Although many popular films and TV shows don’t seem to use the convention of using roman numerals in their copyright statements anymore, the BBC has, as far as I’m aware, always consistently used them. It used to be kind of fun to see who could figure out the roman numerals first, although my wife was always better at it. For anything made since 2000 (MM) of course, it’s become a bit boring, since you only need to know how to count to 10. For some reason this occurred to me today as I considered that, after this year, we won’t see as simple a roman numeral representation until 2050 (MML). This year of course, we have to live with the knowledge that our year is named after a SIMD instruction set. But hey, it was funky, right?:
So anyway, 2010 is here. I’ll be keeping an eye out for black obelisks, but since we didn’t come up with an equivalent of Hal by 2001 I’m beginning to suspect the books weren’t that prophetic a vision of the future after all. It’s a new decade that we have to find yet another awkward moniker for - the ‘noughties’ was pretty rubbish but the ‘tens’ isn’t much better. Frankly, I couldn’t much care for the significance of entering another decade - after all, it’s all arbitrarily counted anyway, and after you’ve seen the passing of a new millennium (in all its vastly anticlimactic glory) it’s hard to get excited about any piddling small numbers any more.
I can’t say I mourn the passing of 2009, which despite a few high points (returning to Canada on holiday, seeing the viral success of Torchlight, getting 1.7 out the door, and so on) wasn’t an ideal year for me. Better than the end of 2008, when my back injury was at its worst, but due to the economic climate and needing to recover my health, I’ve been juggling lots of smaller jobs in 2009, and as such have not felt a great deal of attachment to most of the projects I’ve worked on. I’ve also had to consciously hold myself back from over-committing for fear of putting my recovery in jeopardy. By nature I’m an ‘all or nothing’ kind of character, so I’ve found this deeply unsatisfying at times. It’s kept the financials ticking over, but it also comes with lots more admin overhead (= wasted time) and doesn’t motivate me as much. I intend to change that in 2010 - I can’t go back to the kind of hours I was doing in 2008 and before, but I intend to try to fill the hours I have with things I can feel more personally committed to. OGRE is one of those things of course.
In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2010!