josemanuel @josemanuel@qoto.org

First World problems:

To be honest, I wouldn’t want to invest in a country that has a tendency to shut its borders for years, or even centuries, for the darndest reasons. Call me weird, but I don’t find that trustworthy, business- or otherwise.

Some of the places I stayed in when I was there years ago were forced to close due to the pandemic. 赦せない.

I like to repost job offers because I was unemployed for a long time years ago, and I don’t want anyone to have to go through that. Recently, I decided to make a rule of reposting requests for meetups, too, because I know how hard it is to make friends online and I want to make the process as easy and painless as possible for everyone.

Sad news indeed. I learned to program using Modula-2. The language itself was awful in many ways, but it was perfect for learning. I will always be grateful for his work. RIP.

Most people think the Y2K scare was a scam because they were sort of forced into buying new, “Y2K ready” computers when computers themselves didn’t need fixing.

I personally owned a Unysys 486 from 1991 that worked fine many years after 2000, and I bet my MSX2 would have worked fine, too.

If anything, it was a software problem, but computer and software manufacturers made it everybody’s problem. That was the scam and the disinfo.

Should software engineers be treated as heroes because they had to solve a problem that they created themselves? That’s the real question.

I have to be honest: I have received more abuse here than I ever did on Twitter, and it’s getting increasingly common, which goes to prove what I said a few years ago: it’s not the platform, it’s the people.

My sentiments exactly, except I don’t think 2024 will be any better, at least in the short term. This decade has been FUBAR from the very start.

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.