Linked List: July 15, 2025

Tuesday, 15 July 2025

Drew Saur’s Ode to the Commodore 64 ★

Drew Saur, pushing back on my post slagging on the Commodore 64:

I cannot argue with your nostalgia. It is uniquely yours.

That said: The Commodore 64 as cheap-feeling and inelegant! Oh my.

I was fourteen when the Commodore 64 came out, and I want to convey — in as brief a form as I can — why it captured so many hearts during the 8-bit era.

What a great post. Fond memories all the way down the stack with that whole era of computing. As I told Saur in email, my fondest memory of the Commodore 64 is that they sold them at Kmart, and for years had a working model on display. And every time I’d go to Kmart with my mom, I’d swing by the electronics department and type:

10 PRINT "KMART SUCKS!!!!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

Sometimes I’d be clever and do something like add an incrementing number of spaces to make the lines go diagonally. Something like:

5 LET X = 0
10 PRINT SPC(X); "KMART SUCKS!"
20 X = X + 1
30 IF X > 28 THEN X = 0
35 FOR T = 0 TO 100 : NEXT : REM SLOW DOWN
40 GOTO 10
RUN

This never got old for me. Try it yourself. (And of course I never actually commented my code at Kmart — that REM is for you, if you’re wondering what that do-nothing FOR loop is for.)

The Party of ‘Free Speech’ ★

David A. Graham, writing at The Atlantic:

Not that long ago, believe it or not, Donald Trump ran for president as the candidate who would defend the First Amendment.

He warned that a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media” was “conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people,” and promised that “by restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy, and save our nation.” On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order affirming the “right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech.”

If anyone believed him at the time, they should be disabused by now. One of his most brazen attacks on freedom of speech thus far came this past weekend, when the president said that he was thinking about stripping a comedian of her citizenship — for no apparent reason other than that she regularly criticizes him.

“Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her,” he posted on Truth Social.

The people who griped that the Biden Administration was anti-free-speech because they ... checks notes ... applied soft pressure on companies like Meta to clamp down on algorithmically promoting disinformation are pretty quiet these days.