I nearly included “but no mention of Oni” in my last post about Marathon. Lo and behold, there’s a history of Oni as well.

Oni was a great game: amazing physics and combat, with a solid story. The promo shots (which never materialized into an actual game) as well as the Oni 2 scenes are fascinating. While some of the background textures in the levels always looked stark, the game still looks great in these videos.

Most interesting is that the console version was a bomb. It was a great Mac game, but it never took hold on the nascent Xbox… whereas Halo, well… That’s a different story.

I played a lot of Oni on the Mac. These people seem to like it, too.

Demon: The Untold Story of Bungie’s Forgotten Franchise

This is a great history of Bungie, the Mac game developer that brought us Marathon (and eventually published, in a sad turnaround, Halo for Xbox). I wasn’t familiar with the story of Bungie trying to sell itself to Apple after getting an offer from Microsoft. It’s hard to imagine a sale to Apple turning things around for the Mac as a gaming company, but it was the killer app for Xbox. In any event, I spent a lot of time playing Marathons 1 through 3 in college and thereafter.

Bungie’s Forgotten Decade

“A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Faces His Own Mortality” in the *Atlantic*:

In one scene, Fingarette listens to a string quartet that was once meaningful to his late wife. He hasn’t heard the piece since her death seven years earlier—“her absence is a presence,” he says in the film—and becomes overwhelmed with grief.

I worked in an art museum in college, and one of the exhibits was by Françoise Gilot. My grandfather came to visit me there and I showed him the exhibit. One of her pieces was titled “In the Absence of the Beloved,” and it expressed her feelings of loss of her windowed husband, Jonas Salk. The piece featured the likeness of a couple walking, viewed from behind, with a stark black rectangle covering the male figure. I gave a sophomoric tour of the exhibit and when I described the theme of “Absence” to my grandfather, widowed then for only over a year, uttered with an unmistakable, palpable “Oh.” He grokked what Gilot was trying to get at.

Link

I finally finished Taffy Akner’s Fleischman is in Trouble after starting it on vacation this summer. Some reviews:

NPR:

The great trick of Fleishman Is in Trouble is that it cons the reader into siding with Toby. Brodesser-Akner demonstrates how women get suckered into acquiescing to misogyny by suckering both narrator and reader — and then showing us what she’s done. When I saw her trick, I was floored.

Wapo:

But, she suggests, when you’re stuck, tightfisted, inside your own story — unable to imagine that how you experience others is really how you experience yourself — the most unknowable person may be you, after all.

Vox:

That’s the Taffy Brodesser-Akner trick, the thing that makes her profiles so clear-eyed and important, the thing that lifts her divorce novel head and shoulders above so many others in its genre: She is always willing to extend her empathy to people we are trained to believe are not worthy of our consideration. She is always willing to treat them as real people.

Fleischman does pull quite a trick: after establishing Toby as a sympathetic character, the narrator starts to sour on him a bit. And then we come to sympathize, quite surprisingly, with the ostensible source of Toby’s distress–his ex-wife, Rachel.

I had no idea that The Clone Wars was aired out of order.

STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS CHRONOLOGICAL EPISODE ORDER

NY *Times*:

This week, Seattle Public Schools ramped up its effort even further, telling families that schools would turn away any remaining students who were not compliant.

At a time when states and school districts are exploring strategies to increase vaccination rates and avoid outbreaks, the tactics in Seattle appear to be paying off in a region with plenty of vaccine skepticism. The number of students with incomplete or noncompliant records — once around 7,000 — has dropped steadily to just a few hundred on Wednesday, the deadline for students to show their vaccination paperwork.

New Jersey is likewise trying to curb the rise in number of persons claiming exemptions for their children.

After a Measles Scare, Seattle Cracks Down on Vaccine Compliance – The New York Times

John Voorhees, writing for MacStories, about the transformative power of iPadOS’s version of Safari on the device’s utility:

With the release of iPadOS 13, Safari took a big step forward as a ‘desktop-class’ browser with a wide variety of enhancements that collectively eliminate a long list of complaints leveled against the app in the past. Safari’s ability to dynamically adjust the viewport to fit the iPad’s screen, enhanced support for pointer events, hardware-accelerated scrolling of frames and other regions of a webpage, along with other under-the-hood changes add up to a genuinely new browsing experience that has made work in sophisticated web apps like Mailchimp a viable option for the first time.

…

Web apps are a substantial part of most people’s workflows these days… I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of MacStories readers gave up on using certain web apps in Safari on an iPad long ago and haven’t gone back. If that sounds like you, I encourage you to give Safari another shot.

Like Voorhees, I too prefer an app over a website when available–and not just on iPad. I spent much of today scheduling in OmniOutliner instead of Sheets, and I use applications like MailMate and OmniFocus instead of Gmail webmail and tasks. Google’s G Suite apps are an example, however, of how the applications are poorly implemented compared to the browser. But iPadOS’s version of Safari elevated the iPad from occasional sidekick to my main computer with one update.

Desktop-Class Safari for iPad: A Hands-On Look at the Difference the iPadOS Update Makes to Apple’s Browser – MacStories