Same generation, very insightful. Seeing the old covers makes me remember for a second what it was like to be 10 years old again. Scoring some of those at a school bookmobile was like Christmas. I remember learning about them on a PBS children's book show and being captivated by the idea and implications. I already loved books and the new dimension was fresh, along with D&D. Watching that stuff turn into the video games of today has been quite amazing.
In the FPS space, there used to be only three games worth modding for: Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half Life. You could make a mod back then and get tons of press and players if you could follow through. I was interviewed in popular gaming websites! The games themselves were quite simple graphically so anyone with a drip of talent, time, and motivation could contribute. That specific environment doesn't exist anymore. There are so many games now, it's an ocean, developers have exerted more control over their games, and the talent required to create content for FPS games is too high a bar now.
I loved the mods for the holy trifecta: Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half Life. I consider it the golden age of online gaming. I also spent a lot of time on IRC servers chatting with developers (eventually joining a team myself which lead me to my current career as a developer). My favorite was for Weapons Factory, which was a popular Quake 2 mod at the time. The old dev team moved on with their lives so the community took over...and it was actually released and was even better than the first. High quality, with tons of cool maps, and for an active community of maybe 1000 people? Insane.
Nice to see someone similar. I was into the Weapons Factory mod, first for Quake 2 and then Quake 3. I made a map for the Quake 3 version that it still played this day by a small group of die-hards. I think it took me three days to make that map. Draw a brush, slap a texture on it, keep things neat. All there was too it. It wasn't long before modding just became too hard. I remember reading about static meshes being introduced in the Unreal Engine and I knew I was done.
I would just play as medic and camp the enemy spawn room, infecting them as they spawned and watch as they passively infected their teammates. It was great fun (I have since grown as a person). It wasn't long before the enemy spawn rooms would instantly kill you if you entered.
I much prefer TADS 3. With that said, I'm glad Inform 7 exists. It's such a strange one that seems to work for a subset of creatives, made by people that really love the art form.
Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic and ancient coral reef of a library and tool set but has a lot of inconsistencies in naming conventions and usage (gdal_translate, gdalfinfo). Many geospatial professionals are not savvy enough to leverage it without it being wrapped by someone else like Esri. Windows power users typically install it with something like OSGeo4W [2], whose name I can never remember. Whenever I need it I spin up a Docker image for convenience.
There should be a law about what "delete" means for online services. I used to delete old comments on reddit until their AI caught up to my behavior and shadow-banned my 17 year-old account. As soon as that happened, I could see every comment I ever deleted in my history again. The only consolation is that no one but me could see my history anymore.
One of those youtubers that goes to old stores (Retail Archaeology or something like that) came across a boxed version of Alpha Centauri at a thrift store or something and bought it because he thought it looked cool. I couldn't believe his luck. I would really like to have that manual again. If I remember correctly, it was more than just a manual...it had a lot of backstory and whatnot.
From experience, I agree with your points. One thing OSM data is ok for is land classification labels ("landuse", etc tags) as the accuracy is not as important at their scales and requires less effort to cleanup. Most of the work is aggregating disparate landuses into buckets that make sense for your model.
I love the strange "event" sound, the little bleeps and bloops of the interface, the "pew-pews" of the weapons, and the fantastic voice acting. I've had this game installed on one computer or another since I bought it retail back in '99. It's a work of art. No other Civ game ever matched it for me, no matter how far graphics have come in the last 25+ years.
Geospatial data would be great. This stuff is notoriously annoying to search for. For example:
"Give me a list of free imagery service endpoints I can use in a maplibre style sheet. Include information such as name, description, service endpoint, service type, extent (global/regional)."
Has Reddit ever spoken publicly about this issue? I would think this to be an existential threat in the long term. Posting patterns can be faked and the models are just getting better and better. At some point, subreddits like changemyview will become accepted places to roleplay with entertaining LLM-generated content. My young teenager has a default skepticism of everything online and treats gen AI in general with a mix of acceptance and casual disdain. I think it's bad if Reddit becomes more and more known as just an AI dumping ground.
I love crows so much. I had some in my backyard that I would give stuff too a lot. When I would leave in the morning for work, they would perch on my gutters and make clucking sounds while looking down at me. I'd wave and be on my way.
I was watching some crows eat some food in a parking lot yesterday. The first one landed next to a tiny morsel, investigated it a bit, then did a head bob thing while looking up and making what sounded like a cross between a hoot and a caw. Another crow swooped in about ten seconds later and they poked at it a bit. Then a lady walked over towards them, they flew away, and she dumped out her half eaten to-go meal in the parking spot. Too easy.
I had a 17 year old account that got shadow banned so I went ahead and deleted it. All comments I've ever made there were in good faith and respectful and I avoided hot topic discussions (i.e. the entirety of the front page). It's no big deal. I'd say up until 2014 or so the site was pretty decent. The decline in quality in recent years is especially remarkable. Maybe they are trying to do something about this, resulting in people getting caught in the crossfire. I've moved to old-school forums for niche topics of interest. Even niche subreddits have really poor discourse these days. I'm tired of interacting with random user names as well. It's nice to recognize who you are talking to.
I suppose that's debatable but the point is the site is heavily moderated, something the owners can manage without volunteers for now because it doesn't appeal to the mainstream. I think your post is interesting and should have stayed, for what it's worth. I think it's a topic worth discussing but alas, many people just thought you were a bot as well. It really highlights the state of things.
I've started using old-school forums where I can find them for communities I care about (e.g. music production forums like vi-control...sometimes Hans Zimmer shows up!). It's a joy when you find one, kinda feels like the old days. The only annoying thing is the never-die threads. Some threads on these forums are over 15 years old. But honestly, I've really soured on the voting mechanic.