It needn't be delusion, nor faith... you can try something without believing it will work. All it means is that you aren't perfectly convinced of its impossibility. I don't know that a "caring, beneficial higher power" doesn't exist - but that doesn't mean I believe it does. I have absolutely no expectation of any of my prayers ever being received by anyone or anything, much less answered. There's no awareness of a supernatural anything. Can't hurt to try, though, especially when you see no other alternative.
Though I never tried that while my life was in danger. Maybe that's different then.
I think I'm fundamentally confused about faith - specifically: how it works. I never understood how one could choose to believe. If I could do that, you can be sure I'd have dreamed up the ideal personal faith by now. But as I'd still be seeing no reasons to even suspect its veracity - in fact, I'd know I made it up to cope with the human condition. So how does that work? How can you have blind faith in anything? If that's a fundamental human skill, I've not yet found it in myself.
(Of course - it's possible I'm actually in favour of a godless universe that leaves it up to us to give things meaning...which would mean I've already got what I want. Even so it would be satisfying to believe, say, that I have a precious and beautiful soul that just happens to be tied to a flawed hunam fleshbag through no fault of my own... for example)
Okay, I think I misunderstood something, myself... might have been redefining empathy to fit my idea of a certain, er, mind-type. Systemising vs. empathising, that kinda thing... (necessarily a dichotomy?)
Hm. Was that what was meant by 'empathy' in this context? I thought it referred not so much to compassion or sympathy but to an intuitive awareness and understanding of the subtle conduits between people; body language, eye contact, tone of voice... things that people so frequently find missing in online conversations.
That doesn't necessarily mean these people care how anyone else feels, or even that they'll understand how or why - but they'll have it easier navigating society, distinguishing between jokes and insults, serious debate and "social glue"-type banter, and so on. Provided everyone around them also is a little like that...
(So, is there a Syndrome for extreme forms of that? For people who have no interest at all in actually discussing a topic rather than just agreeing to disagree right away? Who can treat a science fiction or fantasy series as a soap opera revolving solely around their most-worshipped pairing - to hell with all the ideas and concepts introduced, the style, the alien cultures, languages, art, fashion, history...)
Does it really take empathy to understand that somebody who's slipped and isn't getting up might welcome some help? It might take some courage, though (I'd guess most people are socially insecure to some degree and will worry about doing something 'embarrassing')
Sorry if I went off on a wild tangent. I guess this was really more about the word 'empathy' than about Asperger's. (I don't know for sure if I "have" it, or if anybody I know "has" it, or if I'd even notice, or how much more than a personality type it is, or if it's the same as "simply" having no great interest in people as opposed to having an interest but finding them uncomfortably "devious", etc.)
When you can carry, wield, throw, sacrifice, eat, partly eat and refrigerate corpses, when you can turn them to statues or feed them to your pets or put them in tin cans and lob those at your enemies as well, and when it matters whether or not you're wearing gloves, and when rotting corpses can give you food poisoning or turn you to slime (among more beneficial effects), and when mold and fungi grow on them and you can observe vampires drink their blood...
...then the present will finally catch up with roguelikes in one area.
PS: Yes, I know there's Vulture's, and all those tile modes. But really, how can you tell what anything is that way?:}
I'm afraid I can only look at it in a fairly naive endluser kinda way. But Amiga OS without the Workbench loaded was still a functioning OS with a windowing interface, and a stripped-down WB <=3.1 fit on a single 880 KB floppy or a couple MB on the HD if you installed everything that was shipped with a stock A1200. I suppose programmers back then were used to working with far tighter constraints - but can such a comparison be fair at all given the huge difference in functionality of both hard- and software?
And now I feel bad. I hope my A 1200 still likes me. I don't think it took anywhere near 30 seconds to boot. 7 really is more like it. 50 MHz, not 14, but few expansions otherwise. Four-colour icons, bitmap fonts everywhere, no TCP/IP, no "task manager", no security, no multi-user environment, no audio mixer, no 3D acceleration, no dualhead, no fsck/scandisk on boot, no scheduler, no power management, no system-wide clipboard IIRC, no endless supply of off-the-shelf hardware... consider how long it took PPaint to read one of the 256 colour demo PNGs, or the font prefs applet to resize an (unsmoothed!) vector font. Aren't these things Windoze does pretty much all the time and without noticable delays?
Dunno what's "most" responsible for boot time these days, though. Recognising the hardware? Initialising the network? Just plain loading stuff? How long does it take Amiga OS 3.9 (or 4, if it exists by now?) on a PowerPC-based machine? Ohwell.
Gentle, high-pitched whining embedded in the lower whir of the fan(s), augh! PC #2 fancies itself a vacuum cleaner but even the quiet one slowly nibbles away at my peace of mind. And while I don't know how much power they draw in comparison to, say, taking a hot shower, it still bothers me to leave them running unneeded even if it's just for five hours. Might be a deep-seated fear of lonely exploding machinery... so in a sense I "have to" shut 'em down or else lie awake in abject terror.
</drama>
Boot time isn't that bad; what's annoying is having to restart a dozen apps, arrange them on the desktop(s), fish for your documents, enter passwords, blah blah blah just to get to where you were before...
Amigas will boot with no HD and a blank floppy; the basic OS and "window manager" are in two chips of ROM after all. Install Debian m68k on it and time it again;)
If I were a Windows user, I could actually put the churning little power-gobbler to sleep or have the drives spin down successfully instead of either dying altogether or whirring away endlessly. Blaming hardware manufacturers for their broken ACPI implementations unfortunately doesn't change day-to-day reality. Pretending everything's fine doesn't either. So I shut down and reboot way more often than when I was using Windows. Spyware? Viruses? What? I never, not once, got those. I use Linux because it's less condescending, less cumbersome, and actually user-friendlier in some wayswhen it does work and because I don't actually do audio/multimedia work anymore most days... not because Windows is so horribly broken.
YMMV, naturally. But I never understood the constant advertising of Linux as panacea. (YMMV again.)
Well, I've played bits of The Longest Journey, but couldn't quite reconcile being in a moving, epic story with McGyvering objects out of rubber ducks, band aids, corkscrews, spit, hairballs, duct tape and a puppy... I have no mind for that. And I began to dread those endless conversations! You ended up going through every possible branch of them anyway instead of pursuing whatever it was that interested you. In short, it turned the characters into information terminals rather than people. A shame, because the overall atmosphere was pretty good. For once a game that managed to be serious (although it certainly didn't seem very original or deep) without simply overwhelming you with grit and cynicism.
Heh. I RTFA only to find out if they'd mention Zork, as everyone else always does, or a text adventure that actually has a developed story - such as A Mind Forever Voyaging! Whew.
What about Zork, then? It's fun, even atmospheric - but the prose is only so-so, and there isn't much of a story, is there? It's more of an intricate, geeky puzzlebox than an interactive fiction, and overshadowed (in that respect) by more or less every other text adventure Infocom ever released. A Mind Forever Voyaging is no random pick.
Zork does of course have immense historical significance, but if you want to go with the game that started it all, there's always Colossal Cave/ADVENT...
This is still as confusing as it was a year ago or two. It still makes me feel like one of those mythical people who fall for the blinky YOU'RE COMPUTER IS INFACTED BY AN IP ADDRESS!!! faux Windows dialogue box popups. No idea where the GUI ends and the document begins, or even if there's a difference between the two, or between a menu and a status bar and button and the window decoration.
In short, it's like I've never used a computer before and everything's a mystery in both form and function. That's not necessarily the interface's fault; I mean, if it has or strives for internal consistency then there's no reason it couldn't make just as much sense as any other.
Still, I want to be able to explore an interface safely. For that I need to know when I'm doing something rather than just "thinking with the mouse". Else it's like looking for candy in a minefield.
For some purposes, like "passive" information retrieval, I could see how this would be pleasant (if speedy enough. All this animating annoys me a little...)
Did just that, must've been lucky. Just changed all instances of dapper to edgy. The dist-upgrade was slow last night (~30 KB/s) and had two or three package downloads time out, but it got there eventually.
The next round of upgrades replaced sysvinit with Upstart, reducing boot time considerably. I heard it wouldn't... but it's similar to XP now, rather than several times longer. Apps also seem to start faster; KDE apps anyway -- but I might be imagining that. (I'd sacrifice all of that for working ACPI Suspend, though! Back to random tinkering...)
So I'm living proof that (K)Ubuntu can be operated by nontechnical art school dropout clickdroolers if they make up for it with a modicum of natural brilliance. Har.
Except/bin/sh is now linked to something called dash, and dash doesn't seem to like the == operator. I just discovered a third-party script that wasn't working any longer and am now wondering if I'll run into further problems eventually. Should I just re-link sh to bash instead? I really can't tell.
And Falcon's Eye segfaults. I guess I'll just have to play Freedroid instead then.
But on the whole I'm happy with this release. Well, "happy" enough to tell slashdot about it without deluding myself into thinking anyone actually cares.:p
I didn't know that. I installed IE7 on a German XP, parts of which are now English. I think I'll try adding a Northern Low Saxon WMP next. Granted, most people don't actually speak English if they can avoid it. I'm also not downloading Firefox 2, preferring Konqueror. Wait, I'm actually doing a dist-upgrade at the moment. Never mind - mandatory Firefox download for me.:}
Re:You understand not the truth. Let me guide you.
on
Slashdot's Vastu
·
· Score: 1
Whoosh.:)
You need to have sound turned on. I think it's poking fun at vacuous marketing promises, dotcom absurdities and the everything-can-be-done-online mentality that gave us the iLoo. Well, "could have given".
I don't think ALL depression is faked. I just think MOST depression stems from the fact people have really unimportant lives [even to themselves].
That's not what your post sounded like, though. But I think I see what you mean. I don't think I'd like to erect a barrier between the "worthy" depressed and the "fakers". Are we even talking about fakers? I may be naive here, or European, or erring on the side of charity, but who'd resort to faking feeling like shit if they knew other ways to attack their problems? You can consciously make yourself anorexic (for example), but you probably wouldn't do it because you're having a bad year or two and somehow not in the mood to do anything more productive about it. Not everyone's learned to put up a fight. Some support would be in order.
Naturally it's not sensible to just send everyone on their merry way with a lifetime subscription to the drug of the year, if that's what doctors do where you are. If that's so, then I think there's a bit too much of this clinical "it's just like breaking a leg" mentality going around. That might have helped dissociate depression from its social stigmata, might have helped point out that it's way more than "just feeling bad", but it also seems to gloss over that depression and life(style) aren't separate domains. But to really discuss this I'd have to know more than I do, so I'll leave with my usual "dunno"...
Re:The MSX was undoubtedly a computer
on
Consoles M.I.A.
·
· Score: 1
The XEGS was launched in 1987, the C 64 GS in 1990 - well into the Amiga/Atari ST era. But I suppose associating these old machines with the console resurgence looked like the only way to sell another few of them.
I've seen highly creative and active people fall into depression for no external reason whatsoever. Is it so inconceivable that it can be a serious illness, and that it's hard to fight that illness with the very organ afflicted by it?
Even if depression is purely reaction, a being-overwhelmed - once you're choking on insidiously persuasive infinite loops of "I'm filth, everyone can see it, I have no right to ask for help, I have no right to feel better", once self-injury sounds like a perfectly reasonable punishment for being yourself, once meeting your friends makes you cry with fear, once writing, painting, coding, loving, laughing all seem increasingly bizarre - how do you chill out with that shit screaming in your head?
Please excuse the angst and drama. I suppose it's exactly the kind of stuff people love to make fun of... but it's my description of depression. Not a "light" depression, maybe, but what kind of depression could ever be "light"?
Maybe you can chill out in that state and look forward to working on your projects or spending time with your kids or what have you. That's great... quite amazing, actually. And I suppose it does help having built up a sensible life - ideally before falling to pieces. But even then there's no guarantee you'll recognise it once push comes to shove. Well, I guess I shouldn't presume to speak for you.
Re:The MSX was undoubtedly a computer
on
Consoles M.I.A.
·
· Score: 1
All the (working (presumably)) software I have for my Atari 800 XL is games on cartridge: Archon, Rescue on Fractalus, Lode Runner... some of them are labeled XE Game System.
No, cartridge slots weren't uncommon at all. Not too sure about games, but for the Commodore 64 I have the COMAL programming language and Simons Basic, and besides these and (mostly older?) games there were floppy speeders, game hacking tools and plenty other gizmos. Same with the C 16, the Plus/4 and, I assume, the VIC-20. However, the 64 was (unsuccessfully) made into a "Game System" as well so there must've been more than just three games on cartridge although I never saw a single one of them (there was Fire Ant for the C 16 though).
Never really saw the point of these consolified home computers - even if all you ever did was play games, a floppy drive would've gotten you not just more games, but much more sophisticated games as well. Even as games machines, these computers' advantage was that they weren't just consoles. And the C 64 GS didn't even have a keyboard... how would you play Ultima V with a single button joystick? How would you play old cartridges designed for a "real" 64? Ohwell. Not exactly worth getting all worked up about now...
This wouldn't work in emulation (or with any modern Z-code interpreter), but there is a Japenese Zork port for the Sega Saturn. The Real videos aren't working for me and the screenshots at if-legends.org are offline, so I can't tell how it's played. I imagine a menu would work just fine as an interface to the not-so-sophisticated Zork-era parser and world model, but the game does have its "secret" word(s) - how do you offer those up for selection without giving them away? Oh well.
I have no idea what all these people are doing to get their daily dose of BSODs and malware. Keep the firewall running, avoid IE and OE if you can, and don't install every piece of all-singing all-dancing bullshit pouncing from garish pop-ups. That's all I ever did to keep XP "clean" and I haven't had a single security issue... as far as I can tell, of course. Might just be hollowed out from the inside with rootkits:)
It doesn't exactly mean XP is bullet-proof; it quite obviously isn't. And if you still can't use IE and OE for fear of exploits, that's pretty appalling. But particularly difficult it is not. Considering neither is a top-of-the-line app, I wouldn't really want to use them anyway.
But I haven't been using Windows much lately except for "niche" and music apps and to enjoy the relative peace of a clunky and condescending but rather fiddling-free OS. Maybe it's all getting worse, what do I know. If even geeks can't keep XP running...
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It needn't be delusion, nor faith... you can try something without believing it will work. All it means is that you aren't perfectly convinced of its impossibility. I don't know that a "caring, beneficial higher power" doesn't exist - but that doesn't mean I believe it does. I have absolutely no expectation of any of my prayers ever being received by anyone or anything, much less answered. There's no awareness of a supernatural anything. Can't hurt to try, though, especially when you see no other alternative.
Though I never tried that while my life was in danger. Maybe that's different then.
I think I'm fundamentally confused about faith - specifically: how it works. I never understood how one could choose to believe. If I could do that, you can be sure I'd have dreamed up the ideal personal faith by now. But as I'd still be seeing no reasons to even suspect its veracity - in fact, I'd know I made it up to cope with the human condition. So how does that work? How can you have blind faith in anything? If that's a fundamental human skill, I've not yet found it in myself.
...which would mean I've already got what I want. Even so it would be satisfying to believe, say, that I have a precious and beautiful soul that just happens to be tied to a flawed hunam fleshbag through no fault of my own... for example)
(Of course - it's possible I'm actually in favour of a godless universe that leaves it up to us to give things meaning
Okay, I think I misunderstood something, myself... might have been redefining empathy to fit my idea of a certain, er, mind-type. Systemising vs. empathising, that kinda thing... (necessarily a dichotomy?)
Hm. Was that what was meant by 'empathy' in this context? I thought it referred not so much to compassion or sympathy but to an intuitive awareness and understanding of the subtle conduits between people; body language, eye contact, tone of voice... things that people so frequently find missing in online conversations.
That doesn't necessarily mean these people care how anyone else feels, or even that they'll understand how or why - but they'll have it easier navigating society, distinguishing between jokes and insults, serious debate and "social glue"-type banter, and so on. Provided everyone around them also is a little like that...
(So, is there a Syndrome for extreme forms of that? For people who have no interest at all in actually discussing a topic rather than just agreeing to disagree right away? Who can treat a science fiction or fantasy series as a soap opera revolving solely around their most-worshipped pairing - to hell with all the ideas and concepts introduced, the style, the alien cultures, languages, art, fashion, history...)
Does it really take empathy to understand that somebody who's slipped and isn't getting up might welcome some help? It might take some courage, though (I'd guess most people are socially insecure to some degree and will worry about doing something 'embarrassing')
Sorry if I went off on a wild tangent. I guess this was really more about the word 'empathy' than about Asperger's. (I don't know for sure if I "have" it, or if anybody I know "has" it, or if I'd even notice, or how much more than a personality type it is, or if it's the same as "simply" having no great interest in people as opposed to having an interest but finding them uncomfortably "devious", etc.)
When you can carry, wield, throw, sacrifice, eat, partly eat and refrigerate corpses, when you can turn them to statues or feed them to your pets or put them in tin cans and lob those at your enemies as well, and when it matters whether or not you're wearing gloves, and when rotting corpses can give you food poisoning or turn you to slime (among more beneficial effects), and when mold and fungi grow on them and you can observe vampires drink their blood...
...then the present will finally catch up with roguelikes in one area.
:}
PS: Yes, I know there's Vulture's, and all those tile modes. But really, how can you tell what anything is that way?
Especially considering "Download" might just be Skinny Puppy's least accessible tracks.
I'm afraid I can only look at it in a fairly naive endluser kinda way. But Amiga OS without the Workbench loaded was still a functioning OS with a windowing interface, and a stripped-down WB <=3.1 fit on a single 880 KB floppy or a couple MB on the HD if you installed everything that was shipped with a stock A1200. I suppose programmers back then were used to working with far tighter constraints - but can such a comparison be fair at all given the huge difference in functionality of both hard- and software?
And now I feel bad. I hope my A 1200 still likes me. I don't think it took anywhere near 30 seconds to boot. 7 really is more like it. 50 MHz, not 14, but few expansions otherwise. Four-colour icons, bitmap fonts everywhere, no TCP/IP, no "task manager", no security, no multi-user environment, no audio mixer, no 3D acceleration, no dualhead, no fsck/scandisk on boot, no scheduler, no power management, no system-wide clipboard IIRC, no endless supply of off-the-shelf hardware... consider how long it took PPaint to read one of the 256 colour demo PNGs, or the font prefs applet to resize an (unsmoothed!) vector font. Aren't these things Windoze does pretty much all the time and without noticable delays?
Dunno what's "most" responsible for boot time these days, though. Recognising the hardware? Initialising the network? Just plain loading stuff? How long does it take Amiga OS 3.9 (or 4, if it exists by now?) on a PowerPC-based machine? Ohwell.
Gentle, high-pitched whining embedded in the lower whir of the fan(s), augh! PC #2 fancies itself a vacuum cleaner but even the quiet one slowly nibbles away at my peace of mind. And while I don't know how much power they draw in comparison to, say, taking a hot shower, it still bothers me to leave them running unneeded even if it's just for five hours. Might be a deep-seated fear of lonely exploding machinery... so in a sense I "have to" shut 'em down or else lie awake in abject terror.
</drama>
Boot time isn't that bad; what's annoying is having to restart a dozen apps, arrange them on the desktop(s), fish for your documents, enter passwords, blah blah blah just to get to where you were before...
You be well too.
Amigas will boot with no HD and a blank floppy; the basic OS and "window manager" are in two chips of ROM after all. Install Debian m68k on it and time it again ;)
If I were a Windows user, I could actually put the churning little power-gobbler to sleep or have the drives spin down successfully instead of either dying altogether or whirring away endlessly. Blaming hardware manufacturers for their broken ACPI implementations unfortunately doesn't change day-to-day reality. Pretending everything's fine doesn't either. So I shut down and reboot way more often than when I was using Windows. Spyware? Viruses? What? I never, not once, got those. I use Linux because it's less condescending, less cumbersome, and actually user-friendlier in some wayswhen it does work and because I don't actually do audio/multimedia work anymore most days... not because Windows is so horribly broken.
YMMV, naturally. But I never understood the constant advertising of Linux as panacea. (YMMV again.)
"Ix" was the answer to the question, you ...moderator. Geez.
Well, I've played bits of The Longest Journey, but couldn't quite reconcile being in a moving, epic story with McGyvering objects out of rubber ducks, band aids, corkscrews, spit, hairballs, duct tape and a puppy... I have no mind for that. And I began to dread those endless conversations! You ended up going through every possible branch of them anyway instead of pursuing whatever it was that interested you. In short, it turned the characters into information terminals rather than people. A shame, because the overall atmosphere was pretty good. For once a game that managed to be serious (although it certainly didn't seem very original or deep) without simply overwhelming you with grit and cynicism.
Heh. I RTFA only to find out if they'd mention Zork, as everyone else always does, or a text adventure that actually has a developed story - such as A Mind Forever Voyaging! Whew.
What about Zork, then? It's fun, even atmospheric - but the prose is only so-so, and there isn't much of a story, is there? It's more of an intricate, geeky puzzlebox than an interactive fiction, and overshadowed (in that respect) by more or less every other text adventure Infocom ever released. A Mind Forever Voyaging is no random pick.
Zork does of course have immense historical significance, but if you want to go with the game that started it all, there's always Colossal Cave/ADVENT...
This is still as confusing as it was a year ago or two. It still makes me feel like one of those mythical people who fall for the blinky YOU'RE COMPUTER IS INFACTED BY AN IP ADDRESS!!! faux Windows dialogue box popups. No idea where the GUI ends and the document begins, or even if there's a difference between the two, or between a menu and a status bar and button and the window decoration.
In short, it's like I've never used a computer before and everything's a mystery in both form and function. That's not necessarily the interface's fault; I mean, if it has or strives for internal consistency then there's no reason it couldn't make just as much sense as any other.
Still, I want to be able to explore an interface safely. For that I need to know when I'm doing something rather than just "thinking with the mouse". Else it's like looking for candy in a minefield.
For some purposes, like "passive" information retrieval, I could see how this would be pleasant (if speedy enough. All this animating annoys me a little...)
In other words, Linux is the guy who'll neither patronize you nor sell you anything :p
Did just that, must've been lucky. Just changed all instances of dapper to edgy. The dist-upgrade was slow last night (~30 KB/s) and had two or three package downloads time out, but it got there eventually.
/bin/sh is now linked to something called dash, and dash doesn't seem to like the == operator. I just discovered a third-party script that wasn't working any longer and am now wondering if I'll run into further problems eventually. Should I just re-link sh to bash instead? I really can't tell.
:p
The next round of upgrades replaced sysvinit with Upstart, reducing boot time considerably. I heard it wouldn't... but it's similar to XP now, rather than several times longer. Apps also seem to start faster; KDE apps anyway -- but I might be imagining that. (I'd sacrifice all of that for working ACPI Suspend, though! Back to random tinkering...)
So I'm living proof that (K)Ubuntu can be operated by nontechnical art school dropout clickdroolers if they make up for it with a modicum of natural brilliance. Har.
Except
And Falcon's Eye segfaults. I guess I'll just have to play Freedroid instead then.
But on the whole I'm happy with this release. Well, "happy" enough to tell slashdot about it without deluding myself into thinking anyone actually cares.
I didn't know that. I installed IE7 on a German XP, parts of which are now English. I think I'll try adding a Northern Low Saxon WMP next. Granted, most people don't actually speak English if they can avoid it. I'm also not downloading Firefox 2, preferring Konqueror. Wait, I'm actually doing a dist-upgrade at the moment. Never mind - mandatory Firefox download for me. :}
Whoosh. :)
You need to have sound turned on. I think it's poking fun at vacuous marketing promises, dotcom absurdities and the everything-can-be-done-online mentality that gave us the iLoo. Well, "could have given".
Naturally it's not sensible to just send everyone on their merry way with a lifetime subscription to the drug of the year, if that's what doctors do where you are. If that's so, then I think there's a bit too much of this clinical "it's just like breaking a leg" mentality going around. That might have helped dissociate depression from its social stigmata, might have helped point out that it's way more than "just feeling bad", but it also seems to gloss over that depression and life(style) aren't separate domains. But to really discuss this I'd have to know more than I do, so I'll leave with my usual "dunno"...
The XEGS was launched in 1987, the C 64 GS in 1990 - well into the Amiga/Atari ST era. But I suppose associating these old machines with the console resurgence looked like the only way to sell another few of them.
I've seen highly creative and active people fall into depression for no external reason whatsoever. Is it so inconceivable that it can be a serious illness, and that it's hard to fight that illness with the very organ afflicted by it?
Even if depression is purely reaction, a being-overwhelmed - once you're choking on insidiously persuasive infinite loops of "I'm filth, everyone can see it, I have no right to ask for help, I have no right to feel better", once self-injury sounds like a perfectly reasonable punishment for being yourself, once meeting your friends makes you cry with fear, once writing, painting, coding, loving, laughing all seem increasingly bizarre - how do you chill out with that shit screaming in your head?
Please excuse the angst and drama. I suppose it's exactly the kind of stuff people love to make fun of... but it's my description of depression. Not a "light" depression, maybe, but what kind of depression could ever be "light"?
Maybe you can chill out in that state and look forward to working on your projects or spending time with your kids or what have you. That's great... quite amazing, actually. And I suppose it does help having built up a sensible life - ideally before falling to pieces. But even then there's no guarantee you'll recognise it once push comes to shove. Well, I guess I shouldn't presume to speak for you.
All the (working (presumably)) software I have for my Atari 800 XL is games on cartridge: Archon, Rescue on Fractalus, Lode Runner... some of them are labeled XE Game System.
No, cartridge slots weren't uncommon at all. Not too sure about games, but for the Commodore 64 I have the COMAL programming language and Simons Basic, and besides these and (mostly older?) games there were floppy speeders, game hacking tools and plenty other gizmos. Same with the C 16, the Plus/4 and, I assume, the VIC-20. However, the 64 was (unsuccessfully) made into a "Game System" as well so there must've been more than just three games on cartridge although I never saw a single one of them (there was Fire Ant for the C 16 though).
Never really saw the point of these consolified home computers - even if all you ever did was play games, a floppy drive would've gotten you not just more games, but much more sophisticated games as well. Even as games machines, these computers' advantage was that they weren't just consoles. And the C 64 GS didn't even have a keyboard... how would you play Ultima V with a single button joystick? How would you play old cartridges designed for a "real" 64? Ohwell. Not exactly worth getting all worked up about now...
This wouldn't work in emulation (or with any modern Z-code interpreter), but there is a Japenese Zork port for the Sega Saturn. The Real videos aren't working for me and the screenshots at if-legends.org are offline, so I can't tell how it's played. I imagine a menu would work just fine as an interface to the not-so-sophisticated Zork-era parser and world model, but the game does have its "secret" word(s) - how do you offer those up for selection without giving them away? Oh well.
I have no idea what all these people are doing to get their daily dose of BSODs and malware. Keep the firewall running, avoid IE and OE if you can, and don't install every piece of all-singing all-dancing bullshit pouncing from garish pop-ups. That's all I ever did to keep XP "clean" and I haven't had a single security issue... as far as I can tell, of course. Might just be hollowed out from the inside with rootkits :)
It doesn't exactly mean XP is bullet-proof; it quite obviously isn't. And if you still can't use IE and OE for fear of exploits, that's pretty appalling. But particularly difficult it is not. Considering neither is a top-of-the-line app, I wouldn't really want to use them anyway.
But I haven't been using Windows much lately except for "niche" and music apps and to enjoy the relative peace of a clunky and condescending but rather fiddling-free OS. Maybe it's all getting worse, what do I know. If even geeks can't keep XP running...
Already there, just like everything else somebody liked intensely enough...