History: April 2004 Archive Page

In the 1980s millions of teenagers world-wide would battle dragons armed with just dice, paper and pens. D&D became part of youth sub-culture but as the game celebrates its 30th birthday, is anyone still playing? --Darren Water --Whatever happened to Dungeons and Dragons? (BBC)

Effie is an old jade of 50 summers, Jessie a frisky filly of 40, and Addie, the flower of the family, a capering monstrosity of 35. Their long, skinny arms, equipped with talons at the extremities, swung mechanically, and soon were waved frantically at the suffering spectators. The mouths of their rancid features opened like caverns and sounds like the wailings of damned souls issued therefrom. They pranced around the stage with a motion that suggested a cross between the danse du ventre and a fox trot, strange creatures with painted faces and hideous mien. Effie is spavined, Addie is knock-kneed and stringhalt, and Jessie, the only one who showed her stockings, has legs without calves, as classic in their outlines as the curves of a broom handle. The misguided fellows who came to see a leg show got their money's worth, for they never saw such limbs before and never will again--outside of a boneyard.

--Articles on the Cherry Sisters (Oldebolt History)

From a collection of articles about the Cherry Sisters, an apparently ghastly sister act from the 1890s. The lawsuit generated by the above review led to a court decision that protected newspapers from libel suits launched by performers wishing to get revenge against papers that published bad reviews. Via Metafilter, which features additional links to some great context.

There is still the childhood picture just where it'salways been, right above "I was born Justin Allyn Hall in Chicago at 12:01pm on December 16, 1974." And there in the heart of the page is still the one-line paragraph that first woke me out of my early Web-surfing coma: "When I was eight, my father, an alcoholic, killed himself; much of my early writing wrestles with this." The minute I read that I knew this was not going to be your typical mid-90s nerdobiography. And eight-and-a-half million gut-spilling Web-autobiographies later, it still holds up. --Rob Wittig reviews Justin's links. --Justin Hall and the Birth of the 'Blogs (http://www.electronicbookreview.com)

Via Jill/txt.

It's been almost thirty years since young Laura and Sandy Crowther sat down at a Teletype and took their first steps into the mysterious subterranean world their father, Will, created for them. Now, if Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction is any indication, Crowther and Woods's pioneering computer game Adventure and its descendants are finally beginning to garner the critical recognition they deserve. At only 286 pages, Twisty Little Passages is a small, accessible book that addresses a deep and complex subject. The author's stated intention is to bring us the first book-length consideration of interactive fiction (IF) as a legitimate literary field, and he has certainly succeeded. --John Miles --Twisty Little Passages [Review] (Slashdot Books)

Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, Punk Rock, 
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airlines --Billy Joel --Annotated 'We Didn't Start the Fire'

I once thought about doing this kind of thing in a class, but I couldn't find the right environment.

Most of what is being said regarding blogs in composition has been said before. Looking at the ?Guidelines for Using Journals in School Settings? approved by the NCTE on Commission on Composition on November 28, 1986 drafted by [Toby] Fulwiler, it seems that the basic assumptions of learning through blogging have been stamped as legitimate. Jeff Ward --Journals [and Blogging] (This Public Address)

Jeff's bulleted list is a great reminder that few things are really brand new. Of course, traditional journaling in academia doesn't introduce the student-author to the benefit of links, searchable archives, near-instant feedback from readers, etc. So there's still plenty of room for new research into blogs.

Saint-Exupéry disappeared on a solo flight in July 1944 while photographing southern France in preparation for an Allied landing there.

Just one year before, the 44-year-old veteran pilot had published The Little Prince, which went on to become one of the best-loved books of all time.

--'Little Prince' author's plane wreck found after 6 decades  (CBC News)

The study raised new questions about the teaching of history after it found that 11 per cent of the British population believed Hitler did not exist and 9 per cent said Winston Churchill was fictional. A further 33 per cent believed Mussolini was not a real historical figure.... Some 27 per cent of people interviewed thought Robin Hood, whose story has been featured in films by directors such as Kevin Costner and Mel Brooks, existed whereas 42 per cent believed Mel Gibson's Braveheart was an invention. More than 60 thought the Battle of Helms Deep in the Lord of the Rings trilogy actually took place....

Fictional events that we believe did take place
War of the Worlds , Martian invasion - 6 per cent
Battle of Helms Deep , Rings Trilogy - The Two Towers - 3 per cent
Battle of Endor , The Return of the Jedi - 2 per cent
Planet of the Apes , the apes rule Earth - 1 per cent
Battlestar Galactica , the defeat of humanity by cyborgs - 1 per cent

--Cahal Milmo --1066 and all that: how Hollywood is giving Britain a false sense of history (Independent)

And I, for one, saulte our new cyborg overlords...

Of course, it's Hollywood's fault -- how dare Californians presume to educate Britons? Listen to me now and believe me later, U.K. -- if you want your sense of history muddled beyond belief, get your own movies!

Honestly...

Note: An editor should have caught this: "More than 60 thought the Battle of Helms Deep in the Lord of the Rings trilogy actually took place." That should be "More than 60 people out of the survey of 2069," or, as the last paragraph in the story specifies, just 3%.

All of these tracks were then installed into a device known as, appropriately enough, a laugh machine. | This 28-inch-high apparatus resembles an organ, having 10 horizontal and four vertical keys and a foot pedal. The engineer "orchestrates" the laugh track by using the keyboard to select the type, sex, and age of the laugh, while playing the foot pedal to determine each reaction's length. --Ben Glenn --The Laugh Track (TV Party)

This gives new meaning to the term "playing it for laughs".

("Ha ha ha ha ha ha!")

It also makes me think of a certain machine from Barbarella.

("Ohhh... snicker snicker chuckle." )

I am sanitaryware enthusiast (I have no idea why) and have been restoring and supplying antique bathroom fittings for the past fourteen years. I also collect trade catalogues, salesmen'ssamples and even full size W.C.'sand washbasins. --Simon Kirby --Flushed With Pride - The Story of Thomas Crapper (JLDR)

Oh, those eccentric Brits. Much more colorful, and far less likely to commit homicide, than the eccentrics we grow on this side of the Atlantic.

Do you know the origin of term BSOD aka ?Blue Screen of Death?? Well, the term ?Blue Screen of Death? was not the original acronym for BSOD. The original term meant the ?Black Screen of Death? and was seen when running under Windows 3.0. A user would attempt to run a DOS application and instead of the DOS application running, the entire screen would turn black with a blinking cursor in the top left hand corner of the screen. --Wallace B. McClure --Origin of BSOD ['Blue Screen of Death'] (All About Wallym)

For Julie & Donna.