Tuesday TEA Time - Games, songs, and maps…

Yo,

I hope you are having a good start to your week. I am super busy this week and I’ve had waaaaaayyy too much coffee.

Something happened this week that I had never experiences before: I had applied and been accepted to speak at a conference in Sweden later in the year, but then yesterday I got an email that they had cancelled the entire conference. It’s weird to think they would get everything setup, invite speakers, etc but not have sponsors lined up or whatever it is they needed. I am only disappointed because the conference was to be located in Gothenburg which is a great place to visit. So that is a new thing for me.

I stumbled over a story of “the worst video game ever made” and it ended up being a rabbit hole of super strange and interesting stories. So, here is a start for you to go on the same journey.

Hareraiser is a terrible game. That is clear from any video or screenshots of it. But it wasn’t clear to me how terrible until I learned more about who made it. The authors of Hareraiser had created a “treasure hunt book” named Masquerade which was basically impossible to solve.

The above video explains just how crazy things got with the treasure hunt book.

The strangest part to me is that the person who solved the puzzle did it by accident using a metal detector. Such a strange use of publishing and gaming technology. I like to make strange things, but this is pretty far out there. 

This installment of Carpool Karaoke is much better than I expected. It’s def worth a watch. Paul McCartney really seems pretty normal in some settings, which I didn’t expect since he’s been super famous for so long.

Travis White creates these super amazing transect maps that show the elevation by drawing what horizontal lines that rise and fall. He sometimes will offset the lines up and down a bit and the results can look drastically different. Here are two different examples of Michigan: Example 1 and Example 2.

That’s all for this week. I hope you found something interesting. I gotta get back to work.

🏁