paulgorman.org

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Wed Jun 30 06:00:01 EDT 2021 ======================================== Slept from eleven to seven. Woke briefly around four-thirty. Mostly cloudy with scattered showers and chance of thunderstorms. Highs in the lower 80s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of precipitation 50 percent. Work ---------------------------------------- - check on RealVNC renewal Done. - open ticket on Dell firmware vulnerabilities? Done. - follow up on PW modem install Done. - change backup media? Done. - keyboard for Kari Done. Twenty-five-minute walk at lunch. Hot and overcast. Saw a crow and a trio of mourning doves. And a deer. Walked my old 12 Mile to Duffy route, past the fire station. Not much changed, except a few trees cut down. Somewhat emotional though, as I probably won't walk that route many more times. Back to the office again in the afternoon, since I forgot a disk for Randy. Saw a couple crows, a blue jay, and a couple turkey vultures. In the car, alone, driving back from the office, I did my own little primal scream therapy, briefly lamenting my circumstances as the top of my lungs. Felt good. Home ---------------------------------------- - bring home file boxes from office Done. - continue packing Done. - meditation notes https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/projects/vanishing-harry-pace https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/vanishing-harry-pace-episode-1 > SHIMA OLIAEE: One of the strangest, most amazing details of this tour is that at a few of these midnight shows for Ethel Waters' big entrance, the electrician would... > > (SOUNDBITE OF SWITCH, EXCLAMATIONS) > > SHIMA OLIAEE: ...Kill the lights. > > PAUL SLADE: The stage would suddenly be plunged into complete darkness. > > SHIMA OLIAEE: Ethel would then walk onto stage holding a giant Japanese fan that covered her entire body. And behind the fan was her dress made of a 100%... > > PAUL SLADE: Radium. > > JAD ABUMRAD: What? You mean, radium like the element? > > SHIMA OLIAEE: (Laughter). > > PAUL SLADE: Yeah. Absolutely. > > JAD ABUMRAD: Oh. > > PAUL SLADE: So the whole building is pitch-black. And all you can see is Ethel on stage. > > SHIMA OLIAEE: She then snaps shuts her fan. And what the crowd suddenly sees is this woman... > > PAUL SLADE: Illuminated by the light of this radium dress. > > (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, CHEERING) > > PAUL SLADE: And, you know, you imagine the whole house just going crazy. > > SHIMA OLIAEE: Wow. > > JAD ABUMRAD: Wow. That's so cool. > > PAUL SLADE: This is 1922. > > SHIMA OLIAEE: It's so good. > > PAUL SLADE: No one would have seen anything like that. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2021/06/brief-everything-we-know-about-1970s.html > This entry summarizes a series of 1970s mainframe games that have been so lost we don't even have screenshots. > Except for Don Daglow's Dungeon, all the games listed below were written in a language called TUTOR for the PLATO educational mainframe hosted by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. (Some of the authors of these games come from schools that had PLATO links, like Purdue University, Iowa State University, and Indiana University.) Many of the games written on this system have been preserved and are playable today at Cyber1. Games that are not lost, and that I've already covered, include The Dungeon (1975), The Game of Dungeons (1975), Orthanc (1975), Moria (1975), Oubliette (1977), Swords and Sorcery (1978), Avatar (1979), and Camelot (1982). > Students began writing these games almost immediately after the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. The developers were aware of the games being written by other students, and there was a healthy mix of cooperation and competition. It's tough to nail down specific dates, or a specific order, for some of the games because they were continuously updated throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. (Some of them, like Orthanc, even had new coding added well into the 2000s.) > The other important thing to understand about these early games is that they were bootlegging computer space. In the early years, university administrators and system operators frowned upon wasting precious system resources for games (not an entirely unreasonable perspective given the number of stories I've heard about students neglecting their studies to write and play games). Authors tried to disguise their games by giving them educational-sounding names or prefixes used by the lesson spaces allotted to various university departments. pedit5 (The Dungeon) had that file name because it was created on the space allotted to the Population and Energy group. I don't know what the prefix for m199h meant, but that was almost certainly a file name, not the actual name of the game, just like almost no game in Daniel Lawrence's DND line, including Lawrence's, was actually called DND. > Many PLATO RPGs were started, deleted, re-started, and deleted again. When Reginald Rutherford's pedit5 was deleted, students re-created it as Orthanc. When Orthanc got axed, they brazenly followed up with Orthanc2. An entire series of games beginning with the word Think was chased off the system one by one and re-created. Eventually, university officials gave up and allowed the games to remain, which is why the post-1976 games are much better preserved, sometimes in multiple versions. Servings: grains 8/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 8/2, meat 4/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: banana, two hot dogs, cucumber, coffee Lunch: apple Dinner: pizza -30

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