wrongcards

I've got friends who've helped, now and then. But all my friends are either too busy being successful in their career, or too fundamentally silly and unreliable. That said, I don't rule it out. It'd be a shame for the site to disappear off the web, forever.

Also, there's 701 cards. I have this mad idea I should get to at least 1000, before bowing out.

Hey, that's lovely, and I'm glad.

I did simplify the ecard send/receive mechanism - there's been four or five different iterations of the app, and validating emails was nightmarish. As of a few months ago I just let people create and copy-paste 'links with messages', which has made my life considerably easier.

I did print 1000 boxes of postcards years ago - in about 2012, I think. they turned out looking really beautiful, in print. It's a funny story, actually, because I put them on Amazon and forgot all about them, entirely (I was working a full-time job at the time at a university). I still have a few hundred boxes left I've been giving away to people.

I've had a few people contact me in the interest of facilitating that service, but they seemed kinda slimey. I think you're right; I should probably set up print-on-demand. But again, side projects, huh?!

I've been running my side project - free ecards that are wrong for every occasion - (https://wrongcards.com) for eighteen years. I felt like the internet needed something like that, back in 2008. Back then, it was a tribute to the 90s era of terrible, awful ecards websites, about which I had become oddly nostalgic. It was also semi-intentionally a terrible idea from a SEO perspective (ecause, like, search engines aren't going to help anyone find what is ostensibly WRONG for every occasion) and I built the entire thing out of spite towards what I thought of as the 'new web'.

Now, almost 20 years later, I find I want to preserve something from the old days before it all looked like, well, gestures around wildly. It would be a relief not to maintain the site anymore. But I feel like I'd be disappointing a lot of people, as well. I have no idea how long I'm going to keep this going.

I've read Graves' Lawrence and the Arabs (Ranulph Fiennes wrote a recent, new bio of Lawrence that I hear is worth reading), but not his work on the Western front. The most interesting military histories I've read concerned the Mongols. Scholarship has improved, on them, in recent years. And hygiene, it turns out, is a major ingredient in a military's success.

But you're right, of course. (Also, Aragorn might have died of tetanus, or an infected, minor wound; though there is an implication, in LOTR, that within the world of the story, the Elves have a brought to Middle Earth a sophisticated knowledge of medicine, along with everything else. Aragorn became a reknowned 'healer', etc, from staying with them. So you're right; LOTR inhabits a different world altogether from our Middle Ages).

We can't remotely imagine the shock and horror it must have been for men like Robert Graves and Tolkien, to know only picturesque townships and bucolic landscapes, and THEN abruptly be thrust into the hellscape of the Western front. (The recent movie, All Quiet on the Western Front is extraordinarily good at showing how hellish it was. Brilliant, in that respect, though I warn you: it is not a good time). But again, these considerations, regarding history and the culture of the past, are utterly beyond the scope and capacities of the neo-feudalists. They have no conception of the world they're creating, nor how ill-suited they are to inhabiting it.

I had the same experience when I read Ready Player One. Nearly fell out of my chair. But surely dozens of us must have played that game - dozens!

BTW you had to 'incant' a ring, near the end, and I could not have figured that out on my own. It was fantastically fun to me as a kid, despite being, lets be reasonable, impossible to beat without knowing some things outside the game. I actually believed I did beat it, in the late 90s, after I killed the 'false' wizard. However, I thought Level 4 was the game restarting back to Level 1, so exited, thinking it was all done.

Rainbow Magazines were magical and incredibly inspiring. I probably typed-up most of the games they ever published and had them saved on cassette. This one was very lengthy -> https://ia903403.us.archive.org/0/items/rainbowmagazine-1984.... (search for 'Karrak')

Sadly, my brother recorded over it before I could play it more than once ... you know, deliberately, out of pure 80s evil older-brother spite. Some part of me wants to paste that code into Claude Code, and generate some sort of working game, as an act of defiance.

I couldn't play joust on the cabinets (no money as a kid); the TRS-80 game was called Lancer. Good times, absolutely.

I taught myself to program typing out games and apps from Rainbows magazines in the mid-eighties. I was obsessed with text-adventures, and creating my own, from about age eight and onward.

Playing games back then was a wildly different experience; pre-internet, there was no way to find hints. You'd come to a wall, somehow, and be stuck. I never got to the end of Raaka-Tu, or Madness and the Minotaur, or Bedlam. I wasn't even ten-years-old, and those games were an impossible undertaking.

That said, in 2021, finally got to the end of the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath, and killed the final wizard. I was absurdly pleased with myself that day. That goddamn wizard had been a regret-tinged concern of mine for 39 years.

weedbear.com - a webcomic I don't have time to build (though my drafts are pretty funny).