What I’m reading vol. X

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

Did you know that due to the differences in power grid standards the Mega Drive CPU ran at 50 Hz in Europe and Australia rather than its original 60 Hz? That means that if the programming for the games didn’t compensate for it that meant they ran one sixth slower, even the music. This is what the original Sonic the Hedgehog sounded like to me as a child and most of these songs still sound strange to me at full speed. And following on from that…

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PAL retro games deserve to be preserved, respected, and re-released — Kimimi

In most cases these aren’t the games an entire continent (and beyond) grew up with, and we need to seriously consider how successfully the industry’s caring for its past by so quickly and easily throwing out the likes of Castlevania: The New Generation (Bloodlines), Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer’s Call (Nocturne), and Kirby’s Fun Pak (Kirby Super Star). For millions of us there is no preservation to be found in these otherwise excellent re-releases nor any chance to revisit a childhood favourite, because the games we played often aren’t even mentioned, let alone included.

Yes I have a bee in my bonnet about this. There’s another interesting thing to note here: PAL versions of Japanese games also often had quite different English translations to the North American releases. As a child I played Soleil on my Mega Drive, saving the world with Johnny the dog, Charlie the cheetah and Penguy the Penguin, while a girl in Canada playing Crusader of Centy on her Genesis would have met Mac, Flash and Chilly instead¹. Nintendo did this as well and for a lot longer than you might expect. The most recent game that I know off the top of my head that had two different English translations for PAL and NTSC regions was Splatoon in 2015.

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Overview of my Sun Microsystems Type 7 Keyboard and a little Guide on how to use the Compose key in Linux — Pom

I haven’t bound all of them, but having extra keys to do with as you please is sooooooo nice. I really wish I could get, like, relegendable keycaps where I can write down what alternate functions I have them mapped to. (this is where the Type 5 would kinda come in handy, since that has MX switches, that I could easily put relegendable ones on). So far I’ve mainly have them mapped to window controls, like Stop and Undo each move windows between my monitors. The Help key is one I’m kinda unsure on, since I’ve often hit it by accident instead of Escape so I don’t want something else pop up in situations where this happens. Maybe I could map something to hitting Help along with a modifier? I’m not sure.

I haven’t done much manual key remapping myself but on the Manjaro install on my main desktop I have keyboard layout set to an Irish Cló Gaelaċ layout that gives me easy access to writing vowels with síntí fada and consonants with poncanna séiṁiṫe using the AltGr key but a lot of other handy or cute little key combinations for different characters, including smart quotes, en and em dashes, and the Tironian et (⁊) which is still sometimes used in place of an ampersand in Irish and Scottish Gaelic and is appropriately on AltGr+⇧ Shift+7.

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Blaugust Notes on Comments — Rabbit

“If you don’t have comments enabled, then you’re just preaching your truth. You don’t want to have a conversation.”

Correct.

Okay, no, not really–but why is that so bad? If you believe this, why do you think it’s a bad thing for someone to opt out of other people’s viewpoints on it? It’s their blog. A blog or personal website is intrinsically a different thing than a social media account. It is entirely customizable and on your terms. Why is it a bad thing to have full ownership of your space in an era of the internet where we own so little?

Agree wholeheartedly with xir on this. I do have comments on here but I mostly just hope for the occasional nice little comments for my friends. This is my website and I am fully and unapologetically in control of what appears on it. I am not averse to feedback or discussion but if you try to post a comment I don’t like I will simply delete it.

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Further Notes on the Death of the Author — Rabbit

We watched this during critique in class and sat afterwards in horror, none of us willing to be the first person to speak up, until finally someone broke and said, “Is this a film advocating for suicide?”

She was upset with us for thinking such a thing when, to her mind, this was a film about getting in touch with nature to brighten your life. Obviously. Unfortunately, no matter what her intentions were, she had definitely just made a film that was pro-suicide. She was too unskilled at that time to be able to make a film that met her intentions, and also too unskilled to identify what the film was actually about.

Some more notes from Rabbit.

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if you love it, download it — Erysdren

this post started out as a rant about the current state of media preservation on the modern internet… but ranting and complaining rarely helps anything.

so instead, i have written a few short guides and notes about ways you can help contribute to media preservation by doing it your damn self. most of the guides lean very technical, but i try to give appropriate explanations and links to the tools and documentation where i can.

I think that every blog that I currently follow that does its own little post roundups has already linked to this but I will add my voice to the choir as someone who was recently struggling to download and preserve something myself.

Laura Michet also recommended a few other downloaders.

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Let’s stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity — Baldur Bjarnason

Today, big chunks English-language management and executive culture are effectively the opposite of what we know works when managing organisations.

One example are open offices: these have been proven many times over to harm productivity, focus, collaboration, and employee well-being. They only improve real estate costs and employee surveillance.

I love the efficient allocation of resources under capitalism.

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An infodump on vaginal sex, by a lesbian — Elilla

Lately the bottoms I’ve had the privilege of bedding all have described my fingers with the word “magic”, so I figured I must be doing something right. Might as well write down what I’ve learned from a lifetime of chasing skirt.

I already linked to this on my own recent post on penile sex and might as well throw it in here too.