I think YouTube is often a bad influence here. You have a set of popular channels that are demoing gear in well-lit, spacious surrounds, using expensive studio and recording gear, putting effort into post-processing and so on. So it’s easy to think OK, if I buy this thing I’m going to get similar results. Then you discover than nobody is post-processing your life, and Thomann won’t send someone round to install a new skylight and cable management system with your order, and also you have to provide your own cacti and marbles, and the gear sometimes shoulders the blame for this.
I don’t level this accusation at Stimming, although the last video I watched of his he’d set up some grating high-pitched loop that made me bail out well before the halfway point. My favourite YT channels now are the ones by rank amateurs in dark bedrooms with greasy iPhone lenses, who are so in love with a basic feature that they just want to get a video of it out there. That’s where you can pick up the real user experience.
EDIT: I got the cactus from a geologist and the crystal was in there to keep it from tipping over while it was rooting - it’s not there because I believe in CRYSTAL STUFF or anything like that!
Maybe this belongs in the pet peeves thread but also remember these YouTubers are getting everything for free too. I’ve never understood this. They’re getting everything FREE. Is it really a critical review if it’s free? And there’s so many of them.
That’s no different than any other reviews, though. All of the magazine reviewers get their stuff for free (at least temporarily - usually review gear is on loan, sometimes with the option to buy at a steep discount) and then the reviews are run next to ads. Music reviewers got all of their music for free back when people paid for music. Game reviewers get free advance copies.
Reviewing in general is mostly a mutual exchange of free stuff for free publicity, always has been.
I think in a lot of cases it’s essentially the companies offloading the product demos, like a private Cenk army, which is fine as long as you view them with that in mind. Disclaimers are good, and that’s a bit of a grey area with YT - I don’t expect Sonic State to have to explain that they’ve received a review unit, but I think if you’re demoing something you’ve been sent to demo, you should make that clear (which many do - lord knows we don’t want some kind of synthesizer gamergate).
The next stage in development is for companies to start seeding YT channels that look just amateur enough to make us think they’re independent, but not so amateurish that we close the tab in disgust.
I used Vi until I ran into some kind of issue. I forgot if it was “line too long” or some other problem. Vim dealt with the same file, no problem.
Started using emacs when I joined a new team. Lot of peer pressure and jokes that wouldn’t stop until they saw me using emacs. The upside was they were enthusiastic about helping when I got stuck or confused as an emacs user.
After that job, went back to vim whenever working in a *nix like shell. I learned vi before any other editor on *nix - muscle memory/habits are just too ingrained. Doesn’t matter how many devs give me a hard time about how emacs is better.
Oregon Trail is at least 5 or 6 years older than ZZT, maybe closer to 10. I don’t remember exactly when ZZT came out but I got it as a kid from one of those mail order shareware catalogs in maybe 1989 or 1990 and it was pretty new.
1990 was when I transferred from junior college to my 4-year university and got my first-ever Unix account. Most of the computer labs around campus were mostly populated by Unix terminals. Just about all of them had “How to use VI” cheatsheets of some sort. I think somebody mentioned emacs but vi caught on much more quickly for me.
I didn’t see Unix until maybe 1997 and that was in the university library, which was still using those ubiquitous mid 80s terminals with the orange phosphor CRTs that I forget the name of.
Actually, the point of sale machines at the video store where I worked in high school and early college migrated to Linux at some point, but I think it was still DOS when I was in high school. And I guess the inventory management system at the little grocery shop where my mom worked was running Unix back in the late 80s but I barely saw any of that.
I’m not much of a coder at all (as in I understand the basics of C/C++ syntax and can manage simple feature changes in existing Python scripts sometimes) but my first contact with that was getting a floppy full of what I assume were undergraduate final projects from some introductory game development course that my dad got from someone who taught in the CS department. They were all simple, mostly text mode games written in GW Basic and I managed to figure it out just well enough to hack in stuff like basic level systems and rude words into a few of them.
I really need to see if I still have that disk hidden away someplace and locate someone with a 5.25" drive who could copy it for me so I could put it on archive.org, it’s definitely something that would be interesting to see now (especially the horizontal space shooter where you had to destroy the Apple factory, which I remember being pretty good for a text mode action game written in Basic for an 8086.
I played Oregon Trail on the Apple II Plus machines that were brought to my elementary school. They also let us play some sort of fraction math game on them. That’s about it.
Junior high was where I learned how to code in Basic. I wasn’t as smart as the kids that had computers at home though. They were doing stuff that I didn’t understand at the time - like rendering sprites and moving them around the screen - whereas all I could muster was simple text-based games and a random insult generator that just output "Your [Mama|Uncle|Gramps] ".
I didn’t do any fun computer stuff in high school. Jr. college computer activity was just editing documents in Word, WordPerfect, or whatever was available.
First coding class in university was in Ada. Dunno why. Next after that was C++. Gawd I was awful at it.
