JeremyReimer

These could each be an article in themselves. :)

Nice.

I did mention AOL, as part of the "Eternal September" of Usenet (so tangentially, but still acknowledging it was there) but yeah, I did skip over some of the others. CompuSERVE was something I thought was really cool at the time, but there was no way my parents would pay those hourly charges for me...

I self-publish my novels, and I've had steady if very low sales year after year (certainly not enough to live on) and I have friends who have chosen the small independent publisher route and have not been happy with the results at all.

One of my friends sold ten (!!) novels in the 1990s to a small publisher, but they sold in low volume and never earned out their advance. When her publisher dropped her, she wanted to republish them herself. The cost to buy back the rights exceeded all the money she had ever earned from the publisher for the entire series.

I guess what I'm saying is this: anecdotes are not data. Some will find success with the big publishers; many will not. Some will find success self-publishing; many will not. And some will find success with small publishers, but again... this is rare.

Success in writing is just really really hard. No matter what route you choose, luck will play a significant factor. The quality of your writing will also play a big role. Writing really well, exceptionally well, is probably the hardest thing of all.

I think it would be very unlikely for the web and html to arise in the current political climate, yes. It only came to be in the first place because of a massive amount of government investment that was an artifact of the space race in the late 1960s and early 70s. For a time, all the major tech companies were trying to build their own walled garden alternatives to the Internet (Microsoft with MSN, Apple with eWorld, AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc.) and they only failed because the Internet grew faster than any one of them could.

The confusion and disconnect comes from the fact that the Metaverse, by definition, cannot ever exist. Zuckerberg is chasing a fantasy.

I wrote in more detail about it here [1], but the basic gist is:

1. A real "Metaverse" that isn't just another video game would require every tech company to agree on a single standard for a MMO world, and

2. There are zero financial reasons why any other company would agree to a) wait for a standard to be agreed upon and b) cede the majority of their profits to the owner of this singular Metaverse.

Therefore, a real Metaverse can never happen. Which makes it even sillier that Mark Zuckerberg continues to go all-in on this vision.

[1] https://jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?p=287

I think the bitmap being shown in MacPaint implied that you were supposed to create your own clip art from scratch. Which would technically be possible, if you were already a good artist.

But the real weakness, at the time, was in the final step--printing. Apple only had its Imagewriter series of dot matrix printers, and there was no support for vector graphics in any case. So you could print things, but they wouldn't look very professional.

A few years later, when Apple licensed Adobe's vector font software and built their first laser printer, that's when everything changed.

The Amiga was (and still is!) an amazing machine.

If you liked this article and would like to read more, I'll take this opportunity to plug my History of the Amiga series on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

You've got it right. I was going to label the inputs in the transistors in the second animation, but it made the diagram rather crowded, so I left it out.

The diagrams are simplified because they leave out things like connections to ground, attached resistors that mitigate the total current, etc. But I wanted to convey, as simply as possible, how transistors worked and how gates could be made very simply out of a small number of transistors.

The actual CMOS chips in use by ARM (and still in use today) complicate things more, because you have different types of silicon (NMOS and PMOS) on the same substrate, so the transistors work slightly differently and you can simplify making things like NAND gates, which themselves can be combined to make all other types of gates. For this article, I didn't want to get that deep into the woods, though. :)

EDIT: It looks so easy in that video! I'm not sure why I had so many problems opening the door, but I did. Maybe I'll try it again. Maybe I'll just wait a few more years to see if the game gets better first, though.

I suspect that the rationale for adding more and more complicated systems is to increase the sunk cost fallacy for existing players, who will have invested increasing amounts of time into learning how they all work. (And perhaps, to make everything seem less like a video game and more like a "real life simulation").

There is no way that a new player would do anything but bounce right off this game, but perhaps that is by design.

I had even less luck than this with the elevator. I couldn't open the door! Apparently it's unlike every other video game in existence, where door opening is a matter of a) walking up to the door, or at worst b) walking up to the door and hitting a button. But in Star Citizen, someone apparently coded an elaborate "door opening simulator" that requires you to switch modes and active your arm and do something complicated. I tried reading all the button prompts, and hit all the buttons, and I was able to open the door once, but then I was sent to another lobby with another elevator door and that one I couldn't open.

I was an original backer. Years ago I was able to get to the hangar and fly my basic ship around and shoot aliens and asteroids. Today I'm confounded by doors. I expect that when I try the game again in a few years, I'll probably have to read tutorials about how to make my character breathe and blink his eyelids.

In a similar vein, I watched My Thai Bride on a recommendation from a friend, and it also stuck in my head for a long time. It's about an older British man who flies to Thailand in search of a wife, but it handles the entire situation with honesty and sensitivity. It sounds weird, but I learned a lot about geopolitical forces from this film.

I can honestly say that I love all the writing work I do. Every article I wrote for Ars Technica was a labor of love, even though I got paid. My novels are as well.

I still have a day job (although I did write full-time for Ars for a couple of years) so this is a luxury I can afford. But I’m still happy to be able to do it.

I would also posit that the only way to be successful as a writer is to write about things you love. If you try to chase popular topics or genres without loving them, this cynicism will show in your writing and it won’t be much fun to read.

I'm a writer. What you've said here is basically correct, but I disagree with your conclusion.

In 2009 I took basically the same path that Howey is proposing here. I started self-publishing on Amazon in 2011 and I've written five novels so far, and am working on a sixth.

Obviously I did not experience anywhere near the success that Howey did. This may be due to luck, but I've read Wool and it's also a much better novel than anything I've written (so far!) So it's not always about luck. An amazingly good novel can sometimes generate its own luck.

But my lack of success hasn't dissuaded me and I don't consider the journey I took in becoming a writer to have been wasted. On the contrary, it's been amazing every step of the way. I've learned so many things, met so many wonderful people, and even sold a couple of thousand books along the way, which isn't much, but it's not nothing either.

And at the same time, I've been writing non-fiction articles for Ars Technica, which has been considerably more successful for me. (An example would be my article on the history of OS/2, or my history of the Amiga computer). These articles have been read and enjoyed by orders of magnitude more people, which is very satisfying.

I guess what I'm saying is that there are more possibilities for being a writer than being a famous fiction author picked up by a major publishing house. There are all kinds of paths for writers to take.

Success is never guaranteed, and if you want to be a writer you have to be realistic about this. But if you really want to be a writer, nothing can stop you. In fact, that's kind of the only prerequisite for becoming one. If you feel compelled to write, regardless of any success or rewards, you will keep doing it. At the very least, you will become a better writer. And if you become a better writer, it's almost inevitable that, at some point, somebody will notice.

Don't expect to be famous. Expect to write.

Quote: "self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily)"

This is basically correct, although it depends on the definition of "well". You can get a halfway decent cover for $100-$500, and you can get a halfway decent copy editor for about $500-$1000. Tools like Scrivener can handle all the ebook and paper edition formatting for you, with built-in templates, so that's another $100 or so for the tooling, but you can reuse this for future books. Publishing to Amazon and other places (like Smashwords) is free, and this includes print-on-demand paperback copies as well.

What it does take is a lot of time for learning how to use all the tools and to navigate the many options available for covers, editing, etc.

As far as marketing expenses go, there are no good ways to spend money to sell books. I think you're correct that nobody knows how to do it. If you don't win the lottery and get featured on a celebrity's book club, how is anyone supposed to ever know that you even released a book?

If you really want to fall down the rabbit hole, NCommander did a thirteen-hour stream where he successfully (!!) installed OS/2 1.0 in a virtual machine (using PCem) and then upgraded, in-place, every single version after that, ending with OS/2 4.5. Sometimes the crazy custom color scheme migrated over, sometimes it didn't. Some early OS/2 apps worked after upgrading, but many of them didn't. The lengths he went through to make the upgrades work at all were beyond heroic and veered into the insane.

Part 1 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeaRlhz96mI Part 2 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwGTHZzzF4

They weren't owned by Activision-- Activision was only the publisher for Destiny, and never acquired the studio. When the publishing agreement came up for renewal, Bungie and Activision agreed to go their separate ways, for their own reasons. It's likely that Bungie wanted more control and more independence from the partnership.

Bungie's aversion to being owned stems from their Microsoft days, when they yearned to be free from having to make Halo sequels.

However, the reality is that game development is expensive. Destiny doesn't have a monthly subscription fee, so the income for the studio drops dramatically between paid content expansions. It's tough to keep that going without outside support, given the cost of creating said content.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I work for a division of Activision, but these opinions are solely my own)

Hello, author here! You’re right that I didn’t mention many other products in the broader PDA market. The article was about the Newton, and believe it or not, there are still word count limits for online articles. Discussing other products would have taken away from the central story. The hint about Palm was meant to get people interested in finding out more about similar devices.

I don't think so. OpenDoc was a document sharing service in classic Mac OS, similar in some ways to Microsoft's OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) but somewhat more advanced. Back then, some folks thought that applications were going to become more like components that interacted with each other to make a kind of "super-application", but the use case ended up being just dropping an Excel spreadsheet in Word.

Newton had lots of ways to share information between applications running on NewtonOS, but designed to fit the much smaller memory footprint of the device.

I believe the only things the Newton and OpenDoc had in common were that Steve Jobs killed both of them as cost-cutting measures.

There was enough confusion in the comments over whether a folded A4 was an A5 or A6, that I figured I made the right call. :)

Author here! I'm really happy to see people getting into the nostalgia about these weird and wonderful devices. Researching the story was absolutely fascinating, and I loved getting to talk to Steve Capps, who was still excited to talk about the work he did all those years ago.

I don't think there's a good explanation out there.

From what I've read, the main idea is decentralization, either of website databases using blockchain (which seems wildly impractical and ludicrously expensive), or of payment of advertising revenue to website users and contributors (which seems like an impossible business model)

The main issue, I think, is that "decentralization" means a different thing to every person, therefore "web3" can mean a different thing to everyone. This makes it hard to define it or to argue for it or against it.

I read a blog post linked on HN recently on "the architecture of a web3 application" [1] and it was so long and complicated that I honestly thought it was satire. I don't think the methods described in the post were at all practical.

Ultimately, web3 might simply be a rebranding of blockchain and crypto technologies in order to make them seem more democratic and transformational than perhaps they are.

[1] https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-...

The original Max Headroom was played by Matt Frewer in heavy makeup. So his eyes are Matt Frewer's eyes.

phpBB added a mobile theme that works pretty well, but many sites didn't bother to upgrade.

Mostly this was because the upgrade was difficult and required multiple steps (first updating to the latest sub-version, then to the major version, then to the latest sub-version of the major version) and if anything went wrong in any of the steps you could take down your board.

And if you had any custom code, as the forum operators at Ars Technica had, it was just too difficult and too much of a time investment to even attempt.

So phpBB, which was one of the most dominant forum software applications when forums were at their peak, became known as "old-school" and "non mobile-friendly" when that was technically not true but it was de-facto true.

The Ars Technica forums today still exist but they are difficult to view on mobile, and as a consequence their traffic has declined significantly in the last ten years, despite traffic to the main site increasing.

Thanks! I think it's just a combination of the limited graphics character set on the Heathkit, plus eight years of practice (at the time) making games using it.

The stuffed animals are from my childhood, so I kept them on my childhood computer. I think they're happy there. :)

I'm really enjoying it so far. It seems to fit with my mental model of making video games, which basically ended when I was 15 and writing games in MBASIC on my Heathkit (and later QuickBasic on MS-DOS, but I sort of stopped making games at that point) Obviously the language is very different and it's object-oriented, which MBASIC definitely was not, but it sort of feels... similar somehow? I can't really explain it.

Some things about the GML language are a bit odd, and sometimes it seems like people on the forums believe wrong things about it (I read more than one person complaining that you couldn't define your own functions, which is not correct, but the docs could be a lot clearer on that) But overall I'm happy enough with it.

I'm recreating a game I wrote in interpreted BASIC back in 1987 [1] and so far I've got the levels, basic player movement, simple enemy AI, and a very basic game loop. It's nothing fancy but I'm learning a lot so far.

[1] https://jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?p=282

Congrats on releasing the game! Great work!

I'm 49 and I have basically the same story you did... and also share the same secret dream to write games "one day", so I'm starting really small with a simple little 2D game in GameMaker Studio. So far it's slow going but super fun. But you've inspired me to keep going, so thanks!

EDIT: Purchased! Looking forward to playing it!

The publishing industry was disrupted by technology in 2007 when Amazon released the Kindle. It took a few years, but for a while, independent book authors were rivalling the "Big Five" publishers in terms of both sales volume and books sold.

Part of this was driven by the big publishers' response to indies: they raised the price of their own eBooks to protect their hardcover market. They even illegally colluded with each other, along with Apple, to force these higher prices across the industry.

But they were sued and lost, and the result was a lowering of big publisher eBook prices across the board. On the independent side, the problem was that too many people were publishing too many books. It was impossible to keep up, and there was no good system for finding the "best" independent authors, since tastes are so subjective and the vast majority of independent authors didn't have any money to spend on marketing anyway.

So that leads us to today, where the "Big Four" (trying to become the Big Three) still have access to their promotional machinery, which includes retail bookstores. There are a very few insanely successful independent authors, and a veeeeeery long tail of folks that have no way of getting noticed in the crowd.

Still, the sales volume of traditional publishing and independent publishing remains about equivalent even today (it's hard to get exact numbers because Amazon doesn't like giving them out, but apps like KindleSpy offer a broad estimate) It's just that the latter is spread out among many more authors.

I believe the case for micropayments was shot down back in 2002 when Scott McCloud first proposed it as an option for webcomic authors in his comic post "I Can't Stop Thinking" (the original no longer exists at his site, but various rebuttals [1] are still around)

Basically, people hate microtransactions. They hate the very idea of paying per article. They don't want to do it.

Ars, among many other sites, offers yearly subscriptions with various benefits (such as no ads) and that business model has worked well for them for many years.

[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/22/magic-its-what...

Kind of like this: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/05/07/the-fullness-o...