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<p><a href="https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/the-curse-of-monkey-island/9404109-the-curse-of-monkey-island-windows-front-cover/"><img src="https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/9404109-the-curse-of-monkey-island-windows-front-cover-236x300.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>Fair Warning: this article contains plot spoilers for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and The Curse of Monkey Island. No puzzle spoilers, however…</p>
<p>The ending of 1991’s <a href="/2017/03/monkey-island-or-how-ron-gilbert-made-an-adventure-game-that-didnt-suck">Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge</a> is as shocking in its way as that of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsUrfiycSts">the infamous last episode of the classic television series St. Elsewhere</a>. Just as the lovable wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood is about to finally dispatch his arch-nemesis, the zombie pirate LeChuck, the latter tears off his mask to reveal that he is in reality Guybrush’s older brother, looking rathe…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/the-curse-of-monkey-island/
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<p>In the early aughts, Frank Warren ran a medical document delivery business in Germantown, Maryland. It was a monotonous job, involving daily trips to government offices to copy thousands of pages of journal articles for pharmaceutical companies, law firms, and non-profits. By his early forties, he had a house in a nice subdivision, a wife, a young daughter, and a dog. His family fostered children for a few weeks or months, and he felt a sense of purpose in helping kids who were suffering acute crises in their own homes. From the outside, things appeared to be going better than well. But inside, something was missing: A sense of adventure, or at least a little fun. An outlet to explore the weirder, darker, and more imaginative parts of his interior world. He’d never been one for small talk, preferring instead to launch into deep discussions, even with people he barely knew. He wondered if he could create a place like that outside of everyday conversation, a place full of aw…
Originally From https://hazlitt.net/longreads/dark-matter
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<p><a href="https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/jedi-knight-plus-notes-on-an-expanded-universe/heirtotheempire/"><img src="https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/HeirtotheEmpire.webp" /></a></p>
<p>The years from 1991 to 1998 were special ones in which to be a Star Wars fan. For during these years, more so than during any other time in the franchise’s existence, Star Wars truly belonged to its fans.</p>
<p>The period just before this one is sometimes called the “Dark Period” or the “Dark Ages” by the fans of today. After 1983’s Return of the Jedi, that concluding installment in the original trilogy of films, George Lucas, Star Wars‘s sometimes cantankerous creator, insisted that he was done with his most beloved creation. A few underwhelming television productions aside, he stayed true to his word in the years that followed, whilst also refusing anyone else the right to play in his playground; even Kenner Toys was denied its request to invent some new char…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/jedi-knight-plus-notes-on-an-expanded-universe/
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We don’t have a strategy to do a $200 game console that is a direct competitor to what Nintendo, Sega, and Sony are doing…
— Bill Gates, June 1996
<p>It’s hard to overstate the scale of the real-time-strategy deluge of the late 1990s. For a period of several years, it seemed that every studio and publisher in the industry was convinced that duplicating the gameplay of <a href="/2023/06/a-dialog-in-real-time-strategy">Blizzard’s Warcraft and Westwood’s Command & Conquer franchises</a>, those two most striking success stories in the business of computer games since <a href="/2020/02/myst-or-the-drawbacks-to-success">Myst</a> and <a href="/2020/06/the-shareware-scene-part-4-doom">DOOM</a>, must surely be the digital equivalent of printing money. In the fall of 1997, Computer Gaming World magazine counted no fewer than 40 RTS’s slated for release during the coming Christmas season alone, to go along with the “nearly 20” that had already appeared with names ot…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2024/03/age-of-empires-or-how-microsoft-got-in-on-games/
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<p>Just as the Ultima Online beta test was beginning, Electronic Arts was initiating the final phase of its slow-motion takeover of Origin Systems. In June of 1997, the mother ship in California sent down two Vice Presidents to take over completely in Texas, integrate Origin well and truly into the EA machine, and end once and for all any semblance of independence for the studio. Neil Young became Origin’s new General Manager on behalf of EA, while Chris Yates became Chief Technical Officer. Both men were industry veterans.</p>
<p>Appropriately enough given that he was about to become the last word on virtual Britannia, Neil Young was himself British. He attributes his career choice to the infamously awful English weather. “There are a lot of people in the games industry that come from the UK,” he says. “I think it’s because the weather is so bad that you don’t have a lot to do, so you either go into a band or teach yourself to program.” He chose the latter cour…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2024/03/the-rise-of-pomg-part-4-a-world-for-the-taking/
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<div><div><p><a href="https://pitchfork.com/artists/caroline-polachek/">Caroline Polachek</a>, onetime New Yorker, accepts the inevitability of languishing in line. Four parties back in the queue outside Veselka, the perma-busy Ukrainian diner in the East Village, the 37-year-old singer-songwriter seems unrushed as we wait for a table at the peak of lunchtime calamity. It’s a sunny Friday in March, and Polachek—who now splits her time between Los Angeles and London—is in town to play The Tonight Show, a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcAlqdRZTeM">breathless solo performance</a> that appears to take place in the black void from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7bAZCOk0Sc">Under the Skin</a>. But back in the city, she’s just another girl in an Online Ceramics sweatshirt.</p><p>Fresh off spectating fashion weeks in Europe, Polachek expresses an admiration for the city’s ever-changing sense of style as we people-watch outside. Perhaps because she no longer lives here—and …
Originally From https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/caroline-polachek-desire-i-want-to-turn-into-you/
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<p>While the broth of Ultima Online was slowly thickening, not one but two other publishers beat EA and Origin Systems to the punch by releasing graphical persistent virtual worlds of their own. We owe it to them and to ourselves to have a look at these other POMG pioneers before we return to the more widely lauded one that was being built down in Texas. They were known as Meridian 59 and The Realm.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.filfre.net/2024/02/the-rise-of-pomg-part-3-competition-and-conflict/5073479-meridian-59-windows-front-cover/"><img src="https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/5073479-meridian-59-windows-front-cover-235x300.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>Meridian 59 was inspired by <a href="https://www.mobygames.com/game/80189/scepter-of-goth/">Scepter of Goth</a>, a rare attempt to commercialize <a href="/2017/12/games-on-the-net-before-the-web-part-2-mud">the text-only MUD</a> outside of the walled gardens of <a href="/2017/10/a-net-before-the-web-part…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2024/02/the-rise-of-pomg-part-3-competition-and-conflict/
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<div><a href="https://www.filfre.net/2024/02/the-rise-of-pomg-part-2-multima/multima/"><img src="https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/multima.jpg" /></a><p>This sign, executed in throwback 1980s Ultima iconography, hung on the wall outside the elevator on the fifth floor of Origin Systems’s office building, pointing the way to the Multima team. If you neglected to follow the sign’s advice and turned left instead of right here, you would plunge five stories to your doom.</p></div>
<p>To carry our story forward into the next phase of persistent online multiplayer gaming, we first need to go backward again — all the way back to the days when <a href="/2011/07/dungeons-and-dragons">tabletop Dungeons & Dragons</a> was new on the scene and people were first beginning to imagine how computers might make it more accessible. Some dreamed of eliminating the pesky need for other humans to play with entirely; others wondered whether it might be possible to …
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2024/02/the-rise-of-pomg-part-2-multima/
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No one on their deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer!”
— Dani Bunten Berry
<p>If you ever want to feel old, just talk to the younger generation.</p>
<p>A few years ago now, I met the kids of a good friend of mine for the very first time: four boys between the ages of four and twelve, all more or less crazy about videogames. As someone who spends a lot of his time and earns a lot of his income writing about games, I arrived at their house with high expectations attached.</p>
<p>Alas, I’m afraid I proved a bit of a disappointment to them. The distance between the musty old games that I knew and the shiny modern ones that they played was just too far to bridge; shared frames of reference were tough to come up with. This was more or less what I had anticipated, given how painfully limited I already knew my knowledge of modern gaming to be. But one thing did genuinely surprise me: it was tough for these youngsters to wrap their …
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2024/01/the-rise-of-pomg-part-1-it-takes-a-village/
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Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again
2023 Dec 28
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<p></p> Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again
<p>Special thanks to Paul Dylan-Ennis for feedback and review.</p>
<p>One of my favorite memories from ten years ago was taking a pilgrimage to a part of Berlin that was called the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj87B17TERc">Bitcoin Kiez</a>: a region in Kreuzberg where there were around a dozen shops within a few hundred meters of each other that were all accepting Bitcoin for payments. The centerpiece of this community was <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20130820132935/http://www.room77.de/">Room 77</a>, a restaurant and bar run by Joerg Platzer. In addition to simply accepting Bitcoin, it also served as a community center, and all kinds of open source developers, political activists of various affiliations, and other characters would frequently come by.</p>
Room 77, 2013. Source: my article from 2013 on Bitcoin Magazine.
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<p>A similar memory …
Originally From https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html
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<p><a href="https://www.filfre.net/2024/01/televising-the-revolution/26706-circle-of-blood-playstation-front-cover/"><img src="https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/26706-circle-of-blood-playstation-front-cover-297x300.jpg" /></a></p>
When we finished Broken Sword, the managing director of Virgin [Interactive] called me into his office and showed me a game from Argonaut [Software] called Creature Shock. He said, “These are the games you should be writing, not adventure games. These are the games. This is the future.”
— Charles Cecil, co-founder of Revolution Software
<p><a href="/2022/07/broken-sword-the-shadow-of-the-templars">Broken Sword</a>, Revolution Software’s third point-and-click adventure game, was released for personal computers in September of 1996. Three months later, it arrived on the Sony PlayStation console, so that it could be enjoyed on television as well as monitor screens. And therein lies a tale in itself.</p>
<p>Prior to this…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2024/01/televising-the-revolution/
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<p>Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led the charge in surfacing evidence of plagiarism against now-former President of Harvard University Claudine Gay, was born in 1984; he joined X in 2015. Harvard, meanwhile, is the oldest university in the United States — older than the United States, in fact — having been founded in 1636. That mismatch is perhaps the most striking aspect of the Gay episode: a millenial on Twitter took down our most august institution’s president by employing the 4th of Saul Alinsky’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals">Rules of Radicals</a>: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” In this case the book of rules was the <a href="https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/harvard-plagiarism-policy">Harvard University Plagiarism Policy</a>:</p>
It is expected that all homework assignments, projects, lab reports, papers, theses, and examinations and any other work submitted for academic credit will be the stude…
Originally From https://stratechery.com/2024/the-new-york-times-ai-opportunity/
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<p>Back in the fall, I wrote <a href="https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series">a series of posts on a particularly horrific episode in Meta’s past</a>. I hadn’t planned to revisit the topic immediately, but <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/mastodon-founder-touts-threads-federation-saying-it-makes-his-x-rival-a-far-more-attractive-option/">here we are</a>, with Threads federation with the ActivityPub-based fediverse ecosystem an increasingly vivid reality.</p>
<p>My own emotional response to Meta and Threads is so intense that it hasn’t been especially easy to think clearly about the risks and benefits Threads’ federation brings, and to whom. So I’m writing through it in search of understanding, and in hopes of planting some helpful trail markers as I go.</p>
What federation with Threads offers
<p>Doing a good-faith walkthrough of what seem to me to be the strongest arguments for federating with Threads has been challengi…
Originally From https://erinkissane.com/untangling-threads
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<p><a href="https://www.filfre.net/2023/12/putting-the-j-in-the-rpg-part-3-playing-final-fantasy-vii-or-old-man-yells-at-jrpg/6542928-final-fantasy-vii-windows-front-cover/"><img src="https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/6542928-final-fantasy-vii-windows-front-cover-300x300.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>Fair warning: this article includes plot spoilers of Final Fantasy VII.</p>
<p>Historians and critics like me usually have to play the know-it-all in order to be effective at our jobs. My work flow begins with me going out and learning everything I can about a topic in the time I have available. Then I decide what I think about it all, find a way to structure my article, and share it with you as if I’ve been carrying all this information around with me all my life. Often I get things wrong, occasionally horribly wrong. But I can always count on you astonishingly knowledgeable folks to set me straight in the end, and in the meantime being direct is preferable in…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2023/12/putting-the-j-in-the-rpg-part-3-playing-final-fantasy-vii-or-old-man-yells-at-jrpg/
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<p><a href="https://www.filfre.net/2023/12/putting-the-j-in-the-rpg-part-2-playstation-for-the-win/4306305-final-fantasy-vii-playstation-front-cover/"><img src="https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/4306305-final-fantasy-vii-playstation-front-cover-300x257.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>From the Seven Hills of Rome to the Seven Sages of China’s Bamboo Grove, from the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World to the Seven Heavens of Islam, from the Seven Final Sayings of Jesus to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the number seven has always struck us as a special one. Hironobu Sakaguchi and his crew at Square, the people behind the Final Fantasy series, were no exception. In the mid-1990s, when the time came to think about what the seventh entry in the series ought to be, they instinctively felt that this one had to be bigger and better than any that had come before. It had to double down on all of the series’s traditional strengths and tropes to become the ultimate Fina…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2023/12/putting-the-j-in-the-rpg-part-2-playstation-for-the-win/
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<p>Join me in a thought experiment. Imagine you are imprisoned in a room by a despotic regime and allowed contact with the outside world only through a primitive computer. Called a text-only terminal, the computer lets you send and receive as many written messages as you like. It lets you read as many articles as you like. But it can’t display images or videos of any kind, nor play any sound. The only understanding you would have of the reality beyond your four walls — aside from the trays of food slid under the door — comes from the words on your screen.
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<p>From the Symposium:</p>
Saving the Real
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Originally From https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/reading-ourselves-to-death
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The videogame industry has always run on hype, but the amount of it that surrounded Final Fantasy VII in 1997 was unparalleled in its time. This new game for the Sony PlayStation console was simply inescapable. The American marketing teams of Sony and Square Corporation, the game’s Japanese developer and publisher, had been given $30 million with which to elevate Final Fantasy VII to the same status as the Super Marios of the world. They plastered Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, Sephiroth, and the game’s other soon-to-be-iconic characters onto urban billboards, onto the sides of buses, and into the pages of glossy magazines like Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Spin. Commercials for the game aired round the clock on MTV, during NFL games and Saturday Night Live, even on giant cinema screens in lieu of more traditional coming-attractions trailers. “They said it couldn’t be done in a major motion picture,” the stentorian announcer intoned. “They were right!” Even i…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2023/11/putting-the-j-in-the-rpg-part-1-dorakue/
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Fair warning: although there’s no nudity in the pictures below, the text of this article does contain frank descriptions of the human anatomy and sexual acts.</p>
<p>When you want to know where the zeitgeist is heading, just look to what the punters are lining up to see on Broadway. To wit: the unexpected breakout hit of the 2003 to 2004 season was Avenue Q, a low-budget send-up of Sesame Street where the puppets cursed, drank, and had sex with one another. They were rude, crude, and weirdly relatable — even lovable, what with their habit of breaking into song at the drop of a hat. The most enduring of their songs was a timeless show tune called “The Internet is for Porn.” (Eat your hearts out, Rodgers and Hammerstein!) It became, inevitably, an Internet meme of its own, reflecting an unnerving feeling that the ground was shifting beneath society’s feet, that the most important practical affordance of the World Wide Web, that noble experiment in t…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2023/11/a-digital-pornutopia-part-2-the-internet-is-for-porn/
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<div><div><p>Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231031143032/https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/christian-home-schoolers-revolt/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template">ideological fringe</a>, a Washington Post analysis shows.</p><p>The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.</p><p>A chart showing the percentage increase in total home-school student enrollment since the 2017-18 school year nationwide</p><div><div>
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Originally From https://web.archive.org/web/20231031143033/https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/homeschooling-growth-data-by-district/
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<p><a href="https://www.filfre.net/2023/10/a-digital-pornutopia-part-1-the-seedy-rom-revolution/cover-2/"><img src="https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/cover-300x211.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>Fair warning: although there’s no nudity in the pictures below, the text of this article does contain frank descriptions of the human anatomy and sexual acts.</p>
If I’m showing people what a CD-ROM can do, and I try to show them the Kennedy assassination, their eyes glaze over. But if I show them an adult title, they perk right up.
— John Williams of Sierra On-Line, 1995
<p>As long as humans have had technology, they’ve been using it for titillation. A quarter of a million years ago, they were carving female figurines with exaggerated breasts, buttocks, and vulvae out of stone. Well before they started using fired clay to make pottery for the storage of food, they were using the same material to make better versions of these “Venus figurines,” some of them so exp…
Originally From https://www.filfre.net/2023/10/a-digital-pornutopia-part-1-the-seedy-rom-revolution/
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