Atari’s legendary ET dump in the desert has been found:
A decades-old urban legend was put to rest Saturday when workers for a documentary film production company recovered “E.T.” Atari game cartridges from a heap of garbage buried deep in the New Mexico desert.
The “Atari grave” was, until that moment, a highly debated tale among gaming enthusiasts and other self-described geeks for 30 years. The story claimed that in its death throes, the video game company sent about a dozen truckloads of cartridges of what many call the worst video game ever to be forever hidden in a concrete-covered landfill in southeastern New Mexico.
The search for the cartridges of a game that contributed to the demise of Atari will be featured in an upcoming documentary about the biggest video game company of the early ’80s.
I’m of two minds about this discovery. While I’m glad to know the dump was real, (which I always assumed to be the case), I would have preferred for the cartridges to be left for far future generations to discover, just so their archeologists could come up with the usual cockamamie theories about the items they are uncovering.
One of the more amusingly wry gems of The Hermetic Millennia is when the ur-history of the Witches is mentioned in passing:
Mickey turned and turned again, and drew a large circle on the snowy ground with his staff. “Here is my circle of Power! Within it, all who walk tread lightly on their Mother Earth, leaving no trace when they die; and all goods are held in common; and all class-enemies, all enmities, inequalities, and patriarchy must be left outside, and cannot pass my ninefold wards! I call upon Jadis and Jahi, Phoebe and Prudence, Sabrina and Samantha, Willow and Wendy, to watch the sacred bounds!”
Menelaus went up to him, stepping into the circle, and said softly, “Uh. You do know all those people watching your sacred bounds are, um, made up from kiddie pixies and texts and toons, right? Make-believe?”
Mickey drew himself upright, which thrust his belly out even farther, and the scowl on his face was like a line drawn in a pie pan filled with raw dough. “Many records survived from the Days of Fire—the Final Archive listed nine hundred thousand references to the beloved Witch Hermione alone, not to mention Gillian Holroyd and Glinda the Good! Would you have us believe that the ancients devoted so much emphasis, effort, and attention to what they knew to be merely idle fictions?! Next you will claim that the warlocks Klingsor and Castaneda are unreal!”
There can be little doubt that the development of the novel during the present period of civilization is going to seriously screw up future historians if Man ever passes through another post-literate period. Which, based on the present trends, looks increasingly likely.