You can find lots of information about this film at the link:
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Open thread 1/22/22 — 39 Comments
Few of the many people filmed are overweight. Try taking similar film at Disney–the home of the “mobility scooter.”
Too bad the couple in the film didn’t take in a baseball game (some of the men in the clip are wearing straw hats, so the film must have been made in late spring or summer). Here’s some colorized clips of baseball around 1910, right in the middle of the so-called dead-ball era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KktqC08uaWk&ab_channel=BoxingsGreatestFightersInFullColor
From Wikipedia–“This era was characterized by low-scoring games and a lack of home runs. The lowest league run average in history was in 1908, when teams averaged only 3.4 runs per game. Teams played in spacious ball parks that limited hitting for power, and, compared to modern baseballs, the ball used then was ‘dead’ both by design and from overuse.”
No purple hair, piercings, or slit jeans. No hoodies or Nikes. Good old days.
Was that a sightseeing bus?
A fascinating glimpse of a lost civilization. I was interested to see that the guards at Coney Island (at about three minutes in) were wearing pickelhaube helmets (the kind with the spike on top). Those were originally a Prussian military fashion. One that was imitated by many other military organizations (including units in Great Britain and the United States) after the Prussian victories of the 19th Century gave them a formidable reputation. The pickelhaube went suddenly out of fashion in the UK and the US when WW I came along of course.
Fewer people than today, but way more pollution. Horses in the street! Smoke!
What a nice place., it would be great to go there, everyone is dressed nice, streets are clean, no homeless encampment, where is this lovely city again?
Simply captivating, Neo. Thanks for sharing this one!
A more civilized time for sure.
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
The pickelhaube was replaced in 1916 by the stahlhelm (steel helmet) by the Germans not because of fashion, but because it was useless. A German doctor did wound statistics, ….. science! The British developed the Brodie helmet and the French had their own design for steel helmet; they came out in 1916 as well IIRC. None protected the soldier from rifle fire, but small shell and grenade fragments could be stopped. The British, French, and German cloth “covers” worn before 1916 were all useless.
Two years ago today (23rd), Wuhan went into lockdown.
@Huxley:
Last week made my best ever bang for buck audiophile purchase: a fake Persian rug from IKEA. Dampening reflections off the floorboards between speakers and sofa has worked wonders.
Zaphod:
I don’t believe I play in your audiophile league.
I’ve read that KEF speakers improve with some breaking-in. If so, the improvement is either yet to develop or my ears/memory aren’t up to the discrimination.
BTW are you much of a gamer? Every now and then I take a whack, but it quickly seems too much like work, and work that doesn’t build skills I care about. I’ve already got chess, math and programming on my plate.
I’ve been trying to learn Sid Meier’s “Alpha Centauri” for years, but never get the knack or even an idea of what the knack might be. The other day I found the only in-depth and organized guide to SMAC I’ve run across. It clarified just how much is going on beneath the hood and how much experimenting I would have to do to figure stuff out and come up with a decent strategy.
I’ve nothing against people who are up for that challenge, but it’s not me.
@Huxley:
Now I’ve got this rug, I’m not just an Audiophile, I’m an Ayatollahphile…. I foresee myself drinking very thick coffee and issuing fatwas seated cross-legged upon my shiny new living room acoustic treatment.
For sure some audio components require burn-in time. But unless they start out sounding terribly bad, we’re back to the never stepping in the same stream twice business and it’s hard to be sure.
Nope. The last game I played with any seriousness and through to completion was either Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards or the Space Quest series ca. 1988. And as you probably know these were hardly games of skill or strategy. I bought my first Windows laptop in years back in 2020 and was briefly intrigued by the idea that I might enjoy gaming. It seems, though, like too much of a time sink. And too much of a gear / space to put it in hog and money sink rabbit hole. If I got into it, couldn’t do it by halves — not temperamentally wired that way — so fervently hope can remain uninterested in gaming.
I do recall being absolutely transfixed by the first Apple II I saw running Little Brick Out and Oregon Trail ca. 1978. Then a year or two later there was a game where you explored caverns and had to fight Aztec warriors. There was magic then.
The only other time I had fun with gaming was editing the client code on a networked aerial combat game for Sun workstations a decade later so that I could shoot faster and not run out of ammo.
Damn… forgot. Duke Nukem 3D. That was the last game I worked through. Late 90s. But it was a one-off.
SMAC looks complicated! I signed up for Steam on that Windows laptop and purchased an impressive-looking space trading game because hopefully no need giant screens and powerful graphics cards and then promptly got bored with it. Next time I boot that machine I’ll have a look see what it is.
I can also vaguely remember a space trading game called Elite way back in the day. It opened with you needing to get your ship lined up for docking 2001 Kubrick style with a rotating space station.
Poor fellow doesn’t seem to understand the need for “Biden”‘s policy of encouraging Russia to put the screws on Ukraine, either for reasons of Mass Distraction and/or to obliterate/cover-up any evidence of corruption by his genius son and/or the need to potentially blame Trump for the Ukraine “situation”.
And so he paid the ultimate price for his utter naivete…
}}} A more civilized time for sure.
Mrrrr. Remember to take off the rose colored glasses, folks.
Sure there are some great things there.
But blacks could not vote (in the south, at least), women could not vote in most states, in some they still could not own property (I believe) and generally, your job as a woman was “baby factory and nanny”… a few escaped those limits but only a few.
Women also still wore corsets. And not by choice.
Open, blatant discrimination against Irish, Italians, and Jews — and most others — was still very commonplace.
Bugs everywhere. No penicillin. Sulfa drugs were unknown or in their infancy. Aspirin and opium were the only pain relievers.
Food costs far far higher than today. You had to work 10h a week — 1/4th of **today’s** “standard work week (not standard back then) of 40h just to put food on the table.
Few people — even in the city — went more than 50-100 miles from where they were born.
A mere cold could kill you — death from pneumonia was common… And smallpox was still quite prevalent, as was polio, measles, mumps, rubella.
Sorry — give me the option to trade my life with a very very rich person in… oh, 1970 — I might consider it. I would not take you up on it if you offered me the chance to take over the property/wealth of John D. Rockefeller if I had to live in 1910.
OK, Gaming — there are a lot of different styles of gaming in video games — you have the console type, which do vary some but tend towards “twitch” skills, and thus favor the young. These are similar to olden arcade games though their look and feel is quite different. Then there are shooters — as they sound, you’re running around trying to ring up “kills” and “kill streaks”. While intellect and smarts very much apply, they do still give a lot of oomph to twitch.
There is a variant class central to a game called League of Legends, which has a number of knockoffs. These are team games but still very much twitch games, and usually you win by assembling a team who know how to play specific subcharacter types.
In short, probably none of the above are for you.
Then there is the type of game exemplified by Diablo (mid 90s), Diablo II (early 00s), Guild Wars (later 00s) and now currently by Guild Wars II and Diablo III, with Diablo IV coming out soon. They are closely related to games like World of Warcraft, which you have no doubt heard of. They provide a certain visceral violence level, as the general goal is to find things, kill them, and loot their bodies. The objective is to Find Stuff. It says something when you realize that Diablo II servers are still running, even though the game came out in 2000 or so.
— It does require SOME initiative to learn things about how the mechanics work, but they can be played on a very basic level with no real effort — run up, whack whack whack — grab stuff — run up to the next — whack whack whack…
— Much more fun than it sounds, it’s like a complicated game of whack-a-mole, with “finding things” the reward for whacking the moles.
Then there are more intelligent games like Sid Meier games — Civ, et al., including Alpha Centauri, which is actually about 7-8 years old, I think, if not older. These involve a simulation of some kind — in the case of Civ or AC, you are a founder of a peoples in an unknown world. Your people are different from others, which gives you an advantage, but they are also different, and have advantages over you, as well. You are basically guiding your peoples up out of “the muck” and, in one way or another, creating technologies, philosophies, arts, etc., which will lead your people up over and above those other peoples, which surround you in the unexplored land around your space.
— The main trick with these is, first off, learning what parts of the tech tree and ability tree (i.e., “walls”, for example) add to your ability to beat the challenges you face — the other groups you will encounter, alien monsters, and other calamities which can strike you down. The challenges also are — will you be a peaceful group, a diplomatic group, or a militaristic group? Most of these certainly offer a major advantage to being militaristic. And how do you respond to aggression by the leaders of the other people? Some are naturally peaceful, but others are inherently aggressive. Do you wipe out the aggressive ones as fast as possible? Do you diplomatically subvert the other nations?
Then there are sandbox games, like Minecraft. This one is pretty much exploring and building… it is posdef a timesink, but can be pretty fun. I set out to build a “Trojan House”. There are horses in the Minecraft world, and I got screen caps of one… and then set out to “build a house” — an interior space — which looked like that horse. It’s close to the maximum size you could build such a structure, as, while there are no x,y strictures, there is a ‘z’ stricture — you are limited to building things not more than something like 216 blocks above the “zero” level, best thought of as “sea level” — it’s the height that major bodies of water remain at when left alone (there is a negative level, too, which things can be done at — you can, for example, tunnel under the oceans to get to other locations.
— There are, of course, much more complex “geek” things you can do there, if you want. There is a thing called “red dust”, which you can use to build electronics items, essentially — circuitry, and methods for building defacto and/or gates, etc. There are also pistons and such which you can trigger using circuitry. I think someone actually built a working babbage difference engine in the space.
There are other types of games, too, but I’ll touch on one more
If you are unaware of it, board games have been undergoing a revolution for the last 25-odd years. They have changed radically from what you may think of when you hear “board game” — aka, “Monopoly”, “Risk”, “Clue”, “Parchisi”, or even “Go” or “Othello”. Ditto card games — yes, there are all the classics — Hearts, Spades, etc. and “newcomers” like “Uno”… but there are also some silly-fun ones like “Exploding Kittens”.
The mechanisms that games use now — usually called “tabletop games”, to differentiate them from the old-style “board games” — are very very different. The path to winning in the differing types of games have considerably more of a spectrum of luck-vs-skill. Many have some level of luck involved in them, but most allow for much more strategy and skillful play, without the depth of learning required for, say, Chess or Go. And the variance of underlying mechanics offers far more fun playing with them. Moreover, some of the games — particularly a class called “social deception games” — allow a tremendous amount of fun with more people than a card game does — usually, with these, you are either playing for yourself or on a team, and your goal is, somehow, to deceive others as to which team you are on, what your goal is, or other. These games can be quite large — some play best with 6-10 people, while others can number up to 15, 20, or even up to 35 players.
I mention these because —
a — they may appeal more, being inherently more social than video games
b — many have online programs to allow/encourage play. This is relevant if Covid does concern you (either personally or by local laws), both because you can play/practice against an AI if a person is unavailable, or you can play online against other online players, which allows you to play the games with others (often with communications via headset or other, so you can talk and joke and laugh while you play. Not as good as in-person, but does offer a measure of the interactions)
If any of the above sounds of interest, ask me, and I’ll provide more detail in response.
BTW — Diablo was strongly inspired by an 80s classic called “Rogue”, where you went around on a text-driven map as the @ sign, and “killing” other letter characters which represented different types of monsters in a D&D type thing.
Diablo is just a “3D isometric view” (Lord British games, if you recall those on the apple — Sim City is another) version of Rogue, with a heck of a lot more items to find and monsters to kill… More modern versions — Guild Wars, etc. — get to more of the first person view of things, but are otherwise similar.
@OBloody Hell:
Thanks for that overview! You make gaming sound a *lot* more inviting than a certain Vox Day does.
I wasted many a happy hour playing Rogue on Unix terminals back in the 80s.
$ sudo apt install bsdgames-nonfree
Well, looks like Rogue is back. And I’ve just accumulated a Pink Potion and a scroll entitled ‘Blorp Mep’. Onwards and upwards!
@Huxley:
I dug out my untrusty Lenovo and booted it up and had a look in Steam. I’ve got some kind of space trading / empires game called Stellaris. Looks complicated.
I think people are responding to the relative calm and elegance in the film. Of course, there were a lot of hardships as well and much discrimination.
People also often remark that there were no fat people then, or at least few compared to now. Well, unfortunately, actual starvation and/or not having access to much food was far more common back then and that was part of it. People weren’t dieting; many were hungry Food choices were more narrow, as well.
The corsets did make women look thinner, and gave them more elegant posture.
Also, diseases such as TB were not uncommon and basically incurable. TB makes people thin, and they often can walk around functioning for a long time before they finally weaken and are bedridden, and later succumb.
Zaphod, OBloody Hell:
During the late 80s/early 90s I programmed at Broderbund and even wrote a Carmen San Diego title. So I’m familiar with the early days of computer games. I felt a bit guilty for not being more into games, but just keeping up with the tech was enough of an adventure game for me.
I liked the idea of computer games more than the reality. Myst, which was produced by Broderbund, looked breathtaking and had a fascinating feel, but actual game play was laboriously slow (Myst pressed hard the limits of the first CD-ROM drives and IMO didn’t entirely succeed) and its puzzles to solve seemed silly to me.
“Alpha Centauri” appealed to me because a friend recommended Civ 2 (SMAC’s predecessor) highly and I was hooked by SMAC’s soundscape and Frank Herbert-like commentary. But it’s like being behind the controls of a jumbo jet with all sorts of knobs, dials, buttons, menus and displays, but little idea of what to do or what matters. So I just punch at the controls semi-randomly and hope things will work out, then get bored and log out.
I got my copy at GOG (“Good Old Games”) for $6. It came out in 1999 and still has one of the highest ratings in gaming history.
My other problem with simulation/strategy games is that it’s usually not hard to see the political assumptions underlying the game. For instance, in SMAC people are divided into “factions,” one of which is fundamentalist Christian:
___________________________________
THE LORD’S BELIEVERS
The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat
of human progress. Though the song of yesterday
fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still
watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as
it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it
was never the streets that were evil.
–Sister Miriam Godwinson, “The Blessed Struggle”
Christian States of America, Unity Psych Chaplain
+25% Bonus when attacking enemies, from strength of convictions
+1 Probe (devout believers difficult to brainwash)
-2 Research (suspicious of secular science)
-1 Planet (believes Planet is the promised land)
Accumulates no research points until MY 2110.
May not use Knowledge value in Social Engineering
___________________________________
Cleary there is a certain degree of negative stereotyping here. Though from what I’ve read of real SMAC play, all factions are equally playable — just pluses and minuses for different features.
Likewise in longer play, environmental issues can accumulate and bite a player.
When I was much younger, I took computer simulations seriously, but later I realized a simulation was only as good as the assumptions built in to it and those assumptions often reflected the creator’s political biases, not tried and true facts.
The non-falsifiable part of some of the UFO claims may pose a hurdle to a scientific inquiry. Maybe. 😉
Just don’t go full flat earth on it.
Sundance says he won’t forgive leftist influencers who are moving to the “right” side.
Jared Taylor being interviewed in Japanese (with subtitles). This slightly unusual circumstance might help some to short-circuit their programmed conditioning. Short and worth a watch.
Taylor grew up in Japan as the son of missionaries and speaks fluent Japanese.
huxley:
My husband and son were very fond of Myst. It was indeed visually attractive. That’s as far as I ever went with computer games – looking at them looking at Myst.
@Huxley:
“My other problem with simulation/strategy games is that it’s usually not hard to see the political assumptions underlying the game. For instance, in SMAC people are divided into “factions,” one of which is fundamentalist Christian:”
I’ve read that that in some of the more open-ended games, there’s a tendency to subvert the official woke story lines… i.e. if the game designers want to hammer home some heavy-handed message about cartoonish Christian Fundamentalism, well then let’s band together and make our holy rolling clan masters of the universe against the odds.
Mockery and Irony *are* the defining mind tools of late stage Civilizations, after all.
That’s a point, Neo. I never played Myst either… but when it came out there was nothing like it for visuals.
It was released in the 3 or 4 years when all the big brains thought the next big thing was going to be Multimedia. Then this other thing called the Internet went nova in 1995.
The popularity of viral rug cleaning videos is a harbinger of impending Civil War. Debate.
(For those who haven’t binge watched rug-cleaning videos on YouTube… there’s something deeply satisfying about watching all that dirt being driven out.)
Zaphod, neo:
I was gratified to learn that Myst was prototyped in Apple’s remarkable programming language/development environment, HyperCard.
HyperCard was eventually sideswiped by the Web and Apple politics, but in its day HyperCard was a jaw-dropping breakthrough which allowed the non-technical to build Mac GUI applications with inuitive ease.
The CD-ROM version of the Whole Earth Catalog was also written — and shipped — in HyperCard. I was fortunate to be one of the programmers and for some months I went to work at the Whole Earth office in Sausalito. A real treat for me.
In any event HyperCard was terrific. I’ve still seen nothing to compare with it for elegance, power and ease. HTML can do as much and more, though ugly and not so easy. So the tech cookie crumbles.
It was released in the 3 or 4 years when all the big brains thought the next big thing was going to be Multimedia. Then this other thing called the Internet went nova in 1995.
Zaphod:
Indeed.
Some of the bestest and brightest of the Macintosh team started up General Magic, a company which created a new multimedia, networked platform — essentially a modern cellphone without the Internet. They got it right except for that one little thing.
A great doco on General Magic came out a few years ago. It’s one of the best films on the 90s computer revolution.
Never had a Mac before OS X and almost never used one. But one thing I distinctly remember from 2003-ish when I bought my first Al PowerBook G4 was that The Old Guard were *very* pissed off that HyperCard was being sidelined.
I think that 2003 machine came with the ability to dual boot into OS 9. I kind of regret never exploring it, but was just too happy to finally have a laptop running BSD Unix so could munge datasets using awk.
Just had a look at the General Magic Trailer. Silicon Valley is a very different beast today!
I know I romanticize it — a fair amount of the time it was hell — but there was the sense we shared then of being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing.
I was there in the Frontier Days.
“I was there in the Frontier Days.”
Mucho envy emanating from the slightly tarnished Pearl of the Orient.
@ Neo @ huxley: > “My husband and son were very fond of Myst. It was indeed visually attractive. That’s as far as I ever went with computer games – looking at them looking at Myst.”
Ditto. I generally stayed out of the room where the kids were playing because the graphics (early 80s) were cartoonish at best, and the music was acoustically grating and mind-numbingly repetitious (most games are not any better now, when I happen to visit while the grandkids are playing, but I understand they have soundtracks of some of them on CD).
However, when they got Myst, I could sit and watch them solve the puzzles for lengthy periods because the visuals and music were actually quite soothing.
Riven was pretty good too.
That’s the extent of my gaming expertise.
Mucho envy emanating from the slightly tarnished Pearl of the Orient.
Zaphod:
I understand. I was looking ahead and I did have talent and the appetite to work, but the rest was being in the right place and meeting the right people.
There was a plenty of hubris in Silicon Valley, but I never mistook myself for a god, though gods there were.
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Few of the many people filmed are overweight. Try taking similar film at Disney–the home of the “mobility scooter.”
Too bad the couple in the film didn’t take in a baseball game (some of the men in the clip are wearing straw hats, so the film must have been made in late spring or summer). Here’s some colorized clips of baseball around 1910, right in the middle of the so-called dead-ball era:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KktqC08uaWk&ab_channel=BoxingsGreatestFightersInFullColor
From Wikipedia–“This era was characterized by low-scoring games and a lack of home runs. The lowest league run average in history was in 1908, when teams averaged only 3.4 runs per game. Teams played in spacious ball parks that limited hitting for power, and, compared to modern baseballs, the ball used then was ‘dead’ both by design and from overuse.”
Yeah, it’s time for the return of the American Pastime: here’s the 2022 Spring Training Countdown:
https://www.springtrainingcountdown.com/#sthash.IyXu23RG.wQDv24Ku.dpbs
No purple hair, piercings, or slit jeans. No hoodies or Nikes. Good old days.
Was that a sightseeing bus?
A fascinating glimpse of a lost civilization. I was interested to see that the guards at Coney Island (at about three minutes in) were wearing pickelhaube helmets (the kind with the spike on top). Those were originally a Prussian military fashion. One that was imitated by many other military organizations (including units in Great Britain and the United States) after the Prussian victories of the 19th Century gave them a formidable reputation. The pickelhaube went suddenly out of fashion in the UK and the US when WW I came along of course.
Fewer people than today, but way more pollution. Horses in the street! Smoke!
What a nice place., it would be great to go there, everyone is dressed nice, streets are clean, no homeless encampment, where is this lovely city again?
Simply captivating, Neo. Thanks for sharing this one!
A more civilized time for sure.
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
The pickelhaube was replaced in 1916 by the stahlhelm (steel helmet) by the Germans not because of fashion, but because it was useless. A German doctor did wound statistics, ….. science! The British developed the Brodie helmet and the French had their own design for steel helmet; they came out in 1916 as well IIRC. None protected the soldier from rifle fire, but small shell and grenade fragments could be stopped. The British, French, and German cloth “covers” worn before 1916 were all useless.
There’s still hope:
The “Other” German Army – Chile’s Prussian Tradition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adzg_iMg9Sc
Two years ago today (23rd), Wuhan went into lockdown.
@Huxley:
Last week made my best ever bang for buck audiophile purchase: a fake Persian rug from IKEA. Dampening reflections off the floorboards between speakers and sofa has worked wonders.
Zaphod:
I don’t believe I play in your audiophile league.
I’ve read that KEF speakers improve with some breaking-in. If so, the improvement is either yet to develop or my ears/memory aren’t up to the discrimination.
BTW are you much of a gamer? Every now and then I take a whack, but it quickly seems too much like work, and work that doesn’t build skills I care about. I’ve already got chess, math and programming on my plate.
I’ve been trying to learn Sid Meier’s “Alpha Centauri” for years, but never get the knack or even an idea of what the knack might be. The other day I found the only in-depth and organized guide to SMAC I’ve run across. It clarified just how much is going on beneath the hood and how much experimenting I would have to do to figure stuff out and come up with a decent strategy.
https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=1846.0
I’ve nothing against people who are up for that challenge, but it’s not me.
@Huxley:
Now I’ve got this rug, I’m not just an Audiophile, I’m an Ayatollahphile…. I foresee myself drinking very thick coffee and issuing fatwas seated cross-legged upon my shiny new living room acoustic treatment.
For sure some audio components require burn-in time. But unless they start out sounding terribly bad, we’re back to the never stepping in the same stream twice business and it’s hard to be sure.
Nope. The last game I played with any seriousness and through to completion was either Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards or the Space Quest series ca. 1988. And as you probably know these were hardly games of skill or strategy. I bought my first Windows laptop in years back in 2020 and was briefly intrigued by the idea that I might enjoy gaming. It seems, though, like too much of a time sink. And too much of a gear / space to put it in hog and money sink rabbit hole. If I got into it, couldn’t do it by halves — not temperamentally wired that way — so fervently hope can remain uninterested in gaming.
I do recall being absolutely transfixed by the first Apple II I saw running Little Brick Out and Oregon Trail ca. 1978. Then a year or two later there was a game where you explored caverns and had to fight Aztec warriors. There was magic then.
The only other time I had fun with gaming was editing the client code on a networked aerial combat game for Sun workstations a decade later so that I could shoot faster and not run out of ammo.
Damn… forgot. Duke Nukem 3D. That was the last game I worked through. Late 90s. But it was a one-off.
SMAC looks complicated! I signed up for Steam on that Windows laptop and purchased an impressive-looking space trading game because hopefully no need giant screens and powerful graphics cards and then promptly got bored with it. Next time I boot that machine I’ll have a look see what it is.
I can also vaguely remember a space trading game called Elite way back in the day. It opened with you needing to get your ship lined up for docking 2001 Kubrick style with a rotating space station.
Do you mainly play humans or chess programs?
And it’s “anchors oy-vey” in Germany…
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/germany-roiled-political-earthquake-navy-chief-resigns-after-saying-putin-deserves-respect
Poor fellow doesn’t seem to understand the need for “Biden”‘s policy of encouraging Russia to put the screws on Ukraine, either for reasons of Mass Distraction and/or to obliterate/cover-up any evidence of corruption by his genius son and/or the need to potentially blame Trump for the Ukraine “situation”.
And so he paid the ultimate price for his utter naivete…
}}} A more civilized time for sure.
Mrrrr. Remember to take off the rose colored glasses, folks.
Sure there are some great things there.
But blacks could not vote (in the south, at least), women could not vote in most states, in some they still could not own property (I believe) and generally, your job as a woman was “baby factory and nanny”… a few escaped those limits but only a few.
Women also still wore corsets. And not by choice.
Open, blatant discrimination against Irish, Italians, and Jews — and most others — was still very commonplace.
Bugs everywhere. No penicillin. Sulfa drugs were unknown or in their infancy. Aspirin and opium were the only pain relievers.
Food costs far far higher than today. You had to work 10h a week — 1/4th of **today’s** “standard work week (not standard back then) of 40h just to put food on the table.
Few people — even in the city — went more than 50-100 miles from where they were born.
A mere cold could kill you — death from pneumonia was common… And smallpox was still quite prevalent, as was polio, measles, mumps, rubella.
Sorry — give me the option to trade my life with a very very rich person in… oh, 1970 — I might consider it. I would not take you up on it if you offered me the chance to take over the property/wealth of John D. Rockefeller if I had to live in 1910.
OK, Gaming — there are a lot of different styles of gaming in video games — you have the console type, which do vary some but tend towards “twitch” skills, and thus favor the young. These are similar to olden arcade games though their look and feel is quite different. Then there are shooters — as they sound, you’re running around trying to ring up “kills” and “kill streaks”. While intellect and smarts very much apply, they do still give a lot of oomph to twitch.
There is a variant class central to a game called League of Legends, which has a number of knockoffs. These are team games but still very much twitch games, and usually you win by assembling a team who know how to play specific subcharacter types.
In short, probably none of the above are for you.
Then there is the type of game exemplified by Diablo (mid 90s), Diablo II (early 00s), Guild Wars (later 00s) and now currently by Guild Wars II and Diablo III, with Diablo IV coming out soon. They are closely related to games like World of Warcraft, which you have no doubt heard of. They provide a certain visceral violence level, as the general goal is to find things, kill them, and loot their bodies. The objective is to Find Stuff. It says something when you realize that Diablo II servers are still running, even though the game came out in 2000 or so.
— It does require SOME initiative to learn things about how the mechanics work, but they can be played on a very basic level with no real effort — run up, whack whack whack — grab stuff — run up to the next — whack whack whack…
— Much more fun than it sounds, it’s like a complicated game of whack-a-mole, with “finding things” the reward for whacking the moles.
Then there are more intelligent games like Sid Meier games — Civ, et al., including Alpha Centauri, which is actually about 7-8 years old, I think, if not older. These involve a simulation of some kind — in the case of Civ or AC, you are a founder of a peoples in an unknown world. Your people are different from others, which gives you an advantage, but they are also different, and have advantages over you, as well. You are basically guiding your peoples up out of “the muck” and, in one way or another, creating technologies, philosophies, arts, etc., which will lead your people up over and above those other peoples, which surround you in the unexplored land around your space.
— The main trick with these is, first off, learning what parts of the tech tree and ability tree (i.e., “walls”, for example) add to your ability to beat the challenges you face — the other groups you will encounter, alien monsters, and other calamities which can strike you down. The challenges also are — will you be a peaceful group, a diplomatic group, or a militaristic group? Most of these certainly offer a major advantage to being militaristic. And how do you respond to aggression by the leaders of the other people? Some are naturally peaceful, but others are inherently aggressive. Do you wipe out the aggressive ones as fast as possible? Do you diplomatically subvert the other nations?
Then there are sandbox games, like Minecraft. This one is pretty much exploring and building… it is posdef a timesink, but can be pretty fun. I set out to build a “Trojan House”. There are horses in the Minecraft world, and I got screen caps of one… and then set out to “build a house” — an interior space — which looked like that horse. It’s close to the maximum size you could build such a structure, as, while there are no x,y strictures, there is a ‘z’ stricture — you are limited to building things not more than something like 216 blocks above the “zero” level, best thought of as “sea level” — it’s the height that major bodies of water remain at when left alone (there is a negative level, too, which things can be done at — you can, for example, tunnel under the oceans to get to other locations.
— There are, of course, much more complex “geek” things you can do there, if you want. There is a thing called “red dust”, which you can use to build electronics items, essentially — circuitry, and methods for building defacto and/or gates, etc. There are also pistons and such which you can trigger using circuitry. I think someone actually built a working babbage difference engine in the space.
There are other types of games, too, but I’ll touch on one more
If you are unaware of it, board games have been undergoing a revolution for the last 25-odd years. They have changed radically from what you may think of when you hear “board game” — aka, “Monopoly”, “Risk”, “Clue”, “Parchisi”, or even “Go” or “Othello”. Ditto card games — yes, there are all the classics — Hearts, Spades, etc. and “newcomers” like “Uno”… but there are also some silly-fun ones like “Exploding Kittens”.
The mechanisms that games use now — usually called “tabletop games”, to differentiate them from the old-style “board games” — are very very different. The path to winning in the differing types of games have considerably more of a spectrum of luck-vs-skill. Many have some level of luck involved in them, but most allow for much more strategy and skillful play, without the depth of learning required for, say, Chess or Go. And the variance of underlying mechanics offers far more fun playing with them. Moreover, some of the games — particularly a class called “social deception games” — allow a tremendous amount of fun with more people than a card game does — usually, with these, you are either playing for yourself or on a team, and your goal is, somehow, to deceive others as to which team you are on, what your goal is, or other. These games can be quite large — some play best with 6-10 people, while others can number up to 15, 20, or even up to 35 players.
I mention these because —
a — they may appeal more, being inherently more social than video games
b — many have online programs to allow/encourage play. This is relevant if Covid does concern you (either personally or by local laws), both because you can play/practice against an AI if a person is unavailable, or you can play online against other online players, which allows you to play the games with others (often with communications via headset or other, so you can talk and joke and laugh while you play. Not as good as in-person, but does offer a measure of the interactions)
If any of the above sounds of interest, ask me, and I’ll provide more detail in response.
BTW — Diablo was strongly inspired by an 80s classic called “Rogue”, where you went around on a text-driven map as the @ sign, and “killing” other letter characters which represented different types of monsters in a D&D type thing.
Diablo is just a “3D isometric view” (Lord British games, if you recall those on the apple — Sim City is another) version of Rogue, with a heck of a lot more items to find and monsters to kill… More modern versions — Guild Wars, etc. — get to more of the first person view of things, but are otherwise similar.
@OBloody Hell:
Thanks for that overview! You make gaming sound a *lot* more inviting than a certain Vox Day does.
I wasted many a happy hour playing Rogue on Unix terminals back in the 80s.
$ sudo apt install bsdgames-nonfree
Well, looks like Rogue is back. And I’ve just accumulated a Pink Potion and a scroll entitled ‘Blorp Mep’. Onwards and upwards!
@Huxley:
I dug out my untrusty Lenovo and booted it up and had a look in Steam. I’ve got some kind of space trading / empires game called Stellaris. Looks complicated.
RE “serious” scientists studying UFOs–
See https://www.space.com/2022-turning-point-study-ufos-uap
OBloody:
I think people are responding to the relative calm and elegance in the film. Of course, there were a lot of hardships as well and much discrimination.
People also often remark that there were no fat people then, or at least few compared to now. Well, unfortunately, actual starvation and/or not having access to much food was far more common back then and that was part of it. People weren’t dieting; many were hungry Food choices were more narrow, as well.
The corsets did make women look thinner, and gave them more elegant posture.
Also, diseases such as TB were not uncommon and basically incurable. TB makes people thin, and they often can walk around functioning for a long time before they finally weaken and are bedridden, and later succumb.
Zaphod, OBloody Hell:
During the late 80s/early 90s I programmed at Broderbund and even wrote a Carmen San Diego title. So I’m familiar with the early days of computer games. I felt a bit guilty for not being more into games, but just keeping up with the tech was enough of an adventure game for me.
I liked the idea of computer games more than the reality. Myst, which was produced by Broderbund, looked breathtaking and had a fascinating feel, but actual game play was laboriously slow (Myst pressed hard the limits of the first CD-ROM drives and IMO didn’t entirely succeed) and its puzzles to solve seemed silly to me.
“Alpha Centauri” appealed to me because a friend recommended Civ 2 (SMAC’s predecessor) highly and I was hooked by SMAC’s soundscape and Frank Herbert-like commentary. But it’s like being behind the controls of a jumbo jet with all sorts of knobs, dials, buttons, menus and displays, but little idea of what to do or what matters. So I just punch at the controls semi-randomly and hope things will work out, then get bored and log out.
I got my copy at GOG (“Good Old Games”) for $6. It came out in 1999 and still has one of the highest ratings in gaming history.
https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri
My other problem with simulation/strategy games is that it’s usually not hard to see the political assumptions underlying the game. For instance, in SMAC people are divided into “factions,” one of which is fundamentalist Christian:
___________________________________
THE LORD’S BELIEVERS
The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat
of human progress. Though the song of yesterday
fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still
watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as
it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it
was never the streets that were evil.
–Sister Miriam Godwinson, “The Blessed Struggle”
Christian States of America, Unity Psych Chaplain
+25% Bonus when attacking enemies, from strength of convictions
+1 Probe (devout believers difficult to brainwash)
-2 Research (suspicious of secular science)
-1 Planet (believes Planet is the promised land)
Accumulates no research points until MY 2110.
May not use Knowledge value in Social Engineering
___________________________________
Cleary there is a certain degree of negative stereotyping here. Though from what I’ve read of real SMAC play, all factions are equally playable — just pluses and minuses for different features.
Likewise in longer play, environmental issues can accumulate and bite a player.
When I was much younger, I took computer simulations seriously, but later I realized a simulation was only as good as the assumptions built in to it and those assumptions often reflected the creator’s political biases, not tried and true facts.
The non-falsifiable part of some of the UFO claims may pose a hurdle to a scientific inquiry. Maybe. 😉
Just don’t go full flat earth on it.
Sundance says he won’t forgive leftist influencers who are moving to the “right” side.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/01/22/professional-leftists-begin-trying-to-retreat-from-the-consequences-of-their-covid-nonsense/#more-225749
Jared Taylor being interviewed in Japanese (with subtitles). This slightly unusual circumstance might help some to short-circuit their programmed conditioning. Short and worth a watch.
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/058/490/808/original/f2f5e75f81e5bd62.mp4
Taylor grew up in Japan as the son of missionaries and speaks fluent Japanese.
huxley:
My husband and son were very fond of Myst. It was indeed visually attractive. That’s as far as I ever went with computer games – looking at them looking at Myst.
@Huxley:
“My other problem with simulation/strategy games is that it’s usually not hard to see the political assumptions underlying the game. For instance, in SMAC people are divided into “factions,” one of which is fundamentalist Christian:”
I’ve read that that in some of the more open-ended games, there’s a tendency to subvert the official woke story lines… i.e. if the game designers want to hammer home some heavy-handed message about cartoonish Christian Fundamentalism, well then let’s band together and make our holy rolling clan masters of the universe against the odds.
Mockery and Irony *are* the defining mind tools of late stage Civilizations, after all.
That’s a point, Neo. I never played Myst either… but when it came out there was nothing like it for visuals.
It was released in the 3 or 4 years when all the big brains thought the next big thing was going to be Multimedia. Then this other thing called the Internet went nova in 1995.
The popularity of viral rug cleaning videos is a harbinger of impending Civil War. Debate.
(For those who haven’t binge watched rug-cleaning videos on YouTube… there’s something deeply satisfying about watching all that dirt being driven out.)
Zaphod, neo:
I was gratified to learn that Myst was prototyped in Apple’s remarkable programming language/development environment, HyperCard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
HyperCard was eventually sideswiped by the Web and Apple politics, but in its day HyperCard was a jaw-dropping breakthrough which allowed the non-technical to build Mac GUI applications with inuitive ease.
The CD-ROM version of the Whole Earth Catalog was also written — and shipped — in HyperCard. I was fortunate to be one of the programmers and for some months I went to work at the Whole Earth office in Sausalito. A real treat for me.
In any event HyperCard was terrific. I’ve still seen nothing to compare with it for elegance, power and ease. HTML can do as much and more, though ugly and not so easy. So the tech cookie crumbles.
It was released in the 3 or 4 years when all the big brains thought the next big thing was going to be Multimedia. Then this other thing called the Internet went nova in 1995.
Zaphod:
Indeed.
Some of the bestest and brightest of the Macintosh team started up General Magic, a company which created a new multimedia, networked platform — essentially a modern cellphone without the Internet. They got it right except for that one little thing.
A great doco on General Magic came out a few years ago. It’s one of the best films on the 90s computer revolution.
https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com
@Huxley:
Never had a Mac before OS X and almost never used one. But one thing I distinctly remember from 2003-ish when I bought my first Al PowerBook G4 was that The Old Guard were *very* pissed off that HyperCard was being sidelined.
I think that 2003 machine came with the ability to dual boot into OS 9. I kind of regret never exploring it, but was just too happy to finally have a laptop running BSD Unix so could munge datasets using awk.
Just had a look at the General Magic Trailer. Silicon Valley is a very different beast today!
The Scouring of the Shire:
Cats DESTROYED This Area Rug! Watch as we wash away GALLONS of URINE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE96RuvH41U
Compelling viewing! 🙂
Silicon Valley is a very different beast today!
Zaphod:
____________________________
That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory
Called Camelot.
–Richard Harris “Camelot” on The Ed Sullivan Show”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os-jJuwgNkA
____________________________
I know I romanticize it — a fair amount of the time it was hell — but there was the sense we shared then of being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing.
I was there in the Frontier Days.
“I was there in the Frontier Days.”
Mucho envy emanating from the slightly tarnished Pearl of the Orient.
@ Neo @ huxley: > “My husband and son were very fond of Myst. It was indeed visually attractive. That’s as far as I ever went with computer games – looking at them looking at Myst.”
Ditto. I generally stayed out of the room where the kids were playing because the graphics (early 80s) were cartoonish at best, and the music was acoustically grating and mind-numbingly repetitious (most games are not any better now, when I happen to visit while the grandkids are playing, but I understand they have soundtracks of some of them on CD).
However, when they got Myst, I could sit and watch them solve the puzzles for lengthy periods because the visuals and music were actually quite soothing.
Riven was pretty good too.
That’s the extent of my gaming expertise.
Mucho envy emanating from the slightly tarnished Pearl of the Orient.
Zaphod:
I understand. I was looking ahead and I did have talent and the appetite to work, but the rest was being in the right place and meeting the right people.
There was a plenty of hubris in Silicon Valley, but I never mistook myself for a god, though gods there were.