jmac

vga256, 19 days ago to retrogaming

someone local to me is selling a Thayer's Quest arcade cab

i grew up playing a lot of Dragon's Lair as a kid (for a loonie a pop!!) at the local arcade

but i had no idea there were third party developers who made conversion kits for DL cabs. the control panel for this thing is insane 😆

imagine playing a CYOA game on laserdisc.

#retroGaming #arcade

A player taps a membrane keyboard interface to select multiple choice options for an animated laserdisc game. The game pauses every few seconds to allow the player to make a new choice, which plays a different animation.

jmac, 19 days ago to random

A discussion about the unusual cover design for the Traveller RPG—still striking in its tone and its minimalism, decades later—led me to recall and share this timeless banger from @avram.

And only then did I get the joke: Oh, because the ship on the original cover is named “Beowulf”!! OK.

https://wandering.shop/@avram/109809275612064222

jmac, 19 days ago to random

I saw a person talk about the desire to see "a meeting in a smoke-filled room" happen, which seems like an oddly outdated metaphor... but these things do tend to have legs, don't they.

I wonder how many people know perfectly well what a "smoke-filled room" is, but don't know why it's called that. Like, maybe they think it means that since it's addressing an urgent issue, like a fire, that metaphorical fire is filling the room with smoke?

jmac, 20 days ago to random

This is a caring, sad feature about a man who became lost and died, first slowly and then with sudden violence, at a homeless encampment in Ithica, New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/19/nyregion/ithaca-homeless-encampment-thomas-rath.html

I admire the way the writer and photographer thread the story through with "Lost Cat", a mournful graffiti tag found throughout the encampment. It shows up unexpectedly at the end and made my breath catch.

jmac, 20 days ago to random

Because of my dog-crazy 11-year-old niece's most recent visit to NYC, I am more aware of the infinite variety in all the dogs I see every time I leave my building. And this provided the activation codes for a new desire to ask their human companions if I can pet my favorites, which I had unwittingly built up from a couple of in-person walks with @brainwane.

We are all just holograms made from all the other nodes who we know. We're nothing but reflections of each other.

Dogs already know this.

jmac, 20 days ago to random

I think of this every time I wake my MacBook up from a furious sleep, its fans blasting full-speed to render Apple's default screen saver of a fully animated drone flight over Californian vineyards, in order to get back to my screenful of tiled xterms.

https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/112464257491011844

jmac, 21 days ago (edited 21 days ago) to random

I just bought Indika and I can't wait to play it. Sunday morning drowsiness is probably not the right headspace for it, from what little I know of it.

The cover art alone sold me on it!

jmac, 21 days ago to random

“This is how Google’s search result sausage is made: Real people like me make it.” Toni Allen, secretary of the Alphabet Workers #Union, writes about working as a contracted “rater” for Google. https://fortune.com/2024/05/03/google-search-raters-wages-benefits-contractors-tech-ai-employment/

Toni is among many laborers who perform high-speed, human-powered fact checking on AI-generated search results—and, thanks to recent legal maneuvering on the part of our mutual bosses, now receives an hourly rate that is less than California minimum wage.

jmac, 21 days ago to random

I know one word in cat-language, and I'll practice it when Twila seems antsy, pacing around. I hunker down on the ground yoga-style in a sort of Child's Pose, and Twila wanders over to flop on her side in front of me. She doesn't expect any further attention when she does this; she just interprets my action as "Let's flop down on the floor and be chill together", and does so. And we'll stay there together for a minute and she does seem to dig it.

jmac, 22 days ago to random

Got to the credits screen of #AnimalWell in about 12 hours of play-time. What a lovely game. Strong recommend for a tightly intentional and deeply mysterious puzzle platformer.

It feels like the slightly younger sibling of Tunic. Tunic took the decade-old lessons of Fez and went in one direction with them, and Animal Well showed another path some 18 months later.

jmac, 23 days ago to random

Had my first professional massage in a long time, and I wonder if it’s the first since I had my year of medical stuff. Quite possibly!

It brought to mind again Seneca’s thoughts on how the veteran soldier knows how to surrender their body to the surgeon when needed, sending their mind somewhere else, and coming to re-inhabit their carcass when it’s ready.

I thought of this parable a lot, every time my bed was wheeled out of the prep room. It was nice to have a much more pleasant reason today.

jmac, 23 days ago to random

A week in, it occurs to me which elder-days video game that #AnimalWell pleasantly reminds me of, amidst all the much newer work it draws from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtBF7lBZWGw

mightyspaceman, 23 days ago to random

Is it actually possible to tell someone that something was a joke without sounding condescending?

jmac, 24 days ago to random

“Nobody thinks they can whip up an iPhone in their garage over the weekend, but most people think they know how to save the children, fix the schools, reform the prisons, overhaul healthcare, repair politics, restore civility, and bring about world peace. Perhaps that’s why we have iPhones and we don’t have any of those other things.”

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/how-to-get-7th-graders-to-smoke

jmac, 24 days ago to random

Speaking of Discords and puzzle games, I had reason to dig up this circa-2010 parody of both Braid and then-contemporary game streamers. I remembered it for "reverse tiiiime" but I had no memory of the time-loop microfiction that unfolds in the "chat window", so that was a fun discovery! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI

jmac, 24 days ago to random

Don't tell my bosses but I am having a great time in the @shortgame Discord's #AnimalWell channel trading game hints and chinchilla jokes today.

jmac, 25 days ago (edited 25 days ago) to random

The truer function of #GenAI is less answering than illuminating, helping the human prompter locate hitherto obscure paths and connections between ideas on an incomprehensibly large map made of language and vector math.

Used properly, GenAI is a torch that broadens the field of possibilities known to its human petitioner, who must still interpret, investigate, and decide.

We should not mistake soothsaying for truth-telling, but soothsaying does have its use cases.
https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/112445637742357366

jmac, 25 days ago to random

Top tip: If you filed forms electronically with the IRS for the benefit of your new nonprofit, and those forms included the PO Box that you have set up for it, maybe actually go check that PO Box instead of sitting around waiting for them to email you.

• Look, New York State had emailed us about the initial incorporation notice, and maybe it took me weeks to recall that NYS and USA are different entities with different practices, okay

• Yes, I will be less coy about all this in the near future

jmac, 3 months ago to random

I think #Balatro might be the first game where all of the following are true:

• I am 100% sure I would love it right away.
• I can afford to buy it immediately.
• I already own the best system to play it on (Steam Deck).
• I refuse to allow myself to buy it.
• I do not know when I will let myself buy it.

I see all the jokes and memes about addictive it is, and the fact its trailer does a slow zoom-in on a number going up with fireworks, and I can already feel the rush and the crash of it all.