Ramblings of a Technology Addict

Wednesday, May 7, 2003

Genesis of a name

The origins of Cortana are both specific and vague...and they go something like this.
When I was working at Edelman PR in San Francisco during the summer of 1999, the Cortana Letters surfaced.
What were the Cortana Letters? Six emails written by Matt Soell and Doug Zartman of Bungie Software addressed to Hamish Sinclair of the Marathon's Story Page. This all comes back to one source: Bungie Software's Marathon Series.
For those that have not played the game, Marathon is a sci-fi shoot-em-up that precedes Doom in the chronology of the shoot-em-ups. Made by Bungie Software in 1994, it had some unique elements, including a plot that took some deep investigation, the part of which was done by a web community lead by Hamish Sinclair. They were a group that rivalled the Cloudmakers in intelligence, depth of experience and information and camaraderie. Both communities are still active to this day.
The letters themselves were letters from an AI called Cortana addressed to Hamish Sinclair the head of the Marathon's Story page. They were mysterious and contained all sorts of references that were later deciphered as relating to T.S. Eliot and French Mythology surrounding Charlemagne, and some other diverse and deep sources. There was much analysis done on the emails themselves, discussion of the headers and all sorts of good information.
These letters became the backstory for Halo, the popular shoot-em-up that takes place in the Bungieverse and introduce it's main named character, Cortana. Cortana is an AI, much as Durandal, Leela and Tycho were in the original Marathon, sentient, intelligent, and potentially rampant. It was a fascinating journey and the Marathon's Story Page later lead to my involvement in Cloudmakers.
On April 18th, 2001 there was a report from Kenneth Lu on the MSP that said:
In case you haven't heard yet, the upcoming A.I. movie has unleashed a giant network of fake websites describing a murder mystery, making use of HTML comments Looking Glass references and such. There's already an organized effort to solve it all.. and the page reminds me a great deal of the Marathon Story page... http://www.for-evan.com/trail/
That very day came a series of messages that included the DNS registrations with Doug Zartman's name. So I picked up the Cortana moniker and ran with it. Yes, she ended up being female in the game, and I am male. But I didn't know that Cortana was feminine until it was too late.
Thusly I remain by sharp and flame,
Cortana
4:41:40 PM comment []

Movies

So Dave and I wandered off the Courthouse 8 AMC theatre last night to catch X2, which made for a good evening. Tiffany and I had made an abortive attempt to see it on Saturday night, foiled by a slow draw of the credit card in the line at the Hoffman Center. Dave and I got there right as the previews started and boy did we get some killer previews.
We got Finding Nemo and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The Italian Job. These are my type of summer movies. Nemo is the next Pixar flick, which in and of itself makes it worth seeing. The League...(henceforth known as LXG for expediency's sake) looks like a great combination of Jules Verne and Indiana Jones all lead by Sean Connery. It looks like this one's got all sorts of good action in it, and possibly a plot behind it, so we'll have to see. The Italian Job looks like a great heist flick combined with some Usual Suspects style intrigue. Very exciting!
10:08:55 AM comment []