I'm just writing about this to highlight how exciting my life has been recently - I just ordered a book of program listings for the Commodore 64 from Amazon, the immensely-titled The Times Book of Computer Puzzles and Games. It originally came with a tape, which was one of the first things that I remember having for any computer, and also probably the very first step in finding myself where I am today. I was surprised that it still existed anywhere, but it was going for $4 from a bookshop selling through the site.

I'll have to see if I can get any of the games working via an emulator again when it arrives - I'm counting on the way that I can probably now just scan some of the pages and character-recognize them into something coherent, instead of - as was more traditional in the 80s - having to type in 10,000 lines of BASIC by copying it out of the book and going off to do something more entertaining well before you were finished.

Amazon seem to have introduced the concept of pay-phrases since I last ordered from them - I imagine these speed you through the checkout process by... being a password that isn't your password, I don't know. I promise you that when I was on the checkout page today, my suggested one was:

David's Reassuring Innocence

I'm just glad that it only has my email address to go by.