Finished another #NerdStitch project, recreating the cover of Richard Moss’ wonderful book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming. Back when he was writing it, I had a fun trip down memory lane talking with him about my years as a Mac game developer, and neat to read stories of all the other game devs. #MacGaming @MossRC
Really enjoying it — beautiful screen, pretty-good keyboard and touchpad, does everything I throw at it with ease (even intense audio editing tasks), light weight for its size, etc. And way cheaper than an Apple laptop with comparable specs.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/47JnPiqbtCdj57HnWDNJ1n?si=3643adc98e59441f&nd=1
As part of their discussions and planning, lead designer Rick Goodman, who had a background in accounting, drafted up a budget costing based on six different sales scenarios — three for each game. These were realistic numbers, but it's interesting to see them in light of the fact that AoE would actually sell a million-plus copies in its *first year alone*.
So in like 10 minutes, my pal Zophar of Zophar’s Domain (@TheRealZophar) has a video going up about the early online video series he worked on in the days of RealPlayer. It was about #Emulation, because of course it was!
I helped script it. I worked on ZD back in the day, 1998 or so. So consider it a professional relationship, continued.
Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgZfFdPUeAQ
But maybe it is the same thing and I'm splitting hairs by defining them separately. *shrugs*
Like one I have right now is "I'll be your dead bird, you be my bloodhound." Just that one line, whole hog, down to the singer's exact tone and backing instrumentation — but *only* that line — repeating over and over in my head.
Bonus This Week in Business because Microsoft's crackdown on unlicensed Xbox peripherals looks like it will hurt a bunch of people who use accessibility devices to play games.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/microsoft-has-control-issues-this-week-in-business
Given the climate horrors that keep happening all around us, Elizabeth Kolbert (@elizkolbert) wonders how we can allow Business As Usual to continue...
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Before Hurricane Otis slammed into Acapulco, it passed over a stretch of the eastern Pacific where the water temperature was nearly ninety degrees. Hurricanes draw their energy from the warmth of surface waters, so this astonishing heat acted, in effect, as a propellant.
Otis adds yet another entry to the long list of off-the-charts weather-related calamities to have hit the world in 2023. Others include record-breaking heat waves in southern Europe and China, the unprecedented wildfires that ravaged Canada this past summer, and the flooding in Libya in September that caused two dams to collapse, killing more than eleven thousand people.
In the first eight months of the year, the United States alone experienced 23 weather-related disasters that each caused more than a billion dollars in damage; among these were intense rains that flooded places such as Montpelier, Vermont, the devastating wildfires in Maui, and Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall in Florida in late August. All of this devastation prompted the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, last month to warn that “climate breakdown has begun.”
A paper published by an international team of scientists the day before Otis hit put it this way: “Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in uncharted territory.”
For decades, those scientists noted, researchers have warned that the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere would produce a future filled with extreme events. Now that future is here. “As scientists, we are increasingly being asked to tell the public the truth about the crises we face in simple and direct terms,” the team wrote in the journal BioScience. “The truth is that we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023.”
One might expect — or at least hope — that, as the damage from climate change mounts, the will to limit the damage will also increase. In the words of the Secretary-General, “Surging temperatures demand a surge in action.” But it’s hard to find much evidence of such a surge. Instead, most of the news about climate action in recent months has been about inaction.
In March, the Biden Administration approved the Willow project, an enormous new oil-drilling venture in Alaska. Last month, the British government gave the go-ahead to develop Rosebank, the largest untapped oil-and-gas field in the North Sea. Rosebank is expected to produce some three hundred million barrels of oil during the course of its lifetime; Willow, twice that amount.
Such developments are clearly incompatible with stabilizing the climate. As Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, explained to the Guardian, “If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas, and coal from now — from this year.” Birol made these remarks in 2021.
Meanwhile, as Acapulco remained cut off, congressional Republicans elected Mike Johnson to become the next Speaker of the House. The Hill has characterized Johnson as “a longtime ally of the oil industry” who will be “perhaps the most vocal skeptic of the scientific consensus on climate change ever to hold the speakership.”
At this late date, the world simply cannot go on building new fossil-fuel infrastructure and electing climate deniers to high office. As the BioScience paper put it, “Unfortunately, time is up.”
And yet we go on.
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FULL ESSAY -- https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/hurricane-otis-and-the-world-we-live-in-now
#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual
Current plan involves a trip to the LEGO House and LEGOLand and various museums, parks, gardens, castles, etc, based on a bit of web and Lonely Planet research, but we'd love to know if there's any great stuff that you won't find in a tourist guidebook.
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
I think they said to me it'll get put on YouTube at some stage, too, but no sign of it there yet.
really excited that this #macintosh #hypercard 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, #cyan 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:
