Tinselman is the very amusing blog of the co-creator of Myst, Robyn Miller. It’s a bit iffy on a daily basis … and very eclectic. A bit like this blog, but better.

He’s got this ongoing thread about the Republic of Tinselman, which appears to be something dating back to some attempt to create a fake republic on Wikipedia, or something, but whatever. It’s just stuff.

He also seems to be a big fan of Walt Disney . To be particular, Walt Disney, and Disneyland. Not necessarily the Disney company or the movies per se. In fact, thinking about it, or maybe I read this somewhere. Anyway, that he wanted Myst to be a bit like Disneyland, which I think it is.

It’s worth noting that Robyn Miller is the one who did the music for Myst and Riven, and he left after Riven. It’s a bit obvious looking at any of the sequels after that the original spirit isn’t there. With his brother Rand, he also did pre-Myst stuff like Cosmic Osmo, which was pretty cool and all done in the absolutely brilliant and amazing but now-forgotten HyperCard . In fact, did you know that the original Myst for Mac was written and deployed in Hypercard? Amazing but true.

Actually, that reminds me of a story, which is that back when Myst was first released I was working at this rather unusual place called the Southam InfoLab . Anyway, I was mainly a HyperCard hacker and pretty damned good at it if I may say so. And I managed to hack into Myst and actually look at the source code running it. HyperCard is an interpreted language, the language is called HyperTalk, and there was no compiler for it. So, they implemented this fiendishly complex system for preventing you from breaking into debug mode and viewing the code, but I managed to hack it. I don’t remember doing much with it though, because the source code for Myst was way over my head at the time.

Anyway. Robyn is clearly a very interesting an unusual person. I think it would be very interesting to meet him and peer into his brain some day. Once you get past the “oh my god he’s the guy who made Myst” thing then his blog seems to be quite interesting.