Those who do not learn from history are stupid
Happy 28th birthday to my first domain, moshplant.com. The web site is mostly shuttered, though there’s still searchable material on there, some Macromedia/Adobe Director-related stuff, the couple of issues of Plant’s Review of Books I managed to pull out of Quark XPress before the Syquest and DAT tape drives broke down. It’s still my email domain, though, and the hub through which I run my empire.
On the DIRECT-L listserv (yes, it still exists!). the talk of the past week has been how to do a Shockwave for Director emulator in JavaScript.
The invaluable Valentin Schmidt, has something amazing.
Here a funny solution, but it really works:
It’s a 68k mac emulator ported to JS that loads a minimal System 8 (15
MB) and then immediately plays a DCR, in this case it’s the guided tour
that came with Director 4.0. You might have to click into the browser
window to enable sound.
It was one of the great honors of my temporary life as a Macromedia Director semi-celebrity to meet up with folks from the community when I traveled. When Barbara and I got to Amsterdam, Mark Reijnders, Lucas Meijer, Mark Hagers, and P¡m all showed up at the Amstelhoeck, coming from across the country, just for our own little Director convention. You can see Mark R. is wearing his Director Online t-shirt (I was editor at the time). Lucas, had put on an impressive show of 3D content at the Shockwave 3D launch in NYC a couple of months earlier, and has gone on to be a driving force at Unity.
In response to my post about a thread containing lots of yummy pre-Web hyper content, Alan Levine responds:
Back at the house in Arizona I have a virgin set of Hypercard 1.1 floppies circa 1987. To use them you will need a Mac Plus, SE, or Mac II, and at least 1 MB of RAM. Make sure you are running System 3.2 or later.
Several years back, Rob Ford of the FWA contacted me to ask some questions about my minor role in the history of online multimedia for a book he had been working on. I was both flattered and flabbergasted. Like so many labors of love, there have been a number of deadlines that came and went for the project’s release, but apparently Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990–Today (Taschen) has finally reached gestation, and Phillip Kerman caught a glimpse of my first book’s cover in Rob’s unpacking video, posted on his Amazon author page.
I know I haven’t been particularly active on Adobe Support forums in recent years, but I have been using Adobe products since Illustrator 0.88, when I was at Reed College and it was in beta release more than thirty years ago. I’ve had an account on the Adobe site for probably close to two decades, and I authored multiple books on two of the products they acquired from Macromedia.
Congratulations moshplant !
As the result of your contributions to the community, you have earned a new rank.
Your new rank is New Here .
From Ron Bearry, on a Director email list (yes, there still is one!), a piece of history.
I also still have this case, out in the garage. I think there are a couple of SCSI cables in it.
More than fifteen years ago, while I was trying to learn new skills to supplant my knowledge of Director and Flash, I set out to pick up PHP and SQL by writing my own system for posting stuff on the internet, on my own domain, on my own server.
That effort didn’t exactly pay off—I spent most of the intervening years un- or underemployed—it didn’t make me a PHP/SQL savant, and by 2010 I was using WordPress to run my other blog, Mutant Poker. In the meantime, I posted a lot of political and general interest stuff here that I thought was interesting, but the system I wrote made more investment of time in it just seem counterproductive.
I’ve finally taken the time (not so much as I thought it would take) to convert the hand-built system to WordPress, figure out how to redirect all (well most) of the URLs, and get my act together, so: ta-dah! Welcome to darrelplant.com 2.0.
It was two years ago today on a Friday before a holiday weekend just after a major iOS release that I made my splash on the iPhone app scene with Bedeviled: The Most Diabolical Sliding Puzzle Ever. A splash, followed by a quick sink to the bottom and my usual discouragement with new ventures that don’t pan out.
Making the most of the Supreme Court striking down California’s ban on the sale of violent video games to minors, one of the proponents of the ban picks the right metaphor to show how the message of peace wins even with the reversal:
“I think we definitely hit the industry over the head with a 2-by-4,” said James Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, a leading kids and media organization in the United States.