Where I’m @

20040120

The Good Old Days
Somehow we missed for quite some time that you can get an extension for Mozilla Firebird that allows you to play z-machine games via Firebird. We have rectified that error, however, and have enjoyed such moldy oldies as Pyramid of Doom, Strange Odyssey, and Fun House.

We realized in playing these what a lousy player always were. After getting a little way into Fun House, we realized we didn’t really care about figuring it out but rather about finishing it and searched out a cheat page. We feel essentially the same way about most home video games; we just don’t want to spend the time they take. Allocation of resources and all that. Going to an arcade, however, is another matter. The yearly visit to Coney Island always entails a short stay at one of the arcades for Skee-Ball and Galaga. Which it was our great pleasure to discover on a console in a laundromat near our old apartment in Brooklyn. That we discovered this a mere 6 months before leaving that world never bothered us. We aren't that good at Galaga, we just enjoy it.

See also:

• more than you want to know about the Z-Machine
• Infocom, original maker of these games
• Mozilla Firebird
• in researching some of these links, we found that you can play some of the z-machine games online as well, at places like iFiction

20040114

Cartography Recapitulates Sexuality
Le Monde has a story today about prostitution in Paris, reporting that France’s interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy claims a 40% drop in prostitution there. Fortunately for all the johns visiting La Ville des lumières in the next few weeks, the daily has also published a map showing the locations where prostitues congregate most.

The map is nicely Tuftean in its clarity and simplicity, though it would benefit from a stronger contrast between the highlighted areas and the rest of the map. As well, there’s some very real chartjunk that could be eliminated: the parks that do not have prostitution, all the un-frequented streets, the landmark buildings, in short everything that is not a specific reference point to the areas where prostitution is heaviest. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to edit the map slightly and claim that it is modestly improved.

20040112

Adaptive UI, Sort Of
Not Fooling Anybody is a collection of photos of commercial buildings that have changed occupants but not architecture. Our fave is a drycleaner which might have worked had they done just a little more work on the sign.