Today would have been Ellie’s birthday. I still miss her terribly. Once or twice when out I’ve seen someone out of the corner of my eye that looks a little like her for a second and my breath catches and I have to hold onto myself so hard to stop myself shattering again in public as reality catches up to the foolish impressions that the pattern-matching part of my mind has latched onto before I can stop it.

There will forever only be a finite number of stories that I can share about her, an agonising thing to have to accept, and I want to share one of the stories that I have today. It’s silly, inconsequential, and doesn’t go anywhere, but it I hold it in my heart. It’s not even really a story, it’s just an image that I got strangely emotional about while drunk and latched onto:

I send it to Ellie declaring the little pudu fawn to be “literally me”. Ellie had previously send other pictures of pudu fauns and compared them to me. I think in this photo that there is something about the delicate timidness of deer generally with its stumpy little proportions contrasting with its earnest investigation of an unremarkable space puts me in mind of myself and perhaps my selfconsciousness around sharing hyperfixations. And something about the inane caption and double space gives it that energy of a strange, animal thought process that I really love, as if it was made for the understanding of a deer rather than a human. That is far more thought than I was giving the picture at the time, though, I was just drunk and tearing up over a picture of a small deer and sending it to Ellie, who wholeheartedly agreed that this was me and “corner   smell” became a phrase of deep affection in our shared vocabulary.

Also looking back over our chat history the next messages she sent me were about how she got a fancy coffee and then nearly slipped and dropped it but managed to keep her balance, then got home, went upstairs and immediately slipped again and spilled the coffee everywhere, which she said was worse than 10 9/11s.

I have made it through another year in spite of the horrors. I am doing a lot better than I was this time last year but then again that is a low bar. If I wasn’t doing better that would be very, very concerning. But I am genuinely doing very well at the moment. As little selfish plug if anyone has developed a bizarrely intense parasocial relationship reading this bog and want to make my birthday even better I have a Throne wishlist that you can use to buy me things.

But I recently moved in with Caoimhe³ and it has been really lovely. It’s broken me out of some bad habits, it’s helped motivate me to cook a lot more again, and it’s just really lovely to wake up next to someone and nice to have other people around rather than being on my own with Easóg so much. And now even when I am the only human in the house there are two more cats keeping me company: Muffie and Sandy. Easóg is not well socialised with other cats but she has acclimatised to the new place faster than I expected and is tolerating the strange cats quite well, though not without some bapping.

I am looking forward to spending my birthday with Caoimhe and we are using it as an excuse to go on weekend trip to London. The only thing we have booked, other than the travel and accommodation, is restaurant reservations, and we will structure the rest of the trip around those. I don’t love excessive amounts of sightseeing and I adore food, so I am enjoying this strategy and may use it for further trips.

A month ago I saw this this Tumblr post screenshotting a Twitter thread about Bump and was enthralled by both its maximalist aesthetics and how utterly evil it was. Now, before I continue I do what to emphasise: Do not install Bump. It is horrendously evil.

Do not install Bump.

The linked post gives you both a good idea of how invasive Bump is and also what is repulsive but also potentially alluring about it: It records as much as it possible can about everything you are doing through every means it has available to it as a phone app, which is quite a lot. This is, as the thread says, shared with everyone that you have linked with on Bump. That of course means it is also recorded and sent to Amo, the company that makes Bump. People often have a very defeatist attitude about privacy, that so many companies are already tracking everything you do anyway, but Amo really go above and beyond with trying to hoover up everything they can about you and with the way this app works I doubt that internal safeguards are much of a priority. A reminder before I go on: Do not install Bump.

Myself and Caoimhe³ both installed it, added each other, and then deleted our accounts after a couple of days. It was even more of an invasive nightmare than I was expecting.

• If you do not allow access to your contacts straight away it repeatedly badger you to do so. I think it asked me five times before it reluctantly allowed me to continue without doing so.
• It obvious asks your location permission to work. The basic point is broadcasting your location to people, but even if you grant it location permission it will display constant red warning signs on the main map screen and lock you out of features until you grant Bump permission to read your location at all times, even when the app is closed.
• It will then also repeatedly ask you to disable power management features for Bump so that it can always keep monitoring you even when your battery is dying.
• It has a feature to add live widget to your phone’s homescreen that constantly tracks a specific person. Like, stalking your friends at all times is kind of the selling point in the first place, but bloody fuck.
• It doesn’t just want your raw location it is also interested in what places you hang out in and business you frequent. It locks features behind adding a certain amount of favourite locations that it can log you as being at. Each location also has public leaderboards that shows who is there most often, potentially showing where to find you even to people you never linked with in Bump.
• In its quest to log and display everything it goes as far as to display your live battery percentage to everyone (so you can’t feign low battery as an excuse for not replying or wanting to go out).
• Features are locked behind linking with enough people, so even if you were fine with sending all this (live, at all times) to a few people, it will push you to expand that circle.

And yet, I do see some of the appeal. The dwindling of third places gets talked about a lot and I think that something that facilitates spontaneous gatherings by being able to see when friends are nearby or in a group could have value. Back in the day this would be having a local pub where you would go without a plan in the hopes of running into people, but the cost of drinks are so goddamn expensive these days and most people do not want to be functionally alcoholic in order to have a social life any more.

Do not install Bump.

I think a non-evil version of this is possible, thought it would not be straightforward or easily. Something that provided some of this openness, at the discretion of the user, with many safeguards, that did not store any data, and was end-to-end encrypted, could actually have benefits. But it would also never, ever be profitable and would never have the backing that it would need to push it to large-scale adoption. And of course the intersection of people who are safety-focused enough to want these kinds of safeguards and people who are lax enough about privacy to want something like this in the first place is probably quite small.

The other thing about Bump is its maximalist aesthetics. It’s like a ’00s Nickelodeon children’s sitcom’s idea of what smartphones would become. A partner thought that it was aimed at young people who may not have been around for the Y2K aesthetic old web but have seen it evangelised through nostalgic lens. I do find it genuinely quite charming, especially its chat, which allows you to not just customise your textboxes in garish, clashing fashions but allows all elements to be freely moved around, rotated and zoomed, creating an utterly nightmarish form of communication that I kind of love.

I do kind of want this as its own thing. Give me the secure, end-to-end encrypted, privacy-focused, overstimulation nightmare group chat. I would probably get bored of it relatively quickly but I feel like I would have a good time for a few days and then again every few months when I’m feeling particularly silly and whimsical.

Do not install Bump.

As you can see from my games of each year list I don’t play many games with character creators and when I do I generally don’t get particularly attached to the characters I make in them. I couldn’t really tell you anything much about the characters I made for Dark Souls and even when I went through the character creator in Baldur’s Gate III recently¹ I made a dark elf woman without any particular thought to backstory or much else. I honestly don’t even remember what I named her². I do not have the making OCs bone I think. But I do have two old custom skins and a custom character that I have lying around on my computer I’d like to share.

Minecraft

Back seven billion years ago when I was in university and Minecraft was this weird, new thing I wanted to make my own custom skin for it. Being mostly into first person shooters and real time strategy games at the time my first thought about making a skin for a character in a game where you mine was to try and recreate the mining suit from Red Faction:

Pokémon Crystal Clear

I haven’t played a new Pokémon game since I was a child, but during covid lockdowns (before, y’know, every government just dropped all health measures for a debilitating disease that is still rampant) I tried to revisit the series via a hack called Pokémon Crystal Clear³. Crystal Clear adds a lot to Pokémon Crystal. You can choose your starting town (in either Kanto or Johto), play gyms in any order (they scale based on the number of badges you have), it fixes various bugs in the original games, allows you to set any pokémon as an overworld follower with every species having unique follower sprites, adds new areas and battles, new music, a lot of customisation options, and has ways to obtain all 251 pokémon without trading or events.

Sadly all of that was not enough for me to get over the simple fact that these games are too repetitive for me to want to bother with any more. I do not want to do dozens and dozens of nigh-identical battles over and over again. I never got very far in the game but I did make use make use of another feature: The ability to inject custom player sprites and custom starters (I started with a sandshrew). I actually posted one of the player sprites on here before when talking about drawing it in Wplace.

Sonic Forces

The last one is the closest thing that I have to a Sonic the Hedgehog OC: My avatar from Sonic Forces who I decided to call Blitz the Cat, both because she ended up being a little lightning-themed (and I used the lightning whip as my main weapon for a lot of that game) and to keep the alteration going with Blaze the Cat and Big the Cat⁴. I do not have any backstory for her but I like how she turned out.

Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ

Oh it is has been a while since I posted one of these and I have built up quite a backlog of links.

Musical accompaniment for this volume chosen mostly to cause psychic damage against my partner.

Da Web

The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users — Samuel Proulx

Interesting insights here into how the uses of text to speech for sighted and blind people are fundamentally different and how functionality for the latter is usually, unfortunately an afterthought.

Supertonic is slightly faster, as it can stream result audio as it becomes available, whereas Kitten TTS cannot start speaking until all of the audio for the chunk is fully generated. But for use in a screen reader, a text to speech system needs to begin generating speech as quickly as possible, rather than waiting for an entire phrase or sentence. Users of screen readers quickly jump through text and frequently interrupt the screen reader, and thus require the text to speech system to be able to quickly discard and restart speech.

A tale of two Webs — Oblomov

A lot of the development efforts (both creative and destructive) in web browsers in the last decade+ has been going into fostering the “web app” vision of the web, to the detriment of the “web of documents” vision. From the removal of native support for RSS and Atom feeds to the introduction of JavaScript APIs like WebUSB or the Web Environment Integrity attempt I already discussed in the past, nearly all work done on browsers has been in this direction.

I feel this a lot. The web of documents now lives in the margins of the web of apps and with Google’s capturing of standards has made maintaining a web browser to keep up with the former impossible without the backing of Google or other huge companies who are increasingly hostile to users having any agency. I feel similarly about operating systems at this point, too. I abandoned Windows on my home computer years ago and since then it has become ever more hostile to users having control over what their machine does. This isn’t new, simply an acceleration of trends that have existed for a long, long time.

As much as I want the “AI” bubble to burst I do wonder if the push for “agentic” systems might actually stick simply from the obscene amounts of money being powered into trying to make users handing over nearly all agency and control of their machines to chatbots actually work or be desirable. Currently Windows still does allow itself to be used as an actual desktop operating system, but clearly Microsoft at this point want to push everything towards locked-down, controlled and monitored black boxes, possibly even worse than phones possibly are. How long till they think they can get away with amputating the shrivelled lump of the desktop operating system, cut off direct user access to the filesystem outside of what you have in Dropbox that you pay a subscription for and lock everyone into software from the app store for everyone but enterprise customers who can pay through the nose? Or at least just keep breaking core parts of the operating system until they’re barely useable.

On a more positive note this article also prompted me to add metadata to the site that will work with the Website Navigation Bar addon for Palemoon if you’re using that because I thought it was cute and it was easy to do as I was already using that information to render on-page navigation elements anyway.

And speaking of the web of documents…

Consider Making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website! — The Virtual Moose

I know I’m going to be preaching to the choir with the kind of people who are reading a personal blog already, but still.

I think it’s also just fun to see what old posts still get traffic. My most popular posts on here are very old ones about how to play the late 90s MMO Asheron’s Call today, ttrpgs based on video games, and the late 90s Microsoft puzzle game Pandora’s Box. It’s more useful and permanent than an unwieldy thread of posts on bluesky or mastodon too, where you would have to refresh it for anyone to even come across it again.

Stolen Focus — Luna

I do still have to catch and reset myself with various bad computer and social media habits every once in a while. It’s easy to fall into when you are tired and sore and everything that would be interesting or engaging or useful just feels like a massive hump to get over.

By this time, however, I had become once again hopelessly addicted to social media. I wasn’t getting notifications, and I wasn’t fixated on numbers any more, but I was still compulsively checking and refreshing, desperate for the feed to give me another hit of dopamine. I lost hours each day to flicking through TikTok any time I had a quiet moment — rather to flood my brain with stimulation than have to sit in uncomfortable silence even for a moment. A partner and I would engage in a habit we called “TikTok time”, where we’d screen-share the videos we’d Liked recently with each other. Increasingly I was finding I had little to show for the hours I’d spent scrolling the feed. It had become akin to a slot machine; I kept scrolling and scrolling in the hopes that maybe the next video would be something I wanted to see — whatever that was.

Payment processors were against CSAM until Grok started making it — Elizabeth Lopatto

What else is there to say?

So why is X different? It’s run by Elon Musk. “He’s the richest man in the world, he has close ties to the US government, and he’s incredibly litigious,” says Pfefferkorn. In fact, Musk has previously filed suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate; in a now-dismissed lawsuit, he claimed it illegally collected data showing an increase in hate speech after he bought the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Games (general)

Horses Is Tame — Chris Person

But of course, if you want to make art…

This is a hegemony of American prudishness, applied globally, incoherently, unevenly, and unseriously. Anybody responsible for these decisions would be vaporized in seconds by a Pinku movie from the 1970s, and if a single person in this chain of command has an arts degree they are pretending they don’t for the sake of an ill-defined idea of business.

Alternative Games From The Fringes Of Cyberspace — Nathalie Lawhead

And a somewhat more hopeful view on being considering unmonetisable.

The games that exist outside the mainstream, and I think the type of personal empowerment they represent, is what makes them “controversial”.
Especially under the scope of mainstream culture where everything needs to sell, satisfy a commercial value, be consumer centric, or live up to such capitalist standards.

Unmonetized self expression is an act or resistance in today’s tech landscape.

Why we are making Jank — Brendan Caldwell

Games journalists Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Graham Smith have launched a new games site called Jank that fails to live up to its name by functioning well and not being bloated with ads, tracking, affiliate links, chatbots and other crap that turns sites into a churn of advertisement-friendly sludge.

Perhaps less obvious is the kind of writing that disappears in the process. Articles about new games, niche games, and experimental work don't get traffic, so off they go. Deeply researched columns from subject matter experts don't get traffic, so they’re cut. Not many people read interviews, unless you can get someone to say something controversial and pull it out as a news story, so it’s rarely worth talking to developers about their work. Articles designed purely to entertain with daft jokes, such as diary series, don't deliver numbers at scale no matter how much their readers adore them.

Will this work out? Can they make enough money doing this to actually make a living? I don’t know but I hope so, and I hope they make enough that they can round up a few other Rock, Paper, Shotgun veterans as well. They are also trialling a partnership with the Total Playtime podcast which I am a fan of as well. Supporting one will give you access to the membership perks of the other, at least for the next few months.

The gamers hate generative AI — Laura Michet

Gamers rise up.

I've assumed for a while that gamers would have mild distaste for genAI material, in the same way that they have distaste for asset store assets and, for some reason, the Unity engine. It turns out that I was wrong - they hate it a lot more than either of those things.

Games (specific)

“interest sources”, contextual interactions for NPCs in Sleight of Hand — Joe Wintergreen

On the more technical side of games I always like reading Joe Wintergreen’s breakdowns of how systems work.

A scenario I’ve found useful to expose a lot of edges cases is a guy pissing against a wall and leaving a puddle of piss. Support this scenario with no aberrant behaviours and you are doing okay.

Abstraction in Rhythm Doctor — Blueberry Lemonade

How are layers of abstraction perceived? What expectations do they set? At what point do UI elements stop being representational and start to become part of the fiction itself?

It sounds small (and it is), but it was a firm example in my mind of how the game was changing the longer we worked on it. Instead of characters simply appearing and disappearing in abstract space whenever they were needed for gameplay, we were now introducing the idea that they are real characters standing in real rooms that are connected to each other. They can walk, or run, from one place to another. They’re living lives of their own when they aren’t being treated.

The Great Celeste Race 2026 — Caoimhe³

Caoimhe wrote a much better narrative of the annual Celeste race than mine.

This part was a delight. Ruby and I swapped the lead as we often did, but with microscopic gaps becoming the norm. A single death in a puzzle would swap the lead, and hesitating would throw away any advantage we may have had. I lose the lead at the end of the 1500 metres section, at a puzzle I know I hate, and pull it back cleanly at 2000 metres. At 2500 metres, I had a small lead, but here is where the dream ends.

list animals until failure — Vivian

Here is a new blog with a strong, realistic, game plan for updates and a fun post about the suffering involved in defining how many animals there.

If you’re an entomologist, or an evolutionary biologist, you might say “well, bees and ants are just wasps, really”, and I respect that. But colloquially, bees and ants aren’t wasps. If this game insists on a purely phylogenic approach, then it’s like, come on, I can’t get a point for saying wasp and ant? That’s unreasonable. If I ask a 2-year-old to list animals and she lists wasp and ant, I’m not gonna break out the DNA sequences like “Ohh well evolutionarily ants are technically wasps”. I’m gonna say yeah, good job, that’s two animals.

Serious stuff (trans)

'A Directive From Above': Former NYT Editor Lays Out How The Paper Pushes Anti-Trans Bigotry — Billie Jean Sweeney

A look into how hatred and transphobia gets pushed down from above in the media.

She assigned it to a UK correspondent, who wrote it in the context of UK politics, talked about it being very contentious, talked about the criticisms of its findings. Cass was talking about them herself, this isn't jumping to any conclusions at that point. It really put it in the context of being this very contentious, very political sort of document.

When I saw it, because we're a few hours behind, there were 600, 700 words written. I had a pretty good sense of how the story was going to turn out. But within a few hours the story was to the top New York editors, and I don't know who exactly it was who did that. I assume it was Carolyn or her intermediary. They said ‘oh no, we want the science desk to do that,’ specifically that was Azeen [Ghorayshi], who had been a key reporter in a lot of the other anti-trans coverage.

I bear the scars of a healthcare system that fails trans people — Jenny Maguire

And another article on the Loughlinstown gender clinic being awful to throw on the pile.

“Oh wow,” she said. “Did you do this yourself?” Immediately, I felt her fingers running through my curls, as if I was a glamorous dog being poked and prodded. Still, I put on a smiley face and went along with this condescending charade. I knew what I needed, and I was not going to cause a fuss — as if I had any choice.

Serious stuff (general)

Outlive The Bastards — Caoimhe³

May we.

There's been several eye-opening moments for me in the past few years. Realisations that we can simply do things never before imagined. These rolling revelations haven't stopped. I can live and love in ways I was never able to before, and nothing can stop this.

So we live. But only in a way that works for us. We dictate how we breathe, how we act, how we medicate, how we live and how we die. How long did I spend dancing to other peoples' tunes, hoping and begging to be given basic respect, only to be thrown aside? Never again.

TrAPPed: Arrested by Phone — Anand RK, Suparna Sharma & Natalie Obiko Pearson

Bloody fuck.

shit i keep seeing: “conflict resolution” via gaslighting — Joe Wintergreen

I fear that I may been this person before but I know I have definitely worked with a guy who did this.

I guess what I’m seeing is guys who’ve never learned to resolve conflict, only to “win”, overcorrecting and becoming what might be termed “conflict-avoidant”, but their avoidance strategy is pretending, the moment there is a conflict, that there isn’t one. If they can get this past everyone in the moment, face is saved and they’re off the hook for a true resolution.

We Don’t Need Any More Renewables — Adapt : Survive : Prevail

I am endlessly frustrated by people thinking that if we just have more renewable energy then everything else about our suicidal systems of exponential growth and resource extraction will be fine.

So in plain language, here is the actual claim: “We have no choice but to meet all electricity demands and doing so via renewable energy increases greenhouse gas emissions by a lesser amount than fossil fuels.”

Now that we have clarity on the actual claim, we can break it down. The reality is this: 1) We absolutely do have a choice because demand is politically, economically, and socially constructed, and 2) The choice between renewables and fossil fuels is a false binary, like telling a healthy person they must chose between losing an arm or a leg.

Meaning, Memory and Christmas in Ireland — Seán MacBrádaigh

A brief dive into the complex place of Catholicism in Ireland.

A new state, born of revolution, civil war and counter-revolution, sought stability through moral uniformity. In doing so, it aligned itself closely with a powerful and highly conservative Catholic hierarchy, outsourcing social order, education, health and morality to the Church. This was not a neutral partnership. It produced an official vision of Irishness that was narrow and exclusionary - defining virtue and respectability in rigid Catholic terms.

Have some cat photos.

I’ve been playing the “open network test” demo for Sonic Racing: Crossworlds and having a good time. I am not much of a kart racer gal but I did really like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and that is going to be my main point of comparison. The quick version is that it’s fun but I am not spending 70-bloody-€ on this.

One thing that is immediately apparently compared to Transformed is that Crossworlds is much more chaotic. The game is a constant sensory overload. The central gimmick is that the second lap of each race sends you to a random other track and the last lap of each track also adds new items, hazards and shortcuts to the track, so things are constantly changing every race and items feel more powerful and far less easily dealt with than in Transformed. That game’s blue shell created a minefield in front of the lead player, something that is going to slow you down a little but was avoidable with some care, while Crossworlds has two different items that directly target the lead player and seem nigh-undodgeable. The three different homing attacks also feel significantly harder to get away from with a well-timed boost than they did in Transformed (or perhaps I am just very rusty) with the constant sensory overload of the game not helping there. There are also three different catchup items that automatically send you forward in position on top of the monster truck super transformation and regular boost powerups which also help anyone who has fallen behind rejoin the clusterfuck in the middle of the pack.

Of course my impressions also being coloured here by the fact that I mostly played the single-player mode of Transformed while this demo of Crossworlds, being a network test, has very limited singleplayer options with only one grand prix with three tracks¹ to play singleplayer and many more tracks available to experience in online play so I have mostly been sticking to that. I am a bit disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be much character dialogue when playing multiplayer. The grand prix mode assigns you a rival character who will banter with you as you race other racers might talk to you as you interact (i.e. attack each other). I can understand that people eventually get sick of repeated dialogue in online matches but I wouldn’t mind the option to toggle it on and maybe even toggle on assigning other random players (or friends that you are partying up with) as rivals for a race.

The character I’m most interested in terms of these voice lines is Sage, who was only introduced in Sonic Frontiers and hasn’t interacted with most of the wider cast at all yet. I’m curious as to how they handle the context that she exists in outside of the plot of that game. She is not available in the demo, though, and I have been playing almost exclusively as Cream (because Blaze also isn’t available in the demo).

One thing that Crossworlds does have over Transformed is the vehicle customisation. It’s done a little strangely and there’s not a huge amount of depth to it—you are not swapping out spoilers or other individual parts, only the front and back halves of various vehicles—but it’s still fun to play around with. Layering decals on top of the paintjobs does give you some more freedom but even this is pretty restrictive – you can’t overlap decals and they tend have a large transparent zone around the main image that stops you using them to create more detailed shapes. I imagine that this might be intentional to try to stop people making anything offensive with them but I did try my best on my extreme gear design to combine some basic shapes to make a depiction of Rocky behind where the rider stands.

One criticism I have of the car customisation is that when it comes to horns and decals they don’t seem to have given much thought to the Sonic the Hedgehog theming. The horn options sound like they came unaltered from a stock asset pack. There is one labelled “spring” and it is not the Sonic spring noise, just a generic cartoon spring. There is a decal in there of Sonic’s face (which looks quite funny) but really none for rings or Chaos Emeralds? None of the other characters’ silhouetted extra life icons? The “auras” you can apply to the cars also all look like shit and just add to the visual noise of the game.

Your custom paintjob also gets overriden in the game’s time-limited festivals, in which players are put into themed 4v4v4 teams in races with special rules, with the winning team for each race earning points. The festival for the network test is Persona 5-themed with Team Joker, Team Violet and Team Mona. This sounds like a Splatfest but it is not—it’s a battle pass. You do not choose a team you are randomly assigned one every race, making them utterly pointless other than what colour your car is going to be for the next five minutes and points simply go to unlocking Persona-themed decals that I will never use. Joker himself, one of the future DLC characters for the game, was also temporarily unlocked for this which just highlighted how much of a lazy cashgrab the cross-promotional characters are, lacking any voicelines or even a full set of animations. From what they’ve shown of the game so far the only voiced DLC character is going to be Hatsune Miku, the one that they don’t have to pay a voice actor for. Even the Werehog pre-order bonus doesn’t have any lines and he’s just Sonic with a gruffer voice. They have Roger Craig Smith voicing Sonic and Omega in the game already could they not have him do this too at least? But if you want to race as a completely silent Spongebob Squarepants be sure to buy the season pass.

Also the final lap music for a lot of stages is really bad.

I have some more Wplace art in a new post.

I’ve been spending a bit too much time fucking around on Wplace but it’s been nice to flex my pixel art muscles a tiny bit again. One of the first things I added to the map was a dusted-off pokémon trainer sprite I made a few years ago when playing the ROM hack Pokémon Crystal Clear.

I used the Crystal player sprite as a base for this with the arm of the youngster sprite from the first generation games. I put this down near where I grew up, a pretty rural place. It can be quite isolating to grow up weird or queer in a place like that and it warmed my heart to see someone else had already drawn a few pride flags there including a trans one. I don’t know who drew that but I hope they are doing okay.

I also saw a few local GAA club flags and didn’t think much of it but checking back over a few days it quickly became apparent that some cunt was drawing these to cover over pride flags. This put me in a foul mood but over the next few days the ever-growing retaliatory pride flags made them give up and there is a big, unmolested rainbow heart in the middle of the village now.

After that I set my sights on a few landmarks. These took a few revisions but I’m really happy with how they turned out.

Large collaborative art projects Wplace are cool but it can be frustrating when they do them right on top of cities that are already crowded for space. Still, with a bit of silent negotiation I was able to put these down close to where they are on the map.

I do have one other gripe with Wplace: The gamified system and slow drip of pixels back is unfortunately very effective and leading me back into bad habits of sitting at my desk refreshing webpages that I have been trying to break. At least the ability to get larger charges over time, as much as it plays into those systems designed to be addictive, does give you more room over time to step away from it and not feel like you are wasting your chances to draw something.

The other little unique doodle I’ve done is one of Sadako Yamamura, which I wasn’t entirely happy with but a friend said was really good so I will take that compliment.

I have been dotting some variously-sized Eggbugs and some other small things around as well as contributing to a few larger pieces of art and fixing vandalism here and there. It’s been a fun little time waster.

I was going to sign off saying that I didn’t yet have another project I planned on drawing but while writing this I had a brainwave.

I’ll be filling this in as my paint refreshes.

What planet is Sonic the Hedgehog from? That depends on which version of the character you’re talking about. The earliest bios from Sega imagine him as simply living on more or less the Earth as we know it, giving his place of birth as Christmas Island. When the series was published outside of Japan a more elaborate background was painted, putting him on a planet called Mobius inhabited by mobians—anthropomorphic talking animals—and ruled by the evil dictator Dr. Robotnik. Sega were similarly lose with canon when it came to licencing, allowing the details of the world to be filled in very differently in the various adaptations.

In Archie Comic’s Sonic the Hedgehog Mobius is a post-apocalyptic Earth in the far future, a background shared by Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie’s Land of Darkness, while in Fleetway’s Sonic the Comic the Earth as we know it exists as a parallel dimension to Mobius, with characters sometimes travelling between the two¹. Sonic X and later the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog film also feature Sonic travelling from an (unnamed) parallel dimension but then have him be taken in by a human family on Earth, where the bulk of the action takes place.

But this divide between Earth and Mobius never really existed in the games, at least as far as the Japanese versions were concerned, and starting with 1998’s more narrative-focused Sonic Adventure Sega started trying to unify things a bit. The English localisation featured almost nothing from the previous Western Sonic canon: No mention of Mobius, badniks or roboticisation² and with Sonic and friends being just a few talking animals in a world made of mostly of ordinary humans. This depiction of the world and Sonic’s placed in it held in the games for the next decade, as far as Sonic Unleashed in 2008.

The Sonic games of the 2010s, though, shied away from narrative focus and tried to steer the series in a more cartoon-y direction. These games vastly cut down on the size of the secondary and incidental cast, not only dropping background NPCs entirely but also vastly trimming the size of recurring cast of mobian³ characters, sometimes only having Sonic himself and Tails have any major role. Still, one could imagine those teeming human cities just off-screen somewhere. That depiction of the world was not seriously challenged until 2017’s Sonic Forces.

An big selling point of Sonic Forces was that it had a character creator, finally allowing you to play your own Sonic OC in an official game⁴! Your avatar in the game starts off as an ordinary, frightened, mobian who rises up from the crowd to fight against the Eggman Empire alongside Sonic and his friends. For this narrative to work then, your furry OC must start as someone ordinary. Therefore mobians must be ordinary. There wasn’t really such a thing as an ordinary mobian in previous games. Barring the ancient echidna tribe shown in flashback all the way back in Sonic Adventure there had never really been furry background NPCs. No generic anthropomorphic animals. They were all important, named characters. For the avatar character to rise up as part of the masses and become a hero they first need to fit into the masses, and thus Sonic Forces came with a colossal shift in how the world of Sonic the Hedgehog was presented: A world of animals under the thumb of Ivo Robotnik, the sole human in the game - something that aligned closer to Sonic the Comic than any of the previous games⁵.

While the text of Forces itself doesn’t address this change directly series producer Takashi Iizuka made comments to the effect that the there are two different worlds: One that is home to humans and the other that is home to mobians. This, frankly, does not remotely make any sense if you try to fit it with previous games and this was not some sort of reboot, either! Sonic Forces directly references several earlier games. This was coupled with another retcon where the game tries to reframe the younger version of Sonic, returning from Sonic Generations, as actually being from another dimension⁶ rather than being from the past, suddenly putting Sonic Mania and by extension all the Mega Drive games into a different continuity to everything else and making a complete mess of everyone’s understanding of the series. The people who maintain the Sonic the Hedgehog Fandom wiki started splitting off every character into two different pages: One for the primary version and one for the “classic” universe version. It was, in short, a complete disaster if you cared about the canon of a series of children’s computer games.

Something good did come of this, though: The long-running Sonic the Hedgehog series published by Archie Comics had ceased publication in 2016, one year before Sonic Forces was released, and in the year that followed Sega negotiated a new line of comics with IDW Publishing instead. And while Ian Flynn returned as head writer, having helmed the Archie comics for a decade, the new series abandoned the continuity (and legal baggage) of the old comics and started fresh with a backstory much more closely aligned with that of the games and a plot following on directly from Sonic Forces, keeping its status quo of a world full of mobians.

And the IDW comics are really good! Ian Flynn, Evan Stanley, et al. have a deep love for the series and are able to consistently deliver endearing, interesting and fun interpretations of the characters. It has made me warm up a lot to parts of the cast I previously disliked and introduced wonderful new additions like Whisper and Surge. It also strikes an amazing balance in tone, managing to deliver just the right amount of self-serious edginess in its stories while maintaining its warm, bright, colourful world. It successfully managing to keep the good parts of the ow the Edge 2000s without whollly abandoning the cartooniness of the 1990s and without the layer of ironic detachment and self-cringe that haunted the series in the 2010s. I maintain a reading order if you want to have a go at them yourself.

And as the comics became more aligned with the games the games have in turn became more aligned with the comics. Characters from the IDW comic have started appearing in mobile games and Sonic Speed Simulator (the official Sonic Roblox game) and were mentioned in 2021’s Sonic Frontiers. This is because with the success of the IDW comics Sega have more and more let the lunatics run the asylum. Flynn has been writing more and more for the series, from promotional material and animated shorts to eventually being the writer for the games themselves, penning the scripts for Sonic Frontiers and Shadow Generations. And being someone who does care about the canon of a series of children’s computer games he has taken upon himself to sort out the lore mess.

Under Flynn Sega has put out a series of in-character Youtube shorts called Tailstube, which act not just as promotional material but also an ongoing lore-clarification series⁷ with the very first episode trying to lay out as plainly as possible while staying in character: All games take place on the same planet. Humans and mobians⁸ just mostly live in different parts of the world. The Mega Drive games are part of the main canon. Please forget those retcons. Please go fix the wiki pages.

And the games have embraced talking about their history again, acknowledging backstories and characters who hadn’t been mentioned in a decade. The extended human cast, particularly those related to Shadow’s backstory, exist again. Maria and Gerald Robotnik feature in Shadow Generations and the GUN commander⁹ was in the game’s promotional short Dark Beginnings. But the IDW comics, their timeline seemingly stuck in a pre-Sonic Frontiers limbo, has yet to feature any human characters outside of Eggman. Even when using locations that were shown in the games to be populated by humans the comics will show them as being full of mobians or simply empty instead. There still seems to be a reluctance in the series to portray a wider human cast, but that might be changing!

Sega recently licenced a new manga series called Sonic and the Blade of Courage where Sonic returns to the world of humans and teams up protagonist Yuuta, an ordinary boy, to fight Eggman, who has been going around using an ancient cursed idol to turn (human) people to crystal. In the third chapter Sonic takes Yuuta to Spagonia¹⁰ to meet Tails, the only mobian character in the comic so far other than Sonic himself. Spagonia is, like Yuuta’s home Metro City, full of humans. This stands in contrast to the last time Spagonia was shown in the IDW comics, with Sonic and Blaze the Cat on a sightseeing holiday running through empty streets.

Does this mean Sega is open to portraying more humans in the series as a whole again or is it compartmentalising aspects of the franchise to different media? Will any new Sonic mangas barred from having background mobians while IDW stays devoid of other humans? It would, I suppose, contribute to giving different parts of the series their own identities.

That said they have also introduced a new human character in the most recent Tailstube (which is also set in Spagonia): Professor Victoria¹¹. And Sage, Eggman’s AI daughter from from Sonic Frontiers, is joining the IDW cast in issue #84¹² which means that that status quo is finally being moved forward as well.

In any case I really enjoy the direction that the series has gone in recent years and I’m looking forward to seeing how it continues to evolve.

I have posted about how one of Dracula’s funniest moments is from it examining its own format as an epistolary novel but a another amusing use of the format is the inclusion of newspaper articles that give a perspective of some of the events of the novel from the detached perspective of (absurdly verbose) newspaper clippings whose writers have no inkling of the broader events of the story.

A correspondent from The Daily Graph recounts, on the 8th of August, how a freak storm crashes the schooner Demeter into Whitby Harbour with the only living soul on board being a great, black dog¹ that leaps from the ship as soon as it beaches and runs straight to a cliff where it “disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.”

The reporting continues the next day that the cargo of the ship (boxes full of Transylvanian soil) being consigned to a local solicitor and, more importantly, the Whitby SPCA putting out a desperate search for the poor dog who fled the ship, who is imagined to be terrified and hiding in the moors and definitely not a murderous vampire in the guise of a gigantic, ferocious, black wolf.

The newspaper clippings end with the paragraph:

No trace has ever been found of the great dog; at which there is much mourning, for, with public opinion in its present state, he would, I believe, be adopted by the town. To-morrow will see the funeral; and so will end this one more “mystery of the sea.”

I don’t watch game streamers much but one of the few who I have enjoyed a lot is Videochess (a.k.a. Chess). She doesn’t stream regularly at the moment but she has wonderful chaotic energy and a propensity for “crimes”, a term she uses for playfully exploring the mechanics of and pushing at the boundaries of games and seeing what is possible if one strays from the designated path. This can manifest as things like impromptu sequence breaking but not for the purposes of speedrunning or anything like that, just to see where it goes and tease out the foibles of a game. And sometimes she does things like collecting every star in Super Mario 64 while playing the game with a DJ Hero controller.

There are two main places to find her videos, her own Youtube channel that has her streams up until 2022 and another unofficial but endorsed channel that has archived more recent streams. One of her most popular series is an Ocarina of Time randomiser with GGDG but below I will share some of her videos that have had the largest influence on me.

Snolf

Her truly Sisyphean streams of Melon’s Snolf hacks inspired me to make my own Snolf Robo Blast 2 mod for Sonic Robo Blast 2 as well as a chat control mod that Chess ended up playing herself.

Discovering new games

I have also learnt about games and mods that I have since played or are now on my (long) list of things I want to get around to.

Robot Alchemic Drive I still have not gotten around to playing but seems fascinating. I love games with weird controls and especially when there is a diegetic basis for them. Having to remote control a giant robot from the perspective of someone on the ground who has to watch it from a distance rather than getting a camera from the perspective of the robot itself or even a cockpit is an incredible concept. You may be familiar with the game from clips that get shared online showcasing the best value greengrocer or Nanao having a miserable time.

I had only vaguely heard of Cave Story before watching her play “Cave Story Normal Regular”¹, i.e. Sonic Story, a mod that replaces the main character of the game, Quote, with Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes, I know this is a massively important and influential game. No, I never bothered looking into it at all despite having had the Steam version in my library for years from some Humble Bundle or another. I have played both Cave Story and Sonic Story since and I can attest that Sonic Story perfectly replicates the feeling of how Mega Drive Sonic games control. It’s not just a reskin it is is playing as Sonic the Hedgehog in the wrong game in a way that is wonderful and silly.

For the opposite she has played Mario put into a Sonic game with the SM64 Generations mod, which uses libsm64. She has also played some other games using libsm64 as well as other regular normal Mario 64 mods.

Willy Wombat

I also became obsessed with Willy Wombat for a while after watching her play it. It is a fascinating, experimental 3D platformer with an isomorphic perspective with maps that have the same limitations as a Doom level: There are no slopes and not only are there no floating platforms but it’s impossible to have a floating platform in this game. Like Doom the levels are defined by floor sectors with designated heights. There are pillars and walls that rise out of the ground for vertically, but you can never go under anything. It leads to some unique level design, especially as the game progresses to areas were the developers had clearly gotten much more comfortable with their tools. The only thing I can think of that is similar (though lacking the top-down perspective) is older versions of Sonic Robo Blast 2 and that is literally a fork of Doom.

It’s also one of those bygone ’90s games that is fully voiced in English with a script penned and directed by a Japanese crew, giving it a surreal quality that is aided by a post-apocalyptic setting with jarring name choices and very little up-front exposition. Above is a fan animation I adore of a cutscene of Notes and Mail talking about “the peace and eternal life of Prison.”

I have a page on this website dedicated to my cat Easóg where you can see a video of her trying to kill Willy while I am watching Chess play the game and mushroom32x made a fun little Neocities webpage for the game’s 20th anniversary.

There’s plenty more

That’s enough for now. If you want to watch more check out the official and unofficial Youtube channels to dig through yourself.

I added a page to the site dedicated to my cat, Easóg

Easóg

Easóg is the Irish word for stoat and also the name of my cat. There are a couple layers to this name. The first is simply I find it funny to call animals by the wrong species and I have a fondness for the Irish language. The second is she is a thin, white thing and I think sometimes she somewhat resembles a stoat in its winter coat (though stoats in Ireland don’t actually have winter coats).

The final layer to this comes from the medieval Irish law, commonly known as Brehon law, or at least a little titbit about it in a book I read by Niall Mac Coitir titled Ireland’s Animals: Myths, Legends and Folklore, which says that for the purposes of determining legal penalties by offences commitid by a pet, a stoat was legally considered to be a type of cat. I sometimes amuse myself thinking about some exasperated judge who had to decide the original precedent about how to calculate damages when someone’s stoat killed a chicken.

I adopted her when she was, I was told, about eleven months old, though I never got a birthday for her. She’s a very timid creature and the morning after the first night I brought her home I couldn’t find her. I searched my flat top to bottom but she was nowhere to be seen. I was worried that she had somehow gotten out but suspected that she had found a hiding spot in the space under and behind the kitchen cabinets. I did have a look around outside and put up a few posters with my number on it in case anyone spotted her, but inside I left out food for her, sprinkled flour around it so that I could see any footprints she left if she went for it, and set up a webcam with some software to automatically capture video if it detected motion. Here is the first video captured of her.

This worked but sadly it was the only way that I saw her for three weeks. She would hide during the day when I was around and only come out at night to eat, use the litter tray that I had left out, and slowly start to explore her new home. There was no real way of getting to her hiding spot without dismantling the kitchen and that would have terrified her more anyway. Eventually she started to venture out when I was around and would explore other parts of the flat during the day (I left the doors open for her) but would keep her distance and flee back to her hole if I motioned towards her or even moved very quickly or made any noise at all.

Once she was tolerating my (distant) presence more I decided to try and make myself as unthreatening as possible. When she stepped out into the hallway I lay on the floor of the living room and waited for her to come back. When she did she very, very slowly and very, very carefully stalked up ot me then sniffed my hand before running away. Then she slowly came up again and sniffed my hair and ran away. I continued to lay still to not scare her but she very visibly relaxed at this point. She had been deathly silent in those weeks but now started to meow and take some experimental swipes at a mouse toy that I had left on the floor and rubbing her head against the furniture.

She left the room again and I decided to sit up with my legs crossed and wait for her again. When she came back again she sniffed at my hand and experimentally rubbed up against me before running off a short distance. When she came back to me it was like a switch had been flipped. She started rubbing up against me in earnest while purring loudly before headbutting my hand affectionately and licking the hell out of me as I pet her. When I eventually moved over to my desk she jumped up in my lap and settled in. My clothes were absolutely covered in white hair that evening.

To this day she is extremely affectionate (and vocal) and while she is still quite timid and doesn’t like sudden noises or movements she has gotten much more used to people.

I do spoil her a bit, though.

Also a friend pointed out to me that the character I made in Sonic Forces several years before adopting Easóg, who I called Blitz, is also a white cat with yellow eyes. Perhaps they are sisters.

The rest is just a photo dump.

I was on holiday in Copenhagen last week. Here are some photos.

Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ

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</i> 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!

A different GIF will displayed below depending on your browser’s prefers-reduced-motion and prefers-color-scheme settings. There’s four different possibilities:

I hadn’t used prefers-reduced-motion before but I saw a chost from Kore linking to a blog post about accessibility and GIFs and decided I wanted to follow it but I also didn’t want to have to manually write the HTML code for it each time. Thankfully programming is the art of being tactically lazy and I can put some effort in up front and solve an interesting problem once and then let my site generator handle it automatically from then on.

Also thankfully I had done something like this before after taking inspiration how Luna’s blog handles images. I don’t have high DPI images but I do have different dark and light mode versions of images for the The “the Ring” Podcast series tracker chart and the Dracula International diagram I made.

The way I had initially done that was, characteristically, a mess. I wrote a custom custom Liquid tag to handle it which meant that instead of actually using the existing, basic Markdown syntax I had to put images into my posts with something like this:

{% image /bog/images/easóg.gif %}

So revisiting this to include prefers-reduced-motion options I decided to do it differently this time. A way that would allow me to just type the normal Markdown syntax and let my code handle everything else.

![A white cat](/bog/images/easóg.gif "Easóg")

The next step was to look into how to extend and customise Jekyll’s Markdown parsing and output but that sounds hard and I didn’t want to do that so I just used a regular expression¹:

/((!!?)\[([^\[\]]*)\]\((.*?) *("([^"]*)")?\))/

This runs against the raw Markdown before it’s parsed into HTML and pulls out the link, alt text and title. That last part is also a big improvement over the custom tag I previously made as that didn’t support alt text or titles at all.

The code then takes the link and checks if there are any alternative versions listed in the site’s static file list like easóg.dark.gif, easóg.static.gif or easóg.dark.static.gif. when writing a new post now I don’t have to do anything extra other than have those other versions with the right naming scheme in the same folder as the original image.

From there it it compiles it into HTML and replaces the original Markdown in the document:

<picture>
  <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark) and (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
  <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.gif" media="(prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
  <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.static.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" />
  <img src="/bog/images/easóg.static.gif" alt="A white cat" title="Easóg" loading="lazy" />
</picture>

Well, actually it does something else too. You might have noticed in the regular expression up above I am actually checking for an optional, second exclamation mark at the start of the image tag. That’s my own extension of the syntax. If I’m doing my own parsing I might as well go wild with it. If there are two exclamation marks at the start of the tag it also wraps the image in a link to itself and adds an extra class:

<a href="/bog/images/easóg.static.gif" class="dynamic-image-link">
  <picture>
    <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark) and (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
    <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.gif" media="(prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)" />
    <source srcset="/bog/images/easóg.dark.static.gif" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" />
    <img src="/bog/images/easóg.static.gif" alt="A white cat" title="Easóg" loading="lazy" />
  </picture>
</a>

The classes are to enable a little bit of Javascript² to swap out the destinations of the links on the fly when swapping if the user’s media preferences change. Whichever one you currently see in the browser is the one you’ll go to if you click on it.

I might review the double bang syntax if I can figure out something that could be added to the tag that would get stripped out and ignored by a normal Markdown parser for better compatibility. If only Markdown had comments.

Is this a robust solution? Absolutely not! Will I eventually run into annoying weird cases that make me bang my head against the wall as a result of this? I already have! While writing this very bog post! Because the regular expression cannot tell that the markdown code example I have above is not meant to be parsed and turned it into HTML, making it impossible to show the before part of the before and after. Did this make me go back and implement this in a better way? No!

I added some metadata to this post telling it do disable my custom image parsing, made the parser skip doing anything if it finds that metadata on a page and then hardcoded the example at the top of this page. That’s right: This post isn’t actually using the one thing it’s meant to be demonstrating!