https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsmfWRMmKMY&ab_channel=DanieleCogotzi
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua5jxv8TrMc&ab_channel=philty11
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj8mkh_6eWs&ab_channel=igorlegion
 
Somewhere the 80s still lives, working very hard for 15 likes

I'd say it's sad but frankly it would be sadder if she gave up.

Is drake any less of an antique than blink 182?

Stole this from Neogaf while looking into standards for outputting to monochrome monitors. Thought it was pertinent to the conversations here:
 

Googling a screenshot is almost impossibruu but Ultima 6 on EGA was half-decent.

 
On CGA though, pink!

 

Sierra actually totally nailed EGA.

Their background pictures were not actually 16 colors only. Their background pictures contained way more than 16 colors. In fact almost 256 colors. They just ran a dithering pass on them.

 
upper one is the dithered background picture
lower one is the same background picture just w/o the dithering pass

 
 

I used to think the reason early CGA games made such poor use of the meagre four colours available to them was because they were all designed by artless nerds with thick, coke-bottle glasses. While that may be true, it's still only half the story.

Since most PCs at the time were connected to television sets instead of RGB monitors, clever developers would take advantage of imperfections in the TV-out to mix colours directly on the display device. Dithered black and magenta, for example, could be smeared into either solid red or solid blue, with which one you got coming down to the specific dithering pattern used.

Here's the title screen from Ultima II, courtesy of Wikipedia's article on artifact colours:

Hope I didn't find this here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RGLbFS1Y5I&ab_channel=VaporwaveArchive

Bill Drummond was one of the founding members of the prankster electronic musical act the KLF. While not a practicing chaos magician, the KLF were greatly inspired by Discordianism and Robert Anton Wilson’sIlluminatus! trilogy. The KLF notoriously ended their career by firing a machine gun full of blanks into the audience at the 1992 BRIT Awards, burning a million quid, and dumping a dead sheep at an aftershow party.
Below is the Illuminatus-inspired music video for KLF’s utterly bizarre danced hit “Justified and Ancient” (featuring country music legend Tammy Wynette on vocals)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu8fwgGFhvI&ab_channel=OptimusPrime

I remember hearing this around as a kid. Read about the KLF a few times in art school. Never realised it was by them. For me this is up there with the revelations of Ace of Base being a conduit for neo-nazi propaganda.

Now if only there was an explanation for why cotton eye joe exists.

bamcquern

To seize upon your mention of chess on  the last page, does anyone know if there are game designers out there working on games that computers will never be able to beat (or dominate) humans at (as a goal, if not an attainable one)?

What about designing games with the purpose of a Solved game being effectively impossible?

denzquix

To attack the problem from the other end, the sentiment that "reality is an illusion" usually (in my experience) carries with it the underlying assumption that "reality is an illusion and ergo without value".

This is an interesting absurd preposition, were it believed sincerely, rather than situationally where it benefits the person making the assertion for reality to be without value in that moment.

There's this idea that the illusionary (or the transient, or the experienced) has no value, has no reality, which stems from the unspoken cult of the eternal  that underlies humanities hierarchy of values. Where only the eternal is real.

If you were to apply this logic consistently interesting things happen. Reality has no value, but this doesn't do away with reality (or cease the experience of it), it just lowers it to the same status as all other "not real" things (or things that have their own reality, that is rarely acknowledged) such as dreams, videogames, radio dramas, children's lego models etc.

On one hand this is a monumentally powerful position, where anything you dream up has the same authority as reality, on the other it reveals absurdism as a kind of idealism, but an idealism experienced as a subject, or victim, in a world of competing idealisms, rather than as an agent, as under traditional romantic idealism.

Summoning? cards featuring the seals of goetic demons, from 'The Emerald Tablet' fantasy war gaming rules, 1977


 

 

The rules "comprehensiveness" is readily apparent: almost every aspect of any epic fantasy battle in any story ever published in any century is covered. Really. Behold a random sampling from the rules' index:

• Ceremonial Magic
• Bombards
• Metamorphoids
• Sacrificial Victims
• Chariots
• Oblique movement of self-disciplined units
• Rules for innate chi projection
• Killing rampaging large mounts
• Infernal Engine Disadvantages
• Unconscious and mad magic users
• Aerial unit fatigue
• "Goetic Magic Hour Correspondence Charts"
• Effects of routing units on dray animals
• Klipothic and Beneficient Magic

The rules' color text claims that the magic system "is based on the actual grimoires (magical texts) that guided medieval European thaumaturges (workers of miracles)." Cardstock sheets are designed to be cut into individual spell cards marked with "evocation circles, mystical symbols, demons and angels that have been familiar to magic users for centuries." It is hard to judge the historical accuracy of such statements, but the book is packed with so many spell charts, Astral Force cards, magic critical fail results, and the affects of "High Magic Color" rules that Merlin would probably sell his left one for just one peek at the last 30 pages of the book.

I watched a bit of pyjama sam, The arthur and lil critter cd-roms were less challenging and more interactive... more multi-media storybooks and less "games". Basically everything could be clicked on and would trigger some weird nonsensical animation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmCiUowoE5o&list=PLEFCFAB0499A68B47
 
Animism the videogame.

Small Green Cicada

So like the old arthur and lil' critter games/ interactive storybooks?

Worx fine on; -IBM Thinkpad T60 running Windows XP-

Speaking of "authenticity," I wanted to say some words of soft caution about it re our discussion upthread. The moment has passed, so I'll just say that authenticity is a shell game, esp. regarding art and culture. I'm deeply sympathetic to this feeling of there being barbarian hordes on our digital shores, and to any wariness that you all might have towards capitalism and consumerism and towards the commodification of something you love, but I also believe that truly addressing and even fighting these problems means acknowledging and accepting our culpability and complicity, inasmuch as this is the truly ironical and humanitarian pose/attitude. That is, this is really the most salty way of doing things.

 
I dunno. I am kind of automatically weary of cries to abandon "authenticity" in much the same way as I am at derisive snorts at "originality". They aren't holy cows to sit there biting your nails over, that's a trap, and can be counter productive, but it should be understood that to roll the wheel against them is to  become a champion of pop art, which is fine if that's your bag, but it's a constricting jacket to rhetorically exhort people to wear.

At some point in the past (before MTV started moving back in) I had a theory regarding this whole post-corporate aesthetic, that corporate culture had inadvertently created a new aesthetic deformation through it's combination of huge amount's of cash, systematisation of the production of what could be termed "creative" output and lack of taste. This reached it's most exquisite form in the 80's (in part because by this point the apparatus of capitalism had become extremely efficient at turning nascent subcultures/counter-cultures into avenues for consumerism). 
 
It took the internet to really disrupt this, especially the havoc wrought on the music industry, music being the primary philosophical driver of any post 1950's subculture. Suddenly the capitalist apparatus, rather than being directly plugged in to what is trending (once it evolves past being distributed on dubbed tapes at any rate), is in the same position as the rest of us, reading the tea leafs of the internet to guess what is trending.

Even this effort is frustrated though, by the emergence of the hipster. The subculture at the end of history. A subculture that watches other subcultures, both mature and emergent, and falls upon anything "cool", unique or interesting produced and exploits it's cachet as a marker of their advanced taste. What this means is you can't look at anything that pops it's head above the surface and assume it signals a future audience.

This, combined with a inevitable cynicism toward the things we think of as markers of the corporate culture of the 80's, has lead corporations to abandon the aesthetic deformation they created, leaving it as a playground for artists, who can advance and deploy it in ways that it's creators never could have. It's a machine of powerful signifiers, lying abandoned, if you want to play in it, that is to be encouraged, if you want to identify with it I don't want to stop you, probably better to be aware of what you are doing though, rather than sleepwalking into it.

Anyway, now that artists are making the deformation "cool", corporate recapitulation is to be expected. It's not the same as the original creation though. It's not "theirs" any more and they are on the same playing field as everyone else in their activities there, but due to their preoccupations they can only move along it's surface. The artist has the freedom to dive deep, find it's hidden currents and manipulate them or bring them to the surface.
 
Like all technologies the corporate deformation has occult potentials, and any mercenary interloper is constrained by his own remit.

Ragnar. I think part of it is just the images sitting on a black ground, rather than a white surface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfghHEgntWU

Check out the comments on this video (and the channels of the people commenting). I think it's just one guy RPing a community of toilet enthusiasts.

Electronic presskit for Robert De Nero's foray into producing videogames 9: The Last Resort
 
https://archive.org/embed/release_of_nine
 

Wow. Actually this blows De Niro's EPK out of the water. The Drowned God EPK. A little background on the project:
 
Harry Horse conceived the game's ancient planetwide conspiracy. Horse had previously written several children's books and received the Scottish Arts Council Writer of the Year award for his 1983 book, The Ogopogo: My Journey with the Loch Ness Monster. He began forging documents that same year as a way to earn money. The story which became the basis for Drowned God was originally a phony manuscript Horse wrote in 1983, ostensibly describing events after the destruction of the lost city of Atlantis. The manuscript, dated 1846, was said to have been written by the English poet Richard Horne, who shares Horse's birth name. Horse's initiation into the concept of an alternate history came in the early 1980s, when he first encountered professor Ian Halpke, who explained to him that information from the Kabbalah and ancient Jewish texts "hide and encipher the secret", namely, human evolution was aided by extraterrestrial intelligence. According to Horse, Halpke believed the Ark of the Covenant was a nuclear device, and that humans and pigs share compatible genes.
Initially, experts determined the manuscript was genuine, as the date Horse picked matched the time period Horne had been alive and active, and the manuscript's topics matched the poet's interests. Horse had written the manuscript without knowing any of these details. After his hoax was discovered, Horse held onto the text for the next decade, until he played Myst and 7th Guest and decided the point-and-click adventure genre was a good match for his conspiracy theory-inspired ideas. He later said that while the story of Myst did not interest him, the game's artwork and the sense of immersion inspired him to immediately begin working on Drowned God in 1994.

The really interesting thing about this EPK is the "interview" segments. The buy in from all three men. Alastair Grahams delivery. Horse's unhingedness. How much of this was conscious branding and how much was genuine enthusiasm?

https://archive.org/embed/inscape_drowned_god

Two things I'll mention. 

RE: orbs

I encourage everyone to check out a book called "Lineage: What If The Universe Gave You A Gift?" by  Nancy Burson who is/was a digital photographer who pioneered morphing technology back in the 80s?. I would try to describe it, but the summery does a pretty good job.

"Seeing is Believing. For the past 2000 years the Universe has asked mankind to believe in God without proof. Now there has been a policy change. Since the beginning of 2006, Nancy Burson has been allowed to show audiences in the US and Europe the highly sentient Light Beings she calls the Extra Celestials (ECs) that she originally met in a crop circle in 2004.
 
Nancy's quirky yet poignant journey features the miraculous phenomena of glow-in-the-dark statuette dancing Mother Mary. She was a gift from Irish Avatar Derek O?Neill, whose car runs on love not gas and who magically creates rainbows and shape-shifts into other humans with ease. Read Lineage and discover the real reason why the Rays, or ECs are here for contact withmankind at this time."

At any rate the "ECs" reveal themselves as orbs. Also her son is an indigo child spirit medium.

RE: Capitalist cultural backwash.

I have an interest in the "workplace spirituality" movement, which emerged as a distinct entity in the 20's, basicly a spiritual justification for capitalist myths as it jettisoned it's protestant nursemaid. Mostly taking the form of little catch phrases promoting "just world" idealism, positive thinking and the virtues of hard work. Things like "The man who is hauling the oars has no time to rock the boat" "weather you think you can or think you can't, you're right" etc.

The other form early manifestations of it took (based on old corporate diaries I've studied) Is long winded missives on things like salesmanship, the details of warehousing, how people should go about their jobs etc. that are filled with unspoken assumptions culled from the "business wisdom" in the form of these proverbs they've accrued.

It's growth paralleled the growth of the "self-help" genre, (the lasting impact of the popularity and influence of the 1849 book "Self Help" in Japan would be interesting to investigate). 

In the 70's it started mixing with the "human potential" movement, which is basicly the love-child of scientology and the new age movement. You can become highly effective, nay, superhuman... and what better way to use your superhuman powers but to climb to the top of the bussiness world and reap mad profit. EST is a good early example of this.

As an aside that will probably interest people here the precursor to team building exercises was something called the "new games" movement, a project to create "games" with no winners or losers that had it's genesis in the late 60's.
 
Somewhere in this mix "workplace spirituality" like other subcultures and spiritual movements became commodified (not that it was ever something good or worthy but I'd argue it began as a genuine effort amongst the ownership and management classes to come up with a metaphysical justification for capitalism, through the amassing of anecdotes and just so sayings). The interesting thing about this (as opposed to the commodification of say, punk, or buddhism in the west) is that there is absolutely nothing in workplace spirituality that resists this commodification, since it's entire essence is in dealing with how the universe justifies capitalism.

This is allowed it to grow into a truly aestheticly repugnant monstrosity, hollow to it's core, doing everything possible to present a smiling attractive face that appeals to "everyone" (presents nothing disagreeable to the mainstream, doing whatever it thinks will ingratiate itself to you and offering you the carrot of success within mainstream society if you earnestly adopt it's precepts.) that it's managed to create something that no one actually wants in a way that nothing else parallels in the west (though it's easy to imagine creations similarly lacking in appeal springing up through the process of soviet bureaucracy).

My interest in the topic was sprung when I went into a McDonalds and found the wall covered in motivational quotes, flatscreen TVs playing bland top 20 pop videos, an environment so morally antiseptic, so devoid of the controversial,  there could arise no objection, no nagging doubt, about getting your kid that happy meal with the transformers toy.