The first official book in The Witcher series is not as jam-packed with action as the short story volumes were. The plot mainly is focused on the education of Ciri as both a prospective witcher and/or magician. Quite a bit of time is spent getting to know the various characters and setting up hints of the larger machinations in the world without getting in to the nitty gritty yet. Despite being translated from Polish, I really am enjoying the style of the writing.
We are about a month away from what I am told is, “The most important election of my lifetime.” They apparently have forgotten about the season three semi-finals of Dancing with the Stars, but that’s to be expected.
With the pandemic lockdowns and the anxiety-riddled drones being in a constant state of mortal fear, the big newness this year is mail-in ballots. For a brief moment this became a rallying cry to defend the indefensible U.S. Postal Service. Seriously, this year I have had no less than four horrific experiences with the U.S.P.S. either lost packages, express delivery taking months, or just the usual mail clerk incompetence. This was long before Trump appointed that guy (who my Facebook friends assure me is the Antichrist) as Postmaster General.
Thankfully, we are now about 300 news-cycles away from when U.S.P.S. was all that stood between democracy and Armageddon. Since then we’ve been told that dropping your ballot in a specified drop-off box is now the way to go to insure fair election results. Of course, with this is now coming stories of fake ballot boxes. I googled photos of these fake boxes and can’t believe anyone would fall for what is essentially a rusty file cabinet with a printout taped to the front inscribed with the words “Offishal Ballot Box.”
This got me thinking that wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to simply drop a lit match into an actual ballot drop-off box? I can’t be the first person to have thought of this. I haven’t been able to find anyone else suggesting it. Sure, there wouldn’t be enough oxygen inside the box for it to burn very long, but I suppose you could prop the flap open and provide some sort of accelerant. I guess today’s electioneering fraudsters just lack creativity. I blame social media.
Although I am very nostalgic for many a game on the system, the Apple ][ was never the ideal platform for action games. Spare Change is one of the very few that has actually held up after all these years. Yes, the graphics are crude and the sound is mostly restricted to clicks, beeps and a single square wave tone at a time, but it makes very good use of these limited resources.
You play as the manager of a video arcade where a pair of characters from one of the popular games have come to life. The Zerks’ goal is to steal tokens from your arcade. Enough so that they can retire. How dare they! Your job is to grab the tokens before they do and thwart their retirement plans.
You will mainly grab tokens from the change machines scattered about the level, but occasionally you’ll find one in a public telephone’s change slot or after a lucky spin of a slot machine. Fill the collection boxes with ten or more tokens the Zerk Show door will slide open and you can live to battle Zerks on the next level. The game plays a bit like Pac-man: run around the maze, collect coins, and avoid the random movements of the Zerks. There are even between level intermission animations.
Much of the fun of the game is triggering the various Zerk distractions which include a jukebox, a pair of phones, and a popcorn machine. Each distraction costs a coin and then provides about ten seconds in which the Zerks are dancing around rather than stealing away your progress.
The whole game is an appealing, lighthearted affair that retains its charm even after all these years and still provides a pretty intense arcade game challenge.
P.S. If you want to change the game’s difficulty, you can hit CTRL-Z to open the settings screen. There you have precise control over the Zerk’s behavior settings. I discovered this only today, some forty years after having first played the game.
Mike Thaler uses Riddle Magic to come up with his stand-up material. Here he is honing his Kamala Harris routine. Classic.
The second collection of Witcher short stories is actually the first or something like that. You’ll need to Google the series in order to figure out which books to read first. The sections in this collection flow nice in to each other and it really feels more like a connected narrative than The Last Wish ever did. At the heart of all this is the story of Geralt and Ciri’s destiny. And who doesn’t love a good origin story? This is a context that was very much missing from the games.
At first I was going to do something about covid lockdown and isolation but quickly realized that just about every hack artist on Instagram was doing some image with masks and microscopic viruses. Most of it was awful. I stuck with the hermit theme and kept thinking of all these stories of people trying to survive wilderness and being forced to eat tree bark. Many of the early sketches had the guy taking a big bite of the tree, but I went with the stick full of fish instead.
This was the first time using my heat transfer tool to get a LASER printed sketch on the block. It work well without needing acetone as some tutorials suggest.
Here is the resingrave block about halfway through the engraving process. Working this small is really hard by the way.
Finally, here are the finished prints hanging to dry.
The band has certainly gotten much more proficient since those early Planet Pimp singles. The formula remains the same: cutesy pop tinged with a bit of that Mersey Beat sound. I think I may even be hearing some horns in there? That means this is pretty much The Pebbles’ Dark Side of the Moon.
I’ve played the games, watched the television show, and now I am going to work my way through the books. This first book in the series is a collection of short stories interspersed with interludes that tie the various plots together. I’m not sure if these are required to understand the main series, but it does include the story of Geralt and Yennifer’s first meeting which is probably pretty important. The Netflix series draws a lot from this book. I like to think of it as a bunch of literary side-quests before advancing on to the main quest.
It took about two weeks, but I think I have finally finished converting this site to WordPress. The bulk of that process was copying and pasting every post into the new system. I’m sure I probably goofed up a few posts along the way and there are bound to be many broken links. But I think was very thorough, going as far as copying every single comment and tag description.
My reason for moving away from Drupal was my general disappointment with Drupal 8. Nothing ever seemed to work exactly right. I’d make a few changes on the back-end and the site would unbeknownst to me be put in maintenance mode. Several key plugins withered on the vine and stopped working. The built in WYSIWYG editor was absolute garbage. And the worst part of it all was the horrifically user unfriendly update process. There are modules that require Composer to install and update and others that are always in pre-release dev states. No thanks. After a decade of loyal advocacy and usage, it was time to bid Drupal farewell.
I have built a couple WordPress sites for work this year and now feel much more capable in this system. The main disadvantage of WordPress is its lack of a Views plugin. If you want to get creative with outputting data, you need to dive in to .PHP files and WP_Query() loops. There’s a massive user base, so finding help on the Internet is fairly easy and, once you understand the basics, you get an idea of how to accomplish tasks.
As I type this, I am prepping to launch the site. Hopefully all will go well. Having never run a WordPress site with comments enabled I worry that I will find myself buried in comment spam.
This was all a big mistake. Upgrading to Drupal 8, that is. Nothing ever works right and Drupal hates casual users. I am now in the process of converting this site to WordPress by migrating every post by hand. There’s about 1700 posts so it’s going to be a while. There’s probably a plugin that can automagically do this, but the biggest con of WordPress is that good plugins aren’t free. Sigh.
