The milky-way-like blob from exhaust and exploding missile debris makes for lovely formations in the fading high-altitude sunlight, which were quite the rorschach test for my friends.
I recall I thought one photo looked like the starship Enterprise; the lady at the photo shop (before good digital cameras!) said it looked like an angel; my classmate said it looked like a dog. đ
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@brion I might actually have a copy of at least one of those pictures. I’ll take a look.
The first Dungeons & Dragons videogame came out in 1982
for the Intellivision, but the burgeoning industry was already under the tabletop
gameâs influence. By 1980, two games represented a kind of fork in the
philosophical road for computerized RPGs. Rogue focused on the dangers of
dungeon crawling and complex rule sets that verged on the mystical â it was
essentially a simulation of D&D mechanics where stories emerged from the
action without narrative guidance. Down the other path lay Zork.
Zork was developed by students at MIT from 1977 to 1979. It was
inspired by Will Crowtherâs 1975 mainframe game Colossal Cave Adventure that,
though it lacked monsters, was directly inspired by Dungeons & Dragons
sessions (which included Zork writer and Infocom founder Dave Lebling). Zork
was definitely fantasy, though, with a vast underground empire to explore,
treasures to find and monsters to fight (or be eaten by, if weâre talking about
the darkness dwelling Grue).
Zork is an interactive fiction, that is, everything is
presented as text. You direct your actions by typing them into the command line
and a bit of code known as a text parser acts as a kind of dungeon master (Zork
IIIâs subtitle actually is Dungeon Master, come to think of it), interpreting
your commands and telling you their consequences. If the Dave Arneson school of
D&D thought sought to have players inhabit the fantasy stories he read and
loved, then Zork is perhaps the closest weâve come to that Platonic ideal.
I love Zork. It is as old as I am, has no flashy graphics,
and yet remains my favorite videogame of all time. It stoked my imagination as
no other videogame has, but in ways similar to D&D. As a kid, peering at
the green monochrome screen, trying (and mostly failing) to work out the devious
puzzles. I didnât make much of a distinction between Zork and Dungeons &
Dragons. Even though they didnât share a brand name, I knew they were both
facets of a larger world.
Interactive fiction mostly died out in the late 80s, leaving
the mechanical influence of D&D to dominate videogames until recent years,
when technology has allowed complex narrative to remarry rules systems in
something that approximates the experience of telling a story with friends
around the gaming table. Sort of. But Iâm getting ahead of myselfâŠ
Had a conversation this morning on the importance of not shaming people for learning new things that they âshould have known already.â It reminded me of this XKCD from a few years back.
This is my friend TJ, wearing a costume she made for Halloween, 1977. She was 16 at the time.
Now, keep in mind: there was no internet to search for images. She could not have rented and paused the movie, because it wasnât released on video until 1982. No, TJ just went to the movie a bunch of times, took notes with a flashlight, drew a bunch of sketches, and put this together.
In 19-fucking-77. So letâs bury this bullshit about how women didnât grow up on Star Wars.
Some dude tried to explain why TLJ is an insult to real fans and since I liked it I wasnât a real fan and SON, I GOT A DOT MATRIX PRINT OUT OF Star Wars: New Hope, The Journal of the Whills, Part 1 IN A DRAWER SOMEWHERE, COME AT ME.
My mother is 74 years old and knows what a Corellian blood stripe is. The ladies have been here the whole time.
Fun fact: This was the one reblog that got flagged as “adult content” after the Dec. 2018 policy change. My guess is Tumblr’s AI recognized Lying Cat as a scan from Saga, which has been known to have adult content of its own.
A new volume of Tellos, in memory of the late Mike Wieringo. Over 200 artists worked on this, and I mean, there are some BIG names. You can see some of them here, but thatâs just, like a smattering (like, Iâm pretty sure George Perez is on the roster for at least one page).
All the proceeds go to the ASPCA, so hey. You get to help puppies while getting a cool book! Or just spread the word!
Iâm just so stoked to have had a chance to be a part of this. Iâve loved Ringoâs work since I first got my grubby little mitts on an Impulse book, and Tellos is such an icon.
Plus, I got to draw several pages of a snarky fox and an adorable dopey bear. So. That was fun too!
The books are only going to be available for pre-order, like, right now. So if you want a copy, nowâs the time!
That is super-cool!! Â Congrats on becoming part of this đ
ââŠlast
year this photograph of children looking at their smartphones by Rembrandtâs âThe
Night Watchâ in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
[went viral.] It was often accompanied by outraged, dispirited comments such as
âa perfect metaphor for our age,â âthe end of civilizationâ or âa sad picture of
our societyâ.
âŠIt turns out that the Rijksmuseum has an app that, among other
things, contains guided tours and further information about the works on display.
As part of their visit to the museum, the children, who minutes earlier had admired
the art and listened attentively to explanations by expert adults, had been instructed
to complete an assignment by their school teachers, using, among other things, the
museumâs excellent smartphone appâŠ.
