I went and looked through my old design notebooks and found these. I don’t know if they are related to Time Fly or not. Some of the dates I used for “present” are 1990? That would have put it right before or during Monkey Island 1. I wish I would have put dates on my old design docs.
Noah recently sent me a photo of an old Lucasfilm Games design doc of mine. I don’t know when I wrote this. After Maniac Mansion but probably before Monkey Island.
Dear Facebook:
I am not on Facebook. Anyone on Facebook claiming to be Ron Gilbert and a game developer is impersonating me. It’s frustrating because my friends think they are following me. They are not.
Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island.
Some notes about these.
These are the final source backups I made when the game left test and the gold masters were sent off.
They are labeled 1.1 because the game got bounced out of test during the final two weeks and so the version got bumped when it went back in.
For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can’t text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.
UPDATE:
The day has come and gone and I didn’t get a happy birthday card from Disney with the Monkey Island IP tucked inside. There is always next year. Fingers crossed. Maybe it because I don’t subscribe to Disney+.
“The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don’t wait for her. Start alone.” - Roger Ebert
One of my favorite quotes and one I keep needing to remind myself of. No matter how blocked or stuck I am, if I just force myself to start writing or designing, it’s not long before the ideas start flowing.
After posting the Delores code, I read a comment from someone who lambasted me for not using compliant JSON for the .wimpy and other data files.
They are 100% right, I did not use compliant JSON for those or any of my JSON-like files.
JSON was created by Doug Crockford, whom I worked with at Lucasfilm. Doug is a super smart guy and JSON is one of the best formats I’ve ever seen. Fully compliant JSON is also a pain in the ass.
Given that this was my engine, I decided to change it. For the record, my JSON reader can read compliant JSON just fine. With the right flags, it can also write fully compliant JSON.
Here is how my JSON differs and the reason for those changes.
a-zA-Z0-9_{
foo: 100
}
{
name: Delores
}
{ or [ then it is assumed to be a dictionary.foo: 100
The main reason for this change was for the Prefs.json file. I expect these to be edited by consumers and { } is hard to understand if you’re not a techie person. I was seeing people add new keys after the closing }
{
foo: 100
}
bar: 1
99% of my JSON files are dictionaries, so it seem fine to drop this requirement.
{
foo: 100
bar: 200
list: [ 1 2 3 "four" 5 6 ]
}
There is no syntactical reason for commas. If you need multiple items on one line, then you use them.
{
foo: 100, bar: 200
}
This is also OK. Commas don’t matter
foo:100,,,,,bar: 200
The only thing I don’t like about my custom format (and the reason for the initial complaint) is they can’t be loaded into any of the excellent JSON editors.
That is true.
I guess everyone needs to come around to my JSON format.
Good news everyone… I got my microSD card and Plex installed!
Bad news everyone… The Plex server is running. I can watch video from another computer, but I can’t get my Amazon Fire TV to see the new Plex server. I used to run a Plex server on my Mac and everything worked fine with the Fire TV, but no-go on the Pi. I’ll dig deeper next weekend.
My latest weekend project. I’m going to build a Plex server using a Raspberry Pi. I’m tried of having to run Plex on my computer every time I want to watch something.
I’m always amazed they can sell these so cheap. The 11 year-old me’s head would have exploded.
UPDATE: My plans have been thwarted by not owning a microSD card. I guess it will have to wait until next weekend.
This isn’t really about Linux password manager, it’s more about password managers in general. It seems like everyone is going for “cloud storage” of my passwords. This is nuts. I know they “claim” they are fully encrypted and they don’t have access to the passwords, but why should I trust them? These passwords are my life. It’s crazy that this has become standard practice in the password manager world.
I use 1Password version 6, because after that they went subscription with MY passwords stored in the cloud with a “promise” that they couldn’t decrypt them. I can’t get (or find where to get) 1password 6 for Linux.
I might opt for one of the command line managers. I loose browser extensions, but honestly, those are probably way more insecure then cloud storage.