Ook the Librarian

You’re correct in a lot of languages; Excel comes to mind. Just that’s not how int rand() works in C.

Sorry, I don’t why you’re getting snark and even being accused of using the word “integer”.

Little .debbies

Honestly, just because one is nonsense, it wouldn’t mean it’s fake. I’ve read help forums.

Whichever one is fake could be real tomorrow.

I said “read the meme” because that is all I was addressing. The title is just engagement-bait as far as I’m concerned. It’s either a meme or question. I’m sure others are here for the question but not the meme. And therefore, I’m being engagement-baited. Who knows, but I was clear about what I was talking about.

I just think saying “you’re completely missing the point” to a comment that is perfectly on topic is completely uncalled for.

I reason I think git is dead-simple to “self-host” is because I do it. I’m not a computer guy. I just used svn to version control some papers with fellow grad students. (it didn’t last, i was the only one that liked it.) so now i use git for some notes i archive. I’m not saying there aren’t tools to considerably upgrade the easy-of-use factor that would require some tech skills I don’t possess, but I stand by point.

man is self-paging and searchable. It uses some old-school emacs bindings like Ctrl + V from before PgDn was a standard key. So I’m not claiming it’s intuitive.

If cmd --help spews a bunch of info to the screen, you basically have to handle it with grep or less or go modern.

Ctrl + R, what a wonderful phrase.

I disagree that there are much better ways. When I have a question while I’m working in the terminal, it’s nice to have a searchable manual that’s in the terminal.

But I can certainly understand why modern manpages aren’t well-developed. That info is already somewhere else. And it’s good enough. It’s not like I’m paying people to write manpages.

“help is an invalid command. Use --help for help.”

I always feel like an idiot when a read an error message like that.

It’s certainly not a hot take. Every “which distro should I try thread” is just a discussion of the different DEs out there. I would like to hear about different package managers. I always seem happiest with apt, and I don’t know why.

This is fun. I’m listening to two Telsa owners bicker about the precise reason that I shouldn’t buy a Telsa.

Do you honestly think they’re “completely missing the point”? Read the meme. There’s no mention of gitea. Self-hosting git is nothing to wiggle your tie over. Maybe setting up the things you are talking about are, but git?

I have a Brother laser printer. (I love it, but that’s not important here.)

The firmware doesn’t support duplexing A5 paper. I’m wondering if this is a good place to dip my toe into the world of open source driver development.

why not learn how to protect them properly from bad actors?

Exactly. One way to start is asking for help on forum with people who like to talk about this kind of thing. Hope OP finds their way.

It seems I was wrong in that you can’t lock an item in a dungeon by beating it. But you can lose keys to a dungeon turning it into a mountain with keys inside. So using a later dungeon’s key to skip a key could softlock you.

I never beat it as a kid either. I barely played it. I thought it was cryptic and punishing, although 9-year-old me wouldn’t have used those words. Just a simple “This game is dumb.” worked.

In fact, I thought it was pretty universally reviled. I’ve since learned that this is due the to fact that a child’s gaming social-sphere in the 90s could be quite limited.

About 5 years ago, glancing across a bookshelf, a certain game cart happened to catch my eye. I couldn’t tell you why it was this particular game cart that my attention ;) but I really started to think about it. I don’t actually know anything about Zelda 2 (other than “This game is dumb.”). So then I thought, maybe it wasn’t for kids. Nine-year-olds are pretty ego-centric. The NES was one of our toys. No adults were playing these things. Did I mention my social-sphere?

It then occured to me: I’m a blank slate. I know next to nothing about the progression, the map, or anything. Of course along the way, I found things familiar, and I knew things like >!Shadow Link was the final boss!< but I didn’t know >!how to cheese the Shadow Link fight!<.

So I gave it an honest, no-help-other-than-the-game’s-original-manual playthrough. Yadda-yadda-yadda, Zelda 2 is one of the best games on the NES, and in my book, that makes it one of the best games ever.

In hindsight, Zelda 1 is cryptic af. “The 10th enemy has the bomb”, “gumble gumble”, “shaka when the walls fell”, wtf? If you’d like to know what the 10th enemy thing is: >!hopefully someone below explains drop counts because I’m sure as fuck not going to!<. How was a kid or adult going to figure that out?

My Z2 playthrough took days, maybe 10, but my memory is fuzzy. I got pretty stuck >!looking for the mirror!< and I wondered around for a full day with no progress although I felt like I understood where the game wanted me to go. About halfway through the next day, I read the manual. I didn’t actually think when I started that I was going to do a no-help-other-than-the-manual playthrough. I thought of as a no-internet-on-an-80s-game playthrough. After the realization that the manual wasn’t outside help, I did use the internet for that. Well as soon as I learned >!hammers can chop down trees!<, I was on my way. The rest of the playthrough went smoothly, apart from being hard as fuck.

I would be careful with the word “always”. A softlock can occur by entering a later dungeon to steal some of its keys. You can use the surplus keys to beat an early dungeon without collecting its item. This locks the item in the dungeon. Hope you didn’t need that later.

the fact that you basically have to read the manual

This is no joke and deserves a bit of emphasis. NES games expect you to read the manual.

I did my first play of Zelda 2 about 5 years ago. I didn’t like it as kid, but I loved my adult playthrough. I will note that this was one of the games that I got stuck until I read the manual.

Another Z2 pointer, to anyone that wants to give it a go, is that you can logically “soft lock” the game with bad key management. It’s unlikely, but if you like to look for unintended orders to do game goals, it could happen.

I read that assembly instruction set provided. It doesn’t look like any architecture I’ve ever seen.

That ain’t why that light isn’t blinking.