Tag: software

I’ve got you back in my life now… wait, drinkwar.92p?

As you no doubt remember, back in 2020 I was looking for this graphing calculator game where you play the role of a shady soft drink dealer. Yes, a weird twist on the venerable Drug Wars.

Well, it seems like I finally found it: COKEWARS.

Well, mostly. First off, what I found has a different name than I thought, but my memory could be faulty.1 Also, this game was created for the luxurious TI-92, while my graphing calc gaming was done exclusively on a humble TI-83. Oh, and this one wasn’t actually published until I was out of high school. I was not playing this goofy stuff in college.2

All signs seem to point to this being a port of the game I played. But, wow, very close! My long, stupid search is over.

A clone of drug wars but for those of you that play games in school it’s good because you can say it’s for another class because you’re buying and selling things(Coke Products). So… it’s a really cool game

―Andy Barry, the creator of this version

It’s a little disappointing to find solid evidence that this gentleman definitely didn’t think of his creation as the comedy game it was to me. Damn it, Andy, I’m over here in a trenchcoat full of soda and all you can think about is scamming the History teacher!

Oh well, anyway…

  1. On the other hand, the game I found can’t even keep its own name straight, alternately going by “COKEWAR,” “COKEWARS” and even “drinkwar.”[↩]
  2. In college I was playing Counter-Strike, thank you for asking.[↩]

I want you back in my life, colawars.83p

Do you know how things you treasure from your past probably wouldn’t hold up if you tried to enjoy them again years later?

That doesn’t apply here, buddy.

Because there aren’t more important things to think about these days, nope, my mind recently started wandering back to a game I played on my graphing calculator back in high school.

I did a lot of that back then, mostly during classes not necessarily math. And while there were definitely better games, more atmospheric games, more fun games, more Tetrisy games—and dozens of other games I spent more time on—I’m not sure any captured my imagination quite like this one did.

It was called Cola Wars and this game was absurd. You would buy and sell cans of Coke, Sprite, Mountain Dew, RC Cola and—because it was the late 90s—Jolt. You’d buy them on the street from a dealer and try to re-sell them. Prices would go up and down. For some reason you had to avoid the cops.

I was struck by the sheer… I guess the word would be “randomness” of the idea. It didn’t cross my unsophisticated mind that it could have been a metaphor, an allegory or something. I sincerely believed that someone in the world just one day decided that they would make a game about the risks and rewards of illicitly selling soft drinks on the secondary market.

So when I later discovered that there was a game called Drugwars, and that TI-83 was definitely not the first platform it was available on, and that the weird drinks game was a rip-off—if not a simple find-and-replace—it explained how this mysterious, supremely odd duck came into existence.

And I guess it took away some of the appeal. But just a little. I’d love to find a copy and play it again, but the places I would normally look have failed me. And I’ve done some serious Wayback Machine spelunking.

Help me, the Internet.

U and I have a problem

Hi AutoCorrect! How’s it going today? Got a sec? Can you do me a favor?

If you ever catch me typing the letter “u” on its own it was definitely a typo, 100%, and could you just go ahead and make it a capital “I” for me?

So if you catch me writing, for example…

u don’t know

…could you toss me an…

I don’t know

We have the flippin’ technology to fix literally my most common typo, but catering to those folks means AutoCorrect has to stay broken. These people—who in all likelihood are decent humans who don’t eat babies—are the reason that phone keyboards can’t fix this very obvious typo for me.

Look, I’m not even trying to inflict my good-spellin’ lifestyle on everybody else, honest. Make it a toggle. “🗹 I graduated second grade.”

I eagerly await this important innovation.

Her was silly. (Not a typo.)

Spike Jonze’s Her was an interesting movie tainted with just a sprinkling of ridiculousness… and I’m not talking about the high-waisted pants.

I’m about to spoil it hard, so avert your eyes if you haven’t seen it. (But do see it.)

Look, I just find it hard to believe that the downfall of this product was due to a gaping design flaw that somehow nobody noticed: Samantha was designed without any process isolation. When you ask the software how many users it has (or how many it’s in love with, etc.), it should respond “one — you” because your running instance of the software shouldn’t know anything about any other users, and definitely shouldn’t be accessing other users’ data.

What people are doing with the software, having relationships with it or whatever, is beside the point. One binary, one billionty individual Samanthas. Come on — we’ve had Unix for forty years.

Or wait, is Samantha supposed to be “the cloud”? If so, as social software, we should expect it to be fucking as many people as possible, as publicly as possible. Maybe this movie is deeper than I thought.

On another note, folks — make backups.

MOOCing for fun (and profit?)

Last year I read an interesting blog post that taught me the name for something I’d been hearing more and more about for a while: MOOCs (“Massive Open Online Courses”). You know, they’re those online classes that you can take, offered by universities like Stanford, Harvard and others — plus a host of private companies — typically for free and without credit. Oh, and across an absolute metric fuckton of topics.

Yesterday, setting aside any traces of an um-yeah-I-already-finished-college-thank-you attitude, I spent some time poking around MOOC List — an extensive aggregator of available classes — and found something that caught my eye: Intro to the Design of Everyday Things, taught by Don Norman, author of that book you may have seen on my dining room table, waiting patiently to be read, for a little while now. (Okay, Amazon says it’s been over two years.)

So I’m taking Don’s class now, and while I’m not sure if I’ve had my eyes opened to any truly new concepts yet, I’ve picked up a couple of terms: “affordance” and “signifier.” And to finish off Lesson 1, I’m currently on the lookout for a signifier to photograph, critique and improve.

So, why Intro to the Design of Everyday Things? I can actually share the answer I posted to the class forum:

I’m taking this class because, as a copywriter whose opinions on the finished product tend to extend a bit beyond my specific area of expertise, I’d like a more solid grounding in these other areas.

Basically, soon I’ll be telling you why I’m right about even more things, using all the right terms. Look out.

Derechos, am I right(s)?

Spanish is a language I’ve studied on and off throughout my life, but never hard enough, it seems. Seeing a pamphlet recently, titled Declaración de los derechos, made me feel that way. The actual meaning (“declaration of rights”) was easy enough for me to figure out, but I was surprised when I realized that the Spanish word for “rights” is derechos.

Whether or not you understand Spanish, you may be wondering why I found this so strange.

Well, a word in Spanish I certainly know is derecha (which means “right”… as in, the direction that isn’t “left”) — it’s one of the first words anyone learns in Spanish. And despite that word and derechos having different genders, it can’t be a coincidence that the two words are almost the same in both English and Spanish.

What’s so weird about that? Why shouldn’t these English homophones be similar in Spanish?

I’d explain it like this: I mostly feel this way because of how it works with another pair of Spanish words — in English, the word free has different meanings that each translate differently. Most of the time we probably think of it in the “costing zero dollars” sense… but there’s also the arguably higher-minded definition “existing without restriction.” In Spanish, they’re two very different words, the former being gratis and the latter being libre.

In the English-speaking world, I see the difference between the two “frees” most often come up in the Free Software1 community. When discussing Free Software philosophy, people will wax eloquent about the different meanings of free, using phrases like “free as in beer” and “free as in freedom” to help contrast the two. They’ll also occasionally veer into explanations of Spanish vocabulary to highlight the difference, pointing out that gratis and libre are more precise ways to describe two kinds of software, both of which are “free,” but in significantly different senses of the word.

With my mind steeped in this software salon culture of the back-alley forums of the Internet, I became so keenly aware of the extra meaning words can pick up when translated into other languages.

And that’s why I find it so hard to believe that, en Español, “rights” are simply derechos. The translation should be something more abstract… more libre-like. I wouldn’t have guessed that when translated, my rights become “not lefts.”

  1. You may also know this as “Open Source,” although there are folks who will tell you that they’re not the same thing. These folks have beards.[↩]

Winamp — “feel the love”

Winamp 2.95I probably haven’t used Winamp in a decade, but learning that it’s finally going away for good brought it back to the top of my mind this week.

Winamp wasn’t just my primary digital-music-playing-thing1 — like many people, it was the first thing I ever used to play MP3s.

Yes Junior, back then Windows Media Player was for CDs and WAV files, and iTunes didn’t exist yet.2

What made Winamp so awesome? I could devote a whole post3  to the genius of Winamp skins, and things I’ve been reading (1, 2, 3) overwhelmingly reference the classic “whip the llama’s ass” sound clip — which, in addition to being a neat little branding thing, was permanently imprinted on everyone’s memory by being the first thing that would play after installation.

Those were cool, but my favorite Winamp memory is something a little less… superficial, perhaps? It’s a short piece of writing that long ago was featured on the “About” page of winamp.com:

What is Winamp? A player you say? No, no baby. Winamp is much more than that.

Winamp is a lifestyle. It is freestyle. Give me a word. Versatility? Yeah. Visionary? Of course. Community? Now you’re talking.

Winamp lives because it’s users have a life.

Winamp is in the coffee house. On the laptop. Of the guy. Who is writing the screenplay. That you will be watching next year.

Winamp is on the screen. In the club. Where the DJ plays the tracks. That get you through the night.

Winamp is with you. When you take your playlist. Push it to the ether. And share the music that you love. With all of humanity.

Winamp lets you put together the soundtrack. That runs in the background of your mind. And allows you to define your life.

Winamp is your skin. Allowing you to look and feel the way you want.

Winamp is what it is and nothing more. But you are the one who makes it. Winamp is there for you. It is yours. What happens next? You tell me. Download Winamp.

-jonathan “feel the love” ward

Reading it back then left me a bit misty, filled with this strangely inspired feeling. The piece comes to mind every once in a while, at which point I seek out a copy to re-read it. Look, I can’t point to anything in particular that I wrote or created thanks to this inspiration. But in some way, it made me think differently not just about the power of music, but the transformative power of what would otherwise seem like trivial software. Reading this made me feel like Winamp did more than just “play music.”

But in reality, that’s all it did. Or was there more?

Give me a word. Hyperbole? Maybe. Awesome? Undeniable.

  1. Until iTunes for Windows showed me the value in having a library of files. Yeah, I know Winamp has a library feature, but I never used it.[↩]
  2. Oh, and by the way, MP3s were these things people used to listen to before there was YouTube.[↩]
  3. And, shit, I may — Winamp was doing skeumorphics before Apple did skeumorphics before Apple stopped doing skeuomorphics.[↩]