july 1983.
Go is at the sea with my folks, granma included, in Borik. There's even photos from there, dad brought the regula along, it still worked (after 25 years!). Of the known gang, Veca with her husband. We two stayed alone with Nina. Vacation time.
I was already deep in solitaire, which was probably just capable to lay down the cards, picking randomly from the deck. I spent one day on defining graphics, as I needed ten special characters (ten, spade, heart, club, caro [called diamond in english, but then they call any rhomb that; here it's called poppy*] and šđžčć), which could be redefined. zx spectrum has 21 slots for such characters, in a 8 byte bit matrix, so I drew them on paper, dot by dot (word pixel wasn't invented yet), then converted that to numbers, typed them...
Meanwhile I retyped from somewhere... no, this was on the demo casette that came with the zx spectrum, I borrowed a casette recorder to move it to tape... the Wall. The simplest game, fisix rows of bricks on top, a paddle on the bottom, and a ball which would bounce off it and destroy bricks. I don't quite remember how the levels went, was the ball's speed increasing or an extra row of bricks would appear. It was possible to „die“ in the game (which also wasn't called that yet) when the paddle misses the ball more than three or five times - the ball could be too fast to reach on time if your paddle is at the wrong end of the line.
The game was simplest possible, but it was the only one we had and it became very popular. So it occurred that we had Mire and Loba at the same time, taking turns indefinitely. An engineer from mašinska, don't know which course he held then, also came to give it a try.
The best trick in the game was to, if you know how and have a bit of luck, drill a hole in the wall and then the ball goes above the wall, bounces off the screen's edges and destroys several bricks in one go, which would otherwise be impossible. When a player did this, the watchers would get loud, specially Mire.
Looking at this shot, I see the tape deck was already in position. Don't know what's in the bottle, doesn't look like a vinjak, I'd recognize the label, could rather be a syrup which we diluted into juices. The contraption to the left of the television set could be many things, I guess it was the leather case for praktika - for twenty more years it will be somehow assumed that any photo camera had to have a case shaped exactly for it, which was already becoming impractical for SLR bodies. As soon as a teleobjective lens is hooked to it, there's no case which could take that.
On the notebook in front of Loba there's a pair of knitting needles. Nulla dies sine linea.
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* in Belgrade and south of it the clubs is called tref, but here we say mak (poppy, as in seed) because that's how it's called in hungarian card deck (despite the picture showing acorn). Just a look at hungarian deck will make this clear. Likewise, karo (diamonds) is called gourd, spades is zelen aka green (depicted as a gourd and a green leaf). Actually, as I already wrote elsewhere, the hungarian word makk means acorn, which she knew since forever and I never knew that i needed to ask.
Mentions: Borik, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Milorad Škanata (Mire), MPSŠC (mašinska), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), praktika, regula, Slobodan Šumić (Loba), solitaire, Vera Stojanović (Veca), vinjak, ZX Spectrum, in serbian
18-IV-2026 - 6-X-2026