teapot7

I discarded my copy of Tales From Earthsea, but thought The Other Wind was very good indeed. On the other hand, I didn't like Tehanu, so that might help you decide whether my advice is for you or not.

It got some criticism for being simplistic at the time it was published.

I like and respect Le Guin, but maybe not this one so much.

Yeah, we like to think foreigners can't hack it - but we had an American friend staying with us for a while, and one day I came out to breakfast to find him having Vegemite and peanut butter layered on top of each other, on the same piece of toast.

Jesus, Craig - what the hell were you thinking!?!?

My story is a very small one compared to most peoples - a few hours of work on the side, spanning a couple of weeks - but it think it sets a pretty high bar for pointlessnes:

This was back when:

- the internet was new and exciting, rather than just part of the background of our lives

- people used video tape recorders

- "multimedia" was a field of its own, and people made a fuss about it

I got a contract to write a program in Macromedia Director (which was what ruled the multimedia roost before an upstart program called "Flash" came along) which would take a number of still pictures and emit them as a short Quicktime movie, with each picture only on screen for a couple of frames. Definitely not the hardest bit of work I've ever done.

What was it for? Someone had had the idea that the best way of getting real estate ads in front of people was to make a 15 or 20 second movie consisting of dozens of static real estate ads, which would be broadcast on TV at the end of... what? Some news or current affairs show I think. Potential homebuyers would tape this on their VCRs and the go through it frame by frame, carefully reading each ad.

As you can imagine, this was before people had much bandwidth, and long before real estate moved online.

By some miracle this actually got aired a couple of times before the idea sunk into oblivion.

Yes - he's one of the very best! I loved his 3 part series on making a reflector telescope from a single chunk of glass.

Yes! One of my university textbooks and I still remember what a nice physical artifact it was.

Likewise. I can happily drink coffee at bedtime. I never experience a "coffee rush".

A yoga instructor friend once told me "You have a sluggish metabolism". I cannot deny it.

We do like our anthropomorphisation, and I prefer to say that ChatGPT and its pal likes to "bullshit". They're neither "trying" to tell the truth nor trying to lie - they trying to sound plausible, with a cheerful disregard of the value of truth.

I'm done anthopomorphising now.

I wish I'd known about Forth in my first job in the late 80s. We were writing 8-bit assembler on small slow machines, and I've always suspected that Forth could have been a good productivity solution for those circumstances.

Fast forward to the 21st century and I still think Forth is cool, but I don't have any actual urge to use it.

I remember my old boss saying that everyone was expected to do more than was expected of them. He probably thought he was being quite clever.

Thinking of "hey I could do that", here's one of my favourite articles, on the making of the game Sensible Soccer. I end up rediscovering and rereading it every few years, and every time I do I feel the urge to site down and write a football game, despite having no real interest in sport. It makes a complex goal feel very achievable:

https://readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-sensible-soccer/

Some programmers like the idea of making a profit. Apps facilitate this.

> He’s gone and it is perfectly natural that Apple would regress toward the mean of any well funded hip tech company.

I remember when Jobs died I thought "Apple - Jobs = Sony". I don't think I was too wrong.

Made me laugh.

Slightly tangential, but I've always wanted to see the Orkneys and their archaeology since I read Kim Stanley Robinson's "A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations":

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/history.htm

> That surface-level judgement is as naive and nubile as it gets.

Nubile? Auto-correct mistake? Or just a very strange worldview?

I think there's something there - I feel like there's a sort of glamourisation of shyness on some social media, as if claiming it as a label inducts you into a special club. I can be shy, like many people, but I can't fathom those who claim it as a special quality to be treasured.

The original article looks much better in "reader mode" which dumps the styling for a standardised page - no more need to read the folksy mock-handwriting font.

He's saying that it happened for reasons completely unconnected with race.

Whether you believe his claims are correct or not, how do you manage to read them as racist?

> If our displays flicker to them, which is a highly probable, it is annoyance by any definition.

Well, an annoyance by your definition. Not sure how you managed to declare it universal.

Don't forget https://humanclock.com/

I'd look up Grant Abbitt. I think he's excellent for beginners and provides a good foundation. He does some paid stuff, but there's plenty of good free stuff on YouTube.

I tend to listen to him at around 1.5 times normal speed, but that works ok.

I've never played Sensible Soccer, and don't focus much on sports of any form, but this article:

https://readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-sensible-soccer/

is fascinating. I've reread it a few times now, and each time it give me an urge to implement a soccer game.

Seems it's a book of assembler snippets. The Amazon page is less cryptic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1502958082

It's a shame whoever put it at MIT didn't credit the author, the excellent Terry Bisson. Here it is on his home page:

http://www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/

The blog post seems to be pretty much a recreation of examples from the The Algorithmic beauty of Plants, but I didn't notice the author giving any credit to the original source.

One turning point that saddens me as an ex-Smalltalker - at one point there were negotiations underway to have Smalltalk installed by default on all new Sun Workstations (this was back when Sun was a very significant player), but it fell through for financial reasons. Had this been the case, I'm sure Smalltalk would be significantly better known and more commonly used.

And as justinpombrio says above, that has nothing to do with how good or bad the language is.

Photoshop 7. It still works and it does everything I want it to do. And it's not subscription based.

I also agree with the poster who gets an old version of WinAmp. That's a program that started out fine and the just went bonkers.

Though Smalltalk is quite alive and happy in a niche way. I use pharo.org, but there's also Squeak, VisualWorks and a few others.

There's some good recent work on compiling to JavaScript, which seems to be the universal solvent these days.

I guess I do ask for money for this, but it's pretty overengineered and I wrote it knowing that nobody wanted or needed it:

Long ago, when Sun workstations were new and exciting, I wrote a simple Roman numeral digital clock, which just showed the time in Roman numerals.

My friend, instead of admiring my cleverness, said "But that's not how the Romans told the time" - which is true. The Roman day started at dawn and finished at sunset, which meant that day and night length were different every single day, as well as in cities at different latitudes.

Several decades later I did something about it, and wrote it up as a mobile app which showed either the modern time or optionally the Roman time.

Then I made it use the Roman calendar, where you don't have individually numbered days of the month, but count instead how many days until the next Kalends (start of the month), Nones (fifth or seventh day) or Nones (thirteenth or fifteenth day), even if it occurs in the next month.

Then I thought I might as well go all the way, and spent more money than I would ever earn from it on having the help text translated into Latin, just in case any ancient Roman time travellers wanted to use it.

A waste of time and money, but one which made me happy.

http://www.teapot7.com/roman-clock-app/