Author: darrelplant

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Barbara’s Birthday

Barbara likes what she likes. And I try to make her birthday full of likes.

She likes the beach. For a number of years, we’d head to the coast on the weekend closest to her birthday. A little over 20 years ago, we started going to Astoria nearly every year. We’d stay at different places, but we settled into a routine that included a trip to The Bowpicker for their tuna fish and chips, and a Friday night dinner at Mary Todd’s Worker’s Bar & Grill (now just Worker’s Bar) for a burger (Barbara) and prime rib (me).

She also likes Chinese food. Our go-to spot for going out to dinner used to be the Hunan in downtown Portland, where she without fail would always order Shredded Beef with Spicy Sauce, a glorious spicy confection of tender meat and crunchy vegetables. But it closed at the end of 2014, after we’d been going there for over 25 years, and Barbara—who’d never found another restaurant with that particular dish—managed to get the owner to give out a recommendation, which is how we ended up at Lake Oswego’s Hunan Pearl, which has a nearly identical dish (not too surprising, considering one of the chefs came from the Hunan restaurant).

We need to get back to Astoria one of these days—what with the pandemic and all, it’s been a few years—but this year was a trip to the Hunan Pearl.

My selection tonight: Szechuan Shredded Pork, which is the only item on the menu where the description says “Hot, hot, hot!”. My fortune makes me worry that I’m due to end up in a refugee camp.

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John Roach and the TRS-80

RIP to John Roach, the father of the TRS-80 computer.

The TRS-80 wasn’t the first computer I programmed—I had already worked on a series of mainframes and microcomputers in high school and my first two years of college—but in 1982 or so, I convinced a few friends: Mike Ball, Tom Wells, and Chris Lee, to invest a few hundred dollars each in an idea I had for a game company. There was a semi-thriving world of play-by-mail games in the day, where people in a world before the internet and personal computers could play games with each other by postal mail, often adjudicated by someone with a computer. I wrote GANGLORD, a tactical-level gang-warfare game where you controlled individual gang members and selected them to carry out robberies and other actions on and around the blocks you controlled.

Chris was the one with the computer, a TRS-80 with a sticker on the back saying its build date was December 1979. With some of the money, we bought an LNW memory expansion kit and a couple of 5-1/4” disk drives. Given the limitations of home computing storage and memory at the time, it took some work to make things work. Each player’s data was stored on a diskette, and each group of city blocks (amazingly, almost 1600) on another. Game logic on yet another disc. No hard drive, so the game logic would need to be loaded in, then environment and player data as needed.

Player actions were entered, actions were evaluated, and combat between gangs was resolved on a weapon-action basis, with each named gang member and their target identified, as well as the weapon used, plus the results. All printed out on an Epson MX-80 dot-matrix machine.

Aside from the setting—which was unique in a world of big computer-run PBM games set in interstellar space and D&D-influenced hand-adjudicated fantasy PBMs—GANGLORD‘s focus on small-unit actions on an individual level was kind of a new thing, particularly when combined with the ability to name each member of the gang. Sadly, despite the fact that I still have the computer, the peripherals, and the diskettes, I haven’t been able to scare up a copy of the rulebook, a copy of which is sitting on the table in this much-used photo.

I typed up the rules on my friend Melinde Lutz’s fancy proportional-spaced Olivetti typewriter, which put it a couple notches above the standard typewritten or dot-matrix-printed rules for small publishers at the time. Melinde and her then-husband Tucker let me use part of the office in their house for operations. Marcel—who also did the art for EUCON, the science-fiction convention I put together—did a great cover for the book which (again) I only have via that photo.

The whole thing was horribly undercapitalized. I think we ran one or two ads—I’ve got to dig into my copies of Autoduel Quarterly—but we hit a wall with just a couple dozen paying customers. I got some great comments from folks at several established PBM developers, including a couple very soft inquiries about buying the game—but it was such a work-in-development at the time I didn’t think there was any way I could turn it over. The process of running the game involved long sequences of swapping diskettes in an out of the drives, which worked for the scale I had, but might not have been very scalable. I thought if I could get the game to a point where it was running well, then it would be time to talk to people about the next step. But it never got there.

Anyway, that’s my TRS-80 story, sort of.

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Diplomacy Today

Some 30-odd years ago I tried to run a play-by-mail DIPLOMACY game to keep in touch with someone my game-playing friends. I’d moved to Portland, Oregon from Eugene in 1987 and left behind some of the folks I’d played with in my early 20s. I picked up a couple folks in Portland while I was at Reed College, but one of them had headed out to Princeton after a year or so, and the other got sucked up by Microsoft before he graduated. Back in the pre-Internet, mostly pre-email days when you still had to pay long-distance phone fees, it was hard for me to keep up with my far-flung cohort; ultimately, I wasn’t successful, i lost touch with most everyone, either for years or for ever.

I’d started this project while I was working at Powell’s Books, where I had just convinced management to set up a $10,000 state-of-the-art desktop publishing system (just slightly less than my annual income there, at the time) and finishing off my English Literature degree at Reed. Id seen a few other DIPLOMACY zines, and i was reasonably certain this one was unique in style, at least, so i sent a couple of the black-and-white issues off to Avalon Hill’s in-house magazine THE GENERAL. Then-editor Rex Martin wrote back, and he was going to be a player in the second game I was planning to run (the ’Red’ edition), with the possibility that we might run some material in THE GENERAL.

But things didn’t work out in the short run. i don’t recall exactly how it fell apart, but like a lot of PBM games, there were issues with everyone having time to deal with real life before they got around to games. There were already intimations in this relatively early phase of the Blue game. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, DIPLOMACY-wise.

Anyway, the interesting thing to me was that I’d written a little colophon for this edition, highlighting hardware and software in use around 1990.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been asked several times about how DT is put together, what programs are used, how the graphics are generated, etc. It seems appropriate to address some of these questions now that we’re making a major format upgrade.

First, it probably helps to know that my job places me in close contact with Apple Macintosh II computer with 2MB of RAM, a 40MB internal hard drive, an Ehman Engineering removable 45MB hard drive, and a color monitor, all of which is attached to a LaserWriter IINT. Basic page layout is done with Aldus PageMaker (the latest version is 3.02CK), with most of the text being directly entered into PageMaker. Our lovely master map was done by Regan Carey in Adobe Illustrator. I’d tried my hand at tracing a scanned DIPLOMACY map, but Regan’s looks soooo much better. The patterns used in the black-and-white maps were designed by myself, except for the double-headed Russian eagle, which is a simplified version of Regan’s logo (featured on the front page of this issue). Likewise, the DIPLOMACY TODAY logo and most of the other graphics were created by myself with Adobe Illustrator (latest version is 1.9.3). I use bits and pieces of the master map to make the ones with arrows and things. All of the fonts are standard LaserWriter Plus (and later) fonts: the logo is in Avant Garde, with some heavy line strokes, headlines are in Helvetica and Helvetica Narrow, body text is New Century Schoolbook; and some Zapf Dingbats are thrown in for good measure. The look, of course, derives directly from the pages of USA TODAY.

Up until now. I’ve just been printing the newsletter on the LaserWriter and letting it go at that (a process I will continue for most of the people on the mailing list). To get this first color issue, however, I’ve been forced to delay publication partly because none of the Portland service bureaus were equipped with a PostScript color laser printer. Finally, L.graphix, just a block from my office, came through, and got their new QMS up and running just after New Year’s.

If I can get hold of Regan to ask him for permission, I will make the master map available to anyone willing to give him credit for it. Anyone with a self-addressed, stamped envelope can have a copy of DT in black-and-white, an SASE and $2 will get them the color version the players get for free.

—Questions about DIPLOMACY TODAY
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My Satanic Majesty 2

I first referenced this image 14 years ago, when I wrote about the time anti-D&D Christians threatened to picket a talk I gave at the Springfield Public Library to a few tween-age boys about role-playing games, but back then the size of the images I was uploading was fairly small. Combined with the fact that what I had to scan was a sort of grainy newspaper photo from 1982, I didn’t really get into what exactly was on the table.

But I ran across the original print the other day sorting through some boxes and made a new scan, taking a closer look with my aging eyes at what was there.

On the far left of the table, nearest the podium, at the back is a Gamemaster’s Screen for the Champions RPG. The images of the items in front of it are too blown out for me to read, but they are presumably Champions rule books.

Next to that is a line of material for the Bushido RPG, in this case the boxed set that came out after the earlier zip-lock editions. In front of the box (standing) are a couple of the rulebooks, then what appears to be a copy of the supplement Valley of the Mists, which is presumably still in a box somewhere (I catalogued the digest-sized zip-loc Bushido in Just a Box of Games, Box 2. Central on the table is the map of Japan on the gamester’s screen (?) from Bushido that I picked because their graphics were quite good.

In front of the Bushido screen are several of the TRAVELLER books, with Book 1: Characters and Combat and Book 2: Starships, visible enough to sort of read.

Standing just to the right of the Bushido screen would be a couple of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books, both from the first edition as that was state-of-the-art in 1982. The Monster Manual is clearly visible, and I believe the Dungeon Master’s Guide is in front of it (from what little I can see of the cover). Presumably, the kid on the right of the image is flipping through the Player’s Handbook, which logically should have occupied the rightmost corner of the table.

In front of the AD&D books is the rulebook for STARWEB, the flagship galactic conquest play-buy-mail game from Flying Buffalo. And in front of that is a rulebook for The Morrow Project, one of a number of post-nuclear holocaust survivalist RPGs that went for a grittier, more realistic aesthetic than, say, Gamma World.

I can’t make out what’s on the closest corner of the table, but I’m pretty sure it was a printout from my own play-by-mail game, whose cover is just behind it: GANGLORD, a game of gang warfare in The Big City, where you directed individual members of your gang on missions of robbery, extortion, and territory expansion. My long-term plan—if I’d ever gotten past the point where I had only about 40 players, we were seriously under-capitalized— was for the most successful gangs to become organized criminal syndicates (MOBRULES) and then political parties (POLITICO, yeah, I would have sued their asses when they came along twenty years later), in a trio of interrelated power politics games.

Special thanks to the reporter from the Springfield newspaper who provided me with a copy of this image nearly 40 years ago. I will find your name somewhere.

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Kim

via David Landázuri’s TK before I knew her Facebook album

It was three months ago today that a woman of many names passed away.

I met Kim McDonald in 1980 at the science fiction and fantasy bookstore I worked at. I was a year out of high school. I’d spent the previous fall and winter at Oregon State University but the Corvallis branch of the store was sold and I didn’t have a job any more, my girlfriend dumped me on Valentine’s Day, and I was homesick already, so I went back down to Eugene to live with my folks and at went back to work at the Eugene shop.

Kim came in one night and we got into an argument about some book and then she hung around until closing and drove me out to my folks’ house where we talked all night about science fiction and fantasy books we liked. And that was the start of four years together.

Kim’s first name was Teresa, but during our time together she also went by TK and Starsea. She’d often introduce herself by the latter name when she met new people at the monthly party we went to at author John Varley‘s house, where she’d wear springy antenna headgear.

It was an incredibly productive period for both of us. Aside from our jobs, TK was involved in the local theater scene (she’d graduated in theater arts from the UofO) and we played games, went to the then-new Bijou Theater, and visited friends. I was failing school before I dropped out because of the economy, but that was the period I wrote and published a play-by-mail game and organized Eucon, a science fiction convention.

Things didn’t last, though, and by 1985 it was all over. TK moved out of the house we were renting from my parents and moved on with her life. She came to my birthday party at the end of the year, but after I moved to Portland, we didn’t have any contact.

I did hear through the grapevine that she’d gotten married (twice, actually, after her first husband died) and was chosen as the 2006 Slug Queen. She worked for the UofO Philosophy Department administrative office for most of the 35 years she was at the university.

It was an incredible shock to hear from her widower, David Landázuri, a few days after her death, when he reached out to me to help piece out some of the time before he met her in 2003. I was staying in a motel in Gresham with my father during the February ice storm that had much of the Portland area (and beyond) in a power blackout, just after he’d had cancer surgery. What’s been almost more of a shock was to realize how much of that era has slipped away from my memories. I wracked my brain to help David as much as I could and looked through what few photos I have from the pre-digital period. Just a couple of studio portraits, and a couple photos from a trip to the beach in Southern California with Kim’s mother. A couple of birthday cards with her address from when we met and that’s about it.

I was honored to be invited to participate in the Zoom memorial with a bunch of her firends and co-workers, all of whom probably know her better after being friends for years than I do living with her for a few years nearly forty years ago. But it’s still weird to know that someone who was such an integral part of your life in your earliest adult years is gone. Thanks to David for letting me know and for including me.

The University of Oregon has approved space for a memorial to their long-time employee. You can contribute at the GoFundMe link below.

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The Great Shockwave Revival

On the DIRECT-L listserv (yes, it still exists!). the talk of the past week has been how to do a Shockwave for Director emulator in JavaScript.

The invaluable Valentin Schmidt, has something amazing.

Here a funny solution, but it really works:

It’s a 68k mac emulator ported to JS that loads a minimal System 8 (15
MB) and then immediately plays a DCR, in this case it’s the guided tour
that came with Director 4.0. You might have to click into the browser
window to enable sound.

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The Great Dutch Director Confab of 2001

It was one of the great honors of my temporary life as a Macromedia Director semi-celebrity to meet up with folks from the community when I traveled. When Barbara and I got to Amsterdam, Mark Reijnders, Lucas Meijer, Mark Hagers, and P¡m all showed up at the Amstelhoeck, coming from across the country, just for our own little Director convention. You can see Mark R. is wearing his Director Online t-shirt (I was editor at the time). Lucas, had put on an impressive show of 3D content at the Shockwave 3D launch in NYC a couple of months earlier, and has gone on to be a driving force at Unity.

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I’m Learning Japanese, I Really Think So

Somehow, I don’t feel like I’ve made great progress in my late-life attempt to learn Japanese. I started off back when we thought we’d be able to travel, in 2019, trying to cram Japanese, German, Dutch, and Irish every day, built up a month-long streak and then got disgusted with both Duolingo and myself when I missed a day and broke the streak. That, and jeez louise, the Irish course is hard. Got back into it after the pandemic started and just did Japanese. It was an incomplete in my first Japanese class that pushed me over the edge of academic disqualification at the UofO 40 years ago—I’ve never been good at languages OR studying—but I’m back!

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Dad’s Books

One of the things about Twitter is every now and then you accidentally brush up against people in a way you never would in the blog world. I made a comment about reading books I give to Dad before I fork them over, with regard to Nixonland by Rick Perlstein.