www.legendmud.org/raph is gone

 Posted by (Visited 9100 times)  Misc
Dec 132005
 

Or rather, it now redirects to here. A bit of an end of an era.

Right now, most of the buried internal links will return a 404, but if you put in .shtml instead of .html for the URL, you’ll end up on the version on this site. Over time, we’ll be fixing those too, and then all the jillions of citations for the Laws and whatnot will just redirect quietly to here.

It’s actually a decent moment to stop and reflect on this website and its history.

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Why Trauma Center rocks

 Posted by (Visited 11230 times)  Game talk
Dec 132005
 

“Daddy, can you hellllp me?” This would be my 8-year old daughter asking.

“With what?”

“With this game.

“C’mon, Elena, you know you should beat games yourself.”

“Yeah, but after I used the scalpel to make an incision, I couldn’t locate the tumors on the patient’s esophagus.”

“Fine, I’ll help you. What do I do again?”

“It’s just like the operation on the pancreas!”

“Uh… it’s been a few weeks since I did that. What do I do?”

“His vital signs are dropping! You need to use the ultrasound, daddy!”

“Oh right… like this?”

“Now, look! You killed him.”

“Sorry.”

“Now I’m going to have to do the operation over.”

“Sorry.”

“I bet you haven’t walked your Nintendog either.”

At least I didn’t do what Cory Doctorow did: he couldn’t figure it out, so he just slashed the poor patient’s chest to ribbons with the scalpel. I knew that Atkins diet could have side effects…

Korean gov’t LFG

 Posted by (Visited 10572 times)  Game talk
Dec 132005
 

Game&Game is apparently a production of KIPA, which falls under the Korean Ministry of Information and Communication. It aggregates a bunch of Korean online games for the US, Japanese, and German markets.

When governments attack! What does it mean for the game industry when entire countries start evangelizing their products in this way?

via Kim, again

The future of content

 Posted by (Visited 26458 times)  Game talk, Music
Dec 122005
 

Bear with me, this is about more than just music; but you’ll have to suffer through my extended analogy first.

Once upon a time, musicians had exclusively local followings. They were relatively mobile, so they toured the countryside in their usual routes, spreading news from place to place and singing songs that were aimed at a very particular audience. They’d pick up tunes and lyrics and adapt them via the folk process, changing them for their local tastes, playing a decades-long game of telephone that changed the words around until sometimes they made no sense. Was the guy’s name Tom Dooley or Tom Dula? Did it matter?

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