I imagine a programmer unaware of anything that’s going on writing the code for the latest, greatest /r/place feature, getting so wrapped up on the project that they don’t realize it’s not April anymore, smiling proudly and announcing loudly when they deliver their pride and joy. Only to see it be transformed into a big penis that shoots out the letters API.
I was thinking about this a few days ago! The game has maybe a dozen interactable characters, along with some characters that ignore your input and babble on about various nonsense in the voice of Terry Jones. I’m not sure if you’d have to pay Terry Jones’s estate to develop that game with his voice. Probably so.
The game’s setting is really bizarre, the Titanic in space, which leads to the visuals being gaudy and eerily out of place. The graphic design was really wonderful. It’d be nice to see the game’s setting updated to a modern standard. Art deco seems to have fallen out of fashion after Bioshock pumped it up to infinity. I love art deco and would love to see something that embraces it fully like Starship Titanic did.
The puzzles, however, are really terrible. The worst kind of esoteric stuff. But, I think, the point of the game was to talk to the Bellbot and the Doorbot and ask them enough questions to overcome the ultra-esoteric puzzles. I’d love to see such an idea attempted again, perhaps more gracefully. There was a puzzle in Starship Titanic where you had to ask Bellbot to “give me the light” or something like that and if you used any other phrase like “hand me the light” it wouldn’t work. ChatGPT definitely could smooth stuff like that over, where it can ascertain the meaning of text to bridge such gaps in speech.
Could Starship Titanic be rebuilt? Probably not since Douglas Adams and Terry Jones are dead and so whatever passion there might be for this oddball game is likely dead. (Though if Douglas Adams were alive he’d be absolutely enthralled to remake this game.) But I do think Starship Titanic is a game that people who want to make the next big thing in video games ought to play to see what people were reaching toward back in the day but failed. Those bots may not feel real, but they do have a lot of personality.
It reminds me of that Onion piece on a Kindle that loudly shouts what book you’re reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDBzQkWeQ5g
Kinda sucks that whenever major news outlets cover a social media company, they only interview the people who own the company and nobody else involved. Like here, maybe it would’ve made sense to interview a mod or someone. The way major news outlets frame it, social media outlets are theme parks and the only people who work to make it function are the owners. Most users see them more as pseduo-government leaders, and when you think about it like that it makes a lot of sense to interview the people on the ground like they do in non-tech related news pieces.
Here is the proposed text: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/04/21/2023-08239/changes-under-consideration-to-discretionary-institution-practices-petition-word-count-limits-and
The news piece linked is too vague in its explanation on what precisely is in this text that will help patent trolls. I also can’t figure out what it is from my skimming. Perhaps someone with a better legal reading can elucidate.
I supported the blackout not just because of the sudden changes to third party API usage (I only use Old Reddit so it does impact me less) but because this was clearly a change that severely negatively impacted the moderators on Reddit. The moderators on Reddit are unpaid and the work they do is mostly deleting spam. It’s not fun stuff and we are fortunate to have so many volunteers (even if some abuse whatever little power they have). They were the ones who organized this blackout. Reading some of their complaints, I empathize greatly. So even if the API changes don’t get reverted maybe the blackout gave Reddit’s corporate heads a moment’s pause to actually do something to help the people who do all of the work for them.
So even if things don’t get reverted, perhaps there was something positive to this whole event.
Also, being off Reddit for days has been really nice. I feel better, not being there. I might stay longer here.
“Homestuck Made This World” is a critical analysis of the webcomic Homestuck that morphs into a discussion about how the culture of the Internet changed immensely from 2008 to 2015.
“Lavar Burton Reads” is as it says, a podcast about an actor reading science fiction pieces.