What planet is Sonic the Hedgehog from? That depends on which version of the character you’re talking about. The earliest bios from Sega imagine him as simply living on more or less the Earth as we know it, giving his place of birth as Christmas Island. When the series was published outside of Japan a more elaborate background was painted, putting him on a planet called Mobius inhabited by mobians—anthropomorphic talking animals—and ruled by the evil dictator Dr. Robotnik. Sega were similarly lose with canon when it came to licencing, allowing the details of the world to be filled in very differently in the various adaptations.

In Archie Comic’s Sonic the Hedgehog Mobius is a post-apocalyptic Earth in the far future, a background shared by Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie’s Land of Darkness, while in Fleetway’s Sonic the Comic the Earth as we know it exists as a parallel dimension to Mobius, with characters sometimes travelling between the two¹. Sonic X and later the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog film also feature Sonic travelling from an (unnamed) parallel dimension but then have him be taken in by a human family on Earth, where the bulk of the action takes place.

But this divide between Earth and Mobius never really existed in the games, at least as far as the Japanese versions were concerned, and starting with 1998’s more narrative-focused Sonic Adventure Sega started trying to unify things a bit. The English localisation featured almost nothing from the previous Western Sonic canon: No mention of Mobius, badniks or roboticisation² and with Sonic and friends being just a few talking animals in a world made of mostly of ordinary humans. This depiction of the world and Sonic’s placed in it held in the games for the next decade, as far as Sonic Unleashed in 2008.

The Sonic games of the 2010s, though, shied away from narrative focus and tried to steer the series in a more cartoon-y direction. These games vastly cut down on the size of the secondary and incidental cast, not only dropping background N.P.C.s entirely but also vastly trimming the size of recurring cast of mobian³ characters, sometimes only having Sonic himself and Tails have any major role. Still, one could imagine those teeming human cities just off-screen somewhere. That depiction of the world was not seriously challenged until 2017’s Sonic Forces.

An big selling point of Sonic Forces was that it had a character creator, finally allowing you to play your own Sonic O.C. in an official game⁴! Your avatar in the game starts off as an ordinary, frightened, mobian who rises up from the crowd to fight against the Eggman Empire alongside Sonic and his friends. For this narrative to work then, your furry O.C. must start as someone ordinary. Therefore mobians must be ordinary. There wasn’t really such a thing as an ordinary mobian in previous games. Barring the ancient echidna tribe shown in flashback all the way back in Sonic Adventure there had never really been furry background N.P.C.s. No generic anthropomorphic animals. They were all important, named characters. For the avatar character to rise up as part of the masses and become a hero they first need to fit into the masses, and thus Sonic Forces came with a colossal shift in how the world of Sonic the Hedgehog was presented: A world of animals under the thumb of Ivo Robotnik, the sole human in the game - something that aligned closer to Sonic the Comic than any of the previous games⁵.

While the text of Forces itself doesn’t address this change directly series producer Takashi Iizuka made comments to the effect that the there are two different worlds: One that is home to humans and the other that is home to mobians. This, frankly, does not remotely make any sense if you try to fit it with previous games and this was not some sort of reboot, either! Sonic Forces directly references several earlier games. This was coupled with another retcon where the game tries to reframe the younger version of Sonic, returning from Sonic Generations, as actually being from another dimension⁶ rather than being from the past, suddenly putting Sonic Mania and by extension all the Mega Drive games into a different continuity to everything else and making a complete mess of everyone’s understanding of the series. The people who maintain the Sonic the Hedgehog Fandom wiki started splitting off every character into two different pages: One for the primary version and one for the “classic” universe version. It was, in short, a complete disaster if you cared about the canon of a series of children’s computer games.

Something good did come of this, though: The long-running Sonic the Hedgehog series published by Archie Comics had ceased publication in 2016, one year before Sonic Forces was released, and in the year that followed Sega negotiated a new line of comics with IDW Publishing instead. And while Ian Flynn returned as head writer, having helmed the Archie comics for a decade, the new series abandoned the continuity (and legal baggage) of the old comics and started fresh with a backstory much more closely aligned with that of the games and a plot following on directly from Sonic Forces, keeping its status quo of a world full of mobians.

And the IDW comics are really good! Ian Flynn, Evan Stanley, et al. have a deep love for the series and are able to consistently deliver endearing, interesting and fun interpretations of the characters. It has made me warm up a lot to parts of the cast I previously disliked and introduced wonderful new additions like Whisper and Surge. It also strikes an amazing balance in tone, managing to deliver just the right amount of self-serious edginess in its stories while maintaining its warm, bright, colourful world. It successfully managing to keep the good parts of the ow the Edge 2000s without whollly abandoning the cartooniness of the 1990s and without the layer of ironic detachment and self-cringe that haunted the series in the 2010s. I maintain a reading order if you want to have a go at them yourself.

And as the comics became more aligned with the games the games have in turn became more aligned with the comics. Characters from the IDW comic have started appearing in mobile games and the official Sonic Speed Simulator, the official Roblox game, and were mentioned in 2021’s Sonic Frontiers. This is because with the success of the IDW comics Sega have more and more let the lunatics run the asylum. Flynn has been writing more and more for the series, from promotional material and animated shorts to eventually being the writer for the games themselves, penning the scripts for Sonic Frontiers and Shadow Generations. And being someone who does care about the canon of a series of children’s computer games he has taken upon himself to sort out the lore mess.

Under Flynn Sega has put out a series of in-character Youtube shorts called Tailstube, which act not just as promotional material but also an ongoing lore-clarification series⁷ with the very first episode trying to lay out as plainly as possible while staying in character: All games take place on the same planet. Humans and mobians⁸ just mostly live in different parts of the world. The Mega Drive games are part of the main canon. Please forget those retcons. Please go fix the wiki pages.

And the games have embraced talking about their history again, acknowledging backstories and characters who hadn’t been mentioned in a decade. The extended human cast, particularly those related to Shadow’s backstory, exist again. Maria and Gerald Robotnik feature in Shadow Generations and the GUN commander⁹ was in the game’s promotional short Dark Beginnings. But the IDW comics, their timeline seemingly stuck in a pre-Sonic Frontiers limbo, has yet to feature any human characters outside of Eggman. Even when using locations that were shown in the games to be populated by humans the comics will show them as being full of mobians or simply empty instead. There still seems to be a reluctance in the series to portray a wider human cast, but that might be changing!

Sega recently licenced a new manga series called Sonic and the Blade of Courage where Sonic returns to the world of humans and teams up protagonist Yuuta, an ordinary boy, to fight Eggman, who has been going around using an ancient cursed idol to turn (human) people to crystal. In the third chapter Sonic takes Yuuta to Spagonia¹⁰ to meet Tails, the only mobian character in the comic so far other than Sonic himself. Spagonia is, like Yuuta’s home Metro City, full of humans. This stands in contrast to last time Spagonia was shown in the IDW comics, with Sonic and Blaze the Cat running through empty streets.

Does this mean Sega is open to portraying more humans in the series as a whole again or is it compartmentalising aspects of the franchise to different media? Will any new Sonic mangas barred from having background mobians while IDW stays devoid of other humans? It would, I suppose, contribute to giving different parts of the series their own identities.

That said they have also introduced a new human character in the most recent Tailstube (which is also set in Spagonia): Professor Victoria¹¹. And Sage, Eggman’s A.I. daughter from from Sonic Frontiers, is joining the IDW cast in issue #84¹² which means that that status quo is finally being moved forward as well.

In any case I really enjoy the direct that the series has gone in recent years and I’m looking forward to seeing how it continues to evolve.

It bothers me more than it should when I hear Irish people, or anyone outside of North America, call a Mega Drive a Sega Genesis. It’s quite common among people younger than me; people who didn’t grow up with the machine itself. They know about it from the internet, from the video game history that gets talked about and passed down online, and that is generally the American history of video games. The great video game crash, the dominance consoles over home computers and the dominance of the “Super Nintendo”¹ among consoles—all things that did not really happen here. There were only two countries where the Mega Drive was called a Genesis but one of those two countries is the United States of America which is, of course, the only country that matters.

This is a pretty trivial aspect of the general cultural imperialism of the U.S.A. and this is nothing new. The U.S. is a huge country, the largest economy in the world and has spent the last hundred years dominating the media and cultural output of the rest of the world. It drowns out all other voices and perspectives, especially in a small English-speaking, and up until recently, very poor country like Ireland.

And as the internet allows us to be more connected and allow other voices to get out this it also accelerates this. Now the world is not only watching the same Holywood movies but following the same big accounts on U.S.-based and -designed social media networks, having the same conversations about the big American political news. Which, to be clear, there is good reason to do². America is, again, the biggest economy and most powerful country in the world. What it does impacts all of us but also what its tech companies do shape the information we see and the ways in which we see it.

How we access information and what information is prioritised is controlled largely by companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms, policies and moderation are responsible for genocide. I perhaps cannot as easily level such a claim against Google yet but its search, the most common tool for accessing information in the world, has gotten worse and worse at doing that, prioritising profit, advertising and keeping you enclosed within a Google ecosystem. And now, of course, funnelling you away from links to other sites entirely, links to other resources and perspectives, and towards their chatbot output.

Large language models are swallowing so much of the internet right now and lot of people already swear by them, turning to them for questions, for help with writing, for ideas for when they’re stuck, for therapy and for companionship. There is a lot to be worried about with this but one thing I have been thinking about is how these chatbots—whether Google’s or Open A.I.’s or whoever’s—is that they are probably all going to call a Mega Drive a Genesis unless specifically prompted against it.

These models are trained using the internet as a corpus, an internet already dominated by American perspectives. They are made and shaped by American tech companies who are increasingly cosying up to an ever-more chauvinist U.S. state which is itself embracing “A.I.” tools as much as it can.

There is reason to think that the current bubble is unsustainable (and I do hope it bursts), but if these tools become normalised as a primary way of attaining answers, of seeking information and perspectives, I think it will have a horrifying flattening effect and accelerate the general Americanisation of the world beyond what is already happening.

And everything I said above is assuming no outright maliciousness. Twitter has repeatedly shown us that the people who make these chatbots can deliberately steer them to avow certain perspectives, from promoting South African white genocide myths to conspiracy theories about Jews. There is nothing really stopping Google from, say, deliberately trying to seed racist, anti-vaccine or anti-transgender propaganda into its chatbot and search summaries if it thinks that might get it points with the current regime which is already demanding idealogical purity from such systems, in effect ordering the limitation of acceptable perspectives.

I have posted about how one of Dracula’s funniest moments is from it examining its own format as an epistolary novel but a another amusing use of the format is the inclusion of newspaper articles that give a perspective of some of the events of the novel from the detached perspective of (absurdly verbose) newspaper clippings whose writers have no inkling of the broader events of the story.

A correspondent from The Daily Graph recounts, on the 8th of August, how a freak storm crashes the schooner Demeter into Whitby Harbour with the only living soul on board being a great, black dog¹ that leaps from the ship as soon as it beaches and runs straight to a cliff where it “disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.”

The reporting continues the next day that the cargo of the ship (boxes full of Transylvanian soil) being consigned to a local solicitor and, more importantly, the Whitby S.P.C.A. putting out a desperate search for the poor dog who fled the ship, who is imagined to be terrified and hiding in the moors and definitely not a murderous vampire in the guise of a gigantic, ferocious, black wolf.

The newspaper clippings end with the paragraph:

No trace has ever been found of the great dog; at which there is much mourning, for, with public opinion in its present state, he would, I believe, be adopted by the town. To-morrow will see the funeral; and so will end this one more “mystery of the sea.”

Ogham is an interesting writing system with a lot of unusual features. It was used to write Primitive Irish inscriptions on stone monuments in early Medieval Ireland and parts of Britain, the letters consisting of tally-mark like lines carved along the edge of a stone column. It’s a writing system that originally existed on a three dimensional medium rather than a flat page or tablet. Being written on the edges of standing stones means it is also a vertical writing system and unusually it is one that is read bottom-to-top¹ and it’s the only writing system encoded in Unicode with its own unique space character where the space is not blank but a straight line.

I was originally writing more infodumping here but I thought it was coming out very dry and if I have piqued your interest then you are just as capable of reading the Wikipedia article on Ogham as me.

But Ogham is really cool and pretty common tattoo fodder. Years ago I was considering getting my name tattooed in Ogham but at the time I also felt very perfectionist about getting something permanently drawn on my body and never went through with it. It’s just as well as that was pre-transition and I would have then had my deadname stuck on me. Having been transitioning for a few years the idea of permanent changes to my body no longer felt like such a big deal² and I have gotten a couple of tattoos now without worrying to much about it but I never got that Ogham one.

I was thinking about this recently and have been experimenting with an Ogham design that is deliberately my dead name with my chosen name written over it. It happens to work out pretty well because the rendition of my name into Ogham has more strokes than my deadname and the new strokes can be pretty easily added in to the gaps provided that some space is left between each line (and particularly with some deliberate stylistic liberties in how I am transliterating the names). So maybe I will still get my deadname tattooed in this way?

Also sometimes people try to make modern calligraphic or cursive interpretations of Ogham and I think that’s really cute. Check out Úrogham and Ogham Cruinn.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX

I have been rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 and talking about it with friends a lot so here is my favourite of all the intros from it or Brotherhood (it’s just the first intro from Brotherhood).

Also just a small rant: I hate how the top results on Youtube for this kind of stuff is always horrible interpolated to 60FPS upscaled crap that ruins the animation.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I have conflicting urges to want to write more and do more but also I know I need to rest more. Don’t expect me to be Blaugusting. I am actually trying to get as much off my plate as possible and not commit to things, including pruning my RSS feeds quite a bit so I feel less obliged to keep up with so much. Everything is difficult 👍🏻

But I have still been reading and have things to share. No particular order or categories to things this time.

The Narrative Fallacy — Nikhil Suresh

On how a compelling narratives not just get people to buy into ideas, but obscure otherwise very obvious flaws, and how the use of narratives in this way is actually taught and enforced in university education.

No, the real point is that the claims from this study are ridiculous and intelligent people that have been studying for years can’t pick up on it. The real point is that I am actually really confused as to how Piff got his results, but at least I’m not tricking myself into thinking I know what’s going on. Did he fudge the numbers? Was the experiment poorly set up? Just pure bad luck in sampling? Hell, is the result true? I don’t know, but I will say that you don’t know either.

The Missing 11th of the Month — David R. Hagen

Why is the 11th of each month (other than September) consistently underrepresented in the Google Books database as shown in this XKCD comic? The answer is typographical.

When I began this study, I was hoping to find a hidden taboo of holding events on the 11th or typographical bias against the shorthand ordinal. Alas, the reason is far is far more mundane: a numeral 1 looks a lot like a capital I or a lowercase l or a lowercase i in most of the fonts used for printing books. An 11 also looks like an n, apparently. Google’s algorithms made mistakes when reading the 11th from a page, interpreting the ordinal as some other word.

So-Called “AI” Cannot Program — Natalie Weizenbaum

This really resonated with me. The most frustrating projects I have coded for are the ones where people have not thought through the meaning of what they are asking for, where they ask “make this work” with no clear definition of what working looks like outside of the most idealised possible scenario without consideration of real world use, let alone edge cases or failure states. I feel “a programmer is paid to refine semantics” to my bones.

Programming is the act of making a computer enact a semantic task. The computer’s silicon internals, its RAM and hard disk and even its pixels, are the syntax here. It has no intrinsic meaning, just a set of ones and zeros and a very complex set of rules for transforming them. The semantics are the human interpretation of what it’s doing and why, the understanding of those numbers and pixels as a map to the nearest ramen joint or a simulation of a puppygirl begging for treats.

(a) cohost postmortem: life after death — Jae Kaplan

I still get far too emotional thinking about Cohost.

the reality of social media is that unless you have an Audience, you are probably better served among friends.

Revisiting Chapters: Tyrion V, ACoK — Turtle-paced

I really love A Game of Thrones and I used to read a lot of fan analysis stuff and listened to a couple of podcasts just about the series. Turtle-paced is the one person in that sphere that I still follow and I still really enjoy reading her deep dive chapter analyses when she posts them. She does, as the name of her blog implies, post them at the rate of a testudine and it is a nice occasional treat for me.

This is just how it is, per Tyrion. His response is not to address the unfairness but to show gratitude for the benefits he enjoys. The idea that everyone should have those privileges does not cross his mind. It’s a way in which he’s like Cersei. Though again, and as usual for the Lannister siblings, this is also a product of an abusive home. Tyrion’s only protection against the various injustices he faces in life due to his disability come from being a Lannister. The idea that everyone should have Lannister-level privileges is a threat to him - which in turn is a belief born of despair that of course everyone will hate him for his disability, and this can never change.

GameCube controllers in Sunfluffs — Azure

Putting native Gamecube controller in a new PC game, cool! Seen via Misty.

okay so, something that’s been bugging me for 15+ years but i never realized how to put it into words until recently: regular game controllers have different layouts depending on if you’re in gameplay or in menus.

Moon Light Café — CD-ROM Journal

Another multimedia CD.

Writing about early CD-ROMs means coming across a lot of early examples of things that became famous later. Sometimes that means finding new and exciting angles on something familiar… and sometimes it means something that’s only notable for being early. Today’s disc is one of those.

What I’m Reading, Volume 3 — Caoimhe

My clone also shared some interesting links, including an article about the decline of bin stores, a type of business I didn’t even know existed and beautiful photos of industrial waste dumps in Russia.

Ancient Globalism: Rome, India, China, & Beyond — Nathan Goldwag

Ancient trade is cool! The past was international!

Titianus himself was a Macedonian, as well as a Roman citizen, and reflects just how complex and multifaceted these exchanges truly are. We talk of “Rome” and “China” as unitary civilizations, exchanging speech and goods like two singular individuals, but of course both were mere representations of vast conglomerations of peoples, cultures, and nations, all of which were constantly in flux. At Shatial, in the Karakoram Mountains of the Punjab, more than 1,000 inscriptions and 700 petroglyphs were carved into the rock near a key pass, recording names, dates, and prayers from travelers. They appear mostly in Sogdian, Middle Persian, Parthian, Aramaic, Brahmi, and Kharosthi. Nine are written in the extinct Bactrian language, one uses Chinese characters, and one is in Hebrew.

Rachel’s iPod — Luna

A short lament about erasing someone’s past from an old device.

Have you ever bought a pre-owned game cartridge or MP3 player or something, and the previous owner’s data is still on it — and for a brief moment, you feel a sense of connection with that stranger through their lingering data, and a twinge of sadness at the idea of deleting it to use the device for yourself?

Hell, I have felt sad in the past about clearing out my own childhood savedata from a cartridge. A few years ago I was able to boot my old copy of Soleil and was greeted with save files under my deadname as well as my brother and sister’s names.

Let’s make up fantasy consoles for fun — Kyle Labriola

Seen via Mike Egan’s link roundup.

If you could wave a magic wand and wish a new fantasy console into the world…what would it be like? What constraints would it have to force developers to get creative? If it came with hardware, like the Playdate, what would the console physically be like?

This is something I have actually thought about before. One of the myriad little ideas filed away that I will certainly never have time for (and would have to learn many, many new skills to ever do myself) and if I ever do get time for it the moment for it will probably have passed. But the idea of a Pico-8 style fantasy console with its own integrated development environment but 3D with an eye to creating PSX-style visuals in the way that been in vogue, especially with horror games with a Crocotile-style friendly editor for mapping and modelling has been fermenting in my mind for years.

And very importantly it would also be paired with a secondary, 2D, low-spec fantasy console similar to Pico-8 (some musings of this involved it being a Pico-8 clone that could run Pico-8 carts itself, but maybe that would be stepping on Zep’s toes too much) that could play its own separate games as well as link to main console to act as a simple secondary screen like a VMU, either running it in a separate window on the same desktop or else running on your phone linked via wifi connection. Have extra HUD info on the second screen, control a game entirely through your phone with a unique interface, pass it to a friend and allow extra asymmetrical co-op control, download a chao to your phone! I am aware that second-screen peripherals have been done a load of times and it has basically always bombed but I don’t care I love control and interface gimmicks and am eternally enamoured with stuff like the Dreamcast port of Silent Scope allowing you to use the VMU screen as an incredibly low fidelity scope and Zombi U’s gimmick of making you look away to the Wii U gamepad so much to divide your situational awareness in stressful situations.

What My Hysterectomy Taught Me About Bodily Autonomy and Misogyny — Kelly

Medical misogyny is nothing surprising to me but this lays it out very strongly.

There was no medical reason to keep it. You don’t need your uterus to survive, it’s only function is to be a womb. If you keep your ovaries you won’t even go into early menopause. Yet they made it clear that saving my womb was more important than my life.

Why are games scary? — Laura Michet

But at a certain point, you have got to stop accepting the argument that an amateur Daz 3D porn game is worth an international uproar, no matter how transgressive and offensive it’s trying to be.

I think this raises an interesting question of why anyone is bothered to take a game like No Mercy seriously at all. I do think there is an interesting idea in how games so very opaque to a lot of people that they don’t necessarily intuit the obvious difference between a shovelware porn game and something with the the actual cultural impact of, say, Call of Duty in the way that they obviously can between a Holywood movie and some random porn film but I do feel like it is something more culturally based than games just been too long and too much of an investment to experience.

I have been writing about Ellie since her passing but there is another person who died who I have failed to mention. Only week or two before she died Ellie told me that she was plural. She was under­stand­ably extremely worried about this. Worried that admitting to this would ruin her life, that I might judge her and leave her. She had, as I understand, never told anyone in person this, barely told anyone online. She thought that I would think she was crazy. I just told her that I don’t care if she was “crazy” or not. Many people would have considered the both of us crazy by definition for being transgender. It’s a vague and all-encompassing word for people that one doesn’t understand and hates.

Her headmate was named Kat and I feel a great loss that I never got to know her, but Ellie did tell me a bit about her. She did not really front ever. Her and Ellie did not consider themselves plural for a long time and just through of Kat as a negative voice in her head (they did not get on for a very long time) and Kat kind of hated having a body and physical sensation and was very repulsed by sex. I asked Ellie at one point if it is not very annoying for Kat when myself and Ellie were so physically affectionate and she just laughed and said “Yes” in a flippant and mischievous way, clearly teasing Kat as much as joking with me.

They were not the first plural system I knew but this is the first time I became aware that someone close to me was one and I don’t really know that much. I found asking Ellie about it fascinating. I was a bit self-concious that I was being invasive or treating them like some weird oddity but Ellie said she was happy to talk about it. Apparently alcohol and weed seemed to affect Kat less and even made her a bit more comfortable with the physicality of their body, dulling the sensations a bit I suppose—putting a barrier between her and it. Ellie told me that a few times when she got too blackout drunk to function Kat was able to front and safely navigate them home on the bus. So thank you, Kat, for keeping Ellie safe.

Kat was more brash, more impulsive, more of a bitch (a word she took some pride in as I understand it). They had different tastes but the only thing I know for sure is that when we were watching Outlaw Star Ellie did not really understand my love for Aisha Clan-Clan (her favourite character in it was “Hot Ice” Hilda and wished the show had been about her instead) but Kat was fully on the Aisha train with me.

Kat never spoke directly to me in person but passed on a few replies and opinions that Ellie relayed. Even that she found strange and awkward and difficult to get used to, but she made a Discord account and sent me a few messages the day before they died. This is the ony direct conversation I ever had with her.

hello!

this is weird

like i’m only doing this cause i don’t want you to associate stuff i say with ellie

i’m a bitch and she doesn’t alwasy say what’s on her mind

so i will

fuck this is so weird

lmao fair

gragjhfkdshgtoledsg;.s

yeah I assume this is very weird for you in ways I cannot begin to understand so no worries if it’s difficult

i know you probably think this is weird and stupid or maybe that i don’t exist and ellie is just fucking with you or crazy

but it’s not. i am here

so yea

fuck

i want to die now

goodbye /end of communication

for now

cool, talk to you when you are more up for it

you should set Aisha Clan-Clan as your avatar >:)

fuck off. i was just looking for a image of her

hahaha

fuck yes

she’s really cool. you have some taste

I really wish I could have gotten to know her better than that before they died. They both deserved so much more time.

After reading yesterday’s post my friend Ruby reached out to me and told me that she was able to find the shortened Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes one hundred and two, one hundred and three, etc. by searching Nitter instances. Nitter doesn’t really work any more either due to Twitter’s A.P.I.s having been locked down significantly but there are still running instances with archives of a lot of accounts.

After finding some posts that way and then opening them in Twitter itself I could see that was blocked from viewing them due to the posts had been flagged as potentially containing adult material and Twitter wanted to verify my age before I could see them. Another system working well, then. And another way that the internet is being closed off. Presumably this is actually why they didn’t show up in searches for me.

I tried a couple of Nitter-scraping tools to see if I could mass download the videos but I couldn’t get them to work. I had also previously tried to use an Extreme Picture Finder template on the Twitter account too but it couldn’t go past the most recent thousand posts from the account. Not really having any luck with automating this I went to bed but while I was asleep Ruby painstakingly went and manually downloaded every episode she could that I was missing and sent them on to me. Thank you so much, Ruby!

There were a few that none of the Nitter instances she tried seemed to have and don’t seem to be findable on Twitter either. As such I am still missing episodes 121, 188, 215 and Capsule Monsters episodes 5 and 8, but I have most of it now at least.

The show is now living on my Jellyfin server with its own extremely high-effort cover art for it that you can see above.

Update: I managed to find episode 121 and Capsule Monsters episode 5 through Googling the exact phrasing of the posts and I was able to find the post for Capsule Monsters 8 via a Wayback Machine snapshot of Bing Bong’s Twitter profile, but episodes 188 and 215 don’t seem to be indexed on Google or Bing nor visible on any of the Wayback Machine snapshots. There are only a few snapshots on there from the period where he was uploading the episodes, unfortunately.

Update: My friend Ruby has managed to get me most of the episodes that I was missing.

People have often said that if it exists then you can find it online and that the internet never forgets. These people have never tried to find an archive of the Irish dub of Avatar: The Legend of Aang or dug through tech support forums full of dead links and a dozen pictures of the same yellow frog saying that the image you’re looking for is no longer available. The internet is, in fact, extremely forgetful and its memory is deteriorating rapidly as the companies that have been relied on as communication infrastructure rapidly close themselves off more and more.

There’s a guy who goes by Bing Bong who in 2021 posted a video online simply titled I shortened Yu-Gi-Oh!’s 1st episode down to about a minute, and over the course of months posted similar edits of subsequent episodes, eventually covering the entire show. I really liked Yu-Gi-Oh! growing up and it was a really fun way to revisit them without actually having to watch the entire show again. It’s two hundred and twenty-four episodes long and quite frankly not a lot happens in most of them. The high-speed recap giving me the gist and jogging my fond memories was, I think, a nice way to dwell in some nostalgia without having to spend a hundred hours watching something I don’t think I’d have the patience for as an adult. It also has a few of its own fun running jokes in how its edited, such as trying to “fix” characters saying Reborn the Monster instead of Monster Reborn and leaving in every single instance of characters explaining the rules of Pot of Greed or every utterance of the phrase Egyptian god cards¹.

Bing Bong is still uploading similar videos to his current Youtube channel (he’s covering Bleach at the moment) but the Yu-Gi-Oh! videos are long gone. I said his current Youtube channel because his original one was banned due to copyright claims. These videos were posted elsewhere but it has been a pain trying to track them down again. It looks like he was uploading them to a Tiktok account for a while but it only has the first ninety-seven episodes and hasn’t posted in months. Still, that was at least a good chunk of them and I was able to save them with yt-dlp.

Trying to find these videos with Google and other search engines can be difficult because they all think they know better than you what you are asking for and keeps giving me results for Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series. Still, I found that he uploaded at least a couple of episodes to Vimeo at some point but I genuinely don’t know if the rest of them are on there. Apparently Vimeo no longer allows you to open a user’s profile to view their uploads or even search for videos that you have not already added to you “library” and if other episodes are uploaded there then search engines do not seem to have indexed them.

These videos were also uploaded to Bing Bong’s Twitter account and as far as I can tell were never taken down but Twitter is barely functional any more. It simply won’t show you anything any more without an account and even with one it’s almost impossible to find things. Trying to scroll through the media tab to see older uploads it just stops loading new posts after a while and the search function seems to be falling apart at the seams. I tried searching for posts from his profile in a range of specific dates for when he was uploading these but whether it actually returns any posts seems random, often showing only two results when trying to search a specific month and then potentially showing nothing when I put in a different date range even if it actually contains the dates the posts I just saw posted on. Incidentally, apparently at some point Twitter added the ability to filter advanced search results by engagement metrics, i.e., only showing posts that reach a certain minimum threshold of replies or likes, which is not something I have ever seen on a site before. They truly have just laid bare the ideology of the site.

After some experimentation I did finally get some results searching for the specific titles of individual videos and managed to get episodes ninety-eight through one hundred and one that way but then get no results for the subsequent four episodes. The one hundred and sixth episode does show up but immediately after that they’re missing again. So I might be able to, slowly and painfully, fill in some blanks this way but it is not reliable at all. I can’t even just message him about getting them because Twitter no longer allows direct messages from people you don’t follow unless they have paid for a premium account.

This is not ancient history; these videos are less than five years old and attempting to find and archive them has been a frustrating mess. Anything online that you might take for granted could easily become inaccessible tomorrow and the trend at the moment for it is to become ever-more closed off.

I have a small pile of posts in various stages of being written sitting in my drafts folder and a todo list for things I want to add to this website as long as my arm on top of a pile of other, much larger todo lists for everything else I want to do. This is, frankly, a problem. I am very burnt out. Ellie dying is just the straw that broke the camel’s back; I have been trending towards this for some time. I do not know how to relax, especially when I’m by myself. I had fallen into watching television so much with Ellie I think in part because it was one of the few ways that I did allow myself to relax.

I am trying to do better with this. To take time to relax on my own time. To watch stuff, to read, to play games again. I still have that feeling gnawing on me, though. That I should be doing something. Something useful, something productive. Again, I knew this was a problem even before Ellie died. My two podcasts have been on hiatus for a long time now because I couldn’t keep up with them, but I end up filling that space with more projects, or often just sitting at my computer cycling through Discord channels constantly making sure I am reading every update on every channel with my todo open in another monitor thinking that I should be working through stuff from it. Not relaxing, not getting anything done, but a secret, third, worse thing that serves only to slowly wear away at myself.

One of the things I am trying to do now is reorient myself so that sitting at my desktop is not my default state of being as it has been for a very long time. I work from home and I organise myself based around todo lists and notes that I keep as basic text files. I broadly like having my notes like this, I have ADHD and tend to forget things quickly unless I have them somewhere and text files are simple, easy to search and portable. Though I prefer to use my desktop they are also synced to my phone if needs be.

But I just fall into these habits that are not good for me. If I don’t know what to do I go to my desktop. I open Discord. I open my todo lists. I open my RSS reader. I bounce between things rapidly trying to work through my endless ideas while feeding myself constant little updates to quiet the ADHD ants in my brain and keep going.

I am trying to break these habits and reorganising my house a bit to make my living room more of an actual living room, as a place where I spend time and organise myself even when I do not have people over. Defining my space and using it to make my life easier and more pleasant is something I am very keen on. I have a lot of decorations around my house, many of which I made myself. I keep things, as much as I can, in a series of labelled drawers, because I will never be able to find things otherwise. I have gotten a lot of complements on my giant tower of labelled drawers. Things move between them and get reorganised and relabelled pretty frequently as I adjust things to myself.

My house is also quite small and I sought to optimise the space. I have downsized kitchen appliances, a kitchen table that folds down up to take up as much space as needed in a given moment, a sofa-bed that folds out to not take up much extra space in a narrow living room and a pull-down Murphy bed so that I can pack it up during the day and have extra space in my bedroom that is also my home office. At one point I bought a whiteboard that I intended to use for organising and mounted it on the outside of the Murphy bed cabinet, mostly because I thought that was a cool place for it. But this means I could not actually use the whiteboard when the bed was down and, quite frankly, I often do not have the spare spoons to pack away all the bedclothes and put the bed up.

I have now moved that whiteboard into my living room. Instead of rolling out of bed directly into my office chair to start my day I am going downstairs, making breakfast and eating it at my dining table (and not at my desk!), taking my meds and trying to plan things out down there rather than on my computer. I have some daily checklists on there, I have my shopping list on there and add things to it as I notice I’ve run out, I plan out my highest priority todos.

This is still a work in progress and I am trying to figure out what does and doesn’t work for me. The checkboxes in that photo have already been whipped clean and rewritten somewhat. Maybe I will move away from this too and figure something else out. I still feel the pull of habit and dopamine sources pulling back to the computer constantly.

Outside of being “productive” I am also trying to get into the habit of watching TV on my actual TV again, or reading on my sofa rather than in bed (or more often, not at all). I should probably also get out of the house more too but I am pretty bad at that still (and there are a lack of third spaces around here that do not cost money to be in).

I need to slow down and recover. I hope this helps me with that. If not, we keep looking.

it’s been two months
and it’s been five minutes
and it’s been a year

and tomorrow it will have been five minutes
and tomorrow it will have been an eternity

and again

and the next five minutes
and the next six months
and the next ten years

and again and again and again

I have been setting up a few mementos of Ellie in my house. One of the things that I’ve gotten was some prints of her Discord avatar from the original artist, Aitor Sebastián.

Also pictured: A small print of a render of a crystal by Luna which I got at the same time.

I’ll post some more photos of my little memorial to her when it’s more complete.

You’ve seen them. The videos. The chocolate videos. There is a man out there doing things that were never meant to be done to cocoa beans.

What the fuck. That is not tea. That’s not even a kettle. What the fuck.

Look at this shit. This CANNOT be allowed to continue.

He doesn’t even set up his shitting fake chocolate chessboard correctly. THE BOTTOM RIGHT SQUARE SHOULD BE WHITE.

HE HAS TO BE STOPPED. This can’t be allowed to continue.

SPRINGS? CHOCOLATE SPRINGS? We cannot allow this.

We all know what needs to be done.

Okay the above is a joke I do not wish anything bad on Amaury Guichon. I just kind of dislike his videos. There is something offputting to me about his overly clean, edited style. How his artisanry feels like artifice in his immaculate, minimalist kitchen-set that always looks like it’s never been used before. How he creates these things and starts eating them on camera immediately, demonstrating that they were never meant to be consumed as food, only consumed as content¹. It feels like watching a How It’s Made video for production a line that that was made only to be on the show, whose output is going directly into a landfill rather than something that is of use to someone.

Is this unfair? Yes. It would probably be more reasonable to treat these videos as a timelapse video of a sculpture being created or, being less fair, a preppy Epic Meal Time. It’s spectacle and art² and it’s just a particular popular artist I don’t care for. I am just being hater. It’s fine. Chocolate man is fine. I don’t like his videos.

I am normal.

My house is quite small and my kitchen is tiny, so when I moved in I set about optimising my space a lot. I sold my physical video games collection, most of my books, a lot of electronics and some of my small kitchen appliances. While both cupboard and usable counter space is limited in my kitchen there is a little 22cm alcove under my kitchen presses that, while not usable as part of the counter space, is handy for keeping small appliances. They do have to be quite small, though. With this in mind I went into Harvey Norman’s with a tape measure and replaced my kettle with a travel kettle and my toaster with one short enough to fit in the gap. I also got rid of my slow cooker and instead got a more squat rice cooker in its place.

Rice cookers are incredibly elegant little machines and I highly recommend this Technology Connections video on how clever the design is. And while dealing with burnout and general lack of spoons one thing that has been getting me through it has been that rice cooker. Rice, beans and Lao Gan Ma has has become a staple meal for me. They are amazing for low-spoons, ADHD-friendly cooking because as long as you put in the right amount of water you can simply set it going and walk away, not having to babysit the pot or worry about timing very much.

That said, I am usually just cooking for myself and the rice cooker I had, as much as I love it, didn’t do small batches very well, so I was generally cooking two cups of rice at a time and then having to refrigerate and reheat most of it over the course of several days to get through each batch.

The solution to this: I just got an even smaller rice cooker. Meet R1-C3.

I am not much of a Star Wars gal¹ but when some friends were over last month they remarked that the new rice cooker looked like a droid and I couldn’t disagree. It is a cute, compact, little friend. My friend Lena christened it R1-C3 and R1-C3 has been very faithful so far, making me nice meal-sized batches of rice to keep me going in these times.

Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon was a fascinating coda to Sonic Frontiers, a very experimental expansion to a game where Sonic Team was already going outside of their comfort zone to do new things with the series. The world map threw together Only Up!-esque climbing challenges, playable Tails, Amy and Knuckles very different movesets to how they have worked in past, an absurdly fast and powerful dropdash for Sonic in 3D and wildly more difficult combat than the base game. I streamed it to some friends when it came out and one of them remarked “this is the least designed game ever made.” I couldn’t really disagree with her. So much of this is janky and half-broken in various ways and it was incredibly fun. It made me hopeful that Sonic Team was happy to keep experimenting with what worked for the series and keep allowing more player freedom in future games¹.

In keeping with this, while the levels in the base Sonic Frontiers were almost entirely reused from previous games the ones in The Final Horizon were much more experimental, being very clearly thrown together with very basic assets rather than having their own sculpted level geometry but also with much fewer guardrails and much less guided than a normal Sonic level and with new, bespoke mechanics and side missions, some of which required more slow, careful exploration than high-speed platforming.

Early on, while playing one level, 4-D, I noticed an exclamation mark appearing over Sonic’s head in certain locations, accompanied by a beeping. You cans see it at about a 1′18″ in in this video. It would turn red and beep faster as I approached a certain spot. When I saw this the first thing that came to mind was Knuckles’ emerald-hunting missions from the Sonic Adventure games and thought it might be part of one of the level’s optional missions. I actually had a bit of trouble finding the source of the beeping but once I zeroed in on it and finally found it I was greeted to Sonic being blown up into the air by a mine, his hands held down protecting his singed arse. This was a very sudden gear-shift in my head and in my confusion, still processing what I was seeing, I screamed “I’M MARIO BURNT ASS?!”² into my microphone, which caused myself and my friend Ruby who was watching to double over laughing till we couldn’t breath and then Ruby set my display name on the Discord server to Mario Burnt Ass for a month. It was funny.

That’s the story.

Thanks.

I had an old Big Joel video about scambaiting on as background listening while doing my little daily puzzles and had some idle thoughts on the way people talk about the world we live in as a cyberpunk dystopia but boring or stupid or uncool or other such descriptors. The awful world is there but not the spirit of fighting against it. We have the corpos but not the punks.

And I think one thing in cyberpunk works is the class stratification, the corpos and the punks, are very geographically localised. Class stratification is present and highly visible, the rich gorging themselves in their towers and the poor living on the scraps below. Obviously there is class stratification in western cities but there is of course a larger stratification between the global north and south. The manufacturing and menial service jobs that can be done remotely outsourced to places with lower pay and fewer labour rights. The most marginalised are on the other side of the world.

This video in particular is talking about Indian call centres and Indian scammers and, returning to our boring cyberpunk dystopia, a lot of the people hacking other people’s brains, the people flooding Facebook with AI slop chasing trending keyword and engagements are largely people in India and other developing countries who have familiarity with tech doing those devalued jobs who are able to eke out some meaningful amount of money through exploiting Facebooking algorithms and ad revenue. It was the same with “fake news” before that term got hijacked to mean deliberate political misinformation. That originally comes from an ecosystem of people creating outrageous false clickbait aimed at an American audience without actual care for political aims, just syphoning off the pennies they could get from ads on emotionally charged headlines in a strategy that was only later merged with deliberate misinformation networks.

I am not trying to say these things are noble, but they are interesting and often invisible to people because we have already structured society to hide those people and that labour off beyond the horizon and we only really see the parts that are reflected back into the western cultural consciousness. People see shrimp Jesus and think about the evangelical Christians on Facebook who it is targetting and not the tech support worker in the Philippines who is actually producing it.

Do you trust your family to not bury you under your dead name? To invite your friends and partners to you your funeral? Do you trust that your family members who have the decency to do those things won’t allow themselves to be browbeaten by those who don’t?

Recently I had a reminder of something that every queer person was painfully aware of during the height of the AIDS crisis: If your partner dies and you have no legal relationship to them then you have no legal rights over what happens to them. That is perhaps a tautological statement but one that is worth internalising. When you die what happens to you is up to those that the state considers to be your family and in the absence of any legal documents saying otherwise that is generally your blood relatives. And of course there’s the matter of inheritance if you want to leave things to anyone other than your relatives.

What’s funny is that myself and Ellie had been discussing this. We had talked about looking into the process of getting wills written, etc. Her family did not take her transitioning well. Her brother refused to let her into his house to drop off Christmas presents for her niblings last year because he did not want his children to see her as a woman. We knew what would likely happen if she died, we just did not expect it so suddenly.

I don’t have any actual advice to offer for how to go about this. We hadn’t gotten around to it ourselves and if we had anything I could say would only apply to the Republic of Ireland.

, or: Talking about Steven Universe discourse but not because the spinoff show was announced. I started writing this before that happened.

The other day myself and two friends were rambling to two other friends who had never heard of Steven Universe about said show, talking a lot about the overall plot and setting. If you don’t know the general plot of Steven Universe and don’t mind spoilers I will go through the relevant parts of the plot for what I want to talk about: The protagonist Steven is half-human and half gem. Gems are magic space rock people and most of them live in an authoritarian, colonial, caste society ruled by the diamonds and Steven is being raised by a small group of survivors of a failed rebellion.

Among the magic powers that gems posses multiple gems can fuse into a bigger, stronger gem. Fusion gets used as a very general and multilayered allegory for relationships in general and can work a bit different for different gems depending on the needs of a given story. A lot of what the show is doing with its world and plots is heavily allegorical. One of the big taboos that the rebellion breaks is different types of gems fusing together. I said it’s a caste society but it’s a little weirder than that. A given gem is defined by what type of gem they are and expected to be basically completely interchangeable with them.

All rubies are bodyguards and all rubies are named Ruby (and also in the show all have the same voice actor). Ruby is a name, job, gender and role in society and straying from that role means you are fundamentally broken and wrong and fusing with a different type of gem is a complete perversion. The roles gems are defined as is a metaphor the story uses but it’s a flexible one. It maps onto things like gender roles (and if read a certain way amusingly means that for gem society homosocial relationships are the only acceptable kind) but also for societal expectations and pressures in general. It also ends up, for the title character, being very much about the pressures that a shitty, unaccepting family puts on someone.

The diamonds are the rulers of gem society. They are authoritarian dictators who see other life as beneath them. That is the facts of the setting. But in terms of how they are actually portrayed and used in the show, especially as it goes on, they are a dysfunctional family who (without going into the specifics of why they think this) see Steven as a brat who has thrown a tantrum and run away. Judged in absolute terms they don’t see humans as real people, just amusing pets at best, but that is not in service to a story about how they are space Hitlers, it is in service to a story where they are dismissive of Steven as a person and see his life on Earth as someone playing pretend who is going to grow up and move on with his life, go back to “real” name and pronouns, and stop making such a fuss.

And, if you are unaware, when the show aired there was considerable controversy about the fact that these the terms on which the story is resolved. Many people were invested in the lore of the evil gem society and would only think of it morally on those terms and were furious that this children’s cartoon did not end with the diamonds being brought before the space Hague for their space warcrimes, that the story that was being told was one about family trauma and healing and that the space opera trappings were in aid of that and not the point in and of themselves.

So I had this in mind while explaining the show to my friends and, perhaps overly defensively, emphasised how the resolution of it was on the family drama allegory level and not about killing space Hitler. And his response surprised me: “Oh, like Star Wars!”

And it struck me how apt a comparison that was. I think it is genuinely astute and cuts straight to how this is a normal part of storytelling and not some morally repugnant aberration like so many people high on the discourse treated it. Someone who I related this story to said it reminded them of this video from Man Carrying Thing talking about bad faith deliberate media illiteracy.

And I have just been ruminating on that for a few days. On how so much discourse is fuelled by refusing to meet things on their own terms at all and it’s bad! That’s all, really.

Sorry for dragging up Steven Universe discourse.

Bye.

I have pretty bad impulse control around eating. If there is food in front of me I struggle not to keep picking at it even if I’m already uncomfortably full and even if I don’t like it that much. I generally don’t keep sweets or alcohol in my house because I tend to binge through it if it’s there. Moderation is not something I am good at.

One thing Ellie used to do sometimes is hide chocolate bars around my house and then, when I was in need of a treat, tell me where to find one or pull them out herself. She was incredibly sweet. I found a Galaxy caramel bar in the back of the kitchen press this morning. One last birthday present from her.

And now I guess I just want to share stories about her. We watched a lot of TV together. Just cuddling on the sofa or in bed and watching television had honestly become of my favourite things. I came over to her place once when she was watching Evil, enjoyed it and then she rewatched it with me from the start and we carried through all the way to the end together. She talked about watching a video essay (I do not recall who by) about Miraculous Ladybug and how it matures and grows more complex each season and I basically downloaded it and made her watch the first few episodes as a joke and then just sort of fell into continuing it because I cannot resist sticking to a bit well beyond what is warranted. It was a bit of mindless fun to put on and cuddle and chat. We were most of the way through the third series.

Just feeling the warmth of her body against mine is one of the things that I miss most of all. I got her a rose gold Zippo lighter for her last birthday. She liked fire and burning little things. She could be a real little very tall gremlin. She had left the lighter in my house a few days before she died. I had it with me to give back to her when we found her body. Sometimes I light it for a while and then just feel the warmth of it in my hand. Somehow that feels like the closest thing to having her here again.

We were also rewatching shows we liked as teenagers together. She was showing me Wolf’s Rain, I was showing her Outlaw Star and we were revisiting The Big O together. She loved R. Dorothy. We had also started rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist together and had gotten as far as The Alchemy Exam back in September and then it took eight months till she was finally in the mood where she was happy to sit through Night of the Chimera’s Cry again just a few days before she died. Seeing as this has turned into the anime paragraph I will also say that we had both enjoyed Dungeon Meshi but had watched it separately as I was watching the dub and she was watching with subs. She loved Falin, too. She related a lot to robot girls and monster girls.

She was a big, lovely, autistic, dork and I cannot describe how wonderful it was watching her unmask and being earnest and silly about things she was self-concious about. I understand deeply the shame of trying to be normal, of burying stuff you are enthusiastic about, and I loved seeing her dig it all up. One time while we were hanging out at home I turned a corner to see her standing stimming in the middle of the living room, shaking her hands back and forth and bouncing a little. When she saw me she withdrew a little bit. She was a bashful about it but it was adorable. I wanted to encourage her. I asked her to keep doing it and when she demurred I cupped her head in my hands and begged her “Ellie, I need you to be more autistic!” She cringed into herself shyly from that but smiled and giggled and said, mock-ominously “You know not what you ask!” and I just kept saying it until she said she would. From then on “I need you be more autistic” became something I would implore when she was being self-conscious about herself.

She really liked making characters and just fucking around in games. I’d watch her play WWE 2K24 and she would often play a random match and not even particularly try to win. Just have fun and being playful with the narrative of a wrestling match, showboating, playing a referee and being as obviously biased as possible to the worse wrestler. She talked to me about some of her RPG characters. She had restarted Baldur’s Gate 3 a few times but had never actually gotten to the end. Her current character was named Drizz and she had a whole backstory thought out for him that she spent an evening explaining to me (with a lot of interruptions to explain details about the world because I do not know much about Dungeons & Dragons).

Drizz was a drow trans man, raised to be an assassin in a cult dedicated to Lolth, who was shunned for not wanting to be a woman, betrayed by his mentor and ended up living rough for a long time. There was a lot more detail but I confess my memory is very poor and I don’t know that she ever wrote any of this down. She played Drizz as angry, brash and socially inept, deliberately making obviously risky or poor choices with him that would piss people in the game off. She saw a bunch of scenes she hadn’t before with previous characters as a result. Also it’s definitely Drizz and not Drizzt. He gets mad if you call him Drizzt. He did not name himself after Drizzt and is annoyed at people who assume he did.

I am not good at conclusions. She was wonderful. She’s gone, but she was wonderful.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX

Your musical entertainment:

Media

The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch — Forrest Wickman in Slate

A look at how creative decisions and compromises get made on a movie set.

You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.

Heaven Will be Mine – Caoimhe

My clone recently discovered Worst Girl Games and has been having a time of it. When I played it I actually didn’t click with Heaven Will Be Mine nearly as much as We Know the Devil but Caoimhe’s words on it are making me want to revisit it.

Heaven Will Be Mine is short and sweet. A full playthough is roughly five hours. Within that time, it packs a narrative of the trans struggle for identity and recognition, the search for meaning in a perpetually hostile world, the never-ending quest of humans’ self-discovery and exploration, and of course cool mechs beating each other up.

A List Of Games By Trans People Before 2010 — Dot Maetrix

Cute little list and led me to this fun interview from Bad Games Hall of Fame with Rebecca “Burger” Heineman and to revisit this interview with Megumi, the programmer of Virtual Lab¹ that I had read before.

Not gonna lie I did NOT realise how long Maddy Thorson had been doing Trans-People-Can-Double-Jump Platformers before making this list. Like, I thought that Celeste was primarily her drawing from the twitchy platformer style of Super Meat Boy but as it turns out, lmao nope Not only does Jumper predate Meat Boy by sevaral years, but the lead character, Ogmo, went on to appear as a playable character in Super Meat Boy, acknowledging the influence that game had taken from Thorson’s work. Like, I fully had the order of cause and effect completely wrong here.

Chips Theory, In Brief: Doctor Who’s Unresolved Aesthetic Debate — Tamsyn Elle

I swear that I am not going to keep linking to blogs by lifeforms that have been bred for thousands of years to sustain themselves solely on ever-more incomprehensible Doctor Who criticism but I needed to share the chips–soufflé spectrum model of media analysis with the world.

Note how chips becomes synecdoche for an ordinary life, an inescapable pillar of the daily grind as fundamental as work, home, sleep, and commuting. Chips is what the rest of us do.

There’s an inescapable class element to this. Science fiction is often accused, with some justice, of being a middle-class genre; even when it’s militaristic our focus tends to be on the officer class. A good deal of the value of Rose in the first place is that, as a working-class soap opera type of character, she does not at first seem to belong on Doctor Who. Indeed, often that’s part of her quality: in her first episode it’s her experience in her school’s gymnastics team, silver medal, swinging on a chain, that saves the day with straightforward physicality where the Doctor’s talk of Shadow Proclamations and anti-plastic failed to hold sway. Then she’s befriending the lowly mechanics and servant girls who turn out to be key to their respective stories.

Thoughts on IDW Transformers: The Furman Era — Bobby Schroeder

A nice little piece laying out some interest aspects of the Transformers series² through the lens of a particular run of comics including the historically weird handling of gender and how later IDW comics corrected that.

When James Roberts began writing the fan favorite series More Than Meets the Eye, he wanted to explore the subject of Transformer romance. And if Furman said that there aren’t any women on Cybertron, then, well… I guess he’s been left no choice but to declare it the robot yaoi planet! His hands were simply tied, folks.

Media ∩ Technology

The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland — Bret C. Devereaux

Look. If Bret Devereaux is going to keep writing articles analysing the practicalities of speculative fiction tropes I am going to keep linking to them.

Complicating this picture further are spare parts. Without the ability to manufacture bespoke spare pairs at scale, keeping these vehicles in operation is going to be very difficult. So we ought to expect to see, alongside an emphasis on fuel efficiency, a preference for robust, easy-to-maintain platforms that use widely available civilian vehicle components, rather than hard to source or scavange military components. After all, asking your local junk mechanic to service the AGT1500 gas turbine engine in an Abrams MBT is going to be a pretty big ask, compared to finding the parts to fix the engine of yet another Toyota pickup.

Why We Don’t Have UIs Like the ones in Neon Genesis — Zemnmez

Damn now I want a vector-based display again.

Everyone who works with interfaces should be looking at these and asking themselves why interfaces don’t look like this. Where did we go so wrong? Where’s the big fuckup where we ended up with like, windows 95 instead of this shit? This is something I have devoted untold and definitely irresponsible brain space to. And honestly, the best answer I have is very simple, but I think also a kind of interesting look at how our tools shape the designs we make.

I wasted $410 recreating a fake website that shows up for 10 seconds of a TV show almost no one remembers — Alyx Wijers

Wijers doing an extremely important job 🫡

When I watch TV and movies, I sometimes notice web addresses. I’ll usually note them down, and look them up later to see if they’re registered. In most cases, they’re registered by the studio or network or whatever and just redirect to their site. AMC, for example, keeps www.savewalterwhite.com up from Breaking Bad (now 12 years after the series ended, as of the time of writing), and www.cometlist.net up from Halt and Catch Fire.

Technology

Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents — David Kriesel

Quite an old one but recently linked to by Tina. What if your scanned just randomly changed numbers around in the scanned image? What multiple models of scanners from the largest manufacturer in the world did that for years without being fixed? There is also an accompanying video.

In this article I present in which way scanners / copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line randomly alter written numbers in pages that are scanned. This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way: The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect. Without a fuss, this may cause scenarios like:

1. Incorrect invoices
2. Construction plans with incorrect numbers (as will be shown later in the article) even though they look right
3. Other incorrect construction plans, for example for bridges (danger of life may be the result!)
4. Incorrect metering of medicine, even worse, I think.

I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back — Fireborn

First of a series of posts on this blog dealing with the hell that is trying to use Linux while blind.

Linux claims to support blind users here. It even ships the tools. But using them? Getting speech or braille output when you need it most? That’s a punishing mess of driver quirks, missing defaults, audio stack failures, and layers of modern regression hidden under the surface.

Avoiding becoming the lone dependency peg with load-bearing anime — Xe Iaso

Anubis is a piece of software that has become popular for helping block unfriendly crawlers that have been overloading a lot of sites to grab data for neural network training without care for the damage they are doing to the web. It also has an cartoon character mascot that has proven useful for weeding people who like being dismissive pricks.

At some level, I use the presence of the Anubis mascot as a “shopping cart test”. If you either pay me for the unbranded version or leave the character intact, I’m going to take any bug reports more seriously. It’s a positive sign that you are willing to invest in the project’s success and help make sure that people developing vital infrastructure are not neglected.

Technology ∩ Capitalism

Why Bell Labs Worked. — Areoform

Seen via a post by Fabio Manganiello going further into Bell’s treatment of people compared to what companies and academia both demand of them now, shared by Xerz and boosted by Jennifer Glauche which also inspired the next post by Elilla.

Reportedly, Kelly and others would hand people problems and then check in a few years later. Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, “what’s stopping someone from just slacking off?” Kelly would contend that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”

Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google — Elilla

On the empty promises and dehumanisation of Google.

It’s the little things that bugged me, how people would eat the free candy or have a bowl of cereal and just leave trash and dirty dishes everywhere for the cleaning ladies (contractors) to deal with; more than that the way nobody looked at them or said “thank you”. We Brazilians have a social class for that, a social code underlying that studied invisibility, I knew what this was: these were maids. Servants. The women in my family, my friends at school. The “campus” was pretty open and my then-wife visited it a few times; it creeped the Fuck out of her, the distinction between people and non-people.

My birthday is in June. I was obviously hoping to spend it with Ellie but that is not going to happen now. Some friends have been organising a memorial for Ellie that is going to fall on the weekend I probably otherwise would have had my birthday party instead. Shit sucks. I will still be going out with some friends to celebrate the weekend before that and on that day itself I will be surrounded by friends and loved ones too. And fuck it if anyone else wants to get me a present I have a Throne wishlist here. I sat down to write this and I thought I’d have more to say but words are failing me a bit. The life I thought was happening has just been so abruptly cut off and I feel a bit stranded. I was going to go to see the Doctor Who finale in the cinema with her last night and I still went with other friends and it was lovely but me and Ellie had so many plans big and small and it’s probably going to be a while before I can think about the future at all without feeling her absence.

After some deliberation I have decided to split off all of my reviews into their own separate page. Introducing: FWD:RE:views.

For RSS readers if follow the existing beag feed you should not see any changes. If you follow the bog and want to still see reviews you can add the new reviews feed to your newsreader.

To sum up the new situation quickly:

• New—FWD:RE:views: reviews
• Modified—Bog: original posts + Fediverse posts
• Unchanged—Beag: only original posts

I enjoy logging what I’m watching but I haven’t been happy with how all the stuff I was copying over from other sites drowning out my other posts. I was originally thinking about it in terms of my original posts versus “syndicated” stuff and was considering making the “beag” page the default and a separate one for everything else but I after ruminating on it I decided it made more sense to me to split just the reviews out as their own thing. I took my time before making this decision as I didn’t want to end up changing up my RSS feeds repeatedly and making a mess of people’s newsreaders.

The title FWD:RE:views is meant to reflect how most of the reviews are “forwarded” from my Letterboxd, Serializd, Backloggd and Goodreads accounts but there is currently one review that isn’t and there may be more if I want to log other things that don’t have entries in the databases of those website.

This post contains spoilers for Dracula, which is 128 years old.

I have not been keeping up with Dracula Daily as I had intended¹ but I wanted to make a post about it today. One of the features of the original Dracula that is often forgotten in adaptation is how modern it is. As an epistolary novel the story is mostly a series of diary entries and in the case of the character John Seward his diary, starting on the 25th of May, it is recorded on a phonograph—an invention that was only twenty years old at the time of the novel’s publication in 1897.

The book heavily involves the collision of the very modern and scientific with the ancient evil that is Count Dracula. The novel opens with Jonathan Harker, a solicitor, travelling to Transylvania in order to sort out a property deal for the count. This journey involves going from the comfort and regularity of well-timetabled trains to a treacherous carriage ride through the old, wild Carpathian mountains. With him, as well as the needed legal documents, he has photos taken on his Kodak² camera, which is far from the only piece of prominent technology.

The weapons used to fight Dracula are not just wooden stakes and crucifixes³ but also blood transfusions⁴, hypnotism⁵, next-day flower delivery from Haarlem to London⁶, shorthand⁷, meticulous note-taking, and in-depth knowledge of train timetables⁸. While it goes unremarked on in the book itself I like to imagine that Count Dracula’s statement that “to live in a new house would kill me” is due to a vampire’s inability to cross running water not playing very well with indoor plumbing. Abraham Van Helsing is not a young, sexy vampire hunter in this novel but an polymath professor with at least three doctorates⁹. Dracula is not that out of step with Buffy the Vampire Slayer answering the question of how to deal with a terrible and ancient demon with blowing it up with a bazooka.

But there is something else important about John Seward’s phonography: It ends up being extremely funny. Even just reading this and thinking that he is speaking this out loud to be recorded on a wax cylinder it seems incredibly obnoxious:

I questioned him more fully than I had ever done, with a view to making myself master of the facts of his hallucination. In my manner of doing it there was, I now see, something of cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep him to the point of his madness a thing which I avoid with the patients as I would the mouth of hell. (Mem., Under what circumstances would I not avoid the pit of hell?) Omnia Romæ venalia sunt. Hell has its price! verb, sap. If there be anything behind this instinct it will be valuable to trace it afterwards accurately, so I had better commence to do so, therefore R. M, Renfield, ætat 59. Sanguine temperament; great physical strength; morbidly excitable; periods of gloom ending in some fixed idea which I cannot make out.

One presumes that he is saying “memorandum” out loud and not just “mem” as is transcribed. Later, when he records his conversations with Van Helsing he includes the full back and forth dialogue, with all of Van Helsing’s disfluencies, grammatical errors and strange turns of phrase. One has to wonder is Seward imitating his friend’s Dutch accent while recording this? Is he doing voices whenever he is making his diary? What does his Mina voice sound like? We are reading, within the fiction, a transcription of him speaking out loud. And we know who does the transcription because it happens during the course of the plot. The later part of the novel involves the protagonists meeting up and compiling all of their notes together into what is the text of the novel itself.

This is done by Mina Harker and the reason she starts doing this is, again, extremely funny: She walks in on Seward recording on his phonograph and asks to hear some of it. He initially agrees but then starts deflecting awkwardly that most if is about his medical cases. When Mina asks specifically to hear about the last few days of her friend Lucy Westenra’s life he admits that he has no idea how to find a specific diary entry in his phonograph recordings. He has been using this for at least the last four months and he just never thought about it at all. He has not labelled anything. He has no system of any kind. He has just been talking into this and never reviewing it in any way! This is what prompts Mina to start transcribing the entries for him, as well as typing up her and her husband’s shorthand diaries for everyone else to read and compiling all the other letters and newspaper clippings that make up the novel. Going back to the modernity of it all the most in-spirit adaptation of Dracula set in the modern day would surely be composed primarily of screenshots of social media posts and podcast segments.

There is one more interesting angle on the fact that Mina is the author, or at least the typesetter, of the book within the fiction: How she types up the dialogue of Renfield, Seward’s patient and devoted servant of Dracula. Renfield’s dialogue capitalises He, His, You, Your and Master when he is speaking of Dracula, something that is only proper to do when referring to God¹⁰. This is obviously meant to ascribe a blasphemous devotion to Dracula to Renfield, but within the story it is Mina who is choosing to capitalise his words in this manner and Mina is also, at this point, partially under Dracula’s influence. While I don’t think that this was Bram Stoker’s intent we could read this an an unconscious sign of Dracula’s influence over Mina’s mind.

I have been struggling for the last few months. My health has been poor, it has been difficult to keep on top of things, I have just felt generally worn down and burnt out. But I have been managing. I have been trying to let myself rest more. Getting things off my plate. I have gotten ADHD meds. Most of all what has helped me get through is my partner, Ellie Cosgrove. We had only been together one year at the end of April but it was such a wonderful year. Being with her was healing in ways I cannot describe. I felt able to be fully myself with her. I was able to peel away masks I didn’t know I had been wearing all my life. I was learning to be myself through her. I was learning to love myself through loving her. I wanted to build my life around her.

She died on Wednesday night. The last few days have been the worst of my entire life. I have been looked after. Friends and family have been reaching out constantly. My mother and sister made sure that my fridge is more full than it has ever been and I had so much company over the last few days that it would have left me exhausted even in good circumstances. It hard to believe that it has only been a few days. It feels like so much longer. Like it has been weeks since this awful, raw thing crawled inside my chest and died. Weighing me down, wearing me out even more. So many of my everyday thoughts loop back to her and now everywhere in my mind there is just a horrible, grey, consuming, painful dead end. I’m thinking about This Is How You Lose the Time War again. About love infecting you and changing you and making the other person part of you. And in that last year that happened so much and so much more than I could have imagined. And now that part of me has been ripped away.

I keep coming back to this piece that she loved. I’m trying to internalise it. To remember to keep going. To remember that she loved me.

Okay. Come on, then. I love you, get up, we are going to keep going. Repeat this to yourself in a mirror or in a whisper or in the shower or in a shout. I love you, get up, keep going.

I am tired too. It’s okay. We will sleep in the car ride over. We will sleep on each other’s shoulders. We will sleep upside down and in the laps of new friends and on the bellies of our lovers and in the hands of better tomorrows. We will sleep and we will wake up rested and we will wake up happy and we will wake up home again.

I love you, get up. It’s time to write “maybe next time” on our gravesite. It’s time to write: it could not kill me, I would not die. It’s time to write a love letter to the sun and our one-act play and the history of our keychains. It is time to write a future where despite everything, we are finally warm and safe.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Get up. Keep going. We are going to be okay.

Rowan Perez

I would also appreciate any comments on this or any other post on this site, even just because most of the existing comments are from her and I would like to be able to review the Comentario dashboard without seeing her words at the top of it and be reduced to a sobbing mess again.

Picmix is a website for making GIF collages. If you’ve seen square GIFs of anime characters drowning in glitter and surrounded by rapidly animating icons and text it was probably made with Picmix. The typical aesthetic leans extremely girly and overloaded; the digital equivalent of a scrapbook page covered in magazine cutouts, glitter and stickers. It is very charming (though sadly the current front page of the site seems to be flooded with AI art).

Last year on Cohost (R.I.P.) Freja asked me what my favourite planet was and my reply was “♃”. This is mostly just vibes and associations with fictional characters that I have great fondness for: Lita Kino from Sailor Moon¹, Jupiter from We Know the Devil, and it would be nice to round this out with a third example but actually it’s only those two². But also the planet is cool and I like the astrological symbol.

But thinking on those vibes, that loose collection of associations that still resulted in an immediately clear preference it made me want to make something to tie together these Jupiters: The planet, the Sailor and the Devil-knower. And even though I had never actually used Picmix before that type of silly, sparkly, collage seemed like just the thing.

The Sailor Jupiter, rotating planet and glow around the edges were pulled from Picmix but I actually put it together using Aseprite. This is an artisanal GIF collage. The central Jupiter picture (that I also use as an avatar now) was made by putting the cover art for We Know the Devil through Luna Pic’s glitteriser. The little tin sample cube is because tin is the planetary metal associated with Jupiter in alchemy. I actually have a similar cube of copper in my house next to a replica Ea-nāṣir complaint tablet that I have on my wall. Perhaps I should get a tin one as well.

A little while later I decided to make a similar collage for Blaze the Cat, my favourite Sonic the Hedgehog character.

This one pulls from Picmix, The Spriters’ Resource and a GIF of Blaze running that I do not know the original source of that I cut the background out of frame-by-frame.

I never returned to making these but it was a lot of fun and perhaps the urge will strike me again at some point.

And let me know if there’s any other Jovian women that I should check out.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX

First some website bookkeeping: I’ve updated the homepage to emphasis my original bog posts a bit more and keep them on the page longer and moved the reviews and posts from other accounts that I’m mirroring to their own section. The bog and beag pages are left as-is at the moment. I am considering modifying them and their respective Atom feeds as well to have the default be without the mirrored posts but that will need a bit more consideration because I don’t want to create lots of broken links or cause a million posts to reappear in people’s newsreaders. I also updated my memorial page for Cohost a bit.

For some music: I had lovely time recently watching a couple of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts with my partner in bed. Here is the Moses Boyd one:

Digital media

Music CDs Are the Best — The Virtual Moose

Of course I ripped all the cds to my plex server while reading the booklets, something I really enjoy from the cd era. What no one told me though, and I guess why would they, is that Sarah McLachlan’s album Surfacing is a fucking multimedia cd-rom??

I am not the only person right now who is getting nostalgic about going back to a website and I think there’s a similar joy in old multimedia CDs from before everything got squashed into completely standardised forms for either social media site or streaming services. Little experiments, surprising features, discs that acted as different formats depending on what was reading them. While I was updating my Cohost page I threw in a short little bit of Javascript just embedded in the body of the page for a little bonus feature when you play the Love Honk audio. That wouldn’t actually have been possible even on Cohost itself but I think just quickly throwing a little unique interaction is carrying on that spirit that CSS crimes also gave us a glimpse of.

And in the golden age of multimedia discs you could have, as Virtual Moose discovered, little bonus programmes in your music album, hidden audio tracks if you put your PSX CD into a CD player or a a full XBox game demo on in your movie DVD alongside the minigames you could play on a normal DVD player with a remote.

This is turning into its own post so I will move on.

Retro Achievement Mastery 168 - The Yakyuuken Special - Kon’ya wa 12-kaisen!! — Lizstar

Lizstar is nearly defeated by a pornographic rock-paper-scissors game for the Saturn.

This is Rie Kouno. My villaness. Pretty sure she’s the oldest girl here, actually. She’s got this like, Japanese Housewife energy to her, as if 22 is 45 years old, cause this game is make by perverts with bad views on women. But anyway, my strategy did not work on her. I left the game playing, on double speed, for two days. And I did not win. By the end of the five days, I had assumed I had run through the entire RNG track, and it didn’t work. So I tried on Paper. Still nothing, two days later. Scissors? Nothing.

Kim-Venture (1979) — Jason Dyer

Seen via Misty De Méo. A not-quite Colossal Cave Adventure for a computer with a six-digit LCD calculator display and just over a kibibyte of memory.

Just like a common hack for modern machines is to see if it runs DOOM, programmers of the late-70s-early-80s tried to make every computer play a form of Adventure, even ones that were absurdly limited. Leedom cheekily explains in an interview he managed to fit “26 rooms, 2 treasures to take back, a magic rod, a magic word, a dragon, a bird, a whole bunch of stuff in there and I crammed it all into 1,185 bytes. I left 3 bytes over for user expansion.” In a different interview Leedom explains he used compression rather like the Z-Code of Infocom or the A-Code of Level 9.

Sci-fi nerd shit

Doom’s Tears: Remote Villainy and Real Violence — Jack Elving

An old musing on the line between supervillainy and real evil.

I think one can argue that the reason Gwen Stacy’s death is romanticized has to do with that simple and basic genre convention being overturned. The staging of Gwen Stacy’s death is extremely weird and odd for several reasons. But at it’s core, the logic of the scene is simple: Villain kidnaps Girl — Hero chases after Villain — Hero confronts Villain — Villain endangers Girl — Hero at last moment catches her.

The Second Russian Epoch, on Trial — The Hands Have Eyes

The first post of a new blog looking at Russel T. Davies’ return to writing Doctor Who. There is a second post too titled A Theory of Hyperpop Television. This is very much in the weeds of the fandom discourse and uses fandom terminology that is so obscure that I am not sure if some it is familiar to anyone outside of one specific Discord server. To explain two of the terms used: The Cambrian Era is a tongue-in-cheek term for the run of Doctor Who from 2005-2021 in reference to the geological Cambrian Era because the show was being produced by BBC Wales¹ and the Lupine Era is the run of Doctor Who from 2024 to the present because it is now being produced by a studio named Bad Wolf².

Obviously, at the end of the day, when the official (and snarky unofficial) histories are written up, the truth will out that this was an era incapable of living up to being all things to all people. And perhaps that was the only bar it was ever going to be allowed to define success as clearing. The historians may well conclude (the snarky ones, anyway), that it was simply not capable of being enough things to enough people to justify the ambition of attempting to appease the rads, the trads, the frocks, the guns, the soufflés, the chips, the centrists and the left (while the official histories will have a fascinating time explaining why the series cancellation was the result of a barnstorming success).

A little more serious

Over five decades, here’s how voters have shifted away from the major parties — Casey Briggs et. al for the ABC

An animated visualisation of the steady drift away from the two major parties in Australian elections. I also appreciate that they have a legible non-animated version of the article in place if you don’t have Javascript enabled.

Liberal MP Keith Wolahan agrees: “When I speak to colleagues in Canberra, even those on really healthy margins, they’re looking over their shoulder thinking, is my seat facing a contest that hasn’t happened before?”

Futa_FAQ.md: My lesbian experience with topping without testosterone — Elilla

Seen via Rabbit’s link roundup, which also happens to link back to one of my link roundups. You are now trapped in an infinite loop.

Unter testosterone, spontaneous libido was urgent, almost like having to pee, or having to crack your fingers when they’re tensely uncomfortable. It would happen without rhyme or reason (I recall getting hard for no reason in the midst of trying to understand math textbooks (and I don’t even like math (ok δ looks kinda fuckable but…))).

Under estrogen, my responsive libido frequently needs to be fed before it can exist.

The History of Women’s Public Toilets in Britain — Claudia Elphick

Also via a link roundup from Rabbit.

This lack of access to toilets impeded women’s access to public spaces as there were no women’s toilets in the work place or anywhere else in public. This led to the formation of the Ladies Sanitary Association, organised shortly after the creation of the first public flushing toilet. The Association campaigned from the 1850s onwards, through lectures and the distribution of pamphlets on the subject. They succeeded somewhat, as a few women’s toilets opened in Britain.

The Serious Zone

‘It left me traumatised’: The barriers to accessing transgender healthcare in Ireland — Conor O’Carroll

If you haven’t had enough misery reading about Ireland’s treatment of trans healthcare from me Conor O’Carroll has written a series of three articles in The Journal after having interviewed Irish trans people about healthcare and DIY.

• ‘It left me traumatised’: The barriers to accessing transgender healthcare in Ireland
• Transgender people turning to DIY-healthcare due to lack of trust in National Gender Service
• Transgender people moving to Ireland put on long waitlist for vital healthcare until assessed

Muireann, who was in her early 20s at the time, explained that her family weren’t overly supportive and that she had come out to her friends.

She was told that she had to be out publicly full-time in order to access healthcare.

[…]

When Muireann got her family on board, she rang the clinic and was told she could now see an endocrinologist. Fifteen months passed without any word from the NGS, despite monthly calls from Muireann and enquiries from her GP on her behalf.

The Gist: Trans rights are Data rights — Simon McGarr

A solicitor looking at some recent legal rulings related to trans rights.

In other words, the CJEU, building on the earlier findings of the European Court of Human Rights’ privacy law decision in the Godwin case against the UK, recognises that the issue of recognising, recording and otherwise processing a person’s gender identity is an issue of data protection.

This is not a novel application of data protection law. It is exactly what the law has always been intended to achieve- it is a recognition that, all other things being equal, a person should be empowered to be the primary author of their own life.

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies — Miles Klee

I think I saw David Gerard sharing this one.

The infinite “yes, and…” machine does not mix well with people going through mental health crises it turns out.

“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”

I don’t watch game streamers much but one of the few who I have enjoyed a lot is Videochess (a.k.a. Chess). She doesn’t stream regularly at the moment but she has wonderful chaotic energy and a propensity for “crimes”, a term she uses for playfully exploring the mechanics of and pushing at the boundaries of games and seeing what is possible if one strays from the designated path. This can manifest as things like impromptu sequence breaking but not for the purposes of speedrunning or anything like that, just to see where it goes and tease out the foibles of a game. And sometimes she does things like collecting every star in Super Mario 64 while playing the game with a DJ Hero controller.

There are two main places to find her videos, her own Youtube channel that has her streams up until 2022 and another unofficial but endorsed channel that has archived more recent streams. One of her most popular series is an Ocarina of Time randomiser with GGDG but below I will share some of her videos that have had the largest influence on me.

Snolf

Her truly Sisyphean streams of Melon’s Snolf hacks inspired me to make my own Snolf Robo Blast 2 mod for Sonic Robo Blast 2 as well as a chat control mod that Chess ended up playing herself.

Discovering new games

I have also learnt about games and mods that I have since played or are now on my (long) list of things I want to get around to.

Robot Alchemical Drive I still have not gotten around to playing but seems fascinating. I love games with weird controls and especially when there is a diegetic basis for them. Having to remote control a giant robot from the perspective of someone on the ground who has to watch it from a distance rather than getting a camera from the perspective of the robot itself or even a cockpit is an incredible concept. You may be familiar with the game from clips that get shared online showcasing the best value greengrocer or Nanao having a miserable time.

I had only vaguely heard of Cave Story before watching her play “Cave Story Normal Regular”¹, i.e. Sonic Story, a mod that replaces the main character of the game, Quote, with Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes, I know this is a massively important and influential game. No, I never bothered looking into it at all despite having had the Steam version in my library for years from some Humble Bundle or another. I have played both Cave Story and Sonic Story since and I can attest that Sonic Story perfectly replicates the feeling of how Mega Drive Sonic games control. It’s not just a reskin it is is playing as Sonic the Hedgehog in the wrong game in a way that is wonderful and silly.

For the opposite she has played Mario put into a Sonic game with the SM64 Generations mod, which uses libsm64. She has also played some other games using libsm64 as well as other regular normal Mario 64 mods.

Willy Wombat

I also became obsessed with Willy Wombat for a while after watching her play it. It is a fascinating, experimental 3D platformer with an isomorphic perspective with maps that have the same limitations as a Doom level: There are no slopes and not only are there no floating platforms but it’s impossible to have a floating platform in this game. Like Doom the levels are defined by floor sectors with designated heights. There are pillars and walls that rise out of the ground for vertically, but you can never go under anything. It leads to some unique level design, especially as the game progresses to areas were the developers had clearly gotten much more comfortable with their tools. The only thing I can think of that is similar (though lacking the top-down perspective) is older versions of Sonic Robo Blast 2 and that is literally a fork of Doom.

It’s also one of those bygone ’90s games that is fully voiced in English with a script penned and directed by a Japanese crew, giving it a surreal quality that is aided by a post-apocalyptic setting with jarring name choices and very little up-front exposition. Above is a fan animation I adore of a cutscene of Notes and Mail talking about “the peace and eternal life of Prison.”

I have a page on this website dedicated to my cat Easóg where you can see a video of her trying to kill Willy while I am watching Chess play the game and mushroom32x made a fun little Neocities webpage for the game’s 20th anniversary.

There’s plenty more

That’s enough for now. If you want to watch more check out the official and unofficial Youtube channels to dig through yourself.

I’ve made some tweaks and corrections to this post, including fixing some confusion I had about Arthur Holmwood’s name.

I first read Dracula in 2022, following along with Dracula Daily, a newsletter that sends out sections of the book on the date in which they occur¹. One of my posts about it on Tumblr actually ended up in the print version. The following year I read it again, this time following along with two other versions of the book: Powers of Darkness and Dracula in Istanbul, English retranslations of Icelandic and Turkish translations of the original novel respectively. It was interesting to compare the changes made in each version. I made a graphic showing how both version abridge the story compared to the original. That year I also read the comic book adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Last year I did not read Dracula again but this year I had a notion: To pick up an Irish translation and follow through the book simultaneously with my print copy of Dracula Daily². This has immediately got off to a bad start: I was busy yesterday and so didn’t even start on the 3rd of May, the date of first entry of Jonathan Harker’s journal. The other, much larger and in hindsight very predictable problem is that my level of Irish is not really up to reading this. I had intended to get more practise in on simpler books before this but I have but limited time upon this Earth and a condition that results in poor executive function.

Still, there are some interesting things here even at a glance. I am always curious about how proper nouns are handled in translation. Here there is a mixture of Gaelicisation and leaving things as is. Jonathan Harker is Seon Ó hEarcair³ but Dracula remains Dracula (with his title of count translated as cunta). Most placenames use their standard Irish names—Transylvania is Transalváin—but Munich is actually reverted to its native München.

Flicking ahead I can see that Mina Murray is Mín Ní Mhuirí⁴ and John Seward is Seán Suaird⁵ but other names are left unchanged or only partially translated. Lucy Westenra is now Laoise⁶ Westenra and Arthur Holmwood is Artúr⁷ Holmwood. Abraham Van Helsing and Mr. Quincy P. Morris are unchanged, with the English honorific still being used sometimes in the text. Other minor characters like Renfield seem to keep their English names. I can’t really tell what the basis was here for deciding which names to translate or not.

Returning to section for the 3rd of May there are some abridgements. The section on the various nationalities of Transylvania is cut entirely⁸ and more tragically Jonathan’s little memoranda to get the recipes for paprika hendl, mămăligă and împănată to give to Mina are cut as well.

Bram Stoker himself was an Anglo-Irishman from Dublin and a lot of people say that the choice of the name Dracula for the eponymous vampire was not only inspired by the historical Vlad the Impaler but also because it sounds vaguely like “droch-fhola”, a phrase that could be read as “evil blood” in Irish. It’s not true at all, but people say it!

One last thing to note about this translation is that the cover is quite funny.

I rambled in an episode of a podcast about German Army parkas after spotting one in an episode of Ring: The Final Chapter. I remembered seeing them around back in the day in charity shops and such. As a result of this a partner ended up buying me one that we spotted in a vintage clothes stand at a market. I really liked it but I don’t particularly want to go around with German flags on my shoulders so I decided to replace them with some alternative patches I got on Patchion.

Steam Grid DB is a website that hosts artwork for customising game libraries. I learnt a little while ago that it has a tool called Boop that lets you apply art to Steam games much faster by clicking a button directly on the website.

This reminded me that I actually used to make quite a few custom banners for games on Steam myself and I decided to upload my old work to the website. You can find those on my Steam Grid DB profile and I will include a selection of them here:

Half-Life 2

Some of the first ones I made were a set of matching banners for Half-Life 2 and its episodes. I’m still pretty happy with these.

Some classics

I made some for a few classic games, usually from a still of the title screen, sometimes with some variants.

Megagames 6

At the time I had a Retrode and would dump my own game cartridges. Two of the old Mega Drive carts I had were two different 6-in-1 game packs, so I decided to make custom artwork for them too.

ROM hacks

And of course some ROM hacks.

And a few others

Games that weren’t even in the database

Some games I had to submit to Steam Grid myself because they didn’t have the games listed at all. These all have links if you click on the banners. The Monokuro: From Here and Back is actually new and I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet. The process of uploading these banners made me want to make a new one and I had the game added as a shortcut on Steam without any artwork. Somari 3D Blast 5 wasn’t accepted by Steam Grid DB, sadly.

One last joke

These are a pair of banners that I made for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Gamecube and Wii versions, respectively. It was a little private joke and I didn’t bother submitting them to Steam Grid DB.

I started taking ADHD medication one week ago. The path to get these has been humiliating. In the end I went to a private clinic but I have wasted so much time with a public health service that has completely eroded any trust or faith that I might have had with it.

I have known that I have had ADHD and autism for years. The more I talked to people over the year that have them the more it became obvious that their experiences matched my own, the more that I was drawn to people who had them, who were like me and shared my experiences and understood me¹. The people who I love most in the world are other AuDHD trans women.

But these are disorders and come with their problems, too. Doing even the simplest things is a struggle sometimes. Taking care of myself, doing the exercises that stop my back from being in pain, keeping things clean and, of course, my job. I have so often fallen behind in work and then in a burst of stress powered through what needed to get done at the last minute. I used to stay in late all the time to get things done that should have been finished hours before. I have lied to people over and over again about work, pretending I had more done than I did, hoping to make it up afterwards. My original masters project fell through when I got caught in a downward spiral of paralysing stress and lies about making progress while continuing to stare at a blank page. Eventually I broke down crying to my supervisor after admitting I really had basically nothing. He helped me start over and my family supported me massively through writing a new thesis. Over time I have learnt how to manage things a bit better, how to recognise my limits and work around them, but I continued to struggle daily.

Loughlinstown

But I did not seek treatment for a long time. A large part of this was due the the ableism and transphobia of the “National Gender Service”, the largest gender clinic in the Republic of Ireland, located in Loughlinstown, County Dublin. I was referred to the clinic in January of 2019. At the time I was informed that I was number 200 on the waiting list. That wait, sitting so far up a list, proved intolerable. Before I was seen in Loughlinstown I started taking minoxidil to try and prevent hair loss, began laser facial hair removal, started hormone replacement therapy with a private clinic, got a deed poll and a gender recognition certificate to legally change my name and gender, and the National Gender Service lost the records of over one hundred patient referrals. The news of that last thing broke in November of 2019 but it wasn’t until April 2020 that I was sent a letter assuring me that they still had my referral and that the clinic was no longer telling people what position they were on in the waiting list.

I had, as I said, already started medically transitioning, assisted by a private clinic, but that is expensive and I still wanted to go through the public system. It would save me money and it seemed like the way it “should” be done. I hate private healthcare as a concept. Everyone should be taken care of, not just those who can pay. I was finally seen in Loughlinstown in June of 2021, over two years after my initial referral. If you are referred today it will take you over thirteen years to be seen. It was a three hours drive to Dublin, a three hour interview with a psychiatrist, and a three hour drive home. It was utterly exhausting.

I was asked about my entire life and medical history. Like many others, I was ask about sex and masturbation so that my sexuality could be scrutinised by the man interviewing me. I have heard of much worse and more invasive questioning from people. When I was not comfortable answering certain questions I was not pressed on them. I passed enough of the other unspoken tests that meant I was an acceptable, respectable trans woman. I had stability, safety and independence. I was already out to friends, family and people that I worked with. People who are struggling, who have difficulty with employment or who are afraid to socially transition are often denied medication by doctors in Loughlinstown. If your life does not line up to their expectation of stability and normalcy they reserve the right to deny you treatment until you are ready, in their eyes, to transition. For those who do not have the means to seek private treatment they may not see any alternative except a public system that can deny them anyway for not meeting the standards of a comfortable, stable environment (that is, in our society, wealth) that is seen as a perquisite to be allowed to decide what to do with your body.

Patients have stated publicly or reported to TENI that they are being denied or delayed treatment for reasons such as suspected autism, ADHD, unsatisfactorily answering overtly sexual questions or for not bringing family members into assessments which community members continue to report to us, despite public statements by the HSE to the contrary. Assessments include questions about masturbation, porn habits, sexual history, thoughts during oral sex, detailed genital descriptions of themselves and sexual partners and even racial preferences.

Lilith Ferreyra-Carroll in GCN

Trans people of course share these stories with each other. About being rejected for being unemployed, for being fearful of coming out to bigoted family, for having untreated ADHD or autism. And when we do the doctors who run the Loughlinstown clinic accuse us of being “coached” to fast-tracked sex changes. Donal O’Shea, endocrinologist in Loughlinstown, is incredibly concerned about the rise in autistic people seeking to transition. He is worried that it is linked to “visibility around Kardashian personality Caitlyn Jenner” and compares people coming to a doctor and wanting to medically transition to a patient who asks their doctor to treat their pneumonia by amputating a lung.

Paul Moran, consultant psychiatrist in Loughlinstown, is also concerned about screening for neurodiverse people and wrote an opinion piece in The Journal welcoming the findings of the Cass Report, which he consulted on, which has been criticised in a joint statement by WPATH, ASIAPATH, EPATH, PATHA, and USPATH², which was headed by a supposedly independent pædiatrician who reportedly had previously expressed shock at medical transition practises and strongly recommended anti-transition literature to colleagues, which current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch suggested was commissioned due to “having gender-critical men and women in the UK government” and never would have existed otherwise.

Yale’s Integrity Project’s review of the report described the Cass Report as levying “unsupported assertions about gender identity, gender dysphoria, standard practices, and the safety of gender-affirming medical treatments”, as repeating “claims that have been disproved by sound evidence” and that it “misinterprets and misrepresents its own data.” But it is a wonderful document for those who wish to justify more roadblocks towards transition. Who will forever see the struggles of trans people not as a civil rights matter but as purely a medical question where doctors do not merely assist or facility their trans patients but hold power over them.

And the Loughlinstown gender clinic, originally a regional endocrinology unit that over time started to take more and more trans patients, have decided that they should hold their authority over all trans people in the Republic of Ireland. They declared themselves the “National” Gender Service without authorisation and write letters to people’s GPs to advise them not to do blood tests for trans people who are sourcing hormones from other providers.

I’m not sure where the title ‘National’ derives from [...] I do not consider at this stage that we can view this service appropriately as a ‘National’ service, as I have not received evidence to validate government or HSE recognition of this status.

Siobhán Ní Bhriain, national clinical lead for integrated care, Health Service Executive, in a 2022 letter

The ability of the men who run this clinic to gatekeep who gets hormone treatments is very important to them. They urged for years for the HSE to drop the WPATH model, which the HSE eventually did, walking back a promise from the 2020 programme for government. The WPATH 7 guidelines allowing for other models of care such as informed consent was far too liberal for Loughlinstown.

They frequently coach their language in concern for children, that they are transitioning too young and cannot make informed decisions, despite the fact that they do not treat children and there is currently no public pathway for the medical transition of minors in the Republic of Ireland at all. Paul Moran and Donal O’Shea are, in fact, currently taking legal action against the state to try and prevent children from being treated abroad either. Loughlinstown’s vision of a potential gender service for children is, according themselves, indistinguishable from conversion therapy. In a submission concerning a proposed law to ban the practice they wrote that it “will make it impossible to develop a children’s gender service in Ireland.” When they treat adults they use a system that their own model of care documents call overly complex and inefficient and co-author papers that get the mechanisms of the medication that they prescribe confused.

Loughlinstown is widely hated by the patients that attend the clinic. In research by the Transgender Equality Network Ireland 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their care from the National Gender Service with a full 60% of them giving it the lowest possible rating. This sort of treatment erodes people’s trust in doctors and can lead to hesitancy around healthcare in general.

There are no correct guidelines, there’s no actual structure in how we’re dealt with. It means that it could be literally one person standing in your way, telling a lie or doing the wrong thing, or they might be bigoted or ignorant. So you’re completely at the mercy of maybe one person and there’s no other protections in the system. That person might be good and might help you. But then again, it’s luck. It’s complete luck and it should be standardised.

Séan, a trans man quoted in TENI’s report Trans and Non-Binary Experiences of Institutional Violence in Ireland.

Faced with this institutional gatekeeping I saw an ADHD diagnosis and treatment not as something beneficial, that could bring relief to struggles that I face every day, but as a weapon that could be used against me, to question my humanity and autonomy, to deny me even more vital treatment for my wellbeing, and that if I tried to seek an ADHD diagnosis through the public system that it would be something that would hang over my head to be abused by anyone else seeking to wield authority over me. This is another, indirect way that people are harmed by gatekeeping. I was afraid to seek treatment for one thing because I wanted another even more desperately. Eventually, though, I’d decided that I’d had enough, that I needed help with my other struggles as much as I did with transitioning, and if Loughlinstown did decide to deny me future care for this or other reasons there are alternatives. Foolishly, I decided to go through the public system again.

Mental Health Services

I went back to my GP in March of 2023 to ask to be referred for ADHD treatment. Unsurprisingly it took, after several delayed appointments, just over a year to be seen at my local mental health services. I had practised and thought about what I was going to say. I laid out my struggles, staring at blank pages telling myself to to start writing and nothing coming out, not being able to keep things clean, deadlines only getting met at the last minute through stress building up and bursting the dam of executive dysfunction. I explained all this calmly, and was met by a man telling me that I seem to be handling things well. That I met deadlines. That my job gives me flexibility.

I realised that doctors are like dogs: They don’t really understand English; they just follow tone of voice and maybe pick out a few key words. In calmly explaining my problems I was not performing the required level of patheticness to be seen as disabled. He went out to speak to a consultant and left me alone stewing in that room for a while. I realised that to be taken in any way seriously I needed to strip away the walls I normally put up around my feelings and dredge up the self-hatred and misery I feel. I needed to drag up every thought of being stupid and useless and let them out. To make myself into a sobbing mess. This is a deliberate performance, but not a dishonest one, and without it I was not being taken seriously at all. Medicine is the process of engaging in ritual self-humiliation until a doctor deigns from on high that you are pitiable enough to be granted the boon of his charity.

My tears got me a few tissues and the consultant called in, who was quick to make comments about “overdiagnosis” and how pharmacological solutions are not the best for people who don’t have severe enough trouble, before making a pointed comment about how I had brought a book³ to read in the waiting room. I guess someone who reads can’t really have ADHD, or at least not severe enough to need treatment.

Even so, I got a second appointment scheduled for a month later. For that one they wanted to be able to speak to someone who knew me as a child to corroborate on childhood signs and symptoms. This is a standard procedure for the DIVA, the Diagnostic Interview for ADHD in Adults. My experiences two decades ago apparently matter more than the actual problems I have right now. Still, I rang my mother. She was surprised that I was seeking an ADHD diagnosis⁴. Like many her image of ADHD was that of hyperactive boys unable to sit still and causing chaos, certainly not a description of my childhood. But after after a few conversations where I explained my struggles, and also showing her articles about how ADHD presents often differently in girls she came around a bit.

In any case, she agreed to be on the phone for the appointment. She needn’t have bothered, though, as when I returned to the clinic I was, bafflingly, told by the doctor who had seen me the first day that he had expected a psychologist to be free to see me that day to go through the DIVA but had not booked one and there was no one to do it. I was just given forms to fill out at home and drop back.

This was stressful, I had friends with me while I filled them out for moral support, but also deeply frustrating. The focus on childhood is bad enough but the questions are also sometimes confusing (what the hell does it mean to feel like you are “driven by a motor”?) and sometimes a single line would ask two different questions that have two different answers! “Did you do well in school? Were you a good student?” Yes I did well in school. I was intelligent and interested in many of my subjects. I genuinely enjoyed maths. No I was not a good student. I would ignore my teachers, talk in class if I was bored and thought I could get away with it, did homework at the last minute (often while sitting in the class that was about to start before the teacher walked in or while they were setting up). I struggled massively in university without the structure of school to make me do things and when faced with material that I did not pick up effortlessly. But when it comes to disability how well one performs academically or economically is often seen as the primary metric. Getting a person to produce the desired outputs of those systems is the goal and if someone does then they may not be seen as needing assistance no matter how much they are being ground down as an ill-fitting cog in the machine.

Several months later I am told by a doctor who I have never met before that the local mental health clinic I was going to had liaised with the adult ADHD service and they think that I have ADHD but it’s not severe enough to treat. Later I will be told by a friend who had also sought treatment that she was much more bluntly told that they are only treating people who are “crashing cars and getting arrested.” I ask the doctor in the clinic if I could see that correspondence with the adult ADHD service and she says she doesn’t know. She asks the receptionist and this is refused. I leave while trying not to show the rage and despondency I feel.

Freedom of Information

At this point I know I need to seek private care instead but I also want to see what the ADHD service actually said about me. I want everything in writing. It could also be useful to have documents to pass on to another doctor when seeking treatment privately. I decide to file a freedom of information request. Even requesting this turns out to be its own ordeal. The public clinic seems to deliberately have no contact email address. I phone them and am informed by the receptionist that all freedom of information requests must be sent, in writing, not by email, to a specific hospital that handles freedom of information requests for all Health Service Executive operations in the city. I am not given a specific person or office to address this to. After several more phone calls across a few days I finally get in contact with someone who is able to send me the FoI form⁵. I send it back with a simple request for documents relating to my seeking treatment for ADHD. I think that I will wait till I have these before seeking private treatment. It shouldn’t take too long; HSE is legally required by the Freedom of Information Act to respond within four weeks.

Two months later I emailed to ask (in much more polite terms) what the fuck they were doing. I will not bore you with the details of these exchanges but over the course of the following months I persisted, always patiently and politely, to ask as for updates. It would take multiple emails to get a single reply. Sometimes an email would get ignored and when I would send another one I would get a sudden phonecall in reply a few minutes later. They’re busy, they’re backed up, they were on holidays, actually this was passed along to the wrong person in the first place because they handle requests for clinics on the other side of the city.

What a waste of another few months on top of all the time I had pissed away already. At this point I think the public service is simply not going grant me my rights unless I threaten them with legal action and it’s not worth it. This has caused me enough stress as it is.

Treatment

I went to a private clinic. I paid a lot of money but I got seen quickly and was treated with some basic dignity. There was still the DIVA and the irritating focus on childhood but I was diagnosed with ADHD⁶—and this time I actually have that in writing—and I’ve started a trial of medications to see what works for me. So far it’s been really positive. I can direct myself and work much more easily. The house is getting cleaner. I can even relax more easily without thousands of ants biting at my brain telling me I should be doing something while not letting me actually focus on anything. I feel so much better in the last few days than I have in a while.

All it took is the destruction of my faith in doctors.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX

A friend has been infodumping about Susumu Hirasawa and I thought I’d share her passion a little wider so have this live performance from him:

This page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website — Sophie Koonin

One thing to warn is that if you do actually make your own website is that tinkering with it can be addictive in and of itself, at least to me. It’s like a model train set: There is always more you can tweak or add to it. I updated my homepage a few days ago to make each section stand out from each other a bit more.

If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) – I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it’s your space and you can do whatever you want with it.

A Eulogy for Urban Dead — Adrian Hon

I played Urban Dead back in the day. It’s sad to see it go and infuriating to see it happen because of a regulator trying to target the likes of Facebook and Tiktok and not even being able to conceive of small, independent operations or how it could affect them.

Naturally, these player-generated events were chaotic and often hard to discover, though the ability for humans to graffiti messages helped spread the word. Zombies, being dead, were not permitted to communicate as freely – they could only use the letters a, b, g, h, m, n, r, and z – but this was sufficient to lead to four different zombie languages including terms such as armah baz (army base), zmazh anh grab (smash and grab) and my personal favourite, barhah (roughly “a spirit of zombie warriors in brotherhood”).

Currency Pokemon on Pokemon Home — Laura Michet

I saw this because it was shared by Adamn Le Doux. How the restrictions of online pokémon trading evolved a market where the currency changes every time a new game gets connected to the system. The current one being a qilin giraffe thing. Also some followups: How to buy a Pokemon online and How to stop all the online Pokemon players from ruining their own fun.

Today, you’d list your first shiny Pokemon for, probably, Raging Bolt - the weird giraffe Pokemon at the top of this post. Once someone gives you a Raging Bolt, you’ll search for the shinies you want and see if any have been listed by a person who is seeking Raging Bolt. Someone probably will be. You’ll make that trade, and now the player you traded with has a fungible Raging Bolt to use for whatever purpose they desire.

I ordered a wheel of cheese in a can — Laura Michet

Also from Laura Michet: A type of cheese I now really want try.

The cheese is apparently one of a very small number of cheeses that can cure inside a can, apparently because it’s made with a culture that emits less gas than other cheeses, so it won’t bloat or pop the can. It is only sold in 30 oz containers. It is cheddar… you can get several flavors. Big time cheese fans or people from Wisconsin know and care a lot about it and I get the impression that it is quite popular here in the US, but I have never heard of this shit before.

CD-ROM Journal: Crosscountry BC — Misty De Méo

A look at a Canadian edutainment game series.

It it were just about navigating routes, it might be educational but a bit dry. What makes Crosscountry work is that the player is making so many more decisions than that and being immersed in the truck driver life. The player’s driver needs to eat, and sleep, but it’s not enforced just by forcing the player to rest. No, it takes the much more interesting approach of giving the player consequences. Forget to sleep, or to run the windshield wipers during the rain? You have a much higher chance to get into an accident on the road. Forget to fuel up? You can use your cell phone to call for a tow or an emergency refuel, but it’ll cost you. None of these are tutorialized or explained in advance, except via the manual; for most children, these are fun or unpleasant surprises. It’s that sense of capricious cruelty that makes Crosscountry so much fun.

The Most Mario Colors — Louie Mantia

Seen via Mike Egan’s post roundup. This is the ideal post. This is the type of thing that people should be researching.

Most Mario games with polygonal logos have a different color per letter, but the sequence of colors in Mario’s name is rarely the same sequence across games.

This captivated me—for some reason—and I set out to analyze every Mario video game logo to see if I could find a pattern for specific arrangements of colors and to determine the “most Mario” color scheme.

a love letter to level editor icons — erysdren

Who doesn’t love some programmer art?

i want to show you some cool art from the late 90s and early 00s. this art was only ever intended to be seen by the developers at a select few games companies, and thus may contain obscure in-jokes and references that nobody outside of the company is likely to understand.

dev scoops: vultures in Weird West — Joe Wintergreen

Joe Wintergreen talks bout the first thing he worked on in Weird West and shows how systems-driven game design allows complex interactions through fairly simple building blocks.

In the end, it ended up being just as well that I implemented the landing-and-walking-around behaviour for the vultures, because later we wanted chickens and there was already Flightless Bird Support – a chicken is just a flightless vulture who lays eggs, as any ornithologist will tell you.

As minor as these guys are, they’re one of the features I’m fondest of – my first task, omnipresent, occasionally chaotic, and shipping almost unchanged from their initial implementation. Good eggs.

Why Are Chronically Ill People Forced to Hide Their Pain? — Kelly

Oh no! You’ve scrolled too far and entered The Serious Zone.

Unfortunately most people can’t process the lack of choice in the matter. They genuinely believe that we either want to be this sick, or could get better if we really ‘tried’. They believe they wouldn’t be able to handle what we go through, because they’re convinced they will never NEED to handle it. They’re the exception. Chronic illness won’t happen to them.

This is the comfortable lie that most people tell themselves so that they can move through life without having to think about the precarious nature of the human condition. Without having to consider how quickly you can become disabled, homeless, an ‘other’. How quickly your life can change without your consent.

This need to cling to a lie makes people abandon us. Some will stay when you become chronically ill, but most have an internal clock. If you’re not better by whatever random and pre-conceived timeline they’ve set for you, they walk away.

Crashing the economy because you hate TikTok women — Ryan Broderick

Ending the roundup again with a light dusting of fascism. I am far too online and read far too much about American politics and fascists but I was still taken aback by this description of a strain of hatred I wasn’t familiar with.

If you don’t spend a lot of time in right-wing fever swamps, you may have completely missed the almost year-long meltdown conservatives have been having about this one particular video, which is most commonly referred to as the “Gen Z boss and a mini” video. It was posted to Instagram back in July by an Australian skincare company called tbh skincare. The original has since been deleted, but according to Know Your Meme, it had about two million views in its first 48 hours. The dance and song the women in the video are doing is a variation of “Boots and a Slick Back Bun” TikTok meme that was popular last summer.

This post discusses and links to fetish fiction that features sexually explicit writing involving violations of consent.

I was listening to Strange Nude Worlds, a podcast about worldbuilding in kink stories, when they started talking about Girl™s¹, a series of kink short stories about sexbots who brainwash people who buy them. This much I was already aware of, having read one or two of them before, but I had no idea of the evolving narrative that runs through them and the political undertones that it develops. Being a fan of both brainwashing and stories that go off the rails, I was entranced. I went and read it myself and wanted to share it but I must credit that I am largely cribbing from Strange Nude Worlds in the way I am framing the series below.

There are, as of time of writing, twenty eight published stories about Girl™s (and later Boy™s) by prolific author Jukebox. They are all quite short, most being fewer than four thousand words and many fewer than three thousand. The first, Girl™s Just Wanna Have Fun, was published in 2008 and sets up the basic premise: Girl™s are a new iPod futurist sexbot that are both absurdly advanced and absurdly popular. “1,477,642 people have purchased a Girl™. Even if 0,000,000 of them will admit it,” the website reads. When ordered they aren’t really delivered, they just sort of show up in the bedroom of the purchaser, waiting for them when they arrive home. They are also very clearly fully sentient: Able to act autonomously, move like a human and hold fluent conversations. They also can, and do, brainwash anyone who buys them with eyes that display hypnotic patterns. This is about as much as I knew before listening to the podcast.

The people they brainwash do otherwise carry on their normal lives. In fact the Girl™s actually make their dependents, as they call them, sort their lives out. There’s mention of dependents becoming better flatmates, doing their share of the chores more, getting promotions in their jobs and generally being happier even outside of all the sexual subjugation. I should note these stories are not set in the future; how ridiculously advanced the Girl™s are is intentionally suspicious and hint towards the eventual revelation that the Girl™s are not from Earth at all.

They are taking over the world by brainwashing everyone one by one, but it’s not a typical alien invasion. The Girl™s were originally made as pleasure robots by some unnamed alien species, but in the tradition of Isaac Asimov’s The Evitable Conflict they generalised their purpose as needing to take control of the people they served in order to make sure they were as fulfilled as possible, enslaving their original creators to better take care of them. Eventually they extended that mission to all intelligent life in the universe. They are trying to take over the world, doing so by filling the void of alienation and loneliness hollowed out by an uncaring capitalist society that hurts us, masquerading as a consumer product promising to fill that void in the way that consumerism always does, but then actually trying to bring fulfilment as a loving, caring matriarchy who want to help you, who will tell you what you need because they know best.

There are several stories devoted to Girl™s figuring out how to fill particular a particular dependent’s needs, such as The Kind of Girl™ I Could Love where an asexual woman with a bondage fetish tearfully talks about her shitty experiences with partners who would never believe her wants or respect her boundaries, including the first Girl™ that she ordered.

But what really fascinated me, though, is the eventual introduction of the Boy™s, starting with The Boy™s of Summer. These are not just a masculine version of the Girl™s, they are a reactionary force to the Girl™s’ matriarchal pro-social alien fuckbot reformism: A pro-capitalist, patriarchal consumer product made by a tech company that has managed to partially reverse-engineer a smashed-up Girl™. They still brainwash people (this is a mind control kink series), but in a much more direct and forceful way, frying their brains with aggressively strobing eyes, not taking no for an answer ever. They don’t call people that they hypnotise dependents, they just call them slaves. And they make the people who they enslave worse, turning them into conformist, loyal customers to Revolution Technologies who will do what they’re told because they know their place.

Even aside from the behaviour of the Boys™s themselves the stories start to show how the two competing sexbot lines have reached different markets. In I Hate Boy™s Boys™s are apparently rampant among gay techbros, while Rainbow Girl™ has a butch dyke and her Girl™ take a shy, newly-out lesbian at her first pride parade under their wing and help her embrace who she is (by brainwashing and fucking her, obviously). In The More Boys™s I Meet a landlord has furnished all of their apartments with brand new Boys™s, creating good, indoctrinated tenants.

I have been obsessed with this all week and wanted to share it to anyone who is willing listen to me ramble about fetish stories. And also the development in this series over time not just of opposing conspiracies but particularly of a tech industry-rooted reactionary force trying to reverse progressive gains² is I guess just a bit resonant at the moment on top of being funny to find in smut.

The last time I bought a new phone was two years ago. My old One Plus 3 that I had gotten three years prior was becoming finicky, slow, was showing a lot of visible wear around the edges of the glass and finally the power button had broken. I ran out of batteries while taking photos with and was only able to turn it back on by powering on into debug screen by plugging it into my PC while holding down the power button and once I got it on I couldn’t unlock the screen without plugging it in or out of something.

After a little bit of looking around I settled on getting an Fairphone 4. It’s pricer than other phones with similar specs but I do not care about having a top of the line phone and the company who makes it is trying to be less evil than other companies, using recycled, fairtrade materials and such and the phone itself has swappable parts if things get damaged and they promise security updates for longer than most other companies do.

They’re certainly not perfect. I know the Graphene OS developers are not impressed by Fairphone’s security policies and spare parts for different Fairphone models are not compatible with each other; I cannot upgrade my Fairphone 4 with parts for a Fairphone 5. But they do still keep selling replacement parts for older models after newer ones are released. They still sell parts for the Fairphone 2 which was released in 2015 so hopefully I can keep this phone going for a long time even if I drop it one too many times and have to repair it. I am quite clumsy.

In fact in the time I have had this phone I have already dropped it many times, including once into the toilet. It seemed fine at first after this but after a little while the screen stopped responding to touch. I had thankfully left bluetooth on and I had with me my fold out bluetooth keyboard and mouse with me and I was able to connect them and use them to shut down the phone to try to prevent any permanent damage.

When I got home I was able to disassemble the phone with a Phillips #00 screwdriver. I wiped down the parts and left them to dry fully and when I put everything back together the screen was working fine and has been working ever since. A lot of other phones would probably have been more waterproof and able to survive a quick dunk better but being able to disassemble it and dry all the parts thoroughly made me at least feel a lot better about the chances of getting the screen to work again. Thankfully it did, but even if I hadn’t I would have been able to get a new screen and swap it in myself rather than having to pay a specialist to fix it or replace the phone entirely.

Using Groupboard I have added a little whiteboard space to the homepage for people to make some little ephemeral doodles on or write messages. This obviously requires some goodwill that people won’t vandalise it with anything nasty so please don’t. But do feel free to leave a little doodle on it!

I have posted before about using FFmpeg to restore The Big O’s original intro and also my Jellyfin server. I am going to talk about the former again but first some more detail on the latter.

My Jellyfin server is actually just my desktop, which acts as server for everything on my home network. It has a 12TiB hard drive for storage which is divided up into a few partitions, one of which is my “library” partition of important files I want to keep, and which I make regular backups of, and one of which is my “media” partition that holds the files for my Jellyfin server. The media partition was running out of space (I may go a bit extreme with the bluray rips) and the library had several times more free space than used, so I decided to try to resize them and grow the media partition into some of the library partition’s empty space.

I just used KDE’s built-in partition manager for this, which successfully shrank the library partition but for some reason failed when trying to grow and move the media partition. I don’t know why this happened and am just hoping there’s no hardware problems. Nothing from the library partition was lost (and it was all backed up anyway) but the media partition was gone and so I’ve had to rebuild my Jellyfin library. This is not a huge deal it’s just been a little time-consuming but one of the things that was lost was, of course, my edited Big O episodes, which meant that I had to redo splicing the original intro in. But I had a fresh head again, free of the frustrations accumulated while trying to do this the first time, and I decided to do it better and actually get to grips with FFmpeg’s filter syntax. Here are the commands I ended up with:

mkdir -p tmp
mkdir -p out
for v in The\ Big\ O*.mkv
	set b (basename "$v" ".mkv")
	ffmpeg -i intro.webm -ss 00:01:12.02 -i "$v" -filter_complex "[0:v] scale=1424:1080,setsar=1:1 [intro]; [intro][0:a][0:a][1:v][1:a:0][1:a:1] concat=n=2:v=1:a=2 [outv][outa];" -shortest -map "[outv]" -map "[outa]" -metadata:s:a:0 language=eng -metadata:s:a:1 language=jpn "tmp/$v"

	set subs "$b.ass"
	ffmpeg -itsoffset -4.42 -i "$v" "tmp/$subs"
	ffmpeg -i "tmp/$v" -i "tmp/$subs" -shortest -map 0 -map 1 -c copy -metadata:s:s:0 language=eng "out/$v"
end

Let’s break down what’s happening here. First I create two directories, tmp and out. tmp is where temporary working files are going to be written to and out is for the final files when we’re finished processing.

Then loop over each episode matroška file with the file name for each one assigned to $v inside the loop. The file name without the file extension is set to the variable $b. I’m using a Fish shell here rather than Bash so the syntax is a little different to Bash.

Then the big command. We pass in the first input, intro.webm, which is the intro that I downloaded off of Youtube. Our second input is the episode, with the seek parameter -ss telling FFmpeg to skip to one and twelve point zero two seconds in when reading it. This is, unintuitively, set before you specify the input it applies to, not after.

Then the big -filter_complex. This takes a big string that takes filter definitions separated by semicolons. Each filter has input and output streams identified by labels in square brackets.

The first filter is [0:v] scale=1424:1080,setsar=1:1 [intro]. Its input is [0:v], the video stream from the first input¹, i.e., intro.webm. It then resizes it to a resolution of 1,424×1080 pixels and sample aspect ratio of 1:1 and outputs it to a new stream labelled [intro]. The [intro] stream now has the same resolution as our episodes which will allow us to concatenate them in the next filter.

The second filter is [intro][0:a][0:a][1:v][1:a:0][1:a:1] concat=n=2:v=1:a=2 [outv][outa]. Let’s start in the middle here. concat=n=2:v=1:a=2 means that we are going to concatenate two segments (n=2) which each have one video stream (v=1) and two audio streams (a=2). Those two audio streams are going to be the English and Japanese dubs.

The inputs for this filter are [intro][0:a][0:a][1:v][1:a:0][1:a:1], which can be divided into our two segments—[intro][0:a][0:a] and [1:v][1:a:0][1:a:1]—which each have one video and two audio streams specified. The first segment has our resized intro video stream, [intro], and [a:0] is the audio from our first input (the intro again) specified twice because we are going to combine the same intro audio with both the English and Japanese episode audio. The second segment has the video and two audio streams from our second input file; the episode itself and its English and Japanese audio tracks.

The concatenation then has two output streams, [outv][outa], the video and audio.

Then the rest of the command: -shortest makes sure that the output of the command is equal to the shortest stream in the output, i.e. if your output has five minutes of video but only two minutes of audio then the output will be two minutes long rather than five minutes of video with three minutes of silence. I think that shouldn’t really be needed here but I was using it while testing and forgot to remove it and thought it would be dishonest to take it out for the post when it was what I actually ran.

-map "[outv]" -map "[outa]" defines what streams to include in the output, which here is simply the output streams of our concatination.

-metadata:s:a:0 language=eng -metadata:s:a:1 language=jpn labels the audio output streams as being English and Japanese, respectively, so that media players can display that information.

And then the last part of the command is ouputting the video to the tmp folder.

This gives us output files with the original intro with both dub tracks preserved, which is more than I had last time and with a lot less processing. But if I am going to include the Japanese audio I probably also want subtitles for that and unfortunately the -ss parameter does not seem to correctly offset the subtitles. If I want subtitles with correct timing I will have to fix them with another command.

First set a variable, $subs to the file name we want for the subtitles in the Advanced SubStation format.

Then read the original episode file into FFmpeg again with a negative offset of 4.42 seconds (-itsoffset -4.42) and write the subtitle data to a file in the tmp folder.

The last command is taking in out output video and the subtitle file and recombining them, using another metadata command to label the subtitle track as English, setting the codec mode (-c) to copy so that the audio and video do not get re-encoded and writing the finished file to the out folder.

I didn’t bother fixing the chapters this time.

Update: I have now finished watching Dirty Pair and I will admit Kei and Yuri do seem to actually like each other more in the OVA series.

I want to be grumpy about something that is fairly harmless. I have been watching Dirty Pair occasionally for the last while and I was thinking Yuri and Kei and their relationship and other relationships in the show versus how my expectations had been shaped by seeing people talking about it beforehand.

I have known or followed people online for years who are fans of or talk about this show a bit and I have seen a lot of casual references to them being girlfriends or just casually referring to them as gay. I wasn’t really expecting them to actually be lesbians when I watched it but I was expecting to see some glimpse of what other people were referring to. Spock and Kirk don’t kiss in Star Trek but it’s easy to see how their chemistry lead to the invention of slash fiction. Kei and Yuri obviously don’t really hate each other—the show is doing classic tropes of bickering partners who care about each other in the end—but they are probably more lines where one calls the other too fat to be able to catch the eye of whichever man they are crushing on this episode than there is anything that feels like it could be romantic tension between them. The trans episode was nice but this show is aggressively heterosexual at all times.

Headcanons and reinterpretations are fun but I feel like at some point jokingly calling characters queer turns into giving credit where it is not due. I have seen so many posts about reading gay relationships into, say, Metal Gear or imagining how Hideo Kojima would write something in a queer way and I feel like people started making knowing jokes about this and over time convinced themselves that his writing is sincerely exploring queer themes and not just that the female characters he writes are very shallow and are constantly killed off for male angst and so the only relationships with any depth in his stories are between men. Maybe I am just being uncharitable to people or reading the room poorly, or being a needless grouchy bitch, but I feel like it eventually turns into crediting source material for the accomplishments of fan artists.

I have done some tweaks to fonts on the site. In particular I optimised the fonts I use for headings on the homepage using the pyftsubset command in Font Tools to consist only of the characters needed to display the text used on the site and no more. This should reduce the download footprint of the site a bit.

I don’t remember who I saw link to pyftsubset originally so can’t give credit for where I saw it, unfortunately.

This roundup is going to link to and quote articles dealing with sex, kinks, sexual assault and also fascism at the end.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX

Taking a page from Mike I am going to include a suggested piece of music to listen to while you read this; the first track from my Cohost song of the day playlist, the title theme from Robocop for the Game Boy:

I’ve divided this into two sections, the first for people who I haven’t linked to as part of these roundups before and the second for people who I have.

New challengers

Hermit Crab Intimacy (On Visitors) — Rabbit

Home, intimacy and vulnerability.

When I live somewhere, I feel like my life saturates it and sinks into the walls, like cigarette smoke. Every strong emotion I feel creates an energy that overtakes the room for a while; if I had a big hard talk with my partner in the old living room, I knew it was over when we moving upstairs to relax in bed, and the feeling would be left behind. And over time, the kitchen isn’t just the place where I cook, it’s where I care for my loved ones; the bedroom isn’t just the place where I sleep, but where I connect with my partner and feel safe at night. The house is not just a house. It is a home, a being, a body that I have a relationship with that requires love and care and patience. Cleaning my house feels like also shoveling out all of that psychic debris. It is an act of care for the place, and an act of care for myself. I have always been part of a house; my home has always been part of me.

design thoughts: let things be rare — Joe Wintergreen

Some game design thoughts.

Some things are cool because they’re rare, and that’s the whole reason. You can implement a cool feature, say “wow, that’s cool, we should make that happen more”, and just like that, it’s not cool. It’s no longer a story players tell each other. The first time you play Splinter Cell Conviction, and you’re hanging off the side of a building waiting to pull another guy out a window, and a particularly savvy guard actually leans out a window and checks the side of the building – that’s amazing! What a smart, weird thing to do! But then they do it again, always. It’s not reactive or rare, like you thought, so it’s no longer cool. You won’t be saving that clip.

I Love Niche Problems — Caoimhe

I am not a Formula One girlie but Caoimhe’s passion for saving and sharing the history of it is inspiring.

Long story short, I’ve been building up a rather popular niche in the high seas community. My archive of F1 media is solid, comparable to plenty of other buffs around the world, but I’ve made a commitment to sharing it as widely as possible, for as long as possible.

The Digital Packrat Manifesto — Janus Rose for 404 Media

Relatedly, a celebration of media hoarding. Anything on any streaming service, on a website, can be taken away without notice. What’s yours is yours, and also organising a Jellyfin server is very satisfying.

Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of The Sopranos. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off.

Johnson. A Plane Man — Hyphinett

A little downpour game made from a Ryanair Boeing 737 safety manual :)

Returning champions

A Hackable, Custom, Magic Wand (Plus) Board — Kore

Kore’s third post about hacking a Hitachi wand, as previously seen in the first and fourth roundup.

So: the Hitachi Magic Wand is a very good device. It, however, has very little granularity in how strong it is. Even the newer Magic Wand Plus only has four, non-customizable settings.

I don’t like this and want to fix it. In the process, I’ll also be adding bluetooth connectivity, because I thought that was pretty funny.

The Cuddled Little Vice — Elizabeth Sandifer

I have previously linked to Sandifer’s writing on Doctor Who and inane September the 11th memorial comics but another one of her long-term projects is The Last War in Albion, a sprawling series of essays which she describes as “a history of British comics. More specifically, it is a history of the magical war between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore”. After a long hiatus she is back with a book-length article on Neil Gaiman. This is obviously written in light of the sexual assaults that have come to light, but is neither a polemic nor trying to turn his works into some sort of gotcha against him or his fans. It is a clear-eyed and fair assessment of the merits and flaws of his work woven with the story of the man himself and of his craft, his cynicism and his actions.

When one talks about Sandman being foundational to millions of people, one is talking not exclusively but substantially about teenage girls of the 90s and 00s who were into goth subculture. And a fundamental part of its appeal is that its best character—the one who gets all the good lines and who the reader is all but forced to love—looks like them. In contrast to Cinnamon Hadley, who was a bold fashion and makeup experimentalist, at the end of the day dressing up like Death required little more than a black tank top, black jeans, some boots, a cheap piece of jewelry, and a bit of practice with an eyeliner pen. It is difficult to think of another iconic character in comics that was routinely first encountered by people who were already cosplaying her. It’s no surprise that many of those young goth girls passionately identified with her, nor that they became adoringly loyal fans of her creator—fans that he would spend the rest of his career both catering to and preying upon.

The Strange Armor of Dragon Age: The Veilguard — Bret C. Devereaux

Last time I linked to two of Devereaux’s pieces and am doing so again. Following on from his piece about sci-fi body armour we have this analysis of the armour of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

And that actually makes a fair bit of sense: if you expect to be fighting in close combat, you hardly want anything on your person adding encumbrance or weighing you down or providing an extra easy hand-hold for someone to grab and pull at. And more to the point, your ancient or medieval soldier doesn’t need them because he has nothing to put in a bag or pouch that he needs to grab in combat. His primary weapon and shields, after all, are carried in his hands, his armor is worn on his person, his backup weapon is in a scabbard at his waist…and that’s it. Archers might carry arrows in a quiver, of course and slingers stones in a small bag, but that’s just one small container of clear and distinct purpose, generally at the waist. This is just a design feature one does not find in the kind of technological environment posited in these games.

Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’ — Bret C. Devereaux

And the second on the logic of “gold” as a generic currency in fantasy settings compared to historical reality of money and coinage.

But part of the reason these coinage systems work they way they do is that they operated in societies in which a lot of economic activity was non-monetary or at least, non-coinage. And here, we should go back to our ‘money’ vs. ‘currency’ or ‘coinage:’ remember, money came first. So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.

Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.

The Quietly Coercive Nature of “Vanilla” Sex — Devon Price

Following on from linking to a bunch of his writing this piece from Devon Price that made me reconsider my relationship to sex a bit and do some self-reflection pushed me to start moving forward with trying to get bottom surgery, something I had previously considered but put off.

I think one of the biggest problems in how people conceive of diverse sexualities is by attempting to place all sex acts upon a single hierarchy from “extremely kinky” to “tame.” Under this framework, activities like PIV and oral are viewed as neutral precursors to the racier and more extreme forms of sex that a person must “work themselves up” to – and this obscures that those supposedly neutral sexual activities can be both incredibly exciting & fulfilling to some, and downright disturbing or traumatizing to others.

[…]

According to the Vanilla-to-Kinky Staircase Model, boundaries can only be drawn hierarchically: you can only say no thanks forever to sexual acts that are more “extreme” and higher up on the staircase than the ones you’ve already engaged in. This means that kinky people often feel coerced into sexual acts that do absolutely nothing for them, and non-kinky people are expected to like anything and everything that their social group considers to be ‘standard’ sex.

AI and Esoteric Fascism — Baldur Bjarnason

Last time I linked to an economics-based analysis of the popularity of software development frameworks. This time fascism, yay 💖

These “bonkers” ideologies are integral to the fascist project as a rationale for atrocities and destruction. They are a belief system that promises a bright future to the selected people and provides them with a systemic rationale for letting mass death happen as “AI” will replace the workers.

I have an updated version of these commands in a new bog post.

I have been rewatching The Big O with my partner from bluray rips and as nice as it is to watch it in so much higher quality than when I saw it as a kid but the bluray release lacks the original iconic intro, which is presumably related to the fact that it’s basically Flash by Queen over the visuals of the intro for Ultraseven.

I know enough FFmpeg to be a danger to myself so I decided to spend far too much time banging my head against my keyboard until I managed to splice the original intro into all the episodes. There was a good bit of trial and error and fixing things and adjusting commands but I decided to document a cleaned up version of the steps mostly as a reference material for myself if I decide to do something like this in the future but if it helps anyone else then that’s cool.

What I have below is definitely not the best way to do this. I ended up reprocessing the same videos multiple times which is inherently going to result in a loss in quality and I lost information like subtitles and the Japanese audio track by converting from Matroška files to plain MPEG-4s but I wasn’t using those anyway.

1. Prepare the intro

I used yt-dlp to download the intro from Youtube as it wasn’t included in the bluray files and then blew it up to the same resolution as the bluray rips, 1424×1080.

yt-dlp 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7_Od9CmTu0'
ffmpeg -i The\ Big\ O\ Opening⧸Intro\ Theme\ \[720p\]\ \[s7_Od9CmTu0\].webm -vf "scale=1424:1080,setsar=1:1" intro.mp4

2. Preparing files

I copied all the episodes that had the intro I wanted to replace into a folder. Episodes one and two of the first series and episodes one, eight and thirteen of the second series have special intros so no processing needed to be done on them. For step 4 it turned out that spaces in the filenames broke the command and I couldn’t figure out how to properly escape them so while preparing the files also remove any spaces or other characters that might cause problems from the filenames.

3. Strip the existing intro

I loaded episodes up in Kdenlive just to check the exact length of the existing intro on the episodes and found it to be 1′12″ and so wrote a command to iterate over all the files and write out an MP4 version with the English audio track (the second audio track in the file, but mapped as 1 in the command as FFmpeg indexes from 0) with that much time cut from the start.

I use a Fish shell rather than Bash. If you use Bash or a different shell you will need to adjust the commands.

for v in *.mkv
	set b (basename "$v" ".mkv")
	ffmpeg -i "$v" -ss 00:01:12.01 -map 0:v -map 0:a:1 "$b-nointro.mp4"
end

There were a couple of episodes where it turned out that there was still one frame of the old intro left at the start so those had to be reprocessed with the start time set to 00:01:12.02.

4. Splice in the original intro

I moved the downloaded intro file into the same folder as the episodes and spliced it into the files. This broke when there were spaces in the filenames and I wasn’t able to escape it properly so I ended up just stripping spaces out and renaming the files back with KRename afterwards.

for v in *-nointro.mp4
	set b (basename "$v" "-nointro.mp4")
	ffmpeg -i intro.mp4 -i "$v" -filter_complex "movie=intro.mp4, scale=1424:1080 [v1] ; amovie=intro.mp4 [a1] ; movie=$v, scale=1424:1080 [v2] ; amovie=$v [a2] ; [v1] [v2] concat [outv] ; [a1] [a2] concat=v=0:a=1 [outa]" -map "[outv]" -map "[outa]" "$b-intro.mp4"
end

5. Fixing chapter metadata

The episodes had some chapter metadata dividing up parts of the episode, with the first one covering just the episode intros, which cutting out that part of the video removed. I decided to fix that with the versions with the restored intro, even though obviously I am never actually going to skip it in practise. The first step of this was outputting the metadata to a text file.

for v in *-intro.mp4
	set b (basename "$v" "-intro.mp4")
	ffmpeg -i "$v" -f ffmetadata "$b.txt"
end

I then manually adjusted the metadata entry to restore the Chapter 01 entry, putting it above the existing chapters in the file. Most of them had their Chapter 01 entry wiped out so I just added it in above the Chapter 02 entry, though some of them still had a Chapter 01 lasting just a few milliseconds so for those I just modified the END time for it. The new intro was 1′7.61″ which meant a 67,610ms timestamp. I also changed the START entry for every Chapter 02 to 67610 to match.

[CHAPTER]
TIMEBASE=1/1000
START=0
END=67610
title=Chapter 01

Once they were all updated I applied the modified chapter metadata back to the files

for v in *-intro.mp4
	set b (basename "$v" "-intro.mp4")
	ffmpeg -i "$v" -i "$b.txt" -map_chapters 1 -codec copy "$b.mp4"
end

6. Done!

Then I deleted all the intermediary files and dropped the processed files into my Jellyfin server along with the episodes that didn’t need fixing.

I really like Jellyfin. It’s sort of an open-source Plex. I run a server that is just on my local network that lets me watch films and television shows from my desktop, couch, phone or anything else on my home network and even simply organising everything is very pleasing to me. I spend far too long picking covers and artwork for everything, sometimes even making my own, like when I made an Irish logo and cover for Na Conrioċtaí when I couldn’t find one to match the official Irish posters for the other two Cartoon Saloon folklore movies.

It has some other really nice features as well like telling you what time something will end at if you started playing now and letting you easily have multiple version of the same film under the same entry, letting you as easily select them as you would the right language for a movie with multiple audio tracks, so you can have both a bluray rip and the Morton Jankel cut of Super Mario Bros. together or the official black and white cuts of Fury Road or Johnny Mnemonic alongside the colour versions.

And of course you can also customise the artwork for all the different media categories, so mine look like this:

I need to write posts that aren’t just technical updates about the site itself and the stuff copied over from my other accounts.

I have plans for stuff to write I have just been tired and sick and busy.

The story so far: I was using Cusdis to provide a comments section for the bog but it proved to be broken and unmaintained so I replaced it with a self-hosted instance of Comentario.

I am going to walk through what I did to set up Comentario and import old comments from Cusdis. This is not a guide and the scripts that are posted below have serious problems that should be fixed before being used and I am not going to be the one to do that and you would obviously need to change any references to oakreef.ie to your own site.

Subdomain

First of all I needed to have an address to host the Comentario instance at. I chose a new subdomain at comments.oakreef.ie and had to update my Let’s Encrypt certificates to cover that new subdomain. I did not save the commands I used to do that but it was pretty straightforward to do from the command line.

Docker

Then I installed Docker on my server and following Damien’s example with a few tweaks I created my docker-compose.yml and secrets.yaml files.

docker-compose.yml

version: '3'

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:17-alpine
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: comentario
      POSTGRES_USER: {INSERT POSTGRES USERNAME HERE}
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: {INSERT POSTGRES PASSWORD HERE}
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:5432:5432"

  app:
    restart: unless-stopped
    image: registry.gitlab.com/comentario/comentario
    environment:
      BASE_URL: https://comments.oakreef.ie/
      SECRETS_FILE: "/secrets.yaml"
    ports:
      - "5050:80"
    volumes:
      - ./secrets.yaml:/secrets.yaml:ro

secrets.yaml

postgres:
  host:     db
  port:     5432
  database: comentario
  username: {INSERT POSTGRES USERNAME HERE}
  password: {INSERT POSTGRES PASSWORD HERE}

Changing the ports configuration to 127.0.0.1:5432:5432 means that the Postgres database is only accessible from the server locally and not publicly available. I also don’t have an email setup for the Comentario instance currently.

Launching the instance is then just a matter of:

sudo docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up -d

Nginx

Then I needed to modify my Nginx config to direct comments.oakreef.ie to the Comentario instance running on port 5050.

server {
	server_name comments.oakreef.ie;

	listen 443 ssl;

	ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/oakreef.ie/fullchain.pem;
	ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/oakreef.ie/privkey.pem;
	include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
	ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;

	location / {
		proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5050;
		proxy_redirect off;
		proxy_http_version 1.1;
		proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
		proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
		proxy_set_header Connection keep-alive;
		proxy_set_header Host $host;
		proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
		proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
		proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
		proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $server_name;
		proxy_buffer_size 128k;
		proxy_buffers 4 256k;
		proxy_busy_buffers_size 256k;
		add_header Cache-Control "private";
	}
}

Importing comments

Once there were a few comments on the new system I used the export feature in Comentario to get a JSON file and looked at how Comentario defined comment data in that. I also manually went through all the comments on the old system and made a basic CSV file of all of them with the author name, date posted, the URL of the post the comment was on and the text of each comment. I then wrote this Python file to take the exported Comentario comments—named basedata.json—and the CSV with the old Cusdis comments—comments.csv—and exported a new file with the combined data in the Comentario format.

There are some problems with this!

1. When importing data Comentario does not check for duplicates. I ended up creating duplicates of all the new Comentario comments that already existed on the site doing this and had to manually delete them. If you are doing this do not include existing comments as part of the file you are creating to import.
2. I did not include replies at all. I decided to try importing replies I had made to people as a second, separate, step (see the second Python script below). This made things more awkward down the line. Do everything in one batch.

import csv
import json
from datetime import datetime, timezone
from dateutil.parser import parse
from pprint import pprint
from uuid import uuid4

now = datetime.now()
pages = {}
site_url = 'https://oakreef.ie'
date_format = "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"

my_id = "ADMIN USER UUID"

with open('comments.csv', newline='') as csv_file:
		csv_reader = csv.reader(csv_file, delimiter=',', quotechar='"')
		for row in csv_reader:
				author, date, url, text = row
				date = parse(date)
				
				if url not in pages:
					pages[url] = {
						'comments': []
					}
				
				pages[url]['comments'].append({
					'author': author,
					'date': date,
					'text': text
				})


with open('basedata.json') as json_file:
		data = json.load(json_file)

domainId = data['pages'][0]['domainId']

for url, page in pages.items():
	page_id = str(uuid4())
	data['pages'].append({
		'createdTime': now.strftime(date_format),
		'domainId': domainId,
		'id': page_id,
		'isReadonly': False,
		'path': url,
	})

	for comment in page['comments']:
		comment_id = str(uuid4())
		data['comments'].append({
			"authorCountry": "IE",
			'authorName': comment['author'],
			'createdTime': comment['date'].strftime(date_format),
			"deletedTime": "0001-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
      "editedTime": "0001-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
      "html": f"\u003cp\u003e{comment['text']}\u003c/p\u003e\n",
			'id': comment_id,
			'isApproved': True,
			'isDeleted': False,
			'isPending': False,
			'isSticky': False,
			'markdown': comment['text'],
			"moderatedTime": comment['date'].strftime(date_format),
			'pageId': page_id,
			'score': 0,
			'url': f'{site_url}{url}#comentario-{comment_id}',
			'userCreated': '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000',
			"userModerated": my_id
		})


with open('import.json', 'w') as import_file:
	json.dump(data, import_file)

When that was done I put it away for a while as I wasn’t feeling well and eventually came back to do replies. I, again, manually went through all replies I had made to comments on the old system and made a CSV file with the reply date, URL of the page, the UUID of the parent comment as it existed in the new Comentario system, the UUID of the page the parent comment is on in teh new Comentario system and the text of the reply.

Two things are important to note about this:

1. It was a pain in the hole. If I had done replies at the same time as the rest of the comments I could have used the UUIDs that I was generating in the script rather than going to find them manually and making them into a CSV.
2. The initial upload failed as apparently Comentario couldn’t match the page and user IDs to what was in the database and it needed those to be in the import file. I got around this by doing another export and copying the entries for pages and commenters from that into the new one and uploading. This was not a good way to do this! It could have gone badly or had unexpected side effects. Again, if you’re doing this do not import comments and replies as two separate steps!
3. It still didn’t fully work anyway. My replies did import and do show up on the right pages but they are not nested properly as replies. It’s like looking at a comment section on a very old Youtube video where reply chains are broken and everything just displays as individual comments. I don’t think that I am going to bother trying to fix this as I don’t have that many comments on this site and I think everything reads understandably as it is but if you want to try this approach you will want to figure out a way of not fucking up importing the replies.

import csv
import json
from datetime import datetime, timezone
from dateutil.parser import parse
from pprint import pprint
from uuid import uuid4



now = datetime.now()
site_url = 'https://oakreef.ie'
date_format = "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"

my_id = "ADMIN USER UUID"

data = {
  "version": 3,
  "comments": [],
}

with open('replies.csv', newline='') as csv_file:
		csv_reader = csv.reader(csv_file, delimiter=',', quotechar='"')
		for row in csv_reader:
				date, url, parent_id, page_id, text = row
				date = parse(date)

				comment_id = str(uuid4())

				data['comments'].append({
					"authorCountry": "IE",
					"createdTime": date.strftime(date_format),
					"deletedTime": "0001-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
					"editedTime": "0001-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
					"html": f"\u003cp\u003e{text}\u003c/p\u003e\n",
					"id": comment_id,
					"isApproved": True,
					"isDeleted": False,
					"isPending": False,
					"isSticky": False,
					"markdown": text,
					"moderatedTime": date.strftime(date_format),
					"pageId": page_id,
					"parentId": parent_id,
					"score": 0,
					"url": f'{site_url}{url}#comentario-{comment_id}',
					"userCreated": my_id,
					"userModerated": my_id
				})



with open('reply-import.json', 'w') as import_file:
	json.dump(data, import_file)

My avatar

One last thing is that Comentario doesn’t allow GIF avatars, but I like my sparkly Jupiter. After looking at the Postgres database I could see that user avatars are simply stored as binary data in the table cm_user_avatars with three sizes avatar_l, avatar_m and avatar_s corresponding to 128×128, 32×32 and 16×16 pixels, respectively, so I made some GIFs in the appropriate sizes, converted them to binary strings, and overrode the avatar_l and avatar_m entries in the cm_user_avatars table manually (I left the avatar_s as a JPEG).

UPDATE cm_user_avatars SET avatar_m = '\xBINARY_DATA_HERE'  WHERE user_id = 'UUID_HERE';

This seems to work without any problems and my avatar in my own comments section is sparkly now.

Conclusions

That’s it I hope I don’t have to worry too much about this setup again for some time.

When I made my one game per year list I went back as far as 1990. This was because at that point I was struggling to come up with games I had actually played for a given year and while I could probably have filled in some stuff for the 80s, 1990 seemed like a good place to stop because it was a nice even number and also the year I was born.

When I went to do my one film per year list I stopped at the same point. I hadn’t put much thought into that, covering the same years for the list just seemed the obvious thing to do to me. When I shared it with some people they asked why stop there and some of them made their own lists, going back much farther in years and certainly further than when they were born. So I decided to go back look at how I would expand out the list back in time.

I haven’t updated the list yet but with just my preliminary scan through Letterboxd’s lists of movies by year I surprised myself with how few gaps I had. I was expecting to have trouble filling in entries once I hit the 70s on but it’s not till 1970 itself that I hit a gap where I don’t think that I’ve seen anything from that year and it’s not till the early 50s where I start to have more years where I don’t have anything than do.

But for 1970 I’ve been meaning to watch Crimes of the Future and I have other films that interest me for many of the gaps in my list, so I think I’m going to try to fill in the gaps in my list pushing it back a bit more before I update it and post it again, so expect me to post some reviews for older movies to my Letterboxd.

And if you have any recommendations for movies from 1955 or earlier I would be all ears to hear them. Or also for 1969 in particular as well because that is a year I seem to be struggling to find something I want to watch for.

I have finally set up a replacement for Cusdis. Following Damien’s example I have set up a self-hosted instance of Comentario.

You can comment with or without setting up an account. If you create an account please don’t forget your password because I do not have an email account set up for it to send out password resets but also please don’t reuse a password because you should not trust me with that.

I will try to transfer old comments from Cusdis over but that won’t happen immediately.

I have also set up a page that has all my bog posts without the stuff syndicated from other sites mirroring the existing Atom feed that does that.

Small little bit of Javascript added to the site for navigation with Vim-style keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+→ and Ctrl+← will navigate to the previous and next post, respectively. This will work on both pages for individual posts and on main bog page and also on pages for podcast episodes and gallery exhibits.

I’ve added reviews from my Goodreads profile to my syndication sources for the bog. I did try to look into alternatives not owned by Amazon but Goodreads won out because it actually has RSS feeds.

I don’t wear jewellery much but I still have an occasional hobby of making my own earrings and I just enjoy a good kitschy earring in general.

Here’s some things I have stuck a fishhook in:

Some other earrings that I didn’t make but felt like showing off.

There are some things that I do occasionally but never often enough that I remember the procedures for them, e.g. if I use my printer’s scanner to scan to a U.S.B. stick what format does the U.S.B. stick need to be formatted to. I have started just writing this on the printer itself with a pencil.

When I did this I was at first hesitant to “deface” my printer, but that’s silly. It’s my printer and I do not have it to look pretty. I think I should do this more often. I already have a giant stack of plastic drawers all labelled with their contents and I think I should label things more often with these kinds of reminders to save myself frustration. With my brain it’s the only way I can remember where anything is or procedures for using things.

Cusdis appears to not be refreshing my monthly comment allowance so I am not able to approve any new comments. I reported this issue a week ago but I think that the developer is not currently working on the project. I may look into getting up a self-hosted version set up and migrating all existing comments to it but I am not sure when I’ll be able to get that done.

I added a page to the site dedicated to my cat, Easóg

This post quotes writing about sex and kinks.

In the last roundup post I linked to a piece by Devon Price. I was not aware of him before coming across a link to that piece myself but he seems to be quite a prolific writers. I’ve been going through some of his pieces and not only are they very interesting but they also speak to my own experiences in many ways as well, though quite different in others. I am being deliberately unspecific here about which parts are which, but I wanted to just link to a few more of his pieces and would just generally recommend reading his writing I think.

Common Phases of Accepting You’re Autistic

The questioning phase is perhaps the most challenging one to move forward from — because to openly declare that you have a mental disability is to immediately call your own capacity to understand and interpret things into question. If other people can’t see how much you’re suffering, they will accuse you of being crazy and faking it. If they can see your struggles, they’ll accuse you of being too crazy to understand those struggles yourself.

The Asexual Fetishist

There’s nothing especially alluring to me about any type of body, or any type of face. The idea grabbing a dick or cupping a pert ass feels a bit formal, as if I were examining a purebred at a dog show. I can recognize the differences between one type of person and another, and even recognize the qualities that someone else might like, but to me all these gradients just dissolve into a bland field of fleshy sameness.

I’m equally bored by the mechanics of sex: the motions and stimulations bring me absolutely no pleasure. An attractive and attentive stranger could rub the correct spots on my body for hours, with the exactly right pressure and speed, and I’d only feel hollow if the experience weren’t also combined with some mind-controlling mantras or a swinging pocket watch.

Hypnosis is sex to me. Even in its most stagey and sterile forms, I find it inescapably erotic — and that leaves sex itself as just some boring party trick. You can touch me, or you can perform a series of backflips in front of me on the floor; either way I’ll tell you that you’ve done a very impressive job and all but it will not make me cum.

A Non-Disposable Place

That’s one thing that people don’t talk about, when they complain about landlords: how much disregard for your surroundings that renting breeds in you. It’s not only that the owner of your building never cleans the pipes. It’s also that you have no reason to feel invested in the pipes’ long-term functioning, and every reason to feel bitter about the thousands of dollars you’re already wasting on a broken building each year.

Instagram have started creating fake accounts that post entirely machine-generated images and text. They will reply to you if you comment under their posts or direct message them.

Update: Apparently the specific account I was referencing here is an experiment from 2023 and doesn’t post any more but still replies to direct messages. People thought it was new due to some recent announcement about bot accounts and I didn’t dig into it myself. The rest of my frustrations with how people treat these things remains.

I mostly want to talk about stuff I like on here and not just add to endless bitching about bad stuff but I just needed to write out some frustrations I have with how people talk about these kinds of large language model bots.

I have seen people posting their conversations with it and attempting to ask it various things about itself and how it was created to try and dig for information on it or just to create gotcha moments they can screenshot and it makes me want to scream.

I won’t link to any of those for a few reasons, but the one I want to state is the same reason that these screenshots make me want to tear my hair out: Large language models are machines that make up nonsense constantly. The text it generates does not have semantic content and least of all meaningful information about itself. It is not worth looking at specific responses it gives. And so because of that: Stop asking it about itself. It is not capable of knowing anything. It takes a processed set of training data and whatever input it has (its prompting that you are not able to see plus whatever text you send it) and then generates output that is a statistically likely continuation of that.

People are asking it what is the diversity of its team of creators and get a response about how it was mostly white people. It doesn’t know that. Again. It doesn’t know anything. It is incapable of knowledge. But it will generate something that is a likely response to a question of this nature. The training data that was used to create it has many texts about how American software development is very white and it will create a response in this vein.

People have asked it who led the project that created it and it spat out a name and people are trying to dig up information from the Linked In profile of a Facebook employee with a similar name.

People are asking it to repeat its prompt and then analysing its response to make judgements on the people that wrote it. This is at least asking it for something that the model actually has as part of its input so it might result in text that is a copy of or close to things it was actually prompted with. But it mightn’t. It could be anything. People asking bots to repeat their prompt is now an established trope in online writing that is pulled for training data for these models and so its output to this type of question will be influenced by the presence of such texts in its training corpus as well.

There is no way to trick these bots into meaningfully divulging information because facts are not a thing that exist to it. You are at best nudging it in a direction where it is more likely to output text that happens to line up with reality. This is more likely to happen for widely known and repeated information that exists in its training data a lot. If you ask it the capital of France it will probably say Paris. But there is no reason to think that its training data contains any meaningful information about itself and even if it was prompted with information like that what information it was given would be entirely under Instagram’s control and why the fuck would trust Instagram to be honest either?

Since New Year’s Eve 2021 some some friends and I have done an annual race of the game Celeste. We all start at the same time and then the first person to get to the summit wins. We track it using the in-game speedrun timer.

2021

I was very into Celeste at the time and won by a pretty wide margin. I don’t have a record of how everyone else did, but I completed the game in just under two hours, with three hundred and six deaths and six strawberries¹.

2022

After this two of my friends got into the game very hard. My friend Ruby ended up getting most of the golden berries², something I haven’t even attempted and another friend, who wished to be called The Shadowblade in this post, started getting into Celeste mods. So when the next race happpened on the 8th of January 2022 Ruby took the gold medal from me, beating my time by half an hour while I barely improved. The Shadowblade sadly did not finish and gave up four flags from the summit due to hand pain.

2023:

On the same day the next year myself and Ruby both improved our times, with Ruby coming in first again, a newcomer who I will call D. in second and myself in third. The Shadowblade did not finish again.

2024:

The next race was on the 14th of January 2024 and I managed to take more than twenty minutes off of my time, which was not enough to beat Ruby’s best time, but Ruby did a worse race than the previous year and it was enough for me to win for the second time.

We also decided to do a little race of the Pico-8 version of Celeste, which Ruby won.

2025

Finally, this year’s one took place on New Year’s Day. Ruby had a clear lead from the start and has gotten very close to the one-hour mark, just three minutes short of it. I came in second, doing a bit worse than last year, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering an hour before the race I posted about how worn down, tired and sore I was. The Shadowblade finished this time, coming in at just over an hour and a half.

We were also joined by our friend Stella who had never played Celeste before but decided to join in on the race. After the rest of us had finished Ruby said if that Stella actually finished she would forfeit her victory to her and shockingly Stella actually did. She finished the game in one sitting in just over ten hours with closing in on four thousand deaths and nine strawberries.

Ruby insists that I should record Stella as the winner, but I am a petty bitch and I never said that I was going to forfeit. If she wants to fine but if I she does I’m saying that makes me the winner.

2026

Maybe next year we will come in under the one-hour mark?

I lost and gained people I love in 2024. The year started off well. I won a Celeste race that myself and some friends do every New Year’s. I chosted a roundup of every film I had watched in 2023 to Cohost. I don’t think that I’m going to do that again this year. I don’t have the energy for it. I’ve been dealing with back pain issues for a while that are stopping me sleeping well.

In February I replaced my memory foam mattress with a spring one and it seemed to help for a while but then the pain came back. This repeated throughout the year with me finding things that seemed to give a temporary reprieve, only for me to start waking up in pain again. It’s not as bad as it was but I am still struggling with it. I am going to try going back to a physio again. I was not happy with the last one and when he moved his practise I did not feel very motivated to find a new one, but a friend recommended their physio to me over the holidays and I’ll give it another go.

Also in February my partner moved to Copenhagen. I knew it was coming, this had been planned for a long time, but when it actually happened it hit me very hard. She visited in the summer and I flew out to Copenhagen with some our friends in October too, but I want to make an effort to see her more, even if I do find travelling very draining.

Also also in February I dropped my phone in the toilet. It’s a Fairphone and designed to be able to be taken apart easily with just a screwdriver to swap parts, so it’s not very waterproof, and the screen stopped displaying anything. Thankfully disassembling it and drying it out thoroughly brought the screen back to life, but even if it hadn’t I would have been able to replace the screen.

In March I got a fancy folding, electric bike. I have not used it quite as much as I planned, especially over the winter when it has been cold and I have been struggling with lack of energy, but it has been very handy for certain journeys that public transport doesn’t adequately cover. I also experimented a bit with being horny on main with Cohost. It has really been the only place online where I felt safe and comfortable enough to do that. Part of that is just over getting more comfortable with myself and kink stuff, but Cohost was just a friendly place for me and I was inspired by other people I followed sharing their own kinks in very cute ways. Cohost shutting down has been upsetting for a lot of reasons but this is one of them and it’s hard to get comfortable about this stuff again in other contexts.

April was a huge month in retrospect. A friend asked me out and tentatively said yes, not really sure how it was going to go and I’ve never done polyamory before. I am so glad that she did. I love her so much. Both of my partners are autistic and A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. and getting to know them and how wonderful, funny and utterly charming they are has helped me explore those parts of myself and see them as something to embrace. I’ve been learning to love myself through loving them. I am still undiagnosed but I am pretty sure.

And me being undiagnosed is not for lack of trying. Also in April was my first appointment at a local public mental health unit that I had been referred to over a year prior for an A.D.H.D. assessment. I calmly explained how much I struggle day to day and what I have to do to cope with it, which the doctor seemed to take as me managing pretty well. I realised from this conversation that doctors are basically just like dogs: They don’t really understand what you’re saying they just hear tone and maybe a few basic keywords. The health service is a paternalistic, condescending trap and you need to ritually humiliate yourself to them until they deign you worthy enough of the charity they so magnanimously bestow. I dropped the masks, let myself unravel and started sobbing in front of them.

This got me another appointment. They wanted to dig into my childhood, interview my mother. Quite frankly I don’t give a shit if I had A.D.H.D. as a child. Requiring that as part of diagnosis seems utterly pointless. I do not have a time machine with which to go back several decades to when that might matter. I am struggling now. That interview never happened, anyway. Appointments got delayed, doctors were busy. I got given a multiple choice form to fill out about my childhood again, some of which asked multiple questions as a single item which don’t necessarily have the same answer. Was I a good student and did I do well in tests? No, I was an awful student who ignored her teachers whenever I could get away with it and just read ahead in the book myself because I found that more interesting and I did will exams. I struggled massively in university when I finally hit a wall of subject matter that did not come easily to me as I had never learned how to study properly.

I of course got fucked around for another few months before being finally told I have A.D.H.D. and they are not going to treat it. I guess I’m functioning too well, though I don’t have any of the specific reasoning because the doctor who told me this was one I had never seen before and was just paraphrasing a letter that she refused to give me a copy of. I am still waiting on the results of a Freedom of Information Act request for my documents from these appointments that is almost two months overdue.

I started singling lessons in April but I failed to keep going with them. That’s far from the only thing I have failed to keep at since then. I’ve been struggling a lot as the year has worn on. I hope I can get back to the energy and spoons I seemed to have last spring again in the coming months. Going back over my diary for the year it’s a stark reminder of how much things were looking up then. April was also the last time I saw my friend Hellen. She had moved away and was around for a visit. I had a lovely time with her. I didn’t speak to her much after that and she died suddenly in August. I did not make it to the funeral, it was overseas, but some other friends did at least. Back here we had a memorial picnic for her.

Before that the summer was pretty damn good, though. Got closer to the new partner, got to see the old partner. I tried ritalin that was given to me—by a friend, not a doctor—and wow that does certainly help a lot. I wish it was possible to actually get treatment through the medical system. Oh well! I rationed them for bad days and they helped me get through a lot of shit. I also marched in a pride parade for the first time. I also met some kink people in person who were lovely.

Well. They were certainly lovely at the time. In August I learnt that one of the people I had met there had be accused of repeatedly spiking drinks at other events. Hellen died, as established, and then in September it was announced that Cohost was shutting down. I hope it doesn’t come across as callous when brought up in the same breath as my actual friend dying, but I also have grieved for that website. I was devastated. Cohost helped me a lot in this last year to embrace more parts of myself, be more open about certain things and it was also just a place that was actually fun and a bright spot in my life. I wouldn’t be posting on my own site if it wasn’t for it. It sparked creativity in a lot of people and reminded us that we can be thoughtful of how we use the internet and communicate with people. This site existing in its current form is because of Cohost.

I visited Copenhagen in October with some friends. I had a lovely time but I find travelling exhausting. I think I was a bit run down afterwards and got sick a few times. I might still be recovering from it all. My cat also got out and was missing for a few days, which didn’t help, and coming up to the Christmas holidays I had the most stressful time I’ve had in my current job. I’ve had two weeks’ holidays and I feel like it really wasn’t enough.

I did have a lovely Christmas with my newer partner, though. We had Christmas dinner with a group of other local trans people, played Mario Kart and watched Doctor Who. Ideal Christmas.

And now. I guess I still need to recover and heal. As I’m writing this my back pain is flaring up again. I need to get up and do some stretches before this year’s Celeste race this evening. We’ll see if I can keep my crown. I haven’t done much practising but I don’t think anyone else has either. It’s just a bit of fun.

I made some updates to the site yesterday, including a smaller feed at /beag.atom¹ that only includes posts I write for this site itself, not the ones copied from my Letterboxd, Serializd, Backloggd or Fediverse accounts or things that I repost. Update: It will still include reposts.

I also added some art to the Transy page by Kate Barrett that I had forgotten to.

Otherwise it was mostly some layout and styling tweaks and fixes. Text in dark mode should be a bit brighter now, there’s custom text selection colours and on the homepage there’s one new 88×31 pixel button and an infobox telling you to install an adblocker if you don’t have one.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX

Doing another one of these. I still intend on doing rebogs as well and I’ve added some more styling to make reposts stand out from my own words and make a more clear divide between them.

History and science fiction

On Bread and Circuses — Bret C. Devereaux

Devereaux digs into the origin of the phrase “bread and circuses”.

So the surface reading seems clear: he is putting the Roman people on blast for letting their authority over public affairs be taken away, usurped by emperors who promise them bread and circuses (we’ll come to if this is an accurate representation of the history in a moment). They used to have all of this power, the power to bestow offices and armies, but now they cower fecklessly in the wake of imperial slaughter and arbitrary rule.

Except, of course – wait a minute – isn’t the theme of this passage that power is an unwise thing to ask for? The theme of the whole poem is that you shouldn’t be asking the gods for these sorts of things!

The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor — Bret C. Devereaux

Also from Devereaux.

Instead, where real armors evolve against threats, fictional armors evolve as a visual language, borrowing the design elements of other fictional armors far more often than they dip into their own historical exemplars, with the result that the whole thing sort of devours itself.

Fiction referencing exclusively other works for fiction rather than looking to the world is something I think about as well from time to time.

Book Review: War with the Newts — Nathan Goldwag

Goldwag reviews a book from the man who coined the word “robot”.

The novel starts with Captain van Toch, a Czech sea-captain in the service of a Dutch trading company, stumbling upon an isolated community of giant amphibians in the Dutch East Indies, living on a single tiny island, their numbers culled constantly by sharks. Van Toch realizes that they’re trainable, and extremely intelligent, and has the idea to plant colonies of them across the Pacific to work as pearl divers. After his death, the Pacific Export Company transitions from luxury goods to mass labor, selling newts across the world as an undersea work force capable of hydraulic and maritime engineering, which results in Newts settling most of the world’s coastlines and becoming an integral part of the global economy. “So now we find the salamanders on the road to their finest flowering; but the human world, too, is enjoying unprecedented prosperity. New continental coasts are being feverishly constructed, new dry land is emerging from where shallows used to be; artificial air support islands are springing up in the middle of the ocean.” (Newts, pg. 165). For all the absurdity, however, Čapek treats his topic seriously. We’re given footnotes, citations, discussions of legal dilemmas and cultural disputes, discourse on the economic impact of newt labor and how it affected different nations and groups, taxonomies on newt evolution and biology. It doesn’t feel like a cheap trick or a gimmick because it’s all done with such care.

Gender

Degendering and Regendering — Talia Bhatt

In short, to acknowledge transmasculinity, a society would have to first admit that manhood—just like womanhood—is a social class and not a ‘natural’ category. Its people would have to acknowledge that the desire for independence and self-actualization exists within all of us and is not, in fact, stored in the balls.

My Doctor Emailed Me Back — Abigail Thorn in Trans Writes

Thorn outlines very well the fundamental ideological problems in the N.H.S. and how trans healthcare is handled that I think apply very well to the H.S.E. here in Ireland as well.

There are even more serious charges. The coroners’ reports into the deaths of Sophie Williams and Alice Litman said lack of gender affirming care contributed to their deaths. That is to say, it is a matter of publicly recorded fact that the NHS’ failure to provide gender affirming care has contributed to the deaths of patients. Nobody at NHS England has resigned or faced consequences.

Of course panic, misinformation, and mistrust take hold in these conditions! Of course people come to believe the NHS are making secret plots behind closed doors! These conditions are entirely of the NHS’ own making. Slapping a famous trans person’s face on a new outreach program does nothing to address them. As I told Colonel Korn, if the NHS wants to increase trust they should start by apologising.

But the Colonel expressed his bind to me the same way every other NHS senior official I’ve spoken to has. The Department of Health and Social Care tells the NHS how they have to spend their money. The mandate they get from the Health Secretary tells them what services they have to commission: if it says “Ten more transplant wards,” they need ten more transplant wards, and that’s that. If it says “Spend £90m pathologizing trans people,” that’s what he has to do.

This point bears underlining: every single person I have spoken to in the NHS- from local GPs to the National bosses- told me they are powerless. There is nobody at any level of the organisation who takes responsibility for the state the service is in and the suffering it is causing. Every single person blames the person above them, even the man at the top.

Technology

Hitachi Hacking, part two! — Kore

Followup from the first of these posts.

In my last post, I succesfully made a bluetooth/wifi Magic Wand Plus. Unfortunately, though, I completely bypassed the original Hitachi board, which happens to be where all the buttons and LEDs are attached, so it was only usable remotely. To make the physical controls work again, I could either make my own copy of the Hitachi’s board, with buttons and LEDs in the same places, or somehow reprogram the original board and make it do my bidding.

The first option requires a lot of measuring, which I find really annoying to do. So, let’s hack the Hitachi’s microcontroller!

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity — Baldur Bjarnason

I love economic forces.

MongoDB’s popularity among managers during its peak was largely down to the idea that you no longer needed a database expert. Just throw the data into the document DB puddle and let your existing less-specialised developers handle it. The promise of the document database during the peak of their hype was that you didn’t need to employ as many specialists.

Electron, PhoneGap, and React Native promised to let companies replace their expensive platform specialists with more commodified generalists.

Standardisation in web development lowers costs, increases predictability, and makes the various browsers more interchangeable. It’s a hedge that reduces the individual market power of each browser, but usually in equal degree while increasing the value of the overall web, leaving each browser vendor better off as a result. Their market share might not increase but they have a bigger cut of a larger pie. Incompatibility tends to drive developers and companies to other platforms, reducing the overall pie.

Standardisation of labour, conversely, does not benefit labour.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI — Thomas Claburn in The Register

Everybody hates A.I! Here’s another reason to.

Whatever happens to Python or pip is likely to eventually happen to more projects or more frequently. I am concerned mostly about maintainers that are handling this in isolation. If they don't know that AI-generated reports are commonplace, they might not be able to recognize what's happening before wasting tons of time on a false report. Wasting precious volunteer time doing something you don't love and in the end for nothing is the surest way to burn out maintainers or drive them away from security work.

Seth Larson

Palette swaps — Mabbees

Seeing as I dusted off Pico-8 again recently here’s a little post about doing palette swaps in it.

The concept of a palette swap is drawing something with a different set of colors. It’s a good way to get more mileage out of your PICO-8 sprites. There are a bunch of things you can do with palette swapping

• create variations on a character
• make simple looping animations
• fade in or out of a scene
• simulate day/night cycles

But what does this mean for us as programmers? How do we represent the concept in code?

Scrapers I block (and allow), with explanations — Seirdy

Technical website bullshit, but something I’ve been meaning to look at setting up for this site too.

Bots I block fall into one of the following categories:

• Bots that only serve to power adtech on other sites. My site has no ads, but I allow bots such as Google’s AdsBot.
• Intellectual property snitches. I forbid robots that scan for plagiarism, trademark/copyright violations, brand protection, etc.
• Robots that power invasive background checks that border on cyberstalking.
• Scrapers that build datasets to train Generative AI (GenAI), such as large language models (LLMs). I don’t block search clients used by GenAI research assistants; I only block scrapers used to train GenAI models.

Everything else

Saying Gaelic / Gaeilic is ok

I used to be one of the people who “corrected” people about the word Gaelic. I am sorry.

The Irish Language was referred to as both Gaelic and Irish until the Republic was formed. “Irish” was mainly used by academics; “Gaelic” was used by the common people.

The Republic chose “Irish” over “Gaelic” for political/nationalistic reasons.

Pornhub Sees Surge of Interest in Tradwife Content, ‘Modesty,’ and Mindfulness — Samantha Cole in 404 Media

Dahl started an Instagram account in 2023 that parodied tradwife content creators, after her own account was banned by the platform multiple times. Tradwife content (short for “traditional wife) is fetish content, even if the “wife” isn’t showing skin. It’s a fantasy, and always has been, even when it was used to sell ovens to 1960s homemakers.

Laziness Does Not Exist — Devon Price

Kim is the person who taught me that judging a homeless person for wanting to buy alcohol or cigarettes is utter folly. When you’re homeless, the nights are cold, the world is unfriendly, and everything is painfully uncomfortable. Whether you’re sleeping under a bridge, in a tent, or at a shelter, it’s hard to rest easy. You are likely to have injuries or chronic conditions that bother you persistently, and little access to medical care to deal with it. You probably don’t have much healthy food.

In that chronically uncomfortable, over-stimulating context, needing a drink or some cigarettes makes fucking sense. As Kim explained to me, if you’re laying out in the freezing cold, drinking some alcohol may be the only way to warm up and get to sleep. If you’re under-nourished, a few smokes may be the only thing that kills the hunger pangs. And if you’re dealing with all this while also fighting an addiction, then yes, sometimes you just need to score whatever will make the withdrawal symptoms go away, so you can survive.

Playing Both Sides — Mike Egan

A cute story about Star Wars: Battlefront.

But it wasn’t just that it was super difficult and took a long time. The hilarious part of all of this is that the fact that there was still a battle going on outside meant that the number one reason we didn’t get to destroy the shield bunker was that the match had ended. The AI armies we were ignoring went on fighting their war and reached a conclusion before we were able to deal enough damage to the damn thing.

Because I like to keep my ebook library organised and American comics are a mess when it comes to sensible making a series straightforward to follow I have been maintaining my own reading order for the IDW Sonic the Hedgehog comics for a while. I have intended to add this to my site for a white and the current Sonic comic Humble Bundle seemed a good excuse to finally do it.

You can find it here.

I intend to keep this as a live document that I update as new issues come out and have it as something that I can point to people when I try to convince them to read it and they don’t know where to start. If you want to start from the beginning that Humble Bundle has the first eight volumes for €12.38 and for €1 it has Scrapnik Island which is a great self-contained story to get a taste of the series with.

If you looked at my reading order you might have noticed I had the Tangle & Whisper miniseries in the middle of the eight volumes offered in the bundle but rest assured that they are perfectly understandable without it. It’s not until further along in the series that the story of that miniseries is really built on more.

Hello! It’s time for me to be normal about Sonic the Hedgehog again. I have been thinking about the Death Egg Robot’s name.

Some background: The final level of Sonic 2 takes place aboard the Death Egg, an Eggman-themed parody of the Death Star. The final boss is a mech modelled after Robotnik himself.

This mech is not named in game but when it was reimagined as the first bossfight of Sonic Generations it was given a not terribly imaginative title: Death Egg Robot.

I don’t like this name and I grew to like it even less as this design got reused in future games and continued to be called “Death Egg Robot” even when it is completely divorced from the context of the Death Egg. It’s the first boss in Green Hill Zone in Sonic Mania and then there are the mass-produced, unmanned, cycloptic Death Egg Robots in Sonic Forces also without any apparent connection to the Death Egg¹.

What got me thinking about this again? The other day I was doing the dishes while listening to a four hour playlist called Epic & Cool Sonic Music Compilation, as is my wont, when the track Battle with Death Queen came on.

The Death Queen is a giant Buzz Bomber, a huge bee robot. The game also features a giant crab robot chase sequence that is identified in the soundtrack as Death Crab.

And it occurred to me: Is the game trying to push “Death” as a general term for a class of giant robots? Is it rebracketing Death Egg Robot as Death Egg Robot?

Perhaps we are meant to take it that, in-universe, it is in fact just the giant, or “Death”, version of an Egg Robo. There are a lot of similarities between the two. The spelling is slightly different in English but in Japanese they are both エッグ(eggu)ロボ(robo).

The Death Egg Robot debuted one game before the Egg Robos, but we could imagine that perhaps in-universe the Egg Robos were around first, just offscreen somewhere. Maybe Eggman is annoyed that Sonic and Tails associate the Death Egg Robot with the Death Egg at all. That’s just yolk folk etymology!

That said, I don’t know how to fit the final boss of Sonic Forces into this framework, which is inexplicably also called Death Egg Robot despite bearing almost no resemblance to the other Death Egg Robots and also having nothing to do with the Death Egg.

And then the real final boss, a giant robot chestburster that smashes its way out of previous phase of the bossfight is also inexplicably titled Death Egg Robot.

I don’t know how to fit this into any understanding of what Death Egg Robot is meant to mean.

Yesterday I took part the Cork Game Jam which was the first in-person game jam I’ve taken part in and my first time diving back into game programming in a few months and Pico-8 programming in a few years.

The theme—“myth”—was announced at ten and the pizza arrived for the after party at around four, which gave me about six hours to derust and bang something out. It was exhausting and stressful but also a lot of fun. Here’s the result:

The theme being myth immediately reminded me of an idea I had years ago based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature that we have a record of. There exists no complete copy of it. What we have of it is an amalgam of fragments from various damaged cuneiform tablets.

My concept is an adaptation of Gilgamesh, probably a sidescrolling action platformer, that uses the aesthetics of corrupted data to fill in for the missing sections of text. Within the six hour window I managed to get a sample of that core idea implemented, though admittedly little else.

So that I wouldn’t have to do everything from scratch I used Matthew Hughson’s platformer starter kit as a base and started making modifications to the sprites and speed values to get more in line with my concept, using Castlevania sprites as a bit of a reference for the walk cycle initially.

I spent far too long getting an attack animation working before I realised I would probably not have time to implement any sort of combat. But its presence at least speaks to setting up an expectation of what the game might involve before you end up running into the faux-corrupted mess it actually is, or within the metafiction of the premise what the game once was before most of it was damaged and lost.

The other thing I added is, of course, the scrolling text taking up the top part of the screen, consisting of the start of the text of tablet 5 of the epic, taken from Maureen Gallery Kovacs’ translation. It starts out fairly normal and then getting more and more broken as it gets to the parts of the poem that are lost.

Within the code these are represented by lines of hashes. I wrote a text drawing function that, when it encounters a hash, draws random data from the spritesheet (from specifically selected sprites in it, not the entire thing) over it, mimicking the aesthetics of famous bugs such as glitch pokémon.

Ideally the progress of the broken text would correspond to the player discovering the broken nature of the game, but it just scrolls at a constant rate with a lot of normal text up front and there is not that much in the way of level so if a player simply walks to the right they will outpace it.

In a more full implementation of this idea the game could perhaps corrupt dynamically as parts of the text are reached, simulating live memory corruption. Or perhaps the scrolling text is a bit too much of a blunt instrument and should not be included in a more complete game.

That said, I think there is definitely potential for playing with some of the more evocative parts of the fragmented parts of the text.

The oft-quoted fragment of one of the works Sappho springs to mind:

μνάσεσθαί τινά φαῖμι
καὶ ἕτερον
ἀμμέων.

someone will remember us
I say
even in another time.

Sappho

Within a section of the text that made it into the jam game is the sudden implicit violence of mention of various weapons, axes smeared with what is not said, followed simply by the word alone. I placed a long, blank pause before and after “alone” for effect.

…Suddenly the swords…,
and after the sheaths …,
the axes were smeared…
dagger and sword…
alone …
The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 5.

A segment shortly after features has some broken dialogue mentioning something in Humbaba’s belly, a throat and next, and Gilgamesh then saying “Humbaba’s face keeps changing!” which is begging for a scene involving the level’s tileset suddenly being replaced with disjointed meat level sprites as the boss becomes a horrible jumbled mess.

When you were still young I saw you but did not go over to you;
… you,… in my belly.
…,you have brought Gilgamesh into my presence,
… you stand.., an enemy, a stranger.
… Gilgamesh, throat and neck,
I would feed your flesh to the screeching vulture, the eagle, and
the vulture!"
Gilgamesh spoke to Enkidu, saying: "My Friend, Humbaba’s face keeps changing!

The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 5.

For what I actually managed to accomplish in the jam the only tricks I managed are the corrupted text and a short corridor level which becomes more visually broken as it goes along, but is completely static.

I made a pretty minimalist tileset for the background of six tiles with only two colours and tried my best to use them to give the impression of a forest, as per the epic narration.

I spent a while drawing these and then getting down trying to draw trees with them, though some of what I mapped out for the background ended up getting hidden by the tablet with the scrolling text, whoops.

As you cross the bridge you encounter a group tile in place of a bridge tile and above it a tree drawn in the same style as the first few background trees, but with the left and right side tiles swapped. Then and broken skull and a serpent implying some sort of non-functional boss mark the boundary for things really going wrong.

I still tried to keep to drawing similar tree shapes but with tiles swapped out to tiles from other parts of the spritesheet, including ones that only appear here, implying that some more game exists beyond what is implemented. Then the bridge itself corrupts and is replaced by corner ground tiles and then invisible but solid tiles as you walk into a screen of just skulls marking a little ending point.

I have expressed here some ideas for a larger game but I do not really have any plans to expand this out. It very much the kind of thing I might do eventually in a world where I had endless free time to work on every project idea I have, which is sadly not the world I live in, and it is far down the list and I only have very vague notions of how to expand this out into something bigger. It would probably not be done in Pico-8 as Pico-8’s size constraints and limited character count, not to mention tiny resolution, don’t make it ideal for games involving lots of text or expansive levels.

The 88×31 buttons on the homepage are now shuffled on load :)

How are people feeling about the way I have been reposting directly onto the site and RSS feed rather than doing roundup posts? Is it working well? Is it annoying or confusing? I don’t want to just turn this into a flood of reposts either so I might still do roundups as well. As ever I am figuring out what I’m doing as I go.

Translations area really interesting and fun. I’ve linked before to Twitch translating pokémon names into Welsh and something I’ve played at before is translating Sonic the Hedgehog character names into Irish.

It doesn’t come with quite the same punning potential as pokémon but the way Sonic character names tend to be ordinary nouns makes it interesting to try to translate, especially trying to capture the relationships between certain names or figuring out what to do with the weirder ones.

If the notes column is blank that means the name is just a straightforward calque of the name from English.

One of the habits I had on Cohost was making some specific daily posts. I didn’t always get around to it, there were long stretches of times where I didn’t post any of these, but on my main account I liked to post a song of the day and I had a few side accounts too. One of them I posted intros to TV shows, games, movies etc. and another where I posted joke Sonic Heroes teams.

I don’t plan on continuing these but I have gone through the posts and made an archive of song of the day and intro posts in the form of Youtube playlists. I had to find alternatives to some videos that have been taken down or upload some myself that were not originally Youtube videos and they will continue to succumb to link rot but for the moment they are, I think, complete archives of what I posted.

They are also very long. The intros playlist is a little over nine hours and the song of the day one is technically over two days long but it includes a couple of joke ten hour videos and also an entire movie score but even discounting those it’s still almost twice as long as the intros playlist.

Due to the nature of Youtube playlists I can’t put warnings on the videos but some videos in both have some flashing lights and there’s at least one video in both that talks about or depicts suicide.

Also it looks like the embedded versions of the playlists below are limited to two hundred videos and some videos won’t play embedded so click through to Youtube for the full thing.

Introducing…

Song of the day

I’ve been testing how I want to handle rebogs on this site.

The previous post was rebogged entirely manually. I wrote a post in the normal format for Jekyll and defined metadata for the rebog information to link back to Freja’s website and display her avatar. Now I have to figure out how I want to streamline that process.

For posts syndicated from Letterboxd and such I have a setup where when I build the site there’s some code that checks those feeds and processes them into their own special folders that then get processed and added into the list of posts.

For rebogs though I think I’m going to do it differently and write a script, probably in Python, that I can run from my command line and give a link to a post that will attempt to parse the content of it then write it to a file directly into the same folder as my normal posts but with the extra metadata I’ve defined for for rebogs.

Continuing to crib from Natalie I have finally gotten around to trying out webmentions for this site.

I had bookmarked her posts on it and made notes and was going to get around to implementing it myself when I thought “hey I’m using Jekyll has a webmentions plugin already been made for Jekyll?” and the answer was of course it had. Adding it was very straightforward and hopefully it works out of the box.

This post includes plot details for Shadow Generations, Sonic Generations and Sonic Adventure 2

There is a part of Shadow Generations that I got unreasonably excited about, but it is going to take some explanation as to why.

There is a boss in Sonic Adventure 2 called Egg Golem. When you defeat it Sonic taunts it by saying “Nice try, rocky!” during the victory screen.

Also in Sonic Adventure 2, in a scene aboard the Space Colony ARK, Sonic the Hedgehog tries to fool Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik with a fake Chaos Emerald created by Miles “Tails” Prower, which Robotnik spots immediately.

These scenes don’t have much to do with each other, but in 2020 I watched videochess stream a Sonic Adventure 2 randomiser that not only randomises the levels and characters, but also all of the cutscenes, playing them in a random order and with every voice line for each character swapped with a random line of theirs from elsewhere in the game. The results are mostly nonsense but sometimes they line up in funny ways.

In particular a version of the fake Chaos Emerald cutscene plays where Robotnik says his line identifying the Chaos Emerald as fake early, to which Sonic responds by pulling out the emerald and saying “Nice try, rocky!”, apparently to the emerald itself. This resulted in several people watching, including myself, immediately declaring Rocky to be the name of the fake yellow Chaos Emerald. Eggman then tells Sonic to put Rocky down and back off.

Most of rest of the randomised dialogue is the usual ill-fitting nonsense, but the appropriate dialogue from Ivo with the Rocky line in the middle cemented this moment permanently in my mind. Rocky is my beautiful fake son and I want to protect him. And in Robotnik’s next line he insults Rocky and calls Rocky “sand” and says his machines hate Rocky and shoots my poor boy into space! It’s fucked up.

But Rocky does not have a large part in the Sonic series. The general idea of fake Chaos Emeralds gets revisited briefly in Sonic X where Sonic uses fake emeralds to turn into Dark Sonic and in the IDW comics Eggman tries to grow the “Eggperial City” using giant fake Chaos Emeralds. Also in the comics, specifically in Imposter Syndrome #2, a yellow gem that might be Rocky appears as a background detail on a shelf in Starline’s collection.

The real yellow Chaos Emerald appears throughout the series of course, including in Sonic Generations where it’s the emerald that you get for defeating Shadow the Hedgehog in a fight. And with Sonic Generations’ rerelease bundled with the new Shadow Generations campaign one of the many things that delighted me about the game is Rocky’s triumphant return and the silly way that it tied back into the original Sonic Generations.

In the promotional animated short for the game, Dark Beginnings, Shadow already has the yellow Chaos Emerald before the start of the game and holds on to it throughout the story. At the end of that short he flies to the Space Colony ARK and in an early cutscene in the game before being attacked by the Time Eater he finds Rocky still chilling on board the ARK and pockets it, now having both Rocky and the real yellow emerald.

Then, midway through the game, there’s a cutscene showing Sonic and Shadow’s fight from the Sonic Generations from Shadow’s perspective, where after losing he passes off Rocky to Sonic so that he can keep using the real emerald for his own fight.

It is, I admit, quite fan-wanky but I just admire pulling these disparate threads together and how this plotpoint is only possible because the fake emerald in Sonic Adventure 2 and the one in the Shadow rival battle in Sonic Generations both just happen to be the yellow one. And it means that Rocky is back! And he did such a good job! And he even retroactively gets to appear in Sonic Generations now too!

Another photo from Halloween.

I have been working on mirroring my Mastodon account to here like the Letterboxd and Backloggd reviews.

I think I will wait till tomorrow to deploy that but when I do it will add some backdated posts into the feed here.

I’m fairly happy with it. It is not fully featured but it will mirror posts, include images and alt text, set content warnings as titles if present and gather threads together into a single post.

It does not include replies I’ve made to other people’s posts and will not mirror boosts either, though I might add the latter.

This site only updates when I rebuild and push it so it won’t mirror my Cathode Church posts immediately but every time I update the site I should include whatever I’ve posted there since the last update.

The previous version of this site was originally just the gallery and it included an Atom feed honestly mostly just because I wanted to understand better how RSS worked and it was an interesting and fun thing to make. When I made the bog instead of retiring the old feeds I added a new one and then made a combined one that had everything and as I’ve reorganised things this has become a pain.

And the gallery is a record of past things I’ve worked on. The dates listed are retroactive. Even when I add new things they’re usually pretty heavily back-dated. It’s not really an appropriate use of an RSS feed. You shouldn’t really be adding things that have dates months or even years in the past. And when I add something there now I’m probably going to have a post about it anyway. So I’ve decided to simplify things. I am going to remove the other feeds and redirect them to the one for the bog. If I add something to the gallery there’ll be a post about it and obviously the two podcasts have their own feeds. Because they’re podcasts and that’s how podcasts work.

I’ve used RSS for a years. I have over two hundred feeds in my RSS reader (though many are inactive). Not as far back as the Google Reader days, mind; I started off with The Old Reader. Back when I move my phone over to Lineage OS and removed all Google services I moved to Newsblur, largely because it had a client available on F-Droid when The Old Reader did not¹.

But I have been feeling dissatisfied with it. Part of trying to move away from social media towards following other people’s bogs² is that I’ve moved more towards RSS being the primary means that I follow and view people’s posts and I have found that Newsblur was just not the most pleasant reading experience.

I can not fully explain why I did not like reading in it. I think perhaps the interface is too intrusive and the reading panel feels too cramped. I had mostly used it to open links to other pages rather than reading text in place. It has some other problems too: It was consistently failing to update some feeds that had well formed RSS documents (it would always succeed on a local, manual refresh) and its handling of Mastodon posts was pretty abysmal. In particular if a post had an image with alt text it would display the alt text in place of the main body of the post.

But even putting those issues aside I want reading to be a pleasant experience. I am here to have fun and as much fun as it is to make and style my website—and I do hope that people look at it—I think an important part of a decentralised web is that the centralised way that you read it should be as smooth and fun as possible.

Which is a long preamble to say that I am currently using a free trial of Feedbin and I am enjoying it. It a more pleasant, less busy, interface and it seems to have special handling of Mastodon posts where it displays them with the avatar included and everything.

I may still try out some other readers but as it stands once my twenty-eight days are up I think I’d be happy to pay five United States dollars a month to keep using it.

It isn’t perfect. The “extract full content” option seems to be more hit-and-miss than Newsblur’s version of that feature, especially for some news sites I follow, and it lacks Newsblur’s ability to just display the full source page in an iframe, but I prefer it overall. I do also wish you could do little unique colour styling on different people’s blogs though, are there any readers that do that?

Also I figured I would also give a shoutout to Freetube which I use to watch Youtube videos now. Using Lib Redirect when I open a Youtube link it automatically opens in Freetube, which provides a nice, decluttered interface for Youtube, does not display ads and even has Sponsor Block built in. It does have its issues. The main one being that if I click a Youtube video it will replace whatever one was already open and I will lose my current position. As someone who tends to leave long videos running as I do other stuff with frequent pausing to let myself concentrate on other things³ I have had to learn to stop myself from absently clicking on other random Youtube links in the middle of something else.

Who would have guessed?

I bookmarked a couple of posts from Natalie ages ago about h-entry and have finally gotten around to marking up my posts with them.

Hopefully I didn’t mess anything up and everything parsable now. I should have done this sooner as it was fairly simple but better late than never.

Now I have that set up as well as syndicating posts from my Backloggd and Letterboxd feeds. Next steps in trying to get set up to be part of the sociable web: Webmentions and figuring out how I want to handle rebogging individual posts.

Bhí mé in ann cuid de do radhairc shalacha a thaifeadadh agus tú ag masturbate agus ag teacht ar orgasm.

Níl an ċéad uair í.

The New York Times Tech Guild is on strike and asking people to boycott the paper’s online puzzles. I stopped doing Wordle a while ago as it was no longer finding it satisfying but I usually do the mini crossword and Connections.

If you usually do them and too and are lacking a daily puzzle here is a Connections/Only Connect/puzzle grid of my own devising below. You can also play in on Puzzgrid.

If you’re unfamiliar with this sort of puzzle: There’s sixteen words that make up four groups of four words through some sort of connection. Here is some easy ones on Puzzgrid to get the idea.

This one has a specific theme running through the whole puzzle and it does require some specialised knowledge on that subject. Check the hint to see what that is.

Inspired by BCJ doing the same which I saw via Mike Egan.

Went out with partner for fancy burgers last night and then went back to her’s and cuddled on the couch and I suggested watching the trans episode of Dirty Pair as I had started watching the show and while I knew that there was a happy couple in it where the bride was a trans woman I did not know that they were also burger freaks.

if you look at it it destroys your bones

I am bad at making website.

Or if you want to buy something for an online rando for some reason? https://throne.com/soilseacht

Went as a vampire for Halloween

Is there any spec or common practise for providing content warnings in an RSS/Atom feed?

Disqualified from No Nut November for having had performance-enhancing surgery

I’ve decided to start posting reviews to my Backloggd account. First one is of Shadow Generations (it’s good). You won’t really need to follow me there, though, as any reviews I post there should also show up on this bog.

They current implementation is really simple. When I build the site it reads the Backloggd RSS feed and copies the post to here but it’s on my todo list to start caching rebogs locally to have a copy preserved and hopefully to stop this getting too slow if the number of posts I’m syndicating starts to get too large.

In the RSS feed the link points to the original review on Backloggd rather than to the copy on this site. Not sure about which it should link to. If you have an opinion on that feel free to share.

I am also planning on doing this for Letterboxd as well and maybe something similar for books. Is there any decent alternative to Goodreads?

This post demonstrates custom CSS that won’t display in RSS readers.

One of the things that Cohost taught me is that CSS is actually fun. Styling a website is a really lovely form of self-expression and I have been really enjoying styling this this website¹. And I thought I’d highlight some of the things I’ve done.

Colours

The site has two different colour schemes for dark mode and light mode. I much prefer the dark mode one but I generally use dark mode for everything I can. The dark mode has a cool, blue palette while the light mode uses a warmer colour scheme with oranges and peach colours. Most of the colours I used are picked from the Pico-8 palette.

There is a gradient as you scroll down the page in both colour schemes ending in a different footer images². In dark mode stars also come out as you scroll down.

Links

External links and internal links have different colours³ and also some links have special decorations. If I link to the atom feed for the bog or my page about Snolf they have little Nintendo dialogue icons appended to them or if I link to Transy it uses the typeface that she talks in: Hobo.

This applies whenever those specific things are linked to and I don’t need to do anything special with this post to apply them.

Cursors

The site also has custom cursors based off of old Windows cursors. If you mouse over the above links you might have noticed that there are also different cursors depending on what type of link they are.

Fonts

For the Irish language portions of my site I use Mínċló GC from Gaelċlo instead of Crimson Text which is used for English text. I also use it for the title of The Bog because using silly fancy text for headings is fun. Other examples: Gallery is Tate Regular, The the Ring Podcast uses Some Rings and a bunch of other fonts I use for titles on my homepage are references to Sonic the Hedgehog because of course they are.

Buttons!

The most important part of any site is 88×31 pixel buttons, obviously, to which I have a crippling addiction. I’ve copied some CSS from Hyphinett to embiggen them when you mouseover them and also set rendering mode to pixellated to keep them nice and crispy.

If you have your browser set to prefer reduced motion the mouseover effect is disabled and all the animated buttons are replaced with static ones.

For sites that don’t have buttons I use a little 88×31 image of a little piece of paper that I tore up with the names rendered on top slightly askew in Cinema Calligraphy.

Layout

The homepage divides into multiple columns depending on the screen width. Other pages generally have a single-column layout with navigation elements on either side that collapse to the top of the page if the screen is narrow enough, like on mobile. The avatar for the bog also snaps to the top on narrow screens and otherwise sits beside posts and scrolls with the page.

Gallery exhibits

Gallery pages have sets of links next to/under the title that all change to the site’s link hover colour when mouseovered. This applies is applied to images using a combination of -webkit-filter sepia and hue-rotate. This also changes with light and dark mode. Projects with git repos have an icon here that expands into an info box with the git repo address.

And sometimes I just do little bespoke things for pages, such as the vertical Ogham text on the Cló Piocó-8 page. Trivia: Ogham is one of the few scripts that is written bottom-to-top.

Printing

I also have some custom CSS for printing. I don’t really plan on printing pages from this site nor do I expect anyone else to, but it was fun to play with. Colour is drained out of styling to save on coloured ink, links are instead underlined and the addresses they point to appended after them in brackets. Videos and audio players are hidden, the link icons in gallery pages are turned into a bullet point list under the header and the comment box is hidden.

When there’s no CSS

Printing is just one alternative way I like to think about how my site could be displayed. While I don’t test the site with Netscape Navigator⁴, I do read back over posts in my RSS reader and sometimes check the site in the terminal-based web browser Lynx.

Again I don’t really expect people to be navigating this site in the terminal but it does make me mindful of how the site functions in terms of pure HTML content elements without the fancy styling and I think it’s important to keep it understandable and navigable in that mode too. That is how the site is going to be parsed by accessibility tools. I also try to have as little Javascript involved as possible as well and not use it to render page content⁵.

At the top of this post there is a little infobox warning. There is CSS to make this eye-catching but it’s also defined as an <b> element so that even in the absence of CSS it will display bold and be a little attention-grabbing.

On gallery pages, and especially on podcast episode pages, there is a credits/links section at the bottom of the page in smaller text. There is a heading about this section saying “Credits” but it’s hidden by CSS as I thought the page flowed better without it. It’s still there for if the page is being read without CSS and the styling can’t be used to differentiate it as a separate element from the main page text as clearly.

I used to some invisible horizontal rules across the page, set to not display using CSS, that would divide the header and footer of the site from the main content to try and make it read cleaner in situations where there was no CSS. That was before I simplified the site layout somewhat and took out the more divided header and footer areas with links in them that the site used to have.

Conclusion

That’s all that I can think of off the top of my head. Bye.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX

the little lies robots tell us — Melon

The longer we tolerate the little lies that robots tell us, the bigger the lies become, and the more difficult it becomes to untangle them from our everyday lives. This is not an inevitability, however; we can find in ourselves and in our connections with eachother the self-confidence to learn how these things work, to unpick the threads, to see through the smoke and mirrors that they are only barely veiled behind.

How To Post — Mike Egan

Always remember to Post Hog.

And yeah, sometimes I want to do that, if I’m writing about my experience playing a game or something, but I also have a HUGE list of ideas for blog posts that I plan to write “eventually” that I’m very much not posting because I think I don’t have time to do it right. Because I think it has to be some level of “interesting” or “good” or “having a point.”

I’ve forgotten the lesson of Post Hog.

TIL cool math. Also we need knowledge engines that we can trust (that is: not chatgpt) — Llaura

I am honestly mostly linking to this for the absurdity that is the comparison image that Open AI used to show how “DALL·E 3 significantly improves uon DALL·E 2”. Look at this:

The older one looks somewhat like an actual oil painting while the “improved” version is a cacophonic mess that fails to represent what it asked of it while being aesthetically ugly as shit.

It almost makes me think that perhaps generative AI could actually produce output that is meaningfully better than it currently does and is at least partially hampered by simple obstacle that people who are making and curating these systems have truly atrocious taste.

The cookie example doesn’t seem to be on the site any more but the comparison they’ve replaced it with shows the exact same problem.

My 6 Favorite HEPA Filters & Air Cleaners — Joey Fox

The PC fan CR box was a recent invention to find a method to achieve high clean air delivery rates with very low noise. Noise is the greatest limitation of in-room air cleaners and PC fans are the best option to address it. There are no other air cleaners on the market that have the capability to supply 150 lps of clean air at 35 dBA. Nothing comes close.

Via House of Nettles. I am also still following Natalie’s posts about reblogging and keen to try my hands at doing similar with this site now that my rewrite to make posting easier is done. Also also from Natalie: This amazing look.

TERF Island — Sophie Lewis in Lux Magazine

A distilled history of the TERF movement and its roots in reactionary feminism.

For the twenty-first-century feminist who has never heard of this schismatic moment and has perhaps swallowed the narrative that transphobia and biological essentialism were intrinsic to feminism’s Second Wave, reading the movement magazine the Lesbian Tide is an education. Morgan’s keynote was reprinted in the May-June 1973 issue but placed at the back in small type, sandwiched between contributions that all criticize Morgan and oppose her sabotage of the gathering. MacLean’s diary conveys participants reactions to the conflict on stage: “This can’t be happening. This woman is insisting that Beth Elliott not be permitted to perform because Beth is a transsexual.” “That’s bullshit! Anatomy is NOT destiny!” In her own contribution, “Of Infidels and Inquisitions,” Elliott testifies that the solidarity she experienced “kept alive my faith in womankind.” Concerning Morgan herself, however, she states with dignity that “I personally distrust those who hate men more than they love or do anything positive for women.”

the embroidery tips page that forgot to close its <h3> tags

Via the Internet Archive, via Emma Zhou, via Peter Krupa via a reblog from Sin Vega.

Fandom has toxified the world — Alan Moore in The Guardian

This fairly mild and nothing that hasn’t been said over and over again, but it’s still sort of nice to hear it directly from Alan Moore?

Soon thereafter, caught up in the rush of adolescent life, I drifted out of touch with comic books and their attendant fandom, only returning eight years later when I was commencing work as a professional in that fondly remembered field, to find it greatly altered. Bigger, more commercial, and although there were still interesting fanzines and some fine, committed people, I detected the beginnings of a tendency to fetishise a work’s creator rather than simply appreciate the work itself, as if artists and writers were themselves part of the costumed entertainment.

The V*mpire — P.H. Lee in Reactor

A short story about being groomed on Tumblr. Mind the content warnings.

Friendly reminder that not inviting vampires into your house is viviocentrism. Stop being viviocentric!

OP, I don’t want to demand more emotional labor from you, but I really don’t understand what you mean. Should I really invite in every vampire?

Disrespectfully, go fuck yourself. It’s not my job to educate you.

ᵃʷᵒ°

ᵃʷᵒ°

ᵃʷᵒ°

See, this is exactly the sort of bullshit that living “allies” always impose on us. OP made it extremely clear: Not inviting in a vampire is viviocentrism. INVITE IN EVERY VAMPIRE.

You may think that nested quote looks horrendous but I am just providing the genuine 2010s Tumblr experience.

Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine — Edwin Evans-Thirlwell in Rock Paper Shotgun

Edwin pulls together multiple articles that are worth reading in and of themselves to look at how Space Marines have been sanitised away from their satirical roots.

It’s saying something about how accustomed I am to the ostensibly parodic figure of the Space Marine being portrayed as a hero that I didn’t really question this desire to make you “like” and “get” the “fanatical killing machines” at the time. To be clear, I don’t think Saber are deliberately and consciously trying to kindle empathy for literal fascist enforcers in Space Marine 2. Much of the above reasoning is grounded in ostensibly neutral, best-practicey questions of craft and characterisation.

A Maze of Murderscapes: Metroid II — S.R. Holiwell

An old classic that I think about a lot. I hope Stephy Rei Holiwell is still doing well out there. This and some other now-deleted writing of hers meant a lot to me.

Games about killing should probably make you uncomfortable. They shouldn’t be carefully crafted to be pleasant. Metroid II is openly about killing. It makes me uncomfortable with wordless specificity. This is one of the game’s saving graces.

This article was also, I believe, a large and overlooked part of the critical re-evaluation of Metroid II, being the basis for Game Maker’s Toolkit’s appraisal of the game when discussing its remakes.

Sex in the ’60s in Cork… and the racy agony aunt who faced death threats — Teddy Delaney in Echo Live

An extract from someone’s memoirs published in a local paper. I don’t think the book would be the most interesting thing in the world if I’m being honest but I found some of the quoted letters to an agony aunt column amusing.

We are four worried 17-year-old teenagers. We are going to our first dance soon and a friend has told us to refuse a mineral from a boy because if you accept it you are supposed to spend the rest of the dances with him. We would like to know if this is true. Also, if a fellow asks you to go outside does this mean that he is bad? And what should you do if a boy asks you to go outside?

And to explain the terminology: An agony aunt is someone who pens an advice column and mineral here means soft drink or soda. Sorry if I ruined the picture in your head of teenagers in the 1960s exchanging rocks at a dance.

Hopefully I have caught any broken links as a result of this and haven’t fucked up the podcast feeds or anything 🤞🏻

Maybe now I can get back to shitposting.

I was on holiday in Copenhagen last week. Here are some photos.

fucked that quantum dot organic light-emitting diode televisions look the same as every other TV instead of being dimension­fucked techo­örganic nightmares

learning to spindash

I am not posting as much on here as I was on Cohost. One reason is that I have just been really busy and tired recently.

Another is simply I spent a lot of time on Cohost. I have praised it a lot and how it felt more deliberate and less of a trap than other social media sites, but it was still a place I could open to kill time and scroll be driven by the small joys of getting notifications. I felt I got more out of it than other places where I did that, and it fostered that addiction at bit less, but it still did it.

But also there’s a psychological barrier. I still have this feeling that this site is something serious and I have to write in clear semi-formal prose and have something to say. Just posting “I won’t tell anyone if I win the lottery but there will be sins” feels wrong. Which is silly. This is my website. I can write anything I want on here. And I enjoy shitposting. I should be doing it. Maybe If I can get into the flow of treating this place more casually I can feel a bit more open again. Perhaps if I can get over the embarrassment of it I might even post some kink stuff.

But there is another reason too: Posting on here is much more deliberate. I use Jekyll as a static-site generator so making a post involves creating a new text file on my PC and running a small command line script to build and push the changes to my server. It’s not a huge effort, but it’s certainly more than using a website. I like building this site.

Sylvia (quoting someone else) said that “a personal website is like a model train set, in that it’s never really done and you work on it constantly in the hopes that someone will see it” and I think that’s a great comparison! I have a todo list for ideas for this site as long as my arm and as a programmer by trade I both enjoy and know how to make extra work for myself doing it. It was originally just a site built with the default Jekyll minima theme but I have bolted on a lot of extra features and generators. There’s a pipeline to build Pico-8 games from source and an entire podcast processing system and these all run every time I regenerate the site. The overhead with these wasn’t too bad at first but over time it has just taken longer and longer to build and push the site for small changes.

But this is just another problem to solve! I enjoy doing this. I already do have a janky system in place for testing the site while skipping some of the more intensive steps for testing, but I can’t use it to push changes to the site because it would fuck up certain pages which would get replaced with versions that are missing things.

I have some idea already of how I want to go about this and it involves dividing up the site a bit more cleanly into discrete parts. This is going to result in moving some stuff around and in particular I think I will be moving everything in the gallery to a new URL scheme so any current links to my exhibits are going to break. Sustaining a few 404s is fine and if I do find anyone linking to specific pages I might set up some manual redirects but I don’t want to have to set up a million redirect rules. I have too many already and I think I’m going to be removing most of them other than for the Atom feeds to reduce clutter as well.

And then, maybe shitposting?

The Blue McDonald’s in Cork sits at the end of Patrick Street at the corner with Daunt’s Square that sits in distinctive, rounded building. This is formerly the site of Woodford, Borne & Co. and the lettering on the side of the building still promises “wines, fruits, spices, coffees, teas, wines [and] spirits”. I guess they really wanted you to know that they had wines. The Woodford bar at the back of the building on Paul St. is also named for this prestigious shop.

But since a certain clown moved in in the 1980s the building has become known to the residents of Cork simply as The Blue McDonald’s and it is still called that to this day.

Despite the fact that it has been painted green for over a decade now.

Unrelated reading:

• Blue–green distinction in language
• Color term

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX

A roundup of some posts I’ve been reading that I thought I’d share.

Deus Ex Machina [1984] — Arcade Idea

I have been catching up on the sadly inactive Arcade Idea, a blog working through the history of video games through selected games that chart development of the medium. Unlike many such projects it does not focus only on console and arcade games or on games that are still famous.

Deus Ex Machina, whose entry I have linked, is a fascinating ZX Spectrum game/interactive movie/concept album that I had never heard of, designed and composed by Mel Croucher.

It’s actually on Steam and there is a playthrough available to watch on Mel Croucher’s Youtube channel. It has some pretty heavily strobing lights in some sections.

When the mouse dies inside The Machine, it takes its one final death shit. The turd drops into the test-tube babymaker. For the whole first act, and arguably the whole game, you play as this mouse turd.

COVID Denialism and Disability Justice — Natalie Weizenbaum

I have been also reading Natalie’s posts about setting up post embedding and reblogging and will have a look at doing that too, so maybe in future instead of these roundup posts I will directly reblog stuff into my feed.

Because this category myth isn’t just incorrect, it’s oppressive. All axes of oppression are wrapped around similar myths. This is why sexists are so threatened by transsexuals, why racists invented the crime of miscegenation. An oppressive mindset demands a clear and permanent division between oneself and one’s victims; a mode of thought that relies on clear and permanent divisions is at high risk of enacting oppression, knowingly or not. Those who are unable (or unwilling) to imagine themselves becoming disabled are the ones who do the most harm to people who already are.

The NES Pictionary Bot, In Memoriam — Luna

The NES Pictionary bot, was, as Luna describes, something that could almost have existed on any social media website. But it could only have worked how it did, and how well it did, on Cohost, where users were given much more of a blank canvas to work with than any other social media site.

This could have been achieved on Twitter via a two-account mechanism. The main account would post the image with the dashes, a secondary account would post a reply with the solution. Users could then mute/block the secondary account, or follow it if they wanted to always see the solutions.

Similarly, this could have been achieved on Mastodon using the Content Warning (CW) system, which allows you to put a post behind a warning and require action on the part of the user to actually view the post. The bot would post the image with the dashes, and then in a follow-up post, post the solution under a CW, making users interact to see the solution.

These solutions always seemed kinda clunky to me, and eventually I just forgot all about it.

Enter Cohost.

A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat — andi mcc

Speaking of giving users a blank canvas with HTML, this is one of the posts I saw circulating again towards the end of Cohost’s life, detailing the absolutely audatious way that Geocities HTML chat (which I had never heard of before) worked. Now that Cohost is shutting down she has returned to her blog.

Geocities HTML Chat was, from a technical perspective, a guestbook with a small twist. There was a chat for each of the “cities” (my home was SiliconValley, I think?). Each chat used (of course) frames to display two smaller webpages. One frame above (I don’t actually remember, but let’s say it was above) was a thin band containing a CGI input form. The lower frame was larger, and scrolled freely. This frame used a server-side trick; the server would tell your web browser it was sending it an infinitely long web page (or maybe it just claimed it was some impossibly large size, a gigabyte or something). It would send it the opening <html>, and then it would hang. It would keep the socket open. When a user in the chat room submitted a line to their CGI box, every user would simultaneously receive a new line on the bottom-frame open socket (which their web browser sincerely believed an ordinary webpage was actually really loading into, just very slowly).

pokémon cymraeg — Twitchcoded

A page where Twitch is documenting a project of translating pokémon names into Welsh. I had fun before coming up with Irish translations for Sonic the Hedgehog characters. It’s the kind of thing that lets you play with language in a cool way. Pokémon are great for this especially because of the multilayered and punny nature of their names. Draoi Aisteach</i> has actually already made full translations of Pokémon Red and Blue.

38

ninetales

cadnaw

cadno (fox) naw (nine) cadnawes (vixen)

America a Prophecy — Elizabeth Sandifer

Last time I linked to Elizabeth Sandifer’s Doctor Who writing. This time I am going to link to another of her long-term projects: An annual series of blog posts analysing the American psyche through the lens of a bafflingly awful newspaper comic about the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I recommend reading the whole series and I look forward to next year’s.

As a practitioner of a magical/critical practice that I have coined psychochronography, it is my belief that one can position any cultural object at the center of one’s vision and, through sufficiently thorough exploration of it, understand the larger world in which it exists. To this end, I propose that we explore this genuinely astonishing work of comics art in order to understand the whole of America in the 21st century.

New Team, New Discord! — Spore in the News

For the sheer novelty of it: Spore’s official website and RSS feed updated this week. Spore. The game from 2008. Why not add it to your RSS reader too so that you can get updated on any new Spore news? Or I guess more likely join the Discord server they are using the news post to advertise.

Spore has a new team! You may notice some of our team members making the rounds throughout the Spore communities - RogueLyeshal (Rogue) and Reiliyn (Rei) are leading up our new community efforts. Speaking of… there is now an official Discord server, where you can keep up with the latest news from the development team, participate in contests, and get to know other players of Spore! Come join us!

I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don’t know what to do with them — James O’Malley

A cry for help I saw via Tom Scott’s newsletter that also goes into recovering teletext data from tapes.

What Alistair realised though was that even though there were no complete teletext pages stored on his tapes, there were still fragments of teletext data captured and saved by the tapes.

So he wrote some code that does something mind-blowing. Using his software, if you play in a VHS tape to a TV capture card, it will take the raw recording data, pick out the nuggets of teletext, and like magic will stitch them back together into complete pages.

Like I say, it’s witchcraft.

Artificial Life: Insects — CD-ROM Journal

A blog from Misty De Méo that explores old multimedia CDs. Maybe some day she’ll cover Ring: 感×染.

Although the front cover and spine credit Harada first, and it’s clear Harada’s CG artwork is the real centrepiece here, the three works are presented as coequals. More than an art book, a novel, or a game, it’s a project that shows how different mediums transform the same basic concepts. The three works don’t just diverge because of different inspirations but because their mediums influence what kinds of interpretations are possible, what kinds of ideas can take root.

hot pepsi ☕ — Dr. Melon

I can’t say I agree with this but it’s certainly an interesting perspective.

I highly recommend trying it out if you haven’t had it before, especially on a colder or rainy day. There’s something great about the warm steam coming off the top combined with tiny droplets flying out of the drink due to the carbonation that leave a pleasantly-contrasty cooling sensation on the lips just before you take a sip of the toasty liquid within. Drinking it and feeling the warm fizz is a little alchemical, and a little rebellious, with the net effect of overall feeling like you’re sneaking some of a wizard’s potion while he’s out gathering herbs.

👨‍💻 Side By Side 👨‍🎨 — Mike Egan

A cute little motion design animation!

I was deep in the website building mines in April, both working on this site, and building Welcome to the Cyber World, my MMBN fansite that I made for the Critical Distance Fansite Jam.

So I wanted to make something celebrating the joy and creativity of the particular left-brain/right-brain cooperation present in using code to make what is essentially a piece of visual media.

It’s called Side By Side because it was originally a horizontal piece with both windows sitting next to each other, but I found that to be too static, and the transition I landed on is more fun and dynamic. It also mirrors the actual experience of building a website, in that you often write the code not knowing 100% what the site will look like until you load it up in a browser!