The promise: Star Trek computers.

The reality: whispering to my phone to turn on the lights, terrified my computer will overhear and tell me it can’t unless I unlock it.

Yesterday i got lots of #retrocomputer , some normal one and some where i can only say WOW!
I had to go 100km from here to a meeting. While i was waiting i got an email from one inside the same town!

After the meeting i drove to him - and ...

I'll write more sooner or later ... also with pictures. I was at home to late ....

if you're into the history of Ultima, Origin Systems and ebooks, andrea contato has released his Through the Moongate Part 1 (200 pages) for free for the next few days

i'll spare you a book review - but yes, it's worth reading. it got a poor quality translation from italian, but the stories are still enjoyable.

https://www.amazon.com/Through-Moongate-Richard-Garriott-Systems-ebook/dp/B07SKKTSNQ

#books #ultima #gamePreservation #history

power over ethernet

"Has anyone here ever played 'Core Wars'?"

It wasn't the weirdest question our lecturer had asked the class, but it was close. Professor Elicia Berman had finished the syllabus for RE211 Comparative Religion and Metapsychology last week; this final lecture of the term was listed as "Coda: Conspiracy Theories".

"It's an old computer game", she continued, "where the players write software programs that all reside in the address space of a single simulated computer. The goal of each program is to eliminate the others by overwriting their memory, and to maximise its own survivability by replicating to control the shared address space. This is directly analogous to religions and other metacognitive entities."

A murmur ran around the room. This was a little more off the wall than usual.

"As you'd know if you've read my book 'The Origin of Metaconsciousness in the Arthropoidal Hivemind', it is my thesis that metacognitive entities such as anthives and beeswarms made the leap to mammals around a hundred and fifty thousand years BCE. Religions were the first metacognitive entities to run on the mammalian brain; since then joined by nation-states, corporations, conspiracy theories and political parties."

I was sitting up straight now. I'd heard of the epithet "Bizarro Berman" applied to Dr B and her off the cuff closing lectures covering extrasyllabic material. The University had tried to stop these, but tenure still meant something at The Big U.

Berman continued: "The common goal of all these entities is survival. And like in core wars the way to do that is to expand territory and eliminate competitors."

"This semester we have reviewed the major religions that are still executing on human brains today. We've seen that these all feature a characteristic fictive origin narrative. For example Judaism purports to have begun around 2000BCE yet the entire text of the Pentateuch in fact dates to no earlier than 300BCE, Christianity has no evidence for the historicity of its founder, with gospels texts unable to be substantiated before the second century of the common era, and some not before the tenth. Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, and all the others we've studied consist of a narrative that, looking back, shades into myth somewhere in the first quarter of their purported histories."

"Why do religions do this? Camouflage! A metacognitive entity executing on a hundred million brains for several centuries has sufficient spatiotemporal baseline to manifest a very small retrotemporal instantiation–say a virus or a tumor–in one brain. But if the founder is lost in mythical nonhistory, retroassaniation becomes a crapshoot."

"The same is true today, Bermuda Triangle, Roswell Incident, MAGA, Facebook, all these metacognitive entities transition from fiction to actual history /somewhere/ in their development but their survival in part depends on concealing the phase-change from competitors."

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

So, @rek and I have been working on turning some of the analog communication knowledge recorded on https://rabbitwaves.ca into downloadable zines for quick access.

We'll do one for various topics that we want to explore with the website: food preservation, food growing, exercise & health, etc..

Here are some previews, we're not done yet.

does so much american culture feel like advertising? like even stuff that isn’t an ad is still half the time “i bought this or was paid by them so go forth and consume”

I was reading a bit about the history of Etherpad. I totally didn't realize that it was originally built by a startup (AppJet) that was acquihired by Google to integrate into Google Wave, and that it had real time editing *before* Google Docs.

Sources: https://dgreenspan.com and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad

“the problem with the left is” lol death to america

Dark Shadows of Sergoth - Custom maps to The Shadows of Sergoth (#Amiga) [V1.0 UPDATE] https://www.indieretronews.com/2025/01/dark-shadows-of-sergoth-custom-maps-to.html

fuck discord for calling their shit a server

The Complete Graphics System - Disk 1, Side A 2 #ApplesauceFDC #Apple2Forever #AppleIIForever

The PRINTOUT output formatting function of Interlisp is similar to Common Lisp's FORMAT but also allows control over fonts and text attributes. In this example the first T is like the T stream of FORMAT, the second like ~%. The comma outputs a space.

#interlisp #CommonLisp #lisp

Actually, has the burning of #bonkwave to a CD been documented before? Am I the pioneer burninator?

hey if i wanted to use a linux distro that won't make me suicidal and is also not ubuntu, which would i use?

a guy literally said to me "but china is the enemy"

Thought you’d wanna see my big, long... CD player. #fleamarket #blešák