Spare Change on Apple ][ (9/10)

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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.

  • Spare Change - Popcorn Machine
    The Popcorn Machine!
  • Spare Change - Zerk Collection
    Collect Zerk Shows!
  • Spare Change - Game Over
    Game over when five tokens are banked.
  • Spare Change - Zerk Settings
    Secret settings screen. Hit CTRL-Z

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.

Sword of Destiny by Andrzej Sapkowski (9/10)

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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.

The Hermit - Wood Engraving

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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.

Hermit Heat Transfer

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.

Hermit Carving

Here is the resingrave block about halfway through the engraving process. Working this small is really hard by the way.

Hermit Drying Rack

Finally, here are the finished prints hanging to dry.

The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski (8/10)

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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.

Pages of Fun, Now With WordPress

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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.

The Last Straw

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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.

The Ghost Galleon (4/10)

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The third film in the Blind Dead series features the return of the terrifying cheap skeleton hand prop. A couple of models are lost at sea and then a crew of unlikable characters set sail to find them. Turns out the models found a fog covered ghost ship that just happens to contain the mummified bodies of the satanic Templars from the first films. The direction and editing are just awful. They don’t know when to cut away from a boring scene or create suspense. The zombies are just out there in plain view from the get go. You might see a few cool looking stills here and there, but, for the most part, this is a dull exercise in amateur film making.

Nick the Sting (6/10)

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A small-time crook is accused of a crime he didn’t commit. He then spends the rest of the movie getting back at the men who done him wrong. No this isn’t quite a revenge film. It’s more like an long episode of Candid Camera in which Nick sets up elaborate pranks to thwart his enemies. The tone is appropriately lighthearted but it doesn’t quite play as a comedy and, despite a couple foot chases, doesn’t quite play as a crime thriller either.