It’s a website that basically chronicles the history of early PC gaming and the companies and games they made that left an impact (for good or bad) on the industry. Yesterday, I read a whole series of articles about Sierra-On-Line, the history of King’s Quest, and Quest for Glory, and then read some articles about the creation of the Wing Commander franchise and its impact on narrative storytelling in games, and today I’m reading about Will Wright and the creation of Sim City.
“After working on the idea for about six months, Wright brought a very primitive SimCity to Brøderbund, who were intrigued enough to sign him to a contract. But over the next year or so of work a disturbing trend manifested. Each time Wright would bring the latest version to Brøderbund, they’d nod approvingly as he showed all the latest features, only to ask, gently but persistently, a question Wright learned to loathe: when would he be making an actual game out of the simulation? You know, something with a winning state, perhaps with a computer opponent to play against?”
If you’re even at all interested in the history of PC gaming, you should check out this site. It’s amazing.
While i dont disagree with the assertation the American public transit is woefully undersupported it feels like the author is making the same fallacy many nonamericans make in assuming that the American government has a lot more influnce over America than it actually does. To declare that “America” should universally retrofit its public transit is a big tangle of bullshit since that infrastructure hasnt really ever been a federal issue.
The problem is that many/most US citizens have never left the country and don’t realize how crappy our shit is. Also, wealthy people don’t care because they all have their own private stuff, and it doesn’t affect them very much if public stuff sucks.
Blah blah blah. That’s not an excuse, it’s a reason. There is no fallacy pointing out that America is falling behind in infrastructure development without also explaining the political system that is making it fail. The point is that, for whatever reason, this is an issue for America and American people.
A huge number of Americans have never lived outside the county they were born. County!
Kind of like how most people who hate the coastal cities so much have never even been to them. They get a weird skewed perception of the outside world. It’s not even that they don’t know how good transit is in the rest of the industrialized world. They don’t even know how relatively good it is in New York compared to every other city even in America…
I’ve realized that most of the anti-transit sentiment comes from a combination of two sources.
People who live in East Shitsburg and have never traveled don’t really understand the scale of the urban world. They don’t realize that cities need trains because more people ride in one car of one subway line on one random Tuesday than went to their entire high school. They don’t think transit is useful or better than cars, because they’ve never encountered the rest of the country where most of the people live.
They believe that the cities only exist due to being propped up by taxes they pay. They don’t want their hard-earned tax dollars going to the city-folk. They don’t realize how heavily subsidized their lives are.
Thus, they see mass transit as useless, and they don’t want their taxes “wasted” on it.
Also every infrastructure discussion always focuses on transportation. There’s a lot more to infrastructure than transportation. Sewers. Water supply. Telco. Transportation is just the most visible.
Yes, that is what im trying to say. I dont want to play devil’s advocate to this article but I guess the question I’m raising is how do you make this a federal issue? My amatuer googling says that 45% of American citizens have no access to public transit, so when an article appraches the problem with the argument America the country should be ashamed that New York City’s and Boston’s transit system is garbage compared to other 1st world countries that’s not a very resonant message.
Professor Google says that about 30% of the American population lives in urbanized areas and is steadily growing, so i don’t doubt that this will become a more hotbutton issue. The challenge will be selling transit concerns to the portion of the population that does not rely on it.
Even in smaller cities there’s weird opposition to mass transit. At some point light rail is supposed to interconnect the cities around here and I occasionally see signs yelling about it being a bad thing. Part of the issue with how things happen in the US is that everything is election cycle based and no one on the state or federal level is interested in projects that will pay off 2 administrations from now.
To be fair, that can apply to the vast majority of people in the world, substituting “county” for whatever local geographic subdivision is used in their countries.
Okay, now if we limit things to the industrialized, developed world, eh… I’m still not quite seeing it as being that rare for various reasons. It may depend on where specifically you live. Most of my family in Portugal have never lived off the island they were born on, but then again, when you’re living on an island literally in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it does limit your options for places to affordably move to.
I don’t really disagree with the sources you described there, however.
About a million years ago ScRym had a brief disagreement on the show where Rym insisted Alcohol had calories and Scott was pretty sure like the alcohol part of alcohol didn’t
“First thing I worked on was how to get max throughput without needing to extrude a 42 atom chain. Long chains are far less useful in this limited overlap because you can’t do anything meaningful while debonding. I stumbled into this setup, which allows you to emulate two single atom sources, available to grab on cycle 6 + 2N and 7 + 2N…”
