Also, there's 701 cards. I have this mad idea I should get to at least 1000, before bowing out.

I did simplify the ecard send/receive mechanism - there's been four or five different iterations of the app, and validating emails was nightmarish. As of a few months ago I just let people create and copy-paste 'links with messages', which has made my life considerably easier.

I did print 1000 boxes of postcards years ago - in about 2012, I think. they turned out looking really beautiful, in print. It's a funny story, actually, because I put them on Amazon and forgot all about them, entirely (I was working a full-time job at the time at a university). I still have a few hundred boxes left I've been giving away to people.

I've had a few people contact me in the interest of facilitating that service, but they seemed kinda slimey. I think you're right; I should probably set up print-on-demand. But again, side projects, huh?!

Now, almost 20 years later, I find I want to preserve something from the old days before it all looked like, well, gestures around wildly. It would be a relief not to maintain the site anymore. But I feel like I'd be disappointing a lot of people, as well. I have no idea how long I'm going to keep this going.

But you're right, of course. (Also, Aragorn might have died of tetanus, or an infected, minor wound; though there is an implication, in LOTR, that within the world of the story, the Elves have a brought to Middle Earth a sophisticated knowledge of medicine, along with everything else. Aragorn became a reknowned 'healer', etc, from staying with them. So you're right; LOTR inhabits a different world altogether from our Middle Ages).

We can't remotely imagine the shock and horror it must have been for men like Robert Graves and Tolkien, to know only picturesque townships and bucolic landscapes, and THEN abruptly be thrust into the hellscape of the Western front. (The recent movie, All Quiet on the Western Front is extraordinarily good at showing how hellish it was. Brilliant, in that respect, though I warn you: it is not a good time). But again, these considerations, regarding history and the culture of the past, are utterly beyond the scope and capacities of the neo-feudalists. They have no conception of the world they're creating, nor how ill-suited they are to inhabiting it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47648890

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

BTW you had to 'incant' a ring, near the end, and I could not have figured that out on my own. It was fantastically fun to me as a kid, despite being, lets be reasonable, impossible to beat without knowing some things outside the game. I actually believed I did beat it, in the late 90s, after I killed the 'false' wizard. However, I thought Level 4 was the game restarting back to Level 1, so exited, thinking it was all done.

Rainbow Magazines were magical and incredibly inspiring. I probably typed-up most of the games they ever published and had them saved on cassette. This one was very lengthy -> https://ia903403.us.archive.org/0/items/rainbowmagazine-1984.... (search for 'Karrak')

Sadly, my brother recorded over it before I could play it more than once ... you know, deliberately, out of pure 80s evil older-brother spite. Some part of me wants to paste that code into Claude Code, and generate some sort of working game, as an act of defiance.

I couldn't play joust on the cabinets (no money as a kid); the TRS-80 game was called Lancer. Good times, absolutely.

Playing games back then was a wildly different experience; pre-internet, there was no way to find hints. You'd come to a wall, somehow, and be stuck. I never got to the end of Raaka-Tu, or Madness and the Minotaur, or Bedlam. I wasn't even ten-years-old, and those games were an impossible undertaking.

That said, in 2021, finally got to the end of the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath, and killed the final wizard. I was absurdly pleased with myself that day. That goddamn wizard had been a regret-tinged concern of mine for 39 years.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44213363

Points: 28

# Comments: 14