The classic arcade game Venture. Go ahead, make my day:

https://archive.org/details/arcade_venture#

Venture is a 1981 arcade game by Exidy. The goal of Venture is to collect treasure from a dungeon. The player, named Winky, is equipped with a bow and arrow and explores a dungeon with rooms and hallways. The hallways are patrolled by large, tentacled monsters (the “Hallmonsters”, according to Exidy) who cannot be injured, killed, or stopped in any way. Once in a room, the player may kill monsters, avoid traps and gather treasures. If they stay in any room too long, a Hallmonster will enter the room, chase and kill them. In this way, the Hallmonsters serve the same role as “Evil Otto” in the arcade game Berzerk. The more quickly the player finishes each level, the higher their score. The goal of each room is only to steal the room’s treasure. In most rooms, it is possible (though difficult) to steal the treasure without defeating the monsters within. Some rooms have traps that are only sprung when the player picks up the treasure. For instance, in “The Two-Headed Room”, two 2-headed ettins appears the moment the player picks up the prize. Players die if they touch a monster or the corpse of a monster. Dead monsters decay over time and their corpses may block room exits, delaying the player and possibly allowing the Hallmonster to enter. Shooting a corpse causes it to regress back to its initial death phase. The monsters themselves move in specific patterns but may deviate to chase the player, and the game’s AI allows them to dodge the player’s shots with varying degrees of “intelligence” (for example, the snakes of “The Serpent Room” are relatively slow to dodge arrows, the trolls of “The Troll Room” are quite adept at evasion). The game consists of three different dungeon levels with different rooms. After clearing all the rooms in a level the player advances to the next. After three levels the room pattern and monsters repeat, but at a higher speed and a different set of treasures.
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Released
1981

Clerks

Some great advice here. I also like this piece of verbal judo: “I have taken up too much of your time, I will let you go now. I have bored you enough with my pedantic nonsense.”

Singapore is a tropical city above ground with an underground city beneath it. Great food, great people, just do not chew gum on the subway.

My obsession with the Fediverse and Linux.

Who are some people to follow on Bookwyrm?

Creatine

I can appreciate art from any artist, but I will not patronize an artist that is trash.

As a kid I got a lot of “Do as I say not as I do.”

The lesson I learned is that a lot of grown ups are hypocrites. I saw this so much it made me decide I would always be honest with myself and others about why I was doing the things I was doing. It is not always easy, especially now that I have kids of my own, but it is much healthier in the long run. I teach my kids by example rather than preaching fake piety.

The Wire

Gotta keep the devil in his hole

I particularly like the original phaser from the pilot episode The Cage but my favorite is the phaser rifle from Where No Man Has Gone Before.

I went back and watched it and I see what you are saying about Furiosa and the concubines, it is a great device for setting up the chase. The chase then becomes the rest of the movie. Furiosa and Max have invincible plot armor during these chases and while I can appreciate the artistic skill in crafting these action scenes, I found sitting through them all a bit laborious.

The most interesting thing about the story to me was how Max and Furiosa went from straight up try to murder each other to becoming best buds. This happens so quickly and without a lot of explanation and to me that is a bit jarring. It seems to me the reason they dont spend more time on it is that the chase has already begun. And this to me is what keeps me from loving this this movie, they compromise on story in favor of chase and action scenes. While there is a lot to love about this movie, it is still not my favorite Mad Max movie.

That’s fair, I may have been overly dismissive with the plot, maybe I need to go back and give it a second look.

My understanding is that attacks like this force deployment of air defences to population centers rather than protecting military targets. So no direct military benefit, but it can help shape the battlefield.

How costly is the air defence in comparison to the cost of the attack?

Phlogiston, its where heat comes from!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

Two questions come to mind: will this demo get out and vote? And if they do who can they vote for that will make policy decisions in line with this viewpoint?

It is hard to separate nostalgia from any rational opinions I have about this movie, since it came out when I was a randy and uninformed 15 years old. That said it had really interesting characters, a plot which I could follow and I especially liked the village of kids from the crashed plane. It had a Lord of the Flies vibe, but with a counter-narrative to the doom and gloom theme that humans will revert to barbarism, but also not an idealized, utopian vision of what would happen. Even Bartertown had an element of social commentary. It seemed to be offering different versions of how people would organize themselves if we wiped away current civilization and social structures. Which one is better? It does not directly make a judgement, but in some sense Max is fighting for what feel “right” to him in order to redeem himself for not being able to save his family and all the terrible things he has done in the wake of the disaster to survive. Honestly Thunderdome is one of my favorite movies.

/action Takes shovel and starts digging what appears to be his own grave.

I think Fury Road has amazing visuals, cinematography, practical effects, stunts and all that. But I really did not find the story of the characters interesting.Honestly it felt more like Fast and Furious than Mad Max.

My favorite Mad Max film is Thunderdome.