> [...] because interactive and non-interactive forms of storytelling have different narrative needs and require different approaches.
Which can be blended and remixed successfully. The follow-up, Prophecy, is a clear testament to that (while another family member, The Darkening, was a total disaster). The only reason Wing Commander IV feels rough around the edges is because of the still immature emergent multimedia technology, some problematic game mechanics, and related design as well as narrative choices.
> When I posted a notice of his death on Bluesky, Shane McKee, a consultant in genetic medicine in Northern Ireland, responded: “I'm still using my Psion Series 5mx daily.”
Psion's little marvels were (and in some instances still are) the backbone of many outfits in my industry, especially smaller ones.
> And that can be a problem. Especially in a city like, say, Vienna, where people just do not check before they cross some of these little cosy streets.
And not just that: Street's full of smombies, already keeping in mind that the situation awareness of the average pedestrian is a joke to begin with.
Also... mopeds and scooters are not a problem here in big-city Europe, they blend virtually completely into the vehicle hum, with two notable outliers: a) asshole mods, and b) the odd classic, two-stroke sewing machine. But even then, there's many other vehicles much louder than scooters. In the countryside they might be more of burden, for obvious reasons.
> "Of course, none of the airplanes you listed are still flying passengers today."
The Il-62 and the Tu-154 are still in limited service, for example. Not that it does your pseudoargument any favors anyway, as service history plays obviously absolutely no role in evaluating a design purely on its visual accumen.
> "You just seem to have a fetish for aircraft with fully or partially rear-mounted engines."
Hey, what can I say? I'm more of an ass man.
> "Sitting next to those big engines would suck, especially after reading on multiple accidents where they exploded and killed or nearly killed everyone onboard."
I fail to see what this has to do with visual aesthetics, but the safety record of the 747 was not so hot; already excluding the malaise brought on by the fetishes of terrorists and the Evil Empire, of course.
So or so, Bogost's statement is akin to describing the Amiga 500 as the only beautiful home computer. And that's obviously ridiculous. As for your statement, nah, I won't have to search very long for people agreeing with me on many of the aircraft listed; whole coffee table tomes have been published specifically dealing with the subject of Soviet, French and British classic, especially narrow-body, airliners.
> "Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease."
Somewhat mirrors my experience with all those rubbish non-PDF formats for digital document publishing, e. g. ePub: Often terminally ugly and utterly useless on top of it (not properly citeable, et cetera).
Funnily enough, he spoke about one of his first "agentic computing" implementations: a computer agent of his he tasked with compiling a sort of newspaper for breakfast reading. It ran overnight for 12 to 15 hrs., and collated textual as well as graphical information from specified news resources and databases. That was ten years before the interview, in 1980. Sadly, the piece doesn't go into more detail on the setup or its performance metrics.
He also mentioned that the idea of agentic computing was already 30 years old, and that he was busying himself with the topic for 15 years by then (1990). So... five years from taking interest (mid-70s) to his first practical implementations (1980).
Yeah, just a week ago I read an interview with Alan Kay from 1990, where he shared his thoughts about the third revolution in computing: the "intimate computer" (the agentic platform that follows the "institutional computer" and the "personal computer").
> "Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?"
My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).
What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.
> "I think, realistically, the issues the author describes - particularly with the keyboard and trackpad - would drive me up the wall for any kind of serious use."
Me too. But the tray table compatibility resonates. I had hoped someone would build a modern netbook as a detachable focused on productivity and light gaming (say, Steamdeck class), maintainability and (modular) expandability; a modern road warrior that's also a nice hobbyist machine that stands some abuse. Framework was/is positioned to put something out, but they decided to release the F-12 instead.