Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 41

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 Python, for example, is notoriously out of date on the Macintosh’s default installation.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.

A Song of Thanksgiving: America, the Beautiful

America, the Beautiful, by Katharine Lee Bates, with melody by Samuel A. Ward.

TRS-80 Color Computer RCHECK+ in Perl

I much prefer to use a modern keyboard and modern windows to type in programs. But Rainbow’s RCHECK+ was too useful to give up. This script will run RCHECK+ on a text file in the macOS Terminal or any Linux/Unix command line.

Computers and Serial Imagery linked on Astounding ASCII Art

“The tradition of serial imagery in painting began with Monet who, being vitally concerned with light, often painted the same object or scene repeatedly under varying light conditions… Since Monet, many painters (mostly abstract) have worked serially. Andy Warhol, with his painted (and printed) series of movie stars, Mona Lisas, soup cans, coke bottles, etc. is the foremost serial artist today.”

ASCII art has always fascinated me. So when I ran across Laurence Press’s article in the old Artist and Computer• collection, it inspired me to write the asciiArt script for 42 Astounding Scripts.

I ended up not using his greyscale palette, however, mainly because it required too much choice for a script. Most of the letters appear multiple times in his palette. That said, it’s not a bad palette. Choosing somewhat randomly from his 8-level list, the palette --palette "#OX*+=- " produces recognizable ASCII art for complex images.

He also suggests inserting “arbitrary material”, which is what I called “sequential” in the book: using a word or phrase for all non-white sections of the image.

He has some very interesting ideas that I did not use for the script, but which you could program in if you wanted, such as randomly adding noise to the non-white or the white sections.

But also interesting is how unsure he is that using computers for art is a worthwhile use of computer time.

It is uncomfortable to be begging for ‘bootleg’ time. The problem is that computer art doesn’t really fit anywhere. Neither computer scientists and computer science departments, nor artists and art departments generally take it seriously enough to underwrite experimentation. Perhaps this is as it should be, or perhaps the quality of our work will win a place for computer generated art, I think that the jury is (justifiably) still out.

I think the jury is in today about whether using computers for artwork is a worthwhile use of computer time. And that’s partly because a few years after he wrote that, he’d have been able to go out to the local Radio Shack and buy a complete computer that could do what he had to use “bootleg time” for in 1975.

A free market in union representation

Every monopoly is said to be special, that this monopoly is necessary. And yet every time, getting rid of the monopoly improves service, quality, and price. There is no reason for unions to be any different.

Part 1: Copyrightability of RPG Stat Blocks linked on Role-playing design notes

“WotC has a history of taking advantage of gamers’ ignorance of contract and intellectual property law and lack of wealth when making similar demands, thus harming the gaming community and industry, so it’s time those issues are addressed.”

It’s been a long time since I wrote my series on gaming copyright and why, and what kind of, open source licenses are useful and what are merely backdoor attempts to bar people from doing what they’re legally entitled to do under copyright law. As I stated regularly, I am not a lawyer, just an interested amateur. Frylock, as his name might suggest to you if you’re up on your Shakespeare, is a lawyer. He’s just started a series on copyrightability in RPGs, specifically stat blocks, at Frylock’s Gaming & Geekery.

His inspiration is very similar to my initial inspiration for writing Gods & Monsters: a threat from Wizards of the Coast. His came directly, however; mine only came obliquely through Ryan Dancey on Usenet. Keep an eye on his series—the first installment is very informative—and keep an eye on whether there’s a legal battle at all, or WotC/Hasbro just ignores him.

Part 1: Copyrightability of RPG Stat Blocks



Part 2: Copyrightability of RPG Abilities and Spells

The way to be a programmer is to program

How do you become a computer programmer?