Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
I made this for the Lisp Game Jam Spring 2026, and a month later I have a much more complete role-playing game: UNDER STONE 1.1 release! Complete game with: Help! Saving! Job change! Items! Merchant! Second dungeon! WOW! $10 or PWYW. Get it now on itch.io
I was rewatching Jason Scott's BBS Documentary, as one does. See, I was making a fake BBS: The only purpose of this was to test out text render/entry in Kawa Scheme for Lisp Game Jam. It also does a modem squeal on "connection", so I know audio works, this brings back all the emotions. Continue reading "Hey, dial this number. It's a cool BBS!"
As a delta blues story, this is fantastic. The origin of the blues in sharecroppers, and the juke joints wherever black people could get together. And the long long decades later, shown in flash-forwards and visions, to when blues men are loved. I might've liked to have more filmed backstory on the twins, some of Continue reading "What I'm Watching: Sinners"
Haven't done of these in a while, but excitement at new Assemblage 23! And immediately on attempting to post, this server's hosting failed for an hour. Suspicious. Null, by Assemblage 23 Failure 20th Anniversary, by Assemblage 23 Belief Control, by Flesh Field: 2025 Strain, by Flesh Field: 2004 Coincidental Strategies, by Pygmy Children TRON Ares, Continue reading "Machine Failure New Music…
I haven't set up an automated way to push my Gopher phlogs from Cyberhole Online up here yet, so I'm just going to manually paste for the moment. So this may be a bit random. mdh@Aegura:~/Code/CodeJS/Cyberhole/gopher/hole/phlog% cat `ls -1 *.txt sort -r` pbcopy i=== Digital Mark's Phlog === 2025-11-04 19:06:46 UTC Momentary Thoughts About Game Design I've Continue reading "Phlog Collection…
The Shaft podcast, ran from 2010 to 2015, then apparently in 2020 had a brief resurgence and died again; I'm queueing those up to listen, tho I don't know how many I'll tolerate (I don't even play Microsoft® MineCraft™ anymore, but VoxelLibre or Asuna on Luanti ) "Enjoy your stay in THE SHAFT!" It was Continue reading "Things I Used to Like: The Shaft"
One of the many OSR retroclones of some form of early Dungeons Dragons, is Basic Fantasy RPG, by Chris Gonnerman, originally in 2006, and has lately been fully cleaned up as Creative Commons, no OGL or other license problems. And just recently his other game Iron Falcon, from 2014, has got the same CC Continue reading "Iron Falcon Basic Fantasy RPG"
Oh no. Where are we without Ozzy? Well, here's to my entire lifetime of fucking amazing music. Rolling Stone obituary Black Sabbath Black Sabbath Vol 4 Diary of a Madman No More Tears Black Rain
So a few weeks back, prompted by the hosting provider for MysticDungeonClub no longer supporting FreeBSD so I need to move rather post-haste, I bought a new domain, with the ~worst~ BEST name I've ever come up with, I fear that I have now peaked and nothing will ever top this: Cyberhole.online A hole for Continue reading "Old Computer Challenge"
So in 1979, young Digital Mark is shown a computer, a TRS-80 Model I, by 4th-grade teacher. Other kids play Snake, I hit break and type LIST, seeing BASIC code, because I've been reading the instruction card. "I can read and learn this!" Nothing else now matters to Mark. That summer, I take an adult Continue reading "Some of My History of Hypertext"