Psst! Kid! Want a unique game console?

Further proof that if something has a CPU and a screen, someone's rigged it to play Doom...

The code that runs Redbox DVD rental machines has been dumped online, and, in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy, a community of tinkerers and reverse engineers are probing the operating system to learn how it works. Naturally, one of the first things people did was make one of the machines run Doom.

As has been detailed in several great articles elsewhere, the end of Redbox has been a clusterfuck, with pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers stuck with very large, heavy, abandoned DVD rental kiosks.

In case you think I'm kidding, here's a dude playing Doom on an old Kodak point & shoot camera.

Scammer's Arrogance

So I'd gotten into playing a game called MLB 9 Innings on my iPad. I'd spend about thirty minutes or so after lunch fiddling with my team and playing the various game modes. It had become a part of my daily routine.

It's one of those "Free to Play" games where you'll need to occasionally spend money if you like winning and upgrading your team, and every other week or so, I'd buy a $4.99 or $9.99 pack of in-game currency or player upgrades.

Every once in a while Com2uS, the publisher, would double-charge my Apple Pay account. I checked on the subreddit for the game and other players had noted the same thing, but warned that if you asked for a refund, they'd give it to you but lock you out of your game account.

Then the other night I spent $4.99 on a pack of game bucks... and got charged for that and a $29.99 booster pack that I did not either ask for nor receive.

So I went and asked for my refund, which I got, and my account was locked, as I'd been told, and I now have that thirty minutes after lunch back as free time to do some reading or something instead of playing digital baseball, and an extra couple gigs of free storage on my iPad.

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Big Excitement

A sure sign that I'm well on my way to becoming an Old is that my big excitement this weekend has been solving the New York Times Sunday crossword in twenty-one minutes and fifty-seven seconds, which is a new personal best.

Go Team Me!

*blows noisemaker, throws confetti*

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Wordle Wobble

I used to use fairly random start words for Wordle, a different one every day. Eventually, though, I settled in on the one the WordleBot used for hard mode: "SLATE".

Well, they've juggled the dictionary and now WordleBot's favorite hard mode start word is "TROPE". I'm sticking with "SLATE". I don't care what the robot says, the letter P is not found in the sacred name of Etaoin Shrdlu.

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Terminal Roles

Here's a fascinating article on the Dungeons & Dragons players on Texas's death row.

It's definitely worth a read.

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Just Missed...

The NYT crossword gets more difficult from Monday through Saturday, and I just missed a personal best on the solution for the Monday puzzle today.

Off by eight seconds. So close!

(Yes, I've become the sort of person who does crossword puzzles for fun. I figure it's good for the brain, and since I work with words, it's probably useful.)

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Buy More! Spend Now!

It's Prime Day, the big sale day at BezosMart, which is generally more hype than anything else. For many things, like appliances or electronics, you're better off waiting for more traditional sales, like Labor Day or  Black Friday.

But if you want the products actually made or marketed by Amazon, this really is the best day. They've got 7" Kindle Fire tablets for forty bucks and the Kindle Oasis is, like, a hundred bucks off.

It's the Kindle Fire that gets me. A high-res touchscreen tablet with sixteen gigabytes of memory, a thing that would have been absolutely nothing more than a prop in a cyberpunk scifi movie twenty years ago, is going for the price of dinner for two at Applebee's. Add drinks and dessert and you can get the 32GB 8" HD version.

I mean, I remember when the the 3.2" 160x144 screen on the Sega Game Gear was pretty frickin' magic. It's color! Backlit! You can play Mortal Kombat on it! Now my wristwatch has better than double that resolution. 

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Overheard in the Office...

So I'm pretty addicted to the Spelling Bee game at the NYT, and I was playing this morning...

Me: "What do you mean it doesn't know 'wadi'?"

RX: (from down the hall): "'W-A-D-D-Y' or 'W-A-D-I'?"

Me: "The latter. I know it's a foreign word, but it knows 'tatami'."

RX: "The Times like Japanese better than Arabs."

Me: "They sell tatamis at Ikea, but not wadis."

RX: "They sell wadis in California."

READY? FIGHT!

Whoever did this video is a hero of the internet.

Better with sound pic.twitter.com/dwdZ7zoYVU

— Tyler (@Tyler496) May 30, 2023

How I know I'm an Old now...

So I got the digital subscription to the NYT that includes the games, so I could do the crossword every morning. I figure that since I have to use words for a living, it'd help keep me sharp.

Now I totally look forward to it every morning. Bobbi walked in on me playing the Mini this morning and quipped "Wow, they have totally sucked you into their web of games."

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2022 Year-End News Quiz

I got 19.9 out of 25 right on the 2022 year end news quiz!

Here's a paywall-bypassing gift link!https://t.co/S2ZRRcvKfg

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 1, 2023

Turns out it's a physical activity...

Intense thinking and concentration burn more calories than most people realize. Getting really into a mental exercise can release adrenaline and elevate heart rate. If you wear a smart watch or FitBit and spend a day behind the wheel of your car doing any sort of involved driving, you'll often be surprised at the number of calories it says you've burned.

So imagine what it's like for really intense dudes who are doing olympic-level thinking...

In recent years, the proliferation of livestreams, fit trackers and other tools have created almost a game within a game at modern chess tournaments. Rubbernecking audiences watch for clues of mental cracking and physical distress in the quirky, contemplative figures bowed over the boards. At the 2018 Isle of Man International tournament, fitness metrics projected on a large screen revealed that grandmaster Mikhail Antipov torched 560 calories sitting stock still for two hours. By way of comparison, the average person will burn just 100 calories running a mile on a treadmill.

How far is it?

If you play the web game "Globle", the "Draw A Circle On A Map" tool is turbo useful...

Also, I guess, if you're a military history nerd and wanted to see what the action radius of a Q-39 Sky Dominator squadron operating out of an airfield on Vanuatu would have been.

Lines on the map...

Every morning, while I wait for the caffeine to take hold, I play the day's game of Worldle, where one is shown the outline of a country and tries to guess which one it is by its shape. A wrong guess will get an arrow pointing in the direction of the mystery country and the distance in kilometers.

One thing you can tell about the map shapes are that if they consist solely of irregular edges, it's either in East Asia, Europe, or the Americas. Its borders often just sort of... happened ...over time. (Either that or it's an island and Mother Nature drew the boundaries.)

Yesterday's country was Lithuania.

If the country has a ruler-straight border or three? It's in Africa or the Middle East and the borders were arbitrarily drawn by some possibly-inebriated dudes using a map and a straight-edge in Paris or Brussels or someplace in the 19th or early 20th Century.

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Pattern Recognition...

Every morning of late, I've been following a pretty familiar pattern: Get up, grab a soda, throw my watch on the charger, spin up the computer, and before I commence any writing I solve the day's Wordle puzzle and post the score to my smallest Facebook friends list as well as a little running Telegram chat I have with a few friends.

It's a fun little brain-teaser and if nothing else, I start the day having accomplished something, no matter how inconsequential.

Plus, good habits can save your life!

Apparently Meemaw over there in Illinois didn't text her older daughter her Wordle score, like she did every day. Worried about her mom, the daughter had a neighbor check on her. The neighbor rang the doorbell and got no answer, but told the daughter that her car was still there. So they called the po-po for a wellness check. The po-po made entry and arrested the naked, scissors-wielding lunatic who'd been holding Meemaw hostage.

Now, we'd never have heard this story if Meemaw had plugged the lunatic with a Shield EZ like she should have... but we'd never have heard it if she didn't play Wordle, either.

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Purse Fight

"The scheming New York Times has spent big bucks to buy the very popular free-to-play online game, Wordle!" ...breathlessly reports the Washington Post, who were probably mad they didn't think of it first.

The Times spent an undisclosed figure on the game, but described it in the “low-seven figures.” The company said in a statement that “at the time it moves to The New York Times, Wordle will be free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay.” The migration will happen “very shortly,” a spokesman said.

It’s a notable acquisition for the news organization, which has a goal of reaching 10 million digital subscribers by 2025 and has singled out the games and cooking parts of its business as “a key part” of its strategy. As of December 2021, New York Times Games and Cooking had 1 million subscribers each.

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Some men want to watch the world burn.

Some jerk had a launched a bot account on Twitter whose sole purpose was to spoiler Wordle results, which is pretty douche-y. Fortunately it was also pretty clearly in violation of the terms of service.

For anyone who’s managed to avoid it, Wordle is a game where you get six chances to guess a five-letter word — if you’re interested, you can learn how to play it here. The answer is the same for everyone playing, and it only changes once a day. The game also has an interesting sharing mechanic, where you can copy and paste a series of emoji to let people know how easy or hard it was for you to guess the word of the day. If you’ve seen a ton of yellow, gray, and green squares on Twitter, they’re probably either Wordle results or a joke about Wordle.

How hard is it to just let people enjoy things? Apparently it's very difficult for some folks.

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Getting the Easy W

I've totally embraced starting my day with the easy win of Wordle. I guess the word, get my little endorphin boost, share my result with my friends, and drive on with the rest of my morning routine. The fact that it only lets you play once a day keeps it from turning into a distraction from stress or an habitual nervous tic, the way Solitaire or Minesweeper seemed to. 

I think this columnist is spot on in her assessment; it's the right game at the right time.

Plus, hey, it's words. I've got a lot of those!

Wordle 214 4/6

⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟨⬛🟩
🟩🟨⬛🟨🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 19, 2022

Wooden Ships, Iron Men, 'Splodey Shells

When we think of the tactics of the 18th Century running into the harsh reality of 19th Century industrial technology, we usually think of Union troops assaulting into the massed rifle fire of entrenched Confederates or Mahdists falling in windrows to British Maxim guns.

One example of this collision that's less well known is the Battle of Sinop, a naval engagement in the opening stages of what was to become called The Crimean War.

An expanding and industrializing Russia had been bumping up against an increasingly broke and sclerotic Ottoman Empire along their frontiers in the Caucasus and the Danube basin. They'd already resorted to fisticuffs in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-'29, which resulted in a smarting defeat for the Ottomans.

In the wake of that war, finances caused the Turks to downsize their army and navy, and the Sultan became more dependent on loans from Britain and France to keep things going. Meanwhile, Russia was expanding their Black Sea flotilla with freshly-built men o'war with an eye toward keeping the sea a Russian lake. (Russia was, at the time allied with the other retrograde monarchies of Austria and Prussia in the anti-liberal Holy Alliance.)

When hostilities kicked off in 1853, the Black Sea squadron under Admiral Nakhimov went hunting and cornered a large chunk of the Turkish fleet anchored at Sinop, forming up for a supply convoy under the protection of the harbor forts.

Nakhimov's ships sailed right on in, maneuvered to put the Ottoman ships between his own and the guns of the harbor defenses, dropped anchor, and started blasting. 

On top of the fact that the eleven-ship Russian force included a half-dozen ships of the line versus a dozen Turkish frigates and corvettes, the new Russian ships were armed with the latest in high-tech naval weaponry: Paixhans guns. These were direct-fire, flat-trajectory naval guns firing explosive shells rather than solid shot, the forerunners of the famous Dahlgrens of the US Civil War.

The effect of these shells on the wooden Ottoman frigates and corvettes was devastating. By the time the smoke cleared, the Turkish fleet had blown up, burned to the waterline, or been run aground to keep from sinking. One paddle frigate, the Taif, managed to bolt for the harbor exit and escape, eluding Russian pursuers on a mad dash for the Bosporus.

The effect of Sinop was to demonstrate to the world's navies that unarmored warships were practically helpless, fragile and flammable deathtraps, in the face of shell-firing guns. Ironclads became increasingly common, and in less than a decade the Monitor and the Virginia would be bouncing Dahlgren shells off each other off Hampton Roads, marking the definitive end to the age of wooden ships and iron men.

My guilty nerdy pleasure: Wooden Ships & Iron Men

An Unusual Palette

Saturday morning's cartoons this past weekend included one I had not seen before. 1935's The Calico Dragon was the first MGM cartoon to get an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film (a category that was pretty much owned by Walt Disney all through the Thirties.)



One thing that caught my eye was the color palette, which used the 2-color Technicolor process.

The result is a cyan- and magenta-heavy palette that gave me flashbacks to playing PC games in CGA...