Q: Why do people study dead languages?

A: To experience what it was like to live in the past.

Same thing with programming C-64 games, they’re like archaeologist engineers working with sticks, stones and mud.

Creating Guitar Hero for the Commodore is quite impressive:

(source: Toni Westbrook via Fark)

Could this be the future new Lego video game from Traveler’s Tales?

Image source: Flickr

From the San Diego Union-Tribune, Friday, January 7, 2000:

This was an actual ad clipped from the 1983 edition of Street and Smith’s Pro Football Yearbook:

What a tagline… “THE CLUB THAT BEATS THE STREETS.”

I wonder how many people O.J. has beaten on the street with a club.

#1
Only in Minnesota…

Imagine, calling your business insurance company, and having to explain the basis of your claim:

… can a rampaging deer cause thousands of dollars in damage to an office building.

Source:  Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Sunday June 7, 2009

Okay, does this actually work?

***

The Verndale, Minnesota Police Department has an interesting report to “blotter”:

Source: Brainerd Dispatch, Sunday June 7, 2009.

READ MORE ABOUT IT:

As featured in today’s Jeopardy! episode:

“Grass”

PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

Source: Bartleby.com Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer.

Ben Heck is at it again:

I am always amazed at other people’s modding skills.  Wow.  I can’t even put together a kid’s model of a Ford Thunderbird.

Great attention to detail, including the color scheme of the early 80s C-64.  I also love that it uses SD cards.

(via Fark and Make Online)

For a couple of years, I took my focus off writing. I attempted to study business, corporations, marketing. Something, I realized, held me back. The desire was still burning to create, and once I went back through my notes and files, I made a decision to write and market myself again. I intended to read this at a poetry night in San Diego, but I never had the opportunity.

It’s April again. Everything happens in April. My next 20 years of being a writer starts today.   Please enjoy this poem.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Brainerd Public Library concluded its seasonal book sale by offering a paper bag full of books for $2.00. (Sadly, the bag, overloaded with my choices, didn’t make it into the house and now rests in the recycle bin.  So it goes.)

I grabbed two by Stephen King, a couple of tomes by Erma Bombeck, the last poems of Allen Ginsburg, The Millionaire Next Door, a couple of retro educational books, The People’s Almanac #1 and some children’s books.

I also picked up this vintage computing book:

For the retail price of 5.95 plus tax 1983 dollars – you have 31 games to play on your Texas Instruments computer!

Wait, there’s a catch.

YOU have to type the code into computer, and you also need the Extended Basic cartridge to program and play half of the games.

After all that work typing in the codes, you can begin playing Zombies in the Swamp, Shark Hunt or Las Vegas a Go Go. But how do you save your work?

Presumably, according to Wikipedia’s article, a tape deck and floppy drive were available as peripherals to save TI basic. Though nobody I knew in the early 80s had anything more than the basic console, which cost $600. Add $50-200 for the read-write peripherals, and that’s a lot of money to invest in programming BASIC games with limited appeal and simple vector graphics and/or sprites.

Maybe I’ll get a TI emulator and code these games just to pique my curiosity.

***

Parsec was the star of the TI-99/4A, and more than once a couple of us stayed after school in Mrs. Graham’s classroom playing it.