Literally just now. I was going to agree and add detail about my own thought process, but… meh.

It’s okay guys. You can just call it a Tempest 2000 emulator. Don’t feel bad.

More Tales to Tremble By is the only one so far I might be eventually talked into thinking is the one, but no epiphany yet. The low angle drawing of the house and the sailor peering over the railing feel familiar (particularly that greenish wash over the sailor one), but they don’t quite match the admittedly 35-40 year-old memory in my head.

The Tales of the Black Freighter vibes in it are pretty cool as well.

I just looked through it and that’s not the one, (art style is too different) but I have to say I love block-print drawings. Hell, seeing all this mid-century spooky artwork has been really fun even if the for-sure right book never pops up.

Thanks!

I see it, and it’s not an absurd guess, but of the suggestions so far, the “Tales to Tremble By” books seem closest. I tried AI first, though not with the entire post as a prompt. Oddly, my initial slimmer prompt got something that’s closer than the full thing, though I’ll leave it to the dear reader whether that says more about AI or me. Thanks for the new approach!

I am glad to see ChatGPT is a little less assertive these days about how confident it is.

I will have to take a look, but I tend to think this is not it. I was familiar with Ripley’s as a brand from the newspaper comic, so I think I would have recalled that detail. Still, thanks so much!

I’m not willing to commit, but I can’t dismiss this one out of hand. I will need to track down a copy and see if anything gives me that AHA! moment.

Thanks!

I was really optimistic that the Schwartz books with the original Stephen Gammell illustrations would be it, but it’s just not quiiiite right. It could all be jumbled enough that it’s just me whose wrong, but this feels like one of those times where I think the component parts in my brain are sufficient that the memories will coalesce if and when I see it again.

In a Dark, Dark Room seems to be from something a little later and slimmer. My book was also a good inch and a half thick, maybe pushing 200 pages depending on paper weight.

Ed Gorey specifically got me thinking about this book again, but his style is also not quite right. Thanks for the suggestions, though!

Redacted registrars and contact info at this point just means small-time origins. Most registrars will offer it for free or very cheap.

Poking around reddit, it appears it’s not a scam per se, but the low barrier to entry on both sides means there’s a lot of low-info/low-budget creators on one side, offering gigs that may not be worthwhile and including a lot of people asking for “samples” or tryouts that seem suspiciously like requests for free work. Then on the jobseeker side there are a lot of unskilled newbies just putting their availability out there.

Seems like having a profile is not a bad idea, but each specific opportunity would need to be vetted, and anything that smells fishy probably is.

So, he modded a GBA either to accept control input from modded controllers, or he stuffed a SBC emulator with two USB-C ports into a GBA case.

Pretty cool, and a clever concept to work towards, but hardly revolutionary. I wouldn’t be “drooling” until it was past prototype stage and didn’t look like a it was stuck together with a piece of tape or that a single bump on the train would snap the ports right off those control pads.

All the more reason to emphasize the tough ones!

Also, have you SEEN inflation lately?!?!?

Even then, I can’t quite find a single Linguistics term for this phenomenon, where it becomes a thing of its own or even replaces the original. ‘Eggcorn’ and ‘Malaphor’ seem to be pretty decent casual terms.

So, lots of examples, but not much on your question about terminology. In looking around a bit, I couldn’t find a single specific term for a malapropism that “sticks,” but you could fairly describe it as a form semantic drift driven by catachresis, thought the latter seems more common in literary criticism or philosophy than in linguistics.

I use KMK, which doesn’t require compiling, but instead uses human readable Python, and now there is POG, which I’ve used on my last two and runs you through the process.

Keychron’s relationship with QMK is a touch fraught. If they claim a wireless board supports QMK, it only truly supports it in wired mode. In wireless mode, they’re either using a secondary MCU or an off-license fork of QMK, as the mainline doesn’t support wireless for licensing reasons.

Out of curiosity, what is your non-gaming keyboard? Lot’s of fun stuff over at [email protected]

I use RP2040’s for all my homemade boards. Deeply satisfying, and one of the few DIY projects where you can come away feeling like you’ve got something absolutely as usable as a commercial offering.

Some of the older apps will still work if you can track them down. Most of the features will work with no Logitech software at all (and something like AHK can help). The custom drivers themselves will probably work without the app or at least without logging in. My old M560 still uses SetPoint in Windows, and it seems less oppressive than the newer LogiOptions or whatever.

Finally, join us! There’s a whole world of fully programmable open-source-firmware custom keyboards, and mice are coming along, too, especially trackballs.

None of you assholes in [email protected], I can tell ya that!

::sad gator noises::

I bought a collection of DOSBOX-wrapped TSR Gold Box AD&D games from Steam. After spending more time than I recalled it needing to generate a party and then even longer getting my bearings puttering around the civilized part of New Phlan, Pool of Radiance started crashing and truncating item strings (rendering them useless and un-removeable) and dropping like 50,000 gems from a random Kobold encounter.

It was unplayable without, I assume, tracking down sketchy third-party save-game editors. However, since it took me a couple of hours to get out into the first proper dungeon, they tried to say I was past my “reasonable” preview time, which I guess in reality is treated as a two-hour hard cutoff. I ran it through the system a couple of times and got auto-denied, but eventually got through to a chat agent who gave me my eleven dollars back as Steam credit. :-)