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[scriver]

He meant light pollution, not the Sun.

The Sun is news pollution

[ChairmanPoo]

He meant light pollution, not the Sun.

The Sun is news pollution

Nocturnal pollution

[Il Palazzo]

But page 3, dude. Page 3.

[Iduno]

And what kind of pisses me off the most though, is how I cannot see the vast majority of the night sky because I live in a convenient place where we have so much light we shine brighter than the stars above.

If it makes you feel any better, if we didn't have that light near us we'd die.

Grues aren't real.

[Frumple]

They don't need to be for you to be likely to be eaten in the dark, tasty neighbor.

[Lord Shonus]

And what kind of pisses me off the most though, is how I cannot see the vast majority of the night sky because I live in a convenient place where we have so much light we shine brighter than the stars above.

If it makes you feel any better, if we didn't have that light near us we'd die.

Grues aren't real.

That sounds like grue-talk to me.

[pikachu17]

Grues don't live. The shadow lords ate them all.

[Naturegirl1999]

I’ve never heard of grues or shadow lords. What show are you all referencing?

[Lord Shonus]

"Grue" was originally the name of a monster in the works of Jack Vance. The most common use however, is in the commercial version of the commercial version of the early text adventure Zork and the sequels to said game.

In earlier text adventures (now usually denoted as "interactive fiction", including retroactively) such as the original ADVENT (also known as Colossal Cave Adventure or simply Adventure), wandering around with no light source was extremely dangerous as -just like exploring a real cave- it was very possible to fall into an unseen crevasse and die. Zork retained the mechanic, but the traditional crevasse didn't work so well outside of the original cave setting. As Zork included houses and other such structures, they decided to assign the role to a monster that was conveniently afraid of light. Every time you move in a dark room, you have a chance of being instantly killed by the grue.

[Naturegirl1999]

Thank you

[Reelya]

In earlier text adventures (now usually denoted as "interactive fiction", including retroactively) such as the original ADVENT (also known as Colossal Cave Adventure or simply Adventure), wandering around with no light source was extremely dangerous as -just like exploring a real cave- it was very possible to fall into an unseen crevasse and die. Zork retained the mechanic, but the traditional crevasse didn't work so well outside of the original cave setting. As Zork included houses and other such structures, they decided to assign the role to a monster that was conveniently afraid of light. Every time you move in a dark room, you have a chance of being instantly killed by the grue.

My older sister used to have a collected edition of all the Infocom adventures and it came with reprints of all the text that accompanied the original game, including all the history/backstory for the Zork saga collected into one book. The whole thing is a hilarious read, very witty and Pythonesque, though you have to hunt around to find all the bits these days.

http://infodoc.plover.net/manuals/zork1.pdf

In 659 GUE*, the Kingdom of  Quendor was relatively small ...  ascension of Duncanthrax to the throne of Quendor on the final day of 659... The conquest of Antharia also gave Duncanthrax possession of Anthariaís famed granola mines. Unfortunately, no one in Quendor liked granola. ... As Duncanthraxís invasion swept across the new lands, he made a startling discovery: huge caverns  and tunnels, populated by gnomes, trolls and other magical races, all of whom loved granola.

So, the "Great Underground Empire" setting for the original Zork was conquered because the rising regional power needed to find a market for their excess breakfast cereal.

In 883, after countless years of decadence and over-taxation, The Great Underground Empire collapsed, the Royal Treasury was sacked and everyone moved somewhere else.

This was after they made the point that the Empire covered almost the entire world.

BTW the story continues in the manuals for the other Zork games.
http://infodoc.plover.net/manuals/zork2.pdf

LOCAL GOVERNMENT: Antharia is  ruled by a council of four Elders - one from the Shipbuilding Guild, one from  the Granola Miners Guild, one from the Marble Cutters Guild, and one from a popular waterfront pub called "Emu's"

Infocom really did have high quality extras back in those days, full color manuals, well-written and entertaining.

EDIT: Each game's introductory section is framed in-universe as a different type of publication. Zork 1 was an elementary-school level history book, Zork 2 was a tourist brochure, and Zork 3 was a shareholder's report for FrobozzCo.
http://infodoc.plover.net/manuals/zork3.pdf
This is the relevant bit:

The Frobozz Magic Grue Repellent Company is one of FrobozzCo's fastest growing divisions. Sales of grue repellent nearly tripled last year, spurred on by drastic extensive  improvements made in the product and by an aggressive marketing  campaign. Magic Grue Repellent Company executives can proudly point to a 31% drop in grue-related deaths during the last year, and a  consequent 31% drop in the grue population. The discovery of a particularly  effective new additive by the Magic Grue Repellent Company's research division has increased the efficiency of the product by 45%. Studies have shown that most grues will not come within 70 feet of someone sprayed with New Improved Repellent. The new additive, dubbed G-17, is also longer-lasting, requiring fewer sprayings, and it can be made from ordinary sand!

The Magic Grue Repellent Company also increased the product line with the introduction of seven new odors of repellent, in addition to the regular old socks/burning rubber odor. The new odors include rotting eggs, dead fish, swamp gas, three-week-old meatloaf, gym locker, wet dog and mint. Several ingenious sales strategies were highly successful. The Free-Noseplugs-With-Every-Can campaign, in association with the Frobozz Magic Noseplugs Company, ran for one month and  increased sales by 92%. Advertisements featuring grue-mangled corpses ran before and during the peak travel season. Finally, a joint packaging effort with the Frobozz Magic Lantern Company to produce a Frobozz Anti-Grue Kit paid off with remarkable end-of-year sales.

https://www.mocagh.org/infocom/beyondzork-lore.pdf

DORNBEAST Smart adventurers run the other way when they hear "Hurumph," the battle cry of the deadly dornbeast. Its 69 sensitive eyes can paralyze an unwary explorer with a single glare. Captured victims are plastered with round, sticky secretions that never come off.

Edit³. For completeness now I started poking around for the other good stuff. Pretty sure I found all the stuff I remember now:

This one's good because it has pictures of the various Flathead Dynasty members:
https://www.mocagh.org/infocom/zorkzero-calendar.pdf

These one are in the same setting, have a lot of the same aesthetics / artists involved:
https://www.mocagh.org/infocom/wishbringer-manual.pdf
https://www.mocagh.org/infocom/enchanter-manual.pdf
https://www.mocagh.org/infocom/sorcerer-manual.pdf
https://www.mocagh.org/infocom/spellbreaker-manual.pdf

[Mech#4]

It all made it quite jarring whene the first Zork game I played was Zork Nemesis. Except for some references to the earlier games, Zork Nemesis is very serious and involves murder, forbidden love and immortality through alchemy.

I do have a Zork book on my shelf. It's a choose your own adventure called "Zork 1: The Forces of Krill" by S. Eric Meretzky.

[Reelya]

Yeah, i couldn't imagine a serious Zork game for the same reason. It's quite Disworld-ish in feeling, so to make a serious spin off from that seems a bit of a weird concept.

[Lord Shonus]

That has a lot to do with where Zork came from. Like ADVENT before it, Zork began as a mainframe hobby project on a university mainframe (in this case, PDP-10 at MIT], and unlike ADVENT it was a collaboration from the beginning. The people making it threw in whatever they found amusing at the time, and group effort melded it into a whole. When they went commercial with it (and especially when they split it into three parts to fit on home machinrs, they smoothed it further.


The key here is that the concept of "overall design" was imposed only retroactively, amd the melding gave Zork a unique voice that later, more deliberately crafted games in the series built on.

[Jopax]

New PC arrived and was assembled, works like a charm. Only thing was that it's a desktop so now built-in Wi-Fi reciever. Run out, by  a random cheapo one for now (might get a proper cable going eventually, just need to figure where to route it trough), plug it in and expect it to not work since no drivers and the PC doesn't have a disk drive of any sort (doesn't seem to support having one either, nice flat surfaces with no interruptions except for cooling vents) so I figure I'd load the CD into my laptop and fling the drivers onto a USB.

Suprisingly enough, windows pulls a driver out of its ass somehow and the thing works like a charm, but what the hell I might as well have the manufacturers drivers on it, so I go to install them anyway. And that is when the thing stops working, so I uninstall the drivers and what do you know, it works with whatever windows found for it :V