced back to basics look will help whatever my stale design skills can conjure up look that much more awesome.
I felt my heart sink recently when I learned of the death of Robert Enke, the German goalkeeper who committed suicide. I had never heard of the man before, yet I felt great empathy for him upon reading the circumstances surrounding his untimely demise.
Even before the death of his infant daughter in 2006, Enke had suffered from depression. However, that event took his illness to its deepest form – a spiraling sense of dispair and futility that would ultimately have him take his life, rather than struggle on in apparent hopelessness.
That he had managed to hide the depths of his depression so well only served to make the blow delivered to his friends and family that much more severe. That’s the trouble with depression – it’s something you can hide, both from those closest to you and from yourself.
A few years back when I was at Sony I wrote a short back-story for a fictional company in the game WipEout, called Tech de Ra. I don’t even know if I still have a copy of the original text – it was used for the most part to spark the imagination of the graphic design team and was never published on the website as intended. However, it essentially boiled down to orbital satellites with great big mirrors that focussed the sun’s rays onto solar panels on Earth.
The benefit being that the focussed solar energy would generate more power than the scatter-gun methods available to us now. I even had a bit about one of their older satellites being used to provide power and light to the dark side of the moon for the Lunar Parcs holiday complex up there (another one of the fictional companies I came up with!). So – pretty far fetched, I’ll agree.
Then I read this article on Treehugger last month; “Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and IHI Corp. will join a 2 trillion yen ($21 billion) Japanese project intending to build a giant solar-power generator in space within three decades and beam electricity to earth.”
Which is pretty much what I was getting at with the Tech de Ra back-story, and I think it’s quite exciting that it could become a reality.
This kind of thing has happened before with back-story content I’ve written. Back in November 2004 when I was writing the back-story for WipEout Pure, I wrote that the island the game was set on had been created by volcanic activity which ensued from an underwater Earthquake. I was told by my boss at the time that it sounded pretty far fetched. Six weeks later that infamous tsunami, caused by an earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean, struck. Needless to say, I went back into work in January and re-wrote the parts which were a bit too close to reality for comfort.
Conversely, I really do hope that Mitsubishi and partners can bring the orbital solar power project closer to reality.
Update: It turns out I do have the document after all; Companies – Tech de Ra