Archive of July 2006
Hand Shadows To Be Thrown On The Wall.
I need not explain how these Shadows were suggested, to any one who has seen WILKIE’S picture, “The Rabbit on the Wall.” But by what pains they were invented can never be revealed; for it is known to my tortured digits alone, and they, luckily for me, are dumb. I calculate that I put my ten fingers through hundreds of various exercises before my “Bird” took wing; my left little finger thrills at the memory of “Grandpapa”; and my thumbs gave in no less than twenty times before “Boy” was accomplished. Yet now how easy it is to make the “Duck” to quack, the “Donkey” to bray, “Toby” to wag his tail, and the “Rabbit” to munch his unsubstantial meal.
ADOM Beta 3 (Make that 4, now) for Macintosh!
This is major! Possibly the best game of all time, Adom, has gone b3 for OS X. It’s been available for Windows and Linux (closed source—I don’t wanna hear it.) for a while, and there’s been a beta for OS X—but this one is a lot more polished than b2. Used to be, you had to launch it just like an UNIX app, from the Terminal—for this rev the utter gentleman who’s porting it, Jochen Terstiege, has hacked up a neat little application package: just toss it in your Applications directory and launch it like any other app.
If you don’t actually know what ADOM is, well, that’s a bit of an involved story. It’s a roguelike. You play a little at-sign (like, ‘@’), running around an overhead map made up entirely of other ASCII characters, killing monsters, picking up loot, and leveling up. Like any roguelike, the interface is arcane, but boy howdy, is it worth the learning curve. If you feel like you’ve got too much free time these days, hie thee thither, pronto, matey.
