Digital Mark

Oh, so you worked with my ex-coworker.

It implemented a database. Giant branching if/for loop.

How much “video game”? My first was a guess the number game with knights jousting, you got left/right/up/down hints for the point on his shield. This was on TRS-80 Model I, summer 1979.

Actually moving “sprites” (character graphics blocks) around the screen, Jetfire was my space shooter not QUITE like Defender because I had no ground, late 1980?

No copies of either survive, they would’ve been on cassettes lost/wiped long ago, a few copies of Jetfire were made for others.

I’ve done a lot more since, of course.

I run most solos as journaling. They don’t have to be deep, just narrate the events, and then assign chances. Most of the time I run the normal system for actions, and roll d6 to choose outcomes I don’t control: 1: Disaster, 2-3: Failure, 4-5: Success, 6: Triumph. That’s usually enough.

Mythic is, as Tiberius says, a lot.

I’ve also used Ironsworn, which is a little smaller and more character-beat-driven, which is good for some games, and Changeling esp might fit that.

Or the original thing that got me into soloing, De Profundis, which has no mechanics, just letters to yourself or others, detailing the horrific world you see behind the world.

And what happens when you run that on Feb 29, 2024?

Get an 8-bit computer emulator, and learn 6502 or Z-80 assembly.

Usborne machine-code-for-beginners or any book by Rodnay Zaks.

It gets deeper from there, and modern CPUs are kind of awful to hand-hack assembly on, but you’ll at least learn how the computer really works!

Why does the right-wing kid not just come over to the left-wing?

I was doing some ST retrocomputing last night, and GEM was just great, so much cleaner and simpler than modern GUIs.

print( ["even", "odd"][num % 2] )

If you need to avoid evaluating the wrong branch:

print( [lambda: "even", lambda: "odd"][num % 2]() )

Most people don’t want the WoD 5E crew back. But if nobody from the original writers are present, and the new “White Wolf” is just brand with no new writers mentioned, then this is purely a marketing douchebag move.

Save your hopes and expectations for something that isn’t obviously poisoned well.

Product formerly known as one thing but then renamed, is now known as the old thing! Brands, IP, MARKETING!

No mention of the writers, which is the only part that actually matters, we should kill and compost all marketing douchebags and CEOs.

I only use nerdtree, and bind some scripts to F-keys. Haven’t updated in a couple years, just works.

She just wants a friend and a bath, don’t kick her out.

It won’t kill off the need for skill, but a lot of lazy “coders” will stop even learning a minimal amount, and get by on no skill at all. Until they get fired, too.

Nothing the LLM generates can be relied on, it’s a gibberish machine.

“They were drunk and horny, and didn’t use protection.”

Other way around. You punched the edge to make it writeable (or double-punched to write on the back side, if you were brave). Cover it to make it read-only. The 3.5" sliders were the same mechanism, open was write, closed was read-only.

If you write to a text (as opposed to binary) stream, \n produces \n or \r\n (or \r if old enough) depending on platform just fine.

Nobody should be using C++ anyway, but plenty of languages have silly system newline constants, which do nothing useful.

I wonder if he Dremels the case open and explodes the power supply. (no, I don’t click his links)

Waterfall: Boeing/ULA does this. Their rockets cost $4B per launch, don’t work, strand astronauts. Maybe the next repair/test cycle, if management’s dumb enough to keep paying them.

Agile at least launches something.

I usually freeform people through City of Terrors for Tunnels & Trolls, I have a cheat sheet to where stats and major rooms are in the book if I care, but mostly just eyeball good MR for 20 Orcs or jaguars or whatever.

“Amber Waves” in the Apocthulhu Quickstart is really nice, a little road trip, cult, bad food, human sacrifices, fun for the whole family (if by “fun” you mean “dousing in gasoline and setting on fire”). Apocthulhu’s quickly become my favorite horror game, because there’s so few happy endings. One-shot, then do something different.

ed (1) is still the standard text editor.