Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — AXEGHNC Wordo: KNOCK

  • Bang! 🔫

    Unlike him, I've never been shot at, but today I dodged a metaphorical bullet.

    Working as a dev, I've never liked acceptance testing. I want it to be uneventful because all the issues were already fixed, but nothing ever goes that smoothly. Yesterday, one element of a big suite of changes was doing bad things, but they made no sense. The code shouldn't do what it was doing. If it's doing that, it's down to me getting it wrong. Uh-oh...

  • heatwave project

    i love working with found images. it takes so much pressure off - if it sucks, well... i just didn't have the right materials, i did my best. but a lot of the time it doesn't suck. the limiting parameters of the medium make for a great creative challenge. brains love answering questions and "how can i make this work?"/"what can i make of this?" are extra satisfying to play with. add to that my autistic way of having fun (interacting with collection, in this case my collage stash, plus the general preoccupation with a special interest - tarot) and i've had a very decent few days.

    i'm dipping in and out of Rachel Pollack's seventy eight degrees of wisdom and thought about this project when reading about the emperor. i've never met with the opinion prior to youtube/social media, but apparently "we all hate him". and there are definitely aspects of the emperor that are not great - like with any card - but do we really hate stability, having boundaries, having a vision, being responsible, exacting respect? compared with the creative free-flowing empress the emperor can be a bit of a bummer, but his structure is what gives shape to her abundance. it's like that deliberate creative challenge - fewer materials forcing better ideas. a tarot question giving shape to the answer from the myriad ways to interpret a bunch of cards. without the bounding box, the creativity spills aimlessly in all directions, which isn't always the desired result.

• Technology and Free Software

  • My first time GMing a D&D campaign

    I've been GMing a Dungeon World game for a couple years now, and I love it. I've also played along in two really enjoyable D&D campaigns.

    That D&D group just finished up the second campaign, so we're looking to start another. I somewhat nervously volunteered to GM it.

    I like running games, but I rely heavily on improv. D&D feels a bit intimidating because of how much stuff there is to keep track of; it's so much easier to wing it in Dungeon World, where there are only a handful of rules and it's nearly impossible to kill the players.

    But anyhow, I'm doing it, and I'm looking forward to it.

  • Rogue Legends

    Why only two rings? In rogue(6) the limit is two, even though a humanoid could wear more. Maybe the player is a dolphin? A boring answer is that rogue(6) was a big process. Adding code for, say, wearing 10 rings would take time away from other tasks, like making the monsters more interesting, fixing bugs, and might have resulted in a game too complicated to work, a fate suffered by various ambitious games of that era. Also it would have likely needed a new window and ring inventory code, as there was no support scrolling the inventory, which limited items to just 23 plus a status line, and the player must lug around a lot of loot: wands, panic button scrolls a potions, spare armor, food, hopefully not cursed weapons, and of course some rings, maybe. Does the system have enough memory for that? Some games have expanded on the limits, others not.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Gopher & Spartan: internet for the very old computers

      These days my interest for Gopher spikes consistently, reading and learning more about Gopher let me understood why other dudes came out with Spartan… Now, even though, at least my content, are mainly Gemini focused, I'd like to serve "Pebcak [dot] Club" for all the very low end computers that can't afford TLS.