How nerdy are you?This week Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died. A whole generation of pasty dice-obsessed nerds owes him big time. Me included.
So, in his honour, how nerdy were you? Are you still sunlight-averse? What are the sad little things you do that nobody else understands?
As an example, a B3ta regular who shall remain nameless told us, "I spent an entire school summer holiday getting my BBC Model B computer to produce filthy stories from an extensive database of names, nouns, adjectives, stock phrases and deviant sexual practices. It revolutionised the porn magazine dirty letter writing industry for ever.
Revel in your own nerdiness.
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chthonic, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 10:32)
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Programmable CalculatorI did A-Level Maths, a subject that required I own a programmable graphical calculator. Before owning this the only computing experience I had was typing out BASIC programs from my Spectrum 48K user manual and fetching my parents to watch the onscreen formation of different-coloured circles accompanied by atonal beeps.
I read the manual of my calculator and got the basics for the programming functions. I then set about creating my own game. It was one of those really simple 'Think of a number' jobs, using the random number function and telling you whether your guess was high or low, giving you six or so tries to get the right one. The day after I made it, I took it into school and showed all my mates, thinking they'd be well impressed. Obviously, I was rather disappointed. They treated me as some sort of nerdish pariah, even after I added swear-word-infused insults to the program whenever you got a wrong guess.
I never did learn to program anything, so I guess I could be more nerdy. On the other hand, ten years on, last year, I was working as a temp for a company that didn't really need me, and I spent lots of time doing nothing. The Internet was blocked, so I spent an afternoon creating a version of the numbers game from Countdown in Microsoft Excel, and played that for about a month. I also tried to make Yahtzee, but it was shite.
(, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 13:51, 1 reply)
I did the same thing!When I was doing A level maths (which was way over my head), I had to use a programmable calculator. I tried to program a simple dice game I invented onto it, but didn't have the programming knowledge to get it working. Instead, I programmed a horse betting game onto it, which I copied from a list of keystrokes from the web. I showed it to my mates, and they were like 'If you can get that working, then why are you so bad at maths?' I still can't program.
(, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 17:33, closed)
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