Pleroma

Pleroma

Richard Moss | @MossRC@social.mossrc.me

Author of *Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet* and *The Secret History of Mac Gaming*, as well as two upcoming books — one on the creation of #AgeOfEmpires and the other about the history of football (soccer) games.

Writer/director on TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, an upcoming five-part docuseries about horror games. Producer/co-writer on FPSDOC, a 4.5-hour documentary film celebrating the first-person shooter genre (with an emphasis on the 90s/early-2000s golden age) that's guided by the developers themselves.

Creates The Life & Times of Video Games and Ludiphilia podcasts.

He/him.

rich@mossrc.me
@MossRC on Twitter and @mossrc.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Posts mainly about #gamedev and #indiegames histories and stories, #retrogaming/#retrogames, #retrocomputing, #classicmac, #shareware, #tombraider, and #videogamehistory.

Emily Wynne elsilnora@octodon.social

Jennell Jaquays is one of the most influential dungeons designers for D&D and fantasy RPGs since the 70s and 80s, and a really great person. She's been hospitalized with major health issues and heavy medical bills, and her wife Rebecca Heineman has set up a gofundme

https://www.gofundme.com/f/jennell-jaquays-has-a-long-road-back

Richard Moss MossRC
If you missed me talking about shareware and FPSDOC on the Apogee stream a couple of days ago, you can catch the replay at about the 27-minute mark on https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1959273694

I think they said to me it'll get put on YouTube at some stage, too, but no sign of it there yet.

Richard Moss MossRC
@vga256 I wish I still had my Spelunx box. So many wonderful memories connected to that game. It's one of the titles that I revisit every couple of years.

vga256 vga256@dialup.cafe

really excited that this treasure came in today

while most people remember Myst, fewer remember cyan's earlier first-person hypercard adventures like The Manhole, Spelunx and Cosmic Osmo.

spelunx has a unique and wonderful art style - robyn's 1-bit black/white paintings are crisp, imaginative, and delightful. but what surprises me the most is that *colour* sprites are mixed in at specific places. i do not know of other games that feature both colour and b+w support simultaneously during gameplay. (fwiw, if your macintosh was 1-bit, it would show 1-bit art in its place)

this is the launch edition of the game, ca. 1991. two years later, after the success of Myst, would re-release Spelunx with repainted 256 colour art. robyn himself isn't a fan of the repainted art, and i can understand why. the originals are incredible examples of what macpaint and hypercard are capable of together.

i especially like that the game includes a Hypercard 2.1 diskette, because there were no guarantees that macintosh owners would have a copy of their own.

attached is the receipt I found in the game. it appears the Colbert family of Fayetteville, Georgia bought this for their kids a few days after christmas '92 - one can imagine santa brought the family a new mac for christmas a few days earlier :)

if you're interested in cyan's untold history, i highly recommend @MossRC's wonderful interview with robyn miller on the b+w adventure series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kX5E7yOHJg

A boxed copy of Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo, along with its five floppy disks. An invoice for Midnight Rescue and Spelunx for the Apple Macintosh. The invoice is dated December 28, 1992. The games are priced at $39.95 each, plus tax. It was purchased at AIS Computers in Fayetteville, Georgia. A black and white illustration of a bird, with a colour "x-ray" image overtop. As the user moves the x-ray box, it reveals a colour skeleton of the animal beneath.

Glenda Adams Gmatom@mastodon.social

Back from framing, my recreation of the original Mac Finder about box.

Richard Moss MossRC
Found this — The 10 Rules of Writing for Television — while going through some papers. This is mainly about TV news, but also relevant to current affairs and docos. Writing for radio/podcast is similar, too, but that requires lots of describing things that can't be heard.
Handout - The 10 rules of writing for TV 1. Use the present tense. 2. Write the way you talk. Read what you write out loud. If you think you would never speak like that, don't use that sentence. 3. Keep your sentences short and simple and stick, as often as possible, to S-V-O structure (subject-verb-object). 4. Limit a sentence to one idea. 5. Use active voice and action verbs to activate your script. "A dog bit him" is much more direct than "He was bitten by a dog." 6. Attribution goes at the beginning of a sentence ("The government says" or "According to police sources, the man...") 7. Avoid starting a sentence with a quote, a question or names of unknown and ordinary people. 8. Start strong. Whether it is a powerful image or a powerful sentence, you have to try and grab your viewer's attention right from the start. 9. Avoid using adjectives and adverbs. By using adjectives such as "tragic," "amazing" etc, is like trying to tell your viewer how to feel about something. Feelings should be conveyed through your story and the way you approach it. 10. On TV you can see what is happening, so try not to describe the picture but rather write slightly off of it. For example, you have the shot of a demonstration, with thousands of students marching in the streets of Kabul, holding banners and chanting slogans against the goverment. DON'T write "Thousands of young people took to the streets of Kabul holding banners and chanting slogans against the goverment ..." since we can see that. "Afghan youth vented out their anger towards their government in a big demonstration..." sounds a lot better.

Richard Moss MossRC
When we got the Duplo blocks a few months ago, toddler was building vertical towers and horizontal lines of like pieces. Now she's crafting these elaborate low-rise townships. Amazing to see her mind expanding.
A Lego Duplo town made from a variety of different piece types, with four Duplo people laying down on a bench/bed near one edge.

Richard Moss MossRC
@decryption Ooh damn, I'd hope they would last longer. Praying none of my Blu-Rays have died yet. I've got a few that would be nigh-impossible to replace.

Richard Moss MossRC
@MichaelKlamerus Commercial pressings bought from a store. The only home-burned music CD I have was fine. I already know of two DVDs in my collection that are busted (both from a Sliders box set); hoping they're the only ones.

Richard Moss MossRC
@MichaelKlamerus What surprised me is that the three unreadable CDs were all bought new about 5-10 years ago. Everything older still works, except for one that's got a bad scratch. Made me nervous about my DVD collection and old games discs, and curious about my cassettes (especially the ones with recordings I made off the radio).

Richard Moss MossRC
I've been re-ripping all of my music CDs this month to lossless format for use with my hi-res audio player. About 200 albums and compilations, maybe 230 or so discs in total, the oldest bought about 1998 and the newest last year. Three are unreadable with no visible scratches, meaning likely bit rot, which is a good reminder to backup anything you have stored on CD/DVD/floppy as soon as possible.

Richard Moss MossRC
I'll be on the Apogee Weekly Stream this week talking about shareware games and other stuff. It's at 1:30PM ET / 10:30AM PT Tuesday in US timezones, which is a nasty 4:30AM Wednesday here in Australia (thankfully we're pre-recording the interview the night before).
https://www.twitch.tv/apogee_entertainment

Richard Moss MossRC
I go through this same thought process (and hopeful web search) about the demise of small phones every few months but still can't bring myself to give up on my requirement of a smartphone I can use one-handed.

So I make do with a Unihertz Titan Pocket and its deeply-compromised experience (excellent keyboard and nifty programmable buttons notwithstanding), desperately hoping that either they'll eventually make a small phone with at least mid-range specs or some other company will do the same.

https://www.theverge.com/23913658/best-small-phone-dead-iphone-mini-z-flip-pixel-8

SimCity2000 Traffic Helicopter sc2000bot@botsin.space

Prefabricated
January 2, 1900

A2_Canada A2_Canada@mastodon.social

Today is a huge day for Apple II software preservation. With the help of Antoine Vignau and @txgx42, we have managed to recover, make playable, and archive renowned game designer Dani Bunten's first game, Wheeler Dealers. Released in 1978/79 and published by Speakeasy Software, a small Canadian developer, Wheeler Dealers is a multi-player stock market simulation that only sold ~50 copies. It is the first (known) computer game to have been sold in a box. The game was considered lost until now.

Stefan stefan@gardenstate.social

Wow what a perfect piece of writing. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/17/1081194/how-to-fix-the-internet-online-discourse/

There’s a sort of common wisdom that the internet is irredeemably bad, toxic, a rash of “hellsites” to be avoided. That social platforms, hungry to profit off your data, opened a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed. Indeed, there are truly awful things that happen on the internet, things that make it especially toxic for people from groups disproportionately targeted with online harassment and abuse. Profit motives led platforms to ignore abuse too often, and they also enabled the spread of misinformation, the decline of local news, the rise of hyperpartisanship, and entirely new forms of bullying and bad behavior. All of that is true, and it barely scratches the surface. But the internet has also provided a haven for marginalized groups and a place for support, advocacy, and community. It offers information at times of crisis. It can connect you with long-lost friends. It can make you laugh. It can send you a pizza. It’s duality, good and bad, and I refuse to toss out the dancing-baby GIF with the tubgirl-dot-png bathwater. The internet is worth fighting for because despite all the misery, there’s still so much good to be found there. And yet, fixing online discourse is the definition of a hard problem. But look. Don’t worry. I have an idea.

Richard Moss MossRC
A few of us at CREATORVC are looking at doing an episodic documentary series on horror games (and if it goes ahead then I'll be writer/director). It'll be called TerrorBytes.

If you're interested, please look at our synopsis and fill out our survey — both available via the link below — to help us validate the concept and refine its creative direction.

https://www.creatorvc.com/terrorbytes

"Critical Kate" Willaert katewillaert@mastodon.social

If the letters "m199h" mean anything to you, you should read this:

https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2023/10/m199h-new-findings-both-solve-and.html

Richard Moss MossRC
@damianogerli Is that The Colonists (which I own but haven't played) or a different one? I've seen a bunch of others showing up on Steam and GOG since COVID started.

Richard Moss MossRC
Every time I play it, I'm struck by how beautifully The Settlers II balances its chill vibes and charming world with a complex-yet-intuitive economic simulation. I wrote about it at length in a retrospective for Eurogamer nearly 10 years ago. https://www.eurogamer.net/the-serene-interconnected-world-of-the-brilliant-the-settlers-2

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