There are starting to be jokes written about how the traitors that tried to overthrow the government on January 6th, 2021 are all getting caught in part due to the fact that none of the dipshits wore masks. When I was a kid my brother and I would watch the G.I. Joe cartoon or read the comic book and it’s impressive how many Cobra agents wore masks or otherwise were difficult to identify.

Cobra Commander: TWO masks – either a cloth one or a metal helmet.
Destro: entire face permanently encased in malleable, yet identity-concealing metal.
Storm Shadow: wore a mask and usually kept distinctive tattoos covered.
Zartan: can change his face at any time. How do you prosecute a man like this?
Scar-Face: called Scar-Face because he literally had scars all over his face and wore a bandana because he knew he was an eyesore.
Scrap-Iron: wore one of those Ricky Williams-style helmets so you couldn’t see his eyes.
Raptor… Croc Master… Firefly… these are all masked terrorists that took precautions.

That leaves The Baroness, sure, but she at least had the “Clark Kent glasses” thing if she wanted. But alas, there is… Major Bludd.

Major Bludd just had an eye patch but no real mask or identity covering. The eye patch was medicinal. He wore the same clothes at work or if he was off the clock. One of the early issues of the comic book had a scene where two G.I. Joes — Stalker and Grand Slam — had to take a bus somewhere and Major Bludd happened to get on the bus at the same time. I would now like to post one of my favorite comic panels ever:

In this panel, a terrorist that is very much not wearing a mask got his jaw kicked in and broken like a bitch by a real American hero. It is important to know that Stalker and Grand Slam would not have identified Major Bludd if Bludd had simply worn a mask like his co-workers did when engaged in his anti-American terrorism. But Bludd didn’t wear a mask during his terrorism because he is a fucking moron. If this issue took place in the present day rather than the 1980s, it would be perfectly in character for Bludd to have been on his way to negotiate a group rate for all Cobra contractors and employees with Foursquare.

Just some opening day thoughts from someone who followed hockey very closely from the late 80s to the early 00s and then fell away from the game and is attempting to get back into it. I am sure these thoughts will be as insipid as hell six months from now.

The Sabres played the Capitals to an empty crowd last night to start the 2021 season. I think I can inline a tweet that has an image of Victor Olofsson’s beautiful goal (and Taylor Hall was AS ADVERTISED, best Sabre on the ice to the point where it was obvious as I am still memorizing the jersey numbers and it was clear just how good he is).

you know what time it is: victor olofsson goals of the 2021 season…

he starts himself off with a nice snipe off taylor hall's beautiful pass (vs WSH. 01.14.2021.) pic.twitter.com/MOxvjDMerH

— depressed buffalos #BLM (@depressedbflos) January 15, 2021

My favorite player growing up was Mark Recchi, who was a right winger that had a left shot and I have memories of Recchi sniping just like in the video above. Hockey Reference lists Olofsson as a right winger, but everything I had read leading up to that was that Olofsson was a left winger… I dunno. He looks DEADLY right there. I’m still trying to figure out how important the right wing and left wing spots are.

I didn’t really see Jeff Skinner at all last night. Clearly we don’t know what is going on with him and the Sabres coach (Ralph Krueger). Skinner is on the fourth line — on the third line at LW was Tobias Reider, who I had unfortunately not heard of before I saw the opening lineups last night. Again, my bad, but Jesus. Skinner is clearly in coach Ralph Krueger’s doghouse. What else could it be? Skinner is making $9 million a year to put the puck in the net, why he wouldn’t get paired with wunderprospect Dylan Cozens I have no idea. I just don’t know!!

Eric Staal had a turnover that was pretty costly but when I go back into the office again for the first time in however many months I’m sure I’m going to screw up too and microwave fish or something. (I’m sure my co-workers loved the weekly curry deliveries.) One of the goals the Capitals scored was an empty netter at the end, so really the game was 5-4 going into the last minute – Krueger pulled the goalie with like 4 minutes left and it paid off. Pulling the goalie that early was a new strategy for me, for some reason I thought it just got done in the last minute but with the Sabres down two goals with 4 minutes left it made sense.

This game wasn’t a moral victory or anything but it was entertaining enough to watch. And the Sabres play the Caps again tonight. One of the things I tried to do for myself is learn a little bit about who Buffalo is playing. I knew the Caps won the Cup in 2017-2018 but the pre-game show for the Caps implied that the coach was a different guy — the Caps won the Cup with a guy named Barry Trotz, who left the team after winning the Cup due to a contract dispute. That’s crazy! I feel like if a coach ever wins a championship in Buffalo for hockey or football that guy would never be allowed to fly out of the city, something they really only initiated for people involved with the Capitals this last week, ha ha ha.

I made a new game with Mike Sousa! It’s called Jay Schilling’s Edge of Chaos. Let me see if I can in-line the blurb.

There was an aye-aye behind the bar, staring at me horribly. Or maybe its face just froze that way. I was waiting for my client at ten at night in a dusty, dirty town in the middle of nowhere. Clouds out here were apparently one of the thirty million newly unemployed. There was a missing woman and my client was about to hire an amateur private detective with the world’s most technologically advanced cellular phone. This was going to be a cinch. Seriously. It’ll take me like two searches with it to close this case. Three if mid-investigation I check on my torrents.

Y-You’re a player of the 2020 Interactive Fiction competition. I’m Jay. Let’s straddle the edge.

Download Jay Schilling’s Edge of Chaos (Story File)

Download the TADS game runner for Windows – HTML TADS, Linux or OSX – QTads.

YOU: You’re trying to get the Commodore 64 working in an emulator but you didn’t have one growing up or you don’t remember some specifics. That’s ok! Commodork is here to help you! Take it away, Rob!

01. BASIC

Powering on the Commodore 64 places you at a BASIC prompt. Note that by simply turning the machine on, the amount of available RAM drops from 64k to 39k. Fake news!

02. ATTACHING A DISK IMAGE

All Commodore 64 emulators recognize .D64 files as Commodore disk images. In real life you would would insert a disk into your disk drive before using it. In an emulator, you must “attach” the disk. Different emulators have different ways to do this but they’re all the same basic idea. Note that each physical disk drive on the Commodore 64 had an assigned number on the serial bus, and the first one was always #8. 99% of all Commodore programs assume you are loading from drive 8, and many/most multifile programs will fail if loaded from a different drive.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few of us learned about the PICO-8 fantasy console (get it here – https://itch.io/b/520/bundle-for-racial-justice-and-equality – for $5 and make your own PICO-8 games) the other weekend and Pinback made an Asteroids-inspired Asteroids-style game called Pinneroids.

Check it out here and let us know your high score in the forum!

It has been one year since Frobozz died, here is a picture of him.

I am writing for a project that looks at the top 50 games, as selected and gently encouraged by the posters of Caltrops.com. There’s a couple pieces left to the project, but you can check it out by going to https://www.caltrops.com or if you’re reading this at a later point in time, starting here:

The Caltrops Top 50 Games of 2010-2019 Part One: Honorable Mentions

The Caltrops Top 50 Games of 2010-2019: #50-40

The Caltrops Top 50 Games of 2010-2019: #39-30

The Caltrops Top 50 Games of 2010-2019: #29-21

There is a BBS attached to this website. Here are some fun threads you might want to read!

For three years, Aardvark has been doing a web comic he calls Crazy Doodles. The previous link is to the beginning, here is a good jumping-on point for some more recent ones.

Flack has been giving us his take on NBA news.

We celebrate life and death in this thread which is full of people we can’t believe died before Tdarcos did.

Hungry? Pinback gives us a recipe for Moroccan Pork Stew with Tumeric Rice.

The Mandalorian Thread! Don’t go in fresh, there be spoilers there.

If you’re reading this, we invite you to register an account and participate in the discussion!

The 2019 Interactive Fiction Competition is live!! Check out all the games in this year’s comp here at https://ifcomp.org.

The game I made is called Enceladus, you can download it through the IF Comp site here. The Windows version is included in the zip file, but you can get what you need to play it on Linux and a Mac by going here.

Enceladus is a science fiction game with jokes. On a small saucer-shaped spaceship, a werewolf has somehow boarded your ship. You play as an ensign, just an x-ray technician and attempt to navigate the crisis. If you have never played any of my games before, it’s a great jumping-on point.

Play the games in this year’s comp, write some reviews, let people know what you think about all the games. This year’s pool of authors are one of the nicest groups of people I’ve ever found myself a part of and any feedback created is going to inspire some great people. Enjoy!

Many, many years ago I was trying to get a job with any of the three computer game companies in Colorado. I interviewed with two of them and noticed how they used the term THE INDUSTRY to talk about the video game-making industry. I’ve seen that same thing as a casual observer to other fields like photography. It’s always been a “stop for a second” kind of phrasing to me, where people that speak that way are almost sounding to me like they are on the edge of a cult. But then I realized that I refer to the yearly Interactive Fiction Competition that way. THE COMP. It makes me happy to think of it that way, I’m okay with doing it too.

After a 15 year hiatus, I have entered a small game into this year’s comp. And I’m really excited and nervous about it, I feel like a kid again. I never meant to stop entering. I did a little better each time I entered a game and learned a lot each time. (Though I give mad credit to Mike Sousa for our collaboration on our last game together that we did in 2004.) I just got going on a Spring Competition game, so no fall comp that release for me… and then five years of development for what has become a commercial game, then a quick one for a Hugo Competition, and then the last seven years I’ve been doing the text game / RPG. I took a break from it for my entry for this year’s Comp. I took a break from that for a couple of months to do this.

The making-text-games scene has changed a great deal since 2004. I got a chance to meet the great majority of my Internet online text game eFriends in 2009 and it was awesome. And over the years I’ve had more chances to meet up when they have come to where I live, or when I have flown out to where they are. The community has been a real positive for me, I’m very lucky in that regard. There’s a dude somewhere out there really into frogs who went to a frog convention and wound up sitting in a room with 15 unwashed enthusiasts of Pepe. This has not been that for me.

I don’t mean to be cagey with the game I am submitting, that all comes out on October 1st and I’ll make an update here. It’s good to be back.