leftzero

Dragon 32, if I recall correctly.

Mostly try to learn some basic (probably was too young for that), play some games, and try to get the cassette to work. It almost certainly wasn't the right computer for a kid my age.

Later, if I recall correctly, some model of Atari ST, which again was mostly wasted, though it introduced me to graphics editing, and some 16MHz (with turbo on!) 286 computer with a 65MB hard drive and CGA graphics (later upgraded to EGA and eventually VGA, though that might have been with a later 486), which introduced me to DOS (and extended and expanded memory), WordStar, dBASE 3, Lotus123, LucasArts and Sierra adventures, Wing Commander, a multitude of CRPGs, and eventually Windows 3.x.

I didn't really get online until I went to the university, back in the glorious days of Yahoo, and the much superior Altavista, surfing on Netscape, before Internet Explorer ruined everything.

There were some great SGI Indigo machines (my first contact with a Unix type OS) and a prehistoric VAX machine with actual dumb terminals (never saw the actual server, sadly) for us to practice with there at the university, though, so that was great (though it didn't make up for the Pascal).

You'd need more than two parties for that.

By any civilized standard democrat politicians are far right extremists (a few token exceptions are closer to right or even center-right on some points, but they have little effect on the whole). Republicans are outright deranged lunatics, mixed with a worryingly increasing percentage of fascists.

I don't suck as much at programming as I suck at everything else.

Sounds more like an enlightened centrist to me, but same difference really.

If a maniac wanted to shoot someone ten times, and the victim wated not to be shot, the enlightened centrist would smugly proclaim that the maniac shooting the victim five times would be a just middle ground that'd be fair to both parties, and that the victim would be unreasonable, intolerant, and antidemocratic for not agreeing to it.

Same result, orders of magnitude more hypocrisy and idiocy, and of course you can't criticise them, since by enabling the maniacs they're just debating and trying to find a compromise, and disagreeing with them is being hostile and going against the very principles of democracy itself.

Malignant asshats, the whole lot of them, wouldn't recognize the paradox of tolerance if you violently hit them in the head with it.

I'm not sure Townscaper can be called a game either, but it certainly is an excellent relaxing and enjoyable way to waste one's time.

He set The Hobbit (which he wrote for his kids) in the world he'd already built... not because he particularly enjoyed worldbuilding, but because a culturally complex fantasy world with a rich history and mythology was a prerequisite for the epic poetic sagas he felt needed to write in order to properly develop his fantasy languages, which is what he really liked to do, as a philologist.

“There's no underwear in space.”

Visually it's obviously very dated, but I can still whistle Monkey Island's theme any time I want after all these years...

Horoscopes. Fortune cookies. Political speeches.

Yeah, I sort of forgot the Angle part of Anglo-Saxon, didn't I..?

(Plus, there was probably quite a bit of Latin already there before the Norse and the Norman, at least south of Hadrian's wall, though far from enough to make Old English a Romance language... all in all English has a very complex history.)

extremely rare rocks

Silicon is the second most common element in the Earth's crust... 90% of all rocks are some form of silicate...