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If anybody wants to see how that entire creative process went, there's a "game" called "The Making of Karateka" on Steam that is a nice interactive experience telling the story of Jordan Mechner's start in the games industry and how Karateka came to be.

It's a fun media experience with a lot of playable prototypes.

Seems I'm not the only person doing something like this then.

Personally i started a "To Remember" playlist in about 2009 and have been adding every single track I've liked enough since to said playlist. By now its 4127 songs!

With the timestamps its a great way to relive past periods of my life, and also I can put it on shuffle and get the soundtrack of my life. Been a great boon in my life for a very long time.

Also, to keep track of albums I've listened to i keep a "Where I've Been" list where the first track of every album I've listened to in its entirety goes. Its a small way to fight the ephemerality of listening to an album in the digital environment.

I actually i scrolled through the entire list just two days ago and bathed in the memories, was fun to see all the places I had been and forgotten about.

I really do miss having a rack of CDs to let my eyes float over for the memories, and the digital "equivalent" is a brittle substitute, but it has enhanced my life in many ways so I've come to accept the tradeoff.

Research Paper (2024) : https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11446

December Assessment (2025) : https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Snow-Globe-Multi-Pl...

I got started on Duolingo back when it was still a "Help translate the world" app. I've always liked it for getting to dip my toes in a language and learn some basics whilst exploring the language myself through other methods, and I've shown my support of it by paying for Duolingo Super or whatever they're calling it for years on end whilst hopping on and off my language tracks.

But it's just so horrible now, constant gamification, attempts to pull me in with streaks and freezes and notifications and "did you know you can have us nag you even more"-breaks between the lessons I'm actually there for. It's gotten to the point where I'm just done because I've already paid for the service and i just want to be left alone to do the exercises, but they never let me get from one exercise to the next without having to go through at least two or three of those annoying "gamification and engagement" attempts.

mixcloud has been great for this for me. so many people post their mixes and their radio shows there that there is always something new to explore, and searching for something slightly off that i know i like leads to people using that in a mix so i know we're at least partly on the same wavelength when i start to listen. And then eventually you end up with a list of mixtape makers/DJ's/radio show hosts you trust which is cool, really feels like a world radio show at times.

One successful version of what you're asking about seems to be the Vermont based Front Porch Forum. They have gotten some press in the last year and there was this thread about them on hackernews a while back : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41208506

Whether they'd be receptive to share their secret sauce and let a thousand Front Porches bloom is another question though, guess you could ask them! :)

I just finished "Other Minds" by Godfrey-Smith which reference one of these "Octopolises". For anybody interested in either octopuses or how nature evolves different forms of consciousness its a really interesting read.

What most struck me was how incredibly short lived octopuses are. I guess some deep-sea variants may have longer life spans, but i was surprised that the variants we usually encounter only live for approximately two years before they wither and die.

Now as for what an octopus could be able to do with its body-distributed form of consciousness given a longer lifespan is a rather interesting question.

Microsoft as a whole pivoted hard from the PC as their preferred gaming platform to the XBOX as their preferred gaming platform. As for the whys at the time i assume they wanted to make sure that their console was competitive and didn't just die on launch. They probably also considered the PC gaming environment to be so healthy producer and publisher wise as to not find it worth their time to do in-house development for the platform anymore. As for MSFlightSimulator it didn't fit in the console portfolio at the time, mostly because of how those systems are usually interacted with, and also because the install of a basic global world mesh is huge. Good luck landing a 747 with functioning cockpit knobs with an XBOX controller, and say goodbye to the limited hard drive of a console when you have to install 70GB of world mesh to make it the global experience everybody expects. So making it a good cross-platform game on 2002-2015 tech would have been an exercise in making both console and PC gamers unsatisfied.

What you see now though is that MSFT is pushing really really hard into cross-platform play, and investing directly in gaming companies to make sure that the XBOX remains a competitor to the Playstation environment as Sony has been on a roll when it comes to impactful exclusive games for their platform for a while. Their latest E3 presentation really showcased just how much they consider this a priority, and how hard they are currently working to get their own environment of exclusive publishing houses with AAA games up to the standard of Sony. Due to the narrowing of the gap between high powered consoles and high powered PC's in the later years it makes sense that they would do this now as at this point they can offer a flight simulator experience across both platforms that is (hopefully) not only incrementally better, but transitionary better.

You can have that right now for both X-Plane and Prepar3d with a very well made addon called Active Sky by Hifi Simulation Technologies.

Hard to say with just a 1m30s preview video to go off, but if those visuals are the "basic" MSFS global graphics then they are quite impressive even compared to copy of P3D that has been modded out with global scenery from third party content providers. If i were to guess, its probably a technological leap instead of an increment, as they'd be disinterested in competing with the X-Plane and P3D install bases unless they knew they had something that was more than a sideways improvement. I would find it weird if they just try to be as good as the rest of the pack, at least.

As for your second question, you're right and wrong. Lockheed got the rights to further develop the old MSFS engine, and to rebrand it as P3D, but only for academic/professional simulation purposes. So they are not allowed to sell it as a game, only as a learning and simulation tool. Here are some of the reqs from the Academic License (60USD) EULA, whereamong you'll find this : (3) in connection with Academic Education, (4) by students, instructors and staff associated with Licensee's Academic Education, .., (6) for purposes other than personal/consumer entertainment. Point (6) also appears in the EULA of the Professional (200USD) license.

Though this has, AFAIK this has been done more for corporate legal reasons than for any desire to go after individual users. I've never heard of any revoked licenses on the above-mentioned grounds.

So Microsoft has always signaled that they consider MSFS a product still in their gaming portfolio. Though people learned to cope with the absence.

Always nice to see people rediscover John Brunner, he's one of my favorite authors. There's a quote i once heard that goes approximately like this : "Philip K Dicks novels turn into movies, John Brunners novels turn into reality".

Stand on Zanzibar was a real trip the first time i read it, though in later years my favorite Brunner novel has been Squares of the City. Its not as scifi-ey as Zanzibar, but it is interesting for being built on a famous chess game and for exploring the nature of propaganda and its influence on the body politic.

And honestly, deciding to write a book where the characters conform to the moves of an almost 100 year old chess game and pulling it off is just amazing.

From the omaha.com article on the subject it seems like there was a desire from Offett and an intent to put in greater flood-resistance infrastructure but it was stonewalled by questions about whether it was needed. So i guess the answer is in the realm of "some people knew and planned, but others tried to disregard both warnings and previous near-disaster floods."

https://www.omaha.com/news/military/one-third-of-offutt-unde...

All good.

To be honest it can be considered rooted in a problematic cross-relation between haphzard light drug use, social isolation, self-experimentation with sound in a centered environment and a highly curious reading list.

Definitely wasn't on my list of likely outcomes though....!

Its been ten years or so since the more active parts of this took place, but to try to answer your question.

For a period lasting one to two years, with residual activity several years after that, i had pretty much full on auditory alterations every day. As in, i would think a thought (ego-based, considered my own) and an interloper voice would respond usually with a counterpoint of some sorts. Now it would be easy to say that "oh my thats just your unconscious manifesting itself", but that breaks open whole new areas of inquiry as to just how you can have a part of your own brain break away into what is considered a non-ego aspect capable of perfect responses and behaviour/expression mimicry of all the people you know.

And in a way that is a rehash of an inquiry into the nature of dreams, as that is what happens there as well (barring some novel non-local verifiable explanation into the things one encounters there, but lets not go there just for the time being...), but interacting with it in a waking state fundamentally breaks an aspect of the individuals common human experience up to that point which makes it very difficult to deal with. Especially if its an antagonistic environment, which it was for me a lot of the time. (Granted, there were also a lot of really magical and mentally powerful moments, but it usually required a lot of strenous ego-counter-thought to get there.)

It can in no way compare to "thinking internally", it is at most times a very distinct non-self-ego ego expressing itself (for me it was in the voices of everybody i've ever known, but thats probably a YMMV thing). The thing is, its kind of hard to explain if you've lived in your own brain your whole life, because once you experience it ownership and privacy relating to your internal monologue disappears, so it alters something very basic about the pre-voice mentality most people have.

What the clinical distinction eventually ends up being is hard to say. Eventually we might have the tools needed to monitor brain and matter activity whilst also having the knowledge required to translate brain/matter activity into our experience as beings and vice versa, but we're not really there yet.

Wish i could write it up better, but thats at least a first person attempt.

In so far as what the brain could be without the strictures of society and its learned/forced behaviours, thats an interesting question that i hope no psychologist ever really goes too deep into trying to figure out. I guess parts of it can be deconstructed, if that is your cup of tea, and as long as that works for an individual then hey, thats pretty great.

What i find missing in most conceptual frameworks is a greater response to the raw constructive capacity of the human brain. Most inquiries into mental voice states (non-consciously controlled ones) deal not directly with the capacity of the brain for such activity, and its implications for phenomenology of being, but with it as an outlier to normal human function. Granted, the reason for this being that its what pays the bills, and i assume a lot of people don't want the hassle and can't really afford to spend time trying to figure it out. Thats perfectly reasonable.

As for the great phenomenology of mind/being/brain discussion, its good fun. I'm pretty much consigned to the fact that artifacts are what we have, and what we will forever work with. In my opinion the idea that the natural state is superior in matters of mind is as much an artifact of a particular social conception as all others. Often the conscious sabotages, often the unconscious does. Believing either to be naturally superior without any form of proper data sets relating to weighted choicemaking over an extensive period of time for multiple individuals is still just a statement of faith, regardless of how you assemble it. (And good luck finding the objective criteria on which judgements as to superiority of choices are concerned.)

Basically, its a tug of war between conscious and unconscious, and i think we should be glad that it is thus and not unnecessarily elevate one over the other. But hey, thats just like, my opinion man.

Thanks for both starting this thread here on hn, and this extra link. Its interesting to see how this functions as a field of study within academia, and its been ages since i last looked at what happens there.

I'm worried i might have overmade that statement a bit. One thing is what i can string myself along in believing in, and memories of the period is growing evermore hazy from year to year. Let me restate it as "the world becomes a weird place when they -seem- to go outside your acknowledged "knowns". Saying they did becomes, based on the manner in which i interpreted things/cues/input at the time, something i can't really say with any degree of certainty. Sorry about perhaps leading you on with my choice of words.

But that initial "boom" when you go from "i am me and i am here in my head" to "oh hey, i have an invisible counterplayer in here that is capable of manifesting itself as realistically behaving, voice-pitch-perfect impressions of all my friends and family, who proceed to harass/cajole/support me in a theatrical landscape choreographed with split-second focus on whatever it is my "i" express." Granted, this is also dream, but dream is too fragmented, and too prone to halt|flush|restart compared to four/six hour long internal conversations (with the occasional external auditory hallucination when fitting).

And then you get to live that for a few years, and its a mixture of exhilarating and scary as fuck. And you're forever left with a brain that you sometimes think of with the premonition "well, if you could do that, what other tricks do you have up yor sleeve".

You raise some points which i may have neglected a bit.

Allow me to elaborate a bit on the setting from which my experience came. This was in the later phases of my whole hallucinatory "wonderland", and i spent my time pretty much solely within the realms of classical music (early spotify binges, time to kill, and a tendency to not be able to shut my brain down in the evening.)

Now, the easiest way to describe it is probably to say that my dreamstates seeped over from my "dreaming" brain to my waking brain so that what should be relegated to the realm of dream became something i played with from an "i am awake and physically present and this is all in my mind, hopefully" (when i was in the thick of it the paranoia of the external sometimes asserted itself).

So there are plenty of stories about people who find songs they've never heard in their dreams, or do stuff like that. What is interesting is that when you're awake, conscious, and interactive in your thinking and music manifests itself you (or at least i) end up with a very brittle construction that you need to keep a special kind of mental focus on for it to keep unfolding. This mental focus also affords at least the semblance of control over instruments and moods.

So yes, once the "how does this make sense" part kicks in, you end up tuning your brain away from the music and the music stops, but with the right mental tricks you can

Also, from my experience there was never any active input querying, this was more or less independently manifested from my brain based on the input (really quite excessive amounts of classical music/sensory depravation/scrambling of the daynight wakesleep cycle) that i had exposed it to.

I hope that was reasonably focused and relevant.

I guess it goes parallell to another question i have. How is it possible for a brain without anything but pretty basic musical training to conjure up a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony. This was a place i occasionally ended up in the midst of all of the nightly mental hoolahoops i had to go through. (It would collapse on itself eventually, but still, the array of instruments and sounds was way more than i could ever make in my normal waking time).

It is basically the same question as "how does the brain conjure dream", i guess. But experienced from the awake state. And it just stays with you in a slightly different way when you experience it whilst awake.

I guess i'll never know.

Interesting article. Moreso for me as this is perhaps the one topic around here i have some first hand experience with.

That feeling is really really odd though. There's a moment when you go "wait, that's an apparently fully functioning consciousness that is capable of responding to my every thought, my brain/reality can DO THAT?". For me it took a long time to play off the many different possible solutions to that puzzle, and at the end of the day i settled for a mix of "currently unknown exactly how that is done" (sort of like consciousness itself, i guess) to "wow, reality sure does have some extra layers of "fun" i hadn't really been informed about.

If the voice(es) in any way confined themselves to the spectrum of being/knowledge that i as an individual acknowledged that i was in posession of, that would be one thing, but the world becomes a weird place when they go outside your acknowledged "knowns".

Now, i was lucky enough to have a very supportive and patient family that viewed it as something that could be managed outside of the realm of antipsychotic therapy. I'm not saying that handling it with prescribed drugs is necessarily a bad idea, if it works for you then i hope it continues to do so.

Sorry for the rant, but i was just reminded of how weird all of that stuff was to go through. Its been a while since i thought about it.