Alas! I fear we cannot stay here longer,’ said Aragorn. He looked towards the mountains and held up his sword. ‘Farewell, Gandalf!’ he cried. ‘Did I not say to you: if you pass the doors of Moria, beware? Alas that I spoke true! What hope have we without you?’
He turned to the Company. ‘We must do without hope,’ he said. ‘At least we may yet be avenged. Let us gird ourselves and weep no more! Come! We have a long road, and much to do.’
Preservation, while perhaps idealistic, is about keeping every version that we can. Doom is a great example. Because Carmac released the source code, source ports have proliferated. That means anyone can play the original Doom on just about any machine. Varying degrees of accuracy to the original DOS release exist thanks to ports like Chocolate Doom, GZDoom, Eternity Engine, et al. As do varying degrees of accuracy to Doom 95, the Windows 95 rerelease. Or to the version running on Xbox packed in with Doom 3.
Ports cover the engine, but we also have an archive of all the doom.wad files, the contents. We have demo and prototype versions. The dos release. Officially patched versions. The win95 release. The Xbox release.
But a preservationist also wants the original Bethesda Unity release, wad and engine. The Kex release with the new engine and new episodes. Neither of those Bethesda engines needs to exist but why not keep them too? They’re a part of the Doom legacy, an ongoing chapter in the endless story of Doom.
Its good that in this community we’ve gotten to preserve so much. It keeps the history of one of the most important video games alive and relevant. It keeps the game itself relevant. Without the original source release, there’s no GZDoom and there’s probably no Bethesda rereleases. The impact that source release had on the gaming community, gaming as an industry, modding and indie gaming, is incalculable.
That Crysis–also a landmark game in its own time–deserves any less is laughable. The original release of the game should always be present and available: as an artifact of its time, as a fine game in its own right, and as a piece of living history that can be stood up against its remakes, sequels, and the games it inspired.
So if sunlight hurts vampires, but moonlight doesn’t (but moonlight is reflected sunlight) then does that mean the moon absorbs all holy light, and only reflects unholy light? Sunlight, we must assume, is composed of a random mix of all wavelengths and divinities of light. Therefore, can a vampire’s reflection be seen if the vampire is illuminated by moonlight? Only if using a non-silver mirror? What about office fluorescent light, the most evil light of all?
I’ll just put this with all the other fire.
Giant butterflies that hypnotize people and suck out their souls are a major element of China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station.” Highly reccomended if you like fantasy.
There is no place for Fascists within the Open Source and Free Software communities or the society at large. You will never fester your poisonous roots here. Go back to the cave you crawled out from where no sunlight can reach.
NAZI! DEVS! FUCK! OFF! 💯
The author taking Camus’ other advice, and imagining Sisyphus happy, then going farther, into realms of the fantastical, and imagining Camus happy too.
MAKE AN ASSESSMENT
Ah man, I’d been holding off on setting up another TES game on my PC since going to Linux. Now I’m going to have to go pre-emptive mod shopping for the essentials, and do it for so many games!
It’s a real shame that between crypto currencies, federated servers, and bittorrent we still haven’t come up with a fair and robust system for hosting large content archives.
The need for corporate-funded servers is killing video sites, mod sites, emulators, streaming, libraries, and so much more. Even the “self-hosted” crowd is like 90% dependent on cloud-hosting companies.
Commandos to me is the start of a different lineage of real-time tactical stealth games, which goes on to include Desperados, Shadow Tactics, and Shadow Gambit (yes, most of those were made by the same team).
Outside of the OGRE-alikes (FO Tactics, FF Tactics, Disgea, and so on) some other options for tactical games that are a little different:
New Orleans also had No Kings in the morning and (corporate sponsored, thanks Shell Oil!) Pride in the afternoon yesterday. Lots and lots of folks made this same silly sign or a variant. “No Kings, Yassss Queens” etc.
I tend to concur with the sentiment that it still promotes monarchism as aspirational, but I think a lot of protest signs are “heart in the right place” kinds of things. Like anyone that snow clones “Make Something Whatever Again” I hate, quit validating his slogans with copies!
Or calling Trump TACO and using tacos as mocking images. I don’t want to associate Trump and tacos, I liketacos! And he doesn’t “chicken out”, if you think his tariff nonsense is about playing chicken, please learn what “market manipulation” is.
Trying to imagine objects in higher than 3 spatial dimensions.
Imagining 2 or more temporal dimensions.
Designing a system of governance that is fair to all constituents, physically realizable, and marketable enough to convince future constituents to follow it.
I have a vague notion of a new color. Success!
Hmm…this repost is really making me regret softening my stance in the original thread yesterday.
I sometimes still have nightmares about those aqueducts and fuel tubes!
More realistic versions:
Waterfall: the car is “finished” at the end, but replace the engine with a huge roaring fire. The Dev team continues to put the engine fire out and build the engine for 3x the original project duration.
Agile: replace the cute scooter and bicycle with the partial car graphics from Waterfall, but mount a uniccyle seat and then a park bench on top of the partially built car.
AI: the whole thing should always be on fire, and have several spies from different countries taking pictures of it constantly.
I’m slightly on the young side for FMV games, but Jedi Knight and Command & Conquer were childhood staples that shaped my tastes in so many weird ways. JK is up there with the original trilogy for “Star Wars that is good and I care about.” Katarn is easily the coolest Jedi.
Thank you for creating alchemical programming content!
It’s a fair bit of work to set up, but I replaced Keep with Obsidian.
I suppose you could just pay for obsidian sync and then basically have parity. I do not. I use syncthing to sync my notebooks (vaults in obsidian terms) between my devices.
To get my existing notes, I used Google Takeout to get a copy of all my data, but you can just ask for the Keep data. They’ll send you a bunch of json files, which I was able to extract the text of my notes from pretty easily and copy into Obsidian notes.