BC FUN
Saved by @zmbnski

An interesting set of games that I've been vaguely interested in since I was a kid, after seeing one at a friend's house and never being able to find it again, was the BATTLES IN A DISTANT DESERT/BATTLES ON DISTANT PLANETS series.

 These are turn-based wargames for windows 3.x, sharing the same engine.
Battles in a Distant Desert is from 1992, and is based on the first Iraq war (Desert Storm)
and Battles on Distant Planets is from 1991, and takes place in SPACE!
I'm pretty sure this is the one I played as a kid.
They've got 3 options to play with:
* Player vs. Player
* Player vs. Computer
* Computer vs. Computer

So it's a 0-2 player game!
They also did a DOS strategy game called "STARDATE 2140.2: GALACTIC CONQUEST" in 1990, but it seems to be lost.
All the games share an experimental AI system based on neural networks.
There's also CRUSADE IN SPACE from 1993, which is on the internet archive but doesn't seem to work:
https://t.co/LsXXGlcxTD
There's WORLD WAR II BATTLES: NORMANDY from 1994, (which seems to be lost but I have some leads, so I'll keep looking), and finally LANDS OF SWORDS AND SORCERY, which was in development in 1995 but then halted so it could be revamped for Windows 95 (which never happened)
So those are the six shareware games from Glacier Edge:
Three we have, two missing, one incomplete and never released.
But who was Glacier Edge?
They were basically one person: Eric Dysband, of Glendale, CO. He was a freelance AI consultant working on a bunch of games.
He was a playtester on The Perfect General (1991) by White Wolf Productions.
and the lead developer on Enemy Nations (1996) by Windward Studios.
He programmed The War in Heaven (1999), a Christian FPS from Eternal Warriors/ValuSoft.
He was the AI programmer for NHRA Drag Racing 2 (2000)
His final game was Men of Valor (2004), a Medal of Valor spin-off game.
Sadly, he passed away on April 15, 2004, due to an aneurysm.
He also worked on the AI for Rebel Moon Revolution, which was supposed to be the third game in the Rebel Moon series, which was canceled before release.
There is footage from the demo version, showing the squad-based combat it was going to use.
It turns out the engine for War in Heaven is the same as Rebel Moon Revolution, too.
https://t.co/wbyeSOYZ0j
A correction: I misread what he was saying on Usenet, his games were trying to do AI WITHOUT a neural-network based approach.
He also made some commercial games under the Glacier Edge name:
PARACHUTES AT KANEV (1987) was a DOS wargame based on the Kanev board game, under contract for World Wide Wargames.
He also wrote a series of articles for Gamasutra on AI middleware:
https://t.co/i5lDxELoNb

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The other name for Jörmungandr is Miðgarðsormr, which got rendered into katakana as ミドガルズオルム, or "Midogaruzuorumu".
But when it was translated back into English, the translator didn't get the reference.

So they split that into the city name Midgar and the rest as... "Zolom".
Which is not a word.

It was supposed to be a bit of a pun in Japanese. Midgar, the big city in FF7, is named after Midgard, the Old Norse name for the Earth (as opposed to the other realms of the Nine Worlds)

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time to get back to "repairing" old computers


The funny thing about making the 8-bit-guy into a meme about "repairing" computers with powertools is that the obvious heightening joke would, like, the "8 rounds guy", who fixes computers with firearms

but that would also be him, given that he's also a big gun enthusiast.

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you'd have to go up to like a mythbusters level of overkill.

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Keybort

This one is a MicroWeb Touch-1 XT/AT. Kinda.


See if you look up that keyboard you find the Deskthority page on it, showing this.
It's clearly pretty similar, but there are some differences.


Also that one uses a PC/XT/AT DIN5 connector, and this one uses some kind of RJ connector.


This one isn't in the greatest of shape, but considering I got it from the Chuck Colby estate sale, it's surprising it isn't completely water-damaged.


It's got some minor rust damage inside, where the metal clips rubbed off on the PCB.
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I think chrome is intentionally providing shitty user experience for the blocking of HTTP downloads on HTTPS pages, in order to push developers to fix it faster.

you click a HTTP download link on an HTTPS page and what happens? NOTHING. No error page, no pop-up saying "BLOCKED BECAUSE SECURITY", the browser is just like "did you click? I didn't notice"

it just sticks an error in the JS console.

which I'm sure everyone notices


BTW, this is probably going to get fixed soon, but as of Version 87.0.4280.141 (which seems to be latest) there's a bug which lets you bypass the block, most of the time.

Incognito mode.

Basically chrome won't let you download it because it has the context of you clicking it from a HTTPS page.
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See there's a distinctive look to blacklights, they look like this.


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See, the light produced by the bulb isn't perfectly monochromatic UV. Blacklights are in the UV-A range, which is 315 - 400 nm. The human vision range is 380-nm to 700nm.


There's a little overlap there, between the high UVA and the low end of human vision...
And there's multiple types of ultraviolet lights, but the kinds used in blacklights peak at 370nm or 340nm

so while most of the light coming out of the bulb is in the invisible UV range, some of the light is a bit higher up in the spectrum, which makes it slightly into the visible violet range.

So the light you see from UV lights is either the not-UV light it produces as a side effect, or something else fluorescing.
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The [email protected] slowly began to study the house and he learned that the boy's grandmother was the most influential person in the house. So he thought 'Corrupting the grandmother's mind can make the whole family Xtian as well as the whole village.

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