Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
I spent a little time this evening making some fireworks for tomorrow night!
Download, unzip, launch in your favorite Atari 800 emulator, like Atari800MacX
Pick Y from the menu, ESC to end, reboot to get back to the menu. See you in a year!
(I didn’t get around to putting an emulator page on my site; I will before my next actual game)
Since everyone is finally joining Fediverse as the maniac burns down Twitter shitbird, I have some more advice, after 6 years on (plus some OStatus way back when):
Pick any instance except mastodon.social or mastodon.online, those are run by mstdn gGmbh (aka Gargamel), gigantic, massively overloaded, poorly moderated now and for the foreseeable future. Also don’t join an instance blocked by everyone else, see the list of moderated servers – if in doubt, ask a friend on already on fediverse.
Set your avatar, write a bio. Put your interests in there. Blank accounts might be pigs or advertisers. We fear faceless intruders.
Toot (what we call posts) at least an #introduction – maybe pin that on your profile (ellipses … menu under the toot).
THEN you can follow people, see Local or Federated timelines or look thru follows/mentions. If you know someone’s @userid@host, put that in the search box, hit enter, it’ll show up in a list, and you can pick it there.
When you write something good, pin it. Read pinned toots to know who and what people are. I’m amused by people faving all my pins, but it’s a little noisy.
CW (content warning) ANYTHING someone might be bugged by. ESPECIALLY politics, pictures which might be even a little slutty or eye-contact, gross, whatever. CW anything that might annoy or trigger someone. If you don’t do this, you will be rapidly blocked by almost everyone. This is maybe the single most important bit of etiquette.
When you toot pictures, write a description. It doesn’t have to be long, but the key text & image & context. There are blind users, and those on text-only interfaces. There are online OCR sites or on macOS/iOS you can just open it, copy-paste the text. If the picture is NSFW or blinking or otherwise annoying, hit NSFW to blur it out until it’s clicked on.
Don’t crosspost from shitbird. “Free content!”, no. Nobody wants that, nobody will read you.
Favorite just sends a “hey, cool” beep to the author of the toot. Boost sends it to your followers as well. There is no algorithm, just a timeline! So if you like something, boost it!
Mastodon starts in a single-column simplified UI. It has a much better mode:
There are also lists of users, so you can see JUST the important stuff, and in the next update (rolling out to servers soonish) you can follow a hashtag, but that puts it in Home, which may be too busy.
Welcome to fedi, here’s your ? and ?.
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—”Ozymandias”, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Immediately after ElmoNusk came into shitbird central with a sink (what), he fired the old management (and claims he doesn’t need to pay their bailouts), and is already “making redundant” the workforce (before having to pay off their stock vesting). Win or lose, his scam there is funny; the people who built the Torment Nexus deserve punishment, but he’s likely to have to pay out more in legal fees by the time it’s over.
Already the shitbird to Fediverse migration is going well, the stats account I follow shows a couple million up, which might be half the “MAU” Humans left on shitbird, the rest being bots and defunct accounts. Shitbird’s stats describe anyone posting 3-5 weekly as a “heavy tweeter”, which many of the actual people I know do per hour. I’ve got a lot of new followers, and my policy is “followbackfriday”, every Friday I go thru my new follows and see who’s filled in their avatar, bio, and an intro post at least. I say “a lot”, but on fediverse that’s <500 follows, <1000 followers, I had something like 5x as many on shitbird, but 1% of the activity and “engaaaagement” (excuse the SEO word). Anyway, I expect migration will take another week or so as frogs figure out the stove really is on.
When the Crown Prince of the Joseon Empire (defunct) bought out Freenode, it took a few weeks for everyone to get over to Libera.chat with the same or better channels (# lisp is now all LISP-family, # commonlisp is CL-specific, # scheme is for all Schemes, etc.), and get kicked off the corpse of Freenode. Nobody knows or cares what happened to the CPotJE or what used to be freenode.
So now I’m wondering how long it’ll take for that to happen to shitbird. Days? ElmoNusk posted QAnon shit almost immediately. GM pulled their advertising. And this is just Halloween weekend. Next week, mostly awake and sober, is gonna be lit. And not in a good way, more “your entire city is on fire”. Will there be anything but jesus-dakimakura pillow guy and (Kan’t)Ye posting by next Friday?
?
OK, you want something more positive, actionable than my schadenfreude? Back up your tweets. I had a hell of a time getting my shitbird data out. Don’t stall on this. Because when stupid companies shut down a service, they do it fast and don’t care about your stuff. Remember Yahoo! paying billions for GeoCities, the greatest communal artwork of Humanity, and shuttering it with no backup or warning? That’s what’s gonna happen to shitbird. Don’t be there when it does.
Horrific picture from Larry on ADDN:
Now I’m wondering what other kinds of infrastructure of my yout’ no longer exist. Growing up there were always old-timer stories of “oh we used to have horses and play hoop-and-stick! A live theatre show cost a penny!”, but they never had useful tech and then lost it.
Mentioned earlier today: Party lines. Rotary phones. Phones only owned by Ma Bell. Landlines. Telephone girls.
Newspaper vending boxes, probably all owl nests now. Newspapers; I used to get a weekly big city paper, alt press paper, and sometimes a daily trash paper (USA Today & the like, for mediocre perspective, and I could do the crossword in <30 minutes). Print magazines, used to be the monthly delivery of all information. Books. I say I’d miss books, but honestly I buy only ebooks now, I have thousands of books in my iBooks & Dropbox, a much smaller physical bookshelf now.
Card catalogs are gone. I spent so much time with a little golf pencil, index cards, and flipping thru the catalog looking for a book, writing down Dewey numbers, then go hunting the shelves. Microfiche. Reference/research librarians. Libraries are under attack from the usual suspects aka the GOP, maybe they won’t make it.
Vinyl and cassette tapes have made a temporary, improbable, and really stupid comeback, but once the fad ends they’ll vanish forever. SONY MiniDisc. 8-Tracks. Reel to reel (had a brief fad again after Pulp Fiction). VHS (a few online art projects like FORGOTTEN_VCR and RedLetterMedia’s “Best of the Worst” aside). I have to check if my VCR still works.
Do you even know how to be kind? R E W I N D
DVDs. There’s just streaming you can’t even keep, and Blu-Ray with parasitic Java programming, you can’t just watch a movie without it spying on you online.
Television. Apparently there’s still non-streaming, “cable” and “over the air” (but digital, not analog signal), constantly NCIS and “reality TV” with ads every 10 minutes selling laxatives, painkillers, and Gold Bond Medicated Powder. But that can’t last long, all the Boomers will be dead soon and nobody else cares. Projected movies. Plays in theatres. Vaudeville. Nickelodeons (not the kids series).
Videogame arcades. Pinball machines. Computers that boot up instantly and are useful when you turn them on.
Radio. It’s just right-wing hate speech radio, and a few oldies stations. And “oldies” now means “greatest hits of the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and today” as one near me says; but don’t worry, they don’t really play anything past 2000. That’s a biz model headed for death. Radio dramas have been dead for 70 years. Rock & Roll has been dead a while, there’s still old bands playing it, but not many new.
Malls. If you can order everything online, why go “shop” and maybe hook up with a cute person?
Schools are obviously a bad idea. Chalkboards are gone; nobody’s beaten erasers or choked down chalk dust in years. One-room schoolhouses died out when schools became about training industrial workers to sit down and take it, and now we obviously can’t cluster up kids. Individual education, or none at all, just like in the dark ages.
Work offices are going to be gone soon. It’s easier to deliver to customers (using underpaid gig workers, or soon drones), and work from home with chat and videoconferencing.
Trains and trolleys are long gone, except as tourist attractions. Once the schools and offices remove the need to drive around a city every day, it’s gonna get awful quiet. No more cars, highways, streets, street lights, skyscrapers, planes. Ships are probably still needed to deliver from factories to target continent. Zeppelins could make a comeback, they use less fuel.
The Earth will go dark again. Little campfires as we all live out in the boonies with a single glowing rectangle or a cable into our skulls. Global economy reduced to swarms of drones delivering goods from robotic factories, until the owners, now on Mars, shut them down and all the lights go off.
So I have, uh, three tabletop RPGs in development right now. One’s a little corporate sabotage game, inspired by Severance, Brazil, Paranoia… One of my mini horror games with poor long-term survivability, but neat premise, should be fun.
Second is my sword & planet RPG, still needs a lot of work for space & time & dimension mechanics; it works great for fantasy swordfighting but that’s not the whole point. I considered using variant Traveller/Cepheus Engine for this, but the tone is not “grizzled vets play Elite”, so I’m off in my own direction here.
Third is yet another in a long series of D&D house rules that become their own OGL game, and that’s what I’m on about today. In replacement for my overly-variant and overly-3.x-mechanics Stone Halls & Serpent Men, or handwritten Olde House Rules. Name to be decided later.
I’ve been reading a lot of the very oldest games & magazines, and really getting in the space of “what does this game need instead of what Gary published?”
The lack of Clerics is contentious, but Delta’s DND and Binder Full of Notes share my arguments.
I don’t see heroic Clerics in any of the pulp swords & sorcery I like. There’s Priest-Magicians in Moorcock’s Elric stories or Thieves World, and they’re the baddies. New campaign world is more like Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, where at best the few priests seen are charlatans, at worst cultists. The only historical place they come from is Archbishop Turpin from La Chanson de Roland; even Le Morte d’Arthur has only knights who praise their god, not magic Clerics. The only fantasy Cleric I can think of that I like is Duncan from Deryni Rising, and he’s a secretly-apostate priest who uses black magic to save his people from Christian Human genocide!
They don’t appear in Chainmail (Heroes & Wizards), or Dave Arneson’s games (Adventures in Fantasy has skill-based fighters, who develop faerry[sic] magic skills later). The only reason they were ever in the game was Gary had an annoying vampire PC, and rather than do anything OOC (unaware that Rousseau had published The Social Contract in 1762), he made a grudge class for someone else.
Getting rid of Clerics makes Undead terrifying, and I love the Undead but don’t love turning the undead. You don’t have a living body shield who can just turn Undead all day; a Magician’s Protection, Area spell lasts a few turns and only delays your murder or waiting for sunrise. Healing becomes slow (high-Level Magicians can cast 1 healing spell per day) or expensive (potions and scrolls), which encourages you to creatively avoid combat, not wade in and heal later, unless you have superior power. No raise dead, resurrection, or restoration (tho “level drain” has a different meaning in my game).
The super weird part of Clerics in D&D is they’re based very heavily on Medieval Catholic priests; they carry crosses (not “holy symbols”) in OD&D, they use “blessed holy water”, their miracles are all based on Jesus stories, their hierarchy is based on the Medieval Catholic Church (with some weird level titles). But then they do nothing related to the Church! Because they’re just Van Helsing minus the science.
The thing that stands out to me most is they have no interaction with Faerie or other gods. Historically and in myth, The Church ordered Christians to mass murder any Pagans who wouldn’t convert, and fought endlessly to genocide/unexist the Little People, the Fair Folk, the People Under the Hill, Trolls, whatever you call them; their worship barely survived at all in Iceland, Finland, Norway, they’re just “fairy tales” now. The worlds of Law (Christianity) & Chaos (Faerie) are openly at war in Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts & Three Lions. Clerics should be all carrying iron staves and fighting against the Fey. They do in Ars Magica. But it’s never come up in D&D?
Blackmoor/Eldritch Wizardry/AD&D added Druids (historically, more Sage political leaders than lightning-throwing Poison Ivy/Captain Planet superheroes), who should literally be at bloody war all the time with Christian Clerics, but everyone’s copacetic, it’s an ecumenical matter. Church and Holly Grove are next door in the tiny village of Hommlett. They have Clay Golems, explicitly based on the Golem of Prague, made by Clerics instead of Jewish Rabbis (again, Sages, not magic Clerics except in some Torah stories). What. I do use Golems, I love “programmed clay/flesh/iron machine goes crazy” stories; but the religious issue is impossible to resolve.
If I cared one whit for religious ceremony and all that, well, you can still have religions without Clerics, as seen in our world. They can be non-Classed, Thieves (most appropriately), or Fighters, or even Magicians if you don’t mind the cognitive dissonance. But the only old-timey-religions that have ever been in my games are demon-summoning cultists Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!, or fascist Templar priests, who are more political than religious.
So, the gameplay is better without Clerics. The world is much better (more like the pulp S&S I want) without Clerics. Even in a historical setting (which I very much do not do), Clerics shouldn’t have superpowers.
Because I don’t need 1000 pages of corporate rules to tell me how to move down a corridor, check for traps, fight or flight. I really hate the superheroic power level. It’s nearly impossible to disentangle the healing rules from it.
No looking back. Burn our 2021 ships behind us. Forward is death or glory.
Hey, Big Red.
I’m… look, good and bad are relative terms at the best of times, but this whole year I ain’t killed anyone nor committed insurrection against my country, so you’re grading on a curve, right?
Great. All I want is… it’s a little harder than just some Star Wars figures…
Thanks in advance. It’s been a rough one.
I haven’t seen the new movie yet, but I was in a mood to do something this primitive.
It’ll go into attract mode eventually, which I think is cool, add 11 POKE 77,0 to disable it. Or any key that doesn’t exit will clear it.
Not any really interesting coding tricks, except I replaced POSITION:? with POKE for speed. I use PEEK(764)=255 and then re-POKE it to test if there’s a waiting key, but then use GET to read it in ATASCII instead of scan code.
(updated almost immediately: I realized on XL machines I can turn on accented characters instead of graphics blocks. Take out the POKE 756,204 line if you don’t like that.)
(updated 2021-12-24: I made it pour in from random starts, rather than top of screen, looks somewhat more like the old intro.)
… only outlaws will have View Source.
I’m impressed but unsurprised that nobody at Google said “wait, is this the right thing to do?”, because of course they didn’t, they’re at Google, they already failed any moral test.
Like every nerd of a certain age, I learned web dev by doing View Source, and to this day it’s my basic tool for finding out how/why/stop doing a thing on a site. Safari’s inspector hasn’t been crippled yet; given Little Timmy “Apple” Cook’s bullshit about platform lockdown lately, I’m concerned.
So, this aggression will not stand, man.
I have a View Source bookmarklet which works fine in Mobile Safari and Chromium. It’s only inline, and you have to copy-paste into a real editor to do much, but it gives you the site’s content. They can’t stop you.
wget or curl are useful ways of grabbing a page and all its resources.
Of course the real l33t h4xx0rz know:
% telnet foo 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: foo<ENTER><ENTER>
Or you can make stelnet for https sites (thanks to @feld for the #protip)
% echo 'openssl s_client -connect "$1:$2"' >bin/stelnet
% chmod 755 bin/stelnet
% stelnet foo 443
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: foo<ENTER><ENTER>
Fuck those guys.
Modern software is junk. Almost every program uses vastly more resources than it needs, and does its main task worse than older, more focused programs.
I don’t think I have a single “new” program that’s as good as the thing it replaced, not a single program as good and light as the stuff we had 30 years ago. So where possible I use 30-40 year old software, and I resent the complex stuff I have to deal with. It’s polluting the planet, literally boiling the oceans.
This blog is in WordPress, which is in PHP on a giant tower of shitty software, like 20 “plugins” to fix things that are inadequate and wrong in it. I’ve done what I can to lighten it some, streamline layout, but that’s lipstick & yoga pants on a pig. 25 years ago I had a simple blog (uh, actually also in PHP, tho I had another one in Perl, so that’s not any better). But that was <1000 LOC, it just needed a tiny local database, and really could’ve just used flat files. And before the blog, I had just my hierarchical web site, and before that I had Gopher.
Gopher was basically perfect. Just a structured tree of documents, accessed by raw socket connections or manually by telnet. If you wanted to make a journal (“web log” -> “blog” was a decade away), you put links to plain text entries on a Gopher menu.
iMark's Gopher Hole _ _ 0
gMugshot /images/mark.gif example.com 70
1Games /games example.com 70
iJournal _ _ 0
01990-09-01 /journal/1990-09-01.txt example.com 70
01990-08-25 /journal/1990-08-25.txt example.com 70
.
etc. Actually at the time I probably would’ve done chronological order, not reverse.
We have Gemini now trying to be like Gopher, but it has TLS, and a complex connection protocol, and error messages (Gopher just responded “3” if something went wrong, possibly followed by a message), and then the page you get is presentation, not a menu; it doesn’t tell you the content type of any link, it tries to style content in-line, like a lower-resource WWW. But to run Gemini, you need a web server to update TLS, it won’t stay up without constant maintenance, and it uses more resources than just serving a web page.
Mastodon is a giant database that constantly messages other databases to tell them about posts… and it still sometimes takes a while to propagate messages, or fails utterly. There’s no markup except URLs, and either polls or images (can’t have both, and aren’t inline). The only control you have over your experience is blocking people, and crude text-match filters.
30 years ago, we had USENET, email, and IRC/ICB chat. USENET was often slow, some servers would only connect once a day, others every hour, some every 15 minutes or so. You might need a couple hops to get to someone. But your message length was unlimited, most clients handled some markup with *bold*, /italic/, _underline_, and <URLs and FTP hostnames>. Images had to be UUEncoded, but most clients could insert them easily, graphical ones could display them inline, and download them; I used text-only strn so I’d download and run xv to see images. But the power we had in those clients was so much better. strn did scoring, I had thousands of lines of regular expressions and header lines to match with scores up or down. I’d go into a newsgroup, and the best stuff would be at the top, mediocre stuff below it if I cared, junk and spam and assholes deleted.
If you wanted to immediately contact someone, email or chat existed. There’s an experimental chat system on Pleroma, but not on Mastodon yet/ever. Or you can use the modern equivalent of that, burn 1GB of RAM and a CPU core running Slack or Discord. Madness.
Emacs. Eight-hundred Megs And Constantly Swapping. Is emacs the original sin, or were there flotilla-of-shit programs before it? Back in the day, you could start micro-emacs (“me” on Atari ST, later uemacs) in milliseconds, or emacs in many tens of seconds or even minutes. The emacs people would just leave this giant blob of an interpreter, editor, half an operating system but not really, running all day, eat most available RAM and CPU, and load files into it. The me and vi people would instantly open a file, edit, and close, barely a blip on the system resources. 30 years later, uemacs starts in nanoseconds, and emacs starts in seconds, but it’s just as obnoxious.
Today I use BBEdit, which is svelte for an IDE, but it’s a giant pig compared to what “a text editor” needs to be; I keep trying other IDE-types like Sublime Text or Atom, and they’re too heavy for me to tolerate. And in console, I run Vim, which isn’t as bloated as emacs, but it’s fat. None of these make me happy. STeVIe was much lighter, and I’ve repeatedly considered going back to it if I can recompile it. I did manage to compile Linus’ build of uemacs and it’s nice, but I can’t get used to it again after 25-ish years off it; my console habits are vi, it seems.
The end goal of software is not to put everything in it, a flight simulator in your spreadsheet (fucking Excel!); a computer in your fridge for playing ads; a web server, email client, and text editor in your math program “notebook”; a fucking NTFS miner in your MS Paint clone.
The end goal of good software is to do ONE THING. To do it fast, efficiently, and correctly, in the least resources you can.
Re-evaluate your use of flotilla of shit software, and dump it.