I applied, but the recruiter insisted I already have five years experience in suicide bombing before he could get me a decent placement.

Add me to the list of kids who did this with the same result (OSI C1P - 6502 based CPU). I wrote quite a few games for myself back then...wish I still had the cassettes they were saved to. I wrote

* a "snake" game with two player mode
* a couple with two players using half the keyboard each to chase each other around
* one to drop torpedoes from a ship onto a sub controlled by the other player
* a 3D maze from first person perspective using only ASCII graphics
* space invader clone (assembler and never finished)
* car driving with winding track (assembler to push screen updates fast enough)
* text adventure games with verb noun commands
* and a bunch that I can't recall any more

I lived in a block of flats in the 90s and we had two computer programmers in our flat, and a couple of older guys with PC in a flat above and below ours...solution...run coax out the windows of ours and up / down to the other flats with a terminator at each end. We left it hooked up permanently to power our Warcraft I/II sessions and the occasional Doom / Quake / HL matches.

But sure enough, every so often we'd be like "hey, where's the network" only to find a neighbour had closed with windows and uncapped their end of the net. Time to break out the spare BNC endpoints and terminate their arses! :D

I'm still using the Nokia N73 I bought in 2006. It lasts about a week on a charge, but then again I don't really use it that often. I did have to replace the battery about 2 years back, but 7 years on a single battery seems fair enough. The only reason I'd give it up is the text on the screen is tiny and it's getting hard for my old bastard eyes to read it now.

Maybe you should try getting a second hand handset of ebay?

You didn't need to put all the utilities on it, just command.com was enough IIRC. Then, you'd keep a full DOS disk on hand for when you needed to run any of those pesky external utilities. Real men had two disk drives, so they didn't even need to swap the disk back and forth!

I used to do almost exactly the same thing, except the computer I had (OSI C1P) had a mode to enter hex codes into sequential memory locations one at a time. I'd write the code, hand assemble it to opcode, work out the jumps (pray I didn't make a mistake), then punch it in and JMP to the start location.

Eventually I saw a magazine article that showed how to write an assembler in BASIC for a similar sort of machine . Some quick hacking later I had a pretty decent line editor (my own work) and an assembler that handler the opcodes and jump calculation for my machine. It was pure bliss! :D

Sacrifice a few things, let you mother move into with you, no matter how little space you have. Take control of her finances if you can, mentor her if you can't. Be her shield and keep her demons away (finance, foolishness, whatever). Start to pay out her loans but prevent her from taking more.

She needs help, she needs your help, tough love - so give that in spades. Money means little when you've lost your family.

That's because most of the second year syllabus is written and examined in Yiddish!

I went to uni around the same time, coming from a house with parents who enjoyed mostly rock, with a little nod to metal (Sabbath), a bit of prog, and some electronica.

Once I hit uni my exposure to other music increased massively. I made new friends who were into metal / death metal, including ones in death metal bands. Others were getting further into electronica - meanwhile, the alternative scene was my main influence (goth, new romantics, etc). I still liked radio friendly rock to an extent too, but it started to take a sideline to the newer grunge that was coming out, and even a bit of rap / hip hop.

I'm always happy to try new music, new genres, new production styles. Once you stop growing, there's only one way to go from there...so keep on growing I say :D

Actually, I don't have a mortgage, I have no children, and my divorce is a decade in the past. My shit is sorted.

I think it's something else altogether.

In your teens and early 20's you're partying hard with friends, getting laid, and making lots of good memories. The music playing at that time is the soundtrack to the happiest time of your life. Twenty plus years later and you're weighed down with a mortgage, several kids, a shit job, and an impending divorce. Now the music you hear is the soundtrack to a less wonderful part of your life.

When you're young, you can't help but be exposed to new music. You have no control of the turntable at parties, or when visiting friends. You are challenged more often and learn to enjoy it. As an adult you just press the skip button when something doesn't immediately please you.

TLDR: It's not the music, that's pretty much a constant, it's the memories you have when you were listening to that music.

"What has it got in it's pocketsss...? " (Lars Ulrich)

If you ask me, where we wrong was pushing for this ultra-realistic pixel art when we already had the truly engaging expression of ASCII art. It's still a struggle to make ASCII art work with modern screen sizes and non-standard (80 x 25) layouts...but we must persevere, lest the unwashed heathen masses that consume our art fail to understand it.

I suppose we could supply them with a README.TXT file to tell them what the art is trying to say to their monkey brains.

Don't conflate gameplay quality with engine / grahics quality - they are orthogonal to each other.

You can help the discussion by telling us the name of the engine you created, and the list of commercially released games that used it. We need some perspective.