Henry Jenkins offers a Boston-centric history of video games, from Spacewar to Guitar Hero.
How the Tech Model Railroad Club Changed the World
November 5th, 2007 · 2 Comments
Tags: Asides · Games and Gaming · Technology
A course I’d like to teach on gaming, simulation, and history.
Does the history of telephony ca. 1900 offer lessons for the telecom world of today?
The cat eater and cannibal who gave the world “Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay!”
Plus the Jimmy Carterian Internet and the Millennial Pneumatic Tube.
Philo T. Farnsworth and the invention of television.
Henry Jenkins offers a Boston-centric history of video games, from Spacewar to Guitar Hero.
Tags: Asides · Games and Gaming · Technology
The Unit Upgrade
Mark Rayner’s latest is a funny in-joke for recovering Civilization addicts like myself. Related: uh-oh.
Liberal Arts Education or Sleep Aid, You Decide
I generally mistrust blogs whose every post is a list of stuff from elsewhere, but this is a nice (big) collection of history lectures you can watch online.
Did Alexander the Great Fight the Yeti?
As my man Head 58 says, “I don’t want to live in a world where he didn’t.“
Holden's History of the United States
At Hilobrow, for J. D. Salinger & Howard Zinn.
The Black Pyramids of Georgia
BLDGBLOG on messianic architecture, by way of Tama-Re, the Egyptian city built by an Afro-supremacist UFO cult in rural Georgia.
Sticky Meme
The always worthwhile Zunguzungu is on a Teddy Roosevelt kick of late. Here he goes looking for the origins of Teddy’s big stick.
Everything Was Open-Source, Once
This blog post at Attic #42 hits several of my sweet spots: telephone history, KGB surveillance, a plea for open-source technology, and a gripe about PDFs.
Secede, Suppress, Survive
Not especially funny as Onion articles go, but it actually could be a TV show: New Alternate Reality Series on Island Where South Won Civil War.
The Other KKK
Mystic anti-war boy scouts? Fascist futurist theosophists? What was up with the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift?
The Red Peril
Snarkout’s annual post is as keen as ever: an appreciation of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians becomes a link-happy history of literary invasions right back to Saki and Wells.
© 2001–2009 Rob MacDougall

2 responses so far ↓
1 Bryant // Nov 5, 2007 at 11:10 am
Good history. From the Turbine perspective, I’d add that one of the company’s founders had been an undergrad at MIT (so the connection is there); more directly, everyone who started Turbine was at Brown University when the company started. Boston’s gaming industry is very academically rooted, which is probably no surprise.
Asheron’s Call was certainly groundbreaking — it was a race between AC and Everquest to see who’d have the first 3D environment on the market. AC also went for a relatively literary backstory. It was a big deal to the developers that AC didn’t use elves, dwarves, and so forth. In a fairly real sense, you could think of AC as the Jorune/Tekumel/Talislanta of MMORPGs.
2 Robert (model railroad fan) Anderson // Apr 13, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Model railroading is my hobby of choice. The world you create, where you create it, and how much time you spend in it… is entirely over to you. A highly recommended hobby!
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