Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Walley World now has Arcade 1up cabinets for sale. I want one, but they're a bit expensive, & I don't have a place to put an upright arcade cabinet.

It's a fun little thing, but it's not what I thought I was getting. What got me so upset are the less than authentic collision detection, such as shots passing right between segments of a joined centipede & being killed by a flea without being touched by it, & the fact that poisoned mushrooms aren't restored to normal like partly-shot mushrooms are between lives.

Those "Arcade Classics" mini retro games (about 6" or 15cm) in the toy aisles? I should've known I wouldn't get an authentic arcade-version experience from any of them when I saw the Pac-Man one: fixed-position LED style.

I got Centipede, & all I know is it's almost but definitely *not* the arcade version. (Maybe it's the Atari 7800 version? I only had the 2600.) Yay for retro games being the in thing, but I still feel cheated.

Another review: https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2017/08/basic-fun-for-retro-gamers-stealth.html?m=1

Happy 30th birthday to the Morris Worm, the most famous worm to prove that networked computers can be threatened by insufficiently reasoned noble intent, not just obviously malicious intent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

It looks like the simplest & long-term easiest thing for me to make a generated static website is going to be a makefile running page bodies through docutils & feeding the results into templates written in m4 macros.

reST is mature & unlikely to change, but make & m4 are in posix, which means they'll stay the same for the rest of my life as long as I avoid GNU extensions.

py36-rst2html5 on a year-old Celeron Braswell CPU: 1.05 seconds.

py36-rst2html5 on a 10-year-old Core 2 Quad Kentsfield CPU: 0.55 seconds.

Same OS, same version, same input file, just different hardware. ... Wat.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Tomorrow's half-off candy sale day.

Yay, avatars & images are rendering again!