Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • Reading Middle Earth Role Playing, Second Edition (MERP #2001) from Iron Crown Enterprises

    I started reading *Middle Earth Role Playing* (MERP) Second Edition from Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) two days ago, as part of my exploration of games in the Rolemaster lineage, and started listening to the audio book of *The Hobbit* about the same time (I listen on my commute). As reading an RPG often does, it makes me want to run a campaign using MERP (which is always a plus for an RPG). I have a bunch of old MERP adventures and sourcebooks (so different when I was young from the D&D modules and T&T adventures I was familiar with at the time), and I think it would be a fun campaign. I know that some people say *The One Ring* RPG better reflects Tolkien's Middle Earth, but for this campaign I'm more interested in playing in ICE's version of Middle Earth, with the MERP rules, with easier access to magic for PCs. I plan to point out to players that this would definitely be an alternate world version from straight Middle Earth, and that there are risks to using magic. I would still count the Wizards as a separate class of people, but allow MERPs magic to PCs and opponents. It would be a game of heroes and good rather than murder hobos, but probably not involve the ending of an Age. 😃

• Technology and Free Software

  • How I've set up a password manager, and why you should too

    Humans are extremely predictable. For example, when asked for a random number, a study showed that most people will choose seven. If you take a look at Wikipedia's compilation of most commonly used passwords, the top contenders are pitifully predictable. Passwords like "123456", "iloveyou", "qwerty", and yes, even "password" are still common in the year 2025. We are understandably tired, and no one wants to remember a million passwords for a million applications.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • No ROOPHLOCH again, but an October Gothic

      Once again, I have failed to ROOPHLOCH during the month of September. I moved September 1, and it's been busy. Again. And again, there's nothing really to do more interesting than going to a park and tethering the ThinkPad to the phone. I'm just not living the glamorous permacomputing lifestyle. Even all my ThinkPads except my favorite are in a box right now. Ironically, I'm writing part of this at a picnic table, in the shade, across a parking lot from a not-my-office-building, on the first day of the second "false autumn" we've had this year.

  • Programming

    • C and Ada

      I learned C in college,and Ada at about the same time. Previously I was familiar with Applesoft BASIC, some 6502 machine language and assembly, VAX BASIC, USCD Pascal, OMSI Pascal, VAX Assembly Language, Forth, and perhaps some other languages, but I was most proficient in Pascal and BASIC. I was probably just starting to learn about Lisp.

      I remember how learning C seemed to open up my world to endless possibilities. At the time, learning Ada was not as notable. Writing C programs was a flexible process of imagination, discovery, and crashing code. Writing Ada programs was a lot more thinking up front, and seemed like more work. Unfortunately, I was too naive to see that the additional work caused by Ada's type system was cutting out even more work debugging that was exacerbated by C's weak type system.