Comments | cabell: new column

cabell

new column

Jun 11, 2007 13:38

New column up on Strange Horizons.

I think I may write my next one on co-presence and shared activity in MMOGs. Who else is psyched for double XP weekend on CoH, eh?

writing, video games, links

Comments 11

vaxjedi June 11 2007, 20:56:59 UTC

me!

cabell June 13 2007, 18:42:57 UTC

Awesome! Hopefully we'll see you on--I'll definitely be playing Sparks, and travspence's goal is to make 40 with Red before I hit 50. :p

wiredferret June 11 2007, 21:22:14 UTC

My husband has requested as his father's day present, a weekend to play CoH.

We must not be the only parents whose children imitate freeze moves to stop bad guys.

cabell June 13 2007, 18:44:28 UTC

Hehe. I'm sure.

What server does he play on, again?

amphetamine_47 June 11 2007, 22:51:41 UTC

Oh yeah!

And I blame it all on you :)

cabell June 13 2007, 18:40:47 UTC

What's your main server again? I'll be mostly playing Sparks on Pinnacle, but if you've got any lowbies there or elsewhere, we should play some time!

eeanm June 12 2007, 01:42:23 UTC

From when I was like 4 to 6 we had a subscription to this service that sent a new 3.5in Amiga floppy every month called Ready Robot. A real pre-Internet thing. It had various games (memory, spelling, a scrabbled picture), some stories that the computer could read aloud, a feature on current Space exploration usually. And it had a section that would play MIDI music with some visualizations (perhaps the creator was part of that early 90s "demo scene"). It was a lot of fun. :)

As the Internet has pretty much displaced all that, I sometimes wonder about the quality of the websites for young children mostly financed by ads. But I don't know any 4 year olds, so I don't really know.

Like you used to be able to get various reference and educational CDs during the "CD era" which was like 94-97. All that's left of it is probably Microsoft Encarta.

cabell June 13 2007, 18:42:06 UTC

Yeah, and there were also kind of general education/exploration CD-ROMs made for kids, not just straight-up reference materials, but I think they were always kind of marginal. I don't know if online apps are filling the gap the way wikipedia has for, say, Encarta.

aardvark_gumbo June 13 2007, 03:00:44 UTC

"I remember my then 40+ year-old mother laughing and exclaiming with delight when she realized that the tiny bats on the Haunted Castle-esque card backs actually flapped their tiny wings."

Do you remember that she was a bit shnockered at the time? I mean, it was like two glasses of wine, but I think this may have increased her enjoyment of this simple pleasure...

cabell June 13 2007, 03:21:53 UTC

Yes, I remember the schnockered bit. I just figured I'd go with "never tell anyone what goes on in this house" here.

aardvark_gumbo June 13 2007, 12:20:23 UTC

You're so discreet.