Detailed image description

A screenshot of the online service Prodigy. There is vector art of an eye looking through a magnifying glass, and a spotlight graphic on the banner ad below.

Text reads:

Games: Where In The World Is CARMEN SANDIEGO?

1. THIS WEEK'S CAPER: The Case of the Missing Mummy
2. Last week's winners
3. The Acme Detective Agency Honor Roll
4. About Carmen Sandiego

© Borderbund Software 1986.

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PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE OR M FOR MENU

Recently I've been thinking about how Prodigy used to have banner ads at the bottom of most pages. This was actually INCREDIBLY futuristic for the time. The web was just barely a thing. Most people would still have been using Prodigy's client for MS-DOS at the time. The only reason it even looks as good as it does in the screenshot above is because they were using clever vector graphics techniques to deliver as little information over dialup as possible -- the same techniques that made early Sierra games possible.

A thing that is probably forever going to haunt me is that I have vivid memories of playing what was, in retrospect, almost certainly Mystery House — yes, that Mystery House, the game that gave rise to Sierra On-Line and the entire graphical adventure game genre — on a school computer in elementary school, but because it was so long ago, and my mind has filled in so many blanks over the years, actual screenshots of the game look almost unrecognizable to me.

Target: hey we’re having a sale on final fantasy art books

Past me: oh hell yeah I love final fantasy

[2 days later]

Target: here is your incredibly heavy box

Present me, trying not to trip over my doorstep: why would you do this to me

Remember, if you find some small flaw in your pull request, leave it in, lest your reviewers are motivated to find fault elsewhere.

Why did Jurassic Park have such a banger soundtrack? It didn’t need to. We all would have loved it anyway; it had dinosaurs.

It’s always so funny to me when artists I follow release new albums on Bandcamp Friday. Like, I absolutely get why they do that, and I’m sure it’s great stuff, but I’m already methodically going through my queue of albums I added to my wishlist over the past month and buying them in carefully timed intervals so as to not confuse the credit card company with a dozen Bandcamp transactions at once. I’ll put you on the list but the soonest I can fit you in is next Bandcamp Friday.

(Yes, I know it’s possible to buy music from Bandcamp on other days of the month, and in fact I was buying music from them daily for a while, but I lost my enthusiasm for that when they were acquired by Epic.)

Thinking about the weird quasi-false cognate status of the words azure (English) and aozora (Japanese). They look alike, right? It’s not just me. And they both refer to blue skies or at least the color of a blue sky.

Anyway, these two words aren’t related at all. The Japanese word has a really straightforward construction and I assume etymology. It’s literally just 青 “blue” + 空 “sky”. Standard readings on both kanji.

The English etymology is wild though. It’s Yet Another loan word from Arabic, but it’s so old that it doesn’t have the “al-“ prefix that’s a tell of more modern loan words like algebra:

Middle English (denoting a blue dye): from Old French asur, azur, from medieval Latin azzurum, azolum, from Arabic al ‘the’ + lāzaward (from Persian lāžward ‘lapis lazuli’).

(Also check out how that leading L got dropped because it was grouped together with the L in al! It’s like how “a napron” became “an apron”.)

By the way, there are a few actual loanwords from Japanese in English beyond the obvious ones like sushi or haiku. The one I always think of is honcho.

A fun thing I’ve started to do when I’m on my own: Every time a piece of technology does something infuriating like interpret a stray gesture as a request to pop up a modal dialogue, I’ll yell NO in exactly the same tone as a disapproving toddler.

If anyone would like to feel better about their own technical skill, it took me months of occasionally playing FFXI and thinking I know this is a 20 year old game but it looks like it was rendered on an N64 before realizing today I’d set the game resolution lower than the window it was playing in.