Ook the Librarian

I live in the second one. On purpose. I’ll never wear my debian tshirt.

I never beat it as a kid either. I barely played it. I thought it was cryptic and punishing, although 9-year-old me wouldn’t have used those words. Just a simple “This game is dumb.” worked.

In fact, I thought it was pretty universally reviled. I’ve since learned that this is due the to fact that a child’s gaming social-sphere in the 90s could be quite limited.

About 5 years ago, glancing across a bookshelf, a certain game cart happened to catch my eye. I couldn’t tell you why it was this particular game cart that my attention ;) but I really started to think about it. I don’t actually know anything about Zelda 2 (other than “This game is dumb.”). So then I thought, maybe it wasn’t for kids. Nine-year-olds are pretty ego-centric. The NES was one of our toys. No adults were playing these things. Did I mention my social-sphere?

It then occured to me: I’m a blank slate. I know next to nothing about the progression, the map, or anything. Of course along the way, I found things familiar, and I knew things like >!Shadow Link was the final boss!< but I didn’t know >!how to cheese the Shadow Link fight!<.

So I gave it an honest, no-help-other-than-the-game’s-original-manual playthrough. Yadda-yadda-yadda, Zelda 2 is one of the best games on the NES, and in my book, that makes it one of the best games ever.

In hindsight, Zelda 1 is cryptic af. “The 10th enemy has the bomb”, “gumble gumble”, “shaka when the walls fell”, wtf? If you’d like to know what the 10th enemy thing is: >!hopefully someone below explains drop counts because I’m sure as fuck not going to!<. How was a kid or adult going to figure that out?

My Z2 playthrough took days, maybe 10, but my memory is fuzzy. I got pretty stuck >!looking for the mirror!< and I wondered around for a full day with no progress although I felt like I understood where the game wanted me to go. About halfway through the next day, I read the manual. I didn’t actually think when I started that I was going to do a no-help-other-than-the-manual playthrough. I thought of as a no-internet-on-an-80s-game playthrough. After the realization that the manual wasn’t outside help, I did use the internet for that. Well as soon as I learned >!hammers can chop down trees!<, I was on my way. The rest of the playthrough went smoothly, apart from being hard as fuck.

That explains the extra kitten. Where’s the other Mom cat?

And the reference is a show that ran until 1997. So a small slice of the audience was too young at the time.

I’m not the person to say anything about zsh vs. fish. I last tried zsh around 2008. Back then I decided to stick with bash over other shells. At the time (and for decades earlier) it was clear that sh was inadequate. So the Bourne Again Shell was (and still is) ubiquitous. Other shells fighting for user space seemed like the xkcd-927 problem.

Now, I’m basically seeing that if I’m stuck without my .bashrc file, installing fish gives me most of the niceties I like. It also gives me niceties that I wouldn’t have been able to do, like nice multi-lining. And while I personally find fi and esac charming, they are pretty dumb. And I certainly don’t miss the for-do-done construction.

I bet I would like zsh as much as fish, but I don’t have any motivation to try it.

fish looks at my path to highlight mistyped commands. It autocompletes on the fly and autocompletes with attention paid to the usage in your history. The coolest thing is that it parses man pages. That allows autocomplete to know the options of a command as long as it has a proper man page (which it just should).

I do most of my scripting in perl too. Python has always irked me.

Only semi-related: I recently switched from bash shell to fish. I should have don’t that years ago. Don’t know why I held on to bash so tight.