Monday Links from the Lockdown vol. DLXXX

[ladymuck]

Ian Hislop very interesting article - cheers Nick.

It was good. It also had the desired marketing effect in that it reminded me to subscribe

[BrilloPad]

Ian Hislop very interesting article - cheers Nick.

[BR14]

Leisure Suit Larry was my fave

[ladymuck]

Catacomb 3D evidently passed me by but I loved Wolfenstein 3D!

[OwlHoot]

I thought that was Wolfenstein?
happy to be wrong.

I think they were released around the same time, but as I recall Wolfenstein was VGA and not quite so head-swimmingly nauseating! So I guessed it was slightly later.

Ah here we go. As I wasn't sure myself, I did a quick web search, and this turned up Catacomb 3D :

Catacomb 3-D is a landmark title in terms of first-person graphics. The game was released in November 1991 ..

It was released for the PC platform with EGA graphics. The game introduced the concept of showing the player's hand in the three-dimensional viewport, and an enhanced version of its technology was later used for the more successful and well-known Wolfenstein 3D

and from Wolfenstein 3D :

The game was originally released on May 5, 1992 ..

[BR14]

Oh boy, playing that for more than five minutes at a stretch would give me a worse migraine than when I binge played Catacomb 3-D, the original first person shooter, in glorious EGA technicolour, for three hours non-stop!

I thought that was Wolfenstein?
happy to be wrong.

[OwlHoot]

[*]OKO - ”OKO calls you on a hypnotic and mesmerising journey, travelling through satellite images and rich otherworldly soundscapes composed from recordings taken aboard space shuttles.” The idea of this puzzle game is to stop the rotating parts of the image at the right point until the image is complete. I’ve found that you can hold down whatever you use to point at the rotating segments and spin them into the right position, which is easier than trying to click on them at just the right moment; but maybe that’s a bug and I’m cheating. Anyway, it’s a fun game and the satellite images are awesome ..

Oh boy, playing that for more than five minutes at a stretch would give me a worse migraine than when I binge played Catacomb 3-D, the original first person shooter, in glorious EGA technicolour, for three hours non-stop!

[BR14]

All those critters! Under the sea, even at shallow depths, is so alien and interesting.

Which is why i was an enthusiastic recreational diver for thirty-odd years.

[ladymuck]

• The Whale Bone Squatters - The Hakai Institute’s Calvert Island Ecological Observatory cleaned the bones of a deceased whale by hanging them from a dock for a year: ”When deRoos and his crew members Katie Ford and Claire Schiller hauled the bones to the surface… they found that an amazing array of marine animals had moved into the free space alongside the cleaning crew.”
  
  
  

All those critters! Under the sea, even at shallow depths, is so alien and interesting.

[Uncle Albert]

Good selection Nick, thanks.

[NickFitz]

Snow! Well, a bit, though it's already thawing here

• The Gilded Age - ”Gold mined in the jungles of Peru brought riches to three friends in Miami—but it also carried ruin.” Turns out the South American gold trade attracts some extremely dodgy characters
  
  
• Has science solved one of history’s greatest adventure mysteries? - ”The bizarre deaths of hikers at Russia's Dyatlov Pass have inspired countless conspiracy theories, but the answer may lie in an elegant computer model based on surprising sources.” HT to ladymuck for reminding me about this story
  
  
• The 8-year cycle and 5 ‘petals’ of Venus - ”A word about the 8-year cycle of Venus in our sky and about the “pentagram” of Venus, a highly noticeable rhythm in the motion of Venus as viewed from an Earth-centered perspective.” No wonder they found the solar system hard to explain when they thought Earth was in the middle
  
  
• How Animators Created the Elaborate "Ave Maria" Sequence for 'Fantasia' - Creating the final sequence of the Disney film required a variety of cutting-edge techniques: ”Fantasia was Walt Disney’s greatest and weirdest experiment. Conceived as a technical playground unfettered from linear narrative, the 1940 film is as much an artifact of Disney’s relentless desire to innovate as it is a glimpse into what feature animation could have looked like had the film been a success… for all its tranquility, this serene vision was one of the most technically challenging and catastrophe-riddled sequences in animation history: a protracted camera movement through two-dimensional animated space that, at the time, was absolutely audacious.”
  
  
• The Whale Bone Squatters - The Hakai Institute’s Calvert Island Ecological Observatory cleaned the bones of a deceased whale by hanging them from a dock for a year: ”When deRoos and his crew members Katie Ford and Claire Schiller hauled the bones to the surface… they found that an amazing array of marine animals had moved into the free space alongside the cleaning crew.”
  
  
  
  
  
• Ian Hislop interview: How Private Eye survived Covid-19 and why the BBC is under threat from 'vindictive' government - Interesting interview with the editor: ”Several Twitter users even describe Hislop as a ‘national treasure’… ‘It makes me feel slightly worried. I mean, you put national treasures in museums and then ignore them.’”
  
  
• Physicists Study How Universes Might Bubble Up and Collide - ”Since they can’t prod actual universes as they inflate and bump into each other in the hypothetical multiverse, physicists are studying digital and physical analogs of the process.” Probably for the best; we don’t want them making experimental universes just to see what happens - though maybe that's what already happened, which would explain a lot
  
  
• Black Bart – The Buried TV Sequel To Blazing Saddles - ”Having dealt with studios enough by this point, [Mel] Brooks knew that they might want to take the project away from him and produce sequels – the story essentially opened itself up for on-going narratives. And so he came up with a cunning plan. The contracts for the film stated that there could only be film sequels if a TV series follow-up was made within six months. Brooks and his legal team were pretty certain that the film was too profane and vulgar to ever be adapted as a TV series.” So Warner Brothers supposedly went ahead and made a TV series - they just never broadcast it
  
  
• OKO - ”OKO calls you on a hypnotic and mesmerising journey, travelling through satellite images and rich otherworldly soundscapes composed from recordings taken aboard space shuttles.” The idea of this puzzle game is to stop the rotating parts of the image at the right point until the image is complete. I’ve found that you can hold down whatever you use to point at the rotating segments and spin them into the right position, which is easier than trying to click on them at just the right moment; but maybe that’s a bug and I’m cheating. Anyway, it’s a fun game and the satellite images are awesome
  
  
• On the Beat - ”A fascinating collection of old whisks from around the world.” If you want more, they can be found in this scan of the source book Cerchi d'aria, l'arte del mescolare, which translates to Circles of Air, The Art of Mixing
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!