We have three hives of honeybees in our garden. They’re not really ours, but a friend’s. She has imperial ambitions with her hives, and has even got herself a horse. Sometimes the hives go crazy and she has to come to hunt down the mad queen and replace her with one who doesn’t want to kill us. Sometimes the swarm in buzzing tornadoes and fly away. We take very little of their honey because what we’re after is that the little striped ladies survive the current bee crisis. #RicardoPintoMenagerie #bees #beekeeping #scotland ...

We have a small flock of bantam chickens. This is Chopstick—and she is not a crow!—named@by my sister when she witnessed her plucking flies out of the air with her beak. She is a most intrepid chicken. We have several cockerels—Henry II sadly died, and his son, Noodle, ascended to his perch and took the throne name of Edward. There have been many babies. When we discovered they were a sort of ‘people’, we gave up eating birds... and have now become vegan... at least at home. We do eat the eggs they lay through spring and summer. Though many end up incubated under bushes in the garden—of which they have free rein—and so the flock is getting steadily larger. #RicardoPintoMenagerie #chickens #pets #bantams ...

When we moved into our house we discovered that it is home to a maternity roost of pipistrelle bats from March until October. They’re small enough to hold in your hand; but have to catch them to release them when they get into the house. We’ve made vague attempts to count them and think there are upward of 5000 of them. Some people say that they would get rid of them—even though it’s illegal to harm them. We estimate that they polish off half a million midges a night. Even of these things were not the case, it seems to us that they have probably been coming to summer here for more than 150 years—so they have more right to be here than we do. #RicardoPintoMenagerie #bat #pipistrelle #scotlandwildlife ...

After completing a degree in Maths, I went to London to come out and to make my fortune. When someone told me he knew of someone who was looking for computer programmers to write a game, I pretended to be one—though I had only a bit of exceedingly stodgy programming experience. Dominic Prior, another mathematician, taught me how to write machine code and I was up and running in two weeks. Two friends, Philip Mochan and Mark Wighton, joined us and we formed a company called Torus. I designed Gyron that was one of the first 3D vector graphics games ever. It was monstrously difficult working with cassette tape to load and save and on the tiny Spectrum computer. The whole game has to fit into 48K—we now regularly send larger emails. It was a peculiar affair, where you flew around in a trench shooting towers that controlled other towers in complex arrangements, while avoiding gigantic balls that rolled in the trenches to crush you, and that moved along predetermined routes and according to an monstrously complex choreography. I calculated that the configuration of the balks would only repeat, if the game kept running, every 7 or so billion years. It was published by BT’s subsidiary, Firebird, and a Porsche sports car was won by the first person to solve the puzzle. Them play offs for the solvers was a fiasco, but that’s another story. After that we all moved to Edinburgh where we programmed the Z80 versions of the space game Elite. Of course, this all happened back in what was the computer game Stone Age. It is hard to believe how feeble those early computers were. After a year of busting out guts, we demonstrated Elite to some friends, and we had to explain what the few lines moving at perhaps 11 frames a second represented. #ricardopintowriter #computergames #spectrumgames #z80game #classiccomputergames ...

Back in the 80s, I did an interview for a magazine where I claimed that computer games would play the role in the 21st century that film did in the 20th—people laughed and told me I was being pretentious. Not that I blame them given the extremely limited power of computers then. I was convinced that vector graphics was the future, not sprites. I persevered, but after designing a game for Sega and another for Disney that went nowhere, I baled out of the industry. #ricardopintowriter #computergames #gamedesign #classiccomputergames ...