Textmate Inform Bundle 2.0 for Inform 6
Ever since I downloaded TextMate, I’ve been living in coding Cloud 9. Coding DEX = Coding DEX + 5! I even bought the product. That’s how awesome it is.
However, the Inform bundle was way out of date and rather limited. I sure wasn’t going to stand for a regress in my working environment! Must have syntax coloring. Must have function listing/navigation! So I went to work, delving into the madness of regex and fiddled around a bit until the power of the Inform bundle exceeded the power of my old BBEdit Inform bundle.
Now the TextMate folks have this in source control, so it may be a while before it passes their process and becomes official. However, if you want it now, pssst…over here! Unzip this to your ~/Library/Application Support/Textmate/Bundles directory and enjoy!
Zegrothenus 5.0 Released
If you haven’t played Zegrothenus before, now you have even fewer reasons to avoid doing so, as this release corrects many errors, and the game is now more humane with more commands, more hints, and not a few player-friendly improvements.
Download the game from the IFDB (in a few days when they catch up), or from Intaligo, and if you are in the mood, stop by the official site.
This is the last release of Zegro. I hope you enjoy it. It’s been a long, strange journey.
Soft Censorship
I have noticed an increasing din of calls for books, movies, comics, sites, games, and so on to be banned on the basis of their content. That was distressing enough, but it really hit home when it’s your work that they want to ban. Not that these anonymous haters have any real power to ban, but they would if they could; the tendrils of censorship hit home and they strike deadly cold.
Again, it’s one thing when such calls are on the basis of prurient content. There’s a longstanding tradition and rationale of pornography and obscenity being excluded from the category of free speech, and if I was producing sexually-explicit content, I’d have to take my lumps like a man. No worries. But the argument used is simply this — “I don’t like what you have to say, so you should have no right to say it.” Some people become a little bit more convoluted and vague with their claims of “public interest” or “public discourse” but all that really means is that certain viewpoints are accepted, while others are not, or the same goes for certain styles (i.e. you cannot make death metal; everything must be tepid jazz). Where does someone gets off on telling anyone else what perspective must be held and how one must express themselves especially when morality is never a factor in the argument? We all have preferences, likes and dislikes, but to say that I must paint like Renoir, or that I must write like Hemmingway? Really? It is, to laugh.
And that’s what I’m doing. I laugh, the way that the librarian laughed in Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. He laughed, and he drew a smile on the bullet before he fired it at the witch. There must be nothing more irritating and annoying in life than to want to ban someone else’s work and be unable to. I can’t say that I’ve ever felt that kind of emotion, because regulating on the basis of content is not something that I feel any need to do. The mental picture I have is a blustering hausfrau, attempting to mother someone else’s child, and that makes me laugh at such hopeless futility. Of all the things to waste your time upon!
The would-be censors, finally, are cowards, quaking in their loafers, fearful of their own demise, and willing to sell out and shut down anyone that increases their unease. History is never kind in her judgment of such collaborators, and suppressed works have a nasty tendency of never quite going away, as William Tyndale will attest.
