bobbytuck | 2 years ago | on: Homer and His Iliad
bobbytuck's comments
bobbytuck | 4 years ago | on: Show HN: A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads
Meh.
Reading is a personal experience. I guess I understand the desire to make it more social -- but I'm not sure why I would go to the lengths to do so.
Is it some kind of gamification thing? I guess that's why I never got into Goodreads either.
I might be an outlier -- but I've never seen reading -- authentic, personal reading -- as anything other than personal.
I'm a social creature for sure, but I don't feel the need to share my reading lists. I always feel like social media is for creating a persona -- someone who want to be but aren't -- but want your "friends" to think you are.
This seems like it veers that way -- but I don't know. I didn't sign up -- but I was (obviously) curious enough to take a peek. And that probably says more about me than I care to acknowledge. :(
bobbytuck | 4 years ago | on: The Interactive Fiction Archive (2019)
There's also zilf/z-machine -- the language/virtual machine used to write the Infocom games.
A relatively recent 'awesome' repo for z-machine is here:
https://github.com/cschweda/awesome-z-machine
And the current implementation of zilf is here:
bobbytuck | 4 years ago | on: Adventuron – Text Adventure Authoring in the Browser
It'd be nice if it compiles down to ZIL.
bobbytuck | 5 years ago
Another TRS-80 fan here. I learned programming by sitting in the back of a Radio Shack where they had a Model I Level II and a Model II with those big 8" drives. This was probably around '81 or so. A year or so later they eventually had a Model III in the front of the store.
Whenever I get burned out on software (in my case, Vue and React) -- and build complexity -- I always remind myself of those TRS-80 days. The only learning references around were the books for sale by the TRS80's -- a couple books on TRS80 graphics, Rodney Zak's 'Z80 Assembly Language', and William Borden's Z80 books. And of course the Tandy version of Zork in the little plastic baggie hanging from a wall hook beside 'Eliza' and 'Dancing Demon' -- and then the wall of brown folders of 'Scripsit' and 'VisiCalc' on TRSDOS 1.3 (?). Maybe the editor/assembler at the time, too -- 'EDTASM'. Don't remember if that was in a baggie on the wall hook or in a Tandy brown TrapperKeeper with the cassette insert and several tapes.
Those were great days -- and everything (for me, at least) was new and exciting. Nothing was ever too daunting or too complex -- even as daunting (and as complex) as Z80 assembly seemed to me -- a 13 year old at the time.
That's a feeling I always try to recapture in very deliberate ways these days. It's good remember how it all started.
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If you were in grad school (or maybe even undergrad) 30+ years ago, you read Fitzgerald.
Period.
It's the fundamental translation. Everything new is judged by Fitzgerald's version.
That said, I just finished the Lombardo translation for the Iliad -- and, yeah, it's good. Modern, quick, sweeping. But Fitzgerald's echoes are hard to silence.