This recent @404 Media podcast goes into a deep-dive on #marathon (the 2026 game) and its current issues in the context of the modern gaming industry.
Personally I haven't owned a console since the SNES, and just about everything I play these days runs in a browser. That being said I played the original Marathon trilogy back in the 90's when it was a Macintosh-exclusive game, in an era where "PC gaming" was synonymous with Windows. As such my friends were all playing Quake, possessing a technically superior 3D engine, but also a dull, dirt-brown and black aesthetic, and no particular story to go along with it.
For the past 20 years or so, that's what shooter games have looked like to me. I see billboards for Call of Duty XVI whatever, and it's some grim soldier dude in a burnt-out wasteland, and I think "pfft I'm not missing anything."
But cut to the Marathon cinematic reveal trailer, and I think WOW this is actually different, in a way that the original Marathon felt "violently original" in the context of the gaming world of its time. This might actually convince me to plunk down the petrodollars to get the latest PlayBox5000 or whatever's necessary to run it. But....
I see the value of prediction markets for providing an incentive to surface non-public information... Impending war, political upsets, even scientific discoveries, etc.
But in sports, this is really just gambling... Nobody "should" have insider information about this, so I think something gets skewed about the incentives.
The intellectual parallels between Bitcoin and the Constitution are quite striking when you think about it... These were both attempts to create an enduring "operating system" in which multiple non-trusting (and in fact perhaps rivalrous) parties would nonetheless be incentivized to co-participate in the production of a public good.
Equally interesting to me is the "dead founding father" aspect of it, how every generation there is a new conflict between The Founders' / Satoshi's Intention, and a new class of "interpreters" claiming that, actually, the founders intended this or that, or that we no longer live in the Founders' world and their original intent needs to be updated for the times.
GM -- I saw Johnson give a talk years before he embarked on his " #longevity quest"... He looked completely different.
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Lots of thoughts about this. 100% respect the "don't die" position, that's been my goal since a very young age. I never wanted to have to go the "ascetic" route as he has, although I respect it as somewhere between scientific self-experimentation and extreme performance art.
I thought (mistakenly in the late 90's and early 00's) atomic #nanotech would advance much quicker than it has, instead most "innovation" funding this century has gone to Bits instead of Atoms.
Despite this, there's always #cryonics, which continues to slowly plod along, which in combination with brain imaging (moving reasonably quickly) and continued advancements in nanotech (still moving slowly but non-zero), could I think produce a decent backup by the time I need it.
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