Oct 27, 2003 (Monday)

Mike Abell <mtm84@yahoo.com> writes:

why is the space holder for the cheat codes the 56'th "link" on the list? Of course, 56 = 8 * tru7th.

too bad theres no page56.html... that I could find anyways.

Sept 20, 2003 (Saturday)

Do you know what kind of hat I'm wearing?

As noted in this Story forum post the Marathon's Story Page turned eight yesterday. Did you miss the party?

Sept 11, 2003 (Thursday)

Matt Fernandez <neut@mafmods.com> kindly sent in two Marathon themed destops which he created. You can get them below. Drop him a line if you like them.

Durandal (445K)
Marine (136K)

Tony Smith <tony.smith@theregister.co.uk> writes:

Here's an interesting thing: Iron Maiden's new album, Dance of Death, has a track called New Frontier, which contains the lines:

'Bleeding you dry from the start, the sum of my parts
You give it away, new life in a day Some new frankenstein, damned for all time'

and

'out beyond the new frontier, playing god without mercy, without fear
create a beast made a man without a soul...'

and

'neverending, forever searching. Chasing dreams, the dreams of your heart
always seeking, always asking, questions right from the start'

'...recycled again a lifetime of pain
the spawn of a man. the devil has planned'

Maybe it's me, but I can't help reading a Marathon (particularly Infinity) influence into it.

Best of all, it's track seven...

Gabriel Rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net> writes:

Ever read John Crowley's "Ægypt"? The book's about a small college professor who gets onto various vaguely occult history books that lead him on a way to a mythical (maybe?) land called Ægypt, that's sort of like Egypt, but not quite the same place, and that's where Gypsies (get it, GYPsies?) come from, which is, apparently, why people think that Gypsies can tell the future (they're from some vague, no-longer-extant land that was shattered apart).

Well, on page 187 of the edition I'm reading (a Bantam softcover from 1989; same pagination as the hardcover from April 1987, looks like), we have this:

"Sometime in the 1460s, a Greek monk brought to Florence a collection of manuscripts in Greek which caused a lot of excitement there. What they purported to be were Greek versions of ancient Egyptian writings--religious speculations, philosophy, magical recipes--that had been composed by an ancient sage or priest of Egypt, Hermes Trismegistus: Hermes the Three Times Very Great, you could translate it. Hermes is the Greek god, of course; the Greeks had made an equivalence between their Hermes, god of language, and the Egyptian god Thoth or Theuth, who invented writing. From various classical sources they had--Cicero, Lactintius, Plato--the Renaissance scholars who first got a look at these new manuscripts could find out that the author was a cousin of Atlas, the brother of Prometheus (the Rennaissance believed that these were real ancient people) and that he was not a god but a man, a man of great antiquity, who lived before Plato and Pythagoras and maybe even before Moses; and that these writings were therefore as old as any in the history of mankind. [...]

Sept 9, 2003 (Tuesday)

Steve Wood <smwood1974@hotmail.com> kindly sent in a screenshot of the Marathon line "Frog blast the vent core!" in the game Tron 2.0. You can see it here. Nice one.

Should be a few other references too. See if you can find them.

Sept 7, 2003 (Sunday)

Steve Wood <smwood1974@hotmail.com> writes:

I had a burst of nostalgia while playing Tron 2.0 this weekend. (Besides the nostalgia for the Tron movie.)

There's a level where you're on a corrupted server, and the system messages are all gibberish and scrambled. Attached is the graphic of one of the quotes- "Frog blast the vent core!"

Strange how seeing an odd quote like that can be so heartwarming!