"In high school, I loved playing text-based TRS-80 adventure games written by Scott Adams. Moved to write an Adams-style adventure myself, I set it in the Arctic."
So many of us growing up at that time were inspired by Adams. I think he quite literally is responsible for a huge number of people becoming programmers and game designers. I was lucky enough a few years ago to be able to thank him personally for what he did for me as a kid. He was very gracious and humbly admitted that he gets that a lot.
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.
> the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath
In case you didn't know Dungeons of Daggorath (1982) for the Radio Shack Color Computer featured significantly in the best-selling sci-fi book "Ready Player One" (although it was not an element in movie). https://readyplayerone.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath
I got my Color Computer in 1982 and banged my head on Daggorath for many hours. Randomly reading Ready Player One in 2012 was surreal. There were so many impossibly obscure references to esoteric 80s computer and arcade trivia that was personally very significant to me - but to almost no one else - it felt like I was being punked by someone that knew me. And the more I read, the more bizarre coincidences kept piling up - from Daggorath on the Coco to knowing how to beat a Joust arcade cabinet with the arcane pterodactyl bug which was only present in Red/Yellow Joust cabinets. The Coco was obscure, maybe 1/100th as popular as the Commodores and Ataris, and Daggorath wasn't even close to a top selling game on it.
In the early 80s, every time I'd go to an arcade I was always on the lookout for a red/yellow Joust so I could drop a high score. I also read Rainbow Magazine every month and even flew across the country to attend the first RainbowFest in Chicago. Good times, indeed.
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.
After a number of very frustrating experiences I ended up buying this. For example, in the Sierra Online game "Dark Crystal", i was absolutely stuck in one spot (ruining my enjoyment of the full game) where I needed to "LISTEN BROOK".
There was another game, (Mad Venture), where I needed to read the book so I could do "THROW DOLL".
I count myself among this group. I actually emailed Adams sometime around 1999 or so to ask him a question about a game that I thought was his. Turns out, the game was included in a collection of Adams's games on the TI-994a (the game was called Knight Ironheart) and was in the same exact style and used the same interpreter as his own games.
He was super nice about it, explaining that he didn't actually author that game. We exchanged a few more emails back and forth, but overall a great experience chatting with him over the earlyish Internet. I feel very fortunate that I grew up in an era of computing where it seemed much smaller than it does today.
One of the highlights of my youth was attending Apple convention in boston in the 1980s and meeting Lord British (Richard Garriot). He saw that I liked the game and asked me to stand in the kiosk and teach people how to play it.
I don't know if the Altair 8800 would count as my first home computer, as I was too young to really understand what it was and mostly just liked to play with the paper tape feed on the Teletype attached to it. By the time we got the PET 2001, I was old enough to actually use it as intended.
Wait, what?? I loved Colossus as a kid, read and enjoyed all three books, and still have an original movie poster I got at a yard sale when I was a teenager. I read the books again a couple years ago, and they're still enjoyable, if now quite dated.
> Service in restaurants in Europe is way better than in USA.
Eh. Having eaten at plenty of restaurants all over the USA and Europe, they seem equally littered with both good and bad service. Understanding and adjusting to the culture of individual countries helps make your experiences better.
Yes, this isn't a question about the US or Europe.
Some of the absolute worst service I've received have been in the US, yet they ask for tips. I've also received some of the best service at a US restaurant, where the suggested tip was 10% and the prices where pretty low.
The weirdest thing I've experience is the large number of staff in US coffee shops, compared to locally, yet basically not being able to order, and then having a suggested tip at 20%. I've encountered this a multiple locations, and different chains. Four people, one person takes the order, one makes the drink, one continuously mop the floor and the last person just stands around (manager?) You could significantly increase the base pay by getting rid of two of these people.
> That makes Carl Sagan's claim some what Balonish.
His claim wasn't that invisible dragons don't exist. His claim was that you cannot tell the difference between a dragon that doesn't exist and one that is, to use your qualifier, currently undetectable by any means known to humanity. If you cannot tell the difference between existence and non-existence of something, any claims to its existence are vacuous.
Can you really prove that the last second really existed? I don't think so. It is like taking a frame from a movie reel and from that alone trying to prove that the previous frame really exist. You can't, there is always a possibility that it is the very first frame, or is just a photograph.
But does that stop you from claiming its existence (last second's)?
So as I said in another thread. This logic is completely ignoring the sea of subjective experience that we live in.
It is funny, Because these types of arguments arise because there is no real understanding of the nature of reality. And people have different assumptions on how deep the rabbit hole goes. So every one have a different definition of "existence" when they argue about it. I think Carl Sagan also had one, and it is a shame that he didn't make it explicit when he was talking about it.
It appears that he considered something to "exist" if it can interact with this world in a way that human beings can observe.
That is somewhat a narrow point of view. But it suits scientists because it adds to their authority, instead of taking away from it by implying that there could be a realm of existence that they can't reach or reason about. They say "Oh it is useless to muse about that, so don't do it. Limit your imagination to what we say!".
Professionally, I'm currently working on a touchscreen interface for a medical device warming cabinet. But in my spare time I'm learning to use the micro-mill I recently purchased, by creating a cutting tool for an electric hand drill that will make flat holes in wood that are cut to exact depth and centered correctly. This is for preparing worn out pivot holes in 19th century wooden works clocks to insert bushes.
Naive me was pretty shocked when, after my financial advisor suggested I start a donor advised fund for the tax advantages, my lawyer then explained the loopholes to use to cheat and have the tax free money come back to me instead of actually to charities.
I guess I'm not cut out to be a "big shot". I opened the DAF, but use the money for actually donating to charitable organizations to which I have no other connection.
So many of us growing up at that time were inspired by Adams. I think he quite literally is responsible for a huge number of people becoming programmers and game designers. I was lucky enough a few years ago to be able to thank him personally for what he did for me as a kid. He was very gracious and humbly admitted that he gets that a lot.
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