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Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
djnavarro@hachyderm.io ("Danielle Navarro") wrote:

i love my neighbourhood

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
gmkeros.wordpress.com@gmkeros.wordpress.com ("Stuffed Crocodile") wrote:

Write Your Own Fantasy Games For Your Microcomputer

I was searching through some old files on one of my storage disks when I came across this book again: Write Your Own Fantasy Games For Your Microcomputer by Les Howarth and Cheryl Evans, with a program credited to Chris Oxlade, and illustrations by various people including Chris Riddell.

It was part of the series of Usborne Gamewriters’ Guides back in the 80s, which consisted of multiple books like this, Write Your own Adventure Programsm, Computer Spy Games, etc.

If you aren’t aware about this kind of book, the actual main part of it was the program listing in the later half of the book. This kind of book was supposed to teach you programming by… literally having you type in a program command by command. Which was a way to get software out to other people when storage media for it were too expensive to include. These listings were in computer magazines all the time, I even saw a few for character generators and similar stuff in normal TTRPG magazines.

But it also gives you an explanation what those particular bits are supposed to do, and how to deal with the bugs you are certain to encounter when copying the listing into your own machine.

But before that it had to teach you what they mean with Fantasy Game (roleplaying games), what Dungeon and Dragons (TM) is, and how such a game is played, before then venturing into how they intend to translate this into a game where you are both Dungeon Master and player.

In the end this creates a sort of rogue-like.

But I find some of the implications of the text fascinating. For one it was so early in the development of CRPGs that they don’t talk about this being a game or role-playing game (in fact that term is never used), you are creating a fantasy game like DnD instead, and you are using the computer to run it. I know it’s just a small difference, but this doesn’t come from a position of consuming the game, you are CREATING it instead. It starts from the assumption that you are using this as a framework to do your own adventuring environment that is basically an extension of a tabletop game into computer space. A later chapter goes into explaining how to extend this program with your own creations. In other words, you are not supposed to be a programmer with this, you are a Dungeon Master who just happens to use the computer as a medium. Which I find a fascinating approach.

I also found this bit interesting:

You should name the document of your game rules and conditions your Book of Lore as this is the common name fantasy gamers use to describe this.

Book of Lore.

Now I can’t say I never encountered the name before, but I find the idea that this is a specific term that fantasy roleplayers use to describe… well, what exactly? A campaign Bible I guess. Maybe I should indeed call mine Books of Lore from now on.

Yes I know that lore has come to mean something else by now, but this was written in 1981, maybe this was actually a term a specific subset of gamers used.

By the way, according to the back of the book this book cost £2.25 (in 2026 money: £9.75) when it was published, but according to the inside cover you could also have them send the program on cassette and save yourself the typing… for £5.99 (2024: £22.11)

Which would make the whole book pointless I guess. But computer stuff was expensive back then.

If you are interested in this, the book has been out of print for decades now, but Usborne made this and others available for free on their website a few years ago.

edit: had to change the link to the Usborne site, they changed their site structure a while ago

#C64 #programListing #programming #retroGaming #retrocomputing #retrogaming #ttrpg

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

if anything can bring the population of a South or Central American country together, the US ‘taking control’ of their country will. this is not like replacing a CEO and just moving on after a successful ‘hostile takeover’ of a company.

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

Let Jesus go, and give him a safe warm house to live in and nutritious meals every day.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/01/04/jesus-has-been-arrested/

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
yetzt@yetzt.me wrote:

in the uk, techbro is spelled techbourough.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
rysiek@mstdn.social ("Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦") wrote:

> A poll of 440 investors, economists and analysts by Deutsche Bank found that 57% believe a plunge in technology valuations, or waning enthusiasm in AI, is a top risk to market stability in 2026.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/04/global-economic-outlook-2026

Ah yes, the "finding out" phase of AI bubble looms on the horizon and even "investors" can't ignore it anymore. :blobcatpopcorn:

All those "AI experts", formerly "Metaverse experts", formerly "NFT experts", formerly "cryptocurrency experts" need to start retooling, and fast!

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
emilymbender@dair-community.social ("Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)") wrote:

Experience is central -- no art has any "qualitative value" without experience. Now, people can attribute meaning to synthetic images, but that is also an experience. But as UW's Gabriel Solis once put it so well: writing, art, performance -- these are ways of being human *together*.

>>

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
meganL@mas.to ("Megan Lynch (she/her)") wrote:

RE: https://front-end.social/@heydon/115835904622723404

The problem with succinct is there's often more to say. "Assistive technology", to me, puts emphasis on the tech.

But the real question to ask here is "Why do we think of people who need glasses to see as not being disabled & using an assistive device to meet their access needs, compared to other disabled people needing their access needs met who society is suspicious of and makes jump through hoops to get their access needs met?"

The answer to this gets at the frame of systemic ableism, IMO.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

“Microslop” trends in backlash to Microsoft’s AI obsession:

"Various uses across Instagram, reddit, X, Facebook, and beyond criticized Satya Nadella’s approach to artificial intelligence, as the public’s malcontent with the technology continues to expose deep gulfs between Big Tech’s hopes and what individual consumers actually want."

#Microslop https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/microslop-trends-on-social-media-backlash-to-microsofts-on-going-ai-obsession-continues

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
zkat@toot.cat ("Kat Marchán 🐈") wrote:

RE: https://mas.to/@carnage4life/115832534415373032

It doesn’t matter. This entire topic is irrelevant. There is no amount of productivity gain that can justify the costs of creation and maintenance of these systems.

I continue to be disappointed at any peers who pretend otherwise by very conveniently looking the other way because they think it doesn’t affect them.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
dandean@indieweb.social ("Dan Dean") wrote:

RE: https://mas.to/@carnage4life/115832534415373032

The sleight of hand – or the fundamental flaw – of this observation, is that it took their team a year to understand the problem by actually building a thing. Once you deeply understand a problem, it's trivial to get the dumb code vomit machine to produce code.

But producing the code is not the hard part, and using the code vomit machine is not a great way to build a system you understand from scratch if you haven't already solved the problem.

So the shortcut is a mirage.

Boosted by jwz:
xgranade@wandering.shop ("Cassandra is only carbon now") wrote:

Two things can be, and in fact are, both true:

• AI is unethical whether it works or not.
• AI doesn't work.

Boosted by jwz:
gtconway3@threads.net ("George Conway") wrote:

Boosted by jwz:
attoparsec@clacks.link ("Matthew Dockrey") wrote:

It's been a week since my eye surgery, which means I've graduated to just 3 eye drops a day, and bedtime no longer means transforming into a low budget Mad Max villain. Yay!

Boosted by ratatui_rs@fosstodon.org ("Ratatui"):
orhun@fosstodon.org ("Orhun Parmaksız 👾") wrote:

I watched an amazing talk last night...

They hacked washing machines and built a TUI for diagnostics.

Rust + @ratatui_rs in action again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1S-PVo3GlA

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
benroyce ("Ben Royce 🇺🇦 🇸🇩") wrote:

@lauren

yup

the answer to why the usa is so interested in venezuelan oil, and why trump shuts down wind and solar projects, when solar and wind seem so much better in all respects, was summed up in a newspaper political cartoon from the 1970s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike%5FPeters%5F%28cartoonist%29

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
elena@aseachange.com ("Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂") wrote:

I’m sharing this anecdote because it shows how it is important to speak up. Each one of us can make a small difference.

Discussion about the kidnapping of Maduro last night at dinner with my extended family. General consensus: it’s the law of the strongest, it should be expected.

Meanwhile, me: it’s incredibly dangerous to normalize these actions and accept them. This is not normal… if we change the baseline of what a country can do in the international stage, then that country will take the lack of reactions as a sign… and do something even more shocking in the future. People shrugged and said “we see your point but it is what it is”. Still, I like to think I planted some seeds in their minds regarding the dangers of normalizing extrajudicial actions like what happened yesterday.

Then: two people at the table had their hands glued to their cell phones looking up facts on LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini and Mistral.

So I had to have my saying about the dangers of using LLMs as search engines, their biases and real objectives. I spoke of the loss of critical thinking and… got eye rolls. But an adult at the table (70+) agreed with me.

Then I suggested that people relinquish their cell phones… and put them on a coffee table in the other side of the room so we could have a conversation without the internet - or LLMs - getting in the way.

More eye rolls and protests… but everyone eventually agreed… except for a 22 year old who protested “how can I get my facts?”… and put her cell phone in her pocket. So for another hour we all talked face to face without anyone scrolling or looking things up on LLMs.

Maybe it’s because I’m an only child but I’m not afraid to speak my mind… even when my opinion isn’t the popular one and I appear to be the “wet blanket” of the family.

Speaking up is important.

These are dark, difficult times but we can all resist.

/fin

#NoAI #resist

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
kasdeya@cryptid.cafe wrote:

there are three kinds of programming tutorials:

• “look man we both know you don’t wanna learn this shit so just install 30 GB of random frameworks and here’s the code to copy-paste if you wanna make a basic game and feel like you accomplished something. I’m not gonna explain how any of this works because nobody cares as long as your little guy jumps when you press spacebar”
• “an endofunctor is a type of monoid which is a subcategory of monad that is variadic over the set of all impure lambdas - therefore all possible expressions in this language can be modeled after- wait where are you going?”
• “this is called a variable! a variable is a little friend that can hold onto something called a value! variables love grabbing values and they can even carry them into functions! say hi, variable!”

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Seems like the sort of thing you might send to a congressional staffer...if, you know, you have their Signal.

https://www.justsecurity.org/127962/maduro-capture-operation-and-presidents-duty-to-faithfully-execute-un-charter/

isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:

Did you know Trump recently reclassified fentanyl as a WMD (yes, literally)? They're pretty proud of it: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/12/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-designates-fentanyl-as-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction/

Here, Kat Abughazaleh lays out this and other points you might need for arguing with people who think the ongoing coup in Venezuela is a noble fight against a dictatorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXNOP6s7Q6E

Boosted by jwz:
kbeninato@mstdn.party ("Karen Dalton-Beninato ☑️") wrote:

"We had to remove the president and his wife because he's a criminal the people hate" is quite a line for the US to take right now.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io ("Thomas 🔭🕹️") wrote:

@foone nothing wrong go can

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
indivisibleteam ("Indivisible ❌👑") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@indivisibleteam/115832878989067019

Tell your elected officials to do everything in their power to stand up to Trump and prevent war with Venezuela.

Email your Members of Congress: https://act.indivisible.org/sign/stop-trumps-war-in-venezuela/?source=mastodon

Call your senators: https://indivisible.org/resource/call-now-demand-your-senator-stop-trumps-war-venezuela?source=mastodon

And call your representative: https://indivisible.org/resource/call-now-tell-your-representative-stop-trumps-war-venezuela?source=mastodon

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Compere these ledes and weep:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/03/us-oil-trump-venezuela?CMP=share%5Fbtn%5Furl

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/business/venezuela-oil-industry-trump.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.B1A.bPBj.MdaMgt3yfWjU&smid=url-share

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
croyle@wandering.shop ("David Croyle") wrote:

#Caturday Yama, ridiculous creature that she is, is clearly quite comfortable. I wonder if other cats would see her sleeping like this and roll their eyes. 😁

#cat #CatsOfMastodon

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
sandlapper37@mstdn.social ("ebbtide") wrote:

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
theleftistlawyer ("Sheryl Weikal") wrote:

I hope now everyone who kept saying "but they can't do that because it's illegal" will understand that ILLEGAL AND IMPOSSIBLE ARE NOT SYNONYMOUS.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
georgetakei@universeodon.com ("George Takei :verified: 🏳️‍🌈🖖🏽") wrote:

Good. Other big states should follow suit since Congress under the GOP won't protect our rights here.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
samiamsam wrote:

no healthcare
no education
no housing
low wages

but lots of money for illegal invasions

GOT IT

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

no comment