Speaking of Arrogant
I once tried to claim that I invented the term "Heisenbug".
Michael Vance points out that you can find the term in Unix man pages dating back to 1973. I was four at the time.
To that I say: phooey. Somebody has clearly doctored the historical record.
You know what else I invented? Using right-click to get a context sensitive menu. This was in the MindCraft title Gryphon Masters, well before Windows 95. Unfortunately, MindCraft went under before the title could ship.
(Actually, it was very fortunate, for me. Gryphon Masters was going to be a colossal failure on my part - I wanted to compete with Ultima VII even though we had a team of, like, six people, who were splitting their time with other projects as well.)
People are always stealing stuff from me before I come up with it. They do this with time machines. They also stole this idea from the future.
Damn them. Damn them all.
Posted by: Mark Nau | March 31, 2004 at 03:01 AM
Speaking of familiar. Am I the only one whom the previous post has disappeard for?
Posted by: Jeffool | March 31, 2004 at 05:38 AM
I invented something that has been used a few times: the Icomenu. Where you hold down a button and a set of icons appear in a ring around your character, so you hold a direction and release the button to pick your option. It's great because once you memorize which buttons are where, it becomes an instantaneous thing (you could just hold the direction and tap the button to immediately hit it). The only downside is the iffyness of diagonals, if you include them. Kind of the gmaepad equivalent of a right-click menu!
Posted by: Mike Hommel | March 31, 2004 at 06:57 AM
I would have invented the internet, if Al Gore hadn't beaten me to it.
Posted by: Chris Busse | April 01, 2004 at 10:46 AM
Sorry Jeffool, and anyone else who noticed, the previous post mysteriously vaporized...and I'm going to take it as a sign that I shouldn't have posted it in the first place...besides, I'm too lazy to rewrite it.
Posted by: Jamie Fristrom | April 01, 2004 at 02:13 PM
Are you going through crunch over there? I miss the warm fuzzy feeling of reading new posts.
Posted by: FedEx | April 08, 2004 at 10:18 PM
I suspect they are just inventing various and sundry ways of infuriating me for their next game: Jamie Fristrotron's Pro Progressive Game Designer.
Posted by: Zachary Slater | April 09, 2004 at 12:18 PM