Notices by 獣耳会社ｗａｎ (wan@wolfgirl.bar)

@snappler @jerkdouglas After watching these things at work across a few disciplines, I can only describe them as dangerously overconfident and shamelessly ass-kissing midwit undergrads with a disturbing tendency to slip in... spiritually questionable elements.

@rher A small example, from Chris, C. (1992). A Grain of Sand, A Gust of Wind. The Journal of Computer Game Design, 5(3). https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/jcgd-volume-5/a-grain-of-sand-a-gust-of.html

Nasir Gebelli picked up where Bob Bishop left off. Nasir developed advanced graphics techniques for the Apple II. He was fast and prolific, grinding out game after game on a time scale of months. An entire publisher, Sirius Software, was founded on Nasir’s output. And what output it was! Nasir had developed dozens of tricks for squeezing the fastest animations out of the Apple. His games boasted fast, full-screen animations that nobody else could match. He raked in the royalties; wealth was his in a matter of months. His games were on every store shelf; they were reviewed in glowing terms in every magazine. Nasir Gebelli was a one-man gold mine. A game need merely have the simple tag line “By Nasir” to be assured of massive sales figures.

And then, a grain of sand, a gust of wind, and Nasir Gebelli was gone. Sometime around 1983 or 1984, in the general collapse of the games industry and the specific collapse of Sirius software, Nasir Gebelli disappeared from the scene. I don’t know where he is now.

That Crawford didn't know where Nasir Gebelli had gone was understandable, for he'd headed to Japan where a mutual friend of his managed to help him get a job with a troubled game development company developing software for an ultimately doomed add-on device. Nasir's only credits between his departure from "the scene" mentioned and the date of this article's publication are on obscure NES titles like 1987's Final Fantasy.

@rher @MK2boogaloo a.k.a. a slant

I haven't read the case in detail, but if I had to hope why Alsup included that aside, I'd prefer it be there because one or more of the plaintiffs argued it suspicious that, if Anthropic was just going to scan and destroy the books anyway, they didn't just negotiate to directly purchase a digital copy in the first place. But, it's more likely that it followed on from his citing the contrast of Napster against Sony Betamax and Google. Oh well.

The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly.
—George Orwell, "Rudyard Kipling"