textfiles

Seconded.

Here is a citation in 1981 describing the game and absolutely not related to the term "odd".

https://archive.org/details/BAR_19810115?q=%22Smear+the+Quee...

I think there's been a discussed theory that if something gets public attention, and people respond to it, even if they're not intending to, that they're contributing to the promotion of that item. That goes back many decades.

I don't mind that discussion but I definitely don't want people thinking in any way we got money to write the entry; we simply put into a formal entry that we've had this for a while. A popular awareness of something we do helps a non-profit, so we'll clarify the context of it. I think we're both in agreement the more people know of our work, the better.

Actually, no. We had GayBlade up and emulated earlier this year, completely unaware of the documentary. Causal chain is actually: People working with Ryan Best to tell his story at something called RAINBOW ARCADE, the world’s first exhibition on LGBTQIA* video game history at Schwules Museum Berlin. This includes multiple groups of people and museums. That's early 2019.

During that point, the story of GayBlade and Ryan Best become known to the HIGH SCORE production team, and Best is interviewed for it and his story told.

Late 2019, Best discovers some original materials and they are used to recover the game.

Early 2020, Internet Archive hosts a copy of the game emulated, and LGTBQ Game Archive does an extensive writeup on the game.

Mid 2020, HIGH SCORE is presented to Netflix, and a card is inserted into the documentary to indicate it was found. (I'm finding not many people have seen the card.)

Well, as you saw, someone brought up "Death of The Author" (i.e. I may not even know I'm posting an ad) so there's that.

But.

The blog post is 100% posted because of the Netflix documentary. It's causing literally hundreds of people to go 'Now I hope they found GayBlade! How do we find it!' and also a screenshot of my twitter account (which I had nothing to do with and became aware of after people starting pinging me) is in it.

The GayBlade stuff went up in January and was announced at that time, by the LGTBQ Game Archive (this was mostly their gig, the whole project to find and recover it).

Internally, our social media and outreach folk went "Hey, did you see we're getting mentioned a lot as people find GayBlade on the archive? We should do a blog entry about it." I was hesitant for the reasons people here seem to bringing up, i.e. cynicism that we must be doing it for money or something. But the fact is: we did it, we worked with Ryan Best and Strong Museum and LGBTQ Game Archive to make Gayblade playable (and also downloadable, when I realized nobody had taken that step). So why NOT talk about it, in case people missed it?

(It was also easier to point to the blog entry than endlessly tweet at people asking.)

There you go. Thanks for the trust.

Thanks for enjoying the article, everyone.

I have a reaction when we've got years (and years and years) of this and someone says "well, they're fighting about it on Wikipedia" like that means a single darn thing.

Glad you like the stuff; always up for people having the specific link.

I'm going to trust the family over Wikipedia.

It's your phone. There's a zoom function. This is a very large book and a larger screen than a phone is needed.

If you have bandwidth to share but not cash, use the bandwidth to promote sending cash to the archive. :)

Without going too much into it (not my place) it exists.

Well, obviously, a sneaky bot is a sneaky sneak and acts like a person. But conversely, people act in a way that could be like a bot if anyone casually looked at them - mass downloads, no theme or meaning to content. In general, however, it's all pretty much people. Millions of people a day.

We don't save logs of who hits us, but we watch who hits us. It's not bots. But good thinking.

Nope, retired.

Let's not assume everyone had a great time with me because that will fall apart very quickly.

I appreciate when someone young or curious reaches out to me for context or questions because I did that throughout my life and I always appreciated when it was rewarded with a response. I try to be the person I always hoped was on the other side.

finger guns

All are welcome, enjoy the site.

Yes, there are a number of warehouses with millions of books in boxes, indexed down to the book (hence the metadata of a book has a physical location in it).

Give us time; things are popping up always around here.

What a lot of people think of as "Jason Scott" is the result of hundreds of people working at/with the Internet Archive, hundreds more volunteering effort and resources at Archive Team, and dozens of great contributors to the stacks/collections of TEXTFILES.COM.

I am a very pretty and flamboyant figure standing at the front of a literal army of real contributors to taking online history seriously and making it both available and accessible to future generations.

That's not what happened here. You're making huge leaps of logic, and while we might do a takedown, we will not "modify" a capture to satisfy a third party.

It is not the pineapple fund, although it has been a lovely time working with them. Regardless of the cryptocurrency discussion, the fact that someone who feels some sort of windfall would immediately have an urge to share it with organizations that need it is laudable.

I try. But I'll never be the true Kibo.

(We went to college together, though. Worked on the same humor magazine and everything.)

The derivations are auto generated for easier access by various clients. In the metadata, they are marked as original versus not original for later discernment and perhaps rerendering.

Yee-haw.

Entirely incorrigible.

I'll accept that.

Jason Scott here. Just want to mention that if you see any games with over 50 views in the collection, it usually means the game was around previously, but not working and was taken out of circulation, and now the configuration to make it work within the Internet Archive system was complete and it's ready. I also used it as an indication of what people were looking for.

I am carefully enunciating the words that will undo the locks on the key to the universe.

I'm working on one, but there isn't one as such, no.