#encyclopedia

i’m not really into the whole kinning thing but it was fun thought experiment nonetheless

Vintage encyclopedia article about snails … I just love those lithographs ✨

Is it just me or old encyclopedias are much prettier than modern ones ?

john constantine/nanaue stimboard

sources:xxx|xxx|xxx

o-craven-canto:

Back in 1995, the French videogame company Microfolie, now long defunct, published a didactic game/virtual encyclopedia dedicated to the evolution of life in prehistoric oceans – the kind of virtual encyclopedia that was popular at the time, I suppose, but now seems to be tragically obsolete. (Perhaps those who grew up in English-speaking countries will remember the Eyewitness CD series? I had the one on dinosaurs.)

Its title was L'Océan des Origines. It was quite an ambitious project: data on hundreds of animal species scattered over 500 million years of Earth’s history, geographical and climatic changes over nine geological periods, compared anatomy, paleontology, scientific etymology, phylogenetics… presented as the rooms of a magnificent undersea palace or museum. You get to watch giant cephalopods and primitive tetrapods swim by over triumphant orchestral music, free a precious fossil from stone by choosing the right reagents, follow the branches of the tree of life across half a billion years of change, and come up with appropriate scientific names for creatures of fantasy.

I was gifted a copy of the Italian edition when I was a little grub. I fell in love with it. Decades later, I could still literally recite much of its content by heart. You know how people get starry-eyed about the cartoons they watched in the morning before school? I feel that way about crude animations of trilobites and plesiosaurs. By modern standards, or looking at it with adult eyes, I suppose it’s not so impressive. Whatever. Eventually entropy and hardware marched on, and the original CD became unusable. But guess what – by running Windows 95 on a virtual machine, you can still get it going!

If you have the original CD, that is, which I thankfully do. Alas, the game itself has been completely out of production for over two decades. CD resales are all inactive, the production companies have long since closed their gates. But I really would like this little gem to be more famous, as I think it deserves. So, I’ve taken as much footage as I could of the running game (hey, it disappeared from circulation before the current millennium – I don’t think I’m depriving anyone from potential sales doing so. What sales??) And since all the content is in Italian, I’ve taken the liberty of subbing/translating everything into English for the convenience of the world.

The whole footage is about 2 hours, split up in eight parts. Here is the first, covering the introduction, the game’s internal books and the first of its properly interactive sequences, in which you apply your new knowledge of etymology to name three species from an imaginary alt-prehistory.

More to follow.

Part 2 (archive of species)

Part 3 (hall of paleontologists, continental drift, fossilization, fossil restoration game)

Part 4 (genealogy of species, genealogical game)

Part 5 (Projection room, compared anatomy)

Part 6 (Aquarium)

Part 7 (presentation of epochs, paleobiological game)

Part 8 (time travel, end credits)

@wizardfigurine​

#imagine if some big game company redid this and worked alongside paleobiologists .. !!! amazing quality and so much useful information

If only, if only. I don’t know if I trust major game companies to handle it well, but I can see some semi-independent effort like Thrive doing a good job at it. Imagine: a massive virtual museum filled with features that cannot exist in real-life musea, such as basements going down through geological layers impossibly rich with fossils that you can extract and study, sprawling greenhouses where you can take a stroll through Carboniferous proto-forests, miniature ecosystems where you can fiddle with environmental parameters to see how living populations respond to changes, travelling to major paleoecosystems like Escuminac or Messel at the time of their glory, and so on. Add to that an interactive rescalable tree of life and a virtual library holding digitalized copies of actual books on paleobiology and evolution, just for kicks.

Unlikely to ever happen, but one can dream.

I’m telying you if scour thrift stores often enough & with luck you’ll find cool star trek books! Well good books too BUT these are star trek books! I can’t believe how good of a condition the encyclopedia is! I’ve got all of these reference books on my year round gift list & hubby found these at local thrift shop! Sorry to rattle on but I’m excited! Should I add a Riker gif here? ….yeah of course I should!