“It’s …” This afternoon I went to my local theater to see the live broadcast of Monty Python Live (Mostly) from the O2 Theater in London. I’ve been a Python fan ever since some friends introduced me to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” back in high school and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see their …
Today I took my daughter to see the IMAX release of Steven Spielberg’s classic “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Seeing “Raiders” on the (really) big screen was pretty cool. Spielberg was apparently very pleased with the film but I found the IMAX transfer to be a little sub-par. I know the movie is 30 years old but it seemed overly …
Driving home with my daughter the other day I was “forced” to listen to 101.5, her current favorite radio station. I really don’t listen to the radio anymore (not since getting my first MP3 player in 2002 and then switching to the iPod in 2006 and discovering podcasts) but she’s at that tweener stage where listening to …
… in the not-so-distant future the world has turned into a very bleak place, but luckily there is OASIS, a virtual reality world that is a vast online utopia. People can plug into OASIS to play, go to school, earn money, and even meet other people (or at least they can meet their avatars), and …
If you owned a personal computer in the 80s and played computer games, you probably played at least one Infocom text-based adventure game like Zork or (my personal favorite) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Known as interactive fiction, or IF, these games used the most powerful computers on the planet for their processing engines …
Continue reading ‘Creating interactive fiction with Inform 7’ »
Wow, Pac Man is 30 years old. To celebrate, Google put up a logo Doodle that was an actual playable Pac Man game, sound effects and all! What a blast from the past … I sank quite a few quarters (or tokens) into Pac Man machines back in the day. I also had the Pac …
I read via Ars Technica (and then heard in episode #1012 of Buzz Out Loud) that yesterday AOL shut down CompuServe. A little piece of Internet history has now been laid to rest, as CompuServe was shut down for good just before this Fourth of July weekend. After some 30 years of service, CompuServe’s new …
I found, via slashdot, this great article on the history of Rogue, a character-based dungeons-and-dragons computer game from the early 80s, originally developed for UNIX. While I had been playing paper-based RPGs with my friends and computer-based D&D games (like the Alternate Reality or Ultima series on my Atari 800XL) all through high school, I …
Continue reading ‘You hear maniacal laughter in the distance …’ »
On one of the forums I frequent there’s been a recent thread about the evolution of the graphical user interface. In that discussion someone posted this link to a GUI timeline that shows screenshots of many of the UIs that evolved over the years. It’s a really cool walk through GUI history and made me …
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the movie “WarGames” it’s showing in select theaters tonight at 7:30pm! You can use the event locator to see if it’s playing near you. Unfortunately I just found out about this today and have prior plans so I can’t go … but I totally would if I could. As …