What I’m reading vol. 6
First, second, third, fourth and fifth volumes.
A friend has been infodumping about Susumu Hirasawa and I thought I’d share her passion a little wider so have this live performance from him:
This page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website — Sophie Koonin
One thing to warn is that if you do actually make your own website is that tinkering with it can be addictive in and of itself, at least to me. It’s like a model train set: There is always more you can tweak or add to it. I updated my homepage a few days ago to make each section stand out from each other a bit more.
If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.
A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) – I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it’s your space and you can do whatever you want with it.
A Eulogy for Urban Dead — Adrian Hon
I played Urban Dead back in the day. It’s sad to see it go and infuriating to see it happen because of a regulator trying to target the likes of Facebook and Tiktok and not even being able to conceive of small, independent operations or how it could affect them.
Naturally, these player-generated events were chaotic and often hard to discover, though the ability for humans to graffiti messages helped spread the word. Zombies, being dead, were not permitted to communicate as freely – they could only use the letters a, b, g, h, m, n, r, and z – but this was sufficient to lead to four different zombie languages including terms such as armah baz (army base), zmazh anh grab (smash and grab) and my personal favourite, barhah (roughly “a spirit of zombie warriors in brotherhood”).
Currency Pokemon on Pokemon Home — Laura Michet
I saw this because it was shared by Adamn Le Doux. How the restrictions of online pokémon trading evolved a market where the currency changes every time a new game gets connected to the system. The current one being a qilin giraffe thing. Also some followups: How to buy a Pokemon online and How to stop all the online Pokemon players from ruining their own fun.
Today, you’d list your first shiny Pokemon for, probably, Raging Bolt - the weird giraffe Pokemon at the top of this post. Once someone gives you a Raging Bolt, you’ll search for the shinies you want and see if any have been listed by a person who is seeking Raging Bolt. Someone probably will be. You’ll make that trade, and now the player you traded with has a fungible Raging Bolt to use for whatever purpose they desire.
I ordered a wheel of cheese in a can — Laura Michet
Also from Laura Michet: A type of cheese I now really want try.
The cheese is apparently one of a very small number of cheeses that can cure inside a can, apparently because it’s made with a culture that emits less gas than other cheeses, so it won’t bloat or pop the can. It is only sold in 30 oz containers. It is cheddar… you can get several flavors. Big time cheese fans or people from Wisconsin know and care a lot about it and I get the impression that it is quite popular here in the US, but I have never heard of this shit before.
CD-ROM Journal: Crosscountry BC — Misty De Méo
A look at a Canadian edutainment game series.
It it were just about navigating routes, it might be educational but a bit dry. What makes Crosscountry work is that the player is making so many more decisions than that and being immersed in the truck driver life. The player’s driver needs to eat, and sleep, but it’s not enforced just by forcing the player to rest. No, it takes the much more interesting approach of giving the player consequences. Forget to sleep, or to run the windshield wipers during the rain? You have a much higher chance to get into an accident on the road. Forget to fuel up? You can use your cell phone to call for a tow or an emergency refuel, but it’ll cost you. None of these are tutorialized or explained in advance, except via the manual; for most children, these are fun or unpleasant surprises. It’s that sense of capricious cruelty that makes Crosscountry so much fun.
The Most Mario Colors — Louie Mantia
Seen via Mike Egan’s post roundup. This is the ideal post. This is the type of thing that people should be researching.
Most Mario games with polygonal logos have a different color per letter, but the sequence of colors in Mario’s name is rarely the same sequence across games.
This captivated me—for some reason—and I set out to analyze every Mario video game logo to see if I could find a pattern for specific arrangements of colors and to determine the “most Mario” color scheme.
a love letter to level editor icons — erysdren
Who doesn’t love some programmer art?
i want to show you some cool art from the late 90s and early 00s. this art was only ever intended to be seen by the developers at a select few games companies, and thus may contain obscure in-jokes and references that nobody outside of the company is likely to understand.
dev scoops: vultures in Weird West — Joe Wintergreen
Joe Wintergreen talks bout the first thing he worked on in Weird West and shows how systems-driven game design allows complex interactions through fairly simple building blocks.
In the end, it ended up being just as well that I implemented the landing-and-walking-around behaviour for the vultures, because later we wanted chickens and there was already Flightless Bird Support – a chicken is just a flightless vulture who lays eggs, as any ornithologist will tell you.
As minor as these guys are, they’re one of the features I’m fondest of – my first task, omnipresent, occasionally chaotic, and shipping almost unchanged from their initial implementation. Good eggs.
Why Are Chronically Ill People Forced to Hide Their Pain? — Kelly
Oh no! You’ve scrolled to far and entered The Serious Zone.
Unfortunately most people can’t process the lack of choice in the matter. They genuinely believe that we either want to be this sick, or could get better if we really ‘tried’. They believe they wouldn’t be able to handle what we go through, because they’re convinced they will never NEED to handle it. They’re the exception. Chronic illness won’t happen to them.
This is the comfortable lie that most people tell themselves so that they can move through life without having to think about the precarious nature of the human condition. Without having to consider how quickly you can become disabled, homeless, an ‘other’. How quickly your life can change without your consent.
This need to cling to a lie makes people abandon us. Some will stay when you become chronically ill, but most have an internal clock. If you’re not better by whatever random and pre-conceived timeline they’ve set for you, they walk away.
Crashing the economy because you hate TikTok women — Ryan Broderick
Ending the roundup again with a light dusting of fascism. I am far too online and read far too much about American politics and fascists but I was still taken aback by this description of a strain of hatred I wasn’t familiar with.
If you don’t spend a lot of time in right-wing fever swamps, you may have completely missed the almost year-long meltdown conservatives have been having about this one particular video, which is most commonly referred to as the “Gen Z boss and a mini” video. It was posted to Instagram back in July by an Australian skincare company called tbh skincare. The original has since been deleted, but according to Know Your Meme, it had about two million views in its first 48 hours. The dance and song the women in the video are doing is a variation of “Boots and a Slick Back Bun” TikTok meme that was popular last summer.