Dear Log,
THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, I played the first Commander Keen game, where there are the usual monsters and powerups and things, all in chunky EGA graphics.
But one of the bonus things in the game is a book that says "KANT".
And I always wondered: why Kant? Why not Wittgenstein, or Nagarjuna, or Voltaire? To me, this was a mystery beyond reckoning.
Until today.
Today I realized: The game designer only had about 12 pixels, maximum, in which to spell the name of whatever philosopher he wanted to put there. "Kant" was the only thing that could fit.
Hume and Mead are four letters long, but are out of the running -- an M takes too many pixels.
He could have put "Rand" there, except 1) Ayn Rand isn't a philosopher, she's just Oprah for assholes, and 2) you'd have to squint to see that it didn't say "AANO" or something, and 3) people would probably think "RAND" was supposed to mean some anonymous report from the Rand Corporation about the caloric value of jellyfish or something.
So Kant it was.
Altho the designer could have scored a fun bit of controversy/publicity for the game if he'd made that book red, with "MAO" written on it.
