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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Dragon 32, if I recall correctly.

    Mostly try to learn some basic (probably was too young for that), play some games, and try to get the cassette to work. It almost certainly wasn’t the right computer for a kid my age.

    Later, if I recall correctly, some model of Atari ST, which again was mostly wasted, though it introduced me to graphics editing, and some 16MHz (with turbo on!) 286 computer with a 65MB hard drive and CGA graphics (later upgraded to EGA and eventually VGA, though that might have been with a later 486), which introduced me to DOS (and extended and expanded memory), WordStar, dBASE 3, Lotus123, LucasArts and Sierra adventures, Wing Commander, a multitude of CRPGs, and eventually Windows 3.x.

    I didn’t really get online until I went to the university, back in the glorious days of Yahoo, and the much superior Altavista, surfing on Netscape, before Internet Explorer ruined everything.

    There were some great SGI Indigo machines (my first contact with a Unix type OS) and a prehistoric VAX machine with actual dumb terminals (never saw the actual server, sadly) for us to practice with there at the university, though, so that was great (though it didn’t make up for the Pascal).









  • Sounds more like an enlightened centrist to me, but same difference really.

    If a maniac wanted to shoot someone ten times, and the victim wated not to be shot, the enlightened centrist would smugly proclaim that the maniac shooting the victim five times would be a just middle ground that’d be fair to both parties, and that the victim would be unreasonable, intolerant, and antidemocratic for not agreeing to it.

    Same result, orders of magnitude more hypocrisy and idiocy, and of course you can’t criticise them, since by enabling the maniacs they’re just debating and trying to find a compromise, and disagreeing with them is being hostile and going against the very principles of democracy itself.

    Malignant asshats, the whole lot of them, wouldn’t recognize the paradox of tolerance if you violently hit them in the head with it.




  • “…And that’s what your holy men discuss, is it?” [asked Granny Weatherwax.]

    “Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin, for example.” [answered Mightily Oats.]

    “And what do they think? Against it, are they?”

    “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”

    “Nope.”

    “Pardon?”

    “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

    “It’s a lot more complicated than that–”

    “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

    “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–”

    “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

    —from Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett.