Very fun dive into a bunch of absolute messes. Being divorced from the plot of the comic it’s based on means it’s quite self-contained but also that it gives a deeper view into a bunch of characters who don’t get as much time dedicated to them in the main work and it is impressive how the different story threads interweave and play off each other depending on the order you do them in and which paths you take.

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.

In the latest edition of my "What Else Is On?" link roundup, I mentioned that I finally played Big Tournament Golf, better known as Neo Turf Masters in North America, for the first time.

I'd seen it played on YouTube in various places over the years, but never actually put my own two hands on it. After watching the Remap crew play it on this year's Savepoint charity stream, and realizing it was a whopping $8 on Switch, I snapped it up.

I fell in love with the game's whole vibe pretty much immediately, from the dramatic anime intro, to the luscious soundtrack, to the classic, tinny arcade VO shouting "on the green!!"

One element that really grabbed ahold of my brain and refused to let go was the screen shown before each hole. It depicts a series of graphical representations of the topography of the next hole, along with some text informing the player of the simplest, most pressing information, shown over the chillest, most soothing retro arcade music imaginable.

The way each element flies in from opposite ends of the screen, scales-in from zero, and particularly the way the "Hole No. X" text writes-on and then grows an outline and a thick, opaque drop shadow really entranced me. To say nothing of the gradients! There's so much going on, and yet not very much at all. It's all so simple and juicy and perfect.

I had to try to recreate it. If not only as a fun motion design exercise, than also to exorcise it from my brain.

Here's the original, as created by the masters at SNK:

And here's my attempt at a recreation, with the same audio underneath:

The first thing you'll notice is that I wasn't able to find a close match for the "Hole No. X" font. Which is a shame, because that's a great font, but font-matching is tough, and try as I might, I wasn't able to find the original.

Failing that, I decided on something I thought carried a similar style and similar embellishments that looked fun to animate. I was a little quick and sloppy with the write-on animation, but I don't think it's noticeable in motion, and I'm happy with the result!

For the rest of the elements, it was tough to strike a balance between retro and modern. So much of what makes the original great is down to pixel art and the way it's being rendered. But since I'm not a pixel artist, I knew going in that my version would have a cleaner, more modern look, and I decided to mostly lean into that, and not force a faux-retro look with a ton of effects.

The only place I decided to go for a purposely retro look was in the background, which I posterized to give the gradient that banding effect you see in the original because the hardware couldn't create a seamless gradient. I love that look. It really ties everything together, and provides a solid foundation for the rest of the piece.

The hardest element was, of course, the largest: the big faux-3D rendering of the course in the middle of the screen. As these things go, I liked it more the more I saw it come together. Like its lower-res neighbor on the right, I just pulled in my reference layer, and went to town with the pen tool. From there, it was all about dialing in the right stroke width, getting the texture and shadow of the trees right, and finishing with effects on top.

I wasn't sure how to go about creating the gradient on the strip of extruded land at the bottom at first, but I eventually settled on just eyeballing a gradient fill with a bunch of points on it, and trying to position them where the light and shadows should fall.

This was the last thing I did, so I had all of the other elements in place, and had already pre-comped it so I could start playing around with effects and figuring out the final look. I worked on the gradient inside the pre-comp, so I was seeing it without the final effects applied at first. I wasn't sure about the way it looked, but when I backed out to the main comp and saw everything applied to the gradient, I had a genuine "oh shit" moment.

I had been thinking about posterizing this gradient to achieve the same banding as the background, and tie everything back to the retro aesthetic that way, but when I played around with it, I ended up liking this better! I'm really happy with the effect of that gradient.

All in all, this was a really fun exercise! Like all new projects, it taught me a little something new, and I had to push myself to figure out things I hadn't done before.

And I still absolutely adore what SNK achieved with this screen. I love how far back all the drop shadows are pushed, I love the smooth, linear motion of all the animations, and I love the way each element slowly fills out the screen one by one, with the three boxy elements leaving space for and framing the big, freeform shape of the course in the middle.

Finishing this project has me wanting to try tackling recreations of some other video game UI! Leave some of your faves in the comments, and maybe I'll give 'em a go!

I think one of the most powerful aspects of Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow, and one which sets it apart from a lot of later Weird Fiction about academics who become too invested in the world of the arcane, is the idea that there just isn't anything explainably wrong with the play. People know there's something wrong with it, especially once you get to the second act... but if you just looked at the text itself, you wouldn't find anything.

'No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked.'

The Repairer of Reputations

Despite how central it is, I completely missed it on my first reading (mainly because I was young and grappling with a particularly bad printing of it which made the text really small). I only started to grasp it when I listened to the concept album The King in Yellow by experimental post-rock band "Ah Pook, the Destroyer".

This album is largely inspired by Chamber's work, using that premise - an idea that you can't see but can still cause genuine harm - to talk about the current political climate. Songs touch on a wide array of cults and conspiracies - from the modern-day antisemitic ramblings of Qanon and Lizard People conspiracies to the strong figureheads and interpersonal conflicts of cults like Heaven's Gate. They even find time to touch on the Time Cube somehow, all under the framework of the King in Yellow propagating harmful ideas and bringing about the New Age of Madness.

But it's not as simple as just looking at these people and calling them mad. Okay, sometimes it is that (best exemplified in the gospel stylings of "The Tribulation of Alex Jones"), but there are cases where the characters are presented with genuine empathy, such as in "The Road to Carcosa" where we hear about the life of a man who, through exposure to the Yellow Sign (which here is attached to Right-Wing conspiracy theories) ends up destroying his relationship with his family. The singer gets a moment of lucidity in the refrain "The fall of my life came after; And all of my mind was scattered", though this fades away as we hear the end of this story: Him living alone in a gun-filled squalor.

Another thing that elevates this album is how it turns it all back on the listener. There's obviously a specific audience of Left-leaning listeners a project like this would attract, and those people are very unlikely to also share the beliefs of the average Qanon-minded person, but (much like in the book) it constantly emphasises that the actual specific beliefs don't matter as much as the spread of ideas. This is most visible in the refrain heard throughout the album:

The fall you believe
Is not far as it seems
And the deep can not be so alive
The blithe poison meme
That you did not believe
But you saw and it entered your mind

Belief doesn't matter. Sheer exposure to these toxic ideas means that, in a way, you've already been harmed no matter what you take away from it. This idea is also present in the book, most directly in the story "The Yellow Sign".

In it, Mr. Scott is fully aware of the King in Yellow, but has actively tried to avoid its influence, partially due to the unfortunate fate of Hildred Castaigne (who featured in the story "The Repairer of Reputations" and at the very least wanted to do a monarchist coup of America that would place him as King - all after reading The King in Yellow). By all means, he should be doing the right thing - he has no interest in The King in Yellow and is actively avoiding the play... and it's not like anyone's staging it anymore, so he should be fine... and yet, after strange dreams, an erie watchman, and other bizarre events, he and his model, Tessie, are driven to read it. This is also a story the album quotes right at the start:

'Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie’s soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.'

The Yellow Sign & Beautitudes

It's an idea I think is also evoked in the structure of the anthology. While the first 4 stories directly feature the King in Yellow in one way or another, the rest are tragic, sometimes supernatural romances with seemingly no connection to the title character, to the point where some reprints just do the first 4 and ignore the rest... though I feel it's deliberate when keeping this idea in mind. While the King is absent, Yellow is a recurring motif throughout the book, often emphasising death or danger, and reminding the reader of that titular presence. You have been exposed to the King in Yellow, and now your mind is his domain.

This review contains spoilers.

At last we finally know the origin story of a woman who was invented two minutes before the end of a show for a cliffhanger that was never resolved 😌

The inciting incident of this movie is a petty disgraced noble extrajudicially massacring a fifteen men who wandered into a restricted area. To stem any potential backlash a false story of tiger attacks is spread.

Some of the deads’ countrymen come to investigate this just as, by sheer coincidence, a zombie tiger just happens to go on a rampage and kill a shitload of people.

When they finally kill the undead tiger, the world’s most sceptical man cuts open its stomach and finds nothing but rotten flesh inside it, not the remains of anything identifiable, even the two dozen men he has just seen it kill and declares that seeing as the bones of his friends aren’t present in its stomach then the monster tiger story is clearly bullshit.

The world’s most sceptical yet gullible man is then convinced it was actually this innocent group of people by an official telling him “Oh yeah the tiger was a lie but we found this conveniently identifiable box from a tribe you’re related to next the bodies I guess it was them” so they kill the entire village where they make those styles of boxes.

The only survivor of this massacre is a young girl who decides to become the Joker of zombies.

This review contains spoilers.

The first series of this show manages a steady escalation of both violence and camp as it starts to centre Chucky more and pull in various elements from the films, which is a thing the second series can’t really do a second time but it still manages to have a rising tide of ridiculousness throughout with its different versions of Chucky as well as the wonderful stuff focusing on Tiffany’s Jennifer Tilly facade falling apart. I also love G.G.

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.

Rinne mé leaḃarṁarc de leaṫanaċ fánaċ ar Vicipéid.

Recently, I decided to rewatch the 2015 movie Mad Max: Fury Road, for the first since 2018. I absolutely loved it when I saw it then, but I was curious if it holds up. Reader, it very much does. I think the extraordinary virtues of this movie have been extolled enough at this point–in my previous review, if nowhere else. It’s a stunningly well-constructed film, a two-hour action scene that is perfectly paced, perfectly established, and full of subtle, complex character development and simple, inescapable themes. It is a masterpiece of storytelling and filmmaking. But you already know all that!

So today, I’m going to talk a little about the potential historiography of Fury Road instead.

In this framing, I am choosing to accept the events of the movie as the accurate, God’s-Eye-View of the actual historical events that led to the Fall of Immortan Joe and the creation of what we may provisionally refer to as the Democratic People’s Republic of the Citadel. Presumably, however, in the post-literate society of the Wasteland, this history will be passed down in the form of oral tales, traditions, ballads, and chronicles, told over and over again, changing and evolving until they are finally written down, in the same fashion that the Homeric epic poems were not codified until approximately four centuries after the events they purport to relate took place. Centuries, perhaps millennia in the future, as civilization in Australia and the world rebuilds itself, scholars and academics will study this corpus of literature to try and understand the legends of the founding of their country. And I think they will be absolutely baffled by the existence of Max, and his role in them.

You see, I imagine that Furiosa will be a generally well-attested to quasi-historical figure. Many of the legends surrounding her will be dismissed as myth, but I think historians will accept that there was probably somebody named Imperator Furiosa who led the Revolution, overthrew the Old Regime and founded the new government, even if she perhaps did not ride a Golden War Rig out of the highways of Valhalla, and strangle Immortan Joe with a silver chain, etc. After all, somebody had to do it, and a major military leader turning on her superior and staging a coup d’etat makes as much sense as anything else. Furiosa also makes a lot of sense as a culture hero, somebody who can be credited with the transformation or establishment of their society. As a member of the Vuvalini, she represents an outside force that can be brought in to replace the previous set of values and ethics, but as a high-ranking member of Immortan Joe’s army, she shows that integration is possible for those who served the old regime. There isn’t a contradiction between those two roles, the historical and mythic. Gilgamesh is remembered today mostly for his eponymous epic, detailing his epic battles with monsters and journey to the Underworld, but he appears on the Sumerian King Lists, and may have been a real figure at one point. Or perhaps a better example would be King Arthur, whose entire modern mythos is clearly a much-later invention, but may well have been based on a historical Romano-British or Welsh war-leader who fought the invading Anglo-Saxons in the 5th or 6th centuries AD.

The point is, these are well-recognized tropes and patterns of myth and history, and I have no trouble believing that historians in the future will be able to recognize them. But what I suspect they will not understand is why halfway through most of the traditional ballads, this random guy named “Max” walks out of the Wasteland, helps overthrow Joe, and then vanishes from the historical record without explanation.

I like to imagine three schools of historical theory. The first we may call “The Interpolation School”. These scholars believe that “The Legend of Max” was a preexisting ballad with entirely separate provenance. Either intentionally or accidentally, some chronicler or balladeer confused the stories and inserted Max into the “Furiosa Cycle”. This is actually a relatively common phenomenon with folk music and folklore, as stories passed down through oral tradition mutate and change with each generation. An extreme example can be seen with the traditional English folk song “Matty Groves“, which eventually became the American ballad “Shady Grove“, a song which features virtually nothing in common with it anymore, or how with the Irish song “The Bantry Girls Lament“, about a young soldier sent to fight in the Peninsular War (1807-1814), which features references to the “Peelers“, the British police force first established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829.

We can also look to the Matter of Britain, the great Arthurian story cycle. As mentioned above, these are stories that first first come from the Welsh and Celtic Briton sources, but as they are eventually increasingly told by French minstrels in the High Middle Ages, they increasingly come to focus on a new character, French knight Lancelot du Lac. If you read Le Morte d’Arthur, you can’t help but notice that the entire Grail Quest portion seems to have an entirely different viewpoint than the rest of the narrative. In Virgil’s Aeneid, his attempt to craft an epic national founding myth for Rome, he deliberately sought to tie his story and characters into the older Homeric Epics, borrowing from their prestige and reputation. And perhaps the most infamous example of this phenomenon is Biblical texts, and the long history of exegesis there. Later translators and transcribers interpolating their own additions is a perennial problem, especially in regards to Christian interpretations of older Jewish texts.

George Miller’s own take on the “cannon” of Mad Max certainly seems to fit into this lens. In a press conference for Fury Road he famously said:

All the films have no strict chronology. It’s probably after Thunderdome, but it’s an episode in the life of Max and this world. It’s basically an episode, and it’s us revisiting that world. I never wrote the story, any of the stories, with a chronological connection.

Where does Furiosa fit into the Mad Max timeline? George Miller says it doesn’t matter, Austen Goslin (Source)

This certainly lends credence to the idea of Max as a recurring folk hero, the protagonist of a cycle of songs and stories without clear historicity or connection. We can image him like Robin Hood, with a set number of “standard stories” that can be retold in any order; “Robin Hood Wins the Archery Contest”, “Robin Hood Meets Little John”, “Robin Hood Fights Sir Guy of Gisbourne”, “Robin Hood Rescues Maid Mariam”, etc. You’ve seen at least one of the movies, right? Likewise, we can imagine ballads like “Max the Patrolman“, “Max the Road Warrior“, “How Max Escaped Thunderdome“, etc, with his insertion into the “Furiosa Cycle” likely a way to spice up the story with a fan-favorite character.

However, I think that other academics would disagree. They don’t have access to the omniscient narration of the Maxiverse that we do, or knowledge of the “true” chronology. I imagine they would maintain that other Max legends–if they still exist–are in fact derivative of his role in “The Ballad of Fury Road”. It seems likely to me that some people would find the idea that their national foundation mythos was constructed from popular stories to be deeply unpalatable, in the way we might reject claims that Benjamin Franklin was a well-known trickster deity, inserted into the story of the American Revolution to help boost sales in France. We could refer to this school of thought as the “Max As Metaphor School”. They believe that Max is a constructed composite character, designed as a proxy for the great unwashed masses of the Wretched to give them a role in the story. In his quest for redemption, the original authors wanted their listeners to see that the Revolution required the services of all people, and that through cooperative service, we could regain our humanity.

Credence here might be lent by the structure of Fury Road–while Tom Hardy conveys an extraordinary amount of pathos and emotion through facial expressions and grunts, it might not be easy to communicate that nuance through orally-transmitted epic poems and ballads. It wouldn’t surprise me if later critics find Max to be a remarkably simple character, one without much motivation or story of his own, seemingly perfectly designed to serve as a foil for Furiosa. Myths are usually messier, with a lot more dangling bits and inexplicable detours. In the film’s final epigraph, we can see a moral here, as the story begins its journey from event to history to legend:

“Where must we go….

We who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves?”

– The First History Man

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Wandering the wastelands of post-Apocalyptic Australia is here presented as also a spiritual wandering, a loss of essential humanity and self-worth. In Max’s journey from nameless wanderer, with no goal except survival, to a comrade and member of a group who fight for each other, someone willing to give up his own lifeblood to save Furiosa, we can see the narrative of how we too, the listener of the story, can redeem ourselves, can dedicate our life to something bigger, and find purpose beyond mere continuation, merely driving across the salt flats for a hundred and sixty days until you run out of food and gas. Max’s lack of nuance here is a feature, not a flaw, and his return to the masses of the Wretched at the end symbolic of his transmutation. Sometimes, you have to invent a national epic for your people, as with James Macpherson and his The Poems of Ossian (1761-1763), a compendium of supposedly ancient Celtic lore he claimed to have discovered–though it is now widely accepted that he wrote them himself in order to help popularize the Scottish cultural revival.

I suspect, however, that members of the Interpolation School would dismiss this as utter nonsense; a mountain of speculation and motivated reasoning, built upon no evidence whatsoever. To believe this school of thought, you would have to assign a level of intentionally to the Ancient Bards of the Wastelands that can be supported by almost no historical evidence, assigning the motivations of modern Citadelian nationalists backwards in time to people who likely would have no understanding of the context being ascribed to them, the classic sin of presentism. These two interpretations would dominate the academy, and most attempts at analyzing Max and his role in the Matter of the Wasteland would focus on one of these two lenses.

There is also a third school of thought, who maintain that Max was probably just some rando who wandered out of the Wasteland, helped stage the Revolution, and then wandered off again without telling anybody much more than his name. This, however, is a very disreputable theory, widely-regarded as absurdly naive, and all but the most scapegrace scholars hold it in contempt.

the law of e-Caoimhe-lent exchange

Cork-based trans organisation Gender Rebels now has a donation page if anyone wants to contribute

https://genderrebels.ie/donate/

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

This review contains spoilers.

I will admit that people with mental health issues being preyed on and disbelieved is a very natural progression from the previous film but this is a Hollywood horror movie so how people with mental health issues is handled is not good.

It does pull of neat tricks with keeping you guessing which doll is the real Chucky before undermining that that even matters at all, with the puzzling question of how Chucky gets from being a head in Andy Barclay’s safe into the asylum acting as a hint to that.

But other than providing that hint Andy is entirely superfluous to the story. You could lift everything involving him out of the movie and it would work fine and his presence just messes up the pacing, especially in the climax which seems to pause just to wrap up his part.

And now I am caught up with the TV show having gone through a series of seven films that struggle to rise above “okay”. I still enjoyed this and it will hopefully give context for whatever the show pulls in the second and third series. Glen[da] surely has to come into it at least.

A version of Missile Command for the Commodore 64 where the bottom of your screen is the game state in memory and missiles cause memory corruption, which eventually causes you to lose: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=135463.

In the video below, a missile broke my controls and caused my cursor to move down and to the left so I couldn’t stop other missiles

getting every vaccination I can so I get quintuple autism like Sun Wukong

The series pivots back to horror and actually does a decent job of it. In particular I keep turning the treatment of Nica over in my head. A part of the threat in the earlier films is Chucky targetting children who have very limited agency and whose concerns people do not take seriously and this movie replicates that with an adult through the sheer ableism that Nica faces from her family and the world, though there is a few plot contrivances to make it work and the way it ties her paraplegia into the series lore is a bit ridiculous.

The lore is also a bit of an elephant in the room. The movie felt almost like a soft reboot at the start before it starts to dump more and more of that in. This is something I kind of liked in the television series but that has a lot more room to let that seep in over time to allow the show to evolve, while here it feels more like it’s bulldozing an otherwise tight plot.

And if the series is going to keep bringing up previous stories so much it should probably try to actually have it make sense as a whole. The backstory stuff here does not feel like it fits with either the original movie or the other retconned versions of it.

Definitely an improvement over Bride of Chucky, fully embracing absolutely nonsense and grotesque comedy, but also possibly the one that has aged the most poorly out of all of these so far.

The most important thing this game layers onto the Sonic the Hedgehog template is versatile movesets for each character that gives huge breath for improvisation and recovery, allowing more room for keeping the flow going as one glides through levels.

The tools each of the four characters are also very different from each other, each resulting in their own style of movement and their own challenges in different levels.

The movesets also result in fun, expressive combat. The game has thirty-two levels and all of them have bosses to fight (though some levels are just boss fights) and some of them are really gratifying to bang one’s head against a few times till finally getting how to read and dodge and counter them.

A few other tweaks from its erinaceous roots like lack of contact damage or knockback help to keep the pace of both the running and fights smooth even if you do fuck up a bit and make the whole thing extremely satisfying.

orkz’ life cycle is to go to somewhere far away, die gruesomely and release a cloud of spores so their bloodlust is a reproductive urge

look I know you said that this was just going to be a light, casual thing but the infinite rocket crate in the corner

you said that you’re not mad at me but there was a suspiciously large cache of health packs and ammo outside the entrance to your room

An incredibly satisfying short and sweet little mini-shooter that I found myself looping over and over again.

The movie’s tone is a bit all over the place and I found the more light hearted parts a bit hokey but when it’s serious it works for me and the climax is absolutely glorious. I love Ryu and Nana.

your public transport network is your public transport net worth

Finally, I'm doing a Real blog post about a specific thing. It's been a while since I did this. This was spurred on by a tweet on Twitter and Bluesky linked at the end. I just want to spread the word.

Persona Trinity Soul

First up is an anime spinoff of Persona 3 with this song, how most people learned about the lyrics. They start at 1:12:

Burning Men's Soul

(taken from Genius)

You can see why it blew up a little on tumblr, and then on twitter. Strange lyrics for Persona music? No!

Sample CDs

It turns out that the lyrics come from a sample CD!

Masterbits CLIMAX 6 Rapsody (Vocals ll) - Swiny House

AuraOfANobody: "Like chef boyardee, my rhyme is truly cookin" stick it back in the oven it ain't fuckin done!!

So they just took it from here and dropped it in. But that would mean ANYONE could add the funny bars...

Other Uses

The meat of this post. Frustratingly I can't use WhoSampled for this since the sample CD isn't on there. So I'll have to find some manually.

I remember a tweet about how a mickey mouse game used the sample, and I'm pretty sure it was the point and click/adventure one. And I was right! Disney's Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse, song starts at 29:27.

SiIvagunner made a rip of the song!

QuichePotatoes: This manages to sound better than both the advertised track and the punchline then again one is from a sample pack that's meant to be messed around with not just dropped in without any actual editing and the other was intended as a serious promotion for a product.

There's also this video link to a stream archive where they judge for a contest to use the sample in a song. I'm not watching all of that or vouching for them, just want to put it here for completness.

Toby Fox

So Toby Fox made a Bluesky account and is doing a bit to promote it. And as part of it, he became the latest sampler of House Like Carpet.

(bluesky mirror, also this song was actually uploaded earlier without vocals)

And this was what inspired this post.

Use it yourself

I've got nothing else. Here's the archive.org link to the sample cd, it's on track 7.

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.

yo

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.

Has anyone ever made a bookmarket to open a Fediverse post in your own instance so you can interact with it?

Oh Blue Sky’s RSS feeds are very poor. They don’t seem to even include images at all.

I am glad that the big, official, publically-funded Irish dictionary website has entries like these:

not usually a dating sim person but two different cyberpunk dating sims that I had previously backed got released on Steam in the past week

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.

me: I promise I won’t go on about The Ring
me after two pints:

It’s the late nineties, Scream came out two years ago and we think horror movies are cringe unless veiled with an layer of irony. The Child’s Play series over and now it’s time for the Chucky franchise.

Okay the move into horror comedy does make sense, really. This is a series about a serial killer children’s doll. And I think this film has a lot going for it. Tiffany is great and Chuck’s new design is pretty cool and stops it from repeating the schtick of the last three films of pretending to be a cute cuddly doll who fools children.

The movie makes up a magic amulet so that this doesn’t have to be a fourth film in a row of him chasing Andy Barclay, but road trip to get the MacGuffin is a pretty boring setup too and I don’t think making Chucky and Tiff the main characters instead of his victims was a great move. Chucky is fun but he’s very one-note. Tiff is great but doesn’t have that much more depth. Jade and Jesse are just boring and I do not care about them at all. And the general 90s-ness of it grates against me.

Still, the series has reinvented itself now and I know it does eventually find its footing by the time it gets to the TV show at least, I just hope it actually did it in one of the movies before that too.

cuddling is so nice oh my god

The same basic plot again but this time in a military school. I might not be rating this so low if I wasn’t watching these back to back but I do think it is also a step down. We are getting a little sillier; Chucky gets some more abuse while pretending to be a doll and the kills are getting more elaborate or ironic. But we’re not fully into horror comedy yet and the result is neither tense nor particularly funny.

As horror sequels go it’s pretty decent but isn’t bringing much new to the table. Which Chucky now being an already established movie monster the film is not shy about showing him off from the get-go, so it lacks the first film’s sense of escalation. We do get to see a lot more puppetry though and it is very impressive work, though some lingering shots where Chucky’s face abruptly stops animating do break the illusion somewhat. In links to the TV show we have Kyle and also the theme music.

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.

This review contains spoilers.

A great movie of the sort to watch with friends while making fun of it. Many problems play off each other in a such a way that I find it difficult to decide where to start with it.

A lot of this movie was clearly written with certain set pieces in mind without much thought as to how to get from A to B. It feels like after a certain amount of time in a given location a character will declare what might as well be “well we got all the special effects shots we wanted here done, let’s go to [next location]” with the flimsiest of justifications.

It’s hard to dwell on this in the moment though because it will jump to the next scene the moment someone finishes speaking without so much as an establishing shot to give some breathing room. In at least one case it seemed like it happened mid-sentence.

Almost as jarring as the editing is the acting, which feels unpractised to the point of giving the impression that there is a lot of ad libbing happening. That the actors are expecting to hear the director yell “cut” before realising that the scene is continuing as a single shot and they need to keep it going.

Characters are just baffling in other ways too. Mo’ and Chocolate Chip Charlie talk about going after “it” before they actually see The Stuff move and then barely react to punching people and seeing their faces slough off to reveal that they are hollow inside. They then split up and Charlie proceeds to then disappear from the movie for an hour. Mo’, meanwhile, sees a newspaper article about a boy knocking cartons of Stuff over at a supermarket and with possibly the most grim and serious line delivery he gives in the entire movie declares that he needs to meet this child.

Everyone being so off-kilter perhaps adds to the tension that they might be being affected by the titular substance. I kept expecting reveals of a character having been taken over that just don’t arrive. Certainly it feels like it should be happening when characters are shouting not to let it touch them as if a single drop would be fatal while repeatedly getting it all over their faces. There’s a scene where Andrea Marcovicci’s character is meant to be pretending to eat The Stuff that includes a wonderful shot of her grimacing and cringing with white fluff dangling off of her lips, apparently having been unable to resist the temptation on set to see what the prop actually tastes like and realising that it’s awful.

The special effects are, at least, consistently entertaining, though not consistent in any other regard. The threat The Stuff poses is completely arbitrary moment to moment with it being utterly passive for extended periods while suddenly lunging at our heroes or gushing forth in tidal waves as soon as an escape route opens for them.

In the end though, the looming and arbitrary threat of the The Stuff is no match for an openly racist conspiracy theorist radio host with his own private militia.

Smile dares to ask “What if It Follows had been good?”

If this film had been described in detail to me I probably would have thought it would sound terrible and going back and looking at the trailer now it does not look promising.

But it worked for me. Everything that in the trailer seems so trite gripped me in the moment while watching the full piece. It just all came together into a really tense and occasionally brutal movie.

My only real complaint is the fakeouts where we see the protagonist doing something that turns out to have been a dream or otherwise not real which I feel breaks the rules of how the visions of the smiler (I’m just going to call it that) otherwise work.

I’ve been watching the first series of the Chucky TV show while sick and enjoying it. It starts off slow and focused, its own-self contained thing, but then as it escalates and gets sillier it starts steadily dropping in characters and stories from the movies. I’ve never seen any of the Child’s Play or Chucky movies and decided to give them a go before starting the second series of the TV show.

It’s always interesting going back to the original of a long-running series and seeing how it compares. What of the primitive iconography goes all the way back to the start? What inconvenient plot details have been forgotten? How does the glimpse of Charles Lee Ray’s pre-doll life we see in this movie compare to the flashbacks from the TV show?

Certainly how the show frames murder as a part of Chucky and Tiffany’s relationship gives a retroactive and unintentional bisexual subtext to Eddie’s underdeveloped relationship with Charles in this.

But just taking the movie on its own merits: It’s pretty good! I really like the slow escalation. The doll evolves from object of tension to a stalking presence to a slapstick slasher to a gruesome monster.

There’s some bits I think could have been left on the table. Much of the voodoo stuff and the second scene with the homeless guy who sells the doll to Karen in particular, but they don’t drag the movie down enough to ruin it. It’s easy to see why this was a hit that resulted in so many sequels.

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.

anyway I’ve been sick all week everyone be nice to me

I think I might start posting on here more again but also syndicating this feed back to my blog?

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.

This review contains spoilers.

A man believes that he is promised the middle class American life of ownership of a suburban home, wife and 2½ children and cannot fathom why he does not have what he is owed. The person who sympathises with him the most in the movie is a Nazi and he is incapable of self-reflection over this or anything else, going to his grave not understanding how he became the bad guy.

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

There is an incredible satisfaction in nailing a level of Sonic and/or Shadow Generations. It often feels almost as much like a rhythm game as a platformer, giving you that steady flow of obstacles to react to as you start off sight-reading and then eventually memorising the feel and flow of the stages, with plenty of alternate paths and shortcuts to tease out as well.

The contextual DOOM POWERS add extra layers to this for specific levels and Shadow turning into a squid now or using evil HM03 Surf is just kind of funny to see and Shadow’s chaos control power adds an interesting element of resource management to every stage as well, especially if you are trying to get the fastest possible speedrun time as, hilariously, when Shadow stops time he also stops the level timer.

The music is, like the levels, composed of banger remix after banger remix. I am listening to Space Colony ARK Act 1 as I write this and I will probably be listening to it a lot in the future.

The writing was also a surprisingly highlight. The plot is fairly simple but Ian Flynn uses the giant Sonic lore vault in his mind to weave different threads together in interesting and funny ways without coming across as fan wank. There’s a lot of references to past games but there’s usually some sort of point to it rather than saying “hey look at this thing!” and the supplementary material around the game with the Robotnik family history makes me hope Flynn or Evan Stanley get to explore Ivo Robotnik’s relationship to his family more in the comics or a future game. And the way the third boss was handled is so funny.

It’s good.

Went as a vampire for Halloween

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 pages use Tate Regular, collect my pages is Slender 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.

Previous roundup here.

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.

the vibe here really comes off as lesbian couple going on advenetures and also their supportive friend Sonic the Hedgehog is there

https://youtu.be/G-QS1N6rGK8

which is, frankly, the ideal relationship dynamic

concept: rewrite a bunch of my website code to split out sections from each other more cleanly so I can more easily make small posts with less effort

result: oh god oh fuck everything is broken and I have way to many unstaged changes what was I in the middle of doing a week ago before I went on holiday if I want to post anything I need to stash fifty files and change branches which takes several minutes right now

Though honestly that describes the situation more a week ago than right now. I do have the podcast processing stuff finished now and I just need to do similar rewrites with the Pico-8 processing. That should🤞🏻 be easier now that I have done the podcast stuff and can base what I do on how I handled that.

I cannot stop laughing at this line. (He is talking about Shadow’s inhibitor rings)

Game is great, though.

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

after all the laser hair removal this is what it looks like if I don’t shave for nine days

Actually there is a bit more visible in person than comes through in a photograph, but it’s almost all grey.

people who know about photography I am thinking of getting a little polaroid-style camera for making little memento snaps. Image quality is not of paramount importance but y'know would be nice. Don't want to spend a fortune. Any particular recommendations?

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

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

Previous roundup here.

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 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 11^th 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!

k=2^13::s::for a=0,k do
n=0 for x=0,8 do
n+=peek(k*3+a+x/3+x%3*64-65)end
poke(a,n==12 and 4 or n==16 and peek(a))end
memcpy(k*3,0,k)goto s

That is the entire source code for my my Pico-8 implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, which you can run here:

I made this as a tweetcart back when tweets were still 140 characters and I am still pretty proud of it. Let’s run through how this works!

If you have never heard of it, the Game of Life is a type of cellular automation, a simulation consisting of a grid of cells. Each cell is either alive or dead and with each iteration of the simulation the state of each cell changes based on the following rules, as copied from Wikipedia:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

It’s pretty hard to see how those rules translate to the above code, so I’ll try to explain it as best I can. It relies on some tricks specific to Pico-8.

The first thing in the code is is setting k=2^13, that is 8,192. This is a magic number that is going to have a few uses.

Then we set a label ::s::. This is a label we can use goto later on in the code to return to.

Then we start a for loop, for a=0,k do, counting from 0 to 8,192. This is the length, in bytes, of the part of the the Pico-8 virtual machine’s memory that holds the current screen state. Pico-8 has a resolution of 128×128 pixels, for 16,384 pixels total, and each pixel can have one of 16 colours. That means that the colour of each pixel can be stored in 4 bits—half a byte—and therefore the full screen information can be stored in 8,192 bytes. We are going to treat every byte as a single cell, which means every cell is actually made of two pixels. You can see how every cell in the simulation is one brown and one black pixel side-by-side.

The reason we’re doing this is so that we can iterate over the current screen state in order to determine the next iteration and which cells survive or die. By examining the screen memory directly we don’t have to create a different data structure for storing the cell information; it’s just whatever’s currently on screen. This saves an awful lot of characters.

Then, inside the loop, we start by setting n=0, this is going to be used to track the number of neighbours that every cell has.

Then we start up a new loop, for x=0,8 do, to iterate over all the neighbouring cells.

Which brings us to the first complicated expression, n+=peek(k*3+a+x/3+x%3*64-65). This is adding up the values of all the neighbours (for the purposes of this implementation, each cell is considered to be be one of its own neighbours). It peeks at the memory addresses of each of the neighbours, then adds it to the running total, stored in n.

k*3 (24,576 or 0x6000) is the start of the screen memory, the starting point for iterating over the screen data. Adding a to it is iterating over each cell in sequence in the memory.

Every byte (cell) is going to have a value of 0, for dead, or 4, for alive. I’ll explain why I used the value of 4 rather than the more obvious value of 1 later.

The screen memory is arranged in the order you would probably expect, it starts in the top left corner and scans left to right, top to bottom. The first 64 bytes are the first line of the screen, the next 64 bytes are the second line, etc. As such getting the cells to the left and right of the left and right of the current one is just a matter of taking away or adding one to the address we’re querying. Getting the cells above and below means subtracting or adding 64, respectively.

To get all nine neighbours (including the current cell itself) we need to check nine memory addresses: The current address, k*3+a, and offsets of -1, +1, -64, +64, -65, -63, +63, +65. This is accomplished with the +x/3+x%3*64-65 part of the expression as it iterates from 0 to 8. +x/3 will go from +0, +1, +2 over the course of the loop¹. +x%3*64 cycles through +0, +64 and +128. Then the -65 corrects these to be centred around 0 (-1 for the horizontal and -64 for the vertical).

You may notice that this is going to behave weirdly at screen edges: For the first and last row it will be checking for “neighbours” in memory before and after the screen data. These are simply going to be blank as they aren’t otherwise being used for this programme. Additionally, due to the layout of the memory the left and right edges will wrap around and be treated as neighbours of each other, with a one pixel vertical offset. This weird behaviour is going to be the price we have to pay for trying to fit a mathematical simulation into a tweet².

Once we have the total value of n totted up it’s time to write the next iteration of the simulation: poke(a,n==12 and 4 or n==16 and peek(a)).

Poke is the opposite of peak, it lets us write to a value in memory, and we’re going to just starting writing at address 0x0, which in Pico-8 is normally spritesheet data, but we’re not using sprites in this programme so we can treat it as effectively free memory.

The poke expression is a bit weird but effectively we’re either going to poke a value of 4, 0 or the current value of the cell (peek(a)).

Let’s go back to our bullet points from Wikipedia for a second. We need to rewrite them slightly because we’ve changed the way we counted living neighbours to include the cell itself as its own neighbour. Rephrasing it in those terms we have:

• A live cell with fewer than three live neighbours dies.
• A live cell with three or four neighbours lives.
• A live cell with more than four neighbours dies.
• A dead cell with exactly three live neighbours lives.

Or, simplifying it:

• Any cell with three live neighbours is alive in the next iteration.
• Any cell with four live neighbours keeps its current value in the next iteration.
• Any other cell is dead in the next iteration.

Or, n==12 and 4 or n==16 and peek(a). If n==12 this evaluates as 4, the value we’re using for a living cell. If n==16 this evaluates as peek(a), write whatever the value for the cell is currently. Otherwise this evaluates as nil, and fortunately for us Pico-8 treats poke(a,nil) as being equivalent to poke(a,0), meaning every other case produces a dead cell.

Now we’ve iterated across the entire screen and made the next iteration of our simulation, the only thing left to do is copy the new iteration into the screen memory (memcpy(k*3,0,k)) and then start our loop again (goto s).

That’s it! Except, you might wonder, what about our starting state? We didn’t set any initial data, so why is there anything here in the first place when you run it? Well, our initial data is whatever is on screen when we run the code. You can have any starting state you want simply by having something different drawn to the screen when you hit run.

And that’s also why I used 4 for the value of a living cell: it produced interesting results when running directly after Pico-8’s boot screen rather than dying instantly, which happens if you used 1³. 4 was chosen by trial and error. It’s also a bit easier to look at than using 1, which uses a dark blue colour rather than brown that’s harder to see against the black.

You can play around with this code yourself using Pico-8 Education Edition⁴ or check out my other Pico-8 projects

And that’s (actually) it! I hope you found this interesting.

I am trialling a comments section using Cusdis. There should be a comment section below this and every other bog post as well as every entry in the gallery.

This means most pages on here now use Javascript which makes me a little sad but maybe it is worth it.

Or maybe I will just decide to remove this again! We’ll see.

In any case feel free to say hello in a comment below.

As Cohost shuts down I have been making a fuss about moving away from social media and I am not the only one. We are in the final week before it goes read-only and people have been sharing blogs and websites and my RSS reader has been filling up. So here I will share some things I have been reading lately, both from Cohost people and just other interesting articles.

Makeup

vampy lipsticks — Tulip

There is going to be a lot of more typically nerdy stuff in here so let’s start with something else. I don’t wear makeup much these days but I am not immune to black lipstick recommendations.

as fall approaches, my craving for deep, dark lipsticks increases… my dark metamorphosis.

OK, well, technically it’s Vampire Season year-round here - i don’t need Halloween as an excuse to embrace black clothes and dark lipstick. but still! i thought it would be appropriate to showcase some of my favorite vampy lip colors from my personal collection.

Hardware

The Working Archivist’s Guide to Enthusiast CD-ROM Archiving Tools — Misty

Misty digs through CD-ROM preservation and touches on why the history of the CD as an audio format first and data format second makes it more complicated than it might seem.

CD audio isn’t a file-based format, and instead uses a series of unnamed, numbered tracks. CD-ROM extends this by making it possible for a track on a disc to contain data and a filesystem instead of audio. Since CD-ROM extends CD audio, the two formats aren’t mutually exclusive: a CD-ROM disc can still contain multiple tracks, and it can even contain more than one data track or a mixture of data and audio tracks.

Hacking a Hitachi Magic Wand (Plus) — Kore

This is just cool.

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.

Software

software rendering is awesome — erysdren

i fuckin love software rendering. the act of creating a fully realized 3D scene entirely in your own program, without the aid of OpenGL or DirectX or any GPU whatsoever. something about that is so charming to me. it leads to so many interesting technical design decisions and shortcuts taken to get it to run fast (if that is the goal).

Social media

RIP Cohost — Mike Egan

I had to have at least one R.I.P. Cohost article in here.

From a design perspective, compared to all other social media, Cohost was a paradise. No numbers, no algorithm, no global feed, no discover page, and a lot of really useful ways to curate what shows up in your feed. Having a reverse-chronological feed of only the things I wanted to see from the people I asked to see them from has done wonders for my brain.

It was never about the numbers — Aurahack

Also somewhat of a reflection on Cohost but also on how numbers and stats make you worse.

The close friends I made there motivated me to get better because they were further in their art journey than I was. I looked up to them not because they were my favorite artists but because they would create alongside me and it would inspire me! I wanted to grow like they were visibly growing. Over time, I did, and my following would start to outpace theirs and… I think that’s where it started getting kind of nasty.

Computer games

Everywhere and Nowhere: Emptiness in Level Design — Nat Clayton

Nat Clayton talks about in-between spaces in games both in her work and in other games. She has also made me aware of the Weird Maps series by Whomobile which is great.

There’s a dead-end I think about every single day, tucked away in the back of Half-Life 2’s airboat chapter. It’s a right turn where you’re supposed to go left, a gun turret and a headcrab ambush and some secret crates for those nosy enough to go scavenging. It’s one of a thousand dead ends in Half-Life 2, but this one sticks out to me. As the sickly golden twilight paints the concrete runoff, illuminating basic shanty structures, the sparseness of the space is unavoidable. The roar of airboat fans and chase music given way to gusts of wind and mechanical creaking. Some designer decided that someone once lived here, died here, and painted that scene with an absolute minimum of brushes and textures.

Listening, Watching, Gaming — Chris Hall in First Person Scholar

Not a million miles away from this but in the much more academic side of games writing here’s a piece on the paratext created by submerging oneself in the soundscape and environment of a game level.

As I write this, I have open on another screen, as I often do, one of these ambient paratexts—in this case, an hour-long video from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. There’s no music, no avatar, only a first-person scene at the ground level providing a nighttime view of the exterior of the Graniny Gorki research outpost in Tselinoyarsk, the Soviet Union. Directly before us is a high fence, followed by patches of grass and the concrete façade of the facility. To the far right a guard patrols within the fenced area, as oblivious as the sleeping dog nearby. Presumably we perceive the scene through the eyes of the game’s protagonist, Naked Snake, lying prone, but we needn’t be aware of this, and Snake provides no signs of his presence. The peaceful scene is backgrounded by the ambient sounds of the southern USSR forest, the constant chirping of bugs punctuated by the faraway cries of nocturnal birds.

Doctor Who

Perverting the Course of Human History (War of the Sontarans) — Elizabeth Sandifer

I have been enjoying Elizabeth Sandifer ripping the Chibnall-era of Doctor Who to shreds as part of her long-running TARDIS Eruditorum series analysing the entire run of Doctor Who from the 1963 to the present.

You figure there’s got to be this entire shadow Chibnall era—the one that exists only in Davies’ head and perhaps some text messages to his mates. No more detailed than the Leekley era, perhaps, but undoubtedly there. Like poor Penny in Partners in Crime we can see its shadows—obviously The Timeless Children would have stuck larger and more mind-wrenchingly than the rest, with Davies at once transfixed by its potential and vexed by its production. Ironically, he’s the one person who seems to have been substantially influenced by the Chibnall era.

The Problem with Doctor Who — Luna

An older post but keeping with on the topic of Doctor Who: Luna points out a problem with the current Doctor Who intro segment that has been in place since the 2023 60th anniversary specials. We can only hope that they fix it by this year’s Christmas special.

But something is seriously amiss in the 2023 specials, and neither I nor my inner child can let it go. And it’s not the [whatever the bigots are angry about this time], nor even the [actually legitimate criticism here]. No, none of that. The probl-

Timing.

-em with the 2023 specials is… oh. Right.

Serious articles for serious people

AI and the American Smile — Jenka

In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions.

‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine — Jason Koebler for 404 Media

“I don’t know who needs to hear this but I’m scared too all the time of losing the health that I have. I know what it feels like,” he says. “I know what it feels like to not know what’s wrong with your body and to have to go shop for a stranger who has the authority to maybe or maybe not give you what you need. I know what it feels like to know what’s wrong with your body and to know what you need and to be told you can’t have it because the infrastructure has failed and it’s not available.”

The Third Sex — Talia Bhatt

Here is a morbid, maddening irony: anthropological scholarship, distinctly Western anthropological scholarship, that for decades has touted the maxim of ‘binary gender’ being an ‘imposed’, ‘colonial’ concept, has now been cited by an Indian court in an opinion that explicitly third-sexes the hijra and purports that recognizing them as women would ‘violate their constitutional rights’. It is seemingly only imperialism when populations who seek the technologies of transition and legible womanhood are granted access to them, while the opinions of Western academics shaping local politics is merely sparkling scholarship.

I have decided to move the location of my RSS¹ feeds. I will set up some redirects and hopefully everything will go smoothly but I decided to write this to let anyone following them know just in case it breaks something.

I’ll publish this post first then move everything little while later to give it a chance to be picked up in RSS readers before anything has the chance to go wrong.

I am also going to change the URL scheme for posts from /year/month/day/title to /bog/title.

/blog.xml -> /bog.atom

/feed.xml -> /everything.atom

/gallery.xml -> /gallery.atom

/foṫa.xml -> /dánlann.atom

A different GIF will displayed below depending on your browser’s prefers-reduced-motion and prefers-color-scheme settings. There’s four different possibilities:

I hadn’t used prefers-reduced-motion before but I saw a chost from Kore linking to a blog post about accessibility and GIFs and decided I wanted to follow it but I also didn’t want to have to manually write the HTML code for it each time. Thankfully programming is the art of being tactically lazy and I can put some effort in up front and solve an interesting problem once and then let my site generator handle it automatically from then on.

Also thankfully I had done something like this before after taking inspiration how Luna’s blog handles images. I don’t have high D.P.I. images but I do have different dark and light mode versions of images for the The “the Ring” Podcast series tracker chart and the Dracula International diagram I made.

The way I had initially done that was, characteristically, a mess. I wrote a custom custom Liquid tag to handle it which meant that instead of actually using the existing, basic Markdown syntax I had to put images into my posts with something like this:

{% image /bog/images/easóg.gif %}

So revisiting this to include prefers-reduced-motion options I decided to do it differently this time. A way that would allow me to just type the normal Markdown syntax and let my code handle everything else.

![A white cat](/bog/images/easóg.gif "Easóg")

The next step was to look into how to extend and customise Jekyll’s Markdown parsing and output but that sounds hard and I didn’t want to do that so I just used a regular expression¹:

/((!!?)\[([^\[\]]*)\]\((.*?) *("([^"]*)")?\))/

This runs against the raw Markdown before it’s parsed into HTML and pulls out the link, alt text and title. That last part is also a big improvement over the custom tag I previously made as that didn’t support alt text or titles at all.

The code then takes the link and checks if there are any alternative versions listed in the site’s static file list like easóg.dark.gif, easóg.static.gif or easóg.dark.static.gif. when writing a new post now I don’t have to do anything extra other than have those other versions with the right naming scheme in the same folder as the original image.

From there it it compiles it into HTML and replaces the original Markdown in the document:

<picture>
  <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark) and (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
  <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.gif" media="(prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
  <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.static.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" />
  <img src="/bog/images/easóg.static.gif" alt="A white cat" title="Easóg" />
</picture>

Well, actually it does something else too. You might have noticed in the regular expression up above I am actually checking for an optional, second exclamation mark at the start of the image tag. That’s my own extension of the syntax. If I’m doing my own parsing I might as well go wild with it. If there are two exclamation marks at the start of the tag it also wraps the image in a link to itself and adds an extra class:

<a href="/bog/images/easóg.static.gif" class="dynamic-image-link">
  <picture>
    <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark) and (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
    <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.gif" media="(prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
    <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.static.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" />
    <img src="/bog/images/easóg.static.gif" alt="A white cat" title="Easóg" />
  </picture>
</a>

The classes are to enable a little bit of Javascript² to swap out the destinations of the links on the fly when swapping if the user’s media preferences change. Whichever one you currently see in the browser is the one you’ll go to if you click on it.

I might review the double bang syntax if I can figure out something that could be added to the tag that would get stripped out and ignored by a normal Markdown parser for better compatibility. If only Markdown had comments.

Is this a robust solution? Absolutely not! Will I eventually run into annoying weird cases that make me bang my head against the wall as a result of this? I already have! While writing this very bog post! Because the regular expression cannot tell that the markdown code example I have above is not meant to be parsed and turned it into HTML, making it impossible to show the before part of the before and after. Did this make me go back and implement this in a better way? No!

I added some metadata to this post telling it do disable my custom image parsing, made the parser skip doing anything if it finds that metadata on a page and then hardcoded the example at the top of this page. That’s right: This post isn’t actually using the one thing it’s meant to be demonstrating!

This post uses obscure Unicode codepoints and custom fonts which may not display in RSS readers and some browsers.

A few years ago I made a Gaelic-style monospaced pixel font that I called Cló Piocó-8. This was originally just testing out the custom font mode in Pico-8 for fun. I then ended up making a truetype font using Pixel Forge.

If custom fonts can display it looks like this.

This was mainly for fun and I haven’t used it terribly much.

Around the same time I made it I also made a similar pixel font for Ogham. I think the reason for making these separately was because the main font was monospaced but the Ogham one wasn’t? Or perhaps it just didn’t occur to me to include the Ogham section with the original font at the time. Either way I’ve decided I wasn’t happy with them being two separate fonts so I made a new version of Cló Piocó-8 that includes the Ogham block.

I also changed another character: R.

The original R character in the font was more straightforwardly based on an Insular R and looked like this: R.

You might be wondering what an Insular R is.

Insular? Why is this R so withdrawn?

Because in the middle ages Ireland was a pretty isolated place, and Irish monks were left to their devices, eventually developing a style of writing called Insular script.

When printing came to Ireland, which took a while, most things were printed in English. Gaeilgeoirí didn’t have much to read (but most of them couldn’t, anyway). The first book printed with an Irish type was Aibidil Gaoidheilge agus Caiticiosma in 1571, using a font which had been commissioned by Elizabeth Tudor, though it was actually a bit of a hodgepodge of Gaelic, Roman and Italic, with the new Gaelic letters resembling the Anglo-Saxon type made by John Day.

Since then Irish has been printed in both Roman and Gaelic type, the former often simply due to practical considerations of the availability or expense of Gaelic fonts or because it was seen as more modern. It is rare to see Gaelic script used now except for in decorative text such as signs and plaques.

But I quite like the Gaelic-style scripts and—as evidenced by my homepage—I quite like playing with typefaces. I use Mínċló from Gaelċló for most the Gaelic script on this site.

But I will admit there can be some drawbacks to readability. Particularly with f, s and r, or rather their Insular variants, which Unicode has unique codepoints for: ꝼ ꞅ and ꞃ, respectively.

ꝼ ꞅ ꞃ

Compared to a Roman f, the Insular ꝼ almost appears as if it has been hammered into the ground like a post. The tail of the character dips below the line and the stroke is level with it, the top of the character only reaching to the same height as a small letter like e. But it is still distinct and recognisable as an f.

The problem starts with s. You might be familiar with a long s, which is basically an old-fashioned way of writing an s where it looks like an f without the stroke in the middle. The Insular ꞅ similarly strongly resembles an Insular ꝼ and if one is more familiar with Roman type it is very easy to confuse them at a glance. Many modern Gaelic typefaces simply use a Roman-style s instead for clarity, or offer the use of both using stylistic sets. I opted to use a Roman-style s when making Cló Piocó-8 for clarity. When your characters are only four characters high you need to be careful about legibility and it’s very common to do this anyway with Gaelic typefaces for both s and r.

But I still, in that first version, decided to go with an Insular ꞃ, a character that resembles a cross between the Insular ꞅ and an n, or perhaps a Greek η with the tail on the other side. In an attempt to make it not look too much like an n I cut one pixel off the right-side, to try and maybe make it look a bit more like a Roman r, but really it just makes it look weird. I left it like that for a long time, but I was never fully satisfied with it.

Deciding to change it

When I was making my custom cartridge designs for my Pico-8 projects (something else I could write a bog post on, really) I decided to use Cló Piocó-8 to sign my name and the URL of this site on them. This made me have to face that bloody R again. I was never happy with the compromise I made originally and quite frankly people were not going read it as an r. I don’t want anyone typing “oakneef.ie” into their browsers and finding nothing there.

It was here that I came up with my new compromise: R. It is mostly an upper-case Roman R but with a little bit of a tail sticking down for a bit of Insular influence. I have actually started scribbling my r like this when handwriting in Irish as well.

It took me a while to actually bring this change back to the font file itself but when making the 88×31 pixel badge for this site I was reusing elements from my Pico-8 cartridge design and it reminded me to go back and make the change, and I while doing it I also rolled the Ogham font into it as well, which I had also been intending to do for a while.

So check out Cló Piocó-8.

Appendix: Comparison of fonts

Source for historical claims: The Irish Character in Print: 1571-1923, E.W. Lynam

I have created a new type of communication where I write articles and then “post” them to my log on the web. A “web log” if you will, or “bog” for short.

This site was originally just a gallery of things I made presented in a kind of formal, terse, way. I’m pivoting it to a personal site, though the gallery is still here.

This left me to figure out what I was going to marry the two functions for a redesign and also how to handle the transition with the existing RSS feeds. What I have settled on is having a feed for this bog, a separate feed for the gallery and having the existing feed combine both.

There is also the feed for the Irish-language version of the gallery which will remain in place. Maybe I might try bogging in Irish too to practise it more again, in which case that will probably also become a combined feed for the two. But first the codebase and CSS for this site needs a major cleanup.