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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • It’s mostly a “well, technically” kind of thing. First prototypes were around since the 1840s but the first commercial telefax service was introduced in February 1865, a little under two months before Lincoln was killed. Samurai were around until the late 1860s or early 1870s. I can’t quite find when the first telefax machine was operated in Japan but 1928 shows up on some lists.

    So yeah, Lincoln could have sent a fax to a samurai if they both had traveled to France just a few weeks before Lincoln’s death.








  • HALF-LIFE 2

    Okay that’s a little weird. We’re getting up into the real high-water heights here and I mean HL2 is good but…

    This list is not about good, it’s about influential. HL2 was the first major game that based its core gameplay to its physics engine, the first to have HDR rendering and the game that Source engine was developed for. Without HL2, a lot of video games in the decade that followed it, would have looked a lot different.

    SHENMUE

    THE FUCK WHY WHAT

    The article claims that Shenmue was the first to have a “living world” where characters follow their daily routines and so on. But yeah, I have my doubts if all the other games that do that were influenced by it.



  • Big university in Germany that’s well-known for their computer science department. Started in 2008 and took way longer than planned. As stated in my other comment, being openly trans was rare when I started but had become more common by the time I got my degree, especially among new students who took the chance to make new friends who never knew their pre-outing personas.




  • From personal experience, I would say it’s a phenomenon of the last… maybe 10 years, at least in Germany. When a friend of mine started university in about 2010, I think she was the only openly trans person out of 300 first semester computer science students. These days, when you go to a Chaos Computer Club event, it’s full of pride flags and queer people dressed in skirts, striped programmer socks and cat ear headbands. In the opposite direction, free tampons for trans-masc people in the men’s bathrooms are just… normal.

    For a while this caused a bit of friction, not because people were outright anti-queer or anti-trans but because they felt it had gotten so extreme that their queer-welcoming computer nerd event had turned into a pride event which just happened to include a few people with laptops. Now everyone seems to get along though.

    That being said, there have always been gender-nonconforming people in IT and gaming. As an arbitrary example, Rebecca Heineman is a trans-woman who taught herself how to pirate and reverse-engineer Atari 2600 games in the 1970s, became the first (US) national video gaming champion in 1980, worked at a gaming magazine, co-founded Interplay Productions, worked on many well-known games. It’s just that being trans wasn’t as accepted back then so a lot of them chose not to out themselves, which honestly can’t be good for one’s mental health.