About
This is the blog of Mat ‘Lurks’ Bettinson. Erstwhile Australian native who, having served 15 years hard labour in the United Kingdom, settled back in Australia to pursue the idyllic life he never thought possible. He returned to Australia to make videogames of all things, and bought a house in the mountains with it’s own goddamn creek! Too bad the videogame industry collapsed shortly thereafter, which was unfortunate. Still, being enthused with this New Life Phase, Mat decided to turn mishap to opportunity and decided to go back to university and study the most difficult thing he could possibly study.
You’ll find this blog talks about returning to university to study Chinese in the main but occasionally technology and games when he can’t help himself. Oh and and plenty of references to how weird Australia is these days.
By golly batman that’s amazing, but why are you here?
Having been on the Internet since the very dawn of the web, including the unfortunate angry-young-man phase through to early career positions that he wasn’t particularly good at (or was extremely good at but also extremely bored and hence prone to self-destructive risk taking), Mat is more widely known for brief periods of infamy including, but not limited to, barging his way into id software (as a desperate fanboi) as a games journalist and leaking the subsequent audio interview with John Carmack (a famous games programmer) onto his personal .plan (which is what we called them before blogs came along), launching and editing a short-lived and ill-fated magazine for first-person-shooter fans called Frag, having Blizzard threaten to sue him to death for daring to concoct an tenuous association with World of Warcraft, his employers product, and publicising this in a major British national tabloid. Oh, and then there was the virtual career-ending explosion by having private correspondence with a major technology news site exposed in the public eye.
Well, that one wasn’t his fault – they were a bunch of twats.
Unfortunately for him, these cock-ups were preserved in Google which makes it even more of a mystery that he landed his dream job in Australia making computer games without changing his name. To be frank the name changing thing is still an option, let’s see what happens eh? Well, at least the dream job evaporated as the industry collapsed but to be honest he deserved to suffer a bit because of some BBS post in the early 1990s…
These days Mat is embarked on a New Life Phase, motivated by a change of country, realization of his own mortality through the death of others and, well, maybe a touch of mid-life crisis if we’re honest. This process has introduced strange new concepts such as having friends, hobbies and the whole returning to university to study Chinese at the tender age of 38. Not what you might call the simple life.
That’s why the major theme of this blog is returning to university as a mature age student and the study of Chinese in particular. Other topics like scuba diving might appear if he ever gets enough time to do anything other than study. That means you wont see a lot of game stuff here if that’s what you were expecting, no time to play them and he’s sick of taking about them anyway. Besides, Yahtzee pretty much sums up what he thinks.
Which leads us on to why you’re reading this nonsense.
Either you know Mat, in which case you’re amused that he’s typing in the third person, and wondering what he’d say about himself if he was ballsy enough to write an About page. Or you don’t, in which case, you probably ran into Mat or heard of Mat through said above infamous events and wonder what the royal twat is up to now, or you just want to know who the hell this guy is who’s posting this stuff.
More likely though, you’re a search engine. And you’re piling yet more baggage onto the already too-long index of immortal cock-ups of Mat Bettinson. Well boo to you Mr Robot. None of us are perfect, but at least we live, we die and somewhere in between you show up on a web query. The mistakes of your life scattered across a thousands RAID volumes until the lights are switched off for good.
Mat wonders if, by the time he’s dead, they’ll be enough of his sum total of recorded folly on the Internet for our ancestors to reconstruct him in 790 years time.
If they do they better have good beer.
