A History of ‘Hup,’ the Jump Sound in Every Video Game
Fortnite Courtesy of EPIC Games The blunt tool of jump vocalizations was replaced by more advanced means of facilitating player awareness. As a result, many of the most popular modern…
The Deadly Cyclone That Changed the Course of the Cold War
Frustrated, Frank got back in the Vauxhall to get to his next meeting. The car inched with the traffic past walls full of political slogans splashed in red paint in…
The Birth of Spy Tech: From the ‘Detectifone’ to a Bugged Martini
Eavesdropping technologies of various sorts have been around for centuries. Prior to the invention of recorded sound, the vast majority of listening devices were extensions of the built environment. Perhaps…
‘Disruption’ Is a Two-Way Street
Big Tech as we know it was built on the ethos of subverting sanctity. Ideas, institutions, service delivery, how I make my chai—nothing could be beyond the reach of technological…
Historical Video Games Have Promise—but Only If They’re Honest
This is an issue we see frequently in history-driven games. In an industry dominated by white men—in 2021, according to Statista, 75 percent of developers globally identified as male, while…
Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress
If there is any concept from her books that Palmer hopes will catch on, like “robot” and “cyberspace” did for other authors, it is a model of living called a…
An Unsung Hero of Gaming History Deserves a Higher Profile
Search “video cartridge inventor” on Google. Do you see Jerry Lawson? Good. So why don’t more people know this fact? It might have to do with confusion about the actual…
The Prisoner Who Revolutionized Chinese Language With a Teacup
Zhi felt greatly encouraged. His solitary work was running parallel to these larger efforts. Most of them, though, still had not been able to free themselves from clunky keyboards. While…
Tropical Futurism Envisions the Climate of Our Fate
Is the future over? To some, it has been for some time. Ten years ago, the late critic Mark Fisher wrote of “the slow cancellation of the future” in his…
The History of Predicting the Future
The future has a history. The good news is that it’s one from which we can learn; the bad news is that we very rarely do. That’s because the clearest…