Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

New C64

Since I quit caffeine, I sleep right through the night and never wake up or sleep lightly, which means I also never remember any of my dreams. The other night I was reading John Fail’s weird dream journal, and then when I slept, I remembered an abnormal dream. I wrote it all down, but I don’t remember what it was now. Thismorning, I almost remembered part of a dream, but I couldn’t pull it all together.

Just as I thought the whole zine was going to be composed solely of writing by me and Larry, a bunch of other stuff fell in place. I’m still worried that the big pieces are there, but the small bits that really make a zine readable aren’t there. I also have very little writing in this next issue, and all of my stuff is recycled. It’s been hard to write anything new, even though I have a bunch of projects on my back and I probably could sit and just work on other responsibilities for a month straight.

I bought a Commodore 64 the other day. I don’t have it yet, it should show up on Monday or so. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the net, and trying to pull together some games and stuff. I have about 3 or 4 carts that I rescued from my mom’s house, and I probably have some other stuff lying around her basement. It’s fun to think about – I got my first C-64 for Christmas during the 8th grade, and spent ALL of my time with it. Before that, I had an Aquarius with 4K of RAM, no tape drive, no disk drive, no printer, a chicklet keyboard, a horrible BASIC, and NO place to buy any accessories or documentation for it. I pushed that thing to the limit, which wasn’t hard. It was pure joy going to the 64, with way more memory, good graphics, excellent sound, standard joystick ports, lots of magazines and software available, and lots of programmability. I never got the disk drive, which was my one big downfall – I did all of my work on a tape drive. But I had friends with 64’s and we’d copy games onto tape, and I’d spend forever writing stuff in BASIC. It’ll be nice to toy around with this new machine. I even got a disk drive, too. Maybe I’ll sit down and try to write that adventure game parser, now that I have a bunch of CS classes behind me.