After Inktober and November's National Novel Writing Month, this time it's DOSember, a month long of DOS game streaming on the Twitch community! Screw the classic holiday fanfare, let's have a wonderful DOSember instead. I haven't participated in the DOS Game Club's monthly sessions lately, but this month we're tackling Lemmings, so I might go ahead and double-check the state of my yellowed serial mouse. Judging from the unexpected influx of traffic to last week's Renaissance of FPGAS article, I'd say the interest in vintage hardware and software is still very much alive.

Previous month: October 2023.

Books I've read

Yearning for something digestible in a world far far away, I started re-reading the Malloreon chronicles written by David Eddings. He has written tons of books set in the same fantasy world, and I honestly liked the earlier series better, but had these still lying around. Eddings' books are a great way to wind down after all that heavy non-fiction artillery.

Thanks to a reader of my Save Sourdough book, I bought Thomas Treffi-Chambelland's Sourdough baking: A Treatise, my first bread-related purchase in a long time. Thomas' biologist background is clearly visible as the work starts off with a hefty amount of theory which only makes books such as this one more interesting. I haven't gotten far yet but hope that it will soon reinvigorate my baking experiments.

Games I've played

Most of this month's gaming was devoted to Mario's wonderful (ha!) return to his 2D platforming roots. But before blindly jumping into Super Mario Bros. Wonder, I wanted to replay a few Game Boy oldies such as Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins. The Wario Land franchise is up next, even though I know all levels by heart.

Did you know Commander Keen was published on the Game Boy Color? It's not what you think it is, however: it's a completely different game with some DOS Keen vibes slapped on, such as enemy design, and of course the inclusion of the pogo stick. I loved the 8-bit chiptune soundtrack by by Commodore 64 music chip expert Mark Cooksey, but the main gameplay mechanics raised more than a few eyebrows, so play it at your own risk. For the curious, this is what you're subscribing to:

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I also got tricked into buying Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania but forgot that I hate most roguelike/roguelite games---this one included.

Selected (blog) posts

• Flemish Radio 1 published a Deze boeken moet je lezen in het middelbaar onderwijs! (you have to read these books in high school!) list and it's making my head spin. I presume they forgot to mention to pick a few and not plow through everything...
• Justin Searls talks at RailsConf 2019 about selfish programming, a way to learn by building for yourself.
• Love doesn't scale according to Mark Hurst---a critique on Marc Andreessen’s Techno-optimist Manifesto.
• If you want to have a laugh, you can read Sanjay Brahmawar's Super iPaaS vision of the Software AG's development future. Cloud-first! Leverage the power of generative AI! Sigh.
• Horst Gutmann celebrates 20 years of blogging, summarizing the gradual evolution of Zerokspot.com. Congrats!
• Kev Quirk set up a pen pals blogging system that I'll be keeping an eye on. I subscribed and am planned in for March 2024.
• Wesley Aptekar-Cassels tells us why we should avoid using JavaScript CDNs.

Other random links

• ChimeraOS is an OS that provides an out of the box couch gaming experience---it basically transforms your Steam library into a console. I didn't know it existed, cool!
• If you're on the lookout for a robust plain-text accounting app, Hledger has got you covered.
• Forklift 4 is an interesting alternative to MacOS' built-in Finder I have yet to try out.
• KeeperFX is an open-source remake & fan expansion to Dungeon Keeper. It hit version 1.0 in November! (Thanks, Michael)
• The Pudding Cup is an award for the best visual and data-driven stories of 2023, which will likely inspire your information visualization thinking mode.
• Guile looks like an interesting Scheme implementation and extension language platform that I'd want to play with soon.
• Want to run a large language model such as Llama2 locally? Download Ollama and off you go.
• Remember big box PC games? If you're the kind of person who threw away these cardboard boxes, no worries: you can marvel at the sizable artwork online via bigboxcollectin.com.