Shamus Young

My favorite blog for a long time was Shamus Young over at https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale He passed away a couple of years ago unfortunately but there's a lot of stuff there that is pretty interesting. He has some awesome stuff about procedural generation It's really more of an entertainment blog than an information one but there's still some really interesting stuff there. Rest in Peace Shamus. You made a huge impact on a younger me

Prior art: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2124 It is genuinely a little spooky to me that we've reached a point where a specific software architecture confabulated as a plot-significant aspect of a fictional AGI in a fanfiction novel about a video game from the 90s is also something that may merit seriously consideration as a potential option for reducing AI alignment risk. (It's a great novel, though, and imo truer to System Shock's characters than the game itself was able to be. Very much worth a read, unexpectedly tangential to the topic of the moment or no.)

While we're talking alternative LoTRs, it's worth having a look at The DM Of The Rings https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612 which manages to use all stills from the LoTRs films and tell a completely different story, in the same vein as Darths and Droids https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0001.html .

me2 had some nice character moments, but its main plot was very stupid with ridiculous reasoning that threw away all appeal of me1. Best elements of me2 (and me3!!) were stories that expanded the stories, already established in the first game (genophage and quarians/geth conflict). To anyone who thinks ME2 is better, I can only recommend this mighty analysis of the series: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792 Lots of parts, but it highlights all the problems of the second and third games really well.

Reading this, I can't help but think of this great novella, Free Radical, based on System Shock http://www.shamusyoung.com/shocked/

> It's pretty clear that Blizzard was not following their own guidebook here. I can't imagine them banning a player who said "Free Catalan!". The banning was only because it was anti china. An anti-Spain statement would have just resulted in some scratching of heads, not a 1 year suspension and revoking of prize money. As far as I've read (which is basically nothing but https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=48310 ), the response to blitzchung came from NetEase, Blizzard's legally-required publisher/distributor in China. Unlike Blizzard, NetEase is a Chinese company. It seems unsurprising that the Chinese distributor for Hearthstone would react like a Chinese company -- that's the point of the requirement. Was Blizzard even consulted on the response?

I've followed Shamus Young's blog for years. His best-known writing is game story analysis like this Mass Effect series, but he also has a great gift for describing programming topics in simpler terms for non-programmers to follow. As one example, his "Pixel City" series builds up an application for procedurally generating city environments ( http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940 ). I highly recommend his blog to anyone interested in gaming, programming, or just looking for a site with high-quality writing and discussion.

The novel Free Radical by Shamus Young has a great description of something similar. http://www.shamusyoung.com/shocked/main.php?21

He has also had a bit of a rough life, good to see he making the best of his: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=12687

Oddly enough, this technology was foreseen in a novel, Free Radical [1], which some random fellow on the Internet wrote on the basis of the story from the game System Shock. Quite a good novel, actually, and especially so for being something you just randomly trip over on the web; I recommend it. [1] http://www.shamusyoung.com/shocked/

I also really liked Shamus's Project Frontier, a detailed walkthrough on generating an entire procedural world. http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=11874 He released the executable at the end of the series, and I'm still sad that, as a non-programmer, I couldn't get it to run on my computer. I would have loved to have a chance to explore the world. Some of his screencaps are mindblowing. [ETA: Since it's not immediately obvious how to get there from the rest of the articles on Project Frontier, here's the link to the source code: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=15808]

Don't be intimidated! There are a lot of things you don't know about how to make demoscene-style programs, and the reason you don't know them is probably because you haven't tried to learn them yet. I'm pretty sure that if you start learning when you're n, a lot of things will seem self-evident when you're n+2. Here's a series of really good blog posts from someone who decides to make a shiny procedurally-generated city. The result is an amazing how-did-he-do-that demo, but the steps he went through and the way he thought about the problem are understandable. http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940

This is a great series. The guy can write (he's also funny) and he writes the series in a really accessible way. Definitely worth reading. Also check out his "terrain" series, it's terrific. http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=141

World models do not belong here, or at least, we're still some years from figuring out how they would. If I want to text my wife I can imagine just telling my phone that somehow rather than using the current UI paradigm, but what "world model" am I going to pull up that is helpful to do that? World models belong in their own stream, along with rendering in general (movies, etc.), games, VR, and other similar things that we do not today classify as UI, for good reason. In fact I suspect "world models" may let us re-experience some idiocy from yesteryear we thought we had put behind us, like [1]. Can't wait to go "shopping" in a "world model" of a store again! However do I survive in 2026 merely zipping around the store buying my favorite items off of my favorite's list as fast as I can think of the items and using search on the thousands of available items rather than WASD'ing my way through a "model" of the store. By contrast I think the browser is undersold. GUI toolkits existed before browsers, but they were all based on widget layouts. That is, the top level of the widget hierarchy would be some layout engine, which had components, which had subcomponents, which had a widget, etc. Some were more dynamic and relative, some used a lot of absolute positioning, but they were all structured in this way. Browsers introduced a new paradigm, where textual layout was the "top level" of the tree, and the widgets all fit within that. Prior to a browser, a Mad Lib-style game where…

The problem with the ending wasn't only the outcome (which, IMO, the DCL ending still wasn't enough). It was mainly the the execution. The "press the button" ending was a travesty to what was advertised by the three games. You can really notice that lack of thematic coherence and good writing when Drew Karpyshyn left the project. I really liked ME2. The gameplay was the best, had really good quest lines and some ideas were really interesting (working for terrorists, the suicide mission). And it had Mordrin! On the third game it goes all downhill. Earth is, apparently, the most important planet on the galaxy. To the point that someone thought that it was a good idea to diverge troops that were defending the planet with the biggest and best fleet of the galaxy to defend the Earth. ME2 and Mordrin spent a lot of time convincing me that, while the xenophage was something horrible, curing it would have unforeseen consequences and was a bad idea too. But now we're going to cure it, no choice in the matter. Cerebrus turned from "amoral pragmatists" to "james bond villain". My best bro Wrex still didn't return to the party. And the dreadful awe of the reapers was simply squashed. ME3 was a massive dissapointment. I don't see myself playing a multigame Bioware series ever again. Two links: A massive Mass Effect Retrospective, which cemented some of my feelings on the series: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792 Anon is still mad about ME3:…

Active Worlds was the coolest thing I ever goofed around in, at least at the time. The COFMeta (metaverse) and Mars worlds were my favorite. It was basically the 3D equivalent of Geocities. You could wander for hours, looking at the cool little houses and weird displays people had built. You could even do simple scripting with keyframes for animating objects by toggling their visibility. :) It was so cool, and I even ended up buying a little AWLD stock. The market imploded of course, and the people running it apparently did some scummy things (see Shamus Young's accounting here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13720 ). The only thing really missing was modeling; to solve this, you'd run across giant prefab yards, and then write down model names. Mars had a sort of boneyard for this purpose. They also did kinda-cool tie-ins with other media, like a world for The 13th Floor and the X-Files movie. I miss that sense of "Oh man, this is the future!".

Missing Games for Windows Live, perhaps the worst games platform ever made, you will not be missed. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=8059

Related: Shamus Young's article on adding rivers to a procgen world <https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=12076>.

I also enjoyed his similar series on generating a procedural city: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940

Yes, he died in June of last year[1]. It seems like his family is running the blog etc. now[2]. [1] https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=54513 [2] https://www.patreon.com/posts/finally-news-85529959

For something similar, I always liked this blog series: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940 Unfortunately it seems the author passed away a few months ago

> Or ActiveWorlds Every time I see news about the "Metaverse", I remember the articles Shamus Young (RIP) wrote about ActiveWorlds and the DotCom bubble crash: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=35399 The metaverse doesn't seem quite that bad (Facebook's people seem to have an understanding of the medium they want to operate in), but the basic "we're going to make the user experience worse by replicating the limitations of the real world for the sake of realism" mentality is still there.

There's a way to get a printed copy from Lulu that the author has mentioned: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2124

Twitter deliberately promotes outrage. While hateful screaming is nothing new in the world of politics (or elsewhere), for Twitter and other ad-sellers this is a way to capture attention of users and drag them into flame wars. See this blog for one case thereof: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=46541

here's an inside story from a developper in a DotCom era web company: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=35194 He's also explaining a lot of entrepreneur/technical details, since most of his usual audience is not familiar with those, unlike HN.

I'm not sure how much the fine print matters if it fails basic fit-for-purpose standards. Regarding irrationality -- see e.g. this[0] Shamus Young post about the video game industry. IMO, this general sort of irrationality is everywhere. Businesses in general tend to be irrational because they're run by suits, whose primary motivation is not actually accumulating money for the business but rather prestige for themselves, which you get by doing business-y things, regardless of whether those actually make money. For all his reputed greed, that's how I actually expect Larry Ellison to act. [0] https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=41924

"This Dumb Industry" is such a good name for this series of blog posts [0]. I always tell people game development is both the hardest and least (extrinsically) rewarding programming career you could pick: volatile, driven by personalities, low paying, with hard engineering problems. [0]: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?s=this+dumb+industry

This was a good article that goes over what happened with the Kickstarter project: https://shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=42010

> basing a book around a role-playing campaign can lead to books which read just like they're based around role-playing campaigns... Like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars? Guilty pleasures, they are two webcomics that re-imagine those two works as role-playing campaigns. The Star Wars prequels actually make more sense that way. http://www.darthsanddroids.net/ http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=14

Here's an interesting approach to do this from a game worked on by Shamus Young, http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=20777