Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 40

New Orleans: Beckham’s Bookshop

Beckham’s Bookshop is a musty must-stop if you’re in the French Quarter.

Ten Tips for Beginning DMs linked on Biblyon Broadsides

“… if there are no stakes, then there’s no real victory… The best campaigns are based on the players interacting with the environment, and if they have no real choice, then there’s no real interaction.” These are great tips for any game master, not just Dungeon Masters. Regarding the first tip, “don’t fudge”, I’ve long come to the point where I prefer not to use a shield to hide die rolls. It’s both a lot harder to fudge die rolls when the players know what they were, and it’s a lot more exciting to see how close the monster came to succeeding or failing.

Rainbow Magazine BASIC program preflight tool

This script takes 32-character lines typed in from Rainbow Magazine BASIC listings and assembles them together into full BASIC lines, doing some rudimentary error-checking along the way.

The Year in Books: 2019

2019 was a great year for reading old books.

Smashwords Post-Christmas Sale

Smashwords is having a sale starting Christmas day, and Astounding Scripts is 75% off.

Have a Merry Scripting Christmas with Persistence of Vision

The ASCII Merry Christmas from Astounding Scripts was taken from a scene I created in Persistence of Vision. It’s a very simple scene that highlights many of the advantages of using POV to create images.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

One of my favorite Christmas songs. Save us all from Satan’s power, and tidings of comfort and joy.

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

A glorious song for Christmas. And a glorious bug fixed.

Epstein didn’t kill himself, and other tales of the swamp

Chesterton’s mob howls for more corruption, and we’re all Epsteins now.

Homebrew linked on Astoundingly useful programming tools

“The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux)”

Homebrew is a very useful tool to install on your Mac. As I described in Photo-editing with Persistence of Vision, you can use it to install new languages that don’t come with your computer.

You can also use it to keep the languages that did come with your computer up-to-date. Python, for example, is notoriously out of date on the Macintosh’s default installation. With Homebrew, you can keep both the latest copy for your own scripts while not harming the default installation for the built-in scripts from Apple.

Homebrew is very neat for the applications you can install. You can use it to install Inkscape, for example, which is a full-featured drawing application. If you want to go old-school, you can install a text-oriented browser on the command line, such as elinks, links, or lynx.

If you really want to go old-school, install adventure.

As Apple starts removing scripting languages from the Mac, Homebrew will become more and more an essential tool for weekend scripters.