I'm John Harris (they/them), aka rodneylives, also known long ago as Milen. Hello! I need to spruce this place up, add some cheese under construction GIFs, an annoying background image, a custom cursor, all the standard olden-times niceties. Maybe later.
New:
May 25, 2025: With the permission of its owner and former Managing Editor (and Grand Exalted Mojo) Fender Tucker, I have put together a collection of the issues of Loadstar, the Commodore 64 and 128 computer magazine, and put it up for purchase on itch.io!
Loadstar is something special. It lasted for 22 years, and in that time published literally thousands of computer programs, including around 600 games, and also lots of puzzles, SID music pieces, and hi-res drawings, among other things. I've put them into a package that lets you browse their contents and read their text files more easily than rooting through the contents of over 300 C64 computer disks.
I'm selling it partly because I don't have permission to just give them away (it's still owned by J&F Publishing), and because it feels like it's right to do so? There are places online where you can get the disks without paying, but it'd be nice if you did? It'd help support my continuing efforts to sort through it all and make it more accessible. Anyway, that's the thing I've been working on for the past couple of months. Onward!
March 4, 2025: I have revived the website of Furnitures the Great Brown Oaf! See it here!
I'm currently working on a CRPG inspired by the old Commodore 64 game Dungeon (published on LOADSTAR). The original Dungeon can be bought (with permission) for $5 here.
Part of my work on that has to do with using Fontstruct to create a font with a wide assortment of D&D monsters depicted in it. It's coming along rather better than I expected. Here's an image of how it looked on June 6 2024:
The gaming blog we run is Set Side B. It covers retro, niche and indie interests! I write about all sorts of things there, including roguelikes, romhacks, weird arcade games and gaming culture videos.
Long ago, I wrote the popular roguelike column @Play for the indie gaming blog GameSetWatch, which sadly no longer exists except on the Wayback Machine.
I made Exploring Roguelike Games for CRC Press, which is a collection of @Play columns with some updates and added material.
On Metafilter I'm JHarris. On Mastodon I'm at @rodneylives@mefi.social. On Bluesky I'm @rodneylives. If I'm on other places I don't check them often.
The internet has decayed a lot since the heady days in the early 2000s, but it can be revived! Avoid big tech where you can, support open source tools, public services and net neutrality, be a good netizen, and don't succumb to cynicism!