I’ll say what this means to me

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mapstalgia: Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM), Caverns of Chaos, by Paweł Marczewski. Main dungeon of my favorite roguelike game. I spent hundreds of hours in these dungeons. They are procedurally generated and look different each time, but there always is roughly the same set of special rooms and features. I drew the map a year or two after I last played the game, so the order of rooms is probably wrong in some places, but otherwise, the memories are still vivid. The map may be a little hard to understand for someone who hasn’t played the game - roguelikes are about “killing letters to collect punctuation”, so I would have to tell you that all these ‘P’s are animated trees I managed to make angry this one time, ‘&’s signify fierce demons that killed many a good adventurer, that room with ‘+’s is a graveyard full of undead, the lone ‘f’ is a Cat Lord that will attack you if you are foolish enough to kill a feline during the game (and if you’re careful enough not to, will give you a fabulous reward). There are five elemental temples, caves full of static electricity (and dragons), ancient dwarven town and even a casino. [Josh says: awesome seeing roguelikes getting some love.  There’s a really great Nethack map coming up in a few days as well.] Oh, this game, this game. ADOM is the only roguelike I’ve ever invested a serious amount of time into, and I’ve never made it even close to the end — I only recognize about a third of this map, and getting to that third was itself an accomplishment I’m happy with.

mapstalgia:

Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM), Caverns of Chaos, by Paweł Marczewski.

Main dungeon of my favorite roguelike game. I spent hundreds of hours in these dungeons. They are procedurally generated and look different each time, but there always is roughly the same set of special rooms and features. I drew the map a year or two after I last played the game, so the order of rooms is probably wrong in some places, but otherwise, the memories are still vivid.

The map may be a little hard to understand for someone who hasn’t played the game - roguelikes are about “killing letters to collect punctuation”, so I would have to tell you that all these ‘P’s are animated trees I managed to make angry this one time, ‘&’s signify fierce demons that killed many a good adventurer, that room with ‘+’s is a graveyard full of undead, the lone ‘f’ is a Cat Lord that will attack you if you are foolish enough to kill a feline during the game (and if you’re careful enough not to, will give you a fabulous reward). There are five elemental temples, caves full of static electricity (and dragons), ancient dwarven town and even a casino.

[Josh says: awesome seeing roguelikes getting some love.  There’s a really great Nethack map coming up in a few days as well.]

Oh, this game, this game. ADOM is the only roguelike I’ve ever invested a serious amount of time into, and I’ve never made it even close to the end — I only recognize about a third of this map, and getting to that third was itself an accomplishment I’m happy with.

859 notes

The pitch drop experiment is a long-term experiment which measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. Pitch is the name for any of a number of highly viscous liquids which appear solid, most commonly bitumen. At room temperature, tar pitch flows at a very slow rate, taking several years to form a single drop. The most famous version of the experiment was started in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, to demonstrate to students that some substances that appear to be solid are in fact very-high-viscosity fluids. Parnell poured a heated sample of pitch into a sealed funnel and allowed it to settle for three years. In 1930, the seal at the neck of the funnel was cut, allowing the pitch to start flowing. Large droplets form and fall over the period of about a decade. The eighth drop fell on 28 November 2000, allowing experimenters to calculate that the pitch has a viscosity approximately 230 billion times that of water. This is recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s longest continuously running laboratory experiment, and it is expected that there is enough pitch in the funnel to allow it to continue for at least another hundred years. To date, no one has ever actually witnessed a drop fall. The image above features The University of Queensland pitch drop experiment with its current custodian, Professor John Mainstone (taken in 1990, two years into the eighth drop). Credit: John Mainstone and The University of Queensland SCIENCE! I have heard about this from a few places, but never before seen a photograph.

The pitch drop experiment is a long-term experiment which measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. Pitch is the name for any of a number of highly viscous liquids which appear solid, most commonly bitumen. At room temperature, tar pitch flows at a very slow rate, taking several years to form a single drop.

The most famous version of the experiment was started in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, to demonstrate to students that some substances that appear to be solid are in fact very-high-viscosity fluids. Parnell poured a heated sample of pitch into a sealed funnel and allowed it to settle for three years. In 1930, the seal at the neck of the funnel was cut, allowing the pitch to start flowing. Large droplets form and fall over the period of about a decade. The eighth drop fell on 28 November 2000, allowing experimenters to calculate that the pitch has a viscosity approximately 230 billion times that of water.

This is recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s longest continuously running laboratory experiment, and it is expected that there is enough pitch in the funnel to allow it to continue for at least another hundred years. To date, no one has ever actually witnessed a drop fall.

The image above features The University of Queensland pitch drop experiment with its current custodian, Professor John Mainstone (taken in 1990, two years into the eighth drop).

Credit: John Mainstone and The University of Queensland

SCIENCE! I have heard about this from a few places, but never before seen a photograph.

(via freshphotons)

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Mapstalgia: Draw a map and submit it!

mapstalgia:

Mapstalgia is all about looking at stuff people drew and being like “oh man, that freakin’ game, yeah!” So welcome, and browse away!

But it’s also about sitting down and drawing something up yourself. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it almost certainly won’t be accurate, but you’re dragging these…

Mapstalgia is my favorite new blog of the moment - and not just because I know a bunch of the people who drew the first maps for it before it even was a blog. I have been playing video games for getting on twenty years now; enough time to see the medium change radically in many ways. One constant throughout the period has been the sense of space that games create; in much the same way as your morning commute imprints itself indelibly upon your brain, the opening series of movements playing defense on, say, pl_Goldrush will stay locked in my head for ages to come.

And yet my memory — my visualization — of that space is concretely different than someone else who has played the same game, the same map, for the same period of time: everyone has different priorities, as in life. To see several different people all try to recreate the layout of game maps from memory is interesting to me in how it reveals the played experiences of those games — of how each person approached them.

tl;dr — Mapstalgia is neat and you should contribute a map.