Running Doom Where It Should Not

Tonight on Twitter, dascho posted this image above with the following Tweet comment: "Look, I'm not saying ATMs are trivial to hack, just that lots of them seem to run Doom okay. Infer what you will 😏". This is both funny and disturbing as it cuts to the heart of an underlying anxiety I have for using ATM's and card payment terminals at gas stations. I always check payment terminals for card skimmers. Image courtesy of dascho (all rights reserved).

Revisiting Pac-Man

Tonight I attended the 50th birthday party of a friend I have known for about 16 years. This wonderful party was held at Pear Valley Winery on the East Side of Paso Robles, CA. I did not know most of the people there but did socialize with those I did know. Aside from the fabulous venue and catered meal and homemade/home-prepared desserts, was a classic Pac-Man arcade player belonging to the birthday boy installed for the guests to enjoy.

I spent a lot of time on it given my relative stranger status with most of the guests. Guess whose high score that is?
I achieved it in only my second game and then got sloppier after that.

All photos by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved).

Musik To Invade Moskau By

I have loved the song "Moskau" by the German industrial metal band Rammstein since first I heard it. True, I do not understand most German and Russian which are both heard in this song as Rammstein frontman Till Lindemann is the male voice heard singing in German and Viktoria Fersh is the backup female  vocals heard singing in Russian.

Note: Lindemann has the most bad-ass voice ever to sing in German (or any language for that matter). Language barriers notwithstanding, the sound of the song is certainly stirring to the point of being the perfect music to invade Russia by.

Note: Rammstein also created the perfect song to invade Poland by HERE. The official music video for this song can be viewed HERE. I certainly find it interesting from a historic standpoint and it intellectually stimulates me. However, emotionally-speaking for some reason(s) I love listening to this song while watching this sequence of clips from the electronic game "Hellgate: London".

Memories of Daggorath

Tonight I used the word "syntax" in an online comment which reminded me of the two-word expression "syntax error". That is a computer message which harks back to my days as a preteen in 1983 playing with my very first computer, a TRS-80 computer from Radio Shack where my dad worked at the time. That computer used BASIC computer language and "syntax error" often came up if any command was given the machine which did not conform to its language. This then reminded me of my first ever computer game, "Dungeons of Daggoroth" which I played quite a bit but not for very long as I soon got hooked playing games on friend's and then later my own Atari 2600 game console. Anywho, I still hold fond memories of and harbor strong childhood feelings for "Dungeons of Daggorath" a game which captured my imagination with it's quirky appearance and feel and its creepy sound and memorable beating heart. A short internet search revealed to me the game was not only quite revolutionary but that many other people in my general age group played the game and remember it fondly and it is highly-regarded amongst gamers.  Not only that, but I also discovered quite happily that people still play it and I can download the game and play it for free now as it is in the public domain apparently. I never really thought of myself as having been in the vanguard of home computer gaming when it all broke forth upon society about 30 years ago, but now that I think about it I really was. Below is a good primer on the game.