Rambling on games, coding, and education...
What an amazing website. Explore Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons like it's a Win XP desktop. I'm so impressed with how well the creator nailed the vibe. It really feels like using a 25 year old file system! I don't have much to say about this, but it's a ton of fun to explore. You can also change the virtual desktop background to any of the images in the folders! https://explorer.samismith.com/
There are so many great blogs out there. If I keep finding more I'll probably never need to go anywhere else on the Internet. That would be a great day. Anyway, here are some great ones I've been reading recently! Jim Gerrie's blog intersects with a lot of my interests. He resurrects old BASIC programs that were printed in various magazines and books in the 70s and 80s, and also does work…
Itch.io but purchasable on Steam Tall Trails describes itself a cozy exploration game. In it you're a golem who has no purpose, so you explore a series of islands looking for clay so you can unlock areas to eventually find said purpose. Along the way you'll meet other golems, have conversations, and find them presents. There is no combat or even player death, so exploration is the primary gameplay…
Screenshot from The Gamer American media seems to love complex heroes, especially morally gray ones. The characters who will break the rules, but do so in pursuit of a goal that the viewer/reader supports, make it ok. Butcher in The Boys is one example. He's a bad husband, absent father, liar and killer, but he's trying to take down Homelander who is objectively worse, so the viewer can overlook…
(A portion of a needlepoint sampler from 16th century Italy) It's no secret I love vintage/retro computing. I have a lot of nostalgia for pre-Internet devices (I'm sure I'll explore that more in a future post), from PCs to consoles, there's plenty to learn about. And what's cool is that there always seems to be an earlier breakthrough to research. This weekend I spent time looking into…
CGA is great. I've been a fan for a long time. Possibly because the card is about as old as I am (it came out in 1981), or possibly because my family didn't upgrade computers frequently so I spent a lot of time with those games. Either way, a large part of my childhood was spent in front of the IBM 5150 with its CGA graphics (which we got used because the adjusted for inflation price puts that…
A surprise second post! The first one focused on commercially-released Mario games, but this one will focus on some of the hacks I really enjoy. There are thousands out there for you to explore, so if any of these sound good check them out and then see what's similar! A note about playing these games: Many require you to hack a rom of the original game to get it to work, and some include…
Mario Day (Mar10) is a fake holiday for a corporate franchise, much like May 4th is for Star Wars. I sometimes feel bad for shilling for a corporation, celebrating an IP that is designed first and foremost as a way to make money, but I'd be lying if I said that Mario games didn't bring me immense joy. There's something about the way Mario games feel that grabs me more than most other platformers.…
Happy 30th birthday to one of the seminal video games of my childhood. The game hasn't aged well in many regards with the misogyny and senseless violence, and the pop culture references that most people wouldn't understand now. Heck, I'm firmly middle aged and didn't know the "chew bubblegum" reference was from a movie when the game first came out. I could see how some people considered it biting…
I've shared a few times here how I have a fascination with old programming languages. Maybe it's my middle aged focus instead of a sports car. Either way, I've been reading two books about programming Assembly lately and I wanted to make a quick review of each. There's no real reason to learn Assembly these days, unless you're into making rom hacks or programming new games for old systems, but…