(Click to view the bigger version.)

Unfortunately, there’s way too much truth behind it.

“This suit is impervious to everything, except for conveniently placed lava crystals!”

Seriously. Saints Row 3. Go play it.

It’s  AWESOME!

And you (might) know how rare it is for me to say this about a game. Very little about it bothers me. From the very first moments of the intro until the final moments of the game, it’s one giant ball of goodness topped up with an extra big load of juicy awesome.

Seriously. Why are you still reading this? Go play it!

I am, of course, referring to 3D in the sense of 3D televisions and 3D movies and such. Not real-world 3D – that’s been around for, like, forever.

Personally, I feel that 3D put a lot of added value into a movie. It just makes it feel that much more realistic, it strongly increases the sense of actually being there rather than just watching a flat image on a flat screen. Putting 3D into any random television program is unnecessary if you ask me, but 3D in movies (or video games)? Hell freakin yeah!

The problem that we have, however, is that 3D movies don’t work for everyone. Some people hardly notice the effect, or they get dizzy, or they get headaches. All these things have perfectly good reasons, which I’m going to talk about in a moment. But before we get to that, we should first discuss what the 3D thing really is, how humans perceive 3D, and how 3D video material is created.

(Note that I’ll be talking about 3D movies for the rest of this post, but the same concept applies to video games or any sort of 3D material as well.)

So, what is it, anyway?

When you’re looking at your computer monitor (like you are probably doing right now), you’re watching a flat image being displayed on a flat surface. Every point on that surface can be uniquely identified using two coordinates – one for the horizontal axis and one for the vertical axis. This much you probably already know.

When you look away from your monitor (which is probably a pretty rare occurence), you’ll notice that there is actually a rest of the world around us, too. (If you’re not used to it, I recommend to be very careful and look away only for short periods and slowly increasing the time spent looking away each time – otherwise the existence of this world may come as a bit of a shock.) This rest of the world is not projected on a flat surface. Things, as we perceive them, are in a 3-dimensional space, which means we need 3 coordinates to uniquely identify a position (from a given reference point, of course).

When you look into this mysterious ‘world’ thing, you’ll find that many of the things within it are located at some distance from yourself. You’ll also find that you are capable of estimating how far away these objects are. This is what we call depth perception. The difference between a regular movie and a 3D movie is that we somehow emulate this: rather than perceiving the movie as a flat image projected on a flat surface, you’ll be able to do this depth perception thing with the movie as well, making it a more realistic and more immersive experience.

How does depth perception in humans work?

If you have ever bothered to learn anything at all about how your body is put together, or if you have at least occasional contact with other humans (again, not likely – but just in case), you probably know that a typical human possesses two eyes, and these are the body parts we use to see things with.

Since the laws of physics prohibit two objects from occupying the same space at the same time, these eye things are set approximately horizontally at a certain distance from eachother. This has two important implications: first, you don’t look like a cyclops, and second, the image that each eye perceives (assuming they are looking in the same direction) is slightly different.

Your brain then receives an image from each eye (which actually arrives inside your brain upside-down by the way), and does two things with it. It flips the image back so it’s right side up again, and it combines the images received from each eye. The small differences between each image are used to provide a sense of depth in what you’re seeing. (If you cover one eye, stab yourself in the eye, or for another reason are only able to see with one eye, you’ll find that it gets much more difficult to estimate distances, and it’s going to be much harder to get a driver’s licence for that reason.)

How is 3D content made?

When filming a 3D movie, the main difference is the camera that is used. A traditional camera has a single lens and captures a single, flat image. A camera used for 3D filmmaking is essentially two separate cameras set next to eachother at a distance from eachother. That distance is about equal to the average distance between human eyes (which is about 7 cm).

(An alternative method is to film a slightly wider image than normal and extract both left and right sides from that. This method is usually more practical – profesional video cameras tend to be bulky and putting two next to eachother at a 7 cm center-to-center distance gets rather difficult.)

You can see  where this is going (or not). If we capture two sets of images, with that same distance between them as they would have when captured by human eyes, and then feed those two images into each eye separately, the end result is about the same as when you were actually standing there and looking at it directly. You get depth perception into the scene.

How is it delivered?

When 3D content is shown, what you see is essentially two separate streams of video: one intended for the left eye, and one intended for the right eye. Both are shown at the same rate that you would have when watching a normal movie, so in a 3D video, images refresh twice as fast (at 120 Hertz, typically). This is also why a normal TV cannot show 3D content (the image for each eye would be visible at about 25 to 30 Hertz, and many people will be able to see the flickering rather than a smooth image, which would be bad). The trick is in separating the left and right images so the left image only goes into the left eye and the right image only goes into the right eye.

When going to a 3D movie in a cinema, or if you get a 3D TV at home, you’ll probably have those nice little glasses that you have to put on in order to see the 3D (without them, the image will appear fuzzy). Those glasses are the thing that separate the two image streams. The glasses basically exist in two kinds: active shutter glasses and passive shutter glasses.

Active shutter glasses are essentially two small LCD displays; a piece of glass which can either let light through or block it, controlled by an electrical current. The glasses have a sensor on front, and a transmitter is needed (which usually works with infrared, like your TV remote). The signal received by the glasses tells it which side should be blocked at what time. By quickly alternating the image that is shown on the screen, and simultaneously blacking each eye out, each eye receives a different image, and we have 3D vision.

Notable disadvantages are the high price (active shutter LCD glasses typically sell for around 100 euros, and only work with one particular brand of TV – having some friends over to watch a movie together gets very expensive very quickly!), their relatively high weight, the fact that they need a battery to work, and the fact that when the sensor is blocked or otherwise doesn’t receive the signal, the glasses won’t work anymore. Also, due to the fact that each eye will only see blackness for half of the time, the image will appear only half as bright (or less) than it is on the screen. Your television needs to have a LOT of brightness!

All of those issues are solved by passive shutter glasses. Passive shutter glasses are now used in most cinemas. They are cheap, smaller, lighter, and available in much nicer designs. They work by polarizing the light at the projector. The glasses simply contain a filter to control which image comes in at each eye. Their main disadvantage is that you’ll need a very expensive projector setup with polarizing filters. It is extremely impractical to put such capability into a television.

Technologies have also been developed that allow 3D viewing without using glasses, but these technologies have to make assumptions about the angle at which you’re viewing the screen and your distance from the screen. If either one is too far off, you’re not seeing 3D. Due to this problem it is immediately impractical for applications where more than a single person is watching.

So why does it not work for me?

There are two main reasons you, as a viewer, may experience problemens when watching a 3D movie.

First one, eye distance. 3D content is made with the assumption that your eyes are at a certain distance from eachother, and to make this work for a large audience, the average distance of about 7 cm is typically assumed. However, not everyone’s eyes are at that distance, and in order to correctly estimate distances, your brain has to do a loth of work – all of that work assumes that the eyes are at whatever distance your eyes actually are.

But, when watching a 3D movie, your brain may be fed images where the distance is off – and if the distance is off even by a little, estimating distance doesn’t work anymore as well as it should. As a result you may not see the effect at all, and you may get a headache.

Second one, focal points. Your eyes have the ability to squeeze or stretch the lens in the front in order to focus your vision to a certain point. Things located at the point you’re focussed at will appear to be sharp and other things become progressively more blurry as they are located further away from that point. This is perfectly normal, of course.

One important thing is that, in the real world, your eyes can focus on any point and that point will appear sharp to you. It just works. Always. And that is great.

However, a camera has the same limitation that the human eye has: it can only focus on one point at a time. When viewing a ‘flat’ movie, this is fine: you’re focussed on the screen and everything goes smoothly. But when shooting 3D, this means that the 3D image has one object in it that does have focus, and the rest of the image (especially the background) will be out of focus.

Now, when you look somewhere on the image which is not the point of focus when the image was made, your will perceive depth, and attempt to focus your eyes that depth. You will attempt to focus on something which is never going to be in focus. This is problematic for us. It is not a situation that would occur naturally, and the brain is just not wired to not be able to focus the eyes on something.  The result is that you’ll be having a headache.

Luckily though, if (and I stress the word IF – plenty of 3D content being made today is just not what it should be) the movie is made correctly, your natural instinct will be to focus on whatever the camera was focussing on when the movie was made, and unless you wander away from that, you should be fine. However, it is still an issue that any viewer can have, regardless of eye distance.

But…

If it does work for you, you’ll have a more awesome and more immersive experience watching movies.

Also, I hope you found this post informative

Or maybe, it had more to do with a temporary lack of inspiration and a general not feeling like writing something. I don’t know. Either way, I’m going like crazy – this is the second post that is actually being queued up when I’m writing it (this is when I set it not to publish immediately but some time in the future, in this case, a week in between posts so that I don’t burn through material too quickly – up until now I’ve never done this, actually).

Anyway, I used to play Skyrim, like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee.

Or maybe, it had more to do with the fact that I got fed up with it.

Don’t get me wrong. I played Morrowind for waaaay too many hours, and loved it. I played Oblivion waaaaaaay too much, and I loved it. And in many ways, I love Skyrim, but in some ways…

To start off positively, Bethesda is still a major champion in terms of open-world RPGs. I just love to be able to say, screw you fate of the world, I’m going home, or somewhere else, and do whatever it is I like to do next. A big world with lots of places to visit, plenty of NPCs to talk to, lots of side quests (and often pretty good ones too, not the overly generic ‘go drop off/pick up this item’ or ‘talk to this guy’ and you’re done), and so on is something that I appreciated back in Skyrim’s predecessors, and I can certainly appreciate it a lot in Skyrim.

Compared to Oblivion, the main quest (or, as far as I got with it) is much better. Oblivion’s main quest sits in memory as being very repetitive: you have to close a bunch of Oblivion gates, and each of them is pretty much the same. It’s uninteresting, to say the least. There’s more to the game than that of course, but it kinda sticks. Skyrim does a way better job at it.

But as great a game as Skyrim can be, it lacks. It’s pretty good, but it just misses on the final details, the finishing touches, the last little bits that would have made it really great.

The engine, for instance. Things like their Radiant AI and such are awesome (in short, NPCs wander around, they go to their homes and sleep and go somewhere else to work, stuff like that – they have lives, rather than just standing at their shop or wandering the same bit of street for all eternity), but in other details, Bethesda could have paid a little bit more attention. For instance, when you swim underwater, the screen gets a sort of  color overlay to show that hey, this is underwater, it’s more difficult to see here. Which is great, except that it suddenly appears when the camera is submerged under water a certain amount (and up until that point you can see underwater as clear as you can see above it). This flaw dates back to at least Morrowind, and back then it was perfectly acceptable for a game, but in 2011, I think they should be able to do better.

The game’s controls are horrible. You get used to it, and once you do it’s managable, the controls are very annoying and un-intuitive. They are console-controls on a PC, but mapped to the wrong keys. Not great.

Then, bugs. Especially with a game that is as big and complicated as Skyrim is, there’s bound to be a couple of glitches now and then. If I ran accross such a glitch when doing some obscure side-quest I wouldn’t mind that much and just carry on. The thing is, I had several major problems with the main quest. One NPC’s dialogue was missing (apparantly a very common problem, you have to use some tool and unpack a datafile to fix this – the NPC is quite important and without doing this, he says nothing, you have no idea to what you’re responding, and all dialogue involving him gets terribly bugged). Several times I had to resort to using the console to get past a point that was impossible to complete by playing normally. In a sidequest, I can understand, but having several of these issues in the main quest…

It actually got to the point where I just got tired with having to switch back and forth to a web-browser (which reminds me: it doesn’t handle alt-tab’ing well, which is pretty much unacceptable for a 2011 release, if you ask me) in an attempt to find a workaround for some game-breaking issue in the main quest. As a result I just shut the game down and decided I was done with it.

Bethesda, did you test your game? At all?

(I used to be a playtester like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee. Yeah.)

Another thing – which has evolved into a bit of an internet meme. All of the guards in Skyrim have a small combined pool of lines that they’ll say if the player gets nearby. It turns out that a lot  of the guards in Skyrim used to be an adventurer, until their fate brought an arrow on to a collission course with their knee. It’s fine the first time you hear this line. After hearing it from five different guards…

Well. Yeah.

My overall thoughts on Skyrim: it’s good. In many ways, its pretty damn good. But with a little bit more effort, it would have been so much better.

And now, back to playing Tetris.

Exactly. Facebook.

Yeah, I know Facebook is a piece of privacy-unfriendly crap (in friendly terms), and personally, I don’t really use it anyway. But it has games, and those games tend to be kind of addictive, and marginally entertaining.

One game I’ve been playing a lot (and getting quite good at) is Tetris Battle. For those educated folks who aren’t familiar with it: it’s tetris, except that you play it against other people. In the basic variant, you play against a single other person, and your goal is to knock the opponent out (ie, making his playing field fill up so that he can’t place any new blocks). To do this, you clear lines yourself, which puts ‘garbage’ lines at the bottom of the opponent’s playing field. If you receive those garbage lines yourself, there’s one block in that line, of you place another block yourself that touches that particular block, the garbage line clears away. There’s also a four-player variant, where the goal is to clear 40 lines as fast as you can.

Anyway. You’re supposed to be playing against other players. If you have friends on Facebook who play it, you can invite them so you can play against eachother. But other than that, the game is a load of bullcrap. You’re not playing against actual people at all.

Well, you probably see the names, profile pictures and actual statistics of people who are really on Facebook and really play it, but you’re not actually playing against them at the moment. The game obviously doesn’t say this, but there are a bunch of things that give it away.

1. First of all, timezones. I’ve played hundreds of games, and lots of them against Asian people. Which is fine, except that most of the time when I’m playing, it’s something like 4 AM over in China.
2. Pausing. I can pause the game anytime, and either I have to resume it within 30 seconds, or it continues automatically. I occasionally pause the game to write a message on some instant messaging program or to do some other quick task. In my hundreds of games, it has never happened that the opposing player paused the game.
3. Starting the game. Typically, for a multiplayer game, all players have to indicate that they are ready before the game actually starts. However, every time when I click the ‘START’ button, the game starts instantly. This would require that the other player has already clicked ‘START” himself as well (which is unlikely, since I’ve never had to wait for ANY of my 500+ games), or that his START button is grayed out and the game just starts when I click START (which would mean that on occassion I would have to wait for the other player to start the game, which also, never happened).
4. In addition to #3, the opposite player appears to have infinite patience. It doesn’t matter if I start the game directly, or wait half an hour. He’ll just sit there and wait until I’ve started.
5. Depending on their rank, players invariably use the exact same tactics and perform about equally well. Every single rank 20 or higher opponent that I’ve faced so far uses the same technique where you first build up a lot of blocks in about three quarters of the width of the playing field, and then quickly clear all those lines, so that the opponent receives a lot of garbage lines very quickly. They do this without any variation, and they are always players at rank 20 or above. Players below rank 20 never use it.
6. Similarly, in the four player games, it very frequently happens that one or two of the opponents play so incredibly slow and incredibly poorly that it’s a miracle that they ever got to the rank they appear to be on at all. If they play all their games like that, they should hardly have been able to get past rank 5 or 10.
7. Regardless of how poor your internet connection is at the moment, or how much stuff you’re downloading at the time, the game never has any lag while you’re playing it (or at least, not unless you play against friends).

In short, the game is a fraud. Unless you actually invite friends to play against you, you just see some random player’s name and picture and the rest is all artificial.

It’s been a little while since I last wrote here. If you don’t like it, well, I blame my irregular update schedule (or well, lack of an update schedule, really). As I’ve stated in my little About Me section: it can be a day between posts, a few months, or anywhere in between. Who knows. (I certainly don’t.)

So, yeah!

Normality.

What the hell is it anyway? When are you normal? When are you not?

For starters, being like me would probably put you in the latter category. But that is entirely beside the point.

Wikipedia (oh, how we love thee!) states that ‘in behavior, normal refers to a lack of significant deviation from the average’. This is pretty much how I would define it myself. However, I find this definition a bit unclear.

In order to determine what normal is, we’d need to first find a way to quantify every aspect of a person. Some of these are easy: a person’s age is already counted in years. We can easily count how many times a person has had sex (well, it kind of hangs on how drunk the person usually is when they have sex, but that’s a separate aspect), or how many different bikes they’ve owned as a kid. When it comes to personality traits, it gets a bit more difficult, but let’s assume that we’re able to measure stuff like how well you respond to humor, at what level you’re interested in science, how socially developed you are, and a gazillion other things, on a simple scale of 1 to 10 each. Of course, there are other factors as well, such as what gender you have and how pretty you look.

Now we have the tricky bit. We’d need to know the values for each of these scales, for every living person on the planet. This may be a liiiiiiitle bit problematic, but in order to accurately figure out what ‘average’ is exactly, it’s pretty important.

So, now we know how an exactly average person would be. We know exactly what he/she would look like. Actually, the matter of whether this average person would be male or female is a bit tricky, but since there are slighly more females than males in the world, our person would have need to have a single breast and both a vagina and a penis, but the vagina would have to be slightly larger than the penis (but still of average size of course – you can see why this is a bit difficult). He/she would probably live somewhere in the molten section of the planet’s core (though leaning more towards China than any other area on the planet), have about a quarter of an internet connection, and own something like three quarters of a mobile phone. We would also know exactly how his/her personality is, how well he/she likes certain subjects, and everything else there is to know.

(Obviously, if we take the world’s internet user’s as an accurate representation of the human population, chances are than our average person is a dumb annoying idiot.)

So, yeah.

Now we have a perfectly average person. Problem is, there is probably not going to be any living human in the world who is a perfect match to this average, and besides, we’re talking about normality, which we’ve established to be having a lack of significant deviation.

‘Significant deviation’ is again a pretty vague term. When exactly is the deviation significant?

I’d say, the deviation is significant when it’s more than the average deviation.

Oh boy, we’re gonna need to pull out the numbers again, and compare everyone’s scores against the perfect average, and write down the difference between everyone’s scores and the average scores, and then find the average of that. In other words, we’re calculating the average deviation that people have from the perfectly average person.

Now we have a pretty good baseline: we know what ‘normal’ is exactly, and we know how much you can deviate from ‘normal’ without reaching an over-average (ie, significant) deviation from being normal.

Since our average person is just about halfway between male and female, and pretty much everyone else is either male or female, we all have a large deviation from the average, so you’re probably safe on that count. In other areas… Well, I can’t tell that for you. Not until zeh maths are done.

So, there we go. Normality.

Have a nice day now!

Yeah, it’s a (small) piece of chain mail, and yeah, I’m learning myself how to work this stuff.

It’s actually more complicated than it seems at first. Getting the first bit right is tricky, but once you have a piece of fabric (like the above), it gets easier. The rings will arrange themselves in their pattern more easily, and any mistakes you might have made become more obvious.

Also, it takes a LOT of time.

Of course, somewhere along that line we could also mention Bob, but Bob was never officially released. Microsoft Bob was an attempt at a very easy-to-use version of Windows. You probably know the annoying paperclip from MS Office? The one that you feel compelled to axe-murder the nearest person every time he came up to offer you a tip? Yeah, he’s actually a leftover from Bob. Now imagine what the rest of Bob was like.

Anyway, I’ve read a few things about it before, and today a lenghty article has been published on the Dutch IT-news website Tweakers.net. It goes into details about the new interface that Microsoft is putting on Windows 8, called Metro. It is supposed to be (and well, actually is) the biggest makeover since Windows 95 (and quite possible earlier). It also looks like the most epically-sized mistake Microsoft has made since Windows 95.

Sure, the Metro interface looks all shiny. Integration between applications is definately something I can appreciate. And if this whole Metro interface ended up on smartphones and tablets, there’s not much negative stuff I can say about it. On such a device, the interface will work, and it’ll be all pretty and nice and great.

But not on a desktop.

The first big mistake is that apparantly, the Metro interface is just shoved down your throat and you can’t easily get around it. The “classic” interface with a desktop with icons and a task bar is still there, but is considered an application within the Metro interface, and not one you can go into by default. It’s no secret that running with multiple monitors has not always been optimally supported in Windows (the ever-present lack of native support for a taskbar on those extra monitors is a perfect example of that), but I fear that in Metro, the extra screen space that people like me have come to love can hardly be utilized at all.

Guys, the whole reason why I have more than one screen is that I have more space to put stuff in, not so that I can have the same things only with bigger icons and more empty space (which seems to be the trend that Microsoft has been following lately, along with many others).

Bringing in HTML5/JavaScript/CSS as a platform to develop Metro-applications is language abuse of pretty much the worst possible kind, and using Internet Explorer as the platform to run it on is arguably even worse. I can foresee Microsoft getting serious legal issues because with this, they are once again forcing IE down people’s throat rather than letting you choose which browser to use. The infamous browser selection screen, and especially the debacle that led to its creation, is an issue that is going to roar its head and spew fire like it hasn’t done before.

Just about every single existing application is going to be marked as legacy/outdated in this new Metro interface, and the new application store (yes, yet another one) will again be a perfect opportunity for Microsoft to siphon cash from the pockets of hard-working developers.

The perfectly good explorer-interface from Windows 7 has been desecrated by forcing the infamous Ribbon UI on it. The fact that the world has widely shown its disapproval of the ribbon once again doesn’t seem to bother Microsoft in the least. They’ll do whatever the fuck they like and what the actual users want is certainly none of their concern.

Casual computer users will probably accept the new interface that comes with Windows 8, be it with a bit of getting used to. But unless Windows 8 has at least the option to turn Metro the fuck off and just use the desktop environment that we’ve all come to know and love (which is especially true for power users), Microsoft’s latest stillborn creation will be right up there alongside ME, Vista, and quite possibly, Bob.

CAN is a bus system that has some pretty neat features. It can handle a lot of devices, can achieve pretty good bit rates, it has very good error handling and bus arbitration functions, and so on. It was originally designed for use in vehicles (and in fact, any car manufactured in the last 10 or 20 years or so is largely built around tons of individual devices talking on a CAN bus) but of course there’s a lot of other situations in which the features offered by CAN are useful.

I’ve been trying out the new MPLAB X (which is still in beta). There are some major shortcomings, but overall it’s starting to look like a pretty good IDE, which is nice because I absolutely hate the old MPLAB. Compiling is done using Hi-Tech C.

Now, if you were to ask my opinion on Hi-Tech C a week or two ago, you’d get a pretty negative review. I’ve been having issues with it. Weird issues, like global variables not working (no matter what you write, they always read as 0 unless you access them via a pointer, which is a bit of a stupid and inefficient workaround). I’ve also been running it in Lite mode, rather than Pro, because in Pro mode it uses the big Omniscient Code Generation – an optimization technique which is actually quite good, except that it always seemed to turn out horribly bad code that performed nothing like it was supposed to.

It turned out that all of those issues were caused by the extended instruction set being enabled in the PIC’s configuration bits. What happens is that that bit doesn’t only make a few extra instructions available (8, in fact) that are primarily of interest to a C compiler, bit it also changes the way memory addressing is accomplished. Thus, if the extended instruction set is enabled while the compiler isn’t generating code that uses those extended instructions (or specifically, its way of addressing memory), things go wonky. Big time. Turn the extendend instruction set off, and everything works like a charm (OCG included, cutting the code size in half!). Today, I’m pretty darn happy with Hi-Tech C.

Of course, the user manual doesn’t make a single reference to the extended instruction set (I’d say this is exactly the sort of thing that should be mentioned in the manual, but yeah. It’s not).

Also, for the CAN part, I’ve been using a setup with the MCP2515 CAN controller IC, paired with an MCP2551 transceiver. By my initial look at the datasheets, this should have been easy, until the moment I got to actually using it and had to figure out how the bit timing configuration works (and it would seem that I havn’t been the only person to struggle with this). As it turns out, once you grasp it it’s simple enough, and since I havn’t been able to find a functional calculator tool on the Interwebz (just one for the older MCP2510, which isn’t entirely compatible), I might just find some time to write such a calculator.

Still, with the bit timing issue aside, the packets that one of two CAN nodes is transmitting don’t seem to be making it to the other end, for some reason. That’s a thing to figure out once I have the opportunity to put an oscilloscope in the mix and see what’s going on.

Meow.

Meow.

Meow.

It was the sound that Robertus awaked to every morning.

Meow.

It could go on for ages before he actually woke up. It was a rather dull and soft sound, after all.

Meow.

But not today. Robertus had been clearly awake ever since the first moment the alarm clock started spewing forth its demonic rumble.

Meow.

He had lain in bed, enjoying the warmth and comfort of it, watching as the binary suns of Oomg-Zalaag slowly rose. The two small stars did a rather remarkable job at warming the little backwater planet, considering their tiny size. Suns were, after all, like any self-respecting star, supposed to be enormous you-really-cannot-imagine-how-big-they-are balls of flaming gas, hot infernoes of atoms colliding and fusing and getting so hot that they don’t really remember that they were atoms in the first place.

But not the suns of Oomg-Zalaag. No, the suns of Oomg-Zalaag were small enough to mistake for apples.

It was not the only interesting feature of the planet that Robertus had been calling his home since the day he was born. It also happened to be one of the many features that gave Oomg-Zalaag the wonderful reputation that it had proudly upheld for as long as anyone could remember: a small, filthy, dangerous, dull, poor, smelly, and just generally weird place where you really didn’t want your corpse to be found.

The matter of whether one wishes to have his or her corpse found at all is, of course, another matter. Most people, even those unfortunate enough to live on Oomg-Zalaag had generally stuck to the idea that dying is unpleasant and as such, they avoided doing so if at all possible.

Meow.

Robertus took another good long yawn before he finally convinced himself to get up. He had a lot of things planned for the day that he needed to see to, urgently. A great many of those things seemed to involve hanging around treestumps with Bozo, drinking, and falling asleep again.

The thought of it alone made Robertus reconsider his decision to get up.

However, the door that was being knocked on urged him to stick with his decision.

Robertus turned around in his bed, hoping that whoever it was would go away. The whoever it was didn’t. “Robertus McFidgydoodle?” asked a rather unhappy sounding voice on the other side of the door. “This is the police. Open up or we’ll have to force the door.”

Suddenly, Robertus jumped out of bed and quickly searched for something to put on. The idea of having to repair the door terrified him something awful. Having decided that just pants would be quite sufficient, he rushed to the door and opened it. He was greeted by a tall, red-ish alien creature that had attempted to wear police uniforms. It failed rather miserably at it; the police uniform had been designed to be worn by an approximately human-shaped individual with two arms and two legs. The alien had rather a few more of both, and appeared to have several regular uniforms stretched awkwardly around its body and taped together to cover its flesh.

Oomg-Zalaag silently proceeded to revolve slowly around its axis.

“Are you Robertus McFidgydoodle?” started the displeased looking alien. Robertus gave him a displeased look. “It says so on the door, don’t it?” Obvious questions annoyed him. They would only require energy on his part to answer. Wasted energy, as far as Robertus was concerned.

“We have a warrant to search your house. Actually, we don’t, but we just feel like it.” Robertus absently gestured with his hand that the alien was welcome to come in.

The alien slowly worked its way inside. Coordinating so many legs to move through a doorway made only for human passage proved to be somewhat of a challenge. The alien disliked it; not only were humans considered to be rather dull, inefficient, and not notably proficient at performing any task; their architecture turned out to be less than cooperating as well.

But Robertus was quite satisfied with being human. It may be rather dull, and he may have been clumsy and useless compared to most other races of the galaxy, but that had been a perfect match to his personal philosophy. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, he would always say – and if it is broke, don’t fix it unless you really need it.

He would then apply that same concept not only to fixing things, but to pretty much any activity that involved, well, doing something. Robertus was, as some would say, lazy.

At present, he was – in addition to lazy – also displeased. As most people, he didn’t take kind to being yelled at for having accidentally stored several crates of illegal weapons in his living room. Unfortunately, that was exactly what the police alien appeared to be doing. Worse, though, it was entirely possible that the alien had a point. Robertus considered this for a brief moment.

“… say can and will be used against you. You have the right to a lawyer, in the highly improbably scenario that one is willing to come to this rotten piece of rock out of his own free will, and also – ”

Oomg-Zalaag suddenly stopped revolving around its axis.

The shock of it propelled Robertus against the police alien. The creature screamed out in agony; several of its limbs were suddenly positioned in unusual angles.

Meow, went the alarm clock, while the planet shook violently. Sounds of broken glass, screams from injured people, and gasps from people who were wondering what had just happened filled the morning air. Dust came down from the ceiling. Several of the beams carrying the weight of the roof started to show cracks, under the continued stress of the ground shaking. Oomg-Zalaag certainly seemed very unpleased for suddenly losing all of its angular momentum.

Robertus figured it would be a nice time to temporarily abandon laziness in favor of survival, and run out of the door. Not any faster than strictly necessary, of course, but moving certainly seemed preferable to being crushed by his own house.

The police alien continued to scream while a roof beam broke and crashed down on the alien’s body. Quickly thereafter, he went silent.

Robertus looked back into his house, and saw the mutilated corpse of the police alien. Suddenly, he was grasped by a number of arms that pulled him forward, away from the doorway, which collapsed moments after he was clear of it. With a mighty crunch the walls of his house started on a rapid descend towards the ground. Dust went up into the air, possessions were broken under the weight of the rubble, and everything became a huge mess.

It was going to take forever to clean this up.

He gazed at his collapsing house while it, and most of the buildings around it, were slowly reduced to a pile of rubble and became progressively smaller. One of the people who had pulled him away from the door urged him to move. “You should come in now,” it said. “The airlock will be closing in a moment and we plan to break orbit in about an hour. Unless you wish to stay, of course, but then you’ll have to jump. Otherwise, you’re welcome to stay aboard the Fengor.”

Robertus suddenly realized that he was standing on the ramp of a smallish dark-green space ship heading away from the planet.

It had probably saved his life.