Not known wy (now, there it is, a new shpelling: do people still aspirate the "h" of the "wh"?) you replied to me, Slick, as I wasn't the one suggesting NASA be shut down, but I'll take it as good advice anyway.
Congress would have to revoke their charter, I believe. Senators keep NASA around due to inertia, weather forecasts, the odd bit of national prestige, and contracts to companies from, or doing business in, their states.
Doesn't matter. I don't care if it was only $63.00 spent on Facebook likes. If it's a stupid thing to do, stop doing it. Just because $630,000 is by you a trivial sum is irrelevant - it's still taxpayers' money spent stupidly. One doesn't have to have some external big goal to decide if a sum is worth not spending; all that's needful is to judge a given expenditure for what it is.
For that matter, either-or thinking is itself stupid.
You've got the ground here for an excellent adventure game also.
Start a la Civ - develop tech and tools to decipher the puzzles to get at the records, fight off the various hordes of whatever - zombies, Luddites, other religious fans, rivals. Access the goodies, learn how to read them, develop a base of stable resources to use the preserved writings to do some real re-building. And, is there a larger goal or need than just getting the hidden goodies?
It'd be interesting to see how high a tech level is needed to access the preserved info of higher tech levels. A more interesting question might be what kinds of economics might one have, starting relatively fresh, compared to the longer slog that's gotten us where we are now. Would there be mostly a replay of what's been done to get us where we are now, or might there be sufficiently useful alternate ways to consider value and exchange of labor and knowledge and artistry.
How far back might we get knocked? Alternately, should we be wiped out, could what we leave be in useful form to the next possible intelligent species? Sci-fi has some good stories of us finding stuff from alien dead civs; what if the roles are reversed?
And don't unnecessarily knock tax records and such; much of what we know of Babylon et al is from surviving inventories, tax records, and commentaries. It's kind of amazing what kinds of things can be deduced from what and how people counted things and made deals. Maybe there'd even be some real use for all the crap that the no-such people are stashing away.
I'd never heard of Doug Engelbart when I unboxed my first Atari ST in June of '89. In that first year I'd learned of him, SRI, Xerox PARC, DRI, et al. From then on, from time to time, it would strike me out of the blue, often in the wee hours, just what a tremendous debt I owed Doug and the others for what could so easily be taken for granted. It is dangerous, I think, to become so blasé that we forget that it wasn't some 'force of history' or whatnot that has provided us so much; even if that were entirely true, it's still down to the particular people who actually had the ideas, devised the techniques, and built the devices.
And, if you'll trouble to read them, Doug's thoughts on the what and how and why have continual relevance. Even these days, in the midst of my 'desktop as appliance' and laptop as 'a convenience' daily whatever, some little thing will hit me and I have to stop a bit and say, "Wow."
Funny thing about the Geritol - my mother and her three sisters would gather for the holidays at gramps place, make sure he had food in the cupboard and fridge, check on laundry, do a bit of cleaning up. I recall one year they teased him a bit about his habit of starting the morning with his infamous strong coffee and taking a slug of Geritol tonic - until they checked the label and noticed the 12% alcohol. Then they understood how he could be so chipper in the early morning.
Nah, I can dig it, and I do remember; convenient forgetting is not a luxury for me. I had that old dude in mind, but it's easy enough to type with tongue in cheek. Besides, the criticisms are still valid, even over a millenium or two.
Only this time it's different because.... teh interwebs. [snicker, and running]
I never met Sid Meier. I read the interview at Kotaku and enjoyed it well, and yes, I would like to meet him. From it, I like the way Sid's mind works. I'd already guessed at a few things by playing some of his games - the things that stand out for me are fun, immersive, respect for customer.
Of the games I've spent the most time playing, a goodly number are down to Sid, Chris Crawford, and Will Wright. Empire, Wargame of the Century; Eastern Front; Sim City; Silent Service (and II); Civilization from start through V; Domination (Risk-like from Yura Mamyrin).
I nearly lost the better part of a year to Civ; managed to keep one job and pay rent, then continued to play at a more reasonable level until getting II, and still occasionally play Civ on an Atari ST emulator. Didn't play much of III, spent a lot of time on IV. (The advisors from II and the music from IV are favorites.) Only have 3170 hours into V so far, but the night is young. [grin]
I like the way that, each in their own way, the games that I've played the most have been well-designed, tell a good story - and let me build my own narratives as I go, let me subsume myself into the play to escape the woes and worries of a day, and are fun.
Well, then, you're probably an old fart, as am I. There seem to be a number of generational things less seen out and about these days - wrist and pocket watches, good manners, modestly good grammar, attention span, ability to focus or pay attention, fewer interruptions, knowledge of and respect and appreciation for quiet - and the capability for being quiet, for a few.
I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one to think Google search results are getting worse. Not only do I find it more difficult to get the kind of results that are germane to my query but what does come back is also skewed to commercial sites rather than nuts-and-bolts stuff.
I'm also saddened that search is getting worse, of course. From the few times I've used it recently, I haven't found Bing to be much better.
Think of Crossover as commercial Wine. Their main dev (I embarrassed to not recall his name just now) is also a main contributor to Wine; whatever improvements made in Crossover are folded into Wine. While I've yet been unable to buy a full year's support, I figure it's worthwhile to try to do what I can. Also, whenever I've managed to botch an install of Wine through ignorant configs or tweaking, Crossover has just worked. That's how I originally found it, so's I could get Civ V to play.
Hey, Robbie, it's not that I don't understand what you mean, and for much of it agree, it's just that I thought the target was a bit off, however easy it was. Perhaps it's just my odd way of looking at things, but when I look at the over-the-top silliness of Larry vs. the very real, insidious endemic attitudes that what I consider far too many of my gender carrying around inside, whatever such lip-service they might give to things such as equality, respect, and hell, just plain good manners, I can't get worked up over it. Larry is truly wonderfully silly; the other is gross, demeaning, and hurtful in so many ways. I think there are wonderful differences 'twixt the sexes, to be celebrated, not used as an excuse for power trips and worse.
I admire people who've the know-how and energy to try making an interesting and useful site, respect it whether I agree with someone's views or find direct use or not.
"The solution is end-to-end encryption of all the information"
Or maybe, you know, not keeping the information.
Better yet, not gathering the information.
'The information' stuff is bad enough as is, yet worse still is the secrecy of all the very doing of it - the how and the why and the fact that it is happening but we're not even supposed to know about any of it - including a majority of our lawmakers. A government keeping such things secret, and the fact that any of it is secret at all, has no claim on styling itself a democracy or a republic. The social contract has been broken and the trust breached. If there is to be any hope of restoring same, those in power must return much of that power, and renounce forever such abuse of it.
Sorry, but that's a lame argument; it makes far more sense to assume that bad guys always notice, because in fact they generally do.
The major source of classification it twofold: prevent one's own citizenry from knowing something being 'done in their name' and preventing embarrassment of a higher. The latter runs around 80%, the result from three separate studies done at or at the behest of presidential level. Look the stuff up. Last I looked they hadn't been classified.
It's a case of the horse is bolted, close the barn door.
While the inner working of protocols are something I've not looked at and suspect are over my head, this does sound interesting and, whatever else Google is or isn't doing, I'm glad they're continuing to do some interesting research and fooling around with things.
I downed the tarball because I wanted a DRM-free version. I got the Steam key because in the main I've no big problems with how Steam goes about doing their DRM; Steam offers good flexibility of use and seems to be committed to treating their customers fairyl - IMO and for my needs and wants, of course.
I don't run Steam for Linux client because I don't want to find out about potential gotchas having two Steam installs on one system - one native and one running under Crossover, although I've got some Linux-version games that run fine under the Crossover/Steam combo (the ones from Frictional Games.)
While I prefer backing projects that plan on a Linux version, I sometimes take the gamble of a Windows-only version in the hope it'll run via Crossover - because sometimes I see a thing as a good project in its own right, as I've done with Lifeless Planet and a few others - and Wine continues to improve.
Originally replaygames said flatly that they wouldn't be doing a Linux version. I hadn't followed things in the related areas of the forum there, so was nicely surprised to see Larry for Linux, and as I said, pleased at how well they did it.
I'm still stumbling around with Larry; found out last night that it's a bad idea to carry a full shot glass into the cab, for instance.
I just checked, started watching a TV show on Netflix from my Ubuntu desktop. Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit. "Netflix Desktop" is available in my menu under the heading of Sound and Video. (I always install classicmenu-indicator because I got used to menu lists back in '89 and see no reason to stop using them because of some brain-dead UI "designer". They're simple, direct, eminently useful and usable.)
For the Netflix bit itself, I cheated, in that I installed the mild Wine fork from compholio. (So far as I can tell all they did was add some code to make Netflix "just work".)
But you're absolutely correct in that one can't go to Netflix with a Linux box and have things work, because Netflix won't yet, if ever, deal with Linux. I also have to wonder here just how enthusiastic the folks at Netflix would be about DRM if it wasn't required as part of their deals with the studios.
For the topic at hand, no. As in "Hell, no." No DRM in web standards. DRM is a lie and a scam. Throughout its history it has effectively and essentially only fucked-over the innocent and those trying to do the right thing.
While I have to think that there are people in Hollywood with IQs in excess of room temperature, I also have to think that their rabid insistence on a failed and flawed tech has more to do with either witting hypocrisy or a self-imposed intellectual blind spot, or, just perhaps, something they won't tell us.
DRM is fucked. It's always been fucked. Stop, already, with the fucking DRM.
IFF "piracy" is truly such a huge profit suck, then use watermarks embedded using stegography and find and persecute, oops, prosecute, individual offenders under the appropriate civil law. And on that bit, turning a civil matter of copyright infringement into a high-class felony 'cuz somebody in Hollyweird has their tits in a wringer is so wrong-headed as to be past laughable. (But in a way it's the same as with cops: it's much easier and safer to bust someone for possession than it is to seek out the counterfeiters and cartel bosses.)
Piracy is mostly a red-herring or a scapegoat anyway. People have and will always pay for that which they find entertaining - whether that be food and lodging and mayhap a few coins for a troubador or the price of a cinema ticket - presuming always that the people find the price of that entertainment to be reasonable. When a movie doesn't pull in expected revenue it's said it's because of piracy, when in fact people didn't pay to watch it and they didn't buy the DVD because the movie was shit - and this is one thing the suits in Hollywood are too blind to see.
A grown-up male will have no problem with, indeed will welcome, authentic females wherever they are to be found. They will even actively seek them.
Juvenile males will be stuck with their juvenile concepts. None of this is new, and little of it will appreciably change internally.
As for Larry, the biggest loser this side of Cincinnati? He's just out to get laid and find true love, like every other red-blooded male of an age and mindset. It's a game - a very non-serious, tongue-in-cheek, irreverent look at aging hipsters and disco dollies and all the 'lifes' high and low, all with their own comments on weighty philosophical matters. It's either an existential tour-de-force or a wacky game of chances, or something. So, you know, like, get over it, okay?
If you really need to get your knickers in a twist over something, you might, you know, contemplate living on a planet hell-bent on turning itself into The One True Police State, er, Society, whilst suffocating on its offal and the species careering its way on the long slide to extinction with the 1% self-referentially living out their fading-glory fantasies of superiority behind their walls of police, mortar, and moral rectitude. Or something.
Btw, stopped by your site. Read some stuff. Thanks.
I downloaded the Linux version directly from replaygames.com. Works just fine on my Ubuntu 64-bit 13.04. One really nice thing is I only had to unpack the tarball into a folder of my choosing and double-click the Larry-Linux icon. No terminal-fu, no files scattered about in various directories. This, IMHO, is the way to do these things. (I also got the Steam key, haven't used that yet. I have not yet installed Steam directly, but run it in Crossover for the Windows games.)
My only gripe is that I can't run it in a window, as I prefer to do with my other games. (For those who carp that I miss "the immersive experience" I find that if a game is any good I get sufficiently captivated when it's in a window.)
The art, music, dialog, UI are great. A prodigious amount of goodly work went into this reboot. LSL-Reloaded, indeed. And it's still Larry, Larry Laffer, biggest loser and man about town. Right now I'm just exploring and getting killed a lot. Simple, fun times.
Like you, I'm hoping that there will soon be available working remedies, ones better than what is now done, for some of the things beginning to plague my good eye. This potential tool looks promising.
Slashdot Mirror
Not known wy (now, there it is, a new shpelling: do people still aspirate the "h" of the "wh"?) you replied to me, Slick, as I wasn't the one suggesting NASA be shut down, but I'll take it as good advice anyway.
Interesting sig you have, by the by.
....so we can shut NASA down
Congress would have to revoke their charter, I believe. Senators keep NASA around due to inertia, weather forecasts, the odd bit of national prestige, and contracts to companies from, or doing business in, their states.
Doesn't matter. I don't care if it was only $63.00 spent on Facebook likes. If it's a stupid thing to do, stop doing it. Just because $630,000 is by you a trivial sum is irrelevant - it's still taxpayers' money spent stupidly. One doesn't have to have some external big goal to decide if a sum is worth not spending; all that's needful is to judge a given expenditure for what it is.
For that matter, either-or thinking is itself stupid.
You've got the ground here for an excellent adventure game also.
Start a la Civ - develop tech and tools to decipher the puzzles to get at the records, fight off the various hordes of whatever - zombies, Luddites, other religious fans, rivals. Access the goodies, learn how to read them, develop a base of stable resources to use the preserved writings to do some real re-building. And, is there a larger goal or need than just getting the hidden goodies?
It'd be interesting to see how high a tech level is needed to access the preserved info of higher tech levels. A more interesting question might be what kinds of economics might one have, starting relatively fresh, compared to the longer slog that's gotten us where we are now. Would there be mostly a replay of what's been done to get us where we are now, or might there be sufficiently useful alternate ways to consider value and exchange of labor and knowledge and artistry.
How far back might we get knocked? Alternately, should we be wiped out, could what we leave be in useful form to the next possible intelligent species? Sci-fi has some good stories of us finding stuff from alien dead civs; what if the roles are reversed?
And don't unnecessarily knock tax records and such; much of what we know of Babylon et al is from surviving inventories, tax records, and commentaries. It's kind of amazing what kinds of things can be deduced from what and how people counted things and made deals. Maybe there'd even be some real use for all the crap that the no-such people are stashing away.
I'd never heard of Doug Engelbart when I unboxed my first Atari ST in June of '89. In that first year I'd learned of him, SRI, Xerox PARC, DRI, et al. From then on, from time to time, it would strike me out of the blue, often in the wee hours, just what a tremendous debt I owed Doug and the others for what could so easily be taken for granted. It is dangerous, I think, to become so blasé that we forget that it wasn't some 'force of history' or whatnot that has provided us so much; even if that were entirely true, it's still down to the particular people who actually had the ideas, devised the techniques, and built the devices.
And, if you'll trouble to read them, Doug's thoughts on the what and how and why have continual relevance. Even these days, in the midst of my 'desktop as appliance' and laptop as 'a convenience' daily whatever, some little thing will hit me and I have to stop a bit and say, "Wow."
Thank you, Doug.
Funny thing about the Geritol - my mother and her three sisters would gather for the holidays at gramps place, make sure he had food in the cupboard and fridge, check on laundry, do a bit of cleaning up. I recall one year they teased him a bit about his habit of starting the morning with his infamous strong coffee and taking a slug of Geritol tonic - until they checked the label and noticed the 12% alcohol. Then they understood how he could be so chipper in the early morning.
Nah, I can dig it, and I do remember; convenient forgetting is not a luxury for me. I had that old dude in mind, but it's easy enough to type with tongue in cheek. Besides, the criticisms are still valid, even over a millenium or two.
Only this time it's different because.... teh interwebs. [snicker, and running]
I never met Sid Meier. I read the interview at Kotaku and enjoyed it well, and yes, I would like to meet him. From it, I like the way Sid's mind works. I'd already guessed at a few things by playing some of his games - the things that stand out for me are fun, immersive, respect for customer.
Of the games I've spent the most time playing, a goodly number are down to Sid, Chris Crawford, and Will Wright. Empire, Wargame of the Century; Eastern Front; Sim City; Silent Service (and II); Civilization from start through V; Domination (Risk-like from Yura Mamyrin).
I nearly lost the better part of a year to Civ; managed to keep one job and pay rent, then continued to play at a more reasonable level until getting II, and still occasionally play Civ on an Atari ST emulator. Didn't play much of III, spent a lot of time on IV. (The advisors from II and the music from IV are favorites.) Only have 3170 hours into V so far, but the night is young. [grin]
I like the way that, each in their own way, the games that I've played the most have been well-designed, tell a good story - and let me build my own narratives as I go, let me subsume myself into the play to escape the woes and worries of a day, and are fun.
Well, then, you're probably an old fart, as am I. There seem to be a number of generational things less seen out and about these days - wrist and pocket watches, good manners, modestly good grammar, attention span, ability to focus or pay attention, fewer interruptions, knowledge of and respect and appreciation for quiet - and the capability for being quiet, for a few.
I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one to think Google search results are getting worse. Not only do I find it more difficult to get the kind of results that are germane to my query but what does come back is also skewed to commercial sites rather than nuts-and-bolts stuff.
I'm also saddened that search is getting worse, of course. From the few times I've used it recently, I haven't found Bing to be much better.
Think of Crossover as commercial Wine. Their main dev (I embarrassed to not recall his name just now) is also a main contributor to Wine; whatever improvements made in Crossover are folded into Wine. While I've yet been unable to buy a full year's support, I figure it's worthwhile to try to do what I can. Also, whenever I've managed to botch an install of Wine through ignorant configs or tweaking, Crossover has just worked. That's how I originally found it, so's I could get Civ V to play.
Hey, Robbie, it's not that I don't understand what you mean, and for much of it agree, it's just that I thought the target was a bit off, however easy it was. Perhaps it's just my odd way of looking at things, but when I look at the over-the-top silliness of Larry vs. the very real, insidious endemic attitudes that what I consider far too many of my gender carrying around inside, whatever such lip-service they might give to things such as equality, respect, and hell, just plain good manners, I can't get worked up over it. Larry is truly wonderfully silly; the other is gross, demeaning, and hurtful in so many ways. I think there are wonderful differences 'twixt the sexes, to be celebrated, not used as an excuse for power trips and worse.
I admire people who've the know-how and energy to try making an interesting and useful site, respect it whether I agree with someone's views or find direct use or not.
"The solution is end-to-end encryption of all the information"
Or maybe, you know, not keeping the information.
Better yet, not gathering the information.
'The information' stuff is bad enough as is, yet worse still is the secrecy of all the very doing of it - the how and the why and the fact that it is happening but we're not even supposed to know about any of it - including a majority of our lawmakers. A government keeping such things secret, and the fact that any of it is secret at all, has no claim on styling itself a democracy or a republic. The social contract has been broken and the trust breached. If there is to be any hope of restoring same, those in power must return much of that power, and renounce forever such abuse of it.
Sorry, but that's a lame argument; it makes far more sense to assume that bad guys always notice, because in fact they generally do.
The major source of classification it twofold: prevent one's own citizenry from knowing something being 'done in their name' and preventing embarrassment of a higher. The latter runs around 80%, the result from three separate studies done at or at the behest of presidential level. Look the stuff up. Last I looked they hadn't been classified.
It's a case of the horse is bolted, close the barn door.
It seems to me that the civilian definition is grossly inflated, for what reasons I can only guess, and like none of them.
AC just below got it: it's a community workshop which sets it apart from previous endowments of the word.
While the inner working of protocols are something I've not looked at and suspect are over my head, this does sound interesting and, whatever else Google is or isn't doing, I'm glad they're continuing to do some interesting research and fooling around with things.
I downed the tarball because I wanted a DRM-free version. I got the Steam key because in the main I've no big problems with how Steam goes about doing their DRM; Steam offers good flexibility of use and seems to be committed to treating their customers fairyl - IMO and for my needs and wants, of course.
I don't run Steam for Linux client because I don't want to find out about potential gotchas having two Steam installs on one system - one native and one running under Crossover, although I've got some Linux-version games that run fine under the Crossover/Steam combo (the ones from Frictional Games.)
While I prefer backing projects that plan on a Linux version, I sometimes take the gamble of a Windows-only version in the hope it'll run via Crossover - because sometimes I see a thing as a good project in its own right, as I've done with Lifeless Planet and a few others - and Wine continues to improve.
Originally replaygames said flatly that they wouldn't be doing a Linux version. I hadn't followed things in the related areas of the forum there, so was nicely surprised to see Larry for Linux, and as I said, pleased at how well they did it.
I'm still stumbling around with Larry; found out last night that it's a bad idea to carry a full shot glass into the cab, for instance.
I don't know why you can't.
I just checked, started watching a TV show on Netflix from my Ubuntu desktop. Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit. "Netflix Desktop" is available in my menu under the heading of Sound and Video. (I always install classicmenu-indicator because I got used to menu lists back in '89 and see no reason to stop using them because of some brain-dead UI "designer". They're simple, direct, eminently useful and usable.)
For the Netflix bit itself, I cheated, in that I installed the mild Wine fork from compholio. (So far as I can tell all they did was add some code to make Netflix "just work".)
But you're absolutely correct in that one can't go to Netflix with a Linux box and have things work, because Netflix won't yet, if ever, deal with Linux. I also have to wonder here just how enthusiastic the folks at Netflix would be about DRM if it wasn't required as part of their deals with the studios.
For the topic at hand, no. As in "Hell, no." No DRM in web standards. DRM is a lie and a scam. Throughout its history it has effectively and essentially only fucked-over the innocent and those trying to do the right thing.
While I have to think that there are people in Hollywood with IQs in excess of room temperature, I also have to think that their rabid insistence on a failed and flawed tech has more to do with either witting hypocrisy or a self-imposed intellectual blind spot, or, just perhaps, something they won't tell us.
DRM is fucked. It's always been fucked. Stop, already, with the fucking DRM.
IFF "piracy" is truly such a huge profit suck, then use watermarks embedded using stegography and find and persecute, oops, prosecute, individual offenders under the appropriate civil law. And on that bit, turning a civil matter of copyright infringement into a high-class felony 'cuz somebody in Hollyweird has their tits in a wringer is so wrong-headed as to be past laughable. (But in a way it's the same as with cops: it's much easier and safer to bust someone for possession than it is to seek out the counterfeiters and cartel bosses.)
Piracy is mostly a red-herring or a scapegoat anyway. People have and will always pay for that which they find entertaining - whether that be food and lodging and mayhap a few coins for a troubador or the price of a cinema ticket - presuming always that the people find the price of that entertainment to be reasonable. When a movie doesn't pull in expected revenue it's said it's because of piracy, when in fact people didn't pay to watch it and they didn't buy the DVD because the movie was shit - and this is one thing the suits in Hollywood are too blind to see.
Oops, sorry; soapbox off.
Ehhh, unlax, doc.
A grown-up male will have no problem with, indeed will welcome, authentic females wherever they are to be found. They will even actively seek them.
Juvenile males will be stuck with their juvenile concepts. None of this is new, and little of it will appreciably change internally.
As for Larry, the biggest loser this side of Cincinnati? He's just out to get laid and find true love, like every other red-blooded male of an age and mindset. It's a game - a very non-serious, tongue-in-cheek, irreverent look at aging hipsters and disco dollies and all the 'lifes' high and low, all with their own comments on weighty philosophical matters. It's either an existential tour-de-force or a wacky game of chances, or something. So, you know, like, get over it, okay?
If you really need to get your knickers in a twist over something, you might, you know, contemplate living on a planet hell-bent on turning itself into The One True Police State, er, Society, whilst suffocating on its offal and the species careering its way on the long slide to extinction with the 1% self-referentially living out their fading-glory fantasies of superiority behind their walls of police, mortar, and moral rectitude. Or something.
Btw, stopped by your site. Read some stuff. Thanks.
I downloaded the Linux version directly from replaygames.com. Works just fine on my Ubuntu 64-bit 13.04. One really nice thing is I only had to unpack the tarball into a folder of my choosing and double-click the Larry-Linux icon. No terminal-fu, no files scattered about in various directories. This, IMHO, is the way to do these things. (I also got the Steam key, haven't used that yet. I have not yet installed Steam directly, but run it in Crossover for the Windows games.)
My only gripe is that I can't run it in a window, as I prefer to do with my other games. (For those who carp that I miss "the immersive experience" I find that if a game is any good I get sufficiently captivated when it's in a window.)
The art, music, dialog, UI are great. A prodigious amount of goodly work went into this reboot. LSL-Reloaded, indeed. And it's still Larry, Larry Laffer, biggest loser and man about town. Right now I'm just exploring and getting killed a lot. Simple, fun times.
You've reached the heart of the matter.
From the article, "I’ll only leave some of the most spectacular failures in for entertainment value."
Beautiful. Reminds me of a test pilot of yore at Edwards, "In spite of all the damn fool things I did, the plane managed to land itself."
A truly nerdy project done by a true nerd. Bravo.
Like you, I'm hoping that there will soon be available working remedies, ones better than what is now done, for some of the things beginning to plague my good eye. This potential tool looks promising.
"....where in fashion in his school days"
I guess it would depend on were he went to school.