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The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog
- h2odragon 7y agoPeople make good points about how digital media is ephemeral (many then go on to assure us that this will lead to the Fall of Civilization). Then there's delightful efforts like this. This example gives me faith that the important things will be copied and recopied as necessary, and the ephemeral things that are lost might not be all that lost.
- xfitm3 7y agoThe slippery slope is the definition of important.
- h2odragon 7y agoA definition of important is "what people feel is worth recopying". Always been that way hasn't it?
- criddell 7y ago> People make good points about how digital media is ephemeral I wonder what will happen to all of the digital-only movies and tv shows being made today. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and others are all making stuff that you can't buy on physical media and so if they decide that something shouldn't be available anymore, then it won't be.
- cosmodisk 7y agoThey will eventually disappear. Even though all of them are heavily pirated, they don't stay on people's hard drives for ever. The metadata about them may actually stay alive longer, i.e. IMDB, fan forums,etc.
- vipref 7y ago> I wonder what will happen to all of the digital-only movies and tv shows being made today Why do you feel digital media can't be preserved? There are DVD renditions of old media. Cassettes were popular at one time only to be supplanted by newer technologies and it will be the same for current media formats. To cite an example, I used to listen to cassette music while growing up and was hugely fond of them (Walkman, anybody?) That was then supplanted by digital mp3 players, and now streaming over the internet. If something is worth preserving, newer technology will make sure it is! That is just my opinion for you.
- reaperducer 7y agoThere are DVD renditions of old media. Cassettes were popular at one time only to be supplanted by newer technologies and it will be the same for current media formats. There are thousands (at least) of movies that existed on VHS that never made it to DVD, or streaming. They have effectively been lost. The same is true for audio. Lots of records never made the transition to cassettes. Lots of cassettes never made it to CD. Lots of CD's never made it to digital. Just this morning I remembered a song I used to like a lot as a teen-ager. I looked for it on Amazon, iTunes, all of the streaming services, and it no longer exists. A general Googling shows there are plenty of re-makes by other artists years later. I managed to find one copy of the vinyl single on fleaBay, so I bought it. But effectively, this song no longer exists for the rest of the world. These things will happen to digital, too, when we move on to whatever is next.
- wellpast 7y agoIs IPFS the answer to this?
- brokenmachine 7y agoMaybe? Someone still needs to host the data. I often see IPFS brought up in this context, but it's not a panacea.
- techslave 7y ago> I believe that the historical value of these documents to the IF community outweighs the rights of the legal owner. I couldn’t agree less.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- techslave 7y agodownvotes? laughable. i guess it’s also fine if texas steals copyright and can’t be touched because “sovereign”. it’s the same justification here. don’t worry about copyright because “history”. thievery plain and simple.
- tedshroyer 7y agocurl https://eblong.com/infocom/ | grep href | grep -v http | cut -d '"' -f2 | awk '{print "curl -O https://eblong.com/infocom/" $0}' | bash -x
- m463 7y agothat is very clever. I usually do these sorts of things in a loop, sometimes like: <something> | while read f do sleep 10 <do-something-with> "$f" done
- brokenmachine 7y agoBetter make sure there's no spaces in that <something> or that will break. I usually use this: <something> | tr '\n' '\000' | xargs -0 -n1 command The tr will convert newlines to nulls. Otherwise you need to change the IFS. Just commenting because this was a bugbear of mine when getting started in bash.
- tzakrajs 7y agowget has a recursive mode which is perfect for archival
- dmolony 7y agoWill this overwrite files that have the same name but are in different directories?
- tedshroyer 7y agoI think it would overwrite, but it seems like all the names were unique
- feydaykyn 7y agoThere's a great podcast about infocom games which is very funny to listen to even if you don't know/play the games (that's my case) http://monsterfeet.com/grue/ http://monsterfeet.com/grue/ Eaten By A Grue, the Infocom podcast A podcast about Infocom games, text adventures, and interactive fiction Hosted by Kevin Savetz and Carrington Vanston.
- andrewstuart 7y agoIt would be great if this was on github - individual sites like this disappear and the history is lost.
- m463 7y agooh how wonderful... this led to another site: http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html which had the original vax/vms Dungeon (zork) that I played when young. It actually referenced MEMQ like I remember: <DEFINE FEEL-FREE (LOSER) <TELL "FEEL FREE, CHOMPER!"> <MEMQ ...... The rest is, alas, unintelligible (as were the implementers).
- glangdale 7y agoIt's not obsessively complete until they have Cornerstone - the database software that the whole company was actually meant to be about (weird, but true).