wagnetic | Reading

Per The Verge, The original Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III games are now available under the MIT CC license.

I have such fond memories of the interactive fiction game Zork - or rather its predecessor, Adventure. And now you can see exactly how you got "eaten by a grue!" or stuck in "a maze of twisty little passages, all alike..." if you took a wrong turn somewhere in the game, heh!
( Playing Zork's predecessor, Adventure, with my sister on my brother's mainframe terminal decades ago )
We LOVED that game! I didn't know what Interactive Fiction or Text-based Adventure games were, at the time - I was just a kid. I just knew Adventure was super fun to play, even though it was also difficult for us. I remember us eventually drawing maps as we explored the underground cave system that you got to by going through the locked grate in the streambed, using the keys you got from the small brick building in the forest, where you begin the game.
( what I learned from Adventure/Zork, and the downside of vivid visual imagination )

Anyway - I'm so glad other people can legally see it now. (Zork I/II/III and many of their predecessors and imitators been available for years, though unofficially and in that gray area of "it's not really legal but no one is pursuing anyone who ports it to whatever OS"; more than 25 years ago, I installed an emulator on my Linux computer just so I could play Zork/Adventure again.) Now people can study the code... or just download the game and play it.

(I am not a programmer but I just might study the code myself - I took some basic programming classes as a high schooler - good lord, the punch cards! - and as a kid, taught myself BASIC so I could write stupid little programs on my Commodore 128 computer that my brother bought me and my little sister for Christmas one year. Why, Yes: I am geeky - and kinda proud of it, lol!)

ETA: You can also play Adventure/Colossal Cave Adventure online in a browser here! Yay!

ride_4ever

Ever since Marjorie Taylor Greene "informed" us that California wildfires were being caused by "Jewish Space Lasers" I have been obsessed with making a mockery of her. (Hey, I'm Jewish, and if I had control of some space lasers I would NOT be using them to set California on fire.)

Now I see that she is resigning from Congress after The Orange One called her "wacky"...which is the first time I've ever agreed with something he said.

At this juncture I would like to show what I have created with my Refrigerator Magnet "What Will Marjorie Taylor Green Say Next" Conspiracy Kit.

Marjorie Taylor Greene refrigerator magnet

Bonus Image:

Current Mood: mocking
Current Location: near the lake they call Michigan

ride_4ever

Note: if you don't get sound with this video, check for doing "unmute" in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

This link goes to Facebook: What Would the Founding Fathers Say about Trump

Current Mood: facepalm
Current Location: near the lake they call Michigan

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

It has been an unexpectedly stressful week and I have read nothing, alas.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Captain America #5, Nova Centurion #1, One World Under Doom #9, Spider-Man Holiday Spectacular #1, Ultimates #18 )

What I'm Reading Next

Still not sure yet. Working on having enough energy to read stuff.

Current Mood: exhausted

ride_4ever

Voted first place by the FWF participants for best use of prompt.

My FWF First Place Winner - Category: "Best Use of Prompt" - Shocktober Edition

Title: Things Counter, Original, Spare, Strange
Fandoms: due South, Wristcutters
Rating: Mature
Category: Gen, M/M
Pairing: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Characters: Robert "Bob" Fraser, Benton Fraser, Ray Kowalski, mention of Uncle Tiberius Fraser, mention of Diefenbaker (the half-wolf, not the former Canadian Prime Minister), mention of Nanuk (from Wristcutters), mention of Raife Kneller (from Wristcutters)
Word count: 400 (quadruple drabble)

Summary: Sergeant Robert Fraser -- dead Robert Fraser -- knows first-hand that All Hallow’s Eve is when The Veil between the living and the dead is at its most thin...but he doesn't know anything about Halloween-themed sex toys until Ray Kowalski has something to say about it.

Author's Notes: Written for the recurring Firewhiskey Fic Challenge, a 48-hour period during which fanworks creators drink "adult beverages" or "do the 420" and create their fanworks "under the influence" with no editing allowed. Participants then view all the fanworks and vote on them in the categories of Most Coherent Entry, Least Coherent Entry, Funniest Entry, Favorite Entry, Best Use of Prompt, and Best Smut.

Fic on AO3.

Current Mood: awarded
Current Location: near the lake they call Michigan

verushka70

Regina Keim created and posted a new due South word search over in the private Fraser/Kowalski Facebook group.

You can access it here, if you can't see the group's posts because you're not a member.

verushka70

FYI, over the past few days I have had someone else requesting to change my AO3 password 3 times.

I don't know if this is happening to anyone else, but... I just thought I'd warn people.

I think it is a person rather than a bot, because it seems a bot would be more likely to just keep sending and sending requests (meaning, more than 3 in 5 days).

But you never know. If it is a bot, it could just be going down a long list of hundreds or thousands of usernames and coming back around to mine after going through the list.

Be careful out there!

luzula

I read some books!

What Fresh Hell Is This? by Heather Corinna (2021)
About perimenopause and menopause. Well, I guess I learned things? It did all feel like a huge and intimidating list of possible symptoms to get, and I don't know yet how it'll shake out for me. But I guess one advantage of knowing what's possible is that it will help me connect the dots when/if various things do happen.

A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by K J Charles (2023)
Hmm, hm. Meh. I thought I'd try something that's supposed to be self-indulgent, and this was certainly page-turney enough, but did not really zing for me. I can't tell if it's just that my reading is still far from my previous baseline, or whether this would not have been my favorite Charles in any case. Somehow I could not keep from comparing this to others of her books and seeing commonalities in the types of characters and relationships she often writes, and thus not being entirely able to see the characters as people of their own.

Not a book, but I thought the blog series Life, Work, Death, and the Peasant by the historian Bret Deveraux was interesting. It models the life and labor of pre-modern peasants, using sources from ancient Rome and medieval Europe. And I do mean modeling, trying to estimate such things as the number of pregnancies a woman would have on average, and the number of hours worked on various tasks. It really hammers home that while yes, I do live on a farm now, and I do over time want to try to produce more of the food we eat, there is so much labor pre-modern peasants did that I don't have to do. The amount of time women spent on textile production (mostly spinning) is unbelievable. And I didn't know the medieval spinning wheel is about three times more productive than the spindle of antiquity! Carrying water (back-breaking work!), washing by hand, etc. Obviously I knew people did these things by hand, but it's so interesting seeing estimates of the time it took.

I do think modern civilization is hugely wasteful of energy and materials, but can we not find some appropriate level of energy use and technology? Pumping water for household use, and spinning thread with machines: yes, great use of energy and technology. \o/ Mining bitcoins: nope, terrible use of energy and technology. /o\

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

Every year, well over a hundred pinch hitters take on extra assignments. Many of these pinch hitters are signed up to Yuletide, with an assigned writer and recipient from the start. Some are not!

Though these supporting pinch hitters are not guaranteed a gift, we'd like to make it a possibility. On this post, we're collecting prompts from the pinch hitters who are not signed up to Yuletide, so that others may give them treats.

To writers
Please consider writing a treat for a pinch hitter! See instructions for how, where, and when to post a treat. Full-length gifts for pinch hitters are welcome in the Main collection.

To pinch hitters
If you are signed up to Yuletide this year, this post does not apply to you, but we still hope you enjoy your gift(s).

If you are not signed up to Yuletide this year but you have claimed or posted a pinch hit, please comment to this post with your requests! Please limit yourself to Yuletide-eligible fandoms, but you can ask for more than 8 different fandoms.

Yuletide 2025 tag set on AO3
Tag set as a browser app

You can treat your comment as a Dear Writer letter, with likes and prompts, or include a link to a letter. Either way, please include the following information when you comment:

-your AO3 name
-your requested fandoms [please format the fandoms exactly as they are in the tag set if possible]
-your requested characters

and, optionally, ideas for what you would like to receive, DNWs, and/or (a) link(s) to other places where you have written about what you would like. You're welcome to comment on mini-challenge posts!

Thank you, pinch hitters! And thank you to anyone on the lookout to pick up a pinch hit - we will post them at

yuletide_pinch_hits throughout the exchange.

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

Diane Duane, Dark Mirror: Reviewed here.

Avengers Disassembled: Reread this for 616 Book Club; giving myself credit because otherwise I will not make my Goodreads goal.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( 1776 #1, Fantastic Four #5, Iron and Frost #2, New Avengers #6, Ultimate Black Panther #22, Ultimate Wolverine #11 )

What I'm Reading Next

Not sure yet.

Current Mood: hungry

verushka70

According to this CBC article from October 30, this past summer, Canada tourism hit an all time high!

Well of course it did! Who would want to come to the US right now?? The US is a flaming dumpster fire right now and - as far as I can tell - will continue to be until the current clown and all his flying monkeys get kicked out in 2028. I wish I could live in Canada for the next 3 years, myself.

ETA: Oh, CBC also reports that US tourism is projected to be DOWN $5.7 billion by end of 2025. Are we great again yet? No. No we are not.

verushka70

There is a great interview with Hugh Dillon of Headstones at the V13 site. He talks a lot about how he got started in music by going to London UK to escape some trouble he was in, in Kingston, ONT - squatting in hotels, the early punk scene that inspired him, honing his singing and songwriting by busking.

I have the new album Burn All The Ships and it is great.

You can read or listen to the interview at the V13 article.

Headstones Burn All The Ships album cover

Headstones Burn All The Ships album cover

verushka70

November 9 was Ramona Milano's birthday!

She teaches at her own acting studio, and she's directed, too. See her IMDb.com page.

sineala

Today's cheap indie video game rec, found via a review at Ars Technica, is Skigill, which costs $5, currently $3.50 as a launch discount, and it is definitely at least as much fun as, say, a fancy caffeinated beverage of your choice, although admittedly it's less tasty.

It is yet another Vampire Survivors-esque "bullet heaven" roguelite auto-shooter -- you know, the kind where you dodge the enemies and the game does the aiming and firing for you. You know the kind of game I mean. The gimmick of Skigill here is that it is for people who really, really love RPG skill trees. You are actually running around on a giant skill tree, and as you kill enemies and collect XP, you can stand on any node of the skill tree (that is linked to one you have previously unlocked) and it will put your points in that skill, unlock new weapons, etc. So you are leveling up and building your character based on where you are running around.

There is of course also a second skill tree that you can access between runs and use to get yourself permanent stat increases. You know how this genre works.

It's in Early Access but there is enough content in here that it's pretty playable. The Mac port insists it is 32-bit and will not work, but this is lies; it works just fine on my M1 Air.

The game has extremely retro yellow-on-black pixel graphics and a chiptune soundtrack. The one downside is that the dev is committed to having no tutorial and in fact no in-game text whatsoever, which means I have absolutely no idea what most of these little symbols are or what they do or what my character is or how come when I stand on a skill node it doesn't unlock even though it looks like I have enough XP, which means I probably don't understand what the numbers in the game represent. But I will never know what I am doing wrong, because the game will never tell me.

Still, it's fun, if you like this genre of game. And skill trees.

Current Mood: dorky

sineala

Reposting book reviews from Goodreads because why not? This one is obviously a reread!

For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I haven't felt like reading basically anything at all in a long time, and definitely not novel-length fiction. But lately I have started to feel like my brain can hack it, and then I spent a while thinking I just wanted to read something I already loved, and then I stared guiltily at my TBR pile, and then I thought, fuck it, I'm just gonna read Dark Mirror again. Probably haven't read this in, like, fifteen years. So here I am.

( Dark Mirror )

Current Mood: dorky

Profile

wagnetic

December 2018

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Page Summary

verushka70 - Zork I/II/II now officially MIT CC/open-source! (or, You have been eaten by a grue...) (FF #56)
ride_4ever - Marjorie Taylor Greene
ride_4ever - Political: What Would the Founding Fathers Say about Trump
sineala - Wednesday Reading Meme
ride_4ever - Fannish 50 Challenge 2025: Post # 39: My Firewhisky Fic First Place Winner - Shocktober Edition
verushka70 - new dS word search (Fannish Fifty #55)
verushka70 - AO3 password changes NOT requested by me/you (Fannish Fifty #54)
luzula - Recent reading
yuletidemods in yuletide_admin - Pinch Hitter Prompts 2025
sineala - Wednesday Reading Meme
verushka70 - Canada's summer tourism hit an all time high; US tourism to drop $5.7B (FF #53)
verushka70 - Great Hugh Dillon interview about latest album Burn All The Ships(FF #52)
verushka70 - Belated Birthday Greetings for Ramona Milano (FF #51)
sineala - Skigill
sineala - Star Trek TNG: Dark Mirror by Diane Duane

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