throwaway53678

No offense taken. Sadly, my dislike of SUVs stems more from how they drive and look than anything nobler.

I was actually hoping to illustrate with my own little anecdata about how even if you don’t like them, there seem to be various one-way-ratchet effects pushing their uptake, and this was my personal mechanism. Consumer choice doesn’t always reveal preference—I’d much rather there were a car that fit our situation (back issues + loading kids into the seats also played in here).

I have one hypothesis for part of the uptick: rear seat room for carseats. I consider myself the SUV hater of SUV haters, and I reject that you need one when you have kids (such is the idea in my part of the US), but...we bought one last year anyway, mainly to accommodate two rear-facing carseats with two adults in the front. There aren’t many cars that make this work, and you’d be surprised how big of an SUV you have to get to get any more rear seat space than a regular car. Not even most of the “mid-size” models.

Exophase is the best programmer I’ve ever met. Also, he’s the one that accomplished the port from DOS to Windows (IIRC, having nothing but the decompiled binaries to work from) back in the early 2000’s, and is probably the reason there’s still a community today. I could see MZX having died out otherwise.

Ahaha, I wondered if MegaZeux would ever make it to HN. Which one of us posted this? Been using MZX for 20 years. It’s what got me into programming. It’s a treasure.

There’s something about the programming model (“robots” so easily model people conversing and doing silly things) that allows you to just casually sketch out whatever’s in your head. That’s given rise to so many quirky, funny games for this system in a style that might never be made in any other context, except of course its predecessor ZZT. Dive into the archives and have fun.

The community, to my knowledge, still meets up yearly and also has impromptu hour-long game jams.