Friday Night’s All Right For Falling Off a Cliff

Friday link post with handsome Scotsmen being skeptical about nature documentaries, handsome nerds reminiscing about CompuServe, and handsome Italians touring beautiful Apple stores.

I’m a fan of Late Night with Seth Meyers and especially a fan of Ewan McGregor, but the above clip from an interview with McGregor about his work narrating nature documentaries is just the best. “Yeah, right!”

Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games series continues to be exceptional, and the entry about Trade Wars 2002 hit me with all kinds of nostalgia. I never actually played that game, and in fact I was never that active on BBSes, but I was way into CompuServe, GEnie, and later, QuantumLink, and the potential energy in text-based games over a phone line just can’t be overstated. I wish I could explain exactly how this all-caps paragraph:

EACH OF YOU IS THE CAPTAIN OF TWO INTERSTELLAR TRADING SHIPS. YOU WILL TRAVEL FROM STAR SYSTEM TO STAR SYSTEM, BUYING AND SELLING MERCHANDISE. IF YOU DRIVE A GOOD BARGAIN YOU CAN MAKE LARGE PROFITS.

hits me harder even than when I first put on a VR headset running Elite Dangerous.

Finally for this week, Frederico Viticci and Silvia Gatta’s tour of the new Apple store in Rome, a restoration of a historic building on the Via del Corso, is stunning. Just imagine what wonderful things Epic Games would be able to do with that kind of money!