josemanuel @josemanuel@qoto.org

In the latest issue of the Spanish edition of RetroGamer magazine, there is a piece on Ron Gilbert. In it, the author (and Ron, I guess) wonders why his games were successful in Europe, but not so much in the US, where Sierra and Infocom dominated. The reason is pretty clear: Lucasfilm games were translated, while the others were not.

I'm sure _King's Quest II_ was an awesome game, but I will never know, because I couldn't even understand what the game wanted from me, and the mechanics were so unintuitive and unfriendly that, even after trying with a dictionary, I gave up utterly bored. (Funny anecdote about _Leisure Suit Larry_: after days of trying to bypass the age verification test, all my cousin and I could do in the actual game was to get in the bar, go to the bathroon and URINATE. That's what Sierra games were like for non-English speakers.)

Monkey Island, on the other hand, was funny, well-crafted and just difficult enough to be challenging, but, most importantly, it was in Spanish.

Game magazines did a lot to popularise it, too.

I don't want to derail his thread by disagreeing, but, to be completely honest, I don't even consider BASIC a proper programming language.

It was needlessly hard to type and edit, and impossible to structure your programs in any meaningful way. It wasn't even suitable as a learning tool. Having to number the lines made it hard to get into the ‘Flow’, if you know what I mean. It made programming slow and boring.

Someone in the thread mentioned that people did really cool things with it. Well, people do really cool things with legos, too, but nobody in their right mind would build anything _real_ with them. “I'm gonna build me a house with legos,” said no one ever. (Well, there's always the odd someone, I'm sure.)

You know what's cringe? People who add titles to their online names. I don't mean “PhD” or “MD” (even though these are also cringey in this context), but things like “Joannie, Who Appeases the Animals” or “Melissa, The One With Big Wings”. (Hopefully those two examples don't exist. I haven't checked.) Why do people do that? Genuinely curious.

Today Skeletor fools himself thinking that being surrounded by a bunch of yes-men will help him in any way.

Talent is just the absence of fear.

Just as the artist is entitled to make art as he feels like it, the audience is entitled to like it or not, but, in both cases, we should be intellectually honest. The artist cannot criticise the audience for not liking his art, and the audience must never dismiss art based on their own prejudices.

An extreme case of this is, of course, Leni Riefenstahl, whose movies were nazi propaganda, but one can't judge them based on that, but on their own artistic merits or demerits.

I've criticised Evan in the past, but this seems to me like a pretty good idea.

One of the saddest things anyone can do on social media is announcing that they're blocking someone. The other is thinking that being blocked by others is a badge of honour.

To be honest, I never stopped trusting books over the Internet, and, depending on the topic, older books over newer ones.

After all, before MGC, there was SEO, and before that there were stupid blog authors who wouldn't do proper research.

The only problem with books is that certain fields changed so quickly that they made books obsolete after a very short period of time. Also, editors got progressively worse at their job, to the point that I'm beginning to suspect they may no longer exist.

I can't wait for tiktokers to watch _2001, A Space Odyssey_ and make videos saying: “OMG, the Barbie song!”

Aunque en este caso concreto se puede deducir el país e incluso la ciudad por la instancia y el prefijo telefónico, lo suyo sería aportar esa información explícitamente.

Nobody believes me, but this article that I haven't even clicked on confirms what I've been saying all along, namely that cats are evil.

The best book about Ruby still is, and probably always will be, _Why's (Poignant) Guide To Ruby_:

http://poignant.guide/

#ruby #programming