-
7 votes
-
How fungi made all life on land possible
9 votes -
New Tricks For An Old Z-Machine, Part 3: A Renaissance Is Nigh
From the article: For all that Curses entranced me, however, I never came close to completing it. At some point I’d get bogged down by its combinatorial explosion of puzzles and places, by its...
From the article:
For all that Curses entranced me, however, I never came close to completing it. At some point I’d get bogged down by its combinatorial explosion of puzzles and places, by its long chains of dependencies where a single missed or misplaced link would lock me out of victory without my realizing it, and I’d drift away to something else. Eventually, I just stopped coming back altogether.
I was therefore curious and maybe even slightly trepiditious to revisit Curses for this article some two decades after I last attempted to play it. How would it hold up? The answer is, better than I feared but somewhat worse than I might have hoped.
[...]
[Curses] was designed, like his beloved Crowther and Woods Adventure, to be a place which you came back to again and again, exploring new nooks and crannies as the fancy took you. If you actually wanted to solve the thing… well, you’d probably need to get yourself a group for that.
[...]
All of which is to say that, even as it heralded a new era in interactive fiction which would prove every bit as exciting as what had come before, Curses became the last great public world implemented as a single-player text adventure.
5 votes -
Slaying the speckled monster - The history of smallpox and the origins of vaccines
6 votes -
The untold story of Alien Ant Farm’s ‘Smooth Criminal’
7 votes -
The flight of Apollo 12: Photos from fifty years ago
6 votes -
The rise of 'facadism' in London
13 votes -
The golden age of the internet is over
6 votes -
Space-grade CPUs: How do you send more computing power into space?
8 votes -
Swedish maritime archaeologists have discovered two wrecks believed to be 17th-century warships – one of which is likely to be the sister ship of the Vasa
5 votes -
Behind-the-scenes pictures from the early years of Sesame Street
6 votes -
How a cargo ship helped win WW2: The Liberty Ship story
4 votes -
Why you wouldn't want to fly on the Soviet concorde - The TU-144 story
8 votes -
The extraordinary story of Joy Whitehead - female soldier of the first world war
8 votes -
How did the US Navy win the Battle of Midway?
5 votes -
The world’s oldest-known recipes decoded
9 votes -
Remember, remember, the fifth of November, Gunpowder Treason and Plot...
I see no reason why the gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot. Today is Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes night, where we commemorate the 1605 plot by Guy Fawkes and a group of English Catholics who...
I see no reason why the gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot.
Today is Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes night, where we commemorate the 1605 plot by Guy Fawkes and a group of English Catholics who planned on blowing up Parliament and King James I to set off a popular revolt and putting a Catholic Monarch on the throne.. We do that by burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes on a bonfire, eating black peas, treacle and parkin and terrorising pets everywhere by setting off fireworks.
Unfortunately because of its proximity to Halloween and silly things like "safety" many of the traditional celebrations are dying out. Kids used to essentially beg for money by stuffing clothing and asking for "a penny for the Guy" which they'd use for sweets or fireworks. Locally made bonfires are also becoming rarer with most these days done by professional and regulated firework companies and organised by the council so it feels more like watching a show and less like getting together with your neighbours and family.
Are you going to any events, hosting one, do you have any stories or questions about Bonfire night, do you have any traditions. Thoughts on fire works etc.
Just a general Bonfire Night thread.
18 votes -
To understand what the Golden State is compared to what it was, one solitary hiker follows the trail of the first overland Spanish expedition into California 250 years later
6 votes -
First Contact (Internet at 50yrs old) - Dr Julian Onions recalls working to bring the Internet to Nottingham
4 votes -
How Britain dishonoured its African first world war dead
7 votes -
The story of the team behind the 6502
4 votes -
The frightening history of Halloween haunted houses
4 votes -
On October 24, 1975 over ninety percent of Icelandic women refused to work – to show how much society depended on women's labor, from farms and factories to the home
10 votes -
How to live like Jane Austen
4 votes -
A piece of kitchen art sold for $26 million. A long-lost painting by Italian pre-Renaissance artist Cimabue had been hanging above a stove in an elderly French woman’s home.
10 votes -
The evolution of urban planning in ten diagrams
12 votes -
Killing time during the Trojan War with Ajax and Achilles
4 votes -
Book Review: French Tanks of the Great War
3 votes -
Digging up Woodstock: An archaeological investigation of the famous festival site unearthed evidence hidden in the haze of memory
7 votes -
How skeletons of WWI ships came to rest in the Potomac
4 votes -
Medieval Fighting Techniques - Mounted vs Foot (Lance vs Polearm & Sword)
4 votes -
Martyr of Verdun: Émile Driant's Command Post
6 votes -
The secret mission to seize Nazi map data: How a covert US Army intelligence unit canvassed war-torn Europe, capturing intelligence with incalculable strategic value
9 votes -
The not-com bubble is popping—The unicorn massacre unfolding today is exactly the opposite of what happened in 2000
22 votes -
The Internet and the Third Estate
5 votes -
'The perfect combination of art and science': Mourning the end of paper maps
18 votes -
How art created stereotypes of the Arab world
8 votes -
Florida fruit crate labels, 1920s-1950s
12 votes -
Beautiful tomboys of the 1930s
15 votes -
Lasers reveal 60,000 ancient Maya structures in Guatemala
10 votes -
I’m convinced we found evidence of life on Mars in the 1970s
23 votes -
The feminist history of ‘take me out to the ball game’
6 votes -
Ringed on all sides by the UK but not actually part of it, residents of the Isle of Man value their independence
9 votes -
A brief history of the bar foot rail
8 votes -
Ken Thompson's Unix password
27 votes -
Why are plastic army men still from WW2?
15 votes -
The first video game
9 votes -
Ten years ago, Balloon Boy captivated the country. For the first time, we reveal the true story behind the hoax.
14 votes -
The story of the IBM Pentium 4 64-bit CPU
7 votes -
A new study posits that tsunamis triggered by the Great Alaska Earthquake in 1964 washed a deadly fungus onto the shore
6 votes