TL;DR: ZZT is now 30, there’s still a community, we’ve remixed the shareware world, it’s pretty fun, and you can play it online.
Thirty years ago, on the 15th of January 1991, Tim Sweeney released his first game to the world: a little arcadey game called ZZT, for the IBM PC and compatibles.
Update (2021-12-13): This post is wrong in several places:
In Australia, the AstraZeneca vaccines were not recommended for younger people (by TGA? ATAGI? I don’t remember), so I wound up getting the Pfizer vaccine.
I was under the mistaken impression that AstraZeneca was a “traditional” vaccine made from inactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus. It isn’t: it is an adenovirus that infects but does not replicate within human cells, and it instructs infected cells to produce SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
Despite assurances from the Prime Minister that the vaccine will not be mandatory, everyone is falling over themselves to implement mandates.
We didn’t get to go back to normal life, because the vaccines turned out to offer temporary, non-sterilising protection, and variants keep popping up.
TL;DR: Despite earlier reservations, I will probably be taking a vaccine when offered, but it would be for different reasons if I was outside Australia. Also, continue to watch out for manipulation and fudging from authorities.
(Note: Twitter links have screenshots next to them, as it’s notoriously difficult to predict what Twitter shows on the other end of a link.)
Emergency approvals for the major vaccine candidates (Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Oxford/AstraZeneca) have been issued, and it’s time to scale up and deploy. Then we reach herd immunity and get back to normal life, right? Well, first we need to make sure we’re all talking about the same “herd immunity”, and watch closely for shifting definitions. Between November and December 2020, the WHO’s website changed its definition of “herd immunity” at least twice (emphasis in the quotes is mine):
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