I picked up DEFCON a few months ago on Steam. It’s a game inspired by the “big nuclear war boards” we saw in movies like Dr. Strangelove or, closer to the mark, WarGames. Each player controls a section of the world. The game starts with a few very short bits of placing units and quickly turns into a shooting war. Players launch fighters, deploy fleets, and eventually sound out bombers, subs, and ICBMs. The game looks gorgeous.

Over a decade ago, Paul Elliott wrote a tiny piece of counterfactual history called The Gygax/Arneson Tapes. It recounts the history of the world’s most famous role-playing game, Mazes & Minotaurs, in which the players take on larger-than-life Greek-style heroes in Sword and Sandal adventures.

I don’t use Module::Install or Module::Starter anymore. For the most part, I don’t think anyone should. I think there are better tools to use instead.

Preface

I’ve written a bunch of code that deals with APIs behind OAuth before. I wrote code for the Twitter API and for GitHub and for others. I knew roughly what happened when using OAuth, but in general everything was taken care of behind the scenes. Now as I work on furthering the control of my programmatic day planner, I need to deal with web services that don’t have pre-built Perl libraries, and that means dealing with OAuth. So far, it’s been a big pain, but I think it’s been a pain that’s helped me understand what I’m doing, so I won’t have to flail around as much next time.

A few years ago I heard about the game Microscope and it sounded way cool. In summary: it is.

In Perl 5.10, the idea of a lexical topic was introduced. The topic is $_, also known as “the default variable.” If you use a built-in routine that really requires a parameter, but don’t give it one, the odds are good that it will use $_. For example:

I must have done something right when I attended YAPC::Asia 2011, because they invited me back this year. I was delighted to accept the invitation, and I’m glad I did.

One of the big new experimental features in Perl 5.18.0 is lexical subroutines. In other words, you can write this:

Having finished the Zork trilogy, it was time for me to continue on into the great post-Zork canon. I was excited for this, because it means lots of games that I haven’t played yet. First up: Starcross. I was especially excited for Starcross! It’s the first of Infocom’s sci-fi games, and I only remembered hearing good things. I’d meant to get started on the flight to YAPC::Asia, but didn’t manage until I’d begun coming home. On the train to Narita, things got off to a weird start.