The Brothers Chaps will probably end up switching from Flash to Ruffle on their own site eventually, but until then, the Internet Archive has almost all the Strong Bad Emails archived here playable with Ruffle.
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_strongbad
Hi, I wrote the article! Thanks for your commentary, snidely passing judgement on me and my family. Much appreciated.
The article was intended to be a little provocative, more than a little tongue-in-cheek, but suffice it to say, I never would've continued playing videogames with him if he didn't show interest.
He was nothing less than absurdly enthusiastic about it, and it was a way for us to kill time together, but I never pushed games on him for a moment. Eliot, like many of his friends, loves the creativity and collaboration that comes with the medium of games, and the social aspects of playing them with his friends and family.
He's turning 13 this week, and has taken classes on making games himself in GameMaker, and is now modding the games that he loves. I'm happy he's found a hobby he loves, and I'm proud of him.
I had a similarly negative view about your article and "passed judgment on you" for making the choices you made for your kid. In particular I have a very negative view about e.g. 6 year olds using guns to kill enemies in video games. If the article was about what I would consider to be more constructive video games I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought (eh I probably would still judge but not so negatively!). Did you ever worry about a game like Contra having a negative effect on Eliot? Thanks for chiming in :)
Hi, I wrote the article! We played a bunch of PC stuff along the way, including a good chunk of the Lucasarts catalog. We skipped the text adventure genre entirely when he was little, but we're making up for that now that he loves reading for fun.
Hi! I wrote the article. First off, I find it disingenuous that you don't mention you work for Google. But, hey! I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that it was a simple oversight.
Addressing your comments:
1. Google News Archive is, without question, a dead project. No new material is being added, no new development is being made, and it's unsupported. They removed the News Archive and homepage and redirected it to News.
The method Google suggests for web search isn't limited to news articles, making it effectively useless for research. (It shows everything indexed in Google.)
You can search for some newspapers in Google Search, but it's impossible to find any date before January 1970, order by date, or filter by publication. You're stuck with post-1970 date filtering for all papers, ordered by relevance.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle.com%2Fnewspape...
2. I didn't say Groups was dead. I said it was effectively dead for research purposes, which is true. For example, you can't search or filter by date across groups anymore:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/linux
Not to mention, only a fraction of the total posts are indexed and available in Google Search. For example, changing your query to limit to 1995 only results in 70 posts. There were many more than that being posted monthly in 1995 in comp.os.linux.advocacy alone.
3. It's entirely plausible that Google's library partners are running low on books, though that doesn't explain why the project appears to be completely dormant. As I mentioned, the official blog stopped updating in 2012 and the Twitter account's been dormant since February 2013. It doesn't seem like any book's been added in the last year -- no new books from January 2014 to today:
https://www.google.com/search?q=a&biw=1146&bih=933&source=ln...
4. The 20% time thing is interesting. As a Google engineer, I imagine you'd have a better perspective on that than I would.
Former employees have explicitly said that 20% time no longer exists in the way it used to, and current employees, including here on Hacker News, say that it exists but only on top of your existing workload (effectively making it 120% time). I tend to trust them over a PR person, but really, that was a brief aside in my overall article.
The fact that a tiny fraction of the former functionality of a service is possible, albeit with an obscure and user-unfriendly method, does not detract from the overall point:
Google's current priorities don't appear to be in archiving the past.
For a specific example of real problems caused by killing Google News Archive search, it affected the work of Wikipedia editors. I and a lot of other editors had found it very useful as a high-quality and fast way to find good sources for articles we were working on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_English_newspap...). There's not really anything else like it, so you end up combing through tons of general Google results that don't qualify as reliable sources in order to find a few newspaper articles.
Sigh. Standard disclaimer: nothing I write here has got anything to do with my job, I'm not representing my employer in any way. I cannot talk about anything I know personally. I've also never worked on any of these projects. However, I can read, describe, and link to public material on the internet like anybody else.
In all honesty, I have no interest in the news archive projects; I read an HN link, followed some of the links in it, and said "this isn't what I was promised on the previous page". It sounds like you just made a second attempt at writing the article. I suggest you take the original one down and put this one up instead; it stands up to at least the completely superficial fact-checking of reading the links in it, which makes it a significant improvement - although it now appears to be a list of fairly straightforward bug reports. (I like bug reports. Bug reports are actionable.)
Engaging with the subject would require substantially more effort on my part to research and investigate what's going on here, because I don't know anything about it beyond what I read in links here. I'm not going to do that. However, I would encourage anybody with an interest in this subject to do the research and write up their findings.
Saying that these problems look like bug reports is dismissive of the depth of the problems. Stopping development of products and removing access to features isn't unintentional, and a lot of people have already complained about each of these problems over the years. Andy's article is making a larger point that what has happened to these products is part of a pattern, that Google is not being as responsible in stewarding its information as its mission statement said it would try to be.
> Saying that these problems look like bug reports is dismissive of the depth of the problems.
Personally I completely disagree with your priorities. I think a bug report is far more valuable, since people can act on bug reports and make things better, while I would not anticipate any meaningful action as a result of speculation about mission statements.
That makes me wonder why the Chromium bugtracker appears to effectively be a black hole, if the bug reports are so "valuable". I don't think I've ever gotten a single response to my CSS calculation bug report.
Hey, I made this. I built it for myself, have been using it privately for the last six months, and opened it up publicly for friends this morning. (Which is why it has no credits/about page/nav/etc.)
It's an automated aggregator streaming tweets from around 1,000 Twitter accounts, extracting and normalizing the links, and then ordering them with a dead-simple ranking algorithm favoring URLs that resemble new projects/sites over articles/blog posts.
That's pretty much it, no idea how it ended up here.
Solid question, and I don't blame you for being skeptical. I went through the normal submission process, and was reviewed by a moderator I don't know and have never met. I very explicitly didn't want any special treatment. I was told it met their guidelines.
My understanding, looking at the recent projects in the Technology and Web categories, is that they've loosened their enforcement of that guideline over the last year. Take a look at a search for "Social" in Technology, and you'll see a bunch of sites/apps that push that guideline:
https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?term=social&ca...
I think the fact that Upcoming is, first and foremost, an arts/technology event calendar weighed in its favor over, say, a social network for cats.
My understanding is that web sites shouldn't be crowd-funded because they have no end, given the need for ongoing hosting, as opposed to products that are a discreet "thing".
That's a good point. In this case, I think it's pretty clear that you are funding the resurrection-attempt. No guarantees it will work and that the site will then stick around, but you'll be funding the initial resuscitation.
