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Anybody have a pointer to the "iHole" story mentioned in the article? It seems to have been purged not just from the author's website, but archive.* as well. https://www.juliangough.com/the-ihole-in-original-apple-fl/
https://archive.ph/Wac0r
"Yes my short story, The iHole, was here. No, it's not here now..."
I feel for the guy, making a living off of art is difficult. However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement. > So…
so I said, OK, I’ll take whatever the first thing you offered was If he said that in an e-mail, doesn't that constitute a written agreement to transfer copyright to Mojang?
Just want to say, it's definitely not THE most popular game of all time... Candy crush could be a strong candidate, though they probably never use that term on themselves.
(TFA links to that page toward the end.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I feel a twist in my gut for this guy. He is so frustrated it's incredible. He wrote 90% more than he needed to on this topic. The essay is long and rambling and I've missed any point he's trying to make... much like the words of his "End Poem". They are senseless and, ultimately, meaningless. They are not deep. They are incoherent. No wonder he's stuck in a narrative of his own creation. That's his life. If his…
He made it pretty clear that he didn't have any money (and thus no legal access).
The writer of the poem, or short story, when you beat the ender dragon in Minecraft, never signed the contract releasing his copyright on it. That means Microsoft doesn't actually own the ending to Minecraft.
Microsoft probably doesn’t own the ending to Minecraft, since my non-lawyer understanding is that assignment must be done a particular way unless it is done in very specific terms as a ‘work for hire.’ However, his acceptance of the money, things written in his emails, the poem itself or other behaviors, could possibly form a case that he implicitly assigned a transferable non-exclusive license to Mojang for it to be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like it's time to play it!
Making a server is surprisingly terrible for such a ‘mature’ game. However playing it with your kid is so excellent. Farming, fighting, building, raiding, landscaping, tunnelling, rowing, flying, whatever. Pick your path and it is great fun.
1. If you're on the same network, you can select "open to LAN" in the menu once you load into a world and it'll give you a port so anyone on your network can play in your world with you as if it's a multiplayer server. This is nice for playing with family.
2. Minecraft Realms is Mojang/Microsoft's first party solution to the problem where you pay $8 /month for essentially a private server but with some stricter rules and easier ui.
3. Now we're getting into the weeds but if you want to set up a server on your local machine but don't have admin access to your router to set up port forwarding (as is the case for many young people), there are some free tunneling services you can use like Hamachi. You'll need everyone who wants to play on the same tunnel and then they can connect to a locally hosted server as if it's online.
The remaining options are the obvious ones of setting up port forwarding so you can host a public server from your home and renting a server from a third party provider, many of which have Minecraft instances you can spin up pretty easily.
If you want to play online with friends on Bedrock Edition, the more popular multi-platform version of the game, I think it's actually pretty easy but I don't play that edition much anymore so I can't be sure.
It genuinely does make me really upset though that young people who don't have parents willing to pay monthly fees can't easily play Java edition with their friends. Plenty of other games let you host a public server on your own machine. I don't see why they wouldn't implement this except that it costs them money bydepopularizing Realms. It's honestly really sad and goes against the original spirit of the game.
The irony, it’s now in the public domain but I can only access the bottom of the post if I have a Substack account.
This is a great (long!) piece. I think one important thing for people on HN here is this: > I think Carl, with his background as a Corporate Finance guy, seeing the world through that filter, must have believed that I was trying to blackmail them; trying to maximise my revenue, like the “rational agents” that populate economics textbooks; that I was refusing to sign it to hold up the deal, because I wanted to get pai…