Great essay! I have never played WH40k but have been quite into Magic the Gathering at times.
Before I started playing I asked a friend what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards (even in the 90s this would have been possible)
I understood how silly that question was when I felt the pleasure of actually owning a high quality product. Sure, I could spend the time to make my own cards but playing the game is only part of the fun.
Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.
It’s a good question though! I got into Lorcana in 2024 and spent way too much money. I became curious about the $3 “reproductions” for $50 cards on AliExpress and ordered a few, while having matching copies I had pulled myself from packs, so I knew mine were authentic.
I was shocked that even under a jeweler’s loupe, I could tell no difference. Even the microscopic ink patterns were identical, except for the very rare editions of cards that use a special holographic print (called “Enchanted” cards, which are fancier alt art prints of cards, but those have a regular equivalent for gameplay purposes in all cases). It was all just worthless paper at the point.
This “broke the spell” for me, so to speak, and I quit playing. Soon after, I’m guessing everyone else realized this too, or, more likely, were buying the same cards at full price without realizing their provenance, and card prices tanked substantially. I also quit playing because it took up a lot of time and I rediscovered why I stopped playing Magic competitively. I’m an extremely sore loser and when I get into a hobby I play to win, to the point of obsession.
I thought EDH would satisfy my casual interest in MTG. But it ended up being worse than competitive play because of politics, vague deck building restrictions for balance(brackets) and difficult to organize people to play.
I settled into boardgames(especially solo boardgames) last year to satisfy that itch.
EDH was so bizarre to someone who played Magic in 2003 or so, like “wait I need to care about my opponents feelings and if they’re having a good time? Why would I do that?”
I also went away from competitive scenes and found D&D suits me much better.
I see at least 2 reasons why we don't see proxy play in MTG.
One is the strong dependence on your peers for approval. If your group is against proxies, then you are screwed.
Second is that there are now more ways to play against each other online for free. This approach is much more convenient compared to creating proxies IRL and allows you to play with other people outside your peer group.
> Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.
I guess there really is some kind of "hacker-type" personality who does spend a lot on some things, but these things are typically "not very proprietary", i.e. not things where the producing company enforced the copyright and trademarks heavily, and "highly modifiable". So I guess to such people the question "what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards" is not absurd, but to fans of WH4k or MtG it is: because of their very different product tastes.
I started by finding my own blog and scrolling north, south, east, and west to see my neighbours. I’ve already found several interesting sites and a new person to follow on mastodon.
It’s a shame there doesn’t seem to be any way to link to a particular position on the map but great stuff nevertheless.
Cassettes were never the best for audio fidelity but I always really liked the physicality of pushing the play button to move the heads into position. In some ways the inability to easily skip around a recording made listening a different experience than a CD or streaming.
Which is why I wrote a web component[0] that wraps an html audio element in an interface that mimics a (cheap) tape player.
I remember when IA-64 was going to be the next big thing and being utterly baffled when the instruction set was made public. Even if you could somehow ship code that efficiently used the weird instruction bundles, there was no indication that future IA-64 CPUs would have the same limits for instruction grouping.
It did make a tiny bit of sense at the time. Java was ascendant and I think Intel assumed that JIT compiled languages were going to dominate the new century and that a really good compiler could unlock performance. It was not to be.
EPIC development at HP started in 01989, and the Intel collaboration was publicly announced in 01994. The planned ship date for Merced, the first Itanic, was 01998, and it was first floorplanned in 01996, the year Java was announced. Merced finally taped out in July 01999, three months after the first JIT option for the JVM shipped. Nobody was assuming that JIT compiled languages were going to dominate the new century at that time, although there were some promising signs from Self and Strongtalk that maybe they could be half as fast as C.
By the time IA-64 actually got close to shipping Intel was certainly talking about JIT being a factor in its success. At least that was mentioned in the marketing guff they were putting out.
You mean, in 01999? I'd have to see that, because my recollection of that time is that JIT was generally considered unproven (and Java slow). That was 9 years before Chrome shipped the first JavaScript JIT, for example. The only existing commercial products using JIT were Smalltalk implementations like VisualAge, which were also slow. Even HP's "Dynamo" research prototype paper wasn't published until 02000.
Wikipedia tells me that Merced shipped in May 2001, which matches my recollection of not actually seeing a manufacturer’s sample until about then. That box was the largest computer I had ever seen and had so many fans it sounded like an engine. It was also significantly slower than the cheap x86 clones we had on own desks at running general purpose software.
JIT compilation was available before but became the default in Java1.3, released a year earlier to incredible hype.
Also back then the hype was more important than the reality in many cases. The JIT hype was everywhere and reached a “of course everyone will use it” kind of like AI is at right now.
This is the only "advantage" I can see with space-based datacenters. Crypto will remain a joke but putting devices beyond the reach of ground-based jurisdictions is a libertarian dream. It will probably fail - you still need plenty of ground infrastructure.
If there is one thing I have learned in my years in the internet it’s that there is no minimum reward below which people won’t bother to be dicks.
Farming karma on HN to boost stories seems the most likeliest reason for this - an enterprise which would maybe net 3 figures in advertising dollars. But also it could just be someone wasting everyone’s time for fun - who knows?
The actual plots of Space1999 were pretty laughable but I don’t think the production design has ever been beaten, even it today’s shows. The sets and vehicles look fully functional, even the clothes look perfectly wearable despite being very 70s. Contrast this with Star Trek, with weird consoles and uniforms that look uncomfortable.
The theme is, of course, beyond reproach. I like to imagine the producers couldn’t decide between epic sci-fi chords, funk, and jangly surf guitar so the composer just said screw it and did all three.
The first sesason was solid for its time, a sort of twilight zone in space, or even a more fantastical take on Star Trek. It was less about an overarching plot or consistency or being based on a set of strict rules and more about exploring various themes, such as humans in the face of certain death. Nothing groundbreaking but the production and the actors make it work (some of them anyway - sorry, Barbara Bain is about as convincing as a piece of plywood).
Dragon's Domain has been living rent-free in my head for over two decades now even if I'm acutely aware how silly is the premise.
Long time Space:1999 fan here. I've been thinking about this a lot over the years and I agree with you; the show is best looked at as The Twilight Zone in Space. Well - first season anyway. You REALLY have to pick through the dung of second season to find a few "well, that bit was alright" moments.
I think the show worked best when it was a review of variations of loneliness.
* Dragon's Domain - Tony Cellini is burdened by the loneliness of a demon no one else sees.
* Guardian of Piri - John Koenig is surrounded by the best of the best in his senior staff. But under the "spell" of the Guardian, he has disagree with all of them and make some very lonely decisions.
* Voyager's Return - Ernst Queller is burdened by the memory of his mistake many years ago with development (and many deaths) of the Queller Drive. And it comes back to haunt him in real life, not just his imagination.
* End of Eternity - The alien Balor shows us that immortality could be the ultimate form of loneliness.
The plots are also extremely illogical and incoherent. I think though the greatest failure is in character development.
Rewatching it recently I felt like it was a drama about a really bad boss. Martin Landau's character is a terrible leader: shouty, over emotional, inclined to sudden bouts of despair, micromanaging.
It's obviously a great pity because as everyone agrees it's a beautiful show with a top notch theme.
> The actual plots of Space1999 were pretty laughable
And sooooo slooooooooow.
Given the fact that is was such an expensive (for the time) show, I really, really want to know how it is that they couldn't cough up for a writer that could produce something engaging rather than completely forgettable.
I mean it's not like SciFi was new at that point. Flash Gordon, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, etc. were more than a decade old and even Star Trek was more than 5 years old.
reply