Fuck yeah Quake was fun as fuck. It actually makes a great contrast with modern games if you look at atmosphere and environment vs polygons and art assets and development $$$. No fluff, good imagery, NiN doing the audio while geeked on coke.. it made for great great stuff.
Hypertexts were fun to screw around with in 1995. I made my own 'choose your own adventure' novel and then went back outside to play with my new Supersoaker (back when those things could pressure-wash out a spic kid's eye). I was born too early, if only I'd been born later and either as a girl or with a shitload of exposure to xeno-estrogens, I could have been the latest hip new developer creating Depression Quest before Depression Quest.
As far as we know, the extortion and blackmail that Mark constantly rants about never happened right? He just imagined it because his buddy on ArbCom got sick of defending him and threw him to the wolves, and Mark couldn't conceive of someone getting fed up with his shit? Or did something nefarious actually happen and Mark's distorting it through his "Gamergate is the root of all evil" lens he views the world through?
As far as we know, the extortion and blackmail that Mark constantly rants about never happened right? He just imagined it because his buddy on ArbCom got sick of defending him and threw him to the wolves, and Mark couldn't conceive of someone getting fed up with his shit? Or did something nefarious actually happen and Mark's distorting it through his "Gamergate is the root of all evil" lens he views the world through?
As far as we know, the extortion and blackmail that Mark constantly rants about never happened right? He just imagined it because his buddy on ArbCom got sick of defending him and threw him to the wolves, and Mark couldn't conceive of someone getting fed up with his shit? Or did something nefarious actually happen and Mark's distorting it through his "Gamergate is the root of all evil" lens he views the world through?
He didn't get exactly his way with the shitty anti-GG article that makes a mockery of so-called Neutral Point of View. Like maybe there was a comma somewhere he didn't want it. So he flew into a screaming tantrum and has stayed in that state ever since like his predecessor Ryulong.
Does Mark not have any friends or family to stage an intervention? He's clearly cracked. I wonder if he goes to the local convenience store to buy chips and they're out of his favorite flavor if he launches into a rant right there about how Gamergate is responsible. I mean, he's clearly delusional, and delusional people can get violent as a result of their delusions. Right now, he seems to limit himself to annoying the shit out of that Molly White person (who I think should block him, because he's going to turn on her soon enough for not supporting his unhinged crusade).
Does Mark not have any friends or family to stage an intervention? He's clearly cracked. I wonder if he goes to the local convenience store to buy chips and they're out of his favorite flavor if he launches into a rant right there about how Gamergate is responsible. I mean, he's clearly delusional, and delusional people can get violent as a result of their delusions. Right now, he seems to limit himself to annoying the shit out of that Molly White person (who I think should block him, because he's going to turn on her soon enough for not supporting his unhinged crusade).
When you start seeing memes of a sad green frog as a stand in for a swastika, then you need professional help.
God help anyone near this lunatic when he's watching a rerun of the Muppet Show. He'll start screaming about how Kermit is Hitler and Ms. Piggy is Eva Braun.
Does Mark not have any friends or family to stage an intervention? He's clearly cracked. I wonder if he goes to the local convenience store to buy chips and they're out of his favorite flavor if he launches into a rant right there about how Gamergate is responsible. I mean, he's clearly delusional, and delusional people can get violent as a result of their delusions. Right now, he seems to limit himself to annoying the shit out of that Molly White person (who I think should block him, because he's going to turn on her soon enough for not supporting his unhinged crusade).
As part of the process of getting to know Mark a little better, I began looking through his published academic work and into the people that had worked with him as part of his business. For the latter, it was my hope that someone that had to work with him would have publicly vented about the experience. One of the first parties I looked into was Diane Josefowicz, née Diane Greco. She had worked at Eastgate from 1994 to 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20160825135630/http://www.eastgate.com/people/Greco.html
As far as dishing dirt on Mark was concerned, she turned out to be a big disappointment. Early on I had realized that she was still on good terms with Mark. Here she is (relatively) recently encouraging him:
I was undeterred by the realization that any information about Mark that Diane would provide would not be of the low-hanging variety. I figured that since Mark is so eccentric that she might not be able to keep herself from sharing interesting information about him. So I began trawling through her blog. http://dianegreco.blogspot.com It was not long before Mark came up, but both her and Mark's contributions were boring. http://dianegreco.blogspot.com/2011/02/mark-bernstein-at-atlantic.htmlhttp://web.archive.org/web/20160313...ese-sandwiches-blogging-beyond-the-lab/71228/
The first slightly interesting nibble was Diane and Mark complaining that Mark could not directly add entries for texts published by Eastgate to the Electronic Literature Directory. dianegreco.blogspot.com/2010/07/power-irony-enforced-amnesia-at-elo.html In his presentations, his papers, and his earliest online traces that I can find, Mark has been a casual self-promoter. If not finding a reason to directly mention Eastgate, he often finds reason to make references to the content of texts published by Eastgate. So it did not surprise me that he would object to being prohibited from directly advertising his own products. As Diane puts it, "Without entries by authors, we lose vitally important critical perspectives, new and different ways to understand and appreciate electronic literature."
I decided that Diane's blog was really boring, and that links to something that Mark had written sure came up a lot. I lost sight of my primary goal, and began to wonder why her blog had suddenly ended, because she had seemingly put little effort into it, but had maintained it for years.
I also discovered that she is an editor for The Victorian Web, which is a product of the pre-wiki hyperlinked knowledge bases. At one point in time was implemented in Storyspace, which we will recall is a product of Mark's own Eastgate Systems. http://web.archive.org/web/20160910044359/http://www.victorianweb.org/
I'd suggest taking a look at anything under "Cultural contexts" to get an idea of what kind of writing style and political bent pervades the site as a whole.
All of those years of study at prestigious institutions put to good use.
This preoccupation comes up again in 2016 in her contribution to the book How Does That Make You Feel?: True Confessions from Both Sides of the Therapy Couch
As interesting as Diane started to become, it was her father-in-law Michael Josefowicz, and a little thing called Nemetics that would garner more of my attention.
However, I am out of time so I will leave you with a taste of nemetics:
By the way, if anyone can find a personal link between Mark Bernstein and Nemetics, then I would be quite interested in the findings.
I think that with Mark, the barrier to intervention and recovery will not be isolation. On the contrary, I think what will perpetuate Mark's problem is surrounding himself with people that are host to the same dysfunctional meme complexes. Don't expect any of them to send help.
To them, histrionics over the Facebook Frog are normal.
Damn, he whines like a bitch and basically admits he's only there to continue his autistic crusade but otherwise doesn't give a shit about Wikipedia and expects his block to be undone?
Damn, he whines like a bitch and basically admits he's only there to continue his autistic crusade but otherwise doesn't give a shit about Wikipedia and expects his block to be undone?
LOL. It's PeterTheFourth. Since he's been confirmed by the CON logs to be a member of Chelsea's gang, isn't this a conflict of interest for him to be editing any mentions of it?
LOL. It's PeterTheFourth. Since he's been confirmed by the CON logs to be a member of Chelsea's gang, isn't this a conflict of interest for him to be editing any mentions of it?
LOL. It's PeterTheFourth. Since he's been confirmed by the CON logs to be a member of Chelsea's gang, isn't this a conflict of interest for him to be editing any mentions of it?
I have reverted repeated attempts to claim Margaret Sanger to be a racist, a canard of which alt-right extremists are fond despite her life-long affiliation with W.E.B. DuBois and her eulogy by Martin Luther King.