bobbytuck

Not at all "under-appreciated"

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.

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. :(

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:

https://foss.heptapod.net/zilf/zilf/-/wikis/home

It'd be nice if it compiles down to ZIL.

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.