What I’m reading vol. ⅩⅤ
Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ
I find myself feeling rather inarticulate this afternoon as I sit down to write this, so my comments on each piece shall be brief.
Games
Sandustry is the first factory simulation game I've played that gets heaps right — Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
Sandustry is probably the first factory game I've played that really communicates the physicality of industrial waste, the appalling magnificence of it, for all the dinkiness of its 2D artstyle. It's the only factory game that really makes me think of post-industrial landscapes, like those colossal spoil piles above Aberllefenni. It also engineers a weird exuberance inside the concept of 'byproduct'.
It’s been added to my Steam wishlist.
Technology
CD-ROM Journal - A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS — Misty De Méo
I gestured briefly at the PASSTHRU folder earlier, but I really want to dig deeper into that because this is something very cool. I said before that when you're connecting to a BBS like this, you're connecting to one system rather than the internet as a whole. This is a bit of an exception to that. FirstClass had support for what they called "relays", which allowed BBSs running the same software to talk to each other and exchange messages. It wasn't a realtime connection; this still isn't the internet. It's a little bit more like snail mail. The servers would sync with each other every day, or once every few days, fetching new replies in the conferences they were sharing and transmitting any replies that had been made from a different server. It's quite a bit more "slow internet" than we'd probably tolerate today, but in the pre-internet era the idea you could be talking to these other communities at all would have felt revolutionary.
A really interesting look at early digital communication.
La Fin: I've finished remaking all the websites in H2O: Just Add Water — Alyx Wijers
A little over a year ago, I published a post (“I wasted $410 recreating a fake website that shows up for 10 seconds of a TV show almost no one remembers “) about having re-created a website that showed up for a few seconds in an episode “H2O: Just Add Water”. In the title I described it as “…a TV show almost no one remembers”, which was evidently incorrect, because after posting on Mastodon I discovered that it seemed to be widely known amongst German audiences.
There’s one more fake website that appears in H2O: Just Add Water: greekmythicalcreatures.com
This is just very cute.
An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt — Saleh
To understand why every machine since Gutenberg has wrestled this script and mostly lost, you need one structural fact: Arabic is cursive always. There is no print-versus-handwriting distinction, no block letters. The letters connect in stone inscriptions, in manuscripts, in metal, on screens. Each letter therefore changes shape depending on its neighbours (an isolated form, an initial, a medial, a final), and six letters refuse to connect forward at all, which breaks words into joined clusters and gives the script its rhythm. The shapes are not costumes over some underlying "real" letter. The positional variation is the letter.
Really good read on the history of digital typography for Arabic. Seen from Natalie Weizenbaum sharing it. Speaking of…
I really do think you should learn to use the Linux command line. — Bruno Dias & Natalie Weizenbaum
I really do think you should learn to use the Linux (or Mac, I suppose) command line if you can find the time at all. It is, genuinely, a dramatically more empowering way to use your computer than the alternative, and it will enable to think about your computer as a tool in ways that are completely different.
Cocosigning this post and Weizenbaum also gives a nice quick primer of navigating the command line.
Why do projects reject AI contributions? — Darío Samo
If we were to go by actual lines of code, generated projects easily contain over tens to hundreds of times more documentation and code than human-made ones do. This is intentional by design: the AI companies do not want these projects to be maintainable by anything but their tooling, so you'll have no choice but to keep paying them to work on it.
A good Reddit post from an accomplished game modder on the problems of maintaining or working with generated codebases.
Politics
The End of Trans Rights in the UK Is the Start of Democratic Collapse — Toby Buckle
Unlike, say, Brexit which had rights implications but could point to democratic inputs (however flawed), nothing in the story I told above was backed by any democratic input of any kind. In fact, all of it was elites acting in explicit defiance of the democratic inputs they did receive.
Buckle hammers home how utterly undemocratic the movement against trans rights in the
The Real Class Politics Behind Ireland’s Fuel Protests — Conor McCabe
The oft-used phrase, squeezed middle, may indeed apply here – not in the mainstream media meaning of cost-of-living and prices, but rather in terms of position-of-production and power. There is of course a qualitative difference between a pushbike and heavy goods vehicle, but when seen in terms of mode and relations of production that difference somewhat fades.
A Marxist analysis of the class position of the Irish fuel protests from earlier in the year.
The End of the 100 Year Government — Simon McGarr
Protection of the property-owning class has been the water that Irish politics swims through, invisible to its fishy participants but explaining nearly everything. It is why our housing crisis exists and why it cannot, apparently, be solved. Solving it would mean a political evolution on a scale of growing legs and lungs and actually climbing out of that water.
An essay on the class priorities of the Irish governments of the last century.
History
The Workers and the Tombs of the Ancient Dead — Margaret Killjoy
Last week I researched the first labor strike in known history. The tomb builders living in a town called Deir el-Medina in Egypt went on strike on November 14th, 1152 BCE. Three thousand, one hundred, and seventy-eight years ago. And their strike looked an awful lot like ours today. They set down their tools and staged sit-ins, they blocked roads, they marched, they engaged in workplace sabotage. They wrote letters to the authorities requesting a redress of grievances. They stole from work. They did everything that we do today.
And a meditation on labour struggle throughout history.
The Empresa de China & the Hapsburg Bid for World Supremacy — Nathan Goldwag
The Jesuits proposed an invasion force to be spearheaded by 10,000 Spanish and Portuguese troops, augmented by 6,000 Filipino auxiliaries and between 5,000-7,000 Japanese Christian mercenaries, leading a two-pronged invasion through Guangdong and Fujian.
A part of colonial history that I had no idea of.