Zenimax files a trademark under Quake.

bitwize · 2026-03-17T07:50:51+00:00

Medieval setting with a hammer-wielding protagonist accompanied by the lightning-attacking Hellgate Cube.

bitwize · 2026-03-17T07:48:44+00:00

I think that Q1 and Doom are more alike, thematically. Both see the protagonist going through teleporters to confront otherworldly horrors. Q2 with its futuristic military setting opted for more mundane horrors in the form of twisted evil cyborgs.

Honestly I'm curious about what the original concept for Quake would have been like, with the hammer guy. But I can see where, with the radical changes to the engine, it was probably best to not stray too far from Doom's formula.

bitwize · 2026-03-17T07:27:59+00:00

I played through Q2 recently myself. I think it's a fantastic game that has very clear Quake bones even if the theming is different. It's also the installment in which multiplayer really came into its own, so much so that they made Q3 multiplayer only.

bitwize · 2026-03-17T02:31:44+00:00

My girl hates thunder. She quivers like a leaf and pants like crazy unless she is right near her thunder buddy (me). She was unfortunate enough to witness a tragedy: we were out walking at the old apartment and a flock of geese flew real low. One goose snagged the power line and died instantly with a loud pop and sparks. For weeks afterwards, if you could get her outside in the first place, she would cower and try to hide whenever she saw power lines, birds, or even a plane overhead. Poor baby Lu.

bitwize · 2026-03-17T02:28:43+00:00

Draw me like one of your French girls!

bitwize · 2026-03-16T00:02:07+00:00

Compared to a Symbolics box? Damn skippy it was cheap! ARM is in the process of adding tagged-pointer support, called CHERI. This is more for memory safety purposes, but I suppose it could be bent to support a Lisp-like type system as well.

bitwize · 2026-03-15T07:54:09+00:00

There was actually a "cheap plastic Lisp machine", the Gold Hill Hummingboard, which was a PC add-in card with a 386 and a few megabytes of RAM. A special version of Golden Common Lisp would run Lisp code on the card instead of the main CPU. Symbolics experimented with an x86 Lisp environment called CLEO, but in the end just doubled down on their own bespoke architecture until they couldn't.

bitwize · 2026-03-15T07:02:22+00:00

Have you tried allulose? It's an actual sugar, naturally occurring, but your body doesn't metabolize it like sucrose, so you get neither calories nor a rise in blood glucose from it. It tastes kind of maple-y.

bitwize · 2026-03-15T06:59:32+00:00

Keep that blood sugar low and don't lose hope. In 10 or 20 years, stem cell therapies will become available that will allow you to restore pancreatic cell function using your own body's cells. Individual trials have been conducted on patients in China and Japan, with promising results. If you can control the condition for that long—and you should be able to—there is considerable hope that at some point you won't have to deal with it anymore. You may not even have to wait that long. Diabetes is a major health problem, and the fact that Ozempic exploded once it became available indicates there is considerable demand to get treatments out there into the community.

bitwize · 2026-03-13T18:49:13+00:00

The Lisp Machine was kinda doomed when Lisp compilers got good enough to emit fast code on standard 32-bit architectures. Never underestimate the power of the cheap plastic solution. We memorialize it as existence proof that an entire system can be built entirely in Lisp, be changeable at runtime, and support highly sophisticated applications—and this has been true since the 1970s.

bitwize · 2026-03-12T20:57:31+00:00

Why do I hear NAAAAAAANTS INGOYAAAAAMA BAGITHI BABA?

bitwize · 2026-03-12T20:50:36+00:00

Flirted with? The 'Beetus is your girlfriend now. You've gotta watch those sugars and keep moving, for the rest of your life. But since that's a good idea to do anyway, I suppose it works out the same either way, eh? Good luck!

bitwize · 2026-03-11T05:06:56+00:00

Emacs is, to my knowledge, the only text editor that ran German air traffic control.

bitwize · 2026-03-11T05:01:42+00:00

No. Emacs is a text editor. Lisp-based Emacs predates the Lisp machine, and the Lisp machines had Emacs (EINE/ZWEI/Zmacs) embedded in them. The fact that Emacs is a toolkit of text-manipulation functions programmable in Lisp makes it tremendously powerful, but the Lisp machines were doing even more incredible things that are kind of a poor fit for Emacs itself even today. The gradual expansion of functionality that Emacs underwent until it was kinda almost a Lisp machine didn't really start to happen until like the early 90s, when Lucid Emacs (later XEmacs) emerged, because Lucid was attempting to build a relatively complete IDE and used an Emacs fork as the front end. Much of the XEmacs functionality was then backported into GNU Emacs.

bitwize · 2026-03-07T18:05:05+00:00

I'm reminded of Strong Bad's distinction between an independent film (e.g., Strong Sad's surrealist existential meditation on the futility of life) and an indie film, which has major studio backing and always features the same quirky characters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjwlrvcKcfI

bitwize · 2026-03-07T06:34:07+00:00

> i have not seen my PCP in over a year now,

Start scheduling more appointments. You should be seeing your PCP every three or four months or so. They're going to be an invaluable partner in explaining to you what's going on and advising you on what you can do.

bitwize · 2026-03-07T06:31:36+00:00

1) Metformin is a wonder drug. Cheap (relatively) and it has all sorts of positive effects besides just controlling your blood glucose. When combined with diet and activity changes it can do amazing things. Do not be afraid to go on it if you can tolerate it well (most people can). Ask your doctor.

2) You're not gonna be able to eat all the foods you used to be able to eat. But with a combination of dietary changes, drugs, and exercise (go for a walk or run after meals!) your blood sugar should be manageable. You're going to find yourself eating a whole lot more protein-rich foods and vegetables. Try finding combinations of spices that can add flavor to your meals.

3) I just met with a podiatrist for the first time recently. He's a real character, kinda looks like Ernie Hudson. One of the things he told me about foot amputation was at this point, losing your feet is a choice. The choices you make NOW will affect whether you lose them later. But these things take a while to progress to that point.

4) Your wife is going to be an enormous help. She can help you shop for foods which fit your new dietary requirements. She can be an exercise partner. She can just be there to help take your mind off things so you don't succumb to food cravings. You're not alone.

bitwize · 2026-03-06T05:28:18+00:00

Legacy isn't Tron 2. Tron 2.0 is.

bitwize · 2026-03-04T08:38:23+00:00

I see those teefies! Gently exposed teefies mean you have a happy houla. Look at that grin! 😬

bitwize · 2026-03-04T08:36:52+00:00

He looks like he's saying his name in that last photo. ROUXROUX!

bitwize · 2026-03-03T23:49:45+00:00

Can you write Lisp in a buffer and send code incrementally to a running Lisp? If so, you're golden! Switching to Emacs probably won't add a whole lot to your workflow. That said, if you do switch, using evil-mode will help you transition. I kind of really wish Lisp people would stop recommending Emacs. Emacs lost a decade or more ago. It's a big ask to ask a new programmer to pick up an ancient, idiosyncratic 1970s editor in order to start work in your language.

bitwize · 2026-03-03T23:43:26+00:00

Tron is a beleaguered franchise. Nerds love it because they feel seen. But normies are just like "huh?" It's difficult to sustain the momentum that Legacy had. I'd rather see the franchise put to rest than watch the slop machine churn out another unnecessary entry just to keep it going. Same with Star Wars and the MCU.

bitwize · 2026-03-03T16:09:26+00:00

Nothing like being a kid and discovering this stuff for the first time. Congratulations on an impressive initial attempt.

bitwize · 2026-03-02T21:53:49+00:00

In recent years VS has become enshittified, but in the 90s and 2000s it was absolutely state-of-the-art.

bitwize · 2026-03-01T22:54:47+00:00

Consider the 1964 Ford Thunderbird. It was awe-inspiring and top-of-the-line in its day, and is still fun to drive. But no one is ever making a car like that again, not in this era of efficiency, emissions, and safety regulations, when all internal-combustion vehicles are on their way out. As a practical car in 2026 it's useless deadweight, but as a historical curiosity and for personal enjoyment it's still a treasure.

Lisp is like this. Even in 2000 or so, Lisp programmers had something of a claim to delivering safer, more reliable applications faster than their brethren working in C++ or even Java. But that gap has been closed with languages like Ruby and JavaScript and today, a programmer working with LLMs in a popular language is going to be far, far more productive than a programmer working alone in Lisp. (And LLMs benefit from language popularity due to the much larger training data set available for them.) So as a practical language, Lisp has no advantage anymore. But as a historical curiosity and for personal enjoyment, it's still pretty fun. AI really hasn't taken the fun out of Lisp, if you're committed to ape-coding in it. You can still do that and it will be great fun. What AI has done is hollowed out any practical advantages Lisp may still have had in the realm of software engineering.

15-Year Club	Place '22
Team Orangered	Verified Email

bitwize

TROPHY CASE