Vintage Gaming

So I recently refreshed my RetroPi “gaming rig.” I wanted to mark the occasion by listing some of my favorite games from each of the generations. I’m not saying that I’m a connoisseur, and have played thousands of games, and can speak definitively about which games from each platform are the best. These are just the ones I’ve come across which I thought were good.

Nintendo

  • The Legend of Zelda
  • The Legend of Zelda 2, The Adventure of Link
  • Metroid
  • Castlevania
  • Bionic Commando
  • U.S. Championship V’Ball (trust me)

Super Nintendo

  • Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Turtles in Time
  • Street Fighter 2
  • Donkey Kong Country
  • Super Metroid

It is important to note that A Link to the Past may be one of the greatest video games ever made. And I mean right up there with The Witcher 3.

Arcade

  • Defender
  • Galaga
  • Centipede
  • Dig Dug
  • Robotron
  • Tempest
  • Moon Patrol
  • Star Wars
  • Double Dragon
  • Spy Hunter
  • Tron
  • Joust
  • Golden Axe
  • Gauntlet
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • The Simpsons
  • X-Men
  • Captain America and The Avengers
  • 1942
  • Robocop
  • R-Type
  • Pooyan
  • Sunset Riders

DOS

  • M.U.L.E
  • Archon
  • The Bard’s Tale I, II, & III
  • Wolfenstein 3D
  • DOOM
  • Duke Nukem 3D
  • Myst
  • Quake
  • Outlaws
  • Quake II
  • Unreal Tournament
  • Descent
  • Descent II
  • Fallout
  • Fallout 2
  • Command & Conquer 2, Red Alert

You may notice that there is no Mario-related content on these lists. That’s intentional.

Unseen Effort – The Daily WTF

The only downside to working for him was his disdain toward open source solutions. Anita couldn’t use any NuGet packages whatsoever; everything had to be built from scratch. She learned a ton while making her own JSON parsing library and working out OAuth 2.0 authentication.

Source: Unseen Effort – The Daily WTF

At the bottom of the article, there’s an in-line advertisement for a product which wraps NuGet with permissions. What a perfect way to deliver an ad. Is the whole story fake, in order to deliver it? And what a perfectly “corporate” product, to further exacerbate developer frustrations in large company environments.

Please don’t tell my company (Initech) about the existence of this product. I think there are several mid-level managers who would experience actual arousal at the thought of implementing it.

The Ticking Bomb of Crypto Fascism – In These Times

Crypto, like meme stocks, is a poor replacement for the American dream. A functional nation would end gerrymandering, pass campaign finance reform, end the filibuster, abolish the undemocratic U.S. Senate, tax great wealth, institute public healthcare and build a social safety net to ensure that no one in our very wealthy country slipped all the way through the financial cracks of life and was ruined. But that’s not the American way. The American way is to cheer on the few lucky ultra-rich people, and fete them as heroes, and look for a way to emulate them, although such a thing is mathematically impossible.

…

The bitterest irony, perhaps, is that while the regular folks flock to crypto because they think it’s a utopian land of opportunity for the little guy to make a buck, it is, in fact, largely controlled by a small cartel of rich investors. Just like everything else.

Source: The Ticking Bomb of Crypto Fascism – In These Times

Well said.

Be Careful What You Search For

I saw a post on Imgur that said that Little Cesar’s was going to raise the price of its “Hot and Ready” pizzas, so I wanted to go to Twitter, find an original reference, so that I could make a snarky comment about how my local shop never has any anyway.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT SEARCH FOR “HOT AND READY” ON TWITTER.

Spoiler alert: It’s all gay porn.

Or do, I’m not the boss of you. Maybe that’s your thing.

Conservative social networks keep making the same mistake

Given the extremely predictable turmoil that emerged from Gettr’s content policies, though, I wonder if there isn’t something to this: a false-flag social network, set up only to watch it burn to the ground.

Source: Conservative social networks keep making the same mistake

In this… post-modern era of the Information Age, how are we ever supposed to actually conclude anything about anything? I’m still scratching my head over the twin scandals of Trump’s supposed “pee tape” — which was a false flag, but reported as true — and Hunter Biden’s “laptop” — which was a real story, but reported as a false flag. By the time the dust finally settled, and the actual facts of these stories have been sorted out, and the clown show of perpetrators and accomplices revealed, we find that the political sides don’t care about the truth anyway. The impressions of those stories are what they took away, and that’s all that mattered to the people who perpetrated them on the American public. Where does that leave us?

At this point, I think it’s becoming clear that one of the most important tools of a false flag operation is, in fact, to weaponize social media and news organizations to fight with each other, to occlude the facts until your disinformation campaign has entrenched enough people in the opinions you want them to have that it doesn’t matter when the truth comes out. By the time it does, they don’t care to learn any more about the stories, you will have had the effect on people you wanted, and while the talking heads are sifting through the rubble, your next operation is already underway. Again, as a society, where does that leave us?

I’m not hopeful, that’s for certain.

From Node to Ruby on Rails | D U N K

Building the web app in Rails took me 2 days – the same thing in Node would have taken 2 weeks. I’ve also included things I wouldn’t have attempted to build on Node/Express until I proved the idea out (editing a profile? Psht please – I’ll wait till someone requests that). People in the HN comments always accuse the Node ecosystem of making you re-invent the wheel for every project. But I thought that was just the way things were. Now I realize the truth to their words.

Source: From Node to Ruby on Rails | D U N K

I’ve been saying this for years, but DHH endorsed this writeup.

Why Don’t They Believe Us?

You’re struggling to understand where all this vaccine hesitancy comes from. Let me help you.

Source: Why Don’t They Believe Us?

Terrific summary of the last few years of politics, as played out in the media. N.B., Twitter is never mentioned. For those that think that Twitter is a critical piece of the “news landscape,” and for the talking heads who try to make news stories tweets, Twitter is still downstream of CNN and Fox News.

The Oracle in the Matrix movies, explained before Resurrections – Polygon

The Oracle is, according to the Architect, the “mother” of the Matrix. She is an intuitive program originally designed to study the human psyche who proposed a solution by creating a simulated reality that would offer humanity a choice to mistrust the very nature of that reality, if only on an unconscious level. This solution more or less worked, with the exception that every iteration of this model of the Matrix inadvertently resulted in an anomaly known as “The One” — a human being with inexplicable power to bend the nature of the Matrix to their will. If left unchecked, both The One and the growing human resistance would pose a threat to the stability of The Matrix. To correct for this error, the Architect and the Oracle created a process by which the Matrix would be rebooted, one that would allow the system to continue to exist by assimilating the inevitability of human resistance itself as a crucial component in service of its continued existence. By the time Neo has awakened in the first Matrix movie, the Matrix has already been rebooted five times, with each version having been facilitated by the destruction of Zion, the last human city on Earth, and with it the death of any human being with knowledge of that previous version of the Matrix.

Source: The Oracle in the Matrix movies, explained before Resurrections – Polygon

Swing and a miss. Rather than think that The One is an unavoidable outcome of the programming of the Matrix, it makes a lot more sense if you understand that the Architect intentionally programmed the function of The One into the simulation, in order to give those who reject it a standard to rally around. Everyone who gets freed from the Matrix joins the rebellion, comes to Zion, believes in the “religion” of Morpheus, and comes to center their efforts on a hope in their savior, Neo. It just makes it all easier to control, right? This way, the Architect can efficiently gather up all the people who reject the Matrix — that problem with the natural consequence of at-least subconscious choice — eliminate them before they become a real threat, and then start the process of removing and eliminating those that reject the sim all over again. I feel that this was all pretty clear in the second movie, so I don’t know why this article sums it up in the way that it does.

The Galaxy of a Single Cell

A Single Human Cell

This is the most-detailed photo of a human cell to date. The simplest single-celled organisms aren’t materially less complex. Each tiny strand in the center is a chain of thousands of very-specific combinations of four, very-complicated organic molecules. Then there are all the other complicated parts, and the tiny molecular “machines” that facilitate the functioning of the cell.

According to the world’s thinking and teaching, you are supposed to ignore everyone’s commonly-lived experience about how everything in this world tends to fall apart, and believe that something like this just magically came together in a series of perfect, yet so-far-inexplicable, experiments — in the middle of total chaos, mind you — and then went on to form all known life.

Every time I see something like this, it cracks me up. It’s far, far easier to believe in a supernatural power as the source of our origins than it is to believe that evolution explains our existence. Not because there’s more compelling evidence in religion (as I believe there is), but because the theory of evolution, as an explanation of the origins of life, doesn’t even pass the smell test compared to our known understanding of how our physical reality works.

Spam at Google

As a programmer, who maintained his own email server, directly on the internet, from his home, for many years, I understand the problem of spam better than a lot of other people. It’s tricky. I get that. But, come on, Google. You have 100% certainty that this stuff is garbage, and can be zapped before it even hits the junk folder.