Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 36

Release: The Dream of Poor Bazin

A great journalistic adventure in the style of Dumas or Waugh, four hard-drinking reporters taking on the corruption, toadying, and even murder in America’s beltway.

Hunt the Wumpus: Conditional code and include files in SuperBASIC

Hunt the Wumpus can talk to you if you have a speech synthesizer.

COVID Lessons: The Health Care Shutdown

It’s fortunate that COVID-19 was not as bad as the experts said, because our response was almost entirely to make the problem worse. We shut down everything that could help, including health care for co-morbidities. We locked the healthy and the sick together, and cut people off from routine care. Most of the deaths “from” COVID-19 were probably due more to our response than to the virus itself.

Avoiding lockFocus when drawing images in Swift on macOS

Apple’s recommendation is to avoid lockFocus if you’re not creating images directly for the screen. Here are some examples from my own Swift scripts. You can use this to draw text into an image, and to resize images.

White Supremacy: The Reincarnation of Stephen Douglas

The modern Democratic Party, and the left in general, seems to be reincarnating Stephen Douglas and other early Democrat defenders of slavery and white supremacy. “That’s mighty white of you,” they say, when blacks show independence and reason.

Eager to Believe: Stupid Americans and Smart Corporations

The left is very eager to believe corporations when the corporations say Americans are too stupid to buy our products.

Reversi in SuperBASIC on the Color Computer

One of the ubiquitous games of the early computer era was reversi. Very simple rules, very simple board, very complex play. It’s easy to see why it was so popular.

Better for being ridden: the eternal lie of the anointed

Whenever there’s a crisis, politicians and the media always tell us that if we do what they say, we’ll be all right. This is always a lie. And however often they fail and however many die from their ministrations, their wabbling fingers always return to the mire.

Cinematic roleplaying is an oxymoron

Cinematic roleplaying always seems to be about reducing player choice. This is a direct result of trying to emulate an entertainment style that by necessity must elevate the director’s choice above character development. Even the best movies require the director to curtail the world in which the action and dialogue takes place.

White privilege is not the nail

Attributing George Floyd’s death to white privilege when it was caused by left-run city policy means that we will continue to have more George Floyds.