Dear all websites throwing up cookie requests. It.s ACCEPT or REJECT. Not ACCEPT or <some other deliberately more complicated option so that people will just click ACCEPT>.
I hate all the dark-pattern underhandedness that is just the norm these days. Can't people just be honest? No, because money.
Having arrived here in the November exodus I haven't seen any reason remotely to be arsed to look at any of the Twit-alternatives that have arisen. It's chill and nice here and having been here awhile there's plenty in my timeline to read. Couldn't give the slightest toss if it isn't 'mainstream' (I feel exactly the same way about my work too). 🐂
These are a couple of disk images containing early WIP versions of Llamatron, containing some gameplay elements that didn't make it into the game. They are playable using the STEem Atari ST emulator.
You'll see things like a Baiter-style enemy that came in to hassle you at the end of a level, and also just how unrefined the gameplay was at that stage of development.
Oh for fuck's sake. My heart sinks when someone posts a link to an article, you go to read it and after a few lines the text starts to fade out. You just know a "sign up to read the rest of this article" thing is going to scroll into view.
I absolutely loved what Digital Eclipse did with the Atari 50 archive, so to have them give the same treatment to me, to Llamasoft, has been absolutely incredible. I've had a bunch of archive stuff knocking around for years and had thought one day it'd be cool to maybe make a website or something with some of that stuff on, but to have it presented like this, with so much playable stuff and so beautifully put together is more than I could have ever hoped for.
Hardware progress in the early days was just bonkers. You just expected giant strides all the time because that's what routinely happened. Just brain-smashing chunks of increase in capability inevitably, endlessly, for years. One year you're on a ZX80. A blip of time and it's a C64. A couple of Christmases and it's an Amiga and the distance back to that ZX80 seems like a gulf even though you're not even that much older.
Started reading a webpage with an article about the relentless ongoing enshittification. Before I'd scrolled down more than a page or two I saw the lines of text progressively start to fade out and thought "on this article? surely not?"
But yeah, it faded to nothing and the fucking "Subscribe to read more" box scrolled on.
if anyone's interested in watching an ox and a goat chatting absolute bollocks for an hour and a half, here, we did this earlier this evening and it was a proper laugh :)
(if you enjoy it maybe bung a bit to the lads' charity there too)
I click on a link to something that looks interesting.
Land on the page, eye goes to the middle of the page, below the header photo, to start reading.
As I do that, a white panel slides up smoothly, covering the text. "Thank you for reading", it says, even though it has just obscured the text I intended to read.
"Register or log in" it says, demanding my email address.
I sigh and press the closebox of fuckoffitude.
The constant torrent of enshittification isn't helping my state of mind.
I actually retrieved a couple of early WIP builds of Llamatron from old disks a while ago and I went to play them the other day and it made me realise that boy those early builds sucked, not only because my spritecode wasn't optimised but also due to questionable/not-yet-implemented design stuff. Llamatron shaped up massively in the last few months of dev.
So don't easily give up on a game because it sucks now. If you push on through it could become awesome. 🐂
if people are talking about Macs I should mention my mum. She did admin for Llamasoft and we thought it'd be good for her to have a decent word processor, so we set her up with a C64 and disk drive and associated software and she hated it. So we got her an expensive Sirius business computer thing and she hated that too.
Then I was out in the US just before the Mac released and Apple put on a hands-on demo of the Mac at an exhibition. I tried it and thought "ah, I reckon Mum would get this".
