Interactive fiction and more – This Geek in Review for 21 December 2018

A huge genre of videogames in the 80s and early 90s was the text adventure. Because there were memory and graphic limits on the machines available at the time, the interactive text adventures took a page out of books, and used words to describe the world in the game. These were more than just books, you would have to interact with the objects and characters in the game. It’s kind of like the Choose your own adventure books, but with a lot more interaction. Although text adventures are not commericially viable anymore, they are still being created. A new one called Cragne Manor’ has been released, the culmination of TK of people who worked on the game.

Infocom was huge in the interactive text adventure world, but that didn’t stop other companies from also being successful. Leisure Suit Larry started out as a more adult text adventure, one where your goal was to beโ€ฆ shall I say, “successful” with three of the women in the game. One of the programmers found his backup copy of the source code to some of the Leisure Suit Larry games and attempted to auction it off. Companies don’t really like that, and unfortunately, the auction has been pulled.

Final proof that Die Hard is a Christmas movie

What do you need to go with that ugly Christmas sweater? What about some ugly Christmas shoes

Fortnite, from Epic Games, is a cultural phenomenom, and that in and of itself invites lawsuits. In the game, players can buy emotes, which are dancing that the player’s character can perform during the game. Epic Games is now being sued by Rapper 2 Milly for stealing his dance. Donald Faison, Turk from the TV show Scrubs is also ticked. The default emote in Fortnite is one that he created. Even the Carlton isn’t safe. No one know where this will end up since short dance steps and moves are not copyrightable.

Did you feel an earthquake last week because Microsoft confirmed that its Edge browser is going to be based on Chromium. Every browser has an engine underneath that powers it. This engine interprets the code for a website, and then displays the website. Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is more than one way to display a website. In the beginning we had Netscape Navigator, and currently we have Chromium, Gecko, EdgeHTML, and Webkit. Chromium is the most popular, used by Google’s Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, and a host of other browsers. Gecko is used by Mozilla’s Firefox. Microsoft currently used EdgeHTML with their edge browser, and Apple uses Webkit in the Safari browser on macOS and iOS. Techies are concerned that we are entering an online world of Chromium.

Buffy Summers’ birthday is coming up on January 19th, which prompted the question, How much time do I need to watch the entire Buffy series? Well, like all things on the internet there is a site for that. BingeClock will let you know how long it will take you to watch that TV series that you just haven’t had time to get around to watching.

KFC has some of the most ingenius marketing ads. Whether it is using their Twitter account or sending chicken in to space, KFC is always looking for something that makes them stand out. The newest? A Fire Log that smells like KFC.

Finally, in the I didn’t know this was a problem category we come to K-Swiss selling shoes for E-Sports gamers. Is foot temperature really an issue?

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