What I’m reading vol. 2
A roundup of some posts I’ve been reading that I thought I’d share.
Deus Ex Machina [1984] — Arcade Idea
I have been catching up on the sadly inactive Arcade Idea, a blog working through the history of video games through selected games that chart development of the medium. Unlike many such projects it does not focus only on console and arcade games or on games that are still famous.
Deus Ex Machina, whose entry I have linked, is a fascinating ZX Spectrum game/interactive movie/concept album that I had never heard of, designed and composed by Mel Croucher.
It’s actually on Steam and there is a playthrough available to watch on Mel Croucher’s Youtube channel. It has some pretty heavily strobing lights in some sections.
When the mouse dies inside The Machine, it takes its one final death shit. The turd drops into the test-tube babymaker. For the whole first act, and arguably the whole game, you play as this mouse turd.
COVID Denialism and Disability Justice — Natalie Weizenbaum
I have been also reading Natalie’s posts about setting up post embedding and reblogging and will have a look at doing that too, so maybe in future instead of these roundup posts I will directly reblog stuff into my feed.
Because this category myth isn’t just incorrect, it’s oppressive. All axes of oppression are wrapped around similar myths. This is why sexists are so threatened by transsexuals, why racists invented the crime of miscegenation. An oppressive mindset demands a clear and permanent division between oneself and one’s victims; a mode of thought that relies on clear and permanent divisions is at high risk of enacting oppression, knowingly or not. Those who are unable (or unwilling) to imagine themselves becoming disabled are the ones who do the most harm to people who already are.
The NES Pictionary Bot, In Memoriam — Luna
The NES Pictionary bot, was, as Luna describes, something that could almost have existed on any social media website. But it could only have worked how it did, and how well it did, on Cohost, where users were given much more of a blank canvas to work with than any other social media site.
This could have been achieved on Twitter via a two-account mechanism. The main account would post the image with the dashes, a secondary account would post a reply with the solution. Users could then mute/block the secondary account, or follow it if they wanted to always see the solutions.
Similarly, this could have been achieved on Mastodon using the Content Warning (CW) system, which allows you to put a post behind a warning and require action on the part of the user to actually view the post. The bot would post the image with the dashes, and then in a follow-up post, post the solution under a CW, making users interact to see the solution.
These solutions always seemed kinda clunky to me, and eventually I just forgot all about it.
Enter Cohost.
A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat — andi mcc
Speaking of giving users a blank canvas with HTML, this is one of the posts I saw circulating again towards the end of Cohost’s life, detailing the absolutely audatious way that Geocities HTML chat (which I had never heard of before) worked. Now that Cohost is shutting down she has returned to her blog.
Geocities HTML Chat was, from a technical perspective, a guestbook with a small twist. There was a chat for each of the “cities” (my home was SiliconValley, I think?). Each chat used (of course) frames to display two smaller webpages. One frame above (I don’t actually remember, but let’s say it was above) was a thin band containing a CGI input form. The lower frame was larger, and scrolled freely. This frame used a server-side trick; the server would tell your web browser it was sending it an infinitely long web page (or maybe it just claimed it was some impossibly large size, a gigabyte or something). It would send it the opening <html>, and then it would hang. It would keep the socket open. When a user in the chat room submitted a line to their CGI box, every user would simultaneously receive a new line on the bottom-frame open socket (which their web browser sincerely believed an ordinary webpage was actually really loading into, just very slowly).
pokémon cymraeg — Twitchcoded
A page where Twitch is documenting a project of translating pokémon names into Welsh. I had fun before coming up with Irish translations for Sonic the Hedgehog characters. It’s the kind of thing that lets you play with language in a cool way. Pokémon are great for this especially because of the multilayered and punny nature of their names. Draoi Aisteach has actually already made full translations of Pokémon Red and Blue.
38
ninetales
cadnaw
- cadno (fox)
- naw (nine)
- cadnawes (vixen)
America a Prophecy — Elizabeth Sandifer
Last time I linked to Elizabeth Sandifer’s Doctor Who writing. This time I am going to link to another of her long-term projects: An annual series of blog posts analysing the American psyche through the lens of a bafflingly awful newspaper comic about the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I recommend reading the whole series and I look forward to next year’s.
As a practitioner of a magical/critical practice that I have coined psychochronography, it is my belief that one can position any cultural object at the center of one’s vision and, through sufficiently thorough exploration of it, understand the larger world in which it exists. To this end, I propose that we explore this genuinely astonishing work of comics art in order to understand the whole of America in the 21st century.
New Team, New Discord! — Spore in the News
For the sheer novelty of it: Spore’s official website and RSS feed updated this week. Spore. The game from 2008. Why not add it to your RSS reader too so that you can get updated on any new Spore news? Or I guess more likely join the Discord server they are using the news post to advertise.
Spore has a new team! You may notice some of our team members making the rounds throughout the Spore communities - RogueLyeshal (Rogue) and Reiliyn (Rei) are leading up our new community efforts. Speaking of… there is now an official Discord server, where you can keep up with the latest news from the development team, participate in contests, and get to know other players of Spore! Come join us!
I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don’t know what to do with them — James O’Malley
A cry for help I saw via Tom Scott’s newsletter that also goes into recovering teletext data from tapes.
What Alistair realised though was that even though there were no complete teletext pages stored on his tapes, there were still fragments of teletext data captured and saved by the tapes.
So he wrote some code that does something mind-blowing. Using his software, if you play in a VHS tape to a TV capture card, it will take the raw recording data, pick out the nuggets of teletext, and like magic will stitch them back together into complete pages.
Like I say, it’s witchcraft.
Artificial Life: Insects — CD-ROM Journal
A blog from Misty De Méo that explores old multimedia CDs. Maybe some day she’ll cover Ring: 感×染.
Although the front cover and spine credit Harada first, and it’s clear Harada’s CG artwork is the real centrepiece here, the three works are presented as coequals. More than an art book, a novel, or a game, it’s a project that shows how different mediums transform the same basic concepts. The three works don’t just diverge because of different inspirations but because their mediums influence what kinds of interpretations are possible, what kinds of ideas can take root.
hot pepsi ☕ — Dr. Melon
I can’t say I agree with this but it’s certainly an interesting perspective.
I highly recommend trying it out if you haven’t had it before, especially on a colder or rainy day. There’s something great about the warm steam coming off the top combined with tiny droplets flying out of the drink due to the carbonation that leave a pleasantly-contrasty cooling sensation on the lips just before you take a sip of the toasty liquid within. Drinking it and feeling the warm fizz is a little alchemical, and a little rebellious, with the net effect of overall feeling like you’re sneaking some of a wizard’s potion while he’s out gathering herbs.
👨💻 Side By Side 👨🎨 — Mike Egan
A cute little motion design animation!
I was deep in the website building mines in April, both working on this site, and building Welcome to the Cyber World, my MMBN fansite that I made for the Critical Distance Fansite Jam.
So I wanted to make something celebrating the joy and creativity of the particular left-brain/right-brain cooperation present in using code to make what is essentially a piece of visual media.
It’s called Side By Side because it was originally a horizontal piece with both windows sitting next to each other, but I found that to be too static, and the transition I landed on is more fun and dynamic. It also mirrors the actual experience of building a website, in that you often write the code not knowing 100% what the site will look like until you load it up in a browser!