As an aside, surely a person of Carmack's stature and knowledge would have a dedicated blog. I have to wonder if his decision to post so many of these wonderful stories on Facebook might be due to some "pressure" from his employer.
Would you ever team up with Romero to make another game? I'd love to see your guys' take on a battle royale game. I'm having lots of fun with PUBG, but a game like that needs your engine optimization-fu.
Actually, I'd be surprised if this didn't already exist.
https://www.popsci.com/post-to-all-social-media-accounts-at-...
etc
I immediately remembered John's stories about porting RAGE to iOS.
But it's already not very accessible (almost vanished) without a facebook account. I couldn't find an index to other writings (in fact I didn't come up with a google query to find any of your other writings). I like these stories. Thank you.
If longevity is your only concern, you could create a blog on Wordpress.com (which has been around longer) and pay about $20 or so a year to have your own domain as well.
[This is easier to understand through direct experience.]
sudo apt install finger
finger johnc@oculus.com
finger johnc@facebook.com
Finger was really great microblogging platform.
The only plausible explanation is that Carmack writes on Facebook out of his own free will.
He most definitely has. Heck, spent some of that on founding a rocket company.
1: Biography of id software, obviously heavily featuring Carmack. Highly recommended.
Armadillo Aerospace went into "hibernation" in 2013 and sold off its assets.
1) id Software sold to Zenimax for $150 million. [1] John Carmack was a large shareholder at the time and claimed a year ago that Zenimax still owes him another $22.5 million. Adrian Carmack owned 41% of id when he was fired & bought out of the company in 2005. From that ownership consolidation, it's very likely John had 1/3 or more of the company when it was sold to Zenimax.
2) Oculus was purchased for $2 billion. $400m in cash and 23 million shares of Facebook. Those shares would now be worth $4.2 billion. Carmack owned a position in Oculus pre the Andreessen Horowitz investment. A 1% stake would have been a substantial windfall.
3) He earned a large amount of money from being an owner of id Software from the Wolfenstein days forward.
According to Wired, he put $8m into Armadillo before closing it down. The id sale alone covers that cost at least twice over after taxes.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/john-carmack-zen...
"The rocketry has always been a negotiation with my wife, understandably so, where. She has always insisted I not be one of those celebrities that squanders all of their fortune being high on the hill and then being penniless some day, so, rocketry has always had this carved out area, where, "this is John's crazy money" while "All of this is to make sure the family is well taken care of and John's not going to be begging for work some time." But I basically expended my crazy money on Armadillo. So I don't expect to see any rockets in the real near future."
This is not me inferring Carmack's wish to work there are much as it is just assembling things he has tweeted in the past.
He famously bought a Ferrari and turbocharged it[1]. He doesn't _need_ to work for a living, he's doing what he wants to do.
[1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/transportation/advanced-...
Imagine getting the latest fascicle of TAOCP from a popular social platform instead of http://www.cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/
It reminds me of a joke comic that praises "Don Knuth's Big Dummies Guide to Visual Basic", "All practical examples you can use! No theoretical stuff! --Don"
It's not quite "DOOM's John Carmack's latest l33test Farmville hacks and tricks," but it's a little closer than I'd like it to be.
Function over form.
http://time.com/11740/facebook-10-year-anniversary-interface...
I couldn't even tell you if he even thought that deeply about it. He possibly just thought "I can just write what I need to here, this works" and immediately considered it a solved problem.
He used his .plan file on his unix account to post long musings on things he was concerned about in an era when running your own website was scary, or at least too trendy for people.
The problem with maintaining a blog indefinitely is the same problem I see with musicians. The really profound stuff you come up with shows up at a slow rate. After ten years of obscurity you have years of material stored up. But you write what you know for a while and you don't know that much more than you did when you started. What goes on your 2nd or 3rd album? New good stuff, or the things that weren't good enough for your debut? If you're smart you stop for a while until you have enough good stuff again.