In early 1999, Evin Robertson created a bot called Floyd that allowed people on ifMUD to play interactive fiction games cooperatively. This same code allowed for true multiplayer games to be developed, though the fact that the audience was limited to ifMUD visitors meant that not too many multiplayer titles were developed. I wrote one called Parrot Stock Exchange, but I don’t think anyone ever played it. The one multiplayer game that did take off was called Werewolf, programmed by Evin and based on a game developed by interactive fiction luminary Andrew Plotkin, who in turn had borrowed the core game dynamics from a game called Mafia, created by a Soviet university student named Dimitry Davidoff in the 1980s. Over the years all sorts of optional complexities were added to the ifMUD Werewolf code: vigilantes, freemasons, wolfsbane carriers, etc., etc. Now, here’s the thing. In the 2000s, I would occasionally try to introduce Werewolf (not the ifMUD version, but just the game in its real-life form) to gatherings of the appropriate size, such as the SAT summer camp classes I taught back then. The response I received was always the same: “Wait, isn’t this just Mafia?” “I thought this game was called Mafia!” So I gathered that Mafia was the name of the game as known to the world at large, while Werewolf was the name of the ifMUD-specific variant, developed by one of our own number.
Thus, you can imagine how my jaw dropped when I played Connections on nytimes.com on May 18 and found that the solution had “Werewolf” listed under the heading of “Classic Party Games”. What? The New York Times is aware of my peer group? What’s next, the Wall Street Journal giving a shout-out to Colony Risk?
Speaking of the New York Times, here’s a headline I happened across on nytimes.com on June 24:
As it happens, I’ve had his Freud book on my Kindle for a number of years now; I read a few pages a month while waiting for my number to be called at the burrito shop, that sort of thing. But the main thing I associate with Fred Crews is that, in the days before ratemyprofessors.com, you had to learn which professors in a given department were good or not so good via word of mouth. One day I went to Sproul Hall, the administrative building, to turn in a form, and the girl who took the form glanced at it and said, “Oh, you’re an English major? You should take a class from Fred Crews! He’s great!” So my final semester I took a random survey course just because he was listed as the professor, and it went well enough that at graduation he introduced my valedictory speech.
And while we are commemorating the dead: I went to a site with a database of cemetery pictures, and pulled up the grave of my adoptive grandfather. He was listed as “F. Elmer Gauck”. Asked an accompanying ad:
At the beginning of July, Ellie and I went to Hearst Castle, and since we’d come that far, we continued on to Santa Barbara. I was impressed by how very flaky the food service was there. Ellie ordered a burrito and it seemed to be taking quite a while, so I went up to the register to find the burrito just sitting on the counter while the cashier lounged around doing nothing. I held up the buzzer that was supposed to go off when the order was ready, and said, “I think this buzzer might not be working—that looks like our order, but it didn’t go off.” The cashier casually replied, “Nah, I just didn’t ring it.”
Later we went to an empanada place. I had long been ready for the check when I found that people at every table were looking around in disbelief as the entire wait staff just stood around chatting with each other instead of tending to their customers. Eventually I went up to one group of waiters. One of the waiters looked at me. “Hi!” I said. “We’re ready for our check.” He just stared at me, then turned back to the other waiters and went back to chatting.
To top things off, we went to an ice cream shop. Ellie picked a flavor off the menu board for us to share. “We don’t have that,” the cashier said lackadaisically.
- The Bay Area was one of the last places in the U.S. where masking
was still reasonably common—when the rest of the country
was at 10%, we were still over 50%, and when the rest of the country
was at 0%, we were still over 10%.
But I had noticed that in 2024, we had finally reached the point
that I was usually the only one in a given store to be wearing a
mask.
I read an article on a site that, historically, had held out for
continued masking even when the rest of the world had declared that
the covids were over, saying that, hey, it looked like the covids
were indeed finally over.
“Deaths seem to be genuinely on a ‘heading down, way
down’ trend for the first time”, the article noted;
according to the CDC stats, the figure was at around three hundred
per week, a marked improvement over the 2500+/week we saw at the
beginning of 2024 and far better than the 20,000+/week we saw at
the beginning of 2022, a year after vaccines were rolled out.
I decided that while I would continue to wear a mask in packed
indoor environments, I wouldn’t put it on, even indoors, if
I could keep six feet of distance from people on average.
And I immediately got sick for about three weeks. My covid test came back negative, and I didn’t have covid-like symptoms, but I got something nasty—in fact, on top of the actual illness, I wound up with a bunch of bruises after collapsing at the end of a shower. And then Ellie got sick, and her covid test came back positive. She’s quarantined upstairs as I type this. Lesson: we continue to live in a pestilent world.
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