What I’m reading vol. ⅩⅥ
Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ
Today’s musical accompaniment will be relevant further down the post.
Games
Interview with Satoshi Yokokawa — Ashley Rojas
Cool interview with the enemy designer of Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I’ve always thought that the badniks in Sonic 3 had a more industrial look to them compared to the enemies from the previous games and I’ve always really liked that about it and it pleases me to hear the intent behind that being articulated. I also love Mecha Sonic’s design and it’s really lovely to hear him appreciate the fan art and reinterpretations of his designs. Also look at this short fan animation, it’s really cool.
Given that setting, since the Death Egg had suffered enormous damage from crashing due to Sonic's attack in "Sonic 2," I thought the mecha production facilities inside the fortress must also have been heavily damaged, making it difficult to carry out production as before.
From there, I arrived at the idea that Dr. Eggman, needing a fighting force to oppose Sonic under conditions where the production facilities weren't functioning properly, would gather up usable parts and hastily assemble machines to deal with the situation.
mantle.nes breakdown blog part 1 — Melon
First of (so far) two posts where Melon breaks down the development of their NES recreation of the “original game” in Deltarune chapter 3.
I had previous experience working on NES games already - at least, I had tinkered a little bit and had enjoyed enormously Pikuma’s course on beginning-to-end gamedev with 6502 assembly on the NES a few years back, so I felt confident I could pull it off! Even if the journey seemed daunting, I just had to go one step at a time…
The Web
Self-censorship practices as anti-shibboleth — Laura Michet
Oh do I hate algospeak. I stopped talking to a therapist once in part because I lost a massive amount of respect for him for using the word “unalive”.
In my experience, self-censoring adult terminology on that site in particular is a great sign that you're dealing with someone so incurious, with such a limited experience of online conversation, that they don't understand where they are, or who they're dealing with, or who's accountable for maintaining the peace in the community where they're speaking. I do not want to read the things these people write, and I do not want to talk to them. I'd rather not be the person who teaches them to be curious.
Hulagirl.txt — Deli
An investigation into the origin of classic old web GIF.
Perhaps enough time has passed that she is merely an inconsequential sighting to the average webuser, a rarity of a signal overlooked in the noise. There was once a time that she danced her way across webpages all over geocities and brought a small injection of joy and energy to whatever page she graced. Early on, she was a known quantity but the passage of time and memory made her mysterious. Stayed mysterious for a long while since, honestly, who really cares about the provenance of a free-to-use gif that is barely 5kB?
I Found Evidence Of My House Spinning — Blackle Mori
Some fiction for once, recommended by Laura Michet again. Interesting use of HTML as a medium.
This is the story of the most inexplicable thing to ever happen to me. It still keeps me up at night, just rolling it around in my head as I fail to make it make sense. This is the story of how I took a video from inside a recurring dream.
Animating Bad Apple with no JS, no CSS, & minimal HTML — Vivian
Explainer of Vivan’s very cute little Bad Apple animation using a technique similar to Geocities HTML Chat.
I wanted to show the Bad Apple animation without JS or CSS, with an impressively minimal set of HTML tags, by abusing slow chunked response, forcing the browser to load the page piece-by-piece. That's happening now (unless you're reading some archive) but how can we use it for animation?
The Crawler Zoo
Less of an article and more of a cool website: The Crawler Zoo monitors and categorises bots that scrape the site. Visitors can even watch bots wander an infinitely generated maze of junk pages.
Every request that reaches the site is examined at the gate. Bots are identified, named, drawn and filed into an enclosure; people are waved through and counted only as an anonymous daily total. Everything you see is live: the figures update as the bots arrive.
Irish
What to use: the “w” or “v” difference in dialects
Improving my Irish is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but found difficult to sustain long-term, but I do still have occasional bursts of enthusiasm. In this case I found this article, and especially the videos linked within, a good crash course in improving my understanding of Irish phonetics.
When learners come across this difference in pronunciation, they are usually looking at words like “bhfuil” (i.e. “an bhfuil”) and “mháthair” (i.e. “mo mháthair”). How you pronounce it largely depends on which dialect you choose.
The tale behind the Irish translation of Dracula is something to really get your teeth into — Darach Ó Séaghdha
I’ve written about the Irish translation of Dracula before, so of course I was interested to learn a tiny bit more about the history of the book.
Should the Free State find exciting new literary voices working as Gaeilge and bring them to a wider audience, or should they focus on translating bestselling titles that readers had already heard of?
Finance Minister Ernest Blythe took the latter view. In particular, Blythe was very interested to discover that the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works had a clause at the time regarding translation rights.
Politics
Europe’s centrists are finally paying the price of their extremism — Yanis Varoufakis
Valve Software’s former in-house hat economist weighs in on the consequences of “centrism”.
Everywhere, it is the same mechanism: Parties that called themselves sensible, pragmatic, and centrist have pursued one of the most doctrinaire economic programmes in European history – and pursued it with a rigidity, an intolerance of dissent, and a contempt for democratic contestation that the actual political extremes of the 20th century would have recognised as their own method, even if they had rejected the content.
