“Your blood pressure has gone up 8 points!”
I cut my teeth on the original, ADVENT, and my dad and I even used the source (Fortran!) to hack my own similar game.
Then in the '90s when Inform and TADS came around that made it a lot easier.
Say, wasn’t that the super-obscure reference that led to solving the mystery in Ready Player One? (Jackal joke.)
I discovered Infocom first (Zork, specifically), but even at the time I quickly learned that Adventure was the forebearer, and I played it too. For me this was all on CP/M. It seems quaint now, but at the time Infocom was close to magic: Adventure could handle basics like GET SWORD or GO NORTH, but Infocom could parse things like GET ALL PAPERS EXCEPT GREEN or DROP ALL BUT LAMP, and it just blew my mind.
I finally got a full night’s sleep for the first time this year. (Doc has me trying a new med, and one of the side effects is insomnia.) I needed that.
Also, not to dredge up an off topic thing, but:
For the whole game, you have an item in your inventory called “No Tea.” It doesn’t do anything. It just confirms that you, in fact, do not have any tea. When you finally get a cup of tea, you automatically drop No Tea. If you pick up No Tea, you put down the tea.
The way out of this is to get knocked out. When you “wake up,” you are once again in the dark. This time, it’s a maze, and it has lethal electric sparks. If you get to the right place in the maze, you find your path blocked by a strange object. You need to pick that up, unblocking the path. You then wake up back where you were.
The game does not explicitly tell you this, but the dark maze with the electricity is, in fact, your own mind. (Walls of neurons with electricity jumping across the synapses. Which is not actually how it works, but it’s a metaphor, so don’t mind that.) The object blocking your path was your common sense. Getting rid of it allows you to pick up Tea and No Tea at the same time, which impresses a certain being enough that you can move forward to the last stage of the game.
As for fiber: Congrats on the upgrade, Squid. My building is getting wired for FIOS now (which involves a lot of drilling and banging) but literally no one here wants it just yet because the building recently signed a 5 year group package deal with the cable company for every apartment to get a TV and internet bundle (with a bunch of extra channels) included in our monthly maintenance payments.
Apparently, local law says that if a company wants to install wiring in the main hallways, the building can’t say “no” or “try again later.” Which is weird. But I am definitely in favor of the cable companies having viable competition and customers having options.
No OT, but I did get double time and a half yesterday, so I made bank.
AHHHH! It happened!! Mark Cavendish has signed with a new team! The Quest to break the record continues!
(@klcorridon may be the only person who knows what I’m talking about. Carry on.)
Ah, cool! I’m trying to remember if that sounds familiar at all… it’s been a few decades 
Okay, this is mean, but… I’m grinning about everyone’s complaints about the new Scooby Doo thing. Because I never liked anything about the original show, ever. Not even as a kid. : P Saying that someone “ruined” its latest iteration, to me, is like saying that someone “ruined” a nuclear disaster site by putting pink flamingos out front. Big deal.
Man I love that metaphor. And to be fair, Scooby Doo is one of those things that’s comically easy to adapt to new scenarios. So if you don’t like it, well, there’s always fanfiction.
Well, there are a lot of shows that I don’t care about one bit (and honestly, Scooby Doo was never my favorite although I did watch it as a kid), but I can sympathize when people are upset about something they enjoy getting destroyed by a new iteration, especially when it’s clear that there was no attempt to maintain any continuity with the show. It’s simply being used because there’s a fanbase already.
Scooby Doo never did it for me. I was raised on an almost exclusive cartoon diet, so I’ve seen every episode, but even as a kid I could tell it was lower quality. In an alternate reality, it could just as easily have been Jabberjaw or Speed Buggy or the Funky Phantom that managed to capture everyone’s hearts. They’re pretty much all the same show.
Scooby Doo gets rebooted so often, that even if one version ends up a dud, you just have to wait a bit for another possibly better one to come around.
Well, there is a porn version, but I don’t think it’s canon. It was pretty funny, though.
Just to piggy-back on this…I’m somewhat excited about having bought a 2nd KRK Classic 5 powered monitor AND two mounts that clamp onto a flat surface, such as a desk, so as to preserve room available on the desk surface.
My little project will not involve any drilling or banging, I’m sad to say, but it should be a neat solution, when combined with a tiny little line mixer, and lots of velcro to put various audio effects…where?..wherever I darned well please!
Smells like victory!
In fact, I’m so excited about the idea of clamp-on mounting devices, I have ordered a clamp-on music stand so I can restack the Hammond on top of the 88 digital and still be able to sight-read music, without having to wear eyeglasses to see a stand perched way at the back of the “situation”: up-close and personal is how I like my scores. What kind of solution is that? A MIDI solution! The 1980s live!
And the possibilities are endless for other mounting opportunities! Who knows where it may end! Clamps on top of clamps on top of surfaces, Dutch angles, everything!
And my feet can sit on any surface I desire, unencumbered!
I predict my next visit to Walmart or Harbor Freight will be fruitful and frugal.
And never forget: the proper cables are a joy to behold and to handle. Monoprice be thy name!
The only version worth caring about is the parody from the Animaniacs’ Back In Style episode.
“I like, fell on my beads, Maaaannn.” : P
I’ve been rewatching the extended edition of Lord of the Rings, which is always a good time of course. I had a dream about Aragorn last night that was nothing more than him simply saying something really nice to me but – and I feel incredibly silly saying this cuz I don’t normally get blushy over fictional characters – it was so nice that I woke up grinning, and all day since whenever I think about it I get a little giggly. Now I know exactly how Eowyn feels. Anyway. That’s what I’m smiling about 
Far Out!
I can play four chords, or something!
I favor a very dissonant style, combined with microtonal tuning styles. Sure! That’s the ticket. It’s all part of the spirit of music’s great plan for my life.
But still! I win at Page 1 of Randy Vincent’s *Three Note Voicings and Beyond"!
Plus watching Werewolf.
So, WereYES!!!
I haaaaated that show as a kid. Even as a three-year-old, I understood there were no masks convincing enough to fool anyone, nor do movie projectors create anything remotely ghostly.
That said, if Scooby Doo was ever ruined, it was when they brought in Scrappy, the most hated character in SatAM history.
When I got older, I realized that the whole show was sort of the ultimate end trope of Gothic horror, Ann Radcliffe’s spooky hallways and mysterious rattling chains which, in the end, are nothing more than a real estate deal gone bad.
So when my kids were old enough to be into it, and they flipped the script and had real monsters, I kind of liked that. And then they did that whole David-Lynch-Werner-Herzog-inspired Mystery, Inc show, which took the whole premise to absurd extremes and that was pretty great. (Featuring our own Jeffrey Combs as H. P. Hatecraft.)
But that doesn’t erase the horror of “Scooby Doo and the Ghoul School” or “A Pup Named Scooby Doo”.
No show has been “ruined” more, arguably.
One of the gas in “Mystery, Inc.” is that it lampshades that exact thing, when a feverish Scooby Doo imagines he’s taking part in a mystery competition between him, Jabberjaw, Speed Buggy, and the Funky Phantom.
I have to weigh in that, even as a small child, I found Scooby whatever prime entertainment.
Though, people are mad about Velma or whatever?
Not much of a prize winner myself, but, but…really? I didn’t win the county science fair in second grade. Second place. But I got mean mad at third place in county spelling bee at age eight or whatever.
Some people. I tell you what.
Turn to liquor, childhood fantasies: because that’s how it does, y’all! Whoo-yeah!
Unbelievable. Some people.
It’s just a game! Lighten up, Egon!
I’m thinking about dropping about yeah bucks on this model, because turning 47 in a few months, and what the hell. Yeah, I can finance it with credit, so yolo. https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/XK5Dlx TBH, I drink like a fish and smoke like a chimney, and have no kids that I know of. I’ll pay it off.
So, yeah, I’m not expecting to live long, nor prosper, but I can cover this debt. It’s worth it to me to play on a decent instrument (the XK-5 is not exactly that, but the drawbars are in the right spots, so it’s close enough).
