Posts

Posted on

SimEarth: The Living Planet

SimEarth was $70 USD when it dropped in 1990. That’s $180 in 2026 dollars. It was Maxis’s third release. Fortunately, their second had been SimCity. The marketing didn’t even call their applications games, but “software toys.” It was a radically different industry back then. SimEarth was not a major hit, but it’s a reminder that, prior to their long death milking the Sims franchise for EA, there was genuine experimentation at Macintosh-first developer Maxis.

Free-floating windows, palettes and the menubar were hot UX after the fullscreen jail of DOS gaming. How times have changed.

Is SimEarth really a game? Unlike SimCity, you can dial up a random planet and just leave it running. Maybe life will start but get nowhere. Maybe the biosphere will self-destruct, a Venus or a Mars. Or maybe it’ll all go rather Earth-wise with no intervention on your part. (You could even get multiple sentient species developing and blasting off to greener planets, one after the other.) The following year, Maxis would make the metaphor explicit with a virtual ant farm, but in the Danish language sense, SimEarth is lege rather than spil–undirected fun, not goal-based play. In modern parlance, it’s a sandbox.

SimCity famously fits on six pages of readable diagrams, but SimEarth is a geosphere simulation sitting underneath a hydrosphere simulation under an atmosphere simulation, proceeding (with luck or skill) to overlay a flora simulation, fauna simulation, and civilization simulation. It’s dizzying, even if the underlying machinery is essentially the same: Time-sliced agent calculations across multiple interacting tilemaps, with the precision allowed to drop at higher game speeds. Remember, the target platforms for these games were Motorola 68k Macintoshes and 386 DOS PCs.

Simulation time slows down as you proceed between phases: Geology, Life, Civilization.

Play (lege) involves a slowly recharging energy counter, capped lower at increased difficulties. The surface can be raised and lowered. “Disasters” like meteor strikes (often beneficial if used right) can be called down. Biomes can be painted on the land (without being guaranteed to survive). The models can be tweaked, for instance to change solar input or reproduction rates. At the more expensive end, there are scifi geoengineering buildings–even an extremely expensive Monolith, for uplifting species to sentience.

Should you play it? You’re reading a blog in or after 2026, so maybe. Maybe you have the patience. (Not that a planet takes more than an couple hours without extreme micromanagement.) It runs perfectly in SheepShaver, so don’t expect problems in the emulator of your choice.

True randomness means that, sometimes, your world is just plain boring. Nothing is inherently fair. It’s refreshing, in an icy way, compared to our era of silent rubber-banding and 50% chances meaning 65% chances.

The interface is of its time. It tries a lot. Most of it works. Window management can feel a bit cumbersome. Just finding where on the map an event has occurred can be downright annoying.

The choices it makes will give any science nerd a few eye twitches. For instance, here’s the list of taxa:

  • Prokaryotes
  • Eucaryotes
  • Radiata
  • Anthropods
  • Mollusks
  • Fish
  • Cetaceans (?)
  • Trichordates (!!!)
  • Insects
  • Amphibians
  • Reptiles
  • Dinosaurs
  • Avians
  • Mammals
  • Carniferns (hidden)
  • Robots (hidden)
Each taxon has its own habitats, ranked from happy to unsurvivable. Cetaceans start to make sense in this light–but what taxa haven’t returned to the sea?

There was no real way to make a comprehensible graphical game in SimEarth’s day without the choices of life and paths of civilization being very Earth-like. They more or less did it with Spore, but that was decades later. (MicroProse’s Civilization itself, released the following year, would have the same issue.) Within its limitations, the amount of weird packed into SimEarth is worth celebrating, but those limitations are omnipresent. When life really gets going, you’ll start to wish for a decidedly bigger world than the target systems of the day could simulate in realtime.

As a middle-aged game developer, it’s the naive boldness of SimEarth that I admire most. As a nerdy tween with a Mac Plus, the appeal is harder to define. I’m sure I didn’t play it as much as SimCity (v1.0) but I sure sunk a LOT of hours in. So many planets lived and died in that cold corner of the living room. Maybe the lack of hand-holding is more appealing at that age. (Doesn’t Minecraft have a similar demographic?) Maybe experimental Earth Science is the best kind to learn. Maybe I just had more time than I could ever know what to do with. There’s value in being bored.

In a few months, my team at Chop Chop drops the full release of Flask, and either starts working on new content, or goes on the dole. No one knows which. I’ve got a little kid, and we’re trying to buy a house. It’s scary. I keep wondering what would have happened if SimCity had done the kind of business SimEarth did. Maxis’s headcount can’t have been much different from ours. At $180 a disk, was a minor success enough to keep the lights on back then? How long could a game software toy development team survive without a hit in 1990? Has it changed? Most importantly, what would games look like now without the era of SimEverything?

Maxis did so much right until they didn’t. SimCity to Spore was 29 years. Both were bold, unique, and successful. Inbetween, and after SimEarth, they played things a bit safer. (Maxis even tried corporate training.) Ironically, it was the slipshod launch of a new SimCity (2014) that ultimately did them in.

For those who were there, SimEarth feels like a blast of Earth Day 1990 optimism. For anyone who grew up afterward, I’m curious. Too slow? Too obtuse? Too klunky? Or is there still an odd pleasure in mastering such a weird, geeky, cool beast?

Maybe in ten years I’ll get my little guy to try it.

Every move costs something. Your Ω energy slowly replenishes after being spent.
Posted on

If You’re Wondering Why Polls Don’t Work in the US Anymore

…it’s because of garbage push polling like this.

It’s a garbage company out of Florida (naturally) that runs research-polls.com, opinion-insight.com, research-opinions.com, and likely others. The garbage company’s outdated copyright notice identifies it as Research-Polls, as do their text messages.

Collins, for whom I’ve voted in the past, is a once-reliable moderate who voted first to confirm manifestly unqualified candidate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and then anti-health crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Project 2025 hatchet-man Russell Vought to the Office of Management and Budget. When History called, she failed, and must be retired.

Troy Jackson, meanwhile, A) isn’t in Donald Trump’s party, B) has a pulse (presumably), and C) isn’t Senator Collins. He also, D) Hasn’t insulted my intelligence with a push poll today. If he supports police and prison reform, he’ll also be showing a bit of spine (not to mention fiscal responsibility) in a country addicted to failed policies dating to the Victorian Era. (Beyond that, I can’t find any kernel of truth in this garbage push poll question.)

So, come November: garbage out.

Posted on

Mo Knew

Mo knew. Oh course he knew. Oh, yeah, he just somehow happened to accidentally put that [rancid, snot-soaked] knuffle bunny into the wash.

God damn guys are stupid. We are so stupid. We will literally write and illustrate an entire Caldecott Honor Book rather than admit we screwed up.

Posted on

Eight For a Wish, Nine for a Kiss

The fourth Christmas ghost story by Matt Rasmussen

More in this series

Pull your London trenchcoat up
Think of 1950-something
Think of all the decades they erased
And the newsreel says
The less you know, the better
The less you know, the better
You touched her face
And now you’re racing to forget her
-Comaduster

“There are people that don’t fit in anywhere, Mr. Cribben. Did you ever think about that? I mean, they won’t live by your ways and mine. Some of them are too good, and some are too bad. Everybody’s growing pretty much alike—nearly everybody—in this age, and the ones that don’t fit in are scarce; but they’re still around.”
-Russell Kirk, “Behind the Stumps”

1

The farmhouse beguiled Keel, riding the limit of his vision upon the distant hillside. It appeared as a ramble of joined-up houses and outbuildings predating the two ephemeral centuries his life had touched. A stand of trees fettered the largest mass, presumably a barn, at one end. The walls were lime white, the roofs orange tile in two shades that didn’t quite agree, like the rooflines. If the tiny, inset windows ever caught the sun, he’d never witnessed it. Maybe there were no longer any window. He was fairly sure he could find the way on his touring bike if he could find the time, but Keel’s time was not his own.

He had a baby now. It was what he’d pined after for so many years, and now it was his, or he its. Only the rocking, crunching flight of the baby carriage–the barnevogn, an expat needed to learn the language–could make the baby sleep. The long walks, at every hour of the day and night, were in a way the freest he ever felt now. The baby came first, second, last, always. This was as it should be, but Keel couldn’t always shake his self-pity, despite the long-ingrained knowledge (his was a late start for a new father) that self-pity is self-abuse.

What of the baby? He was pretty. Not girl or boy pretty, but something entirely its own. Impossibly pretty. Changeling pretty. Somehow he’d never before perceived how variably unnatural babies looked. One neighbor’s child had a face like the rancor. Another’s resembled a grey. Pointed ears, pointed chins, pointed butts… The twins were impossible to describe beyond their rosy cheeks and laughing eyes. Surely the other parents couldn’t properly see what they were pushing in their barnevogner.

The baby gave up his fight with the covers and slept.

Keel turned for home–or the apartment, at any rate. Home was far south in another country. In another sense, home was nowhere, not for years. By the narrowest definition, home was a citadel of new three-story concrete buildings dressed with pre-aged wood (all badly, but each differently) upon an isolated hilltop. Two 19th Century stone barns remained nearby, grand in their partial ruin, girded by chainlink fences. A weathered white brick church marked a waypoint across the big road, surrounded by the bones of a rain-lichened village, barely inhabited if at all. Christmas lights twinkled there throughout the night, but something about their uniformity suggested the contrivance of a town council, developers, or someone else. Seemingly everyone lived in the new developments, which had expanded like a fairy ring until running out of forage in the rocky ground. He knew every way and shortcut by now, every path that could accommodate the barnevogn. The city wasn’t far away, by colloquial reckoning, but it might as well have been in another land.

Flashing its white stripes and blue-black trim in the morning light, a magpie–husskade, he was learning the local names–hopped from branch to bare branch, watching him like an hourly supervisor. Saint Lucia’s day was past. Frosted grass crunched under the wheels.

A meandering fox-run cut through the field, visible now that the hay was cut. Wind-battered chestnut trees clung together in the sandy soil. A stream refused to be diverted by an earthwork, forming a meter square swamp before disappearing into the hill for a stretch and sneaking under the road. Keel’s feel for the dynamism of the landscape kept him engaged through the fatigue. It was something he could neither disentangle himself from nor properly share. He knew it as an inseparable part of him, which suggested a nobility where others found only tedium.

Other displaced fathers pushed carriages along the paths, most lost in the glamour of their phones.

The farmhouse dazzled white and yellow in the frosted distance. Was it inhabited? Empty? A ghost? If a ghost were something impossible to understand, what was a thing impossible to notice? The magpie’s shadow flitted over him.

Continue reading “Eight For a Wish, Nine for a Kiss”
Posted on

Surveillance Parenting

“Its malevolent gravity drags humanity and all human ideas into its orbit, warping them beyond recognition. Beneath it, within its context, everything becomes corrupted into the worst version of itself. It takes joy and turns it into vindictive glee; it takes self-reliance and turns it into solipsistic psychosis; it turns love into smothering assault, pride into humiliation, families into traps, safety into paranoia, peace into discontent. It turns people into people who do not see people as people. And civilisations, ultimately, into abominations.”

-Sam Hughes, There is No Antimemetics Division

This is the moment when Hughes’ novel, I think, reaches beyond high-concept pastiche to truly touch something great. An idea, a meme, so all-encompassing that it doesn’t merely pervade and rot everything it casts its dark light on, but replaces the whole with a new always-was.

My son is a year and a half old. I’m 45. I’m a different generation than most of my peer-dads. My memetic space is different. My inevitabilities are different.

The technology now exists to “watch” Hugin everywhere he goes. To know everything he reads, watches, plays, experiences. Because WHAT IF THE WORST HAPPENED? Knowing I could have reached for that golden bough, had the knowledge to prevent the worst–and didn’t. What would that make me?

Hugin scraped his knee so it bled, and got a real prize shiner on his forehead, all today. Since daycare. In my care. My philosophy is: cool, good. You should see him climb! He’s an explorer. He’s a mover. He’s a ponderer. He’s a sweet guy. And he’s going to have worse.

We wandered dumbly into surveillance capitalism. A pack of lies from marketing scum sold the world its panopticons: It’s free because your privacy is worth nothing! Simultaneously: With enough data, we can sell people anything! It wasn’t true in either direction. But if we’ve learned anything from Trumpism, it’s that true is a far more fragile and optional meme than a refugee from the 20th Century would have assumed. Easy is a meme. Everyone else does is a meme. I’m busy is a meme. Stressed. I can do this. I can get out of this hole. I just need a little space. There are so many memes louder than true. Surveillance is a legitimate business. That’s a meme.

Like every child, Hugin stands where a torrent of historical winds cross.

I will protect him. I must protect him. To both statements, sometimes yes, but primarily I must raise him.

Previous generations weren’t as free as we assume. Yes, as a child in the 1950s-60s, my mother could go several streets in any direction with her friends, but everywhere was a loose network of housewives and old ladies who knew one another, had their phone numbers handwritten in the back of one-another’s white pages, and kept a keen eye on everyone’s children throughout the day. (My dad, in a much smaller town: Fewer checkpoints, larger geography, same vague system.) My parents always needed to know whose house I was at, in the 1980s-90s (though it helped that they needed to drive me there until 1996).

The difference in the 2020s is twofold.

First, the granularity has increased extraordinarily. My parents couldn’t even see what I checked out from the school library. Parental controls will literally show me everything Hugin examines. The power is heady. The power is corrupting. The power tries to keep a straight face as it smirks, “What if?” That infrastructure wasn’t built for the benefit of my son; it was built for the massive collection and collation of his thoughts. Initially, to sell him things. Now, to shape those thoughts. Have I mentioned that surveillance capitalism is now politics?

The second difference is, in fact, worse. The second difference is internalization. The meme is no longer a meme, it is the whole memetic space. Have you noticed you can now tell the age of someone online by the circumlocutions they use to allude, even vaguely, to anything serious? Suicide, rape, death, sex. Everything is autocorrected away before it even gets from Millennial/Gen Alpha fingers into the device. They are so used to being watched in every space in which they can communicate, at least by a lazy bot, that they self-censor as a reflex, like Soviet peons. (I fear it’s even deeper. I see suggestions that the surveillance-native feels that their inner thoughts are public. The sleepless imperfections of the new parent are pathologized. The schoolgirl crush on a teacher is pathologized. The teenage boy wanting to see nudity is pathologized. Every inner rebellion must be quelled. God I hope I’m wrong.)

This is where ChatGPT would start talking solutions. ChatGPT can fuck off. Free Range Kids has failed as badly as the Sceptics Movement. I don’t know (unintentional Howard Beale voice) what to do. I don’t know what I must do. I only know that we need to name this abomination, give it metaphysical form, before we can manage it. We need to see the meme for what it is: Another flimsy spinning thing of money, monomania and anxiety, demanding to be treated as inevitable, re-internalized, and forgotten.

We need to accept the memetic version of those skinned knees and bonked heads. We need to do better in our own framing of the problems our children face. Giving in to anxiety is just… so… easy now. Dress it up as righteousness, and you never have to think about it again. Perfect.

Or we can parent these amazing kids the hard way. Whatever the fuck that is.

Posted on

True Horror Subgenres

In the last entry in this series, we defined True Horror genetically. Here we look at its children. Basic genre hybrids like Scifi Horror are out of scope.

Something needs to be set down in writing here: Not being True Horror does not make a work bad. Social media is for rage-bait; this is a blog. Sax Rhomer’s Occult Detective book The Dream Detective is a fun and fascinating work. It’s not True Horror, but so what? No one needs another tutting inner critic.

The Aickmanesque (1960s-1970s) Robert Aickman and Elizabeth Jane Howard resurrected the traditional English Ghost Story along Symbolist lines, creating a distinct form unaccountably disturbing from an inner perspective.

Body Horror (1980s-) Generally credited in its modern horror form to Cronenberg, the subgenre dealing most directly with alteration to the human body, often against one’s will.

Cosmic Horror (1920s-1930s) The most direct attempts to continue in Lovecraft’s style. Blood and violence are largely offscreen, implied or irrelevant, while the insignificance of humanity in a larger order is centered. A narrator lives to tell the tale, carrying an awful burden. Prose are often purple (in imitation of Lovecraft’s imitation of Poe).

Cozy Horror (1970s-) Horror in which the key elements are at an extreme remove, often shrouded in ambiguity, and human slice-of-life storytelling takes center stage. A controversial classification supported by works like Gene Wolfe’s Peace and the art of rt0no.

Folk Horror (1970s-) An expression of the simultaneous fascination and alienation outsiders hold with the perceived generational continuity, insularity and memetic survival of isolated rural regions. (Outsiders include those from different rural regions.) Generally descends from Margaret Murray’s once-popular witch-cult hypothesis.

Possession (1970s-1980s) An often quite conscious attempt to literally scare people back to religion. The universe is immoral and unknowable if one does not follow.

Psychological Horror (1960s-) Often confused with Psycho-thrillers. To fall within True Horror, the loss of touch with reality at the core of the work must rise to the level of the (implied) supernatural.

Slasher-Horror (1970s-1980s) In its hyphenated form, a Slasher in which the killer is (or killers are) implied to possess invulnerability, omniscience, precognition or other impossible attributes.

Vampire (1910s-2010s) The depredations of the ruling class, often mixed with nativism, at a remove. Coalesced initially from a variety of loosely-related Eastern European folklore traditions, and contemporary anxieties around tuberculosis.

Zombie (1960s-2000s) The only way modern pop culture can deal with the specter of societal collapse. Other desperate human beings are transmuted into mindless, soulless Others, to forgive–even make sport of–their slaughter.

Posted on

Have You Read “The Dream Detective?”

Hard to believe it’s been almost 10 years since I put Sax Rohmer’s Moris Klaw stories online. The Occult Detective subgenre was already getting crowded when Rohmer put his spin on it 100 years ago (but then, blogging was already getting crowded out by social media when I finished this project in 2016).

I’ve given the stories a tidy-up, fixing errors, adding proper tags, and ensuring the posts federate properly. If you never gave them a spin, now’s a great time.

Posted on

The Strict Definition of Horror

Horror’s long story is about mixing bloodlines, fuzzy edges, mistaken identities and schismatic reformers. This is the short one.

We’re here to define it. Genetically.

Why bother, if everyone’s having fun? When anything can be Ø, Ø means nothing. Mixing genres is fun, but if the writer doesn’t understand, respect, even know what they’re mixing, the middle falls out.

The Ancestors

Genres never die, they just turn retro. The (-dates) here aren’t when the genre stopped being executed, they’re when it stopped being innovated.

Fairytale (-1800s) bizarre, usually chainable supernatural oral tales told for pure entertainment, sometimes with a moral element. The end of this tradition comes with late-18th-19th Century attempts to catalogue them, as by the Brothers Grimm, Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, etc.

Romance (1300s-1700s) a literary immitation of Fairytale, often told as a first-person narrative–though not meant to be believed by the hip reader.

The Gothic (1600s-1800s) a highly moralized narrative of a virginal character thrust into a dark world. The tension is between the twin human desires to see the innocent preserved and ravaged.

The Grotesque (1840s-1880s) Poe’s groundbreaking step beyond the Gothic form, focusing on a sensation of revulsion, often as much spiritual (and psychological) as physical. Frequently the terminal experience documented.

Symbolist Fiction (1880s-1910s) the uncanny suspension of the world’s logic in pursuit of a felt–rather than enumerated–psychological understanding. Robert Aickman would later take up this thread and merge it with the traditional English Ghost Story.

The Decadent (1870s-1890s) a self-consciously giddy extrapolation of Poe’s Grotesque into an unburdened world of excess, decay and dissolution for their own sake.

Sensation Fiction (1860s-1930s) melodramatic Victorial pulp meant to unsettle the middle-class Victorian reader with taboo topics. The mantle was taken up onstage by the Grand Guignol’s (generally social realist) plays leading to tragic and violent endings; extravagently crafted, their climactic bursts of mayhem were a draw in and of themselves, in the manner of a Grotesque.

The English Ghost Story (1600s-1800s) focused heavily on the experience of the unknown, with a moralizing core. Wounded by the concretizing of formal Occult Fiction in the later 1800s, but revitalized near the emergence of the Weird by M.R. James.

Occult Fiction (1860s-1910s) a proto-science-fiction dressed up as Ghost Story, from a milieu in which literal communion with the dead was believed to be both possible and imminent. Often mixed with the (out-of-scope) Detective genre, also innovated by Poe.

The Weird (1910s-1930s) Lovecraft’s attempt to unify certain strains of contemporary supernatural fiction into a cohesive genre, from which his fixation on human insignificance birthed True Horror. (Science Fiction and Modern Fantasy, both out of scope here, also emerged from The Weird.)

Often Confused

Thriller (1910s-) modern Sensation Fiction, dealing with extraordinary but non-supernatural occurrences such as murder, pursuit, threat and disappearance.

Torture Porn (1970s-2010s) a melding of Thriller and Poe’s Grotesque.

Slasher (1970s-1980s) a blood-soaked form of Thriller, in which the focus is on the violent deaths of the characters by human hands.

Ero Guro (1960s-) Japan’s answer to Slasher, focusing more on sexuality and warped morality than pursuit and murder.

True Horror

True Horror (1920s-) the genre of fiction birthed by Lovecraft, featuring a focal supernatural element (real or perceived), and an indifferent universe in place of a moral one. The emotional effect moves between fear and horror. The True Horror story crystalizes in the moment of realizing one has been wrong.