Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for June 27, 2013

It is very dark here! You are likely to be eaten by a gronk.

I think that’s a grue. Unless there’s a copyright issue; then it’s a gronk.

Oh a spell, that sounds FUN, also I wounder what Marigold knows about granks ? More then I do I’m sure.

And for one definition, and clue me in if I’m wrong but

The Saw-toothed grank were native to the Gungan swamps of Naboo. They were a medium sized predator with sharp teeth and powerful jaws. Their main prey were Shiros. Gungans found the taste of granks very appealing and would fry them. The toenails of granks were used to create Bongo engine parts, while their meat was a delicacy served in high-end restaurants. To hunt, they sensed vibrations through their hair from both the air and ground.

How did one exist in a text based computer game? And does dad still have the 8 1/2 inch flop with that story on it?

When I was a kid we played D&D adventure games with pencils and paper while rolling actual dice. A computer was this large machine that filled a room at large institutions and was programmed with punch cards.

Not to worry, Phoebe, nothing will be “Pointless” when Marigold is around.

In some ways the old style text adventure games were better. You had to use your imagination to envision where you were. You had to draw your own maps. And you had to take clues from the text.

Fee, Fie, Foe, Foo.

Bats nearby!

And dad had to walk eight miles to his computer terminal, every day, through a blinding snowstorm.

Uphill, both ways

Thanks for the talk sir.

http://www.gocomics.com/the-boobiehatch/2013/06/27

Nothing is “pointless” with a unicorn, I suspect…

You are in a maze of pointless narratives, all alike.

>

I played a 5000 line Fortran program called “Advent” on a mainframe back when Marigold was young. Sheldon played something similar to it on The Big Bang Theory.

Marigold always has a spell ready for any situation.

History lesson:

Early computer games all involved cartesian coordinates, until Gregory Yob got sick of them, and invented “Hunt the Wumpus”, a game that, in its original form, involved exploring the inside of a cave shaped like a squashed dodecahedron. It was all topology, and no geometry.

Later, Will Crowther, a former spelunker who had recently gone through a bad divorce, decided to create a computer game that his children could play on the days that he had them. He put his game into a cave, as in “Hunt the Wumpus”, but based it on the real Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. He released it on ARPANet (the original version of the Internet), and another man named Don Woods expanded it considerably, adding Tolkien-like elements. The resulting game was vaguely surreal, and had some Monty-Python-like elements, which became a long-standing tradition in computer gaming. It was called “Adventure” (or “Advent” on computers with name-size limits), or sometimes “Colossal Cave”.

When that game made it to MIT, the artificial-intelligence students decided that they could do better, and created a new game that tried to stretch all the features of “Adventure”. Where “Adventure” could only handle one- and two-word commands (“west”, “take cage”, “throw ax”), their new game could process full sentences (“attack the troll with the nasty knife”). It eventually got the name “Zork” because they couldn’t think of anything else. Zork was written in MDL (a derivative of LISP), but one devoted programmer managed to rewrite the whole thing in FORTRAN. The FORTRAN version came to be known as “Dungeon”, but was also long to be found on CompuServe under the name “Banshi”.

A number of MIT staff and students formed a company called “Infocom” then developed a new language called ZIL that allowed them to pack about 1/2 of Zork into a single 5.25" diskette that could run on most personal computers of the era. This was released as “Zork I: The Great Underground Empire”, and it was followed up by "Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz” and “Zork III: The Dungeonmaster” (it took three games instead of two because a lot of new material was added). Infocom continued to run until about 1990, and produced over thirty games, not only further extensions of the Zork world, but murder mysteries, science-fiction epics, and even one romance. Their most famous production was a mad thing co-written by Douglas Adams, himself, the game version of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. My wife and I were beta testers for that one, and for about ten other Infocom games.

The really cool thing about the Infocom games is that they still work, even on iPhones and other equipment that was undreamed of back when Infocom was in business. And, although Infocom is long gone, there are available programs for creating your own Infocom-compatible games. The most recent, and most powerful, is Inform 7.

> North WestYou can’t go that way. It is blocked by paparazzi and bodyguards.

I like the font for the ‘COMPUTER CAMP’ is different. Funny )Also, how about this: ‘obvious exits are North, South and… Dennis.’

You could make pictures with text symbols.Usually Playboy fold-outs

After lights out, this comic was eaten by a grue.