Given BASIC is what you enjoy, here's something else that might tickle your fancy: A while ago, there was this movement to revive not just the programming experience of the early microcomputers, but also create a similarly limited but easy to understand execution environment (though suitably modernized to make things less complicated). It was called 'fantasy consoles'. The idea is essentially to make some simple emulated hardware that never existed in real life and let people see what they could make with it. Quite a lot, as it turns out.
I suspect you'd get a lot of enjoyment out of playing with something like PICO-8.
I have fond memories of transcribing reams of machine code encoded as BASIC data statements with a small prefixed loader out of the computer mags of the day. My mother would dictate and I would laboriously type, byte by byte. She... had the patience of a saint. I doubt she ever understood what we were doing or why.
Started out with PET BASIC on the Commodore 64 myself, back at the dawn of time. These days I'd probably just use Python if I wanted a easily comprehensible and managed language to do fun things in.
Glad to hear that's working for you, and I can see why it would. Personally, I 'code relax' with small, low-investment creative coding project. Generative / algorithmic art, for example.
You don't get it: You're supposed to be loyal to the King, whereas he owes you nothing in return. Now be quiet peons, or else... Well, it's a nice farm you've got there. It'd be a shame if ICE happened to it.
What? Now you don't like fascism all of a sudden? Huh. How about that?
It's a good idea, and they certainly deserve to be digitally preserved. I can't afford a document scanner, though I might be able to photograph them. Not quite as good, but better than nothing.
"Why now? You never seemed overly concerned about detainee well-being before."
"Yeah, but then Joseph suggested that if we could manage to keep them alive, we'd get to mistreat each of them for longer. And what else are we going to spend this absurdly massive budget on? More artillery?"
Years ago there was this deeply schizophrenic dude wandering the Copenhagen s-train network all day long, handing out these photocopied single-sheet collages constructed from newspaper clippings interlaced with cryptic hand-written notes. Some of the best Art Brute I've ever seen. I always thanked him when I was lucky enough to obtain the daily issue, and have carefully preserved all I managed to get ever since.
Nuts. Have you seen what laser color printers cost? We need that part of the budget for the IT department's new 5080's, which we need for, uh, AI modelling of our future infrastructural requirements. Yeah, that.
Maybe, maybe not, but either way you'll never persuade me he was ever aware of that.
Edit: But more importantly, just because you can argue that you can handle the detonation better than the other bloke in the room, doesn't mean it's a good idea to press the big red button. What kind of lunatic logic is that? Do these people realize that these numbers represent real human fates, or do they just not give a fuck?
Good luck with that.