Game Developers Conference Classic Gaming Postmortem: Zork (2014)
"Dave Lebling, co-author of Zork and co-founder of Infocom, gives a postmortem talk on the classic text adventure. Lebling, who currently works as a senior principal software engineer at BAE Systems, created the "grue," co-authored Zork I-III and wrote seven other text adventures. He plans to give an hour-long talk explaining, among other things, the creation of both the mainframe and microcomputer versions of Zork, the trials and tribulations of coding a cutting-edge text parser, and what it was like to experiment with self-publishing at a time when most PC games were sold in hand-packed plastic bags.
Thanks. I used to run into Dave and other Infocom folks at Steve Meretzky’s Oscar parties but since Steve decamped to CA I may run into a few CA locals once in a great while if I happen to be out there at the right time for some reason.
I was reminded of Mel as well! If you haven't seen it, Usagi Electric on YouTube has gotten a drum-memory system from the 1950s nearly fully-functional again.
Fun fact: If a student in my state is handed a diploma, they've effectively been kicked out of the educational system and aren't eligible for remedial assistance. Context: Tried helping someone not dissimilar to the person in the article.
I'd consider the tools in the iPhone's Photos app to be amongst the most "core" features - yet there've been glitches in it for the past year where if you annotate a picture (say, by adding text), the position of everything you've added is screwed up when you hit 'Done'. I'm sure that's the tip of the iceberg.
a late tl;dr (more background for the above quote):
"...A couple of weeks before she died, Rebecca informed us that she was about to be a big girl of six years old, and Becca was a baby name. Once she turned six, she wanted everyone (not just me) to call her Rebecca, not Becca."
Man, there is no way I can read this. I got choked up just reading the titles of the blog posts, knowing what was coming.
I remember being younger and not being emotionally bothered by anything. Yet as I get older I am able to relate to so much more and everything hits so much harder because of it.
I made the mistake of reading it with my baby kid sleeping in the next room. I am not normally religious, but I'm probably going to say at least a few prayers before bed tonight.
I started reading from the beginning, and by the time I got to the post about her cancer recurring, and her parents having to tell her that she's going to die, I was sobbing.
Had to take a break. Not sure I can go back to it.
My daughter is in remission from leukemia and was in chemo from 3 to 5. If it was all-b then I wouldn’t worry much. Yes, you’ll have some dark thoughts along the way. I still do at times. But they’ll fade away as your son goes on to lead a pretty normal life. My daughter is 10 now with passions for MMA and horse riding which took a pause because a horse stomped on her toe this past summer pulling out a nail. Was an accident and we treated it like one.
Related: Ange Albertini, the creator of the .PDF/.ZIP/ELF reference diagrams (github/corkami) has started posting overview videos on his YT channel (@corkami-albertini) including creating .PDF+.PNG+.ZIP chimera files.
https://archive.org/details/GDC2014Lebling