I like filling the posts on Set Side B with a wide-ranging field of material, but I realize this is pretty far out even for us. We’re about electronic entertainment, right? Cooking is entertaining, or can be! And websites of recipes are electronic!
I told you about Loadstar, the long-lived Commodore 64 disk magazine that I am involved in preserving. Well I was thinking about things I could draw out of the issues, that people to use. And I noticed the recipes.
Someone named James T. Jones submitted, and had published, over 280 recipes on Loadstar’s disks, over a period of nearly six years. I came to realize that I’ve written scripts to export and convert Commodore 64 text files from out of disk images. And everyone hates recipe sites on the internet, right? They’re all SEO-infected ad-soaked pages, and more and more AI slop is moving into that field. James Jones’ recipes don’t have any of that, and if I don’t care about improving their traffic or exploiting them for ad revenue I can make this resource available to everyone for free!
So I’ve added a subsite to my Neocities site, linking all the recipes that appeared in the disks of Loadstar 64. (I think there’s a few extras on Loadstar 128, I might add those later.)
Here is the intro page to the recipe site. Whether people will find it useful or not, who knows. These are the kinds of recipes that will casually use ingredients like Doritos, or ginger ale. I haven’t made any of these. A few of them look a bit suspect: the recipe for ice cream is surprisingly brief, one of the steps being to “follow the manufacturer’s instructions,” assuming you have an ice cream maker. But there seem to be a lot of other good recipes in there, if you explore a bit.
I’m still tinkering with the layout and text, but all of the content is there now. Bon Appétit!
