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Foreign galaxy merging with Milky Way!
Two weeks ago I wrote a piece about the imminent death of Asheron’s Call 2, the online world. On Dec. 30, the game was shut down — and winked out of existence. Ellen Ripley, a longtime resident of the world, showed up for the grand finale and recorded screenshots and the dialogue as the end times approached. My favorite parts? The totally surreal warnings from that flashed onscreen — “This world will be shutting down in 1 minute. Please log out” — and the banter of the remaining residents, which mixes deeply heartfelt good-byes with howls of anguish and nerdcore quotings of The Lord of the Rings and Douglas Adams’ ouevre:
Ctf: so long and thx fer all the FISH!
Mona Lee: so sad”
Royer: thanks for all the pulls jorgen :)
Ch’Tau Pei: bye all
Alty: thanks all, goodbye
Aken-Lotus: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”
Royer: peace
Bodo: bye :
That picture above shows people vanishing into the aether as the server finally shuts down.
(Thanks to Ellen Ripley for this one!)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
» see all of my photos on Flickr
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A long German word for "noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history"
