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The ideological slant of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I grew up with these, and hadn't thought much about the possible conservative ideological implications of "your fate is determined solely by your choices". I'm not sure I fully buy Eli Cook's view -- for example he points out that the author was scoffed at by publishers in the 60s but embraced 12 years later, though I would say that could say more about the fallibility of publishers than being a sure sign of cultural shift -- but it's interesting to consider the implications of the 2nd person, flexible genre.

I guess I still see the narratives as dominated by authorial intent. The writer demarcates a certain possibility space, and the reader picks a single path through it. Or on subsequent readings, recalls the previous experiences and gets to try something new. Or, what I think was my preferred method, sneakily peeks ahead before commiting to the full page turn... sometimes devolving into an exercise in how many bookmarks you can make with your fingers.

Eventually the reader can develop a map of the entire possible narrative space territory. (And a few books even play with the idea of unobtainable pages - only the transcendent explorer, or peeking pageturner - will know the full lay of the land.)

I suppose my cautious, bet-hedging engagement with the books reflected my developing view that there is an objective, God's (or Author's) Eye truth to things, and a likely best-path, but the optimal choices can be obscured.

I think despite Cook's reservations about peddling ideology that presumes choices and culpability, these books are pretty great - learning that you can make choices with consequences is also a good lesson for kids. I wonder if anyone makes similar books for young readers, or for a grownup to read along with a little person - that sounds like huge fun...

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The podcast "Watch Out For Fireballs" recently did an episode on Atari. On their followup letter reading episode, they read the note I sent in (a scooch before 1h29m) - I try to pack a lot in - about writing my own Homebrew JoustPong/FlapPing in assembly, the book Racing the Beam (didn't realize they were going to cover that in the episode), and then a shout out to Batari BASIC for lowering the bar for folks and the communities on the Stella list and the website Atari Age. I'm grateful to all that!

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I'm reading through [Kirk's Old Y2K PSA page]. It's definitely a review of a number of years of my life. And I remember managers suggesting that the systems would be replaced by then. Hah! Governments still use COBOL. I remember one of the "rules" I was told early in my career that systems have 20% of their code changed every year. That meant that in 5 years, everything had been replaced. What they didn't realize was that it was pretty much the same 20% that kept getting replaced, so any problems in the remaining 80% did not disappear.

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Rammstein stage setup timelapse... what a feat of organization...

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If you took professional wrestling, and McDonald's french fries, and the NRA, and infomercials about bogus products that don't work and you just mixed them altogether and you stick them in the back of a tacky white limousine, and you drive it around Central Park 500 times, you open the door, out would step Donald Trump.